Israel has said it would to allow Palestinians crammed into southern Gaza to leave before its planned invasion of Rafah, but experts have warned it was practically impossible to get those civilians out of harm's way. The roughly 1.5 million Gazans in the territory's southernmost tip have the Mediterranean Sea to their west and sealed borders to the south and east, while Israeli forces are poised to push in from the north. "Where will we go if they enter Rafah, and where will we get a tent, mattress and blankets?" said Sabah al-Astal, 50, already displaced inside Gaza by Israel's military onsla...
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Tunisia temporarily closed the Ras Jdir border crossing with Libya for security reasons amid armed clashes on the Libyan side, Tunisian state media said late on Monday. Video footage has been circulated on social media showing a burning vehicle at Ras Jdir, accompanied by the sound of shooting and people running. The interior ministry of the government of national unity in Tripoli was not immediately available for comment. The ministry said on Sunday that it had deployed law enforcement to take control of the crossing to “combat smuggling and control security violations in order to maintain se...
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UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said on Sunday over 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza in Israel's offensive, adding many kids were suffering from severe malnutrition and did not "even have the energy to cry," in an interview with CBS News. When asked if Russell was referring to the agency's own estimate or was basing the figure on reporting from authorities in Gaza, a UNICEF spokesperson pointed to a press statement by the UN children's agency that attributed the figure to Gaza's health ministry. Israel has waged a deadly war in the enclave, killing close to 32,000 people, m...
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The main party in northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region said on Monday it would boycott local elections, accusing the Baghdad-based supreme court of interfering in regional affairs. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) said it would not take part in the June 10 vote following a February ruling by the Federal Supreme Court to amend the electoral law. That decision reduced the number of seats in the Kurdish parliament from 111 to 100, effectively eliminating a quota reserved for Turkmen, Armenian and Christian minorities. It also ruled that the Iraqi Electoral Commission should oversee the v...
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Egyptian police detained an Italian student in Cairo because they thought he was a British spy, taking him to a security facility where he was tortured and murdered, an Italian prosecutor told a Rome court on Monday. Italy has charged four Egyptian security agents with kidnapping and killing Giulio Regeni, a postgraduate student at Britain's Cambridge University, in Cairo in 2016. The four men are being tried in absentia and have never responded publicly to the accusations. The Egyptian authorities have repeatedly denied any state involvement in Regeni's disappearance and death. "The overall p...
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A post by 25-year-old Palestinian Gaza citizen journalist Motaz Azaiza interpreted as criticism of Hamas has caused divisions among his followers. In a social media post shared to his X (Twitter) and Instagram accounts, Azaiza wrote: "Those who turn a blind eye to the suffering and struggles of their own people should matter nought to us. Cursed be those who profit from our blood, scorch our hearts and homes, and wreck our lives." Although Azaiza's post does not mention Hamas or any Palestinian militants, many Palestinians chose to construe it as an 'untimely' criticism of Hamas, the Palestini...
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Half of Gazans are experiencing "catastrophic" hunger, with famine projected to hit the north of the territory by May unless there is urgent intervention, a United Nations-backed food security assessment warned Monday. "People in Gaza are starving to death right now. The speed at which this man-made hunger and malnutrition crisis has ripped through Gaza is terrifying," said Cindy McCain, head of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP). The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) partnership on Monday estimated that 1.1 million people - half the population of Gaza, on UN estimates - wer...
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US Senator Chris Van Hollen has slammed allegations made by Israel against the UN's Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) over the past few months, calling them "flat-out lies". “There’s no doubt that the claim that Prime Minister Netanyahu and others are making, that somehow UNRWA is a proxy for Hamas, are just flat-out lies,” Van Hollen, a Democrat, said in an interview with CBS News on Sunday. Van Hollen accused Netanyahu of fabricating claims in order to eliminate the agency, which provides essential services to nearly 6 million Palestinian refugees around the Middle East. "Netanyahu has want...
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has criticised remarks by US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer calling for elections in Israel as "totally inappropriate". Speaking in the Senate, Schumer - known as a staunch supporter of Israel - slammed Netanyahu as a "major obstacle" to peace. Netanyahu hit back in an interview with CNN on Sunday. "We're not a banana republic," Netanyahu toldCNN's "State of the Union" show. "I think the only government that we should be working on to bring down now is the terrorist tyranny in Gaza, the Hamas tyranny that murdered over a thousand Israelis," he ad...
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Donald Trump told a rally in Ohio on Saturday that November's presidential election will be the "most important date" in US history, painting his campaign for the White House as a turning point for the country. Days after securing his position as the presumptive Republican nominee, the former president also warned of a "bloodbath" if he is not elected - though it was not clear what he was referring to, with the remark coming in the middle of comments about threats to the US auto industry. "The date - remember this, November 5 - I believe it's going to be the most important date in the history ...
The New Arab
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