Six Turkish soldiers were killed Saturday in clashes with Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq, a day after another six were also killed.
The six soldiers slain on Saturday died in a firefight when militants attempted to infiltrate a Turkish base, according to a statement by the Turkish Defense Ministry. The statement said 13 militants had been “neutralized.”
In addition to the six Turkish soldiers killed on Friday, four militants were slain, authorities said.

The Iranian Embassy's Cultural Chancellery, in collaboration with the University of Damascus' Persian Language Department, held a special celebration of the Yalda Night, an ancient Iranian festival, marking an unprecedented occurrence in Syrian public universities.

The Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences at Damascus University reported that the Persian Language Department, in cooperation with the Iranian Cultural Chancellery, held a cultural event on the occasion of Damascus University’s celebration of the centenary of its founding.

The event, featuring Yalda Day, showcased poetic presentations and competitions by participating departments. It took place in the presence of the Iranian ambassador, embassy members, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and his deputies, heads, and faculty members of Persian language departments from Damascus, Aleppo, and Al-Baath (Homs) universities, alongside faculty students.

The University of Damascus has never witnessed cultural events celebrating Syrian religious and national holidays, such as Nowruz (celebrated by the Kurds) or the Assyrian New Year’s Day, Ghadir Day, the Murshidite Day, and Christian holidays, such as Barbara, the Epiphany, the Transfiguration, and the feast of Our Lady. The Baathist authority used to avoid these celebrations as Syria is a secular country.

Sources in Damascus informed Asharq Al-Awsat that Iran's longstanding efforts to integrate into Syrian society became more pronounced during Bashar al-Assad's era. However, this influence had previously been limited to non-public educational institutions. The dynamics shifted when Russia introduced Russian as a second language in basic education curricula, leading to increased competition between Iran and Russia, whose culture is relatively accepted in Syrian society.

Some of the Iranian manifestations left a negative impact, including an arts exhibition held by the Iranian Cultural Chancellery, in cooperation with the College of Fine Arts in Damascus, entitled “Khomeini in the Mirror of Syrian Art” in June. The event caused a wave of denunciation and mockery within Syrian cultural circles.

Iran has boosted its cultural initiatives by extending into public education, particularly in higher education. During the past seven years, he has established Persian language teaching centers in public universities. Iran has also forged several educational agreements. Additionally, several Iranian schools and universities have been inaugurated in Syria.

Iranian paramilitary forces are providing tracking information that the Houthis in Yemen are using to launch drone and missile attacks on commercial ships passing through the Red Sea, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Houthi group has over the past month attacked merchant vessels sailing through the Red Sea in retaliation for Israel's assault on Gaza, leading some shipping companies to switch routes.

Citing Western and regional security officials, the report said the intelligence is being gathered by an Iranian vessel and then transferred to the Houthis, allowing the Iran-backed militias to target ships that have switched their transponders off.

“The Houthis don’t have the radar technology to target the ships,” an unnamed Western security official told the newspaper. “They need Iranian assistance. Without it, the missiles would just drop in the water.”

The report came as the White House alleged on Friday that Iran was "deeply involved" in planning operations against commercial vessels in the Red Sea and its intelligence was critical to enable the Houthi movement's targeting of maritime vessels.

"We have no reason to believe that Iran is trying to dissuade the Houthis from this reckless behavior, White House national security spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement.

More than 90 Palestinians, including dozens from an extended family, were killed in Israeli airstrikes on two homes in the Gaza Strip, rescuers and hospital officials said Saturday.

On Friday, airstrikes flattened two homes, one in Gaza City and the other in the urban refugee camp of Nuseirat in the center of the territory.

The Gaza City strike killed 76 people from the al-Mughrabi family, making it one of the deadliest of the war, said Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defense department. He provided the names of 16 heads of households within the family, and said the dead included women and children.

Among those killed were Issam al-Mughrabi, a veteran employee of the UN Development Program, his wife, and their five children.

