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CAIRO: A passenger train derailed Saturday in western Egypt, killing at least three people and injuring 94 others, authorities said. It was the latest in a series of rail accidents in the country in recent years.
The train derailed as it traveled to Cairo from the western Mediterranean province of Matrouh, on the country’s north coast, railway authorities said in a statement. Seven of its wagons went off the tracks, with two of them overturning.
The Health Ministry released a separate statement detailing the casualty count, adding that 30 ambulances were dispatched to transfer the injured to hospitals.
The railway authorities’ statement said an investigation was opened to determine the cause of the derailment.
Train derailments and crashes are common in Egypt, where an aging railway system has also been plagued by mismanagement. Last October, a locomotive crashed into the tail of a Cairo-bound passenger train in southern Egypt, killing at least one person and injuring multiple others.
In recent years, the government announced initiatives to improve its railways. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi said in 2018 some 250 billion Egyptian pounds, or $8.13 billion, would be needed to properly overhaul the country’s neglected rail network.

CAIRO/JERUSALEM: Israeli forces pounded the suburbs of Gaza City overnight from the air and ground, destroying homes and driving more families out of the area as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet was set on Sunday to discuss a plan to seize the city.
Local health authorities said Israeli gunfire and strikes killed at least 18 people on Sunday, including 13 who tried to get food from near an aid site in the central Gaza Strip, and at least two in a house in Gaza City.
The Israeli military spokesperson’s office said they were reviewing the reports.
Residents of Sheikh Radwan, one of the largest neighborhoods of Gaza City, said the territory had been under Israeli tank shelling and airstrikes throughout Saturday and on Sunday, forcing families to seek shelter in the western parts of the city.
The Israeli military has gradually escalated its operations around Gaza City over the past three weeks, and on Friday it ended temporary pauses in the area that had allowed for aid deliveries, designating it a “dangerous combat zone.”
“They are crawling into the heart of the city where hundreds of thousands are sheltering, from the east, north, and south, while bombing those areas from the air and ground to scare people to leave,” said Rezik Salah, a father of two, from Sheikh Radwan.
An Israeli official said Netanyahu’s security cabinet will convene on Sunday evening to discuss the next stages of the planned offensive to seize Gaza City, which he has described as Hamas’ last bastion.
A full-scale offensive is not expected to start for weeks. Israel says it wants to evacuate the civilian population before moving more ground forces in. On Saturday, Red Cross head Mirjana Spoljaric said an evacuation from the city would provoke a massive population displacement that no other area in the Gaza Strip is equipped to absorb, amid severe shortages of food, shelter, and medical supplies.
“People who have relatives in the south left to stay with them. Others including myself didn’t find a space as Deir Al-Balah and Mawasi are overcrowded,” said Ghada, a mother of five from the city’s Sabra neighborhood. Around half of the enclave’s more than 2 million people are presently in Gaza City. Several thousand were estimated to have left the city for central and southern areas of the enclave, according to local sources.
Israel’s military has warned its political leaders that the offensive is endangering hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza. Protests in Israel calling for an end to the war and the release of the hostages have intensified in the past few weeks.
Large crowds demonstrated in Tel Aviv on Saturday evening, and hostages’ families protested outside the homes of ministers on Sunday morning.
The war began with a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which around 1,200 people were killed, mostly civilians, and 251 taken hostage. Twenty of the remaining 48 hostages are believed to still be alive.
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 63,000 people, mostly civilians, according to Gaza health officials, and it has plunged the enclave into a humanitarian crisis and left much of it in ruins.