‘Nothing Will Be Left’: Israel Prepares For Gaza City Battle
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Syrian soldier killed in clashes between government forces and SDF in Aleppo, state news agency says
Sudan refugees face cholera outbreak with nothing but lemons for medicine. Cholera is ripping through the camps of Tawila in Darfur in western Sudan. Hundreds of thousands of people have been left withNothing but the water they can boil, to serve as both disinfectant and medicine.Across North Darfur state, more than 640,000 children under the age of five are at risk, according to UNICEF.By July 30, there were 2,140 infections and at least 80 deaths across Darfur, UN figures show. The conflict, now in its third year, has killed tens of thousands and created the world’s largest displacement camp, the U.N. says. The UN has repeatedly warned of food insecurity in TawILA, where aid has trickled in but nowhere near enough to feed the hundreds of thousands who go hungry. The U.S. State Department says it is working with the Sudanese government to tackle the problem. But aid convoys remain largely paralyzed by the fighting and humanitarian access to the ground has been blocked.
TAWILA: In the cholera-stricken refugee camps of western Sudan, every second is infected by fear. Faster than a person can boil water over an open flame, the flies descend and everything is contaminated once more.
Cholera is ripping through the camps of Tawila in Darfur, where hundreds of thousands of people have been left with nothing but the water they can boil, to serve as both disinfectant and medicine.
“We mix lemon in the water when we have it and drink it as medicine,” said Mona Ibrahim, who has been living for two months in a hastily-erected camp in Tawila.
“We have no other choice,” she told AFP, seated on the bare ground.
Adam is one of nearly half a million people who sought shelter in and around Tawila, from the nearby besieged city of El-Fasher and the Zamzam displacement camp in April, following attacks by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), at war with Sudan’s regular army since April 2023.
The first cholera cases in Tawila were detected in early June in the village of Tabit, about 25 kilometers south, said Sylvain Penicaud, a project coordinator for French charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
“After two weeks, we started identifying cases directly in Tawila, particularly in the town’s displacement camps,” he told AFP.
In the past month, more than 1,500 cases have been treated in Tawila alone, he said, while the UN’s children agency says around 300 of the town’s children have contracted the disease since April.
Across North Darfur state, more than 640,000 children under the age of five are at risk, according to UNICEF.
By July 30, there were 2,140 infections and at least 80 deaths across Darfur, UN figures show.
Cholera is a highly contagious bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea and spreads through contaminated water and food.
Causing rapid dehydration, it can kill within hours if left untreated, yet it is preventable and usually easily treatable with oral rehydration solutions.
More severe cases require intravenous fluids and antibiotics.
Ibrahim Adam Mohamed Abdallah, UNICEF’s executive director in Tawila, told AFP his team “advises people to wash their hands with soap, clean the blankets and tarps provided to them and how to use clean water.”
But in the makeshift shelters of Tawila, patched together from thin branches, scraps of plastic and bundles of straw, even those meagre precautions are out of reach.
Insects cluster on every barely washed bowl, buzzing over the scraps of already meagre meals.
Haloum Ahmed, who has been suffering from severe diarrhea for three days, said “there are so many flies where we live.”
Water is often fetched from nearby natural sources — often contaminated — or from one of the few remaining shallow, functional wells.
It “is extremely worrying,” said MSF’s Penicaud, but “those people have no (other) choice.”
Sitting beside a heap of unwashed clothes on the dusty ground, Ibrahim said no one around “has any soap.”
“We don’t have toilets — the children relieve themselves in the open,” she added.
“We don’t have food. We don’t have pots. No blankets — nothing at all,” said Fatna Essa, another 50-year-old displaced woman in Tawila.
The UN has repeatedly warned of food insecurity in Tawila, where aid has trickled in, but nowhere near enough to feed the hundreds of thousands who go hungry.
Sudan’s conflict, now in its third year, has killed tens of thousands and created the world’s largest displacement and hunger crises, according to the United Nations.
In Tawila, health workers are trying to contain the cholera outbreak — but resources are stretched thin.
MSF has opened a 160-bed cholera treatment center in Tawila, with plans to expand to 200 beds.
