Neighbors helped rescue teams comb through mud and debris Monday for signs of 52 people missing after a landslide swept through a town in Venezuela, killing at least 25.
Another 13 people were killed in heavy rains elsewhere in the South American country, while four died in Central America after tropical storm Julia dumped torrential rain on El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.
Residents of Las Tejerias some 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Caracas, used picks, shovels and any tools they could find to dig through a thick bank of mud deposited on the town Saturday.
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“It came too fast, we had no time,” resident Carlos Camejo, 60, said of the mudslide.
“The town is lost, Las Tejerias is lost,” added Carmen Melendez, 55, desperately waiting for news on the whereabouts of a missing relative.
Some 1,000 rescuers were involved in the effort, Interior Minister Remigio Ceballos told AFP, with the military also deployed.
Authorities erected shelters for the displaced in Maracay, capital of the affected Aragua province.
The efforts had continued by lamplight overnight, with dogs and drones.
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“We are working to find the people who are still missing, that is our main task right now,” Ceballos posted on social media late Sunday.
President Nicolas Maduro decreed three days of national mourning after the biggest river flood in the area in 30 years.
A torrent of mud several meters deep razed houses and businesses in Las Tejerias, a town of 54,000 people nestled in the mountains.
The deluge swept away cars, homes and telephone poles and felled large trees that were dragged by mud through the streets of the town left without electricity.
By the last count, Ceballos put the toll at 25 dead and 52 missing.
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According to Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, five streams in the region overflowed after “as much rain fell in eight hours as normally falls in a month,” blaming the “climate crisis.”
Crews of workers with machinery were clearing the debris-covered roads while residents battled to clean out meters of mud dumped inside their homes.
Las Tejerias resident Jose Santiago spent 40 minutes clinging to an antenna while the flood dragged along several houses. His home was left standing but a torrent of mud swept through it.
“The river caught me and I couldn’t find anything to do besides climb a roof and grab onto an antenna,” the 65-year-old recounted.
‘Life-threatening’
Further afield, four people died in Honduras and El Salvador when tropical storm Julia raced across Central America.
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El Salvador police said on Twitter that “at least two people died” after a house collapsed in the town of Guatajiagua, some 150 kilometers east of San Salvador.
Wilmer Wood, mayor of the eastern Honduran town of Brus Laguna, said two people died after Julia capsized a boat.
A third person is missing, said Wood.
The storm barelled into Nicaragua early Sunday as a hurricane packing sustained winds of 140 kilometers per hour, before weakening to tropical storm status but still inundating parts of the country with heavy rains that caused flooding.
By Monday morning, Julia’s eye was moving northwestward along the El Salvadoran and then Guatemalan coasts, according to the US National Hurricane Center which warned of “life-threatening flash floods and mudslides” across Central America and Southern Mexico.
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The system was forecast to weaken to a tropical depression later Monday.
In Venezuela, the Tigres de Aragua and Caracas Lions baseball teams availed their stadiums as collection points for donations, and the Caracas metro said it too would raise collections from the public for those affected.
The crisis-hit country is no stranger to seasonal storms, but this was the worst so far this year following historic rain levels that caused dozens of deaths in recent months.
In 1999, about 10,000 people died in a massive landslide in the northern state of Vargas.
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Residents walk among the rubble of destroyed houses washed away by a landslide during heavy rains in Las Tejerias, Aragua state, Venezuela, on October 9, 2022. - A landslide in central Venezuela left at least 22 people dead and more than 50 missing after heavy rains caused a river to overflow, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said Sunday. (Photo by Yuri CORTEZ / AFP)
Residents walk among the rubble of destroyed houses washed away by a landslide during heavy rains in Las Tejerias, Aragua state, Venezuela, on October 9, 2022. - A landslide in central Venezuela left at least 22 people dead and more than 50 missing after heavy rains caused a river to overflow, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said Sunday. (Photo by Yuri CORTEZ / AFP)
The new truce plan in Gaza includes “many demands” from Hamas, according to an Egyptian source
The talks held between delegations from Egypt and Israel in Tel Aviv for a truce in Gaza were “largely positive and successful” and included “many of the demands” of the Islamist movement Hamas, an Egyptian security source familiar with the negotiations and another from Hamas reported to EFE on Sunday.
A delegation from Hamas, headed by the member of the political bureau Khalil al-The Hague, is expected to arrive tomorrow in Cairo, mediator in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group, to deliver its response to the mediators, according to the Egyptian source, which asked not to be identified by the sensitivity of this issue.
