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The World Health Organization has said Gaza’s Nasser hospital has ceased to function following an Israeli raid.

Israel Defense Force (IDF) troops entered the complex on Thursday, saying intelligence indicated hostages taken by Hamas were being held there.

The WHO said it had not been allowed to enter the site to assess the situation.

Israel has been focusing its campaign against Hamas in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis and has indicated it may continue south to Rafah.

“Nasser hospital in Gaza is not functional anymore, after a week-long siege followed by the ongoing raid,” head of the WHO Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, posted on X, formerly Twitter.

“Both yesterday and the day before, the WHO team was not permitted to enter the hospital to assess the conditions of the patients and critical medical needs, despite reaching the hospital compound to deliver fuel alongside partners,” he said.

“There are still about 200 patients in the hospital. At least 20 need to be urgently referred to other hospitals to receive health care; medical referral is every patient’s right.”

The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says only four medical staff were left in the hospital trying to care for the remaining patients.

One source inside the hospital, who did not want to be named, told BBC News that 11 patients had died due to interruptions in the supply of electricity and oxygen, and that several doctors had been arrested.

Yesterday, the Israeli military said its troops had been told to keep the hospital running and that food and water had been delivered. Asked about the state of the hospital this morning, an army spokesman said only that they were checking.

Fighting has raged around the Nasser site for weeks. Israel has repeatedly claimed Hamas is using hospitals, along with schools, as operational bases.

The Israeli military says it has killed about 20 Hamas fighters and seized numerous weapons in the area of the hospital.

“Over the past day, dozens of terrorists were eliminated and large quantities of weapons were seized,” the IDF said.

At least 1,200 people were killed during attacks in Israel by Hamas-led gunmen on 7 October last year.

In response, Israel launched a military campaign in the Gaza Strip. More than 28,400 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed and more than 68,000 wounded since the war began, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

It added that at least 127 Palestinians have been killed and 205 others injured in the past 24 hours.

Despite the continued fighting in Gaza, efforts to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas have been taking place in Cairo in recent days – although Qatari mediators said recent progress was “not very promising”.

“The pattern in the last few days [is] not really very promising but, as I always repeat, we will always remain optimistic and will always remain pushing,” said Sheik Mohammed, speaking at a meeting of world leaders at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he sent negotiators following a request from US President Joe Biden, but added they did not return for further discussions because Hamas’s demands were “delusional”.

Hamas has blamed Israel for a lack of progress in achieving a ceasefire deal.

The group has laid out a series of conditions, including the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, full withdrawal of Israel’s forces and an end to the war after a 135-day pause in fighting, broken into three phases.

Mr Netanyahu has also reiterated the Israeli government is continuing to push its ground invasion of Gaza further south, taking in the area of Rafah, despite international pressure not to do so without first having a plan to evacuate Palestinian civilians who fled there during the early days of the war.

Some 1.5 million people are in Rafah, close to the border with Egypt, after being told by Israeli forces to seek safety there while Hamas targets were attacked in northern, then central, Gaza.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Saturday reiterated his opposition to any forced displacement of Palestinians into Egypt’s Sinai desert. https://merujaksore.com/

In a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron, both leaders agreed instead on the “necessity of the swift advancement of a ceasefire”, according to a summary.

Mr Sisi has long maintained that the only solution is an independent state for Palestinians.

Komedian Alfiansyah Komeng viral karena fotonya di surat suara Dewan Perwakilan Daerah (DPD) Jawa Barat pada Pemilu 2024. Ia mendapatkan suara terbesar dalam perhitungan KPU sementara. Pengamat menilai masyarakat masih mengedepankan sosok yang terkenal dalam memilih perwakilan daerah ataupun calon legislatif.

Berdasarkan hasil perhitungan suara sementara di situs Komisi Pemilihan Umum (KPU), hingga pukul 07:30 WIB, Sabtu (17/02) dengan data masuk mencapai 49,69%, Komeng meraup 1.380.427 suara (12,26%).