A second unit has also been set up in Daba Nyra, one of the most severely affected camps. But both are already overwhelmed, said Penicaud.
Meanwhile, aid convoys remain largely paralyzed by the fighting and humanitarian access has nearly ground to a halt.
Armed groups — particularly the RSF — have blocked convoys from reaching those in need.
Meanwhile, the rainy season, which peaks this month, may bring floodwaters that further contaminate water supplies and worsen the crisis.
Any flooding could “heighten the threat of disease outbreaks,” warned UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric.
The World Health Organization said last week that cholera “has swept across Sudan, with all states reporting outbreaks.” It said nearly 100,000 cases had been reported across the country since July 2024.
UNICEF also reported over 2,408 deaths across 17 of Sudan’s 18 states since August 2024.
Nothing will be left: Israel prepares for Gaza City battle
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out his vision of victory in Gaza following 22 months of war. He ordered the military to attack the last remaining Hamas strongholds in Gaza City and the central camps further south. With a pre-war population of some 760,000, according to official figures, Gaza City was the biggest of any municipal area in the Palestinian territories. Israel has already tried to push civilians further south to so-called humanitarian zones established by the military, but there is likely little space to accommodate more arrivals. The first challenge for Israeli troops relates to Netanyahu’s call for the evacuation of civilians — how such a feat will be carried out remains unclear. The Israeli army will encounter obstacles including a vast network of tunnels where Israeli hostages are likely being held, along with weapons depots, hiding places and combat posts. Other obstacles could include improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and the use of civilians as human shields in a dense urban maze of narrow alleys and tall buildings.
On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out his vision of victory in Gaza following 22 months of war — with the military ordered to attack the last remaining Hamas strongholds in Gaza City and the central camps further south.
With a pre-war population of some 760,000, according to official figures, Gaza City was the biggest of any municipal area in the Palestinian territories.
But following the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 that sparked the war, its population has only swelled, with thousands of displaced people fleeing intensive military operations to the north.
Gaza City itself has come under intense aerial bombardment, and its remaining apartment buildings now rub shoulders with tents and other makeshift shelters.
Amir Avivi, a former Israeli general and head of the Israeli Defense and Security Forum think tank, described the city as the “heart of Hamas’s rule in Gaza.”
“Gaza City has always been the center of government and also has the strongest brigade of Hamas,” he said.
The first challenge for Israeli troops relates to Netanyahu’s call for the evacuation of civilians — how such a feat will be carried out remains unclear.
Unlike the rest of the Strip, where most of the population has been displaced at least once, around 300,000 residents of Gaza City have not moved since the outbreak of the conflict, according to Avivi.
Israel has already tried to push civilians further south to so-called humanitarian zones established by the military, but there is likely little space to accommodate more arrivals.
“You cannot put another one million people over there. It will be a horrible humanitarian crisis,” said Michael Milshtein, an Israeli former military intelligence officer.
According to Avivi, humanitarian aid would be mainly distributed south of Gaza City in order to encourage residents to move toward future distribution sites managed by the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Up from just four currently, the GHF plans to operate 16 sites.
However, Gaza’s civil defense agency says Israeli troops are firing at and killing civilians daily around the sites.
Human Rights Watch has called them a “death trap,” while the UN and other groups have lashed out at what they call a militarization of aid.
According to Michael Milshtein, who heads the Palestinian Studies Program at Tel Aviv University, Hamas’s military wing could have as many as 10,000 to 15,000 fighters in Gaza City, many of them freshly recruited.
“It’s very easy to convince a 17, 18, 19-year-old Palestinian to be a part of Al-Qassam Brigades,” Milshtein told AFP, referring to Hamas’s armed wing as he cited a lack of opportunities for much Gaza’s population.
“While (Israel’s army) prepares itself, Hamas also prepares itself for the coming warfare, if it takes place,” he added, predicting that the battle could end up being “very similar to Stalingrad.”
He was referring to the battle for the city now known as Volgograd, one of the longest and bloodiest in World War II.
The Israeli army will encounter obstacles including a vast network of tunnels where Israeli hostages are likely being held, along with weapons depots, hiding places and combat posts.
