Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Critics say US president’s realpolitik ignores Sisi regime’s ‘hostage-taking tactics’ against dissidents
“It’s a hostage negotiation and it has been all along,” said Sherif Mansour, describing the arrest of his cousin Reda Abdel-Rahman by Egyptian security forces last August as an attempt to intimidate Mansour into silence.
Abdel-Rahman has been imprisoned without trial for nine months. Mansour, an outspoken human rights advocate in Washington with the Committee to Protect Journalists, has since learned that he and his father are listed on the same charge sheet, all accused of joining a terrorist group and spreading “false news”.
Plans blocked after a similar parade stoked tensions that contributed to last Gaza conflict
Israeli police have blocked a planned march by Jewish nationalists through Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem after a similar parade last month played a key role in building the tensions that led to the latest Gaza conflict.
In a statement, police said a permit for a different time or route might be considered.
Relief in the occupied territories is mixed with sense that ‘nothing will change’
“It is the end of Netanyahu’s dark era,” says Kareem Hassanian, 44, a Palestinian psychologist who lives in the Gaza Strip, a place still counting the cost of the latest devastating war between Israel and Hamas.
He adds quickly: “And it’s the beginning of a new dark era. The new coalition won’t be different from the previous one. Israel still occupies Palestine. We will not see the end of the occupation in the coming years.”
More than 50 former foreign ministers, prime ministers and senior international officials, including two British Conservative former ministers, have signed an open letter condemning political interference in efforts by the international criminal court (ICC) to investigate alleged war crimes in Palestine.
The letter follows moves by the Trump administration to sanction court officials – orders that have since been reversed by the Biden administration – and is also seen as a rebuke of Boris Johnson, the British prime minister.
Yair Lapid says Naftali Bennett would serve first in proposed post-Netanyahu power-sharing deal
The far-right Israeli politician Naftali Bennett will be the country’s next prime minister under a proposed power-sharing deal intended to oust Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of the opposition has confirmed.
Yair Lapid said in a speech on Monday that his efforts to forge a coalition of ideologically opposed parties could lead to a new government within days, and with it, Netanyahu’s removal from office after 12 years in power.
Obaida Jawabra was weeks from turning 18 when he was shot by an Israeli soldier, after a life shaped by arrests and imprisonment
Route 60, the north-south artery that carves its way through the West Bank, is both the lifeblood of the region and a source of daily fear.
Flanked in parts by 2.5-metre-high (8ft) separation barriers, military checkpoints and watchtowers crewed by Israeli snipers, the 146-mile highway that starts and finishes in Israel but passes Hebron and Bethlehem in the West Bank, has been the scene of many fatal attacks and violent clashes.
UN chief says Israel attacks on Gaza could constitute war crimes and accuses Hamas of firing indiscriminate rockets
The UN’s main human rights body is to meet to discuss launching an investigation into “systematic discrimination and repression” in Israel and Palestine, with the aim of identifying what it said were the root causes of recent Gaza bloodshed.
A draft proposal that calls for unprecedented levels of scrutiny of alleged abuses, called at the request of Muslim states, will be put before the 47-member UN human rights council on Thursday.
Leeds headteacher forced to apologise after saying Palestinian flag was seen as ‘call to arms’
The recent Middle East conflict has prompted a wave of pro-Palestine protests in British schools and controversy over the staff response, with pupils being accused of antisemitism and one headteacher describing the Palestinian flag as a “call to arms”.
Mike Roper, the headteacher of Allerton Grange high school in Leeds, was forced to apologise after he claimed in an assembly that some people saw the flag as a “symbol of antisemitism”.
Alleged sedition and a royal family feud may have been driven by a broader plan to reshape the Middle East
The phone call that shook the Jordanian government came in the second week of March this year. On the line to the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) in Amman was the US Embassy, seeking an urgent meeting about a matter of national importance. The kingdom’s spies were startled. Danger was brewing on the home front, they were told, and could soon pose a threat to the throne.
Within hours, the GID had turned its full array of resources towards one of the country’s most senior royals, Prince Hamzah bin Hussein, a former crown prince and half-brother of the king, whom the Americans suspected was sowing dissent and had begun rallying supporters. By early April, officials had placed Hamzah under house arrest and publicly accused the former heir and two close aides of plotting to unseat King Abdullah.
Secretary of state Antony Blinken also announces aid to help rebuild Gaza as he begins Middle East trip
The US will reopen a mission in Jerusalem to manage diplomatic relations with Palestinians, which had been downgraded by the Trump administration, the US secretary of state has said.
