At least 15 vessels struck in waterway in past 10 days, with rumours spread that they carried valuable goods
People have been scouring the strait of Hormuz for spilt cargo after Iran attacked at least 15 container ships traversing the crucial waterway in the past 10 days.
Some ships have been hit by drones, others by mines. On Sunday, a ship was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade launched from a small boat 120km (75 miles) north-east of the Saudi port of Jubail.
After Houthis escalated their attacks on Saudi Arabia, the US turned down calls from MBS for help
For years, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, cultivated a close relationship with Donald Trump and his son-in-law and former top adviser, Jared Kushner. The prince understood the president’s transactional approach to power: he signed deals to buy billions of dollars’ worth of US weapons and invested billions more in American companies.
Days after Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, Prince Mohammed pledged to expand investment and trade with the US by $600bn over four years. He later promised to increase that investment to nearly $1tn, although it wasn’t entirely clear how Saudi Arabia would manage to plough a sum close to the kingdom’s entire annual GDP into a foreign economy over a few years.
Mohamad Bazzi is a Guardian US columnist. He is also director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University
Two-thirds of population face crisis levels of food insecurity and 200,000 people are in danger of famine
This winter is likely to deepen hunger for Palestinians in Gaza, after sweeping aid cuts forced the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) to end support for more than half a million people each month, the agency’s director for Palestine said.
More than a year after a Trump-brokered ceasefire came into force, promised reconstruction has not begun, there are few jobs and the vast majority in Gaza still rely on aid to eat.
New video footage of Israeli settler assault on European delegation as Netanyahu attempts to raise doubt
Hours after Israeli militants attacked a delegation of European diplomats, French clerics and a visiting mayor in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded by questioning the delegation’s account of the assault.
“Serious accusations require serious evidence” was the all-caps headline of a social media post from the office of the prime minister. As news of the attack spread globally there was no pledge to find those accountable and bring them to justice.
Capt Smit Machchhar said he screamed for help as he reached to open the cockpit door on flight FZ1073
The captain of a flydubai flight who was attacked by a co-pilot who intended to crash the plane has described blocking axe blows to his head and screaming for help as he reached to open the cockpit door.
Capt Smit Machchhar has been hailed as a hero for his role in averting disaster on the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv last month, helping to thwart what the UAE attorney general has said was an attempted suicide attack by the co-pilot who had intended to crash the plane into Ben Gurion airport.
Mike Huckabee calls for arrest and prosecution of those responsible as Heidi Levine, 63, recovers in hospital in Israel
The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has denounced the settler attack that left the Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine badly beaten and needing surgery as a “despicable act of terror” and called for the arrest and prosecution of those responsible.
Levine, 63, an award-winning journalist who lives in Israel, was set upon last Friday by masked Israeli settlers who used clubs and other weapons to attack Palestinian people attempting to harvest their olives in occupied West Bank towns.
As civil war has left their country in ruins, many young Sudanese have turned to artisanal mining. An airstrike on a mine last week killed more than 100 and has provoked anger against Egypt, seen as the most likely suspect
Torches still fixed on their heads but tools cast aside, the Sudanese goldminers of the North Valley had already mounted an impromptu rescue operation by the time Ammar* arrived at the site of a suspected Egyptian airstrike.
At least 114 were killed, according to the Sudanese rights group Emergency Lawyers, in the strike on Saturday 10 October on an artisanal goldmine brimming with young Sudanese trying to eke out a living in a country where the economy has been shattered by three years of war.
Whether or not Netanyahu can hold on to power, Israelis are expected to vote in a more rightwing Knesset
Four decades ago, when the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane won a single seat in Israel’s Knesset, other legislators passed a law to prevent him running again, left the chamber when he rose to speak and worked together to block discussion of his ethnonationalist proposals.
These ranged from mass expulsions of Palestinians to apartheid provisions such as segregated beaches and the criminalisation of sex between Jews and gentiles.
Film’s executive producer talks about first time he watched film detailing Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza
The director Jonathan Glazer said he was “shocked into silence” the first time he watched NAZA, an award-winning documentary about Israel’s systems of mass killing in the war on Gaza.
Glazer appeared on a panel at NAZA’s UK premiere in London on Thursday night alongside key figures behind the documentary, including its Israeli co-directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
French mayor and archbishop also attacked during violent attempt to stop Palestinians harvesting olives
Israeli settler militants have attacked European diplomats, a French mayor and the archbishop of Cambrai in Taybeh, in the occupied West Bank, injuring three people and damaging a car, in the latest violent attempt to prevent Palestinians from harvesting olives on their own land.
