Foreign News
Israeli forces pushing into south Gaza
Israeli ground forces are pushing into southern Gaza, after three days of heavy bombardment.
Initial reports from Israeli army radio effectively confirmed Israel has launched a ground operation to the north of Khan Younis. The BBC has also verified images of an Israeli tank operating near the city.
The head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) later told troops the IDF was also fighting “strongly and thoroughly” in south Gaza. Lt General Herzi Halevi was speaking to reservists from the Gaza division about military objectives and the IDF’s killing of Hamas commanders. He told the soldiers: “We fought strongly and thoroughly in the northern Gaza Strip, and we are also doing it now in the southern Gaza Strip”.
An IDF spokesman later confirmed Israel “continues to expand the ground incursion” across all of Gaza, including troops “conducting face to face battles with terrorists”.
Since a week-long ceasefire ended on Friday, Israel has resumed a large-scale bombing campaign on Gaza, which residents of Khan Younis have described as the heaviest wave of attacks so far.
The seven-day truce saw Hamas release 110 hostages being held in Gaza in return for 240 Palestinians being released from Israeli prisons.
On Sunday morning, the Israeli army issued evacuation orders for several districts of Khan Younis, urging people to leave immediately.
Israeli authorities believe members of the Hamas leadership are hiding in the city, where hundreds of thousands of people have been sheltering after fleeing fighting in the north in the early stages of the war.
A UN official has described a “degree of panic” he has not seen before in a Gaza hospital, after the Israeli military shifted the focus of its offensive to the south.
James Elder, from the children’s agency Unicef, described Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Younis as a “warzone”.
An adviser to Israel’s prime minister said Israel is making “maximum effort” to avoid killing civilians.
Mr Elder told the BBC he could hear constant large explosions close to the Nasser hospital and children were arriving with head injuries, terrible burns, and shrapnel from recent blasts. “It’s a hospital I’ve gone to regularly and the children know me now, the families know me now. Those same people are grabbing my hand, or grabbing my shirt saying ‘please take us somewhere safe. Where is safe?’.They are unfortunately asking a question to which the only answer is there is nowhere safe. And that includes for them, as they know, that hospital,” he said.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says more than 500 people have been killed since the bombing resumed. More than 15,500 people have been killed in the strip since the war began, the ministry also said.
Mohammed Ghalayini, a British-Palestinian who has stayed in Gaza, said the situation in the city was “beyond catastrophic”. “People have been, for 50 days or more, withstanding brutal Israeli onslaught and are very low on all resources – food, water, power and the sanitation and the waste services,” he told the BBC by phone, before the connection cut off.
The air pollution expert, who normally lives in Manchester, arrived in Gaza for a three-month visit to see his mother shortly before the 7 October attacks.
Israel began its retaliatory bombing of Gaza following Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel on 7 October, which saw around 1,200 people killed and 240 taken hostage.
Rockets have also been regularly fired at Israel from Gaza since fighting resumed on Friday. A 22-year-old man in the city of Holon, near Tel Aviv, was treated for minor shrapnel injuries on Saturday.
Hundreds of thousands of people have already fled the fighting to take shelter in Khan Younis, after Israel told them to leave the north of the strip.
The latest UN update says around 1.8 million people are internally displaced in Gaza.
Speaking to the BBC, the UN’s human rights chief, Filippo Grandi, said Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are being “pushed more and more towards a narrow corner of what is already a very narrow territory”.
The IDF has begun posting maps of areas set to be attacked online. It says these maps, along with other measures like phone calls and leaflets being dropped on Gaza by plane, will warn people to evacuate.
Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s senior adviser Mark Regev said civilians are not targets and protecting them is made more difficult by Hamas “embedding its military terror machine” in civilian neighbourhoods. He says the IDF are trying to be “as surgical as we can in a very difficult combat situation”, and has given advance warning of attacks.
Separately, the IDF say they have destroyed 500 “terror tunnel” shafts used by Hamas in Gaza, out of the 800 they say have been found so far.
It also said around 10,000 air strikes on “terror targets” have been carried out by the air force “under the guidance of IDF soldiers on the ground” since the war began.
(BBC)
At least three suspected rebel fighters and one Indian soldier have been killed in separate firefights in Indian administered Kashmir less than a week after Interior Minister Amit Shah visited the disputed territory.
