Damascus accused Israel on Monday of building a dam on the Golan Heights to steal water and deprive Syria and Jordan from badly needed resources, Syria's official news agency reported.
Irssan Irssan, head of the water resources department at the town of Quneitra just across the border from the Golan Heights, said Israel started building the dam in July only 10m away from the ceasefire line delineated by a UN peacekeeping force in the area.
"The dam will divert rain water from the Golan Heights and will deprive Syrian farmers and shepherds from the most important resources for their farms and their animals," Irssan said.
A senior Israeli official denied Syria's allegations, saying Israel does not have any dams.
"We are not a country that has enough water to have dams," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Israel, however, does have water reservoirs on its streams and creeks to develop agriculture, just as Syria does on its side of the border. The official said the majority of the Golan's water sources flow to the Jordan River and not to Syria.
Quneitra, which lies 65km southwest of Damascus, is a war-wrecked, abandoned town that was destroyed and seized by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war. It was returned by Israel to Syria as part of a negotiated disengagement after the 1973 Middle East war.
Syrian Arab news agency quoted Irssan as saying that the dam Israel was building was 1km long and 8m high and was being built in the no-man zone of the Golan Heights.
Water from the Golan Heights feeds the Yarmouk River and Wihada reservoir, shared by both Jordan and Syria. The two countries use the reservoir to generate some 18,000 megawatts of electricity.
Irssan said the dam constitutes "a threat" to Quneitra and surrounding areas that are rich with water because of the high rate of rainfall in the winter months.
US-brokered talks between Israel and Syria broke down in 2000.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened