Refugees

Lebanon’s Hezbollah group urges Israelis to evacuate border areas as Israel continues to bomb the country.

The death toll from Israeli attacks on Lebanon this week has risen to at least 123 people, the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health says, as a new wave of strikes pounded the country and Hezbollah warned Israeli residents to evacuate towns within 5km (3 miles) of their northern border, in one of the fiercest fronts in the wider United States-Israel war on Iran.

“The toll from the Israeli aggression on Monday … increased to 123 martyrs and 683 wounded,” a ministry statement said on Thursday.

Lebanese state media said early on Friday that Israel had launched air strikes on several towns in southern Lebanon.

“Enemy warplanes launched nighttime strikes on the towns of Srifa, Aita al-Shaab, Touline, as-Sawana and Majdal Selem,” the official National News Agency (NNA) reported.

Another strike hit the eastern Lebanese town of Douris at dawn, the NNA said.

Hezbollah’s message to evacuate the border areas came less than a day after Israel threatened residents that they should leave Beirut’s southern suburbs, prompting a huge exodus from a swath of the capital’s densely populated area known as Dahiyeh, where some half a million people live.

The Israeli army said it has conducted 26 rounds of attacks in Dahiyeh. It claims to have hit various infrastructure used by Hezbollah, including the headquarters of the group’s Executive Council and a warehouse with drones.

“Your military’s aggression against Lebanese sovereignty and safe citizens, the destruction of civilian infrastructure and the expulsion campaign it is carrying out will not go unchallenged,” Hezbollah said.

Hezbollah claimed responsibility for a wave of attacks early on Friday on Israeli ground forces, including those who have entered Lebanon’s territory in recent days.

In a statement on Telegram, Hezbollah said its fighters had attacked Israeli forces in several areas, including Maroun al-Ras and Kfar Kila, within Lebanese territory.

Hezbollah also attacked Israel’s Yoav military camp in the occupied Golan Heights and a navy base in Israel’s Haifa port, the statement said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Israel has said it will not evacuate its border towns and has sent more soldiers into Lebanon, claiming it was a defensive measure meant to protect its citizens who live nearby.

In contrast, tens of thousands of people in Lebanon have fled their homes after threats from Israel, with a mass exodus from Beirut’s southern suburbs leaving the area “almost empty”, the NNA said.

Hundreds of displaced families were left to seek shelter on a Beirut beach, where they waited despondently – many for the second time, after evacuating during a 2024 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

‘We are not animals’

Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, said the humanitarian crisis is growing rapidly, as people seeking shelter can be seen “on the side of the roads on almost every corner”.

“There aren’t enough schools to shelter the hundreds of thousands of people who were forced to flee their homes after Israel’s forced displacement threat for Beirut’s southern suburbs yesterday,” she said.

“People are telling us: ‘We are not animals; we are human beings, our children are cold.’”

She noted that the Lebanese government has opened a number of shelters and told people to head to the north of the country.

Khodr added: “But many do not have any means of transport. It’s not just Lebanese who live in Beirut’s southern suburbs, but also Syrian refugees and Palestinian refugees.”

Lebanon was pulled into the war in the Middle East on Monday, as Hezbollah opened fire, prompting Israeli air strikes focused on Beirut’s southern suburbs and on southern and eastern Lebanon.

The war has rekindled fighting between Israel and Iran-allied Hezbollah fighters, and Israel launched a series of air raids late on Thursday into Friday in the southern suburbs of Beirut and other areas.

MINNEAPOLIS — A federal judge Friday extended an order protecting refugees in Minnesota who are lawfully in the U.S. from being arrested and deported, saying a Trump administration policy turns the “American Dream into a dystopian nightmare.”

U.S. District Judge John Tunheim granted a motion by advocates for refugees to convert a temporary restraining order that he issued in January into a more permanent preliminary injunction while the case develops.

The order applies only in Minnesota. But the implications of a new national policy on refugees that the Department of Homeland Security announced Feb. 18 were a major part of the discussion at a hearing held by the judge the next day.

“Minnesota refugees can now live their lives without fear that their own government will snatch them off the street and imprison them far from loved ones,” Kimberly Grano, an attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project, told the Associated Press.

The Trump administration asserts that it has the right to arrest potentially tens of thousands of refugees across the U.S. who entered the country legally but don’t yet have green cards. A new Homeland Security memo interprets immigration law to say that refugees applying for green cards must return to federal custody one year after they were admitted to the U.S. so that their applications can be reviewed.

The judge expressed disbelief in a 66-page opinion.