Other obstacles could include improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and the use of civilians as human shields in a dense urban maze of narrow alleys and tall buildings, according to press reports.
“It’s almost impossible to go in there without creating both hostage casualties and a large humanitarian disaster,” said Mairav Zonszein of the International Crisis Group.
The material destruction, she added, will be enormous.
“They will simply destroy everything, and then nothing will be left,” she said.
Despite rumored disagreements over the plan by the chief of the army Eyal Zamir, the general said his forces “will be able to conquer Gaza City, just as it did in Khan Yunis and Rafah in the south,” according to a statement on Monday.
“Our forces have operated there in the past, and we will know how to do it again.”
Jordan hosts talks with US, Syria on reconstruction for war-ravaged nation
Sudan refugees face cholera outbreak with nothing but lemons for medicine. Cholera is ripping through the camps of Tawila in Darfur in western Sudan. Hundreds of thousands of people have been left withNothing but the water they can boil, to serve as both disinfectant and medicine.Across North Darfur state, more than 640,000 children under the age of five are at risk, according to UNICEF.By July 30, there were 2,140 infections and at least 80 deaths across Darfur, UN figures show. The conflict, now in its third year, has killed tens of thousands and created the world’s largest displacement camp, the U.N. says. The UN has repeatedly warned of food insecurity in TawILA, where aid has trickled in but nowhere near enough to feed the hundreds of thousands who go hungry. The U.S. State Department says it is working with the Sudanese government to tackle the problem. But aid convoys remain largely paralyzed by the fighting and humanitarian access to the ground has been blocked.
TAWILA: In the cholera-stricken refugee camps of western Sudan, every second is infected by fear. Faster than a person can boil water over an open flame, the flies descend and everything is contaminated once more.
Cholera is ripping through the camps of Tawila in Darfur, where hundreds of thousands of people have been left with nothing but the water they can boil, to serve as both disinfectant and medicine.
“We mix lemon in the water when we have it and drink it as medicine,” said Mona Ibrahim, who has been living for two months in a hastily-erected camp in Tawila.
“We have no other choice,” she told AFP, seated on the bare ground.
Adam is one of nearly half a million people who sought shelter in and around Tawila, from the nearby besieged city of El-Fasher and the Zamzam displacement camp in April, following attacks by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), at war with Sudan’s regular army since April 2023.
The first cholera cases in Tawila were detected in early June in the village of Tabit, about 25 kilometers south, said Sylvain Penicaud, a project coordinator for French charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
“After two weeks, we started identifying cases directly in Tawila, particularly in the town’s displacement camps,” he told AFP.
In the past month, more than 1,500 cases have been treated in Tawila alone, he said, while the UN’s children agency says around 300 of the town’s children have contracted the disease since April.
Across North Darfur state, more than 640,000 children under the age of five are at risk, according to UNICEF.
By July 30, there were 2,140 infections and at least 80 deaths across Darfur, UN figures show.
Cholera is a highly contagious bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea and spreads through contaminated water and food.
Causing rapid dehydration, it can kill within hours if left untreated, yet it is preventable and usually easily treatable with oral rehydration solutions.
More severe cases require intravenous fluids and antibiotics.
Ibrahim Adam Mohamed Abdallah, UNICEF’s executive director in Tawila, told AFP his team “advises people to wash their hands with soap, clean the blankets and tarps provided to them and how to use clean water.”
But in the makeshift shelters of Tawila, patched together from thin branches, scraps of plastic and bundles of straw, even those meagre precautions are out of reach.
Insects cluster on every barely washed bowl, buzzing over the scraps of already meagre meals.
Haloum Ahmed, who has been suffering from severe diarrhea for three days, said “there are so many flies where we live.”
Water is often fetched from nearby natural sources — often contaminated — or from one of the few remaining shallow, functional wells.
It “is extremely worrying,” said MSF’s Penicaud, but “those people have no (other) choice.”
Sitting beside a heap of unwashed clothes on the dusty ground, Ibrahim said no one around “has any soap.”
