UN envoy for Syria slams ‘repeated’ military attacks by Israel in Syria, warning of violations of international law.

Syria has accused Israel of attempting to destabilise the country after it was hit by a double whammy of attacks on airbases and a deadly ground incursion, marking an intensification of Israeli military activity in the country.

Syria’s state news agency SANA said that Israeli shelling overnight on Wednesday in Syria’s southern province of Deraa killed nine people, and described a ground incursion by Israel’s soldiers in the area as the deepest since the toppling of former President Bashar al-Assad.

The country’s Foreign Ministry said on Telegram on Thursday that the overnight raids were an “unjustified escalation”, describing them as “a deliberate attempt to destabilise Syria and exacerbate the suffering of its people”.

A spokesperson for the Israeli army said on Thursday that it was responding to fire from gunmen during the ground operation in the Tasil area, near the city of Nawa, “seizing weapons and destroying terrorist infrastructure”.

“[Israel’s military] will not allow the existence of a military threat in Syria and will act against it,” the spokesperson added.

Residents of the Tasil area told the Reuters news agency that a group of armed locals were killed after confronting an Israeli army contingent that had arrived in the area to destroy a former Syrian army encampment.

Geir Pedersen, the United Nations envoy for Syria, decried “the repeated and intensifying military escalations by Israel in Syria”, saying that they undermined “efforts to build a new Syria at peace with itself and the region”.

He called on Israel “to cease these attacks which could amount to serious violations of international law”.

Strategic airbase smashed

Israeli aircraft carried out two attacks on military targets near Damascus late on Thursday, war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.

“Israeli warplanes carried out air strikes on military positions and posts” in the vicinity of al-Kiswah and al-Muqaylibah outside Damascus, the Observatory said, adding that there were no immediate reports of casualties.

On Wednesday, Israel launched some of its most intense air attacks on Syria since rebels led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa deposed al-Assad in December.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry said Israel struck five separate areas within a 30-minute window overnight on Wednesday, resulting in the near-complete destruction of the Hama airbase and wounding dozens of civilians and soldiers.

The Israeli military said it had struck remaining military capabilities at airbases in Hama and Homs Governorates, in addition to remaining military infrastructure in the Damascus area, where Syrian media and officials said the vicinity of a scientific research facility was hit.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said that the attacks were “a clear message and a warning for the future – we will not allow the security of the State of Israel to be harmed”.

Reflecting Israeli concerns about Turkish influence in the new Syria, Foreign Minister Gideon Saar accused Turkiye of playing a “negative role” in Syria, Lebanon and other regions.

“They are doing their utmost to have Syria as a Turkish protectorate. It’s clear that is their intention,” he told a news conference in Paris on Thursday.

Turkiye’s Foreign Ministry described Israel as a “strategic destabiliser” that was “causing chaos and feeding terrorism”, representing “the greatest threat to regional security”.

“Therefore, in order to establish security throughout the region, Israel must first abandon its expansionist policies, withdraw from the territories it occupies, and stop undermining efforts to establish stability in Syria,” said the ministry.

Neighbouring Jordan called Israel’s repeated attacks on Syria a clear breach of the 1974 disengagement agreement between the two countries and a “flagrant violation of international law”.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar also condemned the Israeli attacks.

Israel has carried out an extensive bombing campaign against Syrian military targets since rebels assumed control of the country.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded in February that southern Syria be completely demilitarised and said his government would not accept the presence of the forces of the new government near Israeli territory.

In December, Netanyahu ordered troops to enter the UN-patrolled buffer zone that separated Israeli and Syrian forces along the 1974 armistice line on the occupied Golan Heights.

At least 33 Palestinians have been killed and more than 100 wounded in Israeli air attacks on three schools housing displaced people in the Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City, according to local officials.

Gaza’s Government Media Office said in a statement that 29 people – including 18 children – were killed and more than 100 were injured when Israeli air raids hit the Dar al-Arqam School-turned-shelter on Thursday.

The school was hit with at least four missiles, a Civil Defence spokesperson said.

Sources told Al Jazeera that at least four people also were killed in an Israeli attack on the Fahd School in the same area of Gaza City, which was also sheltering displaced families.

Israeli forces also reportedly hit Shaaban Alrayyes school in Tuffah, although no figures on casualties were immediately available.

The Israeli military said it struck a command centre in Gaza City that had been used by Hamas fighters to plan and execute attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers. It was unclear whether it was the same attack that targeted a school.