“This Court will not allow federal authorities to use a new and erroneous statutory interpretation to terrorize refugees who immigrated to this country under the promise that they would be welcomed and allowed to live in peace, far from the persecution they fled,” Tunheim said.

He said the U.S. decades ago promised refugees fleeing persecution that they could build a new life after rigorous background checks.

“We promised them the hope that one day they could achieve the American Dream,” Tunheim wrote. “The Government’s new policy breaks that promise — without congressional authorization — and raises serious constitutional concerns. The new policy turns the refugees’ American Dream into a dystopian nightmare.”

Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a statement Friday night that the ruling was “yet another lawless and activist order from a federal judge” and that the Trump administration expected to be “vindicated in court.”

“USCIS is committed to rooting out fraud and protecting the public safety and national security interests of the American people by screening and vetting aliens,” the statement said.

Justice Department attorney Brantley Mayers said during a court hearing last week that the government should have the right to arrest refugees one year after entering the U.S., but he also indicated that would not always happen.

The judge noted that one refugee in the case, identified as D. Doe, was arrested in January after being told that someone had struck his car.

“He was immediately flown to Texas, where he was interrogated about his refugee status. He was kept in ‘shackles and handcuffs’ for sixteen hours. D. Doe was ultimately released on the streets of Texas, left to find his way back to Minnesota,” Tunheim said.

Karnowski and White write for the Associated Press and reported from Minneapolis and Detroit, respectively. AP writer Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, contributed to this report.

Aden, Yemen – Lying on the outskirts of Yemen’s interim capital, Aden, al-Basateen district starts where the paved roads end, stretching into narrow, sandy alleyways. It reveals a decades-old refugee story in which Arabic blends with Somali and the faces harbour memories of a different place, across the sea.

Residents know the area by several names, including “Yemen’s Mogadishu” and “the Somalis’ neighbourhood” – a reference to the demographic shift it has seen since the 1990s, when civil war in Somalia pushed thousands of families across the Gulf of Aden in search of safety.

Today, local sources estimate the district’s population at more than 40,000, with people of Somali origin making up the majority. They live in harsh conditions where economic vulnerability overlaps with an unresolved legal status.

Some arrived as children holding the hands of relatives, while others were born in Aden and have known no other home. But they all share one thing in common: the refugee label stamped on their official documents.

Harsh living conditions

As dawn breaks, dozens of men gather at the entrances of the area’s main streets, waiting to be picked up to do a day’s work in construction or manual labour. Many depend on this fragile pattern of employment to put food on the table.

Residents say the lack of regular work has become the defining feature of life in al-Basateen, as extreme poverty spreads and humanitarian aid declines.

Ashour Hassan, a resident in his mid-30s, waiting at a main road junction for someone to hire him to wash a car, told Al Jazeera that he earns between 3,000 and 4,000 Yemeni rials a day (less than $3). That amount is not enough to cover the needs of his family, which lives in a single room in a neighbourhood lacking basic services, surrounded by dirt roads and piles of rubbish.

In a voice mixed with fatigue and despair, Ashour summed up life in al-Basateen: “We live day to day. If we find work, we eat. If we don’t, we wait without food until tomorrow.”

Families in al-Basateen typically rely on both men and women to be breadwinners.

Some women work cleaning homes, while others run small businesses, such as selling bread and traditional foods that blend Yemeni and Somali flavours, and which become especially popular during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Many children also find themselves pushed into work despite their age. One of the main jobs for children involves sifting through waste for materials they can sell, such as plastic or scrap metal, to help support their families.

Little sense of belonging

Poverty is clearly visible in al-Basateen’s architecture and appearance, with tightly packed homes, some made of metal sheets and consisting of only one or two rooms, separated by dirt roads covered in rubbish.

But that is not the only burden weighing on al-Basateen’s Somali residents. A deeper feeling of what many here call “suspended belonging” hangs over them, with the first generation of refugees still carrying memories of a distant homeland and speaking its language, while the second and third generations know only Aden and speak Arabic in the local dialect, with Somalia only known through family stories.

Fatima Jame embodies this paradox. A mother of four, she was born in Aden to Somali parents. She told Al Jazeera: “We know no country other than Yemen. We studied here and got married here, but we do not have Yemeni identity, and in front of the law, we are still refugees.”

Fatima lives with her family in a modest two-room home. Her husband works as a porter in one of the city’s markets, while she helps support the family by preparing and selling traditional foods. Even so, she says their combined income “barely covers rent and food” because of the high cost of living and few job opportunities.

A bleak reality

Conditions in Yemen were never the best for migrants and refugees, but they have significantly worsened since a civil war began in 2014 between the Iranian-backed Houthis and the central government in Sanaa, in Yemen’s north.

