标签： Africa

Nearly half a century after one of the most audacious hostage rescue missions in modern military history played out on Ugandan soil, Uganda’s military has dedicated a permanent memorial to the fallen Israeli commando who led the operation: Yonatan Netanyahu, older brother of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The bronze statue, which depicts the lieutenant colonel holding an assault rifle in a combat-ready stance, was formally unveiled Saturday by Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Uganda’s top military commander and the eldest son of long-serving President Yoweri Museveni, widely viewed as his likely political successor. Kainerugaba, who personally commissioned the monument, used the opening ceremony to honor the fallen soldier’s extraordinary courage and commitment. The memorial stands on the grounds of Entebbe International Airport, the exact site where the 1976 raid unfolded, and the event drew a crowd that included Israeli nationals based in the region, among them local businessman Barak Orland. The story of the Entebbe raid began when pro-Palestinian hijackers — two Palestinian militants and two German collaborators — seized an Air France passenger flight carrying 106 people, diverting it to Entebbe Airport. The hijackers separated Jewish and Israeli passengers from the rest of the group and issued an ultimatum: they would execute the hostages unless Israel released dozens of imprisoned Palestinian militants within a week. Over seven days of stalled negotiations, Israeli military planners secretly prepared a high-risk rescue mission that would go down in military legend. On the night of July 3, 1976, Israeli commandos landed at Entebbe, stormed the terminal, and engaged hijackers and responding Ugandan forces. In the under-an-hour operation, Yonatan Netanyahu, the raid’s commander, was fatally struck by enemy gunfire — the only Israeli commando killed in the mission. Just three hostages died in the crossfire, and the vast majority of captives were brought to safety. Dozens of Ugandan soldiers were also killed during the clash. At the time of the 1976 raid, Uganda was ruled by dictator Idi Amin, who had cut diplomatic ties with Israel and openly supported the Palestinian independence movement. Israel’s successful rescue severely humiliated Amin, and the operation drew sharp criticism from the Organization of African Unity, the precursor to the modern African Union, which condemned the raid as a violation of Ugandan national sovereignty. For Israel, however, the mission has become a defining moment in the nation’s modern history, widely celebrated as one of the most extraordinary military achievements in its history. Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that his brother’s death during the raid fundamentally altered the trajectory of his own life and political career. In his remarks at the unveiling, Kainerugaba emphasized the enduring meaning of the memorial beyond just remembrance. “Today, this memorial stands not only in remembrance of a distinguished soldier, but also as a tribute to the enduring values he embodied: courage in the face of danger, unwavering commitment to protecting innocent lives, and steadfast devotion to duty,” he told attendees. Today, relations between the Ugandan government and Israel are officially cordial, with President Museveni having repeatedly stated his public support for a two-state solution to resolve the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The unveiling of the monument marks a striking shift from the diplomatic tensions that surrounded the original raid, representing a public acknowledgment of the fallen soldier’s sacrifice decades after the historic mission.

Three years into Sudan’s devastating civil conflict between the national army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a deadly drone attack has left dozens dead and wounded in the restive Darfur region, amplifying global concerns over escalating violence against civilian populations.

A local Sudanese human rights monitoring group, the Emergency Lawyers Group, has confirmed that 35 people lost their lives in the Sunday afternoon strike, which hit an open-air traditional court session in Ghara al-Zawiya village. The village is currently under RSF control, a faction that holds sway over most of Darfur, Sudan’s western territory. Dozens of additional civilians and attendees were injured in the attack, and as of Monday, the Sudanese army has not issued any public statement acknowledging or responding to the incident.

Witnesses to the strike shared chilling details with Agence France-Presse, confirming that the informal court gathering was held under a tree, with local community leaders in attendance. Among those killed were four prominent tribal leaders and two RSF commanders, the witness reported. Local outlet Darfur 24, a privately owned regional news site, cited a resident who said two unmanned aerial vehicles circled the settlement before launching at least four missiles into the gathering.

The Emergency Lawyers Group has issued an official statement condemning the attack, calling for an immediate independent investigation into the strike. The organization emphasized that deliberately targeting civilian gatherings and community infrastructure constitutes a severe violation of established international humanitarian law. It also drew attention to a worrying growing trend in the conflict: the increasing use of drone strikes to target populated civilian areas and public gatherings, a shift that has drastically raised safety risks for millions of Sudanese civilians trapped in crossfire.