Bernard Baudoux, mayor of Aulnoye-Aymeries, was wearing his red, white and blue sash of office and attempting to enter a vehicle with diplomatic plates when he was assaulted and knocked to the ground on Saturday.
The United Arab Emirates has agreed to re-enter the Yemen conflict by resuming payments to some government forces fighting Iran-aligned Houthis in the south, according to sources in Yemen. In return, Saudi Arabia has agreed to provide air cover for the anti-Houthi force.
Families have been scattered, fathers separated from their children, and couples unable to reunite and marry
Wijdan Abu Matar, 43, was forced to leave Gaza in November 2023 with her eight children for medical treatment, while her injured husband, Hatem, remained behind.
Wijdan and her family were living in the Nuseirat refugee camp when the Gaza war began with the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Ten days later, on 17 October that year, an Israeli strike hit the al-Muhandseen tower, near their home, injuring Wijdan and every member of her family.
Settlers hurl rocks at Palestinians and beat photographer Heidi Levine as part of yearly attacks to disrupt harvest
Israeli settlers have attacked Palestinians across the occupied West Bank in a coordinated movement to disrupt the annual olive harvest, burning cars and trees and injuring Palestinians and a Washington Post photographer.
Masked settlers wielding clubs and other weapons attacked people attempting to harvest their olives in West Bank towns on Friday. Palestinian authorities said they recorded attacks in eight villages, and injuries among at least 20 people.
Film interviewing military insiders about mass killing of civilians in Gaza wins widespread praise around the world
Critics around the world have hailed the award-winning documentary NAZA as a “brilliant and harrowing” film that is “impossible to ignore”.
NAZA, which is produced by the Guardian and details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, was released in UK cinemas this week and will be shown in more than 50 countries. As well as its global cinema releases, NAZA will be available free on the Guardian’s website from late November.
The film’s testimonies from Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers expose years of baseless propaganda. Don’t take my word – take theirs
I watched the extraordinary new Guardian-produced documentary from Oscar-winning Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor the other night, and I have struggled to stop thinking about it ever since. The film’s title comes from a Hebrew military term for collateral damage, and it consists of eye-opening interviews with two dozen Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers sitting in darkness, often on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, their voices “digitally altered to disguise their identities”.
At one point, Abraham asks one of the soldiers a remarkably blunt question.
Oscar-winning filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor discuss their new documentary, NAZA, which exposes the AI systems that the Israeli military uses to rain down strikes on Gaza, causing the mass killing of civilians. Based on the testimony of 24 military insiders, the documentary caused uproar in Israel, with the government threatening to strip the filmmakers of their citizenship. The Guardian's Annie Kelly talks to the directors about how the film was made, and the price they paid for speaking out
The documentary detailing Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza is the latest film to give a voice to those who carry out atrocities – confronting viewers with some of the most difficult questions of all
Are we still talking about the banality of evil? When that overworked phrase was first used by philosopher Hannah Arendt, it described the blank persona of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Now, in NAZA, anonymisedmembers of Israeli intelligence discuss their remote execution of the assault on Gaza. The comparison to Hitler’s Germany, while understandably controversial, is made by a subject themselves. If they are banal, it is a modern, oddly familiar kind. These are articulate, middle-class millennials. They say they are leftwing and non-racist. Put differently, they could be Guardian readers.
And yes, one remarks, they have been conducting a genocide.
Use of death penalty against people for crimes committed when they were children a ‘new low’, say rights groups
A young man faces imminent execution in Saudi Arabia for attending protests and funerals when he was aged 15 to 17, say human rights groups, in the latest example of the kingdom’s surging use of the death penalty for non-violent crimes.
The future of western security is being fought out in the mountains and hills surrounding the south-western Yemeni city of Taiz, the country’s former prime minster has said.
Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed, now an adviser to Yemen’s president, said it would be catastrophic if the city fell to the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, since control of the strategic Bab al-Mandab strait in the Red Sea and the road to Aden – the site of the UN-recognised government – would be lost.
Though Burnham and Badenoch may still need the votes of Green and Reform supporters, both leaders have drawn clear lines in the sand
Ask a straight question, get a straight answer. It’s how politics is supposed to work but almost never does, which is why on the rare occasions it happens the result can be faintly chaotic. What did Andy Burnham mean when he said – in response to a question from the Tory MP Harriett Baldwin – that Labour couldn’t partner with the Green party while it remains wedded to the “Zionism is racism” motion its members have just endorsed? Were Green MPs now barred from a future coalition government? If so, what about councils where they are currently sharing power with Labour?
