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Calm returned to southern Syria’s Sweida province on Sunday, a monitor and AFP correspondents reported, after a week of sectarian violence between Druze fighters and rival groups that killed more than 1,100 people.A ceasefire announced on Saturday appeared to be holding after earlier agreements failed to end fighting between longtime rivals the Druze and the Bedouin that spiralled to draw in the Islamist-led government, the Israeli military and armed tribes from other parts of Syria.AFP correspondents on the outskirts of Sweida city reported hearing no clashes on Sunday morning, with government forces deployed in some locations in the province to enforce the truce.The first humanitarian aid convoy entered the city on Sunday, Red Crescent official Omar al-Malki said, adding that it would be followed by others.He said the convoy came “in coordination with the government bodies and the local authorities in Sweida”, which are controlled by the Druze.The Syrian government meanwhile said a Druze group blocked its own convoy from entering the city.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that since around midnight (2100 GMT Saturday), “Sweida has been experiencing a cautious calm”, adding government security forces had blocked roads leading to the province in order to prevent tribal fighters from going there.The Britain-based Observatory gave an updated toll late Sunday of 1,120 killed since the violence erupted a week ago, including 427 Druze fighters and 298 civilians from the minority group, as well as 354 government security personnel and 21 Sunni Bedouin.Witnesses, Druze factions and the Observatory have accused government forces of siding with the Bedouin and committing abuses including summary executions when they entered Sweida days ago.- ‘Totally calm’ -Hanadi Obeid, a 39-year-old doctor, told AFP that “the city hasn’t seen calm like this in a week”.The interior ministry said overnight that Sweida city was “evacuated of all tribal fighters, and clashes within the city’s neighbourhoods were halted”.The Observatory had said Druze fighters retook control of the city on Saturday evening.Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa had on Saturday announced a ceasefire in Sweida and renewed a pledge to protect Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities in the face of the latest sectarian violence since Islamists overthrew longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in December.A spokesman for Syria’s tribal and clan council told Al Jazeera late Saturday that fighters had left the city “in response to the call of the presidency and the terms of the agreement”.A medic inside Sweida told AFP by telephone on Sunday that “the situation is totally calm… We aren’t hearing clashes.”Residents of Sweida city, who number at about 150,000, have been holed up in their homes without electricity and water, and food supplies have also been scarce.An AFP photographer said the morgue at Sweida’s main hospital was full and bodies were lying on the ground outside the building.The United Nations migration agency said more than 128,000 people in Sweida province have been displaced by the violence.- ‘Brutal acts’ -US special envoy to Syria Tom Barrack said Sunday that the country stood at a “critical juncture”, adding that “peace and dialogue must prevail — and prevail now”.”All factions must immediately lay down their arms, cease hostilities, and abandon cycles of tribal vengeance,” he wrote on X, saying “brutal acts by warring factions on the ground undermine the government’s authority and disrupt any semblance of order”.Sharaa’s announcement Saturday came hours after the United States said it had negotiated a ceasefire between Syria’s government and Israel, which had bombed government forces in both Sweida and Damascus earlier in the week.Israel, which has its own Druze community, has said it was acting in defence of the group, as well as to enforce its demands for the total demilitarisation of Syria’s south.US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday urged the Syrian government’s security forces to prevent jihadists from entering and “carrying out massacres” in the south, and called on Damascus to “bring to justice anyone guilty of atrocities including those in their own ranks”.strs-mam-lg/ysm/jsa

Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli forces opened fire on crowds of Palestinians trying to collect humanitarian aid in the war-torn Palestinian territory on Sunday, killing 73 people and wounding dozens more.At least 67 were killed as truckloads of aid arrived in the north, while six others were reported shot near an aid point close to Rafah in the south, where dozens of people lost their lives just 24 hours earlier.The UN World Food Programme said its 25-truck convoy carrying food aid “encountered massive crowds of hungry civilians which came under gunfire” near Gaza City, soon after it crossed from Israel and cleared checkpoints.Israel’s military disputed the death toll and said soldiers had fired warning shots “to remove an immediate threat posed to them” as thousands gathered near Gaza City.Deaths of civilians seeking aid have become a regular occurrence in Gaza, with the authorities blaming Israeli fire as crowds facing chronic shortages of food and other essentials flock in huge numbers to aid centres.The UN said earlier this month that nearly 800 aid-seekers had been killed since late May, including on the routes of aid convoys.- ‘Sniper’ fire -In Gaza City, Qasem Abu Khater, 36, told AFP he had rushed to try to get a bag of flour but instead found a desperate crowd of thousands and “deadly overcrowding and pushing”.”The tanks were firing shells randomly at us and Israeli sniper soldiers were shooting as if they were hunting animals in a forest,” he added.”Dozens of people were martyred right before my eyes and no one could save anyone.”Civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP the death toll was 67 and expected to rise while the WFP condemned violence against civilians seeking aid as “completely unacceptable”.”Israeli forces’ gunfire” was responsible for the deaths in the south, he added.Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify tolls and details provided by the agency and other parties.The army has maintained that it works to avoid harm to civilians, saying this month that it issued new instructions to its troops on the ground “following lessons learned” from a spate of similar incidents.- Papal call -The war was sparked by Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, leading to the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed 58,895 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday expressed his regret to Pope Leo XIV after what he described as a “stray” munition killed three people sheltering at the Holy Family Church in Gaza City.At the end of the Angelus prayer on Sunday, the pope slammed the “barbarity” of the Gaza war and called for peace, days after the Israeli strike on the territory’s only Catholic church.The strike was part of the “ongoing military attacks against the civilian population and places of worship in Gaza”, he added.”I appeal to the international community to observe humanitarian law and respect the obligation to protect civilians, as well as the prohibition of collective punishment, the indiscriminate use of force, and the forced displacement of populations.”The Catholic Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, held mass at the Gaza church on Sunday after travelling to the devastated territory in a rare visit on Friday.- ‘Expanding’ operations -Most of Gaza’s population of more than two million people have been displaced at least once during the war and there have been repeated evacuation calls across large parts of the coastal enclave.On Sunday morning, the Israeli military told residents and displaced Palestinians sheltering in the Deir el-Balah area to move south immediately.Israel was “expanding its activities” against Hamas around Deir el-Balah, “where it has not operated before”, the military’s Arabic-language spokesman Avichay Adraee said on X.The announcement prompted concern from families of hostages held since October 7, 2023 that the Israeli offensive could harm their loved ones.Delegations from Israel and militant group Hamas have spent the last two weeks in indirect talks on a proposed 60-day ceasefire in Gaza and the release of 10 living hostages.Of the 251 hostages taken during Hamas’s 2023 attack, 49 are still being held in Gaza, including 27 the Israeli military says are dead.bur-strs-phz/ysm

As malnutrition surges in war-torn Gaza, tens of thousands of children and women require urgent treatment, according to the UN, while aid enters the blockaded Palestinian territory at a trickle.Gaza’s civil defence agency told AFP it has noted a rising number of infant deaths caused by “severe hunger and malnutrition”, reporting at least three such deaths in the past week.”These heartbreaking cases were not caused by direct bombing but by starvation, the lack of baby formula and the absence of basic healthcare,” civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP.Ziad Musleh, a 45-year-old father displaced from Gaza’s north to the central city of Nuseirat, told AFP: “We are dying, our children are dying and we can’t do anything to stop it.””Our children cry and scream for food. They go to sleep in pain, in hunger, with empty stomachs. There is absolutely no food.”And if by chance a small amount appears in the market, the prices are outrageous — no one can afford it.”At a food distribution site in a UN-school-turned-shelter in Nuseirat on Sunday, children entertained themselves by banging on their plates as they waited for their turn.Several of them had faces stretched thin by hunger, an AFP journalist reported.Umm Sameh Abu Zeina, whose cheekbones protruded from her thin face as she waited for food in Nuseirat, said she had lost 35 kilograms (77 pounds).”We do not eat enough. I don’t eat, I leave the food I receive for my daughter,” she said, adding that she had a range of health conditions, including high blood pressure and diabetes.- Depleted stocks -Gazans as well as the UN and aid organisations frequently complain that depleted stocks have sent prices skyrocketing for what little food is available in the markets.The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) warned in early July that the price of flour for bread was 3,000 times more expensive than before the war began more than 21 months ago.WFP director Carl Skau, who visited Gaza City in early July, described the situation as “the worst I’ve ever seen”.”A father I met had lost 25 kilograms in the past two months. People are starving, while we have food just across the border,” he said in a statement.After talks to extend a six-week ceasefire broke down, Israel imposed a full blockade on Gaza on March 2, allowing nothing in until trucks were again permitted at a trickle in late May.As stocks accumulated during the ceasefire gradually depleted, the Palestinian territory experienced the worst shortages since the start of the war.”Our kitchens are empty; they are now serving hot water with a bit of pasta floating in it,” said Skau.-‘I’m always hungry’ -The effects of malnutrition on children and pregnant women can be particularly dire.Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said last week that its teams are seeing the highest number of malnutrition cases ever recorded by its teams in Gaza.”Due to widespread malnutrition among pregnant women and poor water and sanitation levels, many babies are being born prematurely,” said Joanne Perry, an MSF doctor in Gaza. “Our neonatal intensive care unit is severely overcrowded, with four to five babies sharing a single incubator.”Amina Wafi, a 10-year-old girl from the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis, said she thinks of food constantly.”I’m always hungry. I always tell my father, ‘I want food’, and he promises he’ll bring me something but there is none, and he simply can’t,” she told AFP.MSF said that patients at its Gaza clinics do not heal properly from their wounds due to protein deficiency, and that the lack of food causes infections to last longer than they would in healthy individuals.Hamas’s 2023 attack led to the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 58,895 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to Hamas-run Gaza’s health ministry. The UN considers these figures to be reliable.