The current conflict, which broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF, has already been marked by widespread atrocities against civilian populations on both sides. The RSF has faced repeated accusations of war crimes and mass atrocities, including large-scale drone strikes targeting civilian communities over the course of the three-year war. A United Nations fact-finding mission concluded last year that the RSF’s prolonged siege and assault on el-Fasher, Darfur’s largest remaining major city, carried all the identifying characteristics of genocide—a finding the RSF has repeatedly denied.

As the army continues to mobilize its supporters amid ongoing frontline clashes across the country, the humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan shows no sign of abating. The conflict has killed more than tens of thousands of people to date, and forced millions more to flee their homes as internally displaced persons or cross-border refugees into neighboring countries.

Against a backdrop of shifting global trade flows and widespread economic uncertainty, Africa has cemented its status as the top destination for new investment under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), new collaborative research shows. In the first half of 2026, the continent attracted $33.5 billion in Chinese BRI investment, marking a staggering 254% jump from the same period a year earlier, with growth fueled by rapidly expanding activity in manufacturing, clean energy and critical infrastructure development.

The report, produced jointly by Fudan University’s Green Finance & Development Center in Shanghai and the University of Queensland Business School in Australia, breaks down the key drivers of Africa’s outperformance against other global regions. Among African nations, Ethiopia recorded the fastest growth in BRI-linked engagement of any country worldwide, pulling in more than $18.9 billion in total investment in the first half of the year.

The East African nation secured the world’s largest single allocation of Chinese energy investment through a landmark green energy partnership with China’s Ming Yang Smart Energy Group, valued at over $14 billion. The mega-project is set to dramatically accelerate Ethiopia’s transition to a low-carbon green economy. Its first phase will deliver an 8.4-gigawatt renewable energy facility combining wind and solar power capacity, representing a $7.5 billion investment. For the second phase, Ming Yang Smart Energy will commit an additional $7.3 billion to develop green ammonia production facilities, as well as local manufacturing for electric transmission infrastructure and wind turbine components.

Beyond expanding Ethiopia’s renewable energy capacity, the investment is projected to deliver broad-based economic benefits: catalyzing national industrial development, generating thousands of local jobs, facilitating cross-border technology transfer, and strengthening the country’s foreign exchange earnings.

Egypt also saw a dramatic surge in announced Chinese BRI investment in the first half of 2026, hitting $12.2 billion for the period. China’s Xinfeng Steel is leading a $10 billion project to build a integrated industrial and steel manufacturing complex in Egypt’s Ain Sokhna industrial zone, which will specialize in producing high-grade automotive steel and other large-format industrial steel products for regional and global markets.

Since the BRI launched in 2013, the initiative has driven transformative progress across Africa, expanding critical infrastructure networks, boosting intra-regional and international trade, and unlocking billions in new foreign investment. Flagship projects across the continent continue to deliver sustained positive spillovers for local economic and social development.

On a global scale, the first half of 2026 marked the highest level of overall BRI activity recorded for any opening half of the year since the initiative’s founding. Total global BRI investment hit $49.8 billion, with an additional $76.5 billion in signed construction contracts.

Energy investment remained the primary engine of Chinese BRI engagement worldwide, with total energy-related investment reaching $36.3 billion in H1 2026. This figure is nearly twice the average first-half total recorded since 2013, and only exceeded by the energy investment total recorded in 2025. Notably, investment in green energy reached an all-time record: $14.3 billion was committed to wind, solar, and waste-to-energy projects, alongside $5.3 billion in new hydropower investment. Overall, Chinese investment in green energy and hydropower more than doubled year-on-year in the first half of 2026.

Cumulatively, total BRI activity has surpassed $1.5 trillion since the initiative launched, split between $926 billion in construction contracts and $614 billion in direct investment.
Christoph Nedopil Wang, founding director of the Green Finance & Development Center, noted that BRI engagement is on track to remain strong for the remainder of 2026, even amid widespread global economic uncertainty driven by U.S. trade policy shifts and fossil fuel market volatility tied to geopolitical tensions around the Strait of Hormuz.

