Category: 2. Middle East

A drone strike, Friday, targeted the Atbara power station in northern Sudan, cutting off electricity to the River Nile and Red Sea states and sparking a large fire, according to Sudan’s electricity company.

“The Atbara substation was attacked today by unmanned aerial vehicles, causing a power outage in the River Nile and Red Sea states,” the Sudan Electricity Company said in a statement, Anadolu Agency reports.

Civil defence teams were working to extinguish…

The UN’s World Food Programme said Friday it had depleted its food stocks in war-ravaged Gaza where Israel has blocked all aid for more than seven weeks.

After 18 months of war, the situation in Gaza “is probably the worst” now, the United Nations’ humanitarian agency OCHA said on Tuesday.

WFP, one of the main providers of food assistance in Gaza, said it had “delivered its last remaining food stocks to hot meals kitchens in the Gaza Strip” on Friday.

It said “these kitchens are expected to…

Members of the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee were left visibly exasperated during a tense hearing this week, after UK Lawyers for Israel advocate, Natasha Hausdorff, claimed that Palestinians have no right to statehood under international law and that Israel has “flooded” Gaza with humanitarian aid. The remarks, delivered as part of an official inquiry into prospects for a two-state solution, drew widespread incredulity and sharp rebuttals from…

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Israeli settlers this morning carried out acts of vandalism and destruction in the Masafer Yatta region, located south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank, reported Wafa news agency.

Osama Makhamra, a Palestinian community activist, stated that settlers targeted farmland owned by the Al-Hathalin family in the village of Umm Al-Khair, uprooting newly planted olive saplings and dismantling the protective fencing around the area.

In a separate assault, settlers…

The US military said, on Thursday, a blast on Sunday near a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Yemen’s capital city of Sana’a was caused by a Houthi missile and not an American air strike, Reuters reports.

The Houthi-run Health Ministry said a dozen people were killed in the US strike in a neighbourhood of Sana’a. The Old City of Sana’a is a recognised UNESCO World Heritage Site.

President Donald Trump ordered the intensification of US strikes on Yemen last…

A group of Jewish activists in Austria will host its first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna in June, activist Dalia Sarig-Fellner told Anadolu.

The congress aims to prove that criticising Zionism is not anti-Semitism and to ensure anti-Zionist Jewish voices are heard globally on the issue of Palestine, said Sarig-Fellner, a member of the Vienna Jewish Anti-Zionist Initiative in Austria, Anadolu Agency reports.

She said the initiative was founded after…

US President Donald Trump has said he is open to meeting Iran’s Supreme Leader or President, as the two countries began talks on Iran’s nuclear programme, Reuters reports.

Following a meeting last week to outline a framework for a potential nuclear deal, which a US official described as yielding “very good progress”, Trump told Time magazine, in a 22 April interview, published on Friday: “I think we’re going to make a deal with Iran.”

Asked…

Israel yesterday expressed its condolences following the death of Pope Francis, three days after he passed away at the age of 88, the German Press Agency (DPA) reported.

In a statement the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “The State of Israel expresses its deepest condolences to the Catholic Church and to Catholics around the world on the passing of Pope Francis. May he rest in peace.”

Relations between Israel and the Vatican had…

The Iranian Foreign Ministry today summoned the Dutch ambassador to Tehran, the official IRNA news agency reported, a day after the Netherlands called in Iran’s envoy over suspicions that Iran was behind two assassination attempts, Reuters reports.

An Iranian Foreign Ministry official described the Dutch accusation as “laughable” and based on “suspicions or assumptions”, according to IRNA.

“It is regrettable that the Dutch diplomatic apparatus…