AFP Asia Business

The United States has lost seven multi-million-dollar MQ-9 Reaper drones in the Yemen area since March 15, a US official said Monday, as the Navy announced a costly warplane fell off an aircraft carrier into the Red Sea.Washington launched the latest round of its air campaign against Yemen’s Huthis in mid-March, and MQ-9s can be used for both reconnaissance — a key aspect of US efforts to identify and target weaponry the rebels are using to attack shipping in the region — as well as strikes.”There have been seven MQ-9s that have gone down since March 15,” the US official said on condition of anonymity, without specifying what caused the loss of the drones, which cost around $30 million apiece.The US Navy meanwhile announced the loss of another piece of expensive military equipment: an F/A-18E warplane that fell off the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier in an accident that injured one sailor.A tractor that was towing the F/A-18E — a type of aircraft that cost more than $67 million in 2021 — also slipped off the ship into the sea.”The F/A-18E was actively under tow in the hangar bay when the move crew lost control of the aircraft. The aircraft and tow tractor were lost overboard,” the Navy said in a statement.The carrier and its other planes remain in action and the incident is under investigation, the Navy added. No details of recovery work were released.- Weeks of heavy strikes -It is the second F/A-18 operating off the Truman to be lost in less than six months, after another was mistakenly shot down by the USS Gettysburg guided missile cruiser late last year in an incident that both pilots survived.The Truman is one of two US aircraft carriers operating in the Middle East, where US forces have been striking the Huthis on a near-daily basis.The military’s Central Command said Sunday that US forces have struck more than 800 targets and killed hundreds of Huthi fighters, including members of the group’s leadership, as part of the operation.Huthi-controlled media in Yemen said Monday that US strikes hit a migrant detention center in the movement’s stronghold of the capital Saada, killing at least 68 people.Then early Tuesday, rebel channel Al-Masirah reported two strikes on Bani Hashish, northeast of the capital, citing the local governorate. The Iran-backed Huthis began targeting shipping in late 2023, claiming solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, which has been devastated by Israel’s military after a shock Hamas attack in October of that year.Huthi attacks have prevented ships from passing through the Suez Canal — a vital route that normally carries about 12 percent of the world’s shipping traffic.The United States first began conducting strikes against the Huthis under the Biden administration, and President Donald Trump has vowed that military action against the rebels will continue until they are no longer a threat to shipping.

Amnesty International on Tuesday accused Israel of committing a “live-streamed genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza by forcibly displacing most of the population and deliberately creating a humanitarian catastrophe.In its annual report, Amnesty charged that Israel had acted with “specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, thus committing genocide”.Israel has rejected accusations of “genocide” from Amnesty, other rights groups and some states in its war in Gaza.The conflict erupted after the Palestinian militant group Hamas’s deadly October 7, 2023 attacks inside Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.Militants also abducted 251 people, 58 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.Israel in response launched a relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip and a ground operation that according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory has left at least 52,243 dead.”Since 7 October 2023, when Hamas perpetrated horrific crimes against Israeli citizens and others and captured more than 250 hostages, the world has been made audience to a live-streamed genocide,” Amnesty’s secretary general Agnes Callamard said in the introduction to the report.”States watched on as if powerless, as Israel killed thousands upon thousands of Palestinians, wiping out entire multigenerational families, destroying homes, livelihoods, hospitals and schools,” she added.- ‘Extreme levels of suffering’ -Gaza’s civil defence agency said early Tuesday that four people were killed and others injured in an Israeli air strike on displaced persons’ tents near the Al-Iqleem area in Southern Gaza.The agency earlier warned fuel shortages meant it had been forced to suspend eight out of 12 emergency vehicles in Southern Gaza, including ambulances.The lack of fuel “threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens and displaced persons in shelter centres,” it said in a statement.Amnesty’s report said the Israeli campaign had left most of the Palestinians of Gaza “displaced, homeless, hungry, at risk of life-threatening diseases and unable to access medical care, power or clean water”.Amnesty said that throughout 2024 it had “documented multiple war crimes by Israel, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks”. It said Israel’s actions forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians, around 90 percent of Gaza’s population, and “deliberately engineered an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe”.Even as protesters hit the streets in Western capitals, “the world’s governments individually and multilaterally failed repeatedly to take meaningful action to end the atrocities and were slow even in calling for a ceasefire”.Meanwhile, Amnesty also sounded alarm over Israeli actions in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank, and repeated an accusation that Israel was employing a system of “apartheid”. “Israel’s system of apartheid became increasingly violent in the occupied West Bank, marked by a sharp increase in unlawful killings and state-backed attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians,” it said.Heba Morayef, Amnesty director for the Middle East and North Africa region, denounced “the extreme levels of suffering that Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to endure on a daily basis over the past year” as well as “the world’s complete inability or lack of political will to put a stop to it”.