Sudan

Red Cross begins massive aid effort

Trucks loaded with food and other relief supplies began a two-week trek to Sudan’s vast Darfur region Friday, opening a mammoth Red Cross effort to help hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by ethnic fighting.

U.N. officials consider the plight of the arid region’s 1.4 million displaced people as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and the international Red Cross is mounting its biggest relief operation anywhere, spokeswoman Julia Bassam said in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital.

She said the eight-truck convoy would leave Red Cross warehouses in Khartoum every two days. A giant cargo plane is making six trips from Switzerland, ferrying nearly 800 tons of trucks and other equipment needed for the relief operation.

UNITED NATIONS

Al-Qaida spent little on most attacks, U.N. says

The al-Qaida terror network spent less than $50,000 on each of its major attacks except the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings, and one of its hallmarks is using readily available items like cell phones and knives as weapons, a U.N. report says.

The report released Thursday by a new team monitoring the implementation of U.N. sanctions against al-Qaida and the Taliban detailed just how little it costs to mount terror operations.

For example, the report said the March attacks in the Spanish capital, Madrid, in which nearly 10 simultaneous bombs exploded on four commuter trains, used mining explosives and cell phones as detonators and cost about $10,000 to carry out. The blasts killed 191 people, Spain’s worst terror attack.

JERUSALEM

Israel urged to end Palestinian food strike

The United Nations urged Israel on Friday to find a solution to a 13-day-old hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners, reminding Israel of its obligations under international law and human rights conventions.

The death of a striking prisoner could lead to unrest in prisons nationwide.

The 2,600 inmates are demanding, among other things, to be transferred to facilities along frontiers with the West Bank and Gaza Strip to enable visits from relatives barred from entering Israel.

Meanwhile, 350 prisoners who joined the strike 10 days ago called off their protest Friday, Israeli Prisons Authority spokesman Ofer Lefler said. The prisoners were accompanied by doctors when they resumed eating, he added.

There was no confirmation from the prisoners themselves that they had ended the strike.