Browsing: Region
Fatima al-Safadi sits in her house with her grandchildren whose father was detained by Israel, in the southern Syrian village of Bayt Jinn, near the Israeli-annexed…
A Palestinian was martyred Sunday after being shot by Israeli occupation forces east of Gaza City.Israeli occupation forces continued to violate the ceasefire agreement by carrying out shelling and opening fire in various areas across the Gaza Strip.Israeli occupation artillery shelled Al-Tuffah neighborhood east of Gaza and renewed its targeting of areas in the eastern part of the city, while Israeli military vehicles opened heavy fire in the same area.The artillery shelling also struck the town of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, as gunfire and shelling continued in the eastern parts of Khan Younis in the south and in central areas of the Strip.Earlier today, a Palestinian child was martyred from injuries sustained when he was targeted by an Israeli drone in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.The death toll from the Israeli occupation offensive on the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, 2023, has risen to 72,608 martyrs and 172,445 wounded. Source link
A Palestinian child was martyred after succumbing to wounds sustained from a targeted Israeli occupation drone in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip.WAFA news agency cited medical sources as saying that a drone dropped a bomb on a group of Palestinian citizens in the Qizan Abu Rashwan area south of Khan Younis, resulting in the child being hit and killed by shrapnel instantly before reaching the hospital, as well as wounding others.Meanwhile, medical sources in Gaza reported a worsening shortage of laboratory testing materials in laboratories and blood banks. The deficit reached 86% of the needs, while the stock of many of these materials have depleted.The same sources explained that blood gas testing materials have completely run out in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital laboratory, while the remaining quantities in other hospitals are sufficient for only a few days.The sources warned that the continuation of this shortage threatens medical follow-up procedures for patients, hinders surgical operations, and directly affects emergency and intensive care cases. Source link
Hezbollah has brought reinforcements and weapons to the south of the country since the start of the war with Israel on March 2, the organisation’s director of media relations said yesterday.The Lebanese army said in January that it had finished disarming the group near the Israeli border in southern Lebanon, the scene of multiple wars between Israel and Hezbollah, the most recent of which was brought to a halt on April 17 by a ceasefire.The army had been enacting a plan that it drew up after a 2024 ceasefire agreement that ended the last war between the two.Speaking during an interview with a group of journalists including from AFP, Youssef al-Zein said the group had been able to “introduce forces and arms in the course of the battle” with Israel.He said the reinforcements did not use roads controlled by the Lebanese army.”We are convinced that the army is a national army” that “will not enter into a confrontation with Hezbollah”, al-Zein said.He said that if Israel had been able to penetrate deeper into Lebanese territory it was because Hezbollah had been disarmed south of the Litani river, which runs around 30km (20 miles) from the border, and its infrastructure there, including tunnels, destroyed.Nevertheless, he insisted that Hezbollah was able to “reconstitute its forces” after the last war with Israel, and that it was “prepared for a long battle”.Israel announced on April 7 that it had completed the deployment of its ground forces in southern Lebanon and would maintain a 10km-deep “security zone”.Asked about Hezbollah’s recent use of cheap one-way attack drones controlled via fibre-optic cable against Israeli forces, Zein said it was one of the group’s tactics.”We are aware of the enemy’s superiority, but at the same time we are exploiting its weak points,” he said.The use of such drones which, unlike radio-controlled UAVs, cannot be electronically jammed and are hard to track, was popularised by the Ukraine conflict.Al-Zein, whose predecessor Mohammed Afif was killed in Israeli strikes on Beirut during the 2024 war, said the drones were “manufactured in Lebanon”.Attacks using such drones have killed two Israeli soldiers and a civilian contractor in under a week, according to the Israeli military. Related Story Source link
Activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla, which was intercepted on international waters by the Israeli navy, walk towards the airport of Heraklion, on the island of…
Palestinian bride-to-be Amani Abu Selmi holds damaged wool clothes inside a tent, after they were bitten by rodents, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.…
Fourteen soldiers were killed yesterday during operations to defuse unexploded ordnance in Iran’s northwestern Zanjan province, local media reported.”Following enemy airstrikes using cluster bombs and aerial mines, parts of Zanjan province, including about 1,200 hectares of agricultural land, were contaminated by bombs,” Fars news agency reported, citing the country’s powerful Revolutionary Guards.Revolutionary Guards specialists were working to clear the areas, and had neutralised more than 15,000 items, it added.”However, today, during one of these missions, 14 of these dedicated forces were martyred and two were injured,” it said.Iran has previously accused the US and Israel of using cluster munitions, which explode in mid-air and scatter smaller bomblets – some of which fail to explode, creating a danger that can last for decades.Israel has also accused Iran of using the munitions in its missile strikes on Israeli cities.Iran, Israel and the US have all declined to join the more than 100 countries that are party to the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits their use, transfer, production and storage. Related Story Source link