“The loss of Issam and his family has deeply affected us all. The UN and civilians in Gaza are not a target,” said Achim Steiner, the head of the agency. “This war must end.”

Later Friday, a strike pulverized the Nuseirat home of Mohammed Khalifa, a local TV journalist, killing him and at least 14 others, according to officials at the nearby Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital where the bodies were taken. Mourners held funeral prayers Saturday in the hospital’s courtyard while rescue teams continued to search for survivors. 

More than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's war to destroy Hamas and more than 53,000 have been wounded, according to health officials in Gaza.

Israel’s aerial and ground offensive has been one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history, displacing nearly 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people and leveling wide swaths of the tiny coastal enclave. More than half a million people in Gaza — a quarter of the population — are starving, according to a report this week from the United Nations and other agencies.

The Israeli military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said late Friday that forces are widening the ground offensive “to additional areas of the strip, with a focus on the south.” He said operations were also continuing in the northern half of Gaza, including Gaza City, the initial focus of Israel's ground offensive.

The army said Saturday that it carried out airstrikes against Hamas fighters in several locations of Gaza City. The military says it has killed thousands of Hamas militants, including about 2,000 in the past three weeks, but it has not presented any evidence to back up the claim. It says 139 of its soldiers have been killed in the ground offensive.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has insisted that Gaza is an integral part of Palestine and cannot be separated or subjected to the Israeli occupation's plans for division.

In a telephone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, Abbas emphasized that Gaza remains the responsibility of Palestine.

The President underscored the necessity of intervening to stop the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem.

He emphasized the need to release Palestinian tax funds, currently withheld by Israel, and reiterated that Gaza remains the responsibility of Palestine.

Sputnik news agency said Putin invited Abbas to visit Russia and stressed the importance of "ending the bloodshed" in the Gaza Strip as soon as possible and resuming the political settlement process in the Palestinian territories.

On Friday, the European Commission said it had adopted a $130 million aid package to support the Palestinian Authority.

The commission said the aid would help pay salaries and pensions of civil servants in the West Bank, social allowances for vulnerable families, and the payment for medical referrals to East Jerusalem hospitals.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the EU is also ready to continue helping the Palestinian Authority in the longer term.

"We are reflecting on a wider mid-term package for next year to contribute to the economic and political stability of Gaza and the West Bank, once conditions allow on the ground, as part of wider international efforts to reinstate a two-state solution," von der Leyen said.

For 2024, the EU has also set aside 125 million euros in humanitarian aid for people in the besieged Gaza Strip, where EU commissioner Josep Borrell said food shortages had reached unprecedented levels.

"This is a grave development and should be a wakeup call for the whole world to act now to prevent a deadly human catastrophe," the EU's top diplomat said.

"Aid needs to reach those in need through all necessary means, including humanitarian corridors and pauses for humanitarian needs."

Tensions arose at the Lebanese borders even after Hezbollah withdrew its elite Radwan forces to more than 5-6 kilometers from the border.

Israeli officials stated that the army has prepared plans to invade Lebanese territory, and it is not unlikely that it will declare war.

However, political sources in Tel Aviv indicated that France and the US are continuing their efforts to reach an agreement with the Lebanese government.

Fears of the outbreak of war came as a result of a noticeable escalation in missile strikes on Thursday and Friday.

On Friday, the Israeli army targeted, with artillery shelling, the outskirts of Aita al-Shaab amid reconnaissance aircraft flying over the villages adjacent to the Blue Line, all the way to the Tyre area.

Hezbollah announced the death of two of its fighters, "martyrs on the road to Jerusalem."

During the night, the Israeli army fired incendiary bombs and flare bombs into the forests adjacent to the Blue Line on the outskirts of Naqoura and Alma al-Shaab.

Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported, on its Ynet website, noticing a movement of the Radwan towards the north, saying that successful chances of military and political efforts to withdraw Hezbollah from the border are on the rise.