The violence from that war, along with declining aid and shrinking job opportunities have increased pressure on both host communities and refugees.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says that funding for support programmes in Yemen in 2025 met only 25 percent of the country’s actual needs, directly affecting the lives of thousands of families. Residents of al-Basateen say the aid they used to receive has sharply declined, and in many cases has stopped altogether.

Youssef Mohammed, 53, says he was one of the first Somali arrivals to the district in the 1990s, and now supports a family of seven.

“[We] have not received any support from organisations for years,” Youssef said, adding that some families “chose to return to Somalia rather than stay and die of hunger here”.

He believes the crisis affects everyone in Yemen, “but [that] the refugee remains the weakest link.”

Despite the bleak picture, a few have managed to improve their material conditions through education or by opening small businesses that have helped stimulate the local economy. But they remain an exception, and the flow of refugees continues.

Yemen is the poorest country in the Arabian Peninsula, but is also the region’s only signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, and therefore allows foreign arrivals to apply for asylum or refugee status. According to the United Nations refugee agency, Yemen hosted more than 61,000 asylum seekers and refugees as of July 2025, the vast majority from Somalia and Ethiopia.

Arrivals in recent years have typically travelled to Yemen via boats, with many planning to use Yemen as a transit point before moving on to richer countries like Saudi Arabia.

Hussein Adel is one of those recent arrivals. He is 30, but leans on a crutch on a street corner in al-Basateen.

Hussein arrived in Aden only a few months ago, having made the dangerous journey on a small boat carrying African migrants.

He told Al Jazeera that he fled death and hunger, only to find himself facing a harsher reality. Hussein shelters on the rooftop of a relative’s home and spends his days searching the city for occasional work. His leg injury, he said, was caused by Omani border guards who shot him while he was crossing into Yemen.

As evening falls, the noise in al-Basateen’s alleyways quiets down. Men lean against the walls of worn-out homes, and children chase a ball through narrow passages barely wide enough for their dreams.

On the surface, life looks normal – like any working-class neighbourhood in a city exhausted by crises. But here, in “Yemen’s Mogadishu”, there is an extra trauma – the sense of a lack of belonging, the memory of refugees fleeing danger and poverty at home, and a lack of stability that will not go away.

Bodies of five asylum seekers wash ashore in Libya as three others die in a separate incident off the coast of Greece.

Police in Libya have recovered the bodies of five asylum seekers that washed ashore near the capital, Tripoli, as authorities in Greece announced the deaths of three others in a separate incident off the coast of Crete.

The bodies in Libya were found on Saturday by residents of the coastal town of Qasr al-Akhyar, according to a police officer.

Hassan Al-Ghawil, head of investigations ⁠at the Qasr Al-Akhyar police station, told the Reuters news agency that the bodies were all of dark-skinned people. Two of them were women.

He said people in the area had reported seeing a child’s body wash ashore before the waves returned it to sea.

“We reported to the Red Crescent to ⁠recover the bodies,” said Ghawil. “The bodies we found are still intact, and we think there are more bodies ⁠to wash ashore.”

The tragedy came weeks after the International Organization for Migration said some fifty-three migrants, including ⁠two babies, were dead or missing after a rubber boat carrying 55 people capsized off the coast of Zuwara town in western Tripoli.

It also came as Greek authorities were responding to a separate incident in the eastern Mediterranean.

The Athens News Agency reported on Saturday that authorities had recovered three bodies and rescued at least 20 people after a wooden boat carrying migrants and asylum seekers capsized off the coast of Crete.

Most of the survivors were Egyptians and Sudanese people, the agency reported. They also included four minors.

According to the Greek public broadcaster ERT, the wooden boat capsized when passengers were trying to climb up the ladders during a rescue effort involving a commercial ship.

The search for survivors was continuing with four patrol boats, an aircraft, and two ships from the European border agency Frontex, a spokesperson for the Greek coastguard told the AFP news agency.

According to ERT, survivors said about 50 people had been on board the wooden boat.

A second boat carrying about 40 migrants and asylum seekers was spotted in the area, leading to another rescue operation.

Thousands of people attempt the perilous crossing from Libya to Europe over the Mediterranean every year. Libya has become a transit route for people fleeing conflict and poverty to Europe since the fall in 2011 of longtime ruler Muammar Gaddafi.

Last week, a ‌UN report said migrants in Libya, including young girls, are at risk of being killed, tortured, raped or put into domestic slavery, and called for ‌a ‌moratorium on the return of migrant boats to the country until human rights are ensured.