Angka tersebut jauh melebihi calon-calon lain pada surat suara DPD Jawa Barat. Di peringkat kedua, ada aktris Jihan Fahira dengan perolehan suara 512.161 (4,73%).

Pengamat politik dari Badan Riset dan lnovasi Nasional (BRIN), Devi Darmawan, mengatakan bahwa dalam politik Indonesia, masih sangat ditentukan oleh sosok dan figuritas, ketimbang pengalaman dan gagasan. https://merujaksore.com/

France striker Kylian Mbappe has told Paris St-Germain he intends to leave the club at the end of the season.

The 25-year-old’s deal with the Ligue 1 champions is scheduled to expire and he has been heavily linked with a move to Real Madrid.

Mbappe’s future was the subject of a major stand-off with PSG last summer.

At one point, Mbappe was exiled from the first-team squad and left out of the club’s pre-season tour of Asia.

However, an agreement was reached that ensured PSG would not lose out when Mbappe eventually left and the terms of his now seemingly inevitable exit are still to be confirmed.

The forward has a one-year extension clause, so it is expected his departure will involve either a sale with a transfer fee or financial sacrifices on the player’s part.

Whilst PSG would have wanted Mbappe to remain at the club, his exit looks set to come as they aim to build a younger squad and move away from the ‘Galacticos’ plan, that has also seen Argentina forward Lionel Messi and Brazil international Neymar leave since the end of last season.

It is estimated Mbappe, who won the World Cup with France in 2018, earns around €200m per year (£171m).

PSG are 11 points clear of second-placed Nice at the top of the French league and will also play Nice in the quarter-finals of the domestic cup.

The French champions beat Real Sociedad 2-0 in the first leg of their last-16 Champions League encounter on Wednesday, with Mbappe scoring the opener.

It was his fourth goal in Europe’s top competition this season, while he has 20 goals in the domestic league in the present campaign.

Overall, he has 243 goals and 93 assists in 290 games for PSG and has helped the club to five Ligue 1 title wins.

Mbappe won a French top-flight title with Monaco before joining PSG as an 18-year-old in 2017, initially on loan before a 180m euro (£165.7m) move.

He scored 27 goals and registered 13 assists in 60 games for Monaco.

Mbappe was set to leave PSG on a free transfer at the end of the 2021-22 season but ultimately signed a two-year contract extension, with the option of a further year.

However, after Mbappe told PSG he would not agree to the additional 12 months of the deal, he was not selected for their pre-season tour to Japan last July.

He subsequently refused to meet with representatives of Saudi Pro League side Al-Hilal, who made a world-record £259m offer for him.

The striker later returned to first-team training following what PSG said were “very constructive and positive” talks.

Mbappe turned down a move to Real Madrid when he agreed to his current deal with PSG in May 2022.

He scored a hat-trick in the 2022 World Cup final but finished on the losing side as Argentina won on penalties, and Mbappe was subsequently appointed captain of France after Hugo Lloris retired from Les Bleus duty.

On Friday, Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta was asked whether his club would be interested in the Frenchman.

“When there is a player of that calibre, we always have to be in the conversation, but it looks a different way,” he replied. https://merujaksore.com/

At least five people have been killed in an air attack on the Russian city of Belgorod, the region’s governor says.

Eighteen others are said to have been wounded in the strike not far from the Ukrainian border.

Videos circulating on social media showed several ambulances parked outside a heavily damaged shopping centre with shattered windows.

Russian officials said air defence systems had shot down 14 Ukrainian missiles over the Belgorod region.

Russian Zvezda TV, which is closely affiliated with the ministry of defence, said one rocket hit a shopping centre and one landed on the city’s sports stadium.

Belgorod lies about 30km (19 miles) from the border with Ukraine.

It has often been targeted by Ukrainian forces since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago.

A drone and rocket attack in December killed 25 people and wounded another 100 in the deadliest strike on Belgorod so far.

