GENEVA – Israel’s expanded offensive in the Gaza Strip, aimed at conquering Gaza City and targeting the remaining Hamas strongholds in the besieged Palestinian territory, is “intolerable”, the Red Cross said yesterday. The Israeli military’s plan, which includes the call-up of roughly 60 000 reservists, has deepened fears that the campaign will worsen the already...
JERUSALEM – Israel approved a major settlement project yesterday in an area of the occupied West Bank that the international community has warned threatens the viability of a future Palestinian state. Israel has long had ambitions to build on the roughly 12 square kilometres known as E1 that lie just east of Jerusalem, but the...
KANO – Gunmen killed at least 30 people in an attack on a mosque in northwestern Nigeria earlier this week, according to a resident and a lawmaker, raising an earlier toll of 13. “Bandits”, as members of criminal gangs are locally known, struck a mosque in the town of Unguwar Mantau, in Katsina state’s Malumfashi...
MOSCOW – Jordan’s foreign minister yesterday said that Israel’s assault on Gaza had caused “massacres and starvation” and that its wider actions were “killing all prospects” for peace in the Middle East. His comments came after Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz approved a plan to conquer Gaza City, an urban area home to hundreds of...
COTONOU – At least 27 people have died in Benin after a bus plunged from a bridge into the Oueme River, rescuers said yesterday, updating the toll from the weekend crash that left dozens missing. The director of the west African country’s civil protection agency, Abdel Aziz Bio Djibril, told local Bip Radio that rescuers...
ADDIS ABABA – Amnesty International has sounded the alarm over proposed reforms in Ethiopia targeting the government body overseeing civil society groups, warning the changes risk “a total closure of civic space” in the country. The Horn of Africa nation of some 130 million people is regularly criticised by rights groups for the repression of...
BAR DALORI – Rescuers and residents yesterday resumed searching for survivors as the death toll from five days of torrential rain rose to almost 400, with authorities warning monsoon downpours would continue until the weekend. Torrential rains across Pakistan’s north have caused flooding and landslides that have swept away entire villages, leaving many residents trapped...
JERUSALEM – Mediators were awaiting an Israeli response Tuesday to a fresh Gaza ceasefire plan, a day after Hamas accepted the proposal and signalled its readiness for a new round of talks aimed at ending nearly two years of war. Mediator Qatar expressed guarded optimism for the new proposal, noting it was “almost identical” to...
HELSINKI – A MP from Finland’s Social Democratic Party, Eemeli Peltonen, died in Finland’s parliament building yesterday at the age of 30, the assembly’s communications officesaid. “The person who passed away in the Parliament Building on the morning of August 19 is Eemeli Peltonen, a member of parliament in his first term,” the statement said,...
KYIV – Kyiv and Moscow yesterday launched attack drones at each other, a day before Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is due in the United States for talks with president Donald Trump on ending three years of war with Russia. Fighting has continued to rage during a flurry of diplomatic moves to end Moscow’s invasion. Kyiv’s...