'They have a point': Pro-Palestinian protesters interrupt Biden mid-speech
US President Joe Biden has said that pro-Palestinian protesters who interrupted him mid-speech on Tuesday "have a point".
US President Joe Biden has said that pro-Palestinian protesters who interrupted him mid-speech on Tuesday "have a point".
A member of Israel's three-man war cabinet has threatened to resign from the government if it does not adopt a new plan for the war in Gaza. The move by Benny Gantz escalates a divide within Israel's leadership more than seven months into the war. Israel is yet to accomplish its stated goals of dismantling Hamas and returning scores of hostages abducted during the attack on 7 October.
Chants of “intifada revolution” rang out and a smoke bomb was set off at a large pro-Palestinian demonstration in central London on Saturday.
The apparent crash of a helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country's foreign minister and other officials is likely to reverberate across the Middle East. Tensions have never been higher than they were last month, when Iran under Raisi and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei launched hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at Israel in response to an airstrike on an Iranian Consulate in Syria that killed two Iranian generals and five officers. Israel, with the help of the United States, Britain, Jordan and others, intercepted nearly all the projectiles.
A free Palestine would be a “Taliban-like state,” Salman Rushdie has said.
The head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, has faced calls to resign over the force’s handling of pro-Palestinian protests.
Protest groups such as Just Stop Oil will be forced to pay compensation to people whose lives they disrupt under plans in a Government-commissioned review.
Pro-Palestinian protesters attempted to disrupt graduation ceremonies at Oxford University by blocking the entrances to the events as part of a “die-in”.
Heavy clashes and bombardment Saturday rocked Gaza's southern city of Rafah as the Israeli military announced the first humanitarian aid had entered the besieged territory via a US-built pier.The Israeli army said 310 pallets began moving ashore in "the first entry of humanitarian aid through the floating pier".
A powerful ethnic armed group fighting Myanmar’s military government in the country’s western state of Rakhine claimed Saturday to have seized a town near the border with Bangladesh, marking the latest in a series of victories for foes of the country’s military government. Members of the state’s Muslim Rohingya ethnic minority, targets of deadly army-directed violence in 2017, appear to have been the main victims of fighting in the town of Buthidaung, where the Arakan Army claims to have chased out forces of the military government. Khaing Thukha, a spokesperson for the Arakan Army, told The Associated Press by text message from an undisclosed location that his group had seized Buthidaung after capturing all the military’s outposts there.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels hit an oil tanker in the Red Sea with a ballistic missile early Saturday, damaging the Panama-flagged, Greek-owned vessel in their latest assault over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, officials said.
The Israeli army said Saturday that troops had retrieved the body of hostage Ron Benjamin from the war-torn Gaza Strip after he was "murdered" during the October 7 Hamas attack.Benjamin was "murdered during the October 7th massacre at the Mefalsim intersection, and his body was abducted to Gaza by Hamas militants", the military said in a separate statement.
Israeli troops and tanks pushed on Saturday into parts of a congested northern Gaza Strip district that they had previously skirted in the more than seven-month-old war, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians, medics and residents said. Israel's forces also took over some ground in Rafah, a southern city by the Egyptian border that is packed with displaced people and where the launch this month of a long-threatened incursion to crush hold-outs of Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas has alarmed Cairo and Washington. Exposing further cracks in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, Benny Gantz, a centrist member of the war cabinet, threatened to resign if the right-wing leader does not agree by June 8 to a day-after plan that would include how Gaza might be ruled after the war with Hamas.
Ron Binyamin was seized during the October 7 attack.
Russian forces have captured dozens of civilians in the border town of Vovchansk, a Ukrainian official has said, with a top regional police officer accusing them of using the captives as “human shields.”
As she applies her lipstick in the reflection of the riot policeman’s shield, Ana Minadze has only one thing on her mind: defiance.
La Trobe on Friday followed Deakin in issuing a formal directive for protesters to end their encampment
(Bloomberg) -- Benny Gantz, an Israeli opposition leader in the country’s three-man war cabinet, said Saturday that if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t offer a new plan to bring back hostages and end Hamas rule in Gaza by June 8, he’ll leave the government. Most Read from BloombergIranian President Is Missing After Helicopter Crash in Dense FogGantz Says He’ll Quit Unless Netanyahu Moves to New War PlanEven If Alito Is Right, the Upside-Down Flag Was WrongChina-Bound Oil Tanker Hit by H
At least 11 people were reported killed in attacks in Ukraine’s war-ravaged northeast on Sunday as Russia pushed ahead with its renewed offensive. In the Kharkiv region, the focus of the offensive, the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor's Office said six people were killed and 27 wounded in a Russian strike on the outskirts of the regional capital, also called Kharkiv. Regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said that five more people were killed and nine wounded in an attack on the region’s Kupiansk district, southeast of the regional capital.
