Category: 2. Middle East

ROME (Reuters) -An Italian judge on Monday ordered six police and coastguard officers to stand trial for mishandling operations during a migrant shipwreck that killed more than 90 people near the town of Cutro in 2023, media reports said.

The migrant accident, one of the deadliest in Italy’s history, involved a wooden sailboat that set out from Turkey and smashed apart on rocks within sight of a beach near the shore of the southern Calabria region.

The officials — two from the coastguard and…

The US should stop funding Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, Sen. Bernie Sanders said on Monday amid the growing number of Palestinian casualties, Anadolu reports.

“130 people were killed and more than 1,000 wounded in Gaza this weekend. People are starving. Many were shot by the Israeli military while simply trying to get food. This is completely insane and unacceptable, Sanders said on X, stressing: “No more U.S. military aid to Israel.”

His remarks…

Washington cannot “compel” Israel to do anything, U.S. special envoy Thomas Barrack said in Beirut on Monday, in response to a reporter’s question about Lebanese demands that the U.S. guarantees a halt to Israeli strikes on Lebanese territory, Reuters reports.

The U.S. last month proposed a roadmap to Lebanon’s top officials to fully disarm Hezbollah within four months, in exchange for a halt to Israeli strikes and a withdrawal of Israeli troops still…

The UN said Monday that 87.7% of the Gaza Strip is within Israeli militarized zones, under displacement orders or in areas where the two overlap, Anadolu reports.

Citing Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told a news conference that “87.7% of the Gaza is now under displacement orders or within displacement zones, squeezing about 2.1 million people into a fragmented area of the strip where hardly any…

An Israeli undercover unit has detained Dr. Marwan Al-Hams, director of field hospitals in the Gaza Strip, during a deadly raid near a Red Cross facility in the southern city of Rafah, the Health Ministry said on Monday, Anadolu reports.

Al-Hams, who also heads Abu Yousef Al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, was abducted while visiting a field hospital affiliated with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ministry said, calling the abduction “a grave…

More than two dozen Western countries called for an immediate end to the war in Gaza on Monday, saying that suffering there had “reached new depths” as Israel’s military expanded its operations to the central city of Deir el-Balah.

After more than 21 months of fighting that have triggered catastrophic humanitarian conditions for Gaza’s more than two million people, Israeli allies Britain, France, Australia, Canada and 21 other countries, plus the EU, said in a joint statement that the war…

The World Health Organization said Monday its facilities in Gaza had come under Israeli attack, echoing calls from Western countries for an immediate ceasefire as Israel expanded military operations to the central city of Deir el-Balah.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the Israeli military had entered the UN agency’s staff residence, forced women and children to evacuate on foot, and handcuffed, stripped and interrogated male staff at gunpoint.

Earlier, more than two dozen Western…

Former Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon affirmed on Monday that the forcible evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza, demolition of their homes, and starving them constitute “war crimes”, Anadolu reports.

His statement came in a message on X, addressed to heads of the Israeli security establishment: Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, Mossad Director David Barnea, and the unnamed deputy head of the Shin Bet domestic security agency, referred to only as…