“We don’t have toilets — the children relieve themselves in the open,” she added.
“We don’t have food. We don’t have pots. No blankets — nothing at all,” said Fatna Essa, another 50-year-old displaced woman in Tawila.
The UN has repeatedly warned of food insecurity in Tawila, where aid has trickled in, but nowhere near enough to feed the hundreds of thousands who go hungry.
Sudan’s conflict, now in its third year, has killed tens of thousands and created the world’s largest displacement and hunger crises, according to the United Nations.
In Tawila, health workers are trying to contain the cholera outbreak — but resources are stretched thin.
MSF has opened a 160-bed cholera treatment center in Tawila, with plans to expand to 200 beds.
A second unit has also been set up in Daba Nyra, one of the most severely affected camps. But both are already overwhelmed, said Penicaud.
Meanwhile, aid convoys remain largely paralyzed by the fighting and humanitarian access has nearly ground to a halt.
Armed groups — particularly the RSF — have blocked convoys from reaching those in need.
Meanwhile, the rainy season, which peaks this month, may bring floodwaters that further contaminate water supplies and worsen the crisis.
Any flooding could “heighten the threat of disease outbreaks,” warned UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric.
The World Health Organization said last week that cholera “has swept across Sudan, with all states reporting outbreaks.” It said nearly 100,000 cases had been reported across the country since July 2024.
UNICEF also reported over 2,408 deaths across 17 of Sudan’s 18 states since August 2024.
‘Nothing will be left’: Israel prepares for Gaza City battle
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out his vision of victory in Gaza following 22 months of war. He ordered the military to attack the last remaining Hamas strongholds in Gaza City and the central camps farther south. Hamas’ military wing could have as many as 10,000 to 15,000 fighters in the city, many of them freshly recruited. Israel has already tried to push civilians farther south to so-called humanitarian zones established by the military, but there is likely little space to accommodate more arrivals. Israeli army will encounter obstacles, including a vast network of tunnels where Israeli hostages are likely being held, along with weapons depots and combat posts. The UN and other groups have lashed out at what they call a militarisation of aid, calling it a ‘death trap’ and ‘an enormous humanitarian disaster’ The Israeli army says it will be able to conquer Gaza City ‘just as it did in Khan Younis and Rafah in the south’, and that it will use the city as a staging area for future operations.
Israeli armoured vehicles are seen near the Gaza border in southern Israel on Aug 12.
– In a dense urban landscape, with likely thousands of Hamas fighters lying in wait, taking Gaza City will be a difficult and costly slog for the Israeli army, security experts say.
On Aug 10, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out his vision of victory in Gaza following 22 months of war, with the military ordered to attack the last remaining Hamas strongholds in Gaza City and the central camps farther south.
With a pre-war population of some 760,000, according to official figures, Gaza City was the biggest of any municipal area in the Palestinian territories.
But following the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 that sparked the war, its population has only swelled, with thousands of displaced people fleeing intensive military operations to the north.
Gaza City itself has come under intense aerial bombardment, and its remaining apartment buildings now rub shoulders with tents and other makeshift shelters.
Mr Amir Avivi, a former Israeli general and head of the Israeli Defence and Security Forum think-tank, described the city as the “heart of Hamas’ rule in Gaza”.
“Gaza City has always been the centre of government and also has the strongest brigade of Hamas,” he said.
The first challenge for Israeli troops relates to Mr Netanyahu’s call for the evacuation of civilians. How such a feat will be carried out remains unclear.
Unlike the rest of the Gaza Strip, where most of the population has been displaced at least once, around 300,000 residents of Gaza City have not moved since the outbreak of the conflict, according to Mr Avivi.
Israel has already tried to push civilians farther south to so-called humanitarian zones established by the military, but there is likely little space to accommodate more arrivals.
“You cannot put another one million people over there. It will be a horrible humanitarian crisis,” said Mr Michael Milshtein, an Israeli former military intelligence officer.
According to Mr Avivi, humanitarian aid would be mainly distributed south of Gaza City in order to encourage residents to move towards future distribution sites managed by the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
The GHF plans to operate 16 sites, up from just four currently.