The Indian army said on Saturday that Indian soldiers killed three fighters in a gun battle that began on Wednesday in a remote forest in Kishtwar in southern Kashmir.
Senior Indian army official Brigadier JBS Rathi said troops had displayed “great tactical acumen”.
“In the gun battle, three terrorists were neutralised,” he told reporters on Saturday in a commonly used term for rebels opposed to Indian rule in Kashmir.
Weapons and “war-like stores” were recovered from the site, the army’s White Knight Corps posted on social media platform X.
A soldier was killed in a separate incident late on Friday night in Sunderbani district along the Line of Control (LoC), the de facto border that cuts Indian-administered Kashmir into two.
The White Knight Corps said on X troops had “foiled an infiltration attempt” there.
Muslim-majority Kashmir has been divided between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan since their independence in 1947, with both claiming the territory in full but governing only part of it.
India has an estimated 500,000 soldiers deployed in the territory after an armed uprising against Indian rule in the late 1980s.
Thousands of people, most of them Kashmir civilians, have been killed as rebel groups have fought Indian forces, seeking independence for Kashmir or its merger with Pakistan.
In 2019, a report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights accused India of human rights violations in Kashmir and called for a commission of inquiry into the allegations. The report came nearly a year after the then UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Husseincalled for an international investigation into abuses in the Muslim-majority region.
Last month, four police officers and two suspected rebels were killed in the region in a clash that also wounded several police officers.
The territory has simmered in anger since 2019 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi ended the region’s semi-autonomy and drastically curbed dissent, civil liberties and media freedoms while intensifying military operations.
Thousands of additional troops, including special forces, were deployed across southern mountainous areas last year following a series of deadly rebel attacks that killed more than 50 soldiers over three years.
India regularly blames Pakistan for pushing rebels across the LoC to launch attacks on Indian forces.
[Aljazeera]
Hundreds of flights have been cancelled and trains suspended as gales hit Beijing and northern China today [Saturday].
By 11:30 local time (03:30 GMT) today, 838 flights had been cancelled at the capital’s two major airports, according to the news agency Reuters.
Wind gusts of up to 93mph (150kph) – the strongest in the Chinese capital for more than half a century – are set to continue through the weekend, forcing the closure of attractions and historic sites.
Millions were urged to stay indoors on Friday, with some state media outlets warning that people weighing less than 50kg may be “easily blown away”.
Train services, including the airport’s express subway line and some high-speed rail lines, have been suspended.
Parks were also shut, with some old trees reinforced or trimmed in preparation – but almost 300 trees have already fallen over in the capital.
A number of vehicles were damaged, but no injuries were reported. In Beijing, most residents followed authorities’ advice to stay indoors after the city warned 22 million residents to avoid non-essential travel.
“Everyone in Beijing was really nervous about it. Today there are hardly any people out on the streets. However, it wasn’t as severe as I had imagined,” a local resident told Reuters.
Meanwhile, a businessman from the Zhejiang province, near Shanghai, had his flight home cancelled.
“Because of the severe winds, all flights scheduled for last night and today were cancelled. So I will probably rebook my flight in a couple of days. I’m now basically stranded in Beijing,” he said.
The strong winds are from a cold vortex system over Mongolia and are expected to last through the weekend.
Winds bringing sand and dust from Mongolia are routine in spring, but climate change can make storms stronger and more severe.
Beijing issued its first orange alert for strong winds in a decade, with the strongest winds expected to arrive on Saturday.
China measures wind speed on a scale that goes from one to 17. A level 11 wind, according to the China Meteorological Administration, can cause “serious damage”, while a level 12 wind brings “extreme destruction”.
The winds this weekend are expected to range from level 11 to 13, with conditions expected to ease by Sunday.
[BBC]
The US Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a Maryland man, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador’s notorious mega-jail.
The Trump administration had conceded that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported by accident, but appealed against a federal court’s order to return him to the US.
On Thursday, in a 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court declined to block the lower court’s order.
The judge’s order “requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent”, the justices ruled.
(BBC)
Temporally pause rooftop solar during day time from 13th to 21st April -CEB
Three rebels, one Indian soldier killed in Kashmir gun battles
Hundreds of flights cancelled in China as strong winds hit capital
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