WarSclerotic

Civilians in southern Syria have begun to flee to the border with Israel, as government forces on Tuesday pushed deeper into rebel-held territories in Daraa province under the cover of airstrikes and Jordan said it would not accept any more refugees.

The United Nations estimated that up to 50,000 people have been displaced by the week-long offensive.

Jordan said its borders will remain closed for any new refugees, calling on the UN to provide security in southern Syria.

Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said aid officials were “deeply concerned” for those fleeing the fighting and heading toward the sealed border with Jordan.

He called on warring parties to “ensure the protection of these civilians, according to international law.”

Daraa’s residents described living in extreme fear and said many had also headed to the border with Israel, believing it to be safer.

“The safest place is the border with Israel because the regime and Russian airplanes cannot strike the area near the Israeli border,” said Waseem Kiwan, a 36-year old civilian in the village of Tafas north of Daraa city.

“The area is heading toward a catastrophe, a humanitarian catastrophe in every sense of the word,” he said. “People are living in extreme fear.”

An Israeli military spokesperson said the IDF “is prepared for a large variety of scenarios and is monitoring the events in the area.”

Israel has never taken in Syrian refugees except temporarily to provide medical treatment.

In January 2017, Israel announced a plan to take in 100 Syrian refugees, but officials said the initiative never got off the ground and no Syrians were allowed in the country.

Younis Shtawi, a police officer in the Daraa village of Umm al-Mayadeen, said several villages, including Busra al-Harir, Atesh, and communities in al-Lujat have been emptied of people in recent days.

“No one stayed,” Shtawi said.

Since last Tuesday, Syrian troops have targeted rebel-held areas in eastern Daraa, one of the country’s last major rebel strongholds.

Smoke rises above buildings during an airstrike by Syrian regime forces on the town of Busra al-Harir, east of the southern Syrian province of Daraa on June 24, 2018. (Mohamad ABAZEED/AFP)

The strategic area was part of a truce deal reached last July between the United States, Russia, and Jordan.

The offensive’s goal appears to be regaining control of the border crossing with Jordan, which has been in rebel hands since 2015. Syrian President Bashar Assad’s recent military victories, including the capture of Damascus suburbs and southern neighborhoods, have propelled the push.

Opposition activists said Syrian and Russian warplanes are taking part in the offensive. Russia’s air force threw its weight behind Assad’s forces in 2015, turning the tide of the war in his favor.

On Tuesday, the pro-government Central Military Media said Syrian troops gained control of al-Lujat, a rocky area in northeastern Daraa. It said the capture would have a domino effect on other parts east of Daraa and cut rebel supply lines.

Other pro-government media said the army intends to bring the entire province under its control and is likely to move on to western Daraa, where it has conducted a series of airstrikes Monday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war-monitoring group, reported that government troops were advancing in al-Lujat and captured seven new villages in the area.

Displaced Syrians are seen leaving opposition held areas of Daraa on June 26, 2018. ( Mohamad ABAZEED/AFP)

Daraa-based opposition activist Osama Hourani denied the government controlled parts of al-Lujat, saying the area, known for its caves and rocky plains, will be a challenge for Assad’s troops.

The US has said the Syrian offensive risked broadening the conflict and called on Russia to end what it called violations of the truce.

Israel has also carried out a series of strikes recently on Syrian and Iranian forces in the area, warning against the expansion of Iran’s role in Syria. Iranian advisers and Iran-backed militias are embedded with Syrian troops.

The UN World Food Program put the number of displaced from the Daraa fighting at nearly 50,000, saying it has delivered urgently-needed food across the Syria-Jordan border in the west. It said the fighting closed supply routes, causing a spike in prices of fuel and other basic supplies.

“We’re sleeping in the open air, under the trees, in the mosques and schools. Those lucky to find a tent have to share it with four or five other families,” a displaced man named Nidal told WFP.

Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi urged the UN to provide security in southern Syria. “Our borders will remain closed,” Safadi wrote on his Twitter account.

Jordan is already hosting about 660,000 registered Syrian refugees and estimates that the number of displaced Syrians in the overburdened country is twice as high.

WASHINGTON — The United States warned Tuesday that countries around the world must stop buying Iranian oil before November 4 or face a renewed round of American economic sanctions.

A senior State Department official warned foreign capitals “we’re not granting waivers” and described tightening the noose on Tehran as “one of our top national security priorities.”

Last month US President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, re-imposing US sanctions that had been suspended in return for controls on Tehran’s nuclear program.

Now, Washington is stepping up pressure on other countries to follow suit, including European allies who begged him to stay in the accord and major Iranian customers like India, Japan and China.

European powers in particular have been attempting to negotiate exemptions for their firms, but the official confirmed that Trump intends to stick to his 180-day deadline, expiring November 4.

“I would be hesitant to say zero waivers ever,” he said, but added that the official position is: “No, we’re not granting waivers.”

The senior US official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, admitted that this would be unpopular.

