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Calls for Safety of Beirut Airport under Threat of Israel Strikes

Smoke rises in Beirut's southern suburbs after a strike, near Rafik Hariri International Airport, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Hadath, Lebanon, October 8, 2024. (Reuters)
Smoke rises in Beirut's southern suburbs after a strike, near Rafik Hariri International Airport, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Hadath, Lebanon, October 8, 2024. (Reuters)
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Calls for Safety of Beirut Airport under Threat of Israel Strikes

Smoke rises in Beirut's southern suburbs after a strike, near Rafik Hariri International Airport, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Hadath, Lebanon, October 8, 2024. (Reuters)
Smoke rises in Beirut's southern suburbs after a strike, near Rafik Hariri International Airport, amid the ongoing hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, as seen from Hadath, Lebanon, October 8, 2024. (Reuters)

As Israeli strikes devastate Lebanon, calls to safeguard the country's only airport -- a lifeline for aid and travel located precariously close to Hezbollah's southern Beirut stronghold -- have gained urgency.

Since Israel intensified its air campaign against Hezbollah last month, Beirut's airport has received a flurry of aid shipments from various countries, most recently France and Qatar.

It has also served as a major evacuation hub for foreign nationals and Lebanese citizens fleeing Israel's deadly campaign, despite most airlines suspending services over security concerns as strikes land nearby.

The airport was previously targeted in 2006, during Israel's last war with Hezbollah, prompting concern over a repeat as Israel threatened to unleash destruction on Lebanon similar to Gaza, where it has been fighting a devastating year-long war.

UN and Arab officials have called for the protection of the facility, warning that an attack would disrupt the critical flow of international assistance.

The airport is essentially "the only passage for humanitarian aid", said Qatar's Minister of State for International Cooperation Lolwah Al-Khater who flew in on Tuesday as black plumes billowed into the skyline.

It should be safeguarded as "an absolute necessity", she said, a day after Israel's closest ally the United States warned Israel not to bomb the facility or roads leading to it.

-'Relies on imports'-

On Tuesday, vehicles revved beneath the racket of idling military aircraft engines on the ramp at the Beirut airport as crews unloaded two aid planes.

The humanitarian supplies, bearing the French flag or stamped with "Qatar Aid", contained medicine, medical equipment and tents.

The airport should be protected and treated as "a humanitarian corridor", Al-Khater told reporters during a Beirut news conference as she announced a humanitarian "air bridge" for Lebanon from Qatar.

Lebanon's transport minister Ali Hamieh told AFP Beirut has received "assurances" that Israel will not target the airport, but added "there is a big difference between assurances and guarantees".

He spoke days after the Israeli army said it struck Hezbollah targets near the Masnaa border crossing, damaging the main road between Lebanon and Syria and preventing vehicles from getting through.

"It's important that the airport remains open. It's absolutely critical the ports remain open. And it's also critical that the overland corridors into Lebanon remain open," said Lebanon director of the World Food Program (WFP) Matthew Hollingworth.

"This is a country that relies on imports to cover most, if not all, of its needs, in terms of fuel, in terms of food," he told a briefing.

Jeremy Laurence, spokesman for the UN Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, stressed the "paramount importance of international humanitarian law", saying "all parties must respect not only civilians but civilian objects".

More than 1,150 people have been killed since Israel ramped up air strikes on Lebanon on September 23, according to official figures.

The fighting has forced more than one million people to flee their homes, with many heading to Beirut, which is now overwhelmed.

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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.”