Israeli Channel 12 claimed that half of the Radwan force on the border has already left its place due to Israeli military activity.

The Israeli reports added that Hezbollah had withdrawn its forces to the north, which brought calm to the residents of the northern towns, signaling a possible return to their homes. However, the group's missile bombing reached about 30 kilometers into the Israeli territories, which restored tension.

They noted that the Israeli army insists on responding to the attacks, threatening that continued bombing would lead to war similar to that in Gaza.

According to political sources, the Israeli extreme right is still demanding to seize the opportunity to recruit reserve forces to expand the front with Hezbollah.

But the US administration curbs these intentions and insists on preventing another front with Lebanon because it is convinced it will lead to a regional war that threatens a global war.

The US administration confirmed that President Joe Biden's Envoy, Amos Hochstein, is still making unremitting efforts to reach a truce.

The sources said Hochstein believes that the withdrawal of the Radwan Forces is a positive indication that there is room for progress towards a political agreement that includes a ceasefire and the formation of a security area that prevents slipping into war.

However, the Israelis fear that Hezbollah is seeking an agreement that could sedate Israel for a few months and then choose the time to launch a war similar to the Hamas attack.

They assert that Hezbollah is much stronger than Hamas and possesses combat experience and high-quality weapons that pose a severe threat to Israel. Therefore, a pre-emptive strike should be directed against it.

By: Liam Stack

The number of Gaza residents reported killed during Israel’s 10-week-old war in the territory has already surpassed the toll for any other Arab conflict with Israel in more than 40 years and perhaps any since Israel’s founding in 1948. The Gaza Health Ministry said on Thursday that the death toll was more than 20,000, putting it above one of the most authoritative estimates of those killed in Lebanon by Israel’s 1982 invasion. And though Gaza officials have said counting the dead has become increasingly challenging, most experts say the figure is likely an undercount and express shock at the enormity of the loss.

Some military experts said more people had been killed more quickly in this war than during the deadliest stages of the US-led wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. Azmi Keshawi, the Gaza analyst for the International Crisis Group think tank, said this war was “more horrifying” than any he had experienced before. He said he and his family had fled his home in northern Gaza and moved six times so far. They now live in a tent near a UN shelter in the southern city of Rafah.

The Israeli military has engaged in an intense air and ground campaign to eliminate Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that rules Gaza and led the Oct. 7 attack that officials say killed about 1,200 people in Israel, including hundreds of soldiers.

The high death toll reflects how Israel has chosen to wage the war, using thousands of airstrikes, heavy bombs and artillery in a small territory densely packed with civilians who cannot escape. Israel has said Hamas built an extensive tunnel network underground to shield its fighters and weapons, putting civilian infrastructure and people on the ground in the line of fire.

The Gaza war was already thought to be the deadliest conflict for Palestinians in the 75 years since Israel was established. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, an estimated 15,000 Palestinians were killed during the war surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948.

The deaths in the current conflict, if the figures from Gaza are accurate, have also exceeded the most widely cited estimate of the toll for the initial three months of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. But as in Gaza today, researchers say the number killed in Lebanon may never be known with confidence because of the fog of war, even four decades later.

That estimate comes from an analysis of police and hospital records compiled in 1982 by the newspaper An Nahar, which at the time was among the Arab world’s most respected. It put the death toll at 17,825. But the paper said that tally was most likely an undercount, and in 1982, The Times reported that “numbering the dead correctly is virtually impossible” in Lebanon. In the 1967 Middle East war, nearly 19,000 Egyptians, Syrians and others were estimated to have been killed fighting Israel, while a similar number — mostly Syrians and Egyptians — died in the 1973 war, according to The Associated Press. As in the Gaza and Lebanon wars, the exact tolls for these wars are also not known, but most of the dead were believed to be combatants. In contrast, the Gaza Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government there, said on Wednesday that about 70 percent of those killed are women and children. The Gazan authorities never give breakdowns for how many of those killed are combatants. On Thursday, the ministry said the death toll was 20,057. Israel claims it has killed some 7,000 Hamas fighters, but has not explained how it arrived at that number.