“This is a challenge for them, this is not something that any country that imports oil from Iran … wants to do voluntarily because, you know, we’re asking them to make a policy change.

“China, India? Yes, certainly their companies will be subject to the same sanctions that everybody else is,” he said. “We will certainly be requesting that their oil imports go to zero.”

Iran has faced mounting economic woes since the US pulled out of the 2015 nuclear accord.

On Tuesday angry protesters in Tehran held a second day of demonstrations over the country’s anemic economy as President Hassan Rouhani told the nation that it faces an “economic war” with the United States following America’s pullout from the deal.

Iranian protesters in central Tehran on June 25, 2018. (AFP Photo/Atta Kenare)

While online videos showed demonstrators again confronting police on Tehran’s streets and alleyways, the protests looked far smaller than those on Monday, when security forces fired tear gas on crowds in front of parliament.

Rage persists over the plunging of the Iranian rial to 90,000 to the dollar — double the government rate of 42,000 rials to $1 — as people watch their savings dwindle and shopkeepers hold onto some goods, uncertain of their true value.

Similar economic protests roiled Iran and spread to some 75 cities and towns at the end of last year, becoming the largest demonstrations in the country since the months-long rallies following the 2009 disputed presidential election. The protests in late December and early January saw at least 25 people killed and nearly 5,000 arrested, but took place largely in Iran’s provinces rather than in the capital, Tehran.

These latest protests have hit Iranian commercial areas, including the sprawling, historic warrens of Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, the home of conservative merchants who backed the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It remains unclear who is leading these protests, though analysts say hard-liners wanting to challenge Rouhani likely sparked the demonstrations at the end of last year.

Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani gives a speech in the city of Tabriz in the northwestern East-Azerbaijan province on April 25, 2018, (Atta Kenare/AFP)

On Tuesday, witnesses described a noticeable presence of riot police on the capital’s streets. Official reports and comments also were slim in Iran’s state-controlled media, though Prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said the “main provocateurs” of Monday’s protests were arrested. He did not elaborate on the number of people detained.

The state-run IRNA news agency euphemistically referred to one incident Tuesday in which the city’s metro line was temporarily shut down near the Grand Bazaar, saying it happened “because of some people gathered there.”

On Tuesday morning, Rouhani addressed a meeting of judges that included the head of the country’s judiciary and parliament. While a relative moderate within Iran’s theocratic government, Rouhani struck a hard line himself against America.

“We are fighting against the United States, it wants to make an economic war,” the president said. “The US cannot defeat our nation; our enemies are not able to force us to their knees.”

That’s a far cry from the optimism shared by Rouhani and other Iranians when the 2015 nuclear deal was enacted between Iran and six world powers, including America. Iran agreed to limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.

But that deal came under Barack Obama’s administration. Trump, who campaigned on a promise of tearing up the deal, pulled America out of the deal in May. The ensuing turmoil has seen international firms and oil companies back away from their own billion-dollar deals with Iran.

Rouhani’s own power within Iran’s government appears to be waning, with some openly calling for military officials to lead the country.

Iran also has suggested it could immediately ramp up its production of uranium in response to the US pullout, potentially escalating the very situation the nuclear deal sought to avoid — having an Iran with a stockpile of highly enriched uranium that it could use to build atomic bombs.

Tehran has long denied wanting to build nuclear weapons, despite fears from the West and the United Nations.

Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, speaking at the same event as Rouhani, appeared to directly criticize his administration.

Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani speaks during a press conference in Tehran, Iran, March 13, 2017. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

“The government hasn’t done enough to confront the economic problems,” the conservative politician said, according to the semi-official ISNA news agency.

The protests  have seen unusual scenes of demonstrators chanting against continued Iranian spending of billions of dollars on regional proxy wars and support for terrorist groups, which many say has meant less investment in the struggling economy at home.

In recent years, Iran has provided financial aid to Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Shiite militias in Iraq. Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Tehran has poured a reported $6 billion into propping up president Bashar Assad’s government.

Monday’s protests in Tehran and around the country — including economically hard-hit cities like Kermanshah in western Iran — included shouts of “Death to Palestine,” “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon” and “Leave Syria and think of us.” Chants of “We don’t want the ayatollahs” and “Death to the dictator” were also heard at some rallies.

Israel awarded its top defense prize to three high-level projects on Tuesday, including one that is classified, which were determined to have significantly contributed to the country’s security.

On Tuesday night, President Reuven Rivlin presented the three Israel Defense Prizes, alongside Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, and director-general of the Defense Ministry Udi Adam.

The Israel Defense Prize is awarded each year by the president to individuals, units, or projects that are found to have significantly improved the security of the state.

One prize was granted to the project to locate attack tunnels from the Gaza Strip, which Israel has used to destroy at least 10 border-crossing tunnels since October 2017, the Defense Ministry said.

The system relies on a variety of sensors to locate the subterranean passages, though the exact nature of the project remains classified.

“This is a system that has no equal in the world, which has led to a turning point in the campaign to thwart the tunnel threat,” the ministry said.

