Downpour brings misery to Riyadh

March 20, 2015

Riyadh, Mar 20: Heavy rains lashed Riyadh on Thursday morning causing congestions on main traffic arteries.

Rainwater flooded the new Al-Kharj road. Industrial areas were inundated. Traffic police diverted traffic on the new Al-Kharj road to the old Al-Kharj road to enable workers to make their way to their offices.

Motorists using the airport highway to the city center were caught up in traffic snarls.

Al-Jouf region, including the city centers of Sakaka and Zaloom, Al-Kharj district, Makkah, Khurmah province and places such as Muzamiyah, Quwaiyath, Murat and Ghat in the Riyadh region experienced torrential rains, while Taif received light showers.

Abdul Kareem Mohamed Ashraff, top executive at a food company, said that it took him more than two-and-a-half hours to reach his office because of heavy rains. “The whole new Al-Kharj road from Exit 18 was impassable due to floods,” he said.

Packeer Alithamby, an accountant at a steel factory in the industrial zone, told Arab News that it took him four hours to reach his workplace, which normally would have taken 30 minutes. “I saw the underpass on the new Al-Kharj road was flooded and it was impassable,” he said.

Hameed Mowlana, who works close to the industrial area, said some of the roads flooded quickly because there is no proper drainage system in the Faisaliah district. “Roads are being dug now to install proper drainage facilities in these areas,” he said. The district houses more than 200 warehouses of large suppliers of food, industrial spares, textiles and building materials.

The Presidency of Meteorology and Environment (PME) said that rainfall with thunderstorms accompanied by cold winds would affect regions of Riyadh, the Eastern Province, Qassim, Hail, Northern Border and Al-Jouf. Similar climatic conditions will prevail in the highland regions of Makkah, Baha, Asir and Najran.

Surface winds and rising dust will reduce visibility in Madinah and Tabuk, while people will notice a drop in temperatures in the northwest and west of the Kingdom. Fog is also expected in the northern and eastern regions of the Kingdom.

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Israel orders 100,000 Palestinians to evacuate eastern Rafah ahead of ground invasion

News Network

May 6,2024

The Israeli regime is forcibly evacuating Palestinians from the eastern part of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip amid the prospect of its widely-discouraged ground invasion.

“The estimate is around 100,000 people,” an Israeli military spokesman told journalists on Monday when asked how many people were being evacuated.

International organizations, including the United Nations, have repeatedly warned the regime against invading the city, citing its hosting around 1.5 million Palestinian refugees.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said a ground assault on Rafah would “put the final nail in the coffin” for humanitarian aid operations in the Gaza Strip.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs also said, “Any ground operation would mean more suffering and death,” with an official saying “It could be a slaughter of civilians.”

Multiple aid agencies, including the Norwegian Refugee Council, have likewise warned against a Rafah offensive.

The NRC said such an invasion “would profoundly exacerbate the already catastrophic levels of need and the humanitarian emergency for millions of civilians with nowhere left to go.”

The official alleged Hamas had killed three Israeli forces on Sunday, attacking them from Rafah.

The evacuation order came a sat least 22 people lost their lives in the regime’s airstrikes killed in Rafah earlier on Monday.

Rafah’s evacuation “is part of our plans to dismantle Hamas,” the Israeli spokesman added, referring to the Palestinian resistance movement that has been defending Gaza in the face of the war.

The Palestinians have fled there from the ravages of a war that the regime began waging against Gaza on October 7, following a retaliatory operation by the coastal sliver’s resistance groups.

At least 34,683 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed and 78,018 others injured so far during the brutal military onslaught.

On Friday, Hossam Badran, a member of Hamas’ Political Bureau, said Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence on carrying out a ground invasion of Rafah was a key stumbling block in negotiations aimed at a truce agreement.

The Israeli premier has said the regime would go ahead with invading the city “with or without” a truce.

Hamas has, however, asserted that the regime has failed to defeat the resistance during the war.

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