Though Burnham was only confirming what ministers have been arguing privately for days, at first nobody seemed to know: tellingly, it took almost 24 hours for the Labour party chair, Bridget Phillipson, to confirm that unless local Green groups disowned that idea sharpish, “Labour will bring any such local arrangement to an end”. So much for cuddly cross-party Andy, who always seemed so relaxed about rainbow coalitions. Now elected Greens in places such as Sheffield or Lewes must choose between power and members’ wrath, a useful rehearsal for what a hung parliament might feel like.
The Normal People author’s determination to support Palestine Action, even if it means that her books are withdrawn from sale in the UK, makes a mockery of Britain’s terrorism laws
It’s hard to think of a published author in living memory who risked arrest in the UK for their political beliefs, hard to think of one whose books could be published anywhere but here. Sally Rooney went into this debacle with her eyes open: she said last July that royalties from her books, and their BBC adaptations, would be used to support Palestine Action.
Rooney’s courage is not so much in risking imprisonment, since there is a fix for that, which is what she’s doing – avoiding the UK. Rather, she has chosen the thorniest possible path for this cause. Authors can write essays and sign letters in support of the Palestinian people; actors can voice it in interviews, musicians can say it from the stage, and there is always a cost to it, whether it’s in plain sight and they’ve been kicked off a global tour, or it’s behind closed doors and they are simply excluded from opportunities. But such actions, even if they logically suggest support for a proscribed organisation, don’t entail actively breaking the terrorism laws. Rooney had taken a financial hit anyway, by pledging support for Palestine Action with her royalties; but that’s a price at least you can count. The lost sales and opportunities that ripple out from being effectively both barred from and banned in the UK are innumerable.
Speed of advance has left people rushing to buy food as basic supplies to city are cut off by fighting
Ali Abdulsamed spent all day waiting and walking. Like many people in the besieged Yemeni city of Taiz, he was searching for some food for his family of six. But each time he reached the end of the queue at the grocers, he was greeted with empty shelves. He would go on foot to the next shop, unable to afford the price of petrol, which more than doubled last week.
After visiting more than a dozen stores, Abdulsamed managed to find a 25kg bag of wheat flour – sold at more than twice its usual price. It would have to do, he was lucky to find anything at all.
Finance ministers gathering for the IMF annual meeting know the need for multilateral cooperation to deal with many crises. There is little chance of that
Not much has gone right for the global economy this year, and plenty has gone wrong. Two big regional wars are destabilising prices and supply chains everywhere.Businesses and consumers are feeling the effects of a serious energy shock. Rising inflation has made it a lot more expensive for governments to finance their debts. China and the US are at loggerheads over trade.
Yet, so far, the impact has been modest. It is something of a miracle that the finance ministers and central bank governors gathered for this year’s annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Bangkok are not having to deal with a full-blown crisis. This is not like the autumn of 2008, when the meetings took place during the worst of the global banking meltdown.
Exclusive: Israel has not permitted US-led project to house 150 international troops to move forward
Israel is refusing to allow a key military outpost project for Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to proceed in Gaza, the Guardian has learned.
In early August, the Board of Peace, the international organization authorized in 2025 by the UN and chaired by the US president, issued its first construction contract for Gaza: Louisiana-based Arkel International would construct a military outpost for 150 international troops that would be the vanguard of an international stabilization force.
Global human rights commitments adopted by government extend reach to enablers of unlawful activity
The UK is expanding its sanctions powers to freeze assets and target entities enabling illegal Israeli settlements, obstructing humanitarian aid or unlawfully holding prisoners.
The statutory instrument introducing the global human rights and international humanitarian law sanctions adds three new grounds to the 2020 regime: serious violations of international humanitarian law, obstruction of humanitarian assistance and serious violations of the right to liberty and security of person.
Rights groups warn of Tehran regime’s increasing use of executions to suppress dissent, with at least 600 this year
Human rights groups have raised the alarm over the growing number of death sentences and executions in Iran, after reports that a 23-year-old woman, Najmeh Amini, has been sentenced to death for blasphemy over a social-media post.
Amini, an accounting student, is being held in Vakilabad prison in the north-east city of Mashhad. She has been sentenced to more than 12 years in prison and death in separate cases heard by a revolutionary and a criminal court.
