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UN ‘Alarmed’ at West Bank Violence Day After Israeli Raid

Israeli soldiers argue with a demonstrator holding a Palestinian flag during a protest against Israeli settlements in Jordan Valley in the Israeli-occupied West Bank June 6, 2022. Picture taken June 6, 2022. (Reuters)
Israeli soldiers argue with a demonstrator holding a Palestinian flag during a protest against Israeli settlements in Jordan Valley in the Israeli-occupied West Bank June 6, 2022. Picture taken June 6, 2022. (Reuters)
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UN ‘Alarmed’ at West Bank Violence Day After Israeli Raid

Israeli soldiers argue with a demonstrator holding a Palestinian flag during a protest against Israeli settlements in Jordan Valley in the Israeli-occupied West Bank June 6, 2022. Picture taken June 6, 2022. (Reuters)
Israeli soldiers argue with a demonstrator holding a Palestinian flag during a protest against Israeli settlements in Jordan Valley in the Israeli-occupied West Bank June 6, 2022. Picture taken June 6, 2022. (Reuters)

The UN Middle East peace envoy urged Israel and the Palestinians Wednesday to calm surging violence in the occupied West Bank, a day after the latest Israeli raid killed six peopl

"We are in the midst of a cycle of violence that must be stopped immediately," Tor Wennesland said in a statement.

"The Security Council has spoken with one voice, calling on the parties to observe calm and restraint, and to refrain from provocative actions, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric."

The call came a day after intense fighting during an Israeli raid in the flashpoint northern West Bank city of Jenin, in which the soldiers killed six Palestinians, including a member of Hamas accused of killing two Israeli settlers last month, AFP reported.

Wennesland said he was "alarmed" at the violence, which the army said included soldiers launching shoulder-fired rockets amid ferocious gunfire.

Nabil Abu Rudeina, spokesman for Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, called the use of rockets in Jenin refugee camp on Tuesday an act of "all-out war", Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

The Jenin raid was the latest in a string of deadly military operations in the Palestinian territory, which Israel has occupied since the Six-Day War of 1967.

Among the six killed was Abdel Fatah Hussein Khroushah, 49. The Israeli army said he was a "terrorist operative" suspected of killing two Israeli settlers in the Palestinian town of Huwara on February 26.

The killing of the two settlers, which came just hours after Israeli and Palestinian officials pledged in Jordan to "prevent further violence", sparked fury among Israeli settlers, with hundreds later torching Palestinian homes and cars in the West Bank town.

"I am deeply disturbed by the continuing violence," Wennesland said, condemning both Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and Palestinian attacks against Israelis.

"Israel, as the occupying power, must ensure that the civilian population is protected and perpetrators are held to account," he said.

Overnight, a rocket was fired from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip but fell short and exploded inside the coastal enclave, the Israeli military said.

Commitments made by the two sides in Jordan last month, when they agreed to "commit to de-escalation", must be implemented if "we are to find a way forward", Wennesland said.

"The parties must refrain from further steps that would lead us to more violence," he added.

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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.