Sudan parallel government offers route to diplomatic leverage and arms for RSF

JENIN: Watching her granddaughter sleep in cramped quarters for displaced Palestinians, Sanaa Shraim hopes for a better life for the baby, born into a weeks-long Israeli military raid in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli forces searching for suspected militants have long carried out limited incursions into Jenin refugee camp, where Shraim and about 24,000 other Palestinians normally live.
But with no end in sight to the ongoing military operation across the northern West Bank, “I worry about what will happen, when the children grow up in this reality of constant raids,” said Shraim.
She had already lost her militant son Yusef in a previous Israeli raid, in 2023. More recently, forced to flee the escalating Israeli assault since late January, Shraim has watched her daughter give birth in displacement.
“There have been so many repeated raids, and they won’t stop,” said the stern-faced grandmother, speaking to AFP in a crowded room at a community center in Jenin city where the family have been sheltering for the past month.
The sweeping military operation was launched around the time a ceasefire took hold in the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, a separate Palestinian territory.
Israel has since announced that its troops would remain in Jenin and neighboring camps for up to a year.
’Nothing left’ back home
Shraim and her family are among about 80 displaced residents of Jenin camp sharing the building in the city.
Thaer Mansoura, confined to a wheelchair due to osteoporosis, said he had to be rescued in a cart after army bulldozers tore through the streets around his home.
“We endured it as much as we could, but with so many children — my brothers’ kids, our neighbors’ children, my cousins’ children — we had no choice but to leave,” he told AFP.
Mansoura said his family had remained home for three days as electricity and then phone lines were cut, engulfed by the sound of bombs, gunfire and helicopters, as well as army drone broadcasting calls for residents to “evacuate your homes.”
Now, in the relative safety of the community shelter, he feels “stuck here — there’s no place to return to, nothing left.”
Back in the camp, just five kilometers (three miles) away, the rubble-strewn streets are devoid of people as Israeli soldiers patrol the perimeter on foot or in armored jeeps and personnel carriers.
An AFP correspondent walls riddled with bullet holes, narrow streets littered with concrete slabs and facades torn by army bulldozers, and twisted metal storefronts barely hanging from their hinges.
Awnings blackened by fire stand as a reminder of life in the camp that came to a standstill a little over a month ago, when the Israeli operation began.
In the city center, life has returned despite military presence, with some shops cautiously reopening — a sign of pressing economic concerns for many residents.
“Normally, after an operation, everything shuts down. But this time it is different,” said the manager of one apparel shop who declined to be named.
’The same occupation’
The ongoing Israeli raid is unusual not only in its duration, but also in the rare deployment of tanks to the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967.
Nathmi Turkman, 53, once jailed by Israel, carries a constant reminder of the last time Jenin saw such relentless military activity during the second Palestinian intifada, or “uprising” — a bullet from 2022 still in his flesh.
While Israel maintains that its offensive targets militant groups long active in the northern West Bank, Turkman said that “their bullets don’t differentiate between civilians and fighters.”
Before leaving the camp, he grabbed just one item from his home, a small Eiffel Tower figurine which he chose for its sentimental value.
Now at the community center in Jenin city, Turkman said that for people who did not witness the events of the second intifada, the current Israeli operation “was shocking.”
“But for us, we lived through 2002 with tanks and warplanes,” he said.
“There’s no difference between 2002 and 2024 — it’s all the same occupation.”
In this reality, Shraim fears that her grandchildren will grow up knowing only war and displacement.
On edge, she was startled when the stroller carrying her granddaughter tipped over in a park near the shelter, reacting as though the infant was in mortal danger before realizing she was fine.
“The fear is inside me, and I can’t shake it,” said the grandmother.

CAIRO: Talks resume in Cairo Friday on a second phase of an Israel-Hamas ceasefire that mediators hope will bring a lasting end to the Gaza conflict, a day after Israel’s military acknowledged its “complete failure” to prevent the 2023 Hamas attack that sparked the war.
Mediator Egypt said Thursday that Israeli, Qatari and US delegations were already in Cairo for “intensive” talks on the next stage of the ceasefire, after a first phase only reached following months of gruelling negotiations.
“The relevant parties have begun intensive talks to discuss the next phases of the truce agreement, amid ongoing efforts to ensure the implementation of the previously agreed understandings,” said Egypt’s State Information Service.
The ceasefire, whose first phase is set to expire on Saturday, has largely halted the fighting that began when Hamas militants broke through Gaza’s security barrier on October 7, 2023, in an attack that resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures.
Israel’s retaliation has killed more than 48,000 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, figures the UN has deemed reliable.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent negotiators to Cairo on Thursday, after Hamas handed over the remains of four hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners under the truce.
An internal Israeli army probe into the October 7 attack, released on Thursday, acknowledged the military’s “complete failure” to prevent it, according to a military official who briefed reporters about the report’s contents on condition of anonymity.
“Too many civilians died that day asking themselves in their hearts or out loud, where was the IDF?” the official said, referring to the military.
A senior military official said at the same briefing that the military acknowledges it was “overconfident” and had misconceptions about Hamas’s military capabilities before the attack.
Following the scathing probe’s release, Israel’s military chief General Herzi Halevi said: “The responsibility is mine.”
Halevi had already resigned last month citing the October 7 “failure.”
During their attack, militants seized dozens of hostages, whose return was a key objective of the war.
Netanyahu vowed to destroy Hamas and to bring home all the hostages, but has faced criticism and protests at home over his handling of the war and the hostage crisis.
A hostage-prisoner swap early Thursday was the final one under the initial stage of the truce that took effect on January 19.
Over the past several weeks, Hamas freed in stages 25 living Israeli and dual-national hostages and returned the bodies of eight others.
It also released five Thai hostages outside the deal’s terms.
Israel, in return, was expected to free around 1,900 Palestinian prisoners.
Israel’s Prison Service said that “643 terrorists were transferred from several prisons across the country” and released on Thursday under the terms of the truce after Hamas returned the bodies of four hostages.
Hours after the handover on Thursday, an Israeli campaign group confirmed “with profound sorrow” the identities of the four bodies.
Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan, Itzik Elgarat and Shlomo Mansour “have been laid to eternal rest in Israel,” said the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.
Israel Berman, a businessman and former member of the Nahal Oz kibbutz community where Idan was abducted, said that “until the very last moment, we were hoping that Tsachi would return to us alive.”
Among those freed in exchange was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in an Israeli jail, Nael Barghouti, who spent more than four decades behind bars.
He was first arrested in 1978 and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of an Israeli officer and attacks on Israeli sites.
“We were in hell and we came out of hell. Today is my real day of birth,” said one prisoner, Yahya Shraideh.
AFP images showed some freed prisoners awaiting treatment or being assessed at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza, after their release.
Several freed Palestinian prisoners were hospitalized following earlier swaps, and the emaciated state of some released Israeli hostages sparked outrage in Israel and beyond.
After the swap, Hamas called on Israel to return to delayed talks on the truce’s next phase.
“We have cut off the path before the enemy’s false justifications, and it has no choice but to start negotiations for the second phase,” Hamas said.