On a trip to the Middle East designed to shore up last week’s ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza, Antony Blinken also announced the Biden administration would ask Congress for $75m (£53m) in aid for Palestinians, including $5.5m in immediate aid for rebuilding Gaza. He had earlier pledged at a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that the US would not allow Hamas to benefit from those funds.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has announced that the US would reopen its consulate in Jerusalem after it was downgraded by the Trump administration, and will provide an additional $75m to help rebuild Gaza. Speaking alongside the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, he also promised to ‘continue to rebuild’ the US’s relationship with Palestinians, and repeated comments from Biden that both Israelis and Palestinians should ‘enjoy equal measures of freedom, opportunity, and democracy, to be treated with dignity’
The US secretary of state has arrived in Jerusalem at the start of a Middle East tour aimed at shoring up the Gaza ceasefire. In a joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, Antony Blinken said the US 'fully supports Israel's right to defend itself against attacks' such as those by Hamas. A ceasefire was called after 11 days of fighting in which 250 people were killed by Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and 12 people died when Hamas rockets struck Israel.
Netanyahu spoke positively of his relationship with the US as well as a common ideal of recognising Israel as a Jewish state.
With the Tokyo Olympics just weeks away, the US State Department has issued a “Level 4” warning against traveling to Japan, that’s now struggling through another surge in Covid cases.
A new wrinkle two months before Olympics. US State Department advises travelers not to visit Japan. https://t.co/Hrnfkwzayz
A Tokyo medical organization has joined calls to cancel Japan’s Olympic games this summer, citing a surge in #COVID19 cases in the country.
“Japan will bear the maximum responsibility” for deaths caused by the games, it said.
The Trump Administration, which forced families to separate at the border, also made migrant parents leave without their children according to a new Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report.
The agency watchdog found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) knowingly deported parents who had asked to be allowed to take their children back, the Associated Press reports.
That contradicted assertions by senior DHS officials that parents were choosing to leave their children in the U.S. to stay with family or for other reasons while they were deported in 2017 and 2018 as the administration sought to enforce a hard-line approach to immigration enforcement.
The findings, issued by Trump-appointed Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, provide new insight into a policy that became a significant political crisis for the previous administration and a continuing challenge for the current one, which is working to reunite children who remain separated even now.
Incident comes with city still on edge after 11 days of war, and as Israeli opposition parties restart efforts to oust Benjamin Netanyahu
Israeli police have shot dead an attacker who stabbed an Israeli soldier and civilian in Jerusalem. The attack on Monday came with the city still on edge after 11 days of war, and as opposition parties restarted efforts to oust the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with a unity coalition.
It was the latest reminder of how volatile the situation is, barely two weeks after protests and clashes with police escalated into an exchange of rockets and missiles that killed more than 250 people, the vast majority of them Palestinians living in Gaza.
US secretary of state also reaffirms Biden administration supports a two-state solution
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has pledged the Biden administration will deal with “the grave humanitarian situation in Gaza” and will seek “equal measures of security” for Israelis and Palestinians as a ceasefire after 11 days of conflict held throughout the weekend.
More than 240 people in Gaza, including at least 66 children, and a dozen in Israel were killed during the violence, marking the first major diplomatic crisis for the Biden administration.
Small group of men tried to enter protest area in Kensington waving Palestinian flags
Police officers stepped in after a small group of people chanting “free Palestine” approached a gathering of pro-Israel protesters in London.
The large crowd, which gathered in Kensington High Street on Sunday afternoon, waved Israeli flags and banners and chanted loudly, while speeches were made. Footage circulating on social media appeared to show the English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, among the attenders.
Each side in this bitter conflict needs to recognise the other’s fears and aspirations
‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” runs a Palestinian slogan. Originally a call for a secular state in historic Palestine between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, it soon became a sectarian slogan, deeply inflected by antisemitism. In the hands of Hamas, it is a call for the driving out of all Jews from the region; at best, a demand for ethnic cleansing, at worst for genocide.
The founding charter of Likud, Israel’s leading centre-right party, and the party of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, echoes the same words but from the opposite perspective: “Between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”. It has continually blocked any workable two-state solution.
Thousands of people have gathered in central London in solidarity with the people of Palestine. Organisers estimated that more than 180,000 joined the protest on Saturday, and that it could be one of the largest pro-Palestine demonstrations in British history. The protest went ahead despite the announcement of a ceasefire on Friday morning after a 11-day Israeli bombing campaign, with organisers saying they wanted to demand that the UK government implement sanctions on Israel
A ceasefire is finally in force, but traumatised families have little hope as they recall collapsing buildings and deaths of loved ones
As they emerge from hiding, people living in Gaza City have had to adapt their memories. So deformed is this small place on the coast that a mental map of its roads and landmarks from two weeks ago is largely useless today. Shortcuts to avoid traffic may no longer work, as craters dot back streets and rubble blocks roads. Locally famous high-rises no longer exist.
Eleven days of bombardment have buckled the city. Air attacks shook the ground so violently that some bomb sites appear as if buildings have been pulled into the earth rather than hit from above.