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Raided West Bank City Holds Funerals after Israeli Army Withdraws

Mourners carry the bodies of two of four Palestinians during their funeral following an Israeli operation at Nur Shams refugee camp near the West Bank city of Tulkarem, 13 September 2024. (EPA)
Mourners carry the bodies of two of four Palestinians during their funeral following an Israeli operation at Nur Shams refugee camp near the West Bank city of Tulkarem, 13 September 2024. (EPA)
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Raided West Bank City Holds Funerals after Israeli Army Withdraws

Mourners carry the bodies of two of four Palestinians during their funeral following an Israeli operation at Nur Shams refugee camp near the West Bank city of Tulkarem, 13 September 2024. (EPA)
Mourners carry the bodies of two of four Palestinians during their funeral following an Israeli operation at Nur Shams refugee camp near the West Bank city of Tulkarem, 13 September 2024. (EPA)

The families of Palestinians killed in an air strike in the occupied West Bank city of Tubas held funerals on Friday after Israeli forces withdrew following their latest raid in the territory.

The Israeli military said in a statement on Wednesday that its forces were engaged in a "counter-terrorism operation" in the area of Tubas, in the northern West Bank.

The official Palestinian news agency Wafa said the military withdrew Thursday evening, allowing the funerals to go ahead.

The four men buried in Tubas on Friday were killed in an air strike at dawn on Wednesday, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said.

A fifth fatality from the same strike was buried on Friday in Tamoun, also in the northern West Bank.

The Israeli military said in its Wednesday statement that Israeli aircraft had "struck and eliminated a terrorist cell consisting of five terrorists armed with explosives who posed a threat to (Israeli) forces".

On Friday morning, hundreds of people walked through the streets of Tubas alongside the four bodies hoisted on stretchers and wrapped in white cloth.

Some in the crowd waved the green flag of the Palestinian movement Hamas and gunfire punctuated the chants of the mourners.

"I woke up in the morning to the sound of an explosion," Ahmed Sawafta, father of one of the dead men, told AFP, describing the strike on Wednesday.

"My brothers came and told me that Yassin had been martyred," he said, referring to his son.

Osaid Kharaz, who identified himself as a Hamas activist, told AFP at the funeral that Israel "is attempting to impose a new reality and undermine the popular support for the resistance (to Israeli occupation) in the West Bank."

- 'Full strength' -

The military will use its "full strength" to strike Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on September 4, amid a large-scale operation in the north of the territory that killed dozens.

Israeli forces this week also carried out operations in the northern West Bank governorate of Tulkarem.

The Palestinian Red Crescent and the health ministry both reported that one volunteer paramedic and a young woman were killed during an Israeli raid there on Tuesday.

The health ministry also reported three killed near Tulkarem city on Wednesday "as a result of an Israeli air strike on a vehicle". The Palestinian Red Crescent gave the same toll.

The armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad said in a statement that the three killed in the strike were its fighters.

The Israeli military said on Wednesday its air force had "conducted an aerial strike during the counter-terrorism operation" in Tulkarem, without specifying the target or reporting casualties.

Wafa reported that Israeli forces also withdrew from Tulkarem on Thursday and that funerals were held there on Friday.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 and has ramped up deadly raids in the territory since Hamas's October 7 attack on southern Israel sparked the war in Gaza.

According to the Palestinian health ministry, at least 679 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli military or settlers since October 7.

At least 24 Israelis, including security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks in the territory during the same period, according to Israeli officials.

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Arab World

As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
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As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)

Long-horned cattle wade through flooded lands and climb a slope along a canal that has become a refuge for displaced families in South Sudan. Smoke from burning dung rises near homes of mud and grass where thousands of people now live after floods swept away their village.
“Too much suffering,” said Bichiok Hoth Chuiny, a woman in her 70s. She supported herself with a stick as she walked in the newly established community of Pajiek in Jonglei state north of the capital, Juba, The Associated Press said.
For the first time in decades, the flooding had forced her to flee. Her efforts to protect her home by building dykes failed. Her former village of Gorwai is now a swamp.
“I had to be dragged in a canoe up to here,” Chuiny said. An AP journalist was the first to visit the community.
Such flooding is becoming a yearly disaster in South Sudan, which the World Bank has described as “the world’s most vulnerable country to climate change and also the one most lacking in coping capacity."
More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency.
Seasonal flooding has long been part of the lifestyle of pastoral communities around the Sudd, the largest wetlands in Africa, in the Nile River floodplain. But since the 1960s the swamp has kept growing, submerging villages, ruining farmland and killing livestock.
“The Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities of Jonglei are losing the ability to keep cattle and do farming in that region the way they used to,” said Daniel Akech Thiong, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
South Sudan is poorly equipped to adjust. Independent since 2011, the country plunged into civil war in 2013. Despite a peace deal in 2018, the government has failed to address numerous crises. Some 2.4 million people remain internally displaced by conflict and flooding.
The latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda after Lake Victoria rose to its highest levels in five years.
The century-old Jonglei Canal, which was never completed, has become a refuge for many.
“We don’t know up to where this flooding would have pushed us if the canal was not there,” said Peter Kuach Gatchang, the paramount chief of Pajiek. He was already raising a small garden of pumpkins and eggplants in his new home.
The 340-kilometer (211-mile) Jonglei Canal was first imagined in the early 1900s by Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities to increase the Nile’s outflow towards Egypt in the north. But its development was interrupted by the long fight of southern Sudanese against the Sudanese regime in Khartoum that eventually led to the creation of a separate country.
Gatchang said the new community in Pajiek is neglected: "We have no school and no clinic here, and if you stay for a few days, you will see us carrying our patients on stretchers up to Ayod town.”
Ayod, the county headquarters, is reached by a six-hour walk through the waist-high water.
Pajiek also has no mobile network and no government presence. The area is under the control of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, founded by President Salva Kiir’s rival turned Vice President Riek Machar.
Villagers rely on aid. On a recent day, hundreds of women lined up in a nearby field to receive some from the World Food Program.
Nyabuot Reat Kuor walked home with a 50-kilogram (110-pound) bag of sorghum balanced on her head.
“This flooding has destroyed our farm, killed our livestock and displaced us for good," the mother of eight said. “Our old village of Gorwai has become a river.”
When food assistance runs out, she said, they will survive on wild leaves and water lilies from the swamp. Already in recent years, food aid rations have been cut in half as international funding for such crises drops.
More than 69,000 people who have migrated to the Jonglei Canal in Ayod county are registered for food assistance, according to WFP.
“There are no passable roads at this time of the year, and the canal is too low to support boats carrying a lot of food,” said John Kimemia, a WFP airdrop coordinator.
In the neighboring Paguong village that is surrounded by flooded lands, the health center has few supplies. Medics haven’t been paid since June due to an economic crisis that has seen civil servants nationwide go unpaid for more than a year.
South Sudan’s economic woes have deepened with the disruption of oil exports after a major pipeline was damaged in Sudan during that country's ongoing civil war.
“The last time we got drugs was in September. We mobilized the women to carry them on foot from Ayod town,” said Juong Dok Tut, a clinical officer.
Patients, mostly women and children, sat on the ground as they waited to see the doctor. Panic rippled through the group when a thin green snake passed among them. It wasn't poisonous, but many others in the area are. People who venture into the water to fish or collect water lilies are at risk.
Four life-threatening snake bites cases occurred in October, Tut said. “We managed these cases with the antivenom treatments we had, but now they’re over, so we don’t know what to do if it happens again.”