Georgia’s president on Saturday vetoed the so-called “Russian law” targeting media that has sparked weeks of mass protests. The legislation would require media and non-governmental organizations to register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power” if they receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad. President Salome Zourabichvili, who is increasingly at odds with Georgia’s ruling party, said on Saturday that the legislation contradicts Georgia’s Constitution and “all European standards,” and added that it “must be abolished.”
Heavy clashes and bombardment rocked Rafah on Saturday, as Israel pressed an assault against Hamas militants that has led hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee the southern Gaza city.The Israeli military said its air forces hit more than 70 targets across the Gaza Strip while ground troops conducted "targeted raids" in eastern Rafah, killing 50 militants and locating dozens of tunnel shafts.Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said it fired a barrage of rockets towards the Israeli city of Ashkelon and targeted an Israeli command centre at the Jabalia refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip.An AFP reporter said air strikes and artillery shells pounded eastern Rafah as warplanes criss-crossed over the city on Gaza's border with Egypt.More than 10 days into what the army called a "limited" operation in Rafah that sparked an exodus of Palestinians, fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants has also flared again in northern Gaza.Israel said in early January it had dismantled Hamas's command structure in the north, but the army said Hamas -- whose October 7 attack sparked the war -- had been "in complete control here in Jabalia until we arrived a few days ago".Hamas slammed what it called Israel's "intensified brutal raids" on Jabalia, saying they had killed dozens of civilians and wounded hundreds more while targeting schools and shelters."The escalating crimes of the occupation will not succeed in breaking the will of our brave resistance or in deterring our proud people from their decision to stand firm on their land," it said.- First aid via pier -The Israeli incursion into Rafah, launched despite overwhelming international opposition and as mediators were hoping for a breakthrough in stalled truce talks, has worsened an already dire humanitarian crisis, aid groups say.With key land crossings closed or operating at limited capacity due to the fighting, some relief supplies began flowing into Gaza via a temporary, floating pier constructed by the United States.The Israeli army said 310 pallets began moving ashore in "the first entry of humanitarian aid through the floating pier".Satellite pictures taken on Saturday showed more than a dozen trucks lining up on the approach road to the pier.In the coming days, around 500 tonnes of aid are expected to be delivered to Gaza through the pier, according to US Central Command.But UN agencies and humanitarian aid groups have warned sea or air deliveries cannot replace far more efficient truck convoys into Gaza, where the United Nations has repeatedly warned of looming famine.The European Union welcomed the first shipment from Cyprus to the Gaza pier, but called on Israel to "expand deliveries by land and to immediately open additional crossings".The Rafah crossing, a vital conduit for humanitarian assistance, has been closed since Israel launched its operation in the city last week.The war began after Hamas's unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.Israel's retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 35,386 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to data provided by the Hamas-run territory's health ministry.The toll includes at least 83 deaths over the past 24 hours, said a ministry statement on Saturday.Out of 252 people taken hostage from Israel during the October 7 attack, 125 remain held in Gaza including 37 the army says are dead.- 'Advancing and retreating' -The army said troops in Gaza had recovered late Thursday the bodies of three hostages whom it said had been killed on October 7.Israel has vowed to defeat remaining Hamas forces in Rafah, which it says is the last bastion of the Iran-backed group.The looming Israeli assault has prompted nearly 640,000 of the 1.4 million people who had been sheltering in the southern city to flee to other areas, the UN has said.Palestinian sources in Rafah said Israeli forces were operating in the city's Al-Salam and Jenina neighbourhoods as well as on the Philadelphi route along the Egyptian border."Troops are advancing and retreating around these areas," a security source said.Cairo, which has been involved in mediation efforts during the war, says a potential Israeli takeover of Philadelphi could violate its landmark 1979 peace deal with Egypt.In northern Gaza's Beit Lahia, witnesses reported air strikes near Kamal Adwan hospital on Saturday.The hospital's director Hussam Abu Safiya said Friday the facility had received "large numbers" of casualties from nearby Jabalia and was running low on supplies.The fuel aid that had reached the hospital was "barely enough for a few days", Abu Safiya told AFP.The World Health Organization has received no medical supplies in Gaza since the Rafah operation began on May 6, spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said Friday.- Biden aide visits -On the diplomatic front, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was heading to the region for weekend talks.Sullivan will meet Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Saturday and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.Meanwhile, Israel said it killed two senior Islamic Jihad militants in separate air strikes in the northern West Bank and in Rafah.The armed wing of Islamic Jihad confirmed a local commander was killed in an overnight strike on the West Bank's Jenin refugee camp.But there was no immediate comment from the group, which has fought alongside Hamas, on the army's announcement that a "significant" operative was killed in Rafah.A military statement did not name the slain militant and said he had been involved in "preparing... for operations against IDF (army) ground troops in the area".burs-lb/ami/dv