This new proposal, on whose content it did not provide details, “overcomes the obstacles that hinder” the declaration of a truce, a ceasefire, the exchange of prisoners and hostages, as well as the entry of aid into the Gaza Strip.
The possible announcement of a truce “will contribute to the approval of a first phase and to the efforts of the entire international community to consolidate this ceasefire and seek to move to a permanent truce instead of a temporary one,” according to the informant.
On the other hand, a source of the Palestinian Islamist movement, which also asked for anonymity, confirmed to EFE that tomorrow a delegation from Hamas will arrive in the Egyptian capital to present its response to the new Israeli proposal.
The informant added that the proposal includes “reducing the minimum number of kidnapped that Hamas will commit to freeing and eliminating divisions in sections of the Gaza Strip.”
Last Friday, an Egyptian mediating delegation traveled to Tel Aviv to discuss this truce with Israel, while the Jewish State has warned that it will not allow the Palestinian group to delay and has once again threatened to invade Rafah, at the southern end of the strip and where more than a million refugees are overcrowded.
Hamas warns the United Kingdom that if it sends soldiers to Gaza they will be a “legitimate” military target
The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas warned the United Kingdom on Sunday that if it deploys military personnel in the Gaza Strip, after information that they could help in the distribution of humanitarian aid, they will be “legitimate targets” of its armed wing.
“We alert Britain, or any other country, against the deployment of forces on land or on the coast of the Gaza Strip and affirm that they will be legitimate targets for our people and their resistance,” Hamas said in a statement.
The armed group charged against any initiative in the Palestinian enclave that does not have its approval.
The Islamist group responded to the information released on Saturday by the British network BBC, according to which the British Armed Forces could deploy troops to deliver humanitarian aid on the ground arriving in Gaza through the new floating dock that is being built by Israel and the United States.
The public broadcaster indicated that the United Kingdom could be the intermediary to which the United States referred when it said that it would not be the American soldiers, but others, who would distribute the food packages sent by ship from Cyprus and then transferred to Gaza.
Yesterday, the Israeli Army assured at a press conference with international media that international organizations would be in charge of the distribution of humanitarian aid, but did not indicate which ones would have agreed to collaborate.
Although the British Government has not confirmed the news, the BBC affirms, according to anonymous sources, that the Ministry of Defense is considering getting involved with ‘wet boots’ on the ground.
The possible role of the British forces would involve driving the trucks with the help from the landing boats on the floating runway, hundreds of meters long, and delivering it to a safe distribution area on dry land, the station explained.
The London Ministry of Defense reported on Friday, in turn, that the British Navy auxiliary ship RFA Cardigan Bay set sail from Cyprus to provide support for the construction of the temporary dock, which is led by the United States.
This ship will provide accommodation for hundreds of American sailors and soldiers, about whom Washington has made it clear that they will not set foot in Gaza territory.
Nancy Pelosi says that Netanyahu “could not have made things worse” in Gaza
Former President of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said that the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, “could not have made things worse” in the conflict in Gaza, in an interview broadcast this Sunday by the BBC.
Pelosi, who on Thursday participated in an event at the English university of Oxford, told the ‘Laura Kuenssberg Program’ that Netanyahu “was never a peace agent” and admitted that she “is not a great fan of his.”
The congresswoman said that what is happening in the Strip “challenges the conscience of the world” and maintained that the impact of famine on children “is almost unforgivable”, while calling the Hamas attack on Israeli territory on October 7 “barbaric”.
“Israel has the right to defend itself, but the way it is doing it is a challenge because Netanyahu has never been a peace agent,” he said.
“I’m not a great admirer of yours; I couldn’t have done things worse than those tens of thousands, or whatever number it is, of dead people, malnourished children and the uncertainty that exists… and that’s what people are talking about,” he said.
Asked if she understood why young people in the United States used controversial tactics when protesting against the conflict, Pelosi opined that “when they go beyond the campuses and block the Golden Gate Bridge, or something else, for a long time, and people can’t go to the doctor or the hospital or anything urgent in their lives, they don’t get support.”
But he added: “How can demonstrations on (university) campuses be criticized? That’s a way of life in the United States.”
On Thursday, the British police evicted two pro-Palestinian protesters who protested during their speech on populism to students from the University of Oxford, while abroad another group criticized her for her defense of Israel and her position on the movement to support Palestine.