“With strong engagement in capital-intensive sectors such as mining and manufacturing, and a growing capacity to scale up investment in energy and digital infrastructure like data centers, I expect average deal sizes to remain large going forward,” Wang said.

CAIRO – An independent Sudanese human rights documentation group has confirmed that a drone strike carried out by the Sudanese army on a civilian judicial facility in the country’s restive Darfur region has left at least 35 people dead. In a public statement released Sunday afternoon, Emergency Lawyers — the organization tracking atrocities committed amid Sudan’s ongoing civil conflict — said the attack targeted the main headquarters of the civil court in Al-Zawiya Gara, a village located in North Darfur State. The group emphasized that the targeted site is a clearly marked civilian infrastructure that serves core judicial and community functions for the local population.

The rights group stressed in its statement that deliberately launching strikes against civilian people and civilian infrastructure amounts to a severe breach of established international humanitarian law. It has formally called for an independent, full-scale investigation into the incident to hold all responsible parties accountable.

Sudan’s ongoing full-scale internal conflict broke out in April 2023, pitting the country’s official military against the Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group. Data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, an independent conflict monitoring initiative, shows the fighting has already claimed at least 59,000 lives. International aid organizations working in the region warn this official tally is a significant undercount, and note the actual death toll could be multiple times higher than the recorded figure.

Drone strikes have emerged as a defining feature of the 18-month-long war, with both warring factions routinely carrying out aerial attacks across the country. According to United Nations analysis, drone attacks have become the single leading cause of fatalities in Sudan, responsible for roughly 80% of all civilian deaths recorded in the first four months of 2024. As of Monday, the Sudanese military had not issued any response to repeated requests for comment on the Al-Zawiya Gara strike.

Five days after swimming across to the Spanish North African territory of Ceuta with her teenage sister and cousin, 20-year-old Moroccan migrant Dikra has no certainty of where her next meal will come from — all her meals so far have been donated by generous local residents. One thing she is completely sure of, however, is that she will not return to her home country. “I want to stay. I want to reach mainland Spain,” Dikra told reporters, requesting her last name be withheld to protect her family back in Morocco for safety reasons.

By Sunday afternoon, Dikra counted herself among the small group of remaining holdout migrants in Ceuta, after more than 59,000 of the 60,000 people who breached the Morocco-Ceuta border on Thursday and Friday of the previous week voluntarily crossed back into Morocco. The unprecedented mass crossing left at least 72 people dead during the dangerous journey, and the sudden humanitarian crisis sparked by the surge has reignited long-simmering debates over immigration policy across Europe and the rest of the globe.

For Dikra, the decision to leave Morocco grew out of urgent personal need. While she worked as a cleaner in the coastal city of Tangier, she fled her home to escape an abusive alcoholic father. She holds a professional diploma in hairdressing, and hopes to put that qualification to work building a new life in mainland Spain — a goal that remains out of reach for now, separated by the Strait of Gibraltar and the European Union’s layered, often slow-moving asylum system.

Migrants who have chosen to stay in Ceuta are left in limbo, with no clear information on what authorities will do with them next. Thirty-five-year-old Abdel Karim, another migrant from Morocco, waited outside Ceuta’s official migration reception center all day Sunday, desperate for any updates on his case. Karim was unemployed in Morocco, and had previously lived in mainland Spain years before the crossing. He was later expelled from France, where he had been living homeless on the streets after leaving Spain.

“In Morocco, I’m labeled a deportee,” Karim explained. “Anyone who has been deported knows what that label brings — constant stress, chronic depression, crippling anguish.” Karim said he saw viral social media posts about the mass border crossing, and chose to seize the chaotic window of opportunity. He crossed into Ceuta with just 10 euros in his pocket, and showed reporters his feet, blistered and sore from the long journey. He says he is willing to take any work he can find in Spain, and remains unshaken by the bureaucratic hurdles standing between him and the mainland.

Ceuta, along with its sister Spanish enclave Melilla on the Moroccan coast, is not part of the European Union’s Schengen Area of free movement. Any migrant seeking to travel from either enclave to mainland Spain must pass through mandatory official border checks and asylum processing before being allowed entry.