Last night, Russia fired 26 missiles at Ukraine, killing a 66-year-old woman in Chuguyiv, near Kharkiv in the east, and wounding several more people.

Meanwhile, the battle for Ukraine’s eastern town of Avdiivka rages on.

Some Ukrainian soldiers have told the BBC that the town could fall at any moment, describing severe shortages of weapons and ammunition.

Nato Secretary General, Jen Stoltenberg warned on Thursday that the US failure to approve continued military assistance to Ukraine is already having an impact on the battlefield. https://merujaksore.com/

Avdiivka is a key location because it is a gateway to the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. It has been effectively on the front line since 2014 when the conflict in eastern Ukraine started.

Cara sejumlah bakal calon presiden (bacapres) menjawab pertanyaan dengan bertanya balik, dinilai sebagai “cara untuk mengelak” ketika menghadapi topik yang sulit, sensitif dan berpotensi merendahkan kredibilitas mereka, kata pakar komunikasi politik Lely Arrianie.

Yang terbaru, bakal capres dari PDIP, Ganjar Pranowo, justru bertanya balik ketika dia ditanya oleh seorang mahasiswa apakah dia “petugas rakyat atau petugas partai”, dalam kuliah kebangsaan di Fakultas Ilmu Sosial dan Politik (FISIP) Universitas Indonesia pada Senin (18/9).

Ganjar bukan satu-satunya. Bakal capres dari Koalisi Persatuan untuk Perubahan, Anies Baswedan, juga pernah bertanya balik ketika ditanya apakah akan melanjutkan proyek Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN) atau tidak.

Adapun bakal capres Koalisi Indonesia Maju, Prabowo Subianto, bertanya balik ketika ditanya wartawan mengenai responsnya soal manuver Muhaimin Iskandar yang menjadi bakal cawapres Anies Baswedan, awal September 2023. https://merujaksore.com/

Lebih dari 11.000 pekerja konstruksi proyek Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN) di Kabupaten Penajam Paser Utara, Kalimantan Timur, tidak bisa mencoblos saat pemungutan suara Pemilu 2024 pada Rabu (14/02).

Menurut Ketua Komisi Pemilihan Umum (KPU) Penajam Paser Utara, Irwan Syahwana, para pekerja mengaku baru mendapat informasi dari atasan mereka ketika batas waktu untuk pindah memilih akan ditutup pada 7 Februari 2024.

Alhasil KPU hanya bisa mengakomodasi 3.266 pekerja IKN untuk mencoblos di tempat pemungutan suara (TPS) di sekitar wilayah IKN. Padahal, menurut data yang diterima KPU dari Otorita IKN, jumlah pekerja mencapai 15.000 orang.

“Kami bersurat lebih dari tujuh kali, kami sosialisasi luar biasa intensnya bahkan kami difasilitasi oleh Polda untuk bertemu dengan empat balai besar di bawah kementerian agar segera memberikan data,” kata Irwan kepada BBC News Indonesia, Minggu (11/02). https://merujaksore.com/

A man has been sentenced to death for the murders of prominent Iranian film director Dariush Mehrjui and his wife, Vahideh Mohammadifar.

Mehrjui and Mohammadifar were stabbed to death in their home in Karaj, near the capital Tehran, in October.

Three others were jailed for between 8 and 36 years for their roles in planning and assisting the murders, the chief justice of Alborz province said.

Mehrjui, 83, was considered one of the founders of Iranian new wave cinema.

His wife, Mohammadifar, also worked in the world of film as a screenwriter and costumer designer.

The couple’s bodies were discovered by their daughter after she was invited to their house for dinner, Alborz province chief justice Hossein Fazeli-Harikandi said at the time.

In Monday’s ruling, published on the Iranian judiciary’s Mizan website, Mr Fazeli-Harikandi said the four defendants confessed after being arrested days after the murders took place.

Mr Fazeli-Harikandi added that the convicted killer, who was not named, was sentenced to death in accordance with the Islamic law of retribution, following an application from Mehrjui’s family.

