Wars, quakes usher in 2024

• Published date: 06 January 2024
• Publication title: Weekend Argus

Many around the world were hoping to shake off global tumult and disasters this year, which heralds elections for half the planet’s population of more than eight billion in Russia, Britain, the EU, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, the US and Venezuela

Yet as the new year started there were already ominous signs this week.

Middle East

Israel continued to pound the densely populated Gaza Strip, where the UN says 85% of people have fled their homes.

Since Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7, the Israeli Defence Force has reduced vast areas of Gaza to rubble and killed at least 22 000 people, mostly women and children, according to the territory’s health ministry.

Tensions have also surged with Israel’s northern neighbour Lebanon, where a strike in Beirut on Tuesday, widely assumed to have been carried out by Israel, killed Hamas deputy leader Saleh al-Aruri.

Aruri was killed in the south Beirut stronghold of the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, which has traded tit-for-tat fire across the border with Israel for months.

Hezbollah has vowed that the death of Aruri and six other Hamas operatives on its home turf will not go unpunished.

In Iran, President Ebrahim Raisi joined mourners in Kerman yesterday for the funerals of the 89 people killed, including women and children, in twin blasts claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group, state media said.

Suicide bombings struck crowds in the southern city, where many had gathered on Wednesday to commemorate slain Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general Qasem Soleimani, on the fourth anniversary of his death in a US drone strike.

The Security Council condemned the bombings as a “cowardly terrorist attack” and urged all UN member states “to co-operate actively” with Iran in holding its “perpetrators, organisers, financiers and sponsors” accountable.

Soleimani, who headed the Guards’ foreign operations arm, the Quds Force, was a staunch enemy of IS, a Sunni extremist group which has carried out previous attacks in majority- Shia Iran.

In the US, Pentagon spokesperson Pat Ryder confirmed that US forces conducted a strike in Iraq targeting the pro-Iran military commander of Harakat-al-Nujaba, Mushtaq Taleb al-Saidi, also known as Abu Taqwa, for his alleged role in attacks on US troops in the region.

In response, Iraqi military spokesperson Yehia Rasool described it as an “unprovoked attack on an Iraqi security body operating in accordance with the powers granted to it by the commander-in-chief of the Armed...