Liberman lauded the program, saying it took a “strategic weapon” away from the Hamas terrorist organization, the main digger of these attack tunnels.

“The tunnel detection project is based on technology that is unique in the world, which is practically science fiction. Thanks to the minds that are sitting here… we have taken from Hamas its strategic weapon, in which it has invested most of its rearmament budget: hundreds of millions of dollars,” the defense minister said.

“Attack tunnels have become burial tunnels,” Liberman added.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman awards the Israel Defense Prize to an IDF officer at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem on June 26, 2018. (Ariel Hermoni/Defense Ministry)

The tunnel-finding system was created by the Defense Ministry’s Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure (MAFAT), the IDF’s Ground Forces, the Gaza Division, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Rafael and Elbit defense contractors.

In its announcement, the Defense Ministry said the system was possible thanks to a number of “technological breakthroughs in a number of creative projects.”

The second award was granted to a project whose details are almost entirely classified.

The ministry said the project “gave the first solution of its kind to a central threat to the State of Israel.”

It involved both technological advancements and “extraordinary operational courage,” which has given a “significant and unique strategic contribution to the security of the state,” according to the Defense Ministry.

The third prize was granted to a technological project that was designed to identify potential terrorists using large amounts of data.

“The project dramatically influenced the security reality, mainly in thwarting hundreds of terror attacks,” the ministry said.

Liberman said the project was “no less incredible” than the tunnel detection system.

“It can be said responsibly that many citizens owe you their lives,” he told the prize recipients.

Apparently to keep aspects of these projects a secret, the Defense Ministry would not specify the recipients for each one. Instead, the ministry said that the two prizes were awarded to: Military Intelligence, the IDF Central Command’s intelligence unit, the IDF J6/C4I & Cyber Defense Directorate, MAFAT, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Israel Aerospace Industries MLM Division, which manufacturers missiles and space vehicles.

The Israel Defense Prize has been given yearly by the president since 1958. Though the prize is sometimes given for lifetime achievement, generally the recipients are responsible for the creation of a new piece of technology or a specific operation.

Over the years, the prize has been awarded to both individuals, like Uzi Gal who received the first Israel Defense Prize in 1958 for creating the Uzi submachine gun, and entire teams, like the group responsible for the development of the TROPHY anti-missile system that protects Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers, which won in 2014.

Rocket sirens blared multiples times in communities surrounding the Gaza Strip overnight Tuesday, as Palestinians launched at least a dozen rockets at southern Israel after the military struck a Hamas vehicle in the center of the coastal enclave.

The alarms rang out in towns and small communities throughout the Eshkol, Sha’ar Hanegev, Sdot Negev and Hof Ashkelon regions. At least three rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system. There were no reports of casualties or damage in Israel.

In the hours following the flareup, the army and the relevant regional councils held a “situational assessment” meeting and decided to allow schools to open as usual on Wednesday. No special instructions were given to residents of the area, according to local government officials.

Throughout the day on Tuesday, Palestinians launched incendiary balloons into southern Israel, sparking several fires in the area.

In response, the Israel Defense Forces launched a number of strikes in the Gaza Strip shortly after 1 a.m., targeting a car that the army said belonged to a senior Hamas operative involved in the airborne arson attacks. In addition, the army said it used aircraft and a tank to strike two Hamas outposts in the north of the Strip.

Palestinians said the vehicle that was hit belonged to one of the Hamas terror group’s field commanders and was parked in Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp. There were no casualties reported.

“Bombings will be answered with bombings,” Hamas said after the exchanges.

Earlier Tuesday Palestinians said Israeli drones destroyed two cars and an observation post in Gaza that were being used by a group of Palestinians to launch incendiary balloons into southern Israel. The military confirmed that its aircraft conducted three strikes in response to repeated arson attacks from the coastal enclave.

No Palestinian injuries were reported.

The IDF conducted similar airstrikes on Sunday, firing at groups of Gazans launching incendiary kites and balloons into southern Israel. In one case, three people were injured as an IDF drone fired a missile at a cart being used by the group, according to local Palestinian media.

On Monday, a total of 11 fires were caused in southern Israel by airborne arson devices, according to local government officials.

Palestinians prepare a kite with flammable materials that they will fly into southern Israel from Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, on June 22, 2018. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

The Israeli military has carried out multiple warning strikes in recent weeks at groups of Gazans preparing to launch incendiary devices toward Israel. The army has said repeatedly that it will act to prevent the launch of the airborne incendiary devices and explosives.

Since March 30, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have launched countless kites, balloons and inflated latex condoms bearing flammable materials, and occasionally explosives, into Israeli territory, sparking near-daily fires that have burned thousands of acres of farmland, parks and forests.

Israeli leaders have warned that the military is prepared to take more intense offensive action against the phenomenon.

Israeli leaders have been split on how to respond to those responsible for the airborne arson attacks, with some calling for the IDF to shoot the kite flyers and balloon launchers on sight, while others argue that it would be a step too far.

Judah Ari Gross contributed to this report.