Israeli forces have routinely targeted shelters in the Gaza Strip that house displaced families who have nowhere to flee and remain trapped in the besieged enclave, which is being heavily bombarded.

Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said the footage from the site of the bombing at Dar al-Arqam School was “horrific”.

“Some of the footage is too graphic to show – horrific and deeply disturbing. Many were killed on the spot while others succumbed to their injuries while being transported in ambulances or civilian vehicles to al-Ahli Hospital,” Mahmoud said.

“This tragedy underscores again that Israeli-described ‘safe zones’ are anything but,” he added.

A spokesperson from Gaza’s emergency rescue workers told Al Jazeera the international community must step in immediately to stop the Israeli army from killing Palestinians.

“What is going on here is a wake-up call to the entire world. This war and these massacres against women and children must stop immediately. Children are being killed with cold blood here in Gaza,” he said.

Medical sources told Al Jazeera that at least 112 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since dawn on Thursday with 71 people killed in Gaza City and many others killed in attacks on the southern city of Khan Younis.

In Gaza City, 21 bodies were taken to al-Ahli Arab Hospital, including those of seven children.

Officials in Khan Younis said the bodies of 14 people had been taken to Nasser Hospital – nine of them from the same family. Those killed included five children and four women.

The bodies of another 19 people, including five children aged one to seven years and a pregnant woman, were taken to the European Gaza Hospital near Khan Younis, hospital officials said.

The Government Media Office warned that Civil Defence crews are finding it increasingly difficult to remove people from under the rubble without adequate equipment and vehicles and while the healthcare sector is collapsing.

Israel has imposed a monthlong total siege on Gaza, sealing vital crossings and banning the entry of all humanitarian aid, including food, fuel and medical supplies – leaving Palestinians in Gaza with acute shortages and exacerbating an already dire humanitarian catastrophe.

Searching for shelter

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of fleeing families sought shelter in one of the biggest displacements of the war on Thursday as Israeli forces advanced into the ruins of Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah – part of a newly announced “security zone” they intend to seize.

The Israeli army’s assault to capture Rafah is a major escalation in the war after Israel broke a ceasefire with Hamas on March 18 and resumed its attacks on Gaza.

Israeli forces on Thursday pushed into the city, which had served as a last refuge for people fleeing other areas for much of the war.

Rafah “is gone. It is being wiped out,” a father of seven told the Reuters news agency. He was among the hundreds of thousands of people who had fled from Rafah to neighbouring Khan Younis. “They are knocking down what is left standing of houses and property.”

Separately, the Israeli military on Thursday issued new orders to residents in parts of central Gaza, telling them to move west towards Gaza City and saying it planned to “work with extreme force in your area”.

Many Palestinians leaving the targeted area did so on foot with some carrying their belongings on their backs and others using donkey carts.

“My wife and I have been walking for three hours, covering only 1km [0.6 miles],” Mohammad Ermana, 72, told The Associated Press news agency. The couple, clasping hands, each walked with a cane.

“I’m searching for shelters every hour now, not every day,” he said.

Also on Thursday, Israel’s military said it was conducting an investigation into the deaths of 15 Palestinian aid workers found buried in a shallow grave in March near Red Crescent vehicles, an incident that caused global alarm.

Earlier on Thursday, the Ministry of Health in Hamas-run Gaza said 1,163 people had been killed in the Palestinian territory since fighting resumed on March 18 after a six-week ceasefire.

More than 50,500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since the start of the war in October 2023 and at least 114,000 have been wounded.

The war began after Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel killed 1,139 people.

Civilians in Sudan’s North Darfur’s capital, el-Fasher, and surrounding towns are starving.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have imposed a siege on them for about a year, yet they managed to forestall an invasion thanks to the Joint Forces – an array of local armed factions backed by the army.

The besieged civilians are now pleading for help, but some fear the army has neither the political will nor the capability to rescue civilians, say experts, local journalists and civilians.

The nearly 500,000 civilians in Zamzam camp – the largest refugee camp in North Darfur – are already suffering from famine, according to the United Nations global hunger monitor, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

Residents in Zamzam told Al Jazeera the army dropped some food aid from its warplanes earlier this week, but said supplies will run out in a few days.

“All Sudanese military and security agencies should move towards [North Darfur] to ensure the flow of food, medicine and humanitarian supplies to besieged civilians,” said Mohamed Khamis Doda, the spokesperson for Zamzam camp.