The killer had previously worked for Mehrjui and harboured “a grudge against the deceased due to financial issues,” AFP news agency reported Mr Fazeli-Harikandi as previously saying.

The verdicts for all those convicted are not final and may be appealed at the Supreme Court, according to Mizan.

Tributes poured in for the couple after their deaths.

Prominent Iranian actor Reza Kianian was quoted by the Tehran Times as saying: “If there were and are five renowned directors in the history of Iranian cinema, without a doubt, one of them was Dariush Mehrjui.”

Bahram Radan, another prominent actor who starred in one of Mehrjui’s films, The Santur Player, posted a scene from the film alongside a photo of Mehrjui’s family with the caption: “How strange, how heartbreaking, how ruthless, woe to us.”

Mehrjui, who studied in the US as a young man and later lived in France for five years, first rose to national and international prominence with his 1969 film The Cow, which tells the story of a villager’s obsession with the titular animal.

His other notable films include Hamoun, The Pear Tree, and Leila – about an infertile woman who encourages her husband to marry for a second time. https://merujaksore.com/

Mehrjui won many awards and his films were celebrated at international film festivals. But they were also subject to censorship in Iran, with many never seeing the light of day there.

Canada has long been a draw for people from India’s Punjab province seeking new opportunities elsewhere. But has the Canadian dream soured?

It’s hard to miss the ardour of Punjab’s migrant ambitions when driving through its fertile rural plains.

Billboards promising easy immigration to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK jut out through ample mustard fields.

Off the highways, consultancies offer English language coaching to eager youth.

Single-storey brick homes double up as canvasses for hand-painted mural advertisements promising quick visas. And in the town of Bathinda, hundreds of agents jostle for space on a single narrow street, pledging to speed up the youth’s runaway dreams.

For over a century, this province in India’s northwest has seen waves of overseas migration; from the Sikh soldiers inducted into the British Indian Army travelling to Canada, through to rural Punjabis settling in England post-independence.

But some, especially from Canada, are now choosing to come back home.

One of those is 28-year-old Balkar, who returned in early 2023 after just one year in Toronto. Citizenship was his ultimate goal when he left his little hamlet of Pitho in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. His family mortgaged their land to fund his education.

But his Canadian dream quickly lost its allure a few months into his life there.

“Everything was so expensive. I had to work 50 hours every week after college, just to survive,” he told the BBC. “High inflation is making many students leave their studies.”

Balkar now runs an embroidery business from a small room on one side of the expansive central courtyard in his typical Punjabi home. He also helps on his family’s farm to supplement his income.

Opportunities for employment are few and far between in these rural areas, but technology has allowed entrepreneurs like him to conquer the tyranny of distance. Balkar gets the bulk of his business through Instagram.

“I have a good life here. Why should I face hardships there when I can live at home and make good money?” he asks.

The BBC spoke to at least half a dozen reverse migrants in Punjab who shared similar sentiments.

It was also a common refrain in the scores of videos on YouTube shared by Indians who had chosen to abandon their life in Canada and return home. There was a stark difference one young returnee told the BBC between the “rosy picture” immigration agents painted and the rough reality of immigrant life in Toronto and Vancouver.

The “Canada craze” has let up a bit – and especially so among well-off migrants who have a fallback option at home, says Raj Karan Brar, an immigration agent in Bathinda who helps hundreds of Punjabis get permanent residencies and student visas every year.

The desire for a Canadian citizenship remains as strong as ever though among middle- and lower middle-class clients in rural communities.

But viral YouTube videos of students talking about the difficulty in finding jobs and protests over a lack of housing and work opportunities has created an air of nervousness among these students, say immigration agents.

There was a 40% decline in applications from India for Canadian study permits in the second half of 2023, according to one estimate. This was, in part, also due to the ongoing diplomatic tensions between India and Canada over allegations Indian agents were involved in the murder of Canadian Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

There are also hints of deeper cultural factors at play, for a waning Canadian dream among an older generation of Indian migrants.

