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Biden Urges Netanyahu to Minimize Civilian Harm in Lebanon

US President Joe Biden makes remarks on Hurricane Milton in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 09 October 2024. EPA/RON SACHS / POOL
US President Joe Biden makes remarks on Hurricane Milton in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 09 October 2024. EPA/RON SACHS / POOL
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Biden Urges Netanyahu to Minimize Civilian Harm in Lebanon

US President Joe Biden makes remarks on Hurricane Milton in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 09 October 2024. EPA/RON SACHS / POOL
US President Joe Biden makes remarks on Hurricane Milton in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 09 October 2024. EPA/RON SACHS / POOL

US President Joe Biden urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to minimize harm to civilians in Lebanon, especially in the populated areas of Beirut, while reiterating support to target Hezbollah, the White House said after their call.

“The President affirmed Israel’s right to protect its citizens from Hezbollah, which has fired thousands of missiles and rockets into Israel over the past year alone, while emphasizing the need to minimize harm to civilians, in particular in the densely populated areas of Beirut,” the White House said in a statement.

On Gaza, the leaders discussed "the urgent need to renew diplomacy to release the hostages held by Hamas," it said.

Biden also discussed the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the imperative to restore access to the north, including by reinvigorating the corridor from Jordan immediately, according to the White House.

The call was the leaders' first known chat since August and coincided with a sharp escalation of Israel's conflict with both Iran and the Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon with no sign of an imminent ceasefire to end the conflict with Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza.

The Middle East has been on edge awaiting Israel's response to a missile attack last week that Tehran carried out in retaliation for Israel's military escalation in Lebanon.

Netanyahu has promised that arch-foe Iran will pay for its missile attack, while Tehran has said any retaliation would be met with vast destruction, raising fears of a wider war in the region which could draw in the United States.

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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.