By Sunday evening, hundreds of recent arrivals gathered on one of Ceuta’s public beaches. Some clustered around military trucks as Spanish armed forces personnel distributed bottled water to the crowd. A short distance away, outside a local migrant shelter, 25-year-old Senegalese migrant Cesse Aliou rested with a group of other sub-Saharan African migrants who had made the crossing together. Aliou said he had worked at a call center in Morocco, earning roughly 279 euros ($322) per month, but the position was irregular and offered no long-term stability.

He traveled by train from Casablanca to Tangier, then on to the border town of Fnideq, before swimming the short distance across to Ceuta. Just a short distance from where Aliou rested, on a wooded patch of public land across the street from the shelter, a violent scuffle broke out between a group of migrants over access to drinking water that had been dropped off by local volunteers. “We are all exhausted here,” Aliou said, gesturing toward the ongoing fight. “Finding food, finding a place to sleep — it’s all incredibly hard right now. You can see for yourself what the situation is like.”

Half a century after one of the most bold hostage rescue operations in modern military history, Uganda has inaugurated a public statue honoring Yonatan Netanyahu, the fallen Israeli commando leader and older brother of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who died during the Entebbe raid. The memorial stands directly outside the defunct Entebbe International Airport terminal where the 1976 operation unfolded, casting a permanent marker to the complex legacy of the event that transformed relations between Uganda and Israel.

In remarks at the unveiling ceremony, Uganda’s army chief General Muhoozi Kainerugaba framed the monument as a tribute to Netanyahu’s extraordinary courage and selfless commitment to duty. As the commander of the Israeli elite commando unit that carried out the raid, Yonatan Netanyahu remains the only Israeli soldier killed in the operation, which successfully freed more than 100 hostages held by hijackers.
The 1976 crisis began when four militants — two Palestinian members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and two German collaborators — boarded an Air France Airbus A300 during a stopover in Athens. The flight had departed Tel Aviv bound for Paris, and the hijackers seized control of the aircraft, forcing it to refuel in Libya before diverting to Entebbe, where then-Ugandan dictator Idi Amin welcomed the plane and offered support to the hijackers.
The militants issued sweeping demands: $5 million in ransom and the release of 53 imprisoned militants held across Israel, France, Germany, Switzerland and Kenya in exchange for the hostages’ lives. Most non-Israeli and non-Jewish hostages were released in the days immediately after the hijacking, but roughly 100 people who were Israeli or Jewish were kept captive in the old terminal building.
In a pre-dawn raid on July 4, 1976, Israeli elite commandos flew nearly 2,500 miles from Israel via Kenya, landing undetected at Entebbe and launching an assault that concluded in less than 90 minutes. While the operation was widely celebrated in Israel as a landmark victory against terrorism, it delivered a devastating public humiliation to Amin’s regime.
The human cost of the operation extended far beyond Yonatan Netanyahu’s death. Three hostages died during the fighting, and a fourth hostage, 74-year-old Dora Bloch, who had been transferred to a Kampala hospital for treatment, was later murdered on Amin’s orders. All seven hijackers and three local accomplices were killed in the raid, alongside at least 45 Ugandan soldiers who fought alongside the hijackers under orders from Amin’s government.
In his address, Kainerugaba offered nuanced recognition of all lives lost in the operation. “The Ugandan soldiers fought valiantly… in what they believed was a justified cause,” he said. “Of course, today, we know that the government of Idi Amin, which they served, was a brutal dictatorship which did not represent the Ugandan people.” He also paid tribute to the fallen hostages, saying “May their memories continue to inspire future generations in the pursuit of peace, justice and human dignity.”
The bronze statue depicts Netanyahu striding forward, weapon in hand, a dramatic depiction of the commando’s final advance during the raid. Looking back on the 50-year period since the operation, Kainerugaba described the Entebbe crisis as “one of the most significant episodes in modern history” and framed the current close relationship between Kampala and Jerusalem as a “remarkable journey” from a painful shared chapter to a constructive modern partnership.
“Today, Uganda-Israel relations have developed into a partnership characterised by mutual trust, respect and co-operation,” he added. The event marks a striking turning point in how Uganda confronts the legacy of the Entebbe raid, decades after the operation toppled international confidence in Amin’s regime.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who previously visited the Entebbe site 10 years ago, has long cited his brother’s example as a core influence on his approach to counterterrorism. “I learned from my brother that you need two things to defeat the terrorists: clarity and courage,” he said during that 2016 visit.