Karan Aulakh, who spent nearly 15 years in Edmonton and achieved career and financial success, left his managerial job for a comfortable rural life in Khane ki Daab, the village where he was born in 1985.

He told the BBC he was upset by LGBT-inclusive education policies in Canada and its 2018 decision to legalise recreational cannabis.

Incompatibility with the Western way of life, a struggling healthcare system, and better economic prospects in India were, he said, key reasons why many older Canadian Indians are preparing to leave the country.

“I started an online consultancy – Back to the Motherland – a month and a half ago, to help those who want to reverse migrate. I get at least two to three calls every day, mostly from people in Canada who want to know what job opportunities there are in Punjab and how they can come back,” said Mr Aulakh.

For a country that places such a high value on immigration, these trends are “concerning” and are “being received with a bit of a sting politically”, says Daniel Bernhard of the Institute of Canadian Citizenship, an immigration advocacy group.

A liberalised immigration regime has been Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s signature policy to counter slowing economic growth and a rapidly aging population.

According to Canada’s statistics agency, immigration accounted for 90% of Canada’s labour force growth and 75% of population growth in 2021.

International students contribute to over C$20bn ($14.7bn; £11.7bn) to Canada’s economy each year, a bulk of them Indians who now make up one in five recent immigrants to the country.

India was also Canada’s leading source for immigration in 2022.

The numbers of those leaving are still small in absolute terms with immigration levels at all-time highs in Canada – the country welcomed nearly half a million new migrants each year over the past few years.

But the rate of reverse migration hit a two decade high in 2019, signalling that migrants were “losing confidence” in the country said Mr Bernhard.

Country specific statistics for such emigrants, or reverse migrants, are not available.

But official data obtained by Reuters shows between 80,000 and 90,000 immigrants left Canada in 2021 and 2022 and either went back to their countries, or onward elsewhere.

Some 42,000 people departed in the first half of 2023. https://merujaksore.com/

Fewer permanent residents are also going on to become Canadian citizens, according to census data cited by the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. In 2001, 75% of those eligible became citizens. Two decades later, it was 45%.

Canada needs to “restore the value of its citizenship,” said Mr Bernhard.

It comes as Canada debates its aggressive immigration targets given country’s struggle to absorb more people.

A recent report from National Bank of Canada economists cautioned that the population growth was putting pressure on its already tight housing supply and strained healthcare system.

Canada has seen a population surge – an increase of 1.2 million people in 2023 – driven mostly by newcomers.

The report argued that growth needed to be slowed to an annual increase of up to 500,000 people in order to preserve or increase the standard of living.

There appears to have been a tacit acceptance of this evaluation by policymakers.

Mr Trudeau’s Liberal government recently introduced a cap on international student permits that would result in a temporary decrease of 35% in approved study visas.

It’s a significant policy shift that some believe may end up further reducing Canada’s appeal amid a wave of reverse migrations.

Russia’s election commission has rejected anti-war challenger Boris Nadezhdin as a candidate in next month’s presidential vote.

Mr Nadezhdin has been relatively critical of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war in Ukraine when few dissenting voices have been tolerated in Russia.

Election authorities claimed more than 15% of the signatures he submitted with his candidate application were flawed.

He had tried to challenge this, but the commission rejected his bid.

Refusing to give up, Mr Nadezhdin, 60, said on social media that he would challenge the decision in Russia’s Supreme Court.

The Central Election Commission said that of the 105,000 signatures submitted by Mr Nadezhdin, more than 9,000 were invalid and they cited a variety of violations.

That left 95,587 names, meaning he was just short of the 100,000 required signatures to register as a candidate, commission member Andrei Shutov said.

“There are tens of millions of people here who were going to vote for me, ” Mr Nadezhdin complained to the commission. “According to all polls, I am in second place after Putin.”

“The decision has been made,” declared commission chairwoman Ella Pamfilova. “If Nadezhdin wants, he can go to court,” Tass news agency quoted her as saying.