The toll in Gaza is expected to rise significantly when Palestinians are able to dig out of the vast destruction that the war has wrought. A Gazan government spokesman said Wednesday that in addition to the dead, 6,700 people are missing. Many are believed to still be buried in the rubble. “The likelihood is that many people who are missing under the rubble will be determined to have been killed,” said Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch. For that reason, the death toll is “likely to increase even if the bombing were to stop today,” he added. No independent organizations have been able to verify the Gaza death toll because of the difficulties of operating in the territory. And as the conflict has ground on, the casualty numbers have become more difficult to collect. The Gaza Health Ministry compiles death toll data from the records of local hospitals and morgues, officials in the territory have said. But in recent weeks, the government media office said it had stepped in to help gather the figures after the Health Ministry’s facilities were bombed and 27 of the 36 hospitals in Gaza were rendered unusable by airstrikes amid an Israeli siege that has tightly restricted food, water, fuel and medicine from entering. Frequent disruptions in communications caused by Israeli attacks on telecommunication towers, Israeli control of the enclave’s communication lines and fuel shortages have also made gathering information very difficult. Mahmoud al-Farra, a spokesman for the government media office, said the people collecting the data had to make the most of the “available possibilities” amid the fighting. “It’s hard to count them because the number of martyrs is large,” he added. Throughout the war, the Gaza Health Ministry has released updated death tolls that have been called broadly reliable by the UN, humanitarian groups and a study published this month in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

This month, when the ministry said the death toll had passed 15,000, some Israeli officials said they believed that figure to be roughly accurate. However, the Israeli military has also said the death toll reported in Gaza could not be trusted because the territory is run by Hamas. On Oct. 26, the ministry released a list of the names and ID numbers of 6,747 people it said had been killed up to that point by Israeli bombing — an accounting that enhanced the credibility of its numbers. The ministry’s staff includes many civil servants that predate the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, and humanitarian groups have defended its record. They say it has a history of good faith reporting and has provided reliable information. But the ministry came under criticism after an Oct. 17 explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, when the government almost instantaneously released casualty figures that ranged from 500 to 833 dead. Days later, it announced a final count of 471. After the explosion, John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, called the ministry “a front for Hamas,” and President Biden told reporters he had “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” Mr. Biden then added: “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.” The war has posed a myriad of other complications for compiling accurate casualty counts. An estimated 85 percent of Gaza’s population of more than two million have fled their homes, after Israel ordered the evacuation of much of the territory, to try to escape Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion. Its largest population center, Gaza City, has been reduced to rubble. Thousands sleep on the street, and others live in overcrowded shelters that teem with disease. There has been virtually no electricity for more than two months. Food and clean water are scarce. The UN says half the population is at risk of starvation, and 90 percent regularly go without food for a whole day.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a vocal critic of Hamas who grew up in Gaza but now lives in California, said Israeli airstrikes have so far killed more than 30 members of his family, including people in their 70s and cousins between the ages of 3 months and 9 years old. Early in the war, he said, his childhood home was bombed, killing one young cousin. And last week, his aunt and uncle’s home was bombed, killing at least 31 people. Sitting in California, he watched video of their destroyed home on his phone. None of the people there were affiliated with Hamas, he said. “It was a family home,” he said.

The New York Times

The UN Security Council expressed "alarm" at growing violence in war-torn Sudan on Friday, a day after it reported that seven million people have been displaced by the conflict.

In a joint statement, the Council "strongly condemned" attacks on civilians and the spread of the conflict "into areas hosting large populations of internally displaced persons, refugees, and asylum seekers."

