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UN: Over 30,000 Crossed into Syria from Lebanon in Past Days

People fleeing from Lebanon arrive on the Syrian side of the border with Lebanon in Jdeidat Yabus in southwestern Syria on September 25, 2024. (Photo by LOUAI BESHARA / AFP)
People fleeing from Lebanon arrive on the Syrian side of the border with Lebanon in Jdeidat Yabus in southwestern Syria on September 25, 2024. (Photo by LOUAI BESHARA / AFP)
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UN: Over 30,000 Crossed into Syria from Lebanon in Past Days

People fleeing from Lebanon arrive on the Syrian side of the border with Lebanon in Jdeidat Yabus in southwestern Syria on September 25, 2024. (Photo by LOUAI BESHARA / AFP)
People fleeing from Lebanon arrive on the Syrian side of the border with Lebanon in Jdeidat Yabus in southwestern Syria on September 25, 2024. (Photo by LOUAI BESHARA / AFP)

Well over 30,000 people, mainly Syrians, have crossed into Syria from Lebanon in the past 72 hours, the UN refugee agency said on Friday, amid an escalating conflict between Israeli forces and Hezbollah that has killed hundreds of people in Lebanon.
About 80% of those crossings are Syrians and about 20% are Lebanese, said the UNHCR representative in Syria, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, adding that about half are children and adolescents, and that men are making the crossing in smaller numbers than women.
"They are crossing from a country at war to one that has faced a crisis conflict for 13 years," an extremely difficult choice, he told a news conference.
"We will have to see over the next few days how many more do so," added the representative. 

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18 Dead in Sudan's El-Fasher after RSF Attack on Market

Internally displaced women wait in a queue to collect aid from a group at a camp in Gadaref on May 12, 2024. (AFP)
Internally displaced women wait in a queue to collect aid from a group at a camp in Gadaref on May 12, 2024. (AFP)
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18 Dead in Sudan's El-Fasher after RSF Attack on Market

Internally displaced women wait in a queue to collect aid from a group at a camp in Gadaref on May 12, 2024. (AFP)
Internally displaced women wait in a queue to collect aid from a group at a camp in Gadaref on May 12, 2024. (AFP)

A Rapid Support Forces' attack on a market in the Sudanese city of El-Fasher killed 18 people, a medical source told AFP on Friday, after world leaders appealed for an end to the country's wartime suffering.

The RSF's shelling of the market on Thursday evening also injured dozens, activists said separately, as RSF and regular army vie for control of the North Darfur state capital, 17 months into their war in the northeast African country.

"We received last night at the hospital 18 dead," some of them burned and others killed with severe shrapnel injuries, a source at El-Fasher Teaching Hospital told AFP, requesting anonymity for their own protection.

The plight of Sudan, and El-Fasher in particular, has been under discussion this week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

"We must compel the warring parties to accept humanitarian pauses in El-Fasher, Khartoum and other highly vulnerable areas," Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, said on Wednesday.

The Teaching Hospital is one of the last still receiving patients in El-Fasher, where reports of a "full-scale assault" by RSF on the city last weekend led UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to call for an urgent ceasefire.

The RSF have besieged El-Fasher since May, and famine has already been declared in Zamzam refugee camp near the city of two million.

RSF "artillery shelling continued this morning" on residential neighbourhoods and the market, the local resistance committee said on Friday.

The committee, which reported the dozens of wounded in Thursday's market attack, is one of hundreds of pro-democracy volunteer groups across Sudan that provide crucial aid to civilians caught in the crossfire.

Sudan's war has killed tens of thousands of people. The World Health Organization cited a toll of at least 20,000 but United States envoy Tom Perriello has said some estimates reach 150,000.

US President Joe Biden, who raised particular concern over the assault on El-Fasher, on Tuesday urged all countries to cut off weapons supplies to the country's rival generals, Sudanese Armed Forces chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

"The world needs to stop arming the generals. Speak with one voice and tell them: 'Stop tearing your country apart. Stop blocking aid to the Sudanese people. End this war now,'" Biden told the UN General Assembly.

On the sidelines of the UN talks, Guterres met with Burhan, expressing concern about "escalation" and the risk of "a regional spillover," the UN said.

Both sides have been repeatedly accused of war crimes.