Austria's top diplomat appeals for a pause in Mideast fighting for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan

Feb 29, 2024

Austria’s foreign minister has urged Israel and Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group against escalating the conflict along the volatile Israel-Lebanon border and said he hopes for a pause in the fighting in Gaza in time for the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in March

BEIRUT (AP) — Austria’s foreign minister on Thursday urged

Israel and Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group

against escalating the conflict along the volatile Israel-Lebanon border and expressed hope for a

pause in the fighting in Gaza

in time for the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in March.

The Middle East has witnessed enough devastation and cruelty, said Alexander Schallenberg, speaking after meeting his Lebanese counterpart in Beirut.

Schallenberg said he came to Lebanon after visiting Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the Israeli occupied West Bank.

Overnight, Israeli airstrikes on Lebanese villages along the southern border killed two people and wounded 14 others in the village of Kafra, state-run National News Agency reported.

Since the Israel-Hamas war started

on Oct. 7, after Palestinian militants stormed parts

of southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostage, Hezbollah started attacking Israeli posts, drawing return fire from Israel in daily exchanges. More than 210 Hezbollah fighters and nearly 40 civilians have been killed since then on the Lebanese side.

In Israel, nine soldiers and nine civilians have been killed in Hezbollah attacks since Oct. 7.

European and American officials have tried to ease the tensions in visits to Beirut, to avoid a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah, which has said it won't discuss any deals before the war in Gaza ends.

“Everybody is asked not to escalate and it always takes two sides,” Schallenberg said.

The Hezbollah-Israel exchanges have mostly focused on the stretches along the border but on Monday, Israel’s air forces attacked areas near the

northeastern city of Baalbek

after Hezbollah fighters shot down an Israel drone flying over Lebanon. Israel was also blamed for a strike in Beirut in January that killed

top Hamas official Saleh Arouri

“The region has accounted enough devastation, enough cruelty and we should try to solve the problems and not create further problems,” Schallenberg said.

He also criticized Yemen’s Houthi rebels who have been attacking ships in the Red Sea, saying: “They think they can play with fire without getting burnt.”

Lebanon’s Foreign Minister Abdallah Bouhabib urged for a deal for a disputed stretch of the Israel-Lebanon border, similar to the deal reached through U.S. mediation in 2022

over the two countries' disputed maritime border

. He said the problem can be solved when Israel withdraws from disputed areas, including Chebaa Farms that Israel captured from Syria in 1967.

“Israel would return all the Lebanese land to us and then the problem of Hezbollah and Israel will be at least partly solved,” Bouhabib said.

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Record El Niño? Depends who’s counting

WASHINGTON — Britain’s Met Office says this year’s El Niño is “unprecedented.” Japan’s weather agency has called it the strongest ever observed. US forecasters say it still trails the biggest events in its record books. How can they all be right? The answer lies in how they measure El Niño’s strength, with meteorological agencies using different methods to assess the climate phenomenon that make direct comparisons difficult. “By any measure, we are looking at a very strong El Niño,” climate scientist Emily Becker of the University of Miami told AFP, adding that only once it is over will scientists be able to assess how big it is and “where it fits in the context of history.” Natural climate driver The Pacific Ocean’s El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the planet’s main natural climate driver. Normally, trade winds blow east to west along the equator, pushing warm water from South America toward Asia, while cold water rises from the depths to replace it. READ: El Niño affects over 451,000 people in PH – NDRRMC El Niños, which occur every two to seven years on average and last nine to 12 months, disrupt this pattern. The trade winds weaken and warm water is pushed back east toward the Americas. That shift in where ocean heat is released into the atmosphere ripples across global weather, making some regions cooler and wetter and others hotter and drier. In describing the El Niño as unprecedented, the Met Office points to raw temperatures in the Pacific. “Our observations confirm that sea-surface temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific have now surpassed levels recorded during previous El Niño events,” it said in a statement to AFP. But absolute temperatures are just one way of measuring El Niño’s strength. Agencies also look at anomalies — how far temperatures rise above a historic baseline — to assess the event. The Japan Meteorological Agency last week declared this El Niño the strongest on record based on how far sea surface temperatures were above normal in the Niño3 region of the eastern Pacific. By its count, the event beat 1997 in observations going back to 1949. The US watches a neighboring box, Niño3.4, in the east-central Pacific. It declares an El Niño when temperatures there run at least 0.5C above normal and the atmosphere responds, weakening the trade winds and shifting tropical rainfall eastward. This process is known as “ocean-atmosphere coupling.” Accounting for climate change How “normal” is defined has been a matter of significant debate. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other agencies including the UN’s World Meteorological Organization long used the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI), which compares temperatures to a 30-year average that is updated every five years, so that the baseline keeps pace with a warming climate. READ: Super El Niño demands urgent, science-based governance But with climate change speeding up and warming oceans worldwide, NOAA now uses the Relative Oceanic Niño Index (RONI), and the WMO is in the process of switching. RONI also relies on a 30-year average but goes on to measure how warm or cool the east-central Pacific is compared to the rest of the tropical ocean, because it is that difference that drives the weather impacts we care about. “We were finding a mismatch between the temperature of the tropical Pacific and the impacts,” said Becker about the old index. La Niña years, when the central and eastern tropical Pacific is cooler than normal, were producing stronger effects than their rating suggested, and El Niños weaker ones. NOAA projects this El Niño will be the strongest in its records, which go back to 1950, if the three-month average RONI anomaly reaches 2.5C or higher, a level that would put it above the 1982-83, 2015-16, and 1997-98 events. The chances are rated “high,” but not yet certain. “Regardless of where we’re ranking or how we’re measuring this event, it’s an incredible opportunity to study and understand this very powerful phenomenon in the context of a warming world,” said Becker. /dl