Russia’s presidential election is due to take place from 15-17 March, although the result is not in doubt as only candidates viewed as acceptable to the Kremlin are running.

A final decision on who can take part in the election will come on Saturday, but the election commission chairwoman said it was already clear there would be four candidates on the ballot.

Other than Vladimir Putin, they include nationalist leader Leonid Slutsky, parliament deputy speaker Vladislav Davankov and Communist Nikolai Kharitonov. All their parties have broadly backed Kremlin policies and none of the trio is seen as a genuine challenger.

“Running for president in 2024 is the most important political decision of my life. I am not retreating from my intentions,” Mr Nadezhdin wrote on Telegram. “I collected more than 200,000 signatures across Russia. We conducted the collection openly and honestly.”

Boris Nadezhdin is one of the few government critics whose voices have been heard on the ubiquitous talk shows on state-run TV since the invasion on 24 February 2022. He has appeared as a type of anti-war “whipping boy” that other guests would target for criticism.

In the 1990s he worked as an adviser for Putin critic Boris Nemtsov who was assassinated a stone’s thrown from the Kremlin in 2015. But he also has ties to Sergei Kiriyenko, a key Putin political overseer.

Read Steve Rosenberg: How Russians view looming elections

Although Mr Nadezhdin’s run for the presidency was viewed initially with suspicion by some opposition figures, Russia’s main opposition leader Alexei Navalny gave his backing to the Nadezhdin campaign from his jail cell inside the Arctic Circle, as did exiled former business magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Mr Nadezhdin appeared on the BBC last month promising to end the war in Ukraine on his first day as president, although he was realistic about his chances of success.

“My first task will be to stop the conflict with Ukraine, and then to restore normal relations between Russia and the Western community.”

He is not the first presidential hopeful to have run on an anti-war platform. In December, former TV journalist and independent politician Yekaterina Duntsova was barred from running because the election commission said there were mistakes on her application form. https://merujaksore.com/

Mr Nadezhdin said he had tapped into a wave of anti-war sentiment in Russia, meeting the wives of reservists who want their husbands to return from the war. His campaign started slowly and it was only in recent weeks that Russians began registering their support in large numbers.

His increasing success also attracted condemnation from pro-Kremlin propagandists such as Vladimir Solovyov, who suggested he might be a stooge for “Ukrainian Nazis”.

The scene which greeted Tijuana’s paramedics as they entered ‘La Perla’ bar in the early hours of the morning was grim.

Two men were unconscious – a heavy-set man sprawled on the floor, his friend slumped in a chair – both clinging to life by a thread.

Once more, the city’s emergency services had been called out following a suspected fentanyl overdose – increasingly part of every nightshift, says paramedic Gabriel Valladares.

“It’s getting worse. We’re seeing more and more, and it’s always fentanyl,” he says.

The synthetic opioid is 50 times stronger than heroin and is making the paramedics’ job much harder.

“We generally see two or three overdoses a night. But we’ve had as many as six or seven cases in a single call – probably because they all took the same substance,” adds Gabriel.

Some in the team quickly began CPR on the two patients while others prepared doses of Narcan, the most effective drug to reverse a fentanyl overdose.

The two men may not have even known they were taking fentanyl. Because the opioid is cheap and easy to produce and transport, Mexican drug cartels have begun to cut it into recreational drugs like cocaine.

The Mexican border city finds itself in the grip of a full-blown drug epidemic. But the country’s president, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, has played down the extent of the problem.

“We don’t produce fentanyl here. We don’t consume fentanyl here,” he said last year. Following that controversial claim, he has promised to introduce new legislation to Congress to ban the consumption of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.

Those working on Tijuana’s frontlines fear that may be too little, too late.

The director of the state’s forensic services, Dr César González Vaca, tells me that for over a year his department has tested every dead body that comes into their morgues in two border towns, Mexicali and Tijuana, for fentanyl.

