Category: 2. Middle East

All of the women in Iranian model Azadeh’s family have had nose surgeries, each feeling the pressure to conform with Western beauty standards in a country where female bodies are heavily policed.

To Azadeh, smoothing out the bump in what Iranians would call the “Persian nose” she was born with proved a lucrative investment.

Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iranian women have been required to dress modestly and cover their hair, and the beauty industry has become almost entirely centred on…

Global temperatures hovered at historic highs in March, Europe’s climate monitor said on Tuesday, prolonging an extraordinary heat streak that has tested scientific expectations.

In Europe, it was the hottest March ever recorded by a significant margin, said the Copernicus Climate Change Service, driving rainfall extremes across a continent warming faster than any other.

The world meanwhile saw the second-hottest March in the Copernicus dataset, sustaining a near-unbroken spell of record or…

Hamas and rescuers said an Israeli strike on southern Gaza killed one journalist and wounded nine others on Monday, while the Israeli military reported it targeted a militant posing as a reporter.

The journalist is one of at least 12 people killed in Israeli strikes across the Palestinian territory on Monday, according to Gaza’s civil defence agency, as the war entered its 19th month.

An air strike hit a tent used by journalists in the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis, killing two people, said…

Shuttered storefronts lined empty streets in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank on Monday during a general strike by Palestinians demanding an end to the Gaza war.

“I walked through the city today and couldn’t find a single place that was open,” Fadi Saadi, a shopkeeper in Bethlehem, told AFP.

Shops, schools and most public administrative offices were closed across the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967.

A coalition of Palestinian political movements –…

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Monday that the United States is conducting “direct talks” with Iran over its nuclear program. 

Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters a “very big meeting” with Tehran would take place on Saturday between high-level officials. 

“We’re dealing with them directly, and maybe a deal is going to be made,” Trump said.  

For weeks, Iranian officials have refused to participate in…

American-Palestinian Muhammad Rabee feels abandoned by the United States, he told AFP on Monday, a day after Israeli forces killed his 14-year-old son during a family visit in the occupied West Bank.

Rabee’s family live in New Jersey, and like the vast majority of Palestinians from the West Bank town of Turmus Ayya are dual citizens, but the father said Washington “turns a blind eye” to soaring Israeli attacks and abuses against them.

The sorrow on his face showing even from behind his large…

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said on Monday that 15 medics and rescuers killed by Israeli forces last month in Gaza were shot in the upper body with “intent to kill”.

The killings occurred in the southern Gaza Strip on March 23, days into a renewed Israeli offensive in the Hamas-ruled territory, and have since sparked international condemnation.

Younis Al-Khatib, president of the Red Crescent in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, told journalists in Ramallah that an autopsy revealed that…