Calm returned to southern Syria’s Sweida province on Sunday, a monitor and AFP correspondents reported, after a week of sectarian violence between Druze fighters and rival groups that killed more than 1,000 people.A ceasefire announced on Saturday appeared to be holding after earlier agreements failed to end fighting between longtime rivals the Druze and the Bedouin that spiralled to draw in the Islamist-led government, the Israeli military and armed tribes from other parts of Syria.AFP correspondents on the outskirts of Sweida city reported hearing no clashes on Sunday morning, with government forces deployed in some locations in the province to enforce the truce.The first humanitarian aid convoy entered the city on Sunday, Red Crescent official Omar al-Malki said, adding that it would be followed by others.He said the convoy came “in coordination with the government bodies and the local authorities in Sweida”, which are controlled by the Druze.The Syrian government meanwhile said a Druze group blocked its own convoy from entering the city.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that since around midnight (2100 GMT Saturday), “Sweida has been experiencing a cautious calm”, adding government security forces had blocked roads leading to the province in order to prevent tribal fighters from going there.The Britain-based Observatory gave an updated toll on Sunday of more than 1,000 killed since the violence erupted a week ago, including 336 Druze fighters and 298 civilians from the minority group, as well as 342 government security personnel and 21 Sunni Bedouin.Witnesses, Druze factions and the Observatory have accused government forces of siding with the Bedouin and committing abuses including summary executions when they entered Sweida days ago.- ‘Totally calm’ -Hanadi Obeid, a 39-year-old doctor, told AFP that “the city hasn’t seen calm like this in a week”.The interior ministry said overnight that Sweida city was “evacuated of all tribal fighters, and clashes within the city’s neighbourhoods were halted”.The Observatory had said Druze fighters retook control of the city on Saturday evening.Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa had on Saturday announced a ceasefire in Sweida and renewed a pledge to protect Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities in the face of the latest sectarian violence since Islamists overthrew longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in December.A spokesman for Syria’s tribal and clan council told Al Jazeera late Saturday that fighters had left the city “in response to the call of the presidency and the terms of the agreement”.Another medic inside Sweida told AFP by telephone on Sunday that “the situation is totally calm… We aren’t hearing clashes.”Residents of Sweida city, who number at about 150,000, have been holed up in their homes without electricity and water, and food supplies have also been scarce.An AFP photographer said the morgue at Sweida’s main hospital was full and bodies were lying on the ground outside the building.The United Nations migration agency said more than 128,000 people in Sweida province have been displaced by the violence.- ‘Brutal acts’ -US special envoy to Syria Tom Barrack said Sunday that the country stood at a “critical juncture”, adding that “peace and dialogue must prevail — and prevail now”.”All factions must immediately lay down their arms, cease hostilities, and abandon cycles of tribal vengeance,” he wrote on X, saying “brutal acts by warring factions on the ground undermine the government’s authority and disrupt any semblance of order”.Sharaa’s announcement Saturday came hours after the United States said it had negotiated a ceasefire between Syria’s government and Israel, which had bombed government forces in both Sweida and Damascus earlier in the week.Israel, which has its own Druze community, has said it was acting in defence of the group, as well as to enforce its demands for the total demilitarisation of Syria’s south.US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday urged the Syrian government’s security forces to prevent jihadists from entering and “carrying out massacres” in the south, and called on Damascus to “bring to justice anyone guilty of atrocities including those in their own ranks”.strs-mam-lg/jsa/ysm

China is set to expand its influence over Southeast Asia’s development as the Trump administration and other Western donors slash aid, a study by an Australian think tank said Sunday.The region is in an “uncertain moment”, facing cuts in official development finance from the West as well as “especially punitive” US trade tariffs, the Sydney-based …

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