The war in the Middle East has forced the Gulf monarchies to rethink their oil and trade routes, but rerouting them will be no simple task, experts say.Faced with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the only maritime entry point to the Gulf, the region’s Arab nations are looking for ways to bypass Tehran’s stranglehold on their exports.Badr Jafar, the UAE’s special envoy for business and philanthropy, wrote in the *Financial Times in early April that the Gulf states would never “return to a posture of strategic dependence on a narrow strait controlled by an unpredictable neighbour”.He insisted that new pipeline and port capacity would be built and “the power grids, water systems and trade corridors connecting the region’s economies… formalised”.Economics, politics and regional diplomatic rivalries are likely to get in the way, however , experts told AFP.While Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain have no coastline outside the Gulf and no alternative to the strait for seabound oil and gas, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates both have pipelines allowing them to ship at least some of their output from ports beyond Hormuz – and plan more.Nevertheless, these pipelines only cover a fraction of the two nations’ pre-war exports and would need to be expanded if either country wanted to completely end their reliance on the Strait of Hormuz.Robert Mogielnicki, of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Paris, said that building new pipelines “will take time” and such infrastructure would “still possess vulnerabilities”.”Diversifying energy export supply routes is nevertheless going to be crucial in the years ahead,” he added.For liquefied natural gas (LNG), of which Qatar is by far the dominant producer in the region, the dependency on Hormuz is even greater.Yet, as Frederic Schneider, a senior fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, explained, building alternative natural gas infrastructure would likely prove economically unattractive.”The idea of a trans-Arabian gas pipeline has occasionally been floated but never progressed,” he said. “The distances, political complexity, and cost make it unattractive against LNG tankers in normal conditions, and normal conditions are what pipeline economics are built on.”The Gulf’s major container ports are mostly located on its southern shores, including Dubai’s Jebel Ali, the region’s main logistical hub.With the Strait of Hormuz off limits, ships have been diverted to Oman and Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast with containers then shipped onwards overland.However, overland capacity is limited while costs are “significantly higher” said Schneider.One possibility for boosting land-based transport capacity would be the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC)’s planned rail network.Yet the project, which is supposed to link all six member states by 2030, has been plagued by delays.Another possibility could be the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor project, launched in 2023, which partially aimed to bypass both the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal, using rail links across the Middle East to connect European and Indian shipping routes.However, the idea remains “tenuous, if not hypothetical” said Schneider, not least because the project would involve linking Saudi Arabia with Israel at a time when Riyadh has cooled on establishing diplomatic relations with Israel.While Gulf governments talk about integration, analysts warned that their own self-interest may get in the way.”Tensions around the strait will generate some tailwinds supporting regional integration projects, but these will also have to contend with some serious economic headwinds and governments that will be super focused on their domestic fronts,” said Mogielnicki.The budgetary pressures created by the war, which have not only halted oil and gas exports but also hit tourism, aluminium and fertiliser production, may also make coordination less likely.”This fiscal crisis only intensifies the intense, beggar-thy-neighbour, zero-sum economic rivalry that has marked GCC national economic policies for years,” said Schneider.Previous conflicts in the Gulf, he pointed out, did not lead to more regional integration, even if there were bilateral deals, he said.While the shock of closing Hormuz is much greater, he said, “I would be cautious about treating a geopolitical shock as a substitute for the political will and institutional capacity that have been missing so far”. Related Story Source link
Two people were killed and several others were injured in an Israeli airstrike targeting the town of Choukin in southern Lebanon, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA).According to NNA, the mayor of Choukin was among the wounded, adding that the strike also destroyed several residential buildings and caused extensive damage to a neighborhood.Meanwhile, Israeli warplanes carried out an airstrike earlier in the day on the town of Adshit in the Nabatieh District, while a drone strike targeted a vehicle on the Kfarjuz-Nabatieh road, causing material damage.Israeli artillery shelling also resumed on the outskirts of the towns of Froun, Ghandouriyeh, and Wadi al-Slouqi, alongside heavy machine-gun fire at dawn targeting the vicinity of Ramyeh and Qawzah.Separately, the towns of Zawtar al-Sharqiya and Zawtar al-Gharbiya, as well as the river area between Zawtar and Deir Siryan, were hit by a series of intense airstrikes overnight.Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health had earlier said that the death toll from ongoing Israeli aggression on the country since March 2 has risen to 2,618, with 8,094 people injured. Source link
An undated handout photo released by Britain’s Metropolitan Police in London yesterday, shows the custody photograph of Abdullah Sabah Albadri. (AFP) A man who last year tried to enter Israel’s London embassy armed with two knives and carrying a “martyrdom note” was yesterday convicted in a London court of preparing an act of terrorism.Abdullah Albadri, 34, a failed asylum seeker from Kuwait, attempted to breach the embassy’s perimeter in April 2025 because he wanted to send a message about “the killing of children”, prosecutors said at his trial this month.Albadri denied charges of preparing an act of terrorism and possession of two bladed articles, telling police he had the knives because he was homeless, but a jury found him guilty yesterday.The verdicts came two days after two Jewish men were stabbed in north London in what police described as a suspected terrorist incident, adding to heightened fears within Britain’s Jewish community.Last month, a pro-Iranian group claimed online that it targeted the embassy with drones carrying “dangerous substances”. Police later said they found no hazardous substances.Albadri was arrested by two armed officers as he tried to scale the fence outside the embassy in west London last April. Prosecutors said he later told police he wanted to send a message about stopping the war, a reference to the Israeli-Hamas conflict in Gaza.”The prosecution say that Mr Albadri’s intention was to use or threaten serious violence against the Israeli government, to exact revenge for its alleged murder of children,” Catherine Pattison told jurors at the Old Bailey.Pattison said Albadri had arrived in Britain via a small boat on two occasions and most recently entered the country in April last year, when he applied for asylum, claiming he faced risks in Kuwait as a human rights activist.However, exchanges on his phone showed his asylum claim was rejected later that month, after which his intention began to shift to “far more sinister matters” and he started searching for the location of the Israeli embassy, Pattison said.Commander Helen Flanagan, head of Counter Terrorism Policing London, said the Israeli embassy has faced a number of security alerts but police “continuously review and strengthen protective security plans to ensure the site and the wider community is kept as safe as possible”. Related Story Source link