The study has shown that around one-in-four bodies in Mexicali contained fentanyl, he says, and last July, the statistics for Tijuana were as high as one-in-three.

“It seems the closer we are to the border, the more consumption of this drug we see”, explains Dr González Vaca. “Unfortunately, we can’t compare to other states in the Republic as, in Baja California, we’re the first state to carry out this study,” he adds, urging his counterparts around the country to help build a clearer national picture.

People working with the living in Tijuana also claim the president has underestimated the scale of the crisis in Mexico.

Prevencasa is a harm reduction centre in the city which provides a needle exchange and medical services to addicts. Its director, Lily Pacheco, randomly selects two used needles and two empty drug vials from their disposal unit.

All four items of drug paraphernalia test positive for fentanyl. The city is awash with it, says Lily.

“Of course fentanyl exists. To suggest otherwise is a lack of recognition of this reality. We have the evidence right here,” she says, pointing at the testing strips.

“The overdoses we see and all those who’ve died from fentanyl are part of that evidence too. Ignoring the problem won’t solve it. On the contrary, people will keep dying.”

As our interview ends, there is suddenly a much more visceral illustration of the crisis than fentanyl tests on used syringes.

Lily is rushed outside where someone is overdosing on the street. She carries Narcan too, donated by a US charity after her federal funding was cut, and saves the man’s life.

He was lucky. But many were not so fortunate.

The fentanyl epidemic has hit the neighbouring US – the world’s biggest market for illegal drugs – especially hard. There, an estimated 70,000 people died of overdoses last year.

Elijah Gonzales was one of them.

Just 15 when he accidentally overdosed on a counterfeit Xanax pill from Mexico, he had no idea it was fentanyl-laced. Text messages Elijah’s mother, Nellie Morales, found afterwards suggest it was his first time experimenting with drugs.

His body simply couldn’t cope.

“I miss him every day,” says Nellie in her apartment in El Paso, Texas, adorned with pictures of her son. “He was going to graduate this June. A piece of me died that day that he died.”

Unfortunately, such deaths are common in the US. More than five Texans die every day from fentanyl, say state authorities, and in El Paso County alone, fentanyl was involved in 85% of accidental overdoses like Elijah’s.

City police compare the situation to the crack epidemic of the 1980s.

El Paso sits across the border from one of Mexico’s most dangerous cities, Ciudad Juárez. When we visited, US customs officers seized 33kg (73lb) of fentanyl in a single day, enough to kill everyone in El Paso twice over. https://merujaksore.com/

Arguments over the drug have even seen some Republicans advocate for sending troops into Mexico to fight the cartels. No doubt such debates will feature highly in the US election campaign. In truth though, given how easily it can be transported, it is almost impossible to stem the flow of fentanyl into the US.

In Ciudad Juárez, I meet Kevin – not his real name – a 17-year-old drug smuggler and hitman for La Empresa cartel. He shows me videos of his gang moving the drug through tunnels beneath the US-Mexico border.

“A kilo of fentanyl makes the cartel around $200,000 (£160,000) in the US”, he says, “I earn about $1,000 (£800) to take it north.”

Kevin has been working with the cartel since he was just nine. But he has never seen anything like fentanyl. He predicts it is the future of the illegal drug trade:

“It’s the strongest drug I’ve ever seen, chemically so powerful that people keep demanding more and more. It’s going to keep blowing up,” he says.

I asked him if he felt any remorse over the deaths of US teens like Elijah.

“No, it’s all part of a chain”, he shrugs. “They send guns south, we send fentanyl north. Everyone’s responsible for their own acts.”

Back in Tijuana, it took three doses of Narcan, but the paramedics managed to bring one patient back from the brink in the ‘La Perla’ bar.

For his friend, though, it was too late. He died amid the beer bottles and empty glasses on the barroom floor.

The paramedics’ dignified silence is pierced by the awful sound of wailing. His mother has made it to the bar only to be told her son, at 27, is another victim of this most powerful of narcotics, his death a footnote in an election year on both sides of the US-Mexico border.