Many of the migrants and asylum seekers departing Libya seek to arrive in Crete, the gateway to the EU.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 16,770 people seeking asylum in Europe arrived in Crete in 2025.

Faced with the surge in arrivals, the conservative Greek government suspended the processing of asylum applications for three months last summer, particularly for those arriving from Libya.

The UNHCR says 107 people died or went missing in Greek waters in 2025.

Maryna Bondarenko, a 51-year-old journalist, has three packed suitcases in her apartment in Poland, hopeful for the return of peace in Ukraine. She fled Kyiv with her son and mother when Russia invaded on February 24, 2022, expecting to be away for just a month or two. Now, four years later, she continues to work in a Ukrainian language newsroom serving over 1.5 million Ukrainians in Poland. Bondarenko recounts many moments of anticipation for returning home, having even packed her belongings multiple times, convinced the war would soon end.

The ongoing war has resulted in Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War Two, with over 5 million Ukrainians dispersed across Europe, particularly in Central and Eastern regions. Most refugees are women and children due to martial law in Ukraine that prevents military-age men from leaving. Bondarenko expresses a strong desire to reunite with her husband, Andrij Dudko, who works as a drone operator on the front line. However, the harsh conditions in Kyiv, including devastating air strikes and bitter winter, keep her from returning with her child.

In Poland, large Ukrainian communities have formed in cities like Warsaw and Krakow, but this has sometimes led to tensions with local residents over jobs and welfare benefits. Bondarenko wishes to return home but acknowledges that Ukraine will be significantly changed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hopes that 70% of Ukrainians abroad will go back after the war, but surveys indicate that many want to stay away, particularly among younger generations. Her 11-year-old son, Danylo, finds it hard to remember life in Ukraine and finds Poland more familiar, though he has faced some hostility at school.

Additionally, Iryna Kushnir and Olga Yermolenko, who were high school friends in Kharkiv, found each other again in Istanbul, where they moved at the start of the war. Kushnir had hoped for a quick return home but remains in Turkey, now married and employed as a teacher at Istanbul University, while she left her 19-year-old daughter Sofia to study in Ukraine. Yermolenko works remotely for Ukrainian clients and stays in touch with her mother who still lives in Kharkiv. Despite her efforts to adapt to life in Turkey, she feels caught between her past and an uncertain future. Both women follow the war closely, with Yermolenko expressing fear when seeing news of missile strikes in Kharkiv and making sure to check on her mother’s safety.

With information from Reuters

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has determined it is safe for Yemenis to return to their country, despite ongoing conflict.

The United States government has ended the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Yemen, ordering the more than 1,000 Yemeni refugees and asylum seekers living in the country to leave within 60 days or face arrest and deportation.

The action on Friday came as part of US President Donald Trump’s broad immigration crackdown, which is impacting those who fled perilous lives in war-torn countries.

It will terminate TPS for roughly 1,400 Yemeni nationals who have had access to the legal status since September 2015 because of armed conflict in their country, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced on Friday.

“After reviewing conditions in the country and consulting with appropriate US government agencies, I determined that Yemen no longer meets the law’s requirements to be designated for Temporary Protected Status,” Noem said in a statement.

“Allowing TPS Yemen beneficiaries to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to our national interest,” she said, describing the revocation as an act of “putting America first.”

Contrary to Noem’s determination, Yemen continues to be riven by years-long conflict in one of the world’s poorest nations.

The State Department currently advises against travel to Yemen, citing “terrorism, unrest, crime, health risks, kidnapping, and landmines”.

TPS allows narrow groups of people in the US to live and work in the country if they’re deemed to be in danger if they return to their home nations, because of war, natural disaster or other extraordinary circumstances.

While the protections are technically temporary, historically, presidents have continued to renew TPS statuses for refugees and asylum seekers rather than revoking them and rendering them undocumented.

The TPS for Yemen was last extended in 2024 and was set to expire on March 3 of this year.

Yemeni beneficiaries with no other lawful basis for remaining in the US have 60 days to voluntarily depart the country or face arrest, the statement said, offering a complimentary plane ticket and a $2,600 “exit bonus” for those who “self-deport”.

Since coming to office last year, Trump has ended the status for Venezuelans, Hondurans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Somalis, Ukrainians and thousands of others.

The Trump administration has also expanded its travel restrictions since returning to power, imposing a total ban on citizens of 19 countries from entering the US, primarily targeting Muslim-majority and African nations, including Yemen, Somalia and South Sudan.

Citizens from a further 29 countries, including Nigeria and Senegal, are subject to partial bans.