However, Gaza’s civil defence agency says Israeli troops are firing at and killing civilians daily around the sites.
Human Rights Watch has called them a “death trap”, while the UN and other groups have lashed out at what they call a militarisation of aid.
‘Stalingrad’
According to Mr Milshtein , who heads the Palestinian Studies Programme at Tel Aviv University, Hamas’ military wing could have as many as 10,000 to 15,000 fighters in Gaza City, many of them freshly recruited.
“It’s very easy to convince a 17-, 18-, 19-year-old Palestinian to be a part of Al-Qassam Brigades,” Mr Milshtein said, referring to Hamas’ armed wing, as he cited a lack of opportunities for much of Gaza’s population.
“While (Israel’s army) prepares itself, Hamas also prepares itself for the coming warfare, if it takes place,” he added, predicting that the battle could end up being “very similar to Stalingrad”.
He was referring to the battle for the city now known as Volgograd, one of the longest and bloodiest in World War II.
The Israeli army will encounter obstacles, including a vast network of tunnels where Israeli hostages are likely being held, along with weapons depots, hiding places and combat posts.
Other obstacles could include improvised explosive devices and the use of civilians as human shields in a dense urban maze of narrow alleys and tall buildings, according to press reports.
“It’s almost impossible to go in there without creating both hostage casualties and a large humanitarian disaster,” said Ms Mairav Zonszein, of the International Crisis Group.
The material destruction, she added, will be enormous.
“They will simply destroy everything, and then nothing will be left,” she said.
Despite rumoured disagreements over the plan, the chief of the Israeli army, Lieutenant-General Eyal Zamir , said his forces “will be able to conquer Gaza City, just as it did in Khan Younis and Rafah in the south”.
“Our forces have operated there in the past, and we will know how to do it again,” he said. AFP
Israel-Gaza war LIVE: Israel Opposition chief backs call for strike in support of Gaza hostages
“The moment has come to act, to take to the streets,” the group said in a statement. “No one has a monopoly on emotion, on mutual responsibility, on Jewish values.” The call follows a call for a general strike by parents of hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The call comes after the Israeli government announced plans to expand the Gaza war to areas not yet controlled by the military. The move has been condemned by the U.N. as a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the use of chemical weapons in warfare.
Israel Opposition chief backs call for strike in support of Gaza hostages
Israeli opposition chief Yair Lapid on Tuesday (August 12, 2025) backed calls for a general strike in solidarity with hostages still held in Gaza.
“Strike on Sunday,” Mr. Lapid posted on X, saying even supporters of the current government should take part and insisting it was not party political.
Sunday is the first day of the working week in Israel.
“Strike out of solidarity. Strike because the families have asked, and that’s reason enough. Strike because no one has a monopoly on emotion, on mutual responsibility, on Jewish values.”
Mr. Lapid’s post followed a call on Sunday by around 20 parents of hostages still held by Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip for a strike.
On Monday, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, the main representative group for relatives, backed the idea.
The group has been pressing the leaders of Israel’s main trade union federation, Histadrut, to join in but it decided against doing so.
Instead, it said it would support “workers’ solidarity demonstrations”, the Forum said.
“Allow a citizens’ strike, from the grassroots to the top. Allow everyone to take a day off on Sunday to follow the dictates of their conscience,” the Forum added in a statement.
“The moment has come to act, to take to the streets,” it said, adding “675 days of captivity and war must end”.
The group again accused the government of sacrificing the remaining hostages “on the altar of an endless, aimless war”.
Last week, Israel’s security cabinet approved plans to expand the war into the remaining parts of Gaza not yet controlled by the military, sparking fears that more hostages might die as a result.
Of the 251 hostages taken captive by Palestinian militants during Hamas’s October 2023 attack on southern Israel, 49 are still held in Gaza, including 27 the Israeli military says are dead.
In early August, Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad released videos showing two hostages in emaciated conditions.
Hamas’s 2023 attack that sparked the Gaza war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, the majority civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed at least 61,499 people, the majority civilians, according to the figures from the Hamas-run health ministry considered reliable by the United Nations. — AFP