"The members of the Security Council expressed alarm at the spreading violence and deteriorating humanitarian situation in Sudan," the statement said, reflecting the worsening situation in the country.

In addition to the seven million internally displaced people, the UN said Thursday another 1.5 million had fled into neighboring countries, according to AFP.

Since fighting broke out on April 15 between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, the city of Wad Madani, 180 kilometers (110 miles) south of Khartoum, had become a haven for thousands of displaced people during the conflict.

But the Security Council said fighting had spread there too, causing refugees to flee once again.

As the rival security forces battle for the city's strongpoints, shopkeepers boarded up their stores this week to ward off looters while women disappeared from the streets for fear of sexual violence.

The Council called on the warring parties to allow for "rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian access throughout Sudan."

It condemned a December 10 attack on a convoy belonging to the International Committee of the Red Cross and called for "the scaling up of humanitarian assistance to Sudan."

The war between the army and the RSF has killed 12,190 people, according to conservative estimates by the Armed Conflict Locations and Events Data project.

Lebanon is ready to implement a UN resolution that would help end Hezbollah's cross-border attacks on Israel if Israel also complies and withdraws from disputed territory, Lebanon's prime minister said Friday.

The frontier between Lebanon and Israel has seen escalating exchanges of fire, mainly between the Israeli army and the Iran-backed Hezbollah group, since the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, raising fears of a broader conflagration.

UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended a 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, called for the removal of armed personnel south of Lebanon's Litani River, except for UN peacekeepers and the Lebanese army and state security forces.

The solution to the current cross-border hostilities "is the implementation of international resolutions", including Resolution 1701, Prime Minister Najib Mikati said in a statement.

"We are totally ready to commit to their implementation, on condition the Israeli side does the same, and withdraws -- according to the international laws and resolutions -- from occupied territory," he added.

Mikati's office said the premier was referring territory claimed by Lebanon that remains occupied following Israel's withdrawal from the country's south in 2000: the disputed Shebaa Farms, the Kfarshuba hills and the Lebanese side of the village of Ghajar.

Despite holding sway over swathes of the country's south, Hezbollah has not had a visible military presence on Lebanon's southern border since the end of the 2006 war.

A diplomatic source, requesting anonymity, told AFP that the proposals to avert another all-out conflict include settling the disputed land border between Israel and Lebanon and encouraging Hezbollah withdraw its fighters from near the frontier.

On Monday, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna met with senior officials in Beirut, a day after visiting Israel and the occupied West Bank, as part of efforts to de-escalate border tensions, while Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin urged Hezbollah to avoid provoking a "wider conflict".

Since hostilities began in October, more than 140 people have been killed on the Lebanese side, most of them Hezbollah fighters but also more than a dozen civilians, three of them journalists, according to an AFP tally.

On the Israeli side, four civilians and seven soldiers have been killed, according to officials.

More than seven million people have been displaced by fighting in Sudan, the United Nations said on Thursday as more displaced people continued to flee a former safe haven.

"According to the International Organization for Migration, up to 300,000 people have fled Wad Madani in Al-Jazira state in a new wave of large-scale displacement," UN secretary-general's spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, AFP reported.

Another 1.5 million people have fled to neighboring countries, he added.

"These latest movements will push Sudan's displacement population to 7.1 million people, the world's largest displacement crisis," Dujarric said.

More than half a million people had found shelter in Al-Jazirah, Sudan's pre-war breadbasket, before the fighting engulfed the state capital.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which pulled out its staff last week as fighting reached the city, appealed for "lifesaving access to all areas affected by fighting as humanitarian needs soar".

"Our colleagues in Sudan have heard bone-chilling stories of the harrowing journeys women and children were forced to make just to reach the safety of Madani city," said the head of UNICEF, the UN children's agency, Catherine Russell.

"Now, even that fragile sense of security is shattered as those same children have once again been forced from their homes. No child should have to experience the horrors of war. Children, and the civilian infrastructure they rely on, must be protected."