“There must also be an immediate intervention of [humanitarian organisations],” he added.

Abandoning Darfur?

Most people in the camp, and in el-Fasher, are from sedentary farming communities, known as “non-Arabs”, while most of the fighters attacking them come from the nomadic or pastoralist “Arab” tribes the RSF typically recruits from.

Since April 2023, the RSF has been fighting Sudan’s army in a catastrophic civil war that has triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis by most measures.

The RSF quickly captured four out of five Darfur states – South, East, West and Central Darfur – in 2023. North Darfur was the holdout.

The UN accuses both sides of atrocities but says the RSF has systematically raped women and girls and “disappeared” thousands of civilians.

Many of these crimes have been committed in Darfur, an RSF stronghold nearly the size of France.

In April 2024, the RSF besieged North Darfur’s capital, el-Fasher, after many local armed factions – part of the Joint Forces  – sided with the army, despite having formed in the early 2000s in rebellion against the central government’s marginalisation of their tribes and region.

Since the army captured the capital, Khartoum, in March, experts and civilians from Darfur worry that it will neglect the region again by prioritising its control over central and northern Sudan.

“At the moment, I’m not sure if the army has the political will and resources to continue to fight [in Darfur],” said Jawhara Kanu, an independent Sudan expert originally from North Darfur.

Kanu added that over the past two years, there has been a growing number of personalities with large followings inciting hatred on social media against civilians in Darfur, blaming everyone from the region for the RSF’s criminality.

“They believe the RSF is from Darfur, so let’s just let go of Darfur,” Kanu told Al Jazeera.

“I’m afraid that public opinion [in north and central Sudan] might affect the army’s and allied forces’ decision to [fight for Darfur].”

Indiscriminate warfare

On March 24, the army fired four rockets at a crowded market in North Darfur’s Torra village at sunset, when hundreds of people were gathering to break their fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

Local monitors estimate that at least 350 people were killed.

“There were so many civilians who were killed and injured. So many of them were women and children,” said Adam Rojal, a spokesperson for displaced people in Darfur. “There was absolutely no justification.”

Al Jazeera sent a written inquiry to army spokesperson, Nabil Abdallah, asking why the army hit the crowded market during iftar. He had not replied by the time of publication.

A source monitoring the situation in Darfur, who asked to remain anonymous to protect colleagues from reprisals, told Al Jazeera the army’s air strikes are the only deterrent against RSF fighters.

Despite the attack on Torra, most civilians in North Darfur fear an RSF invasion more than army air strikes.

They believe the group will commit mass killings and rapes and plunder entire cities – as it has done across Sudan – if it conquers el-Fasher and surrounding villages.

However, the source warned, the army won’t be able to strike the RSF accurately if the group infiltrates densely populated spaces in North Darfur, such as el-Fasher and Zamzam.

“I think that strike [on Torra] indicated that even if the RSF gets inside el-Fasher, the army isn’t going to hold back. And what that means for civilians … Well, I think we already have an idea,” the source told Al Jazeera.

A deal to surrender?

Local monitors say the RSF has stepped up abuses across North Darfur in recent weeks.

On April 1, the group killed at least seven people in shelling on Abu Shouk displacement camp, where some 190,000 people live.

Ten days earlier, it stormed the town of al-Malha, north of el-Fasher, reportedly killing at least 40 people, destroying homes, and looting and burning down the market, exacerbating hunger in the area.

The capture of al-Malha, which is located next to Libya, gives the RSF another vital supply line as they close in on el-Fasher, local monitors told Al Jazeera.

On the other hand, they say, the Joint Forces cannot get new weaponry or recruit new fighters due to the siege.

On Sunday, Joint Forces leader, Minni Minawi called for “dialogue” during a speech on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, appearing to contradict an earlier speech by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who promised the army would fight on after capturing Khartoum.

Minawi’s words have prompted speculation that the Joint Forces could seek a deal with the RSF to evade bloodshed, experts and local monitors told Al Jazeera.

However, civilians in the area fear that any deal would result in the ethnic cleansing of non-Arabs, said Mohamed Zakaria, a journalist in el-Fasher.

“The Joint Forces are the sons of people living in this area. It’s really difficult to imagine them surrendering to the RSF, because then the RSF could kill everyone [non-Arabs] who remain here,” he said.

“[Non-Arab communities] view North Darfur as their land; it’s impossible for them to leave.

“They will live or die here,” he added.