Civilians warned to leave target area near Sana’a before attacks as conflict between Riyadh and Houthi forces escalates
Saudi Arabia has launched a series of strikes on a strategic oil depot on the outskirts of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, while later on Tuesday it said it had intercepted missiles launched toward Dharan, location of the headquarters of the huge national energy company Saudi Aramco.
The attacks on both sides were a fresh escalation of the conflict between Riyadh and the Iran-backed Houthi forces. Before its offensive on Tuesday, a Saudi spokesperson warned civilians to leave the target area, in an apparent attempt to strike fear into the local population before the biggest attack so far on Houthi energy infrastructure.
At first the idea of mercy was something that helped me through the ordeal. But would real forgiveness be a form of Stockholm syndrome?
I knew Mohamed Tahlil as a gentle pirate who oversaw a team of guards during the first months of my life as a hostage in 2012. I had travelled to Somalia to report on the outbreak of modern piracy off the coast. On the 10th day, along a dusty road near Galkayo, in the centre of the country, I was kidnapped by pirates. For the next two and a half years, I was a hostage.
I spent most of my time on a thin, sweat-soaked foam mattress on the floor of a dusty room. The dim concrete prison houses changed, but the filth and the circumstances didn’t. Sometimes my captors moved me into the Somali savannah – where we camped in the open and slept on the ground – and for a six-month stretch, I was held on a hijacked tuna vessel, where I joined 28 fishers from east Asia who had been captured about three weeks before I was placed on board. (They had captured me on land, but they were a pirate gang, organised to capture ships at sea.) In each location, pirate guards would sit around with AK-47s and listen to the radio, or else chew khat, a narcotic plant.
Saudi Arabia has been forced to suspend all flights to and from its main international airport in Riyadh until next Saturday after a further round of Houthi missile attacks caused more damage and left one person dead. Some airlines, including Gulf Air and Bahrain Air, had already said they were cancelling flights until next Saturday. More missiles were fired at Saudi Arabian cities by the Houthis on Monday, Saudi Arabian’s military spokesperson said.
The Gulf nation announced it was suspending flights from Riyadh, its second busiest airport, after Houthi missiles killed 13 people on Saturday and left more than 300 injured. Saudi state TV broadcast CCTV footage that showed passengers deluged in smoke and falling masonry as they queued at the airport terminal to board a plane just as the Houthi missile struck.
Naffah Naffah makes the bells in the mountains near Beirut. His sons will take over the foundry when he retires
The story of Lebanon’s last remaining church-bell maker begins with a rifle. In the 18th century, Youssef Gabriel, a local metalworker, was secretly making and equipping Arab revolutionaries with rifles to assist their revolt against the Ottoman empire, which controlled Lebanon at the time.
Then, one day, a Russian engineer came to the Lebanese town of Beit Chabab to make a church bell. Gabriel, intrigued, shadowed the man and picked up the process on sight.
Israeli PM calls for criminal investigation into soldiers and officers interviewed in Guardian-produced documentary
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has ordered the country’s attorney general and the head of the Shin Bet security service to reveal the identities of soldiers and officers interviewed in the investigative documentary NAZA and prosecute them for causing “harm to Israel’s diplomatic and security interests”.
The award-winning documentary, directed by the Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian, details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza. The film is in cinemas, including in the UK and the US, and will be shown in more than 50 countries.
Using archive material of destroyed houses, terrorised children and dead bodies, Kamal Aljafari adds humanity to the reels by overlaying poems by Palestinian authors
In Arabic, “fidai” means someone willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Borrowing this word, which is at times used in a military context, for his collage film, Palestinian film-maker Kamal Aljafari stages a potent uprising of images against the tide of propaganda and historical erasure. Much of the film draws on archive materials once housed in the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut. In 1982, during the Lebanese civil war, Israeli forces raided the centre and seized the archive. Most of these documents on Palestinian history – books, newspapers, audiovisual artefacts – are believed to still be in the hands of the Israeli army.
Obtained through clandestine means, the footage that resurfaces in Aljafari’s film bears the physical traces of political suppression. The images are scratched, grainy and pixelated, yet through the power of montage they evoke startling visual parallels that point to the relentless violence endured by Palestinians through the decades. Black-and-white film taken during the British mandate show soldiers patrolling the streets and inflicting violence upon the Indigenous population; similar acts then committed by Israeli forces. In place of a chronological order, the editing builds a sense of continuity through recurring images. Time and time again, we see torn-down houses, terrorised children and the bodies of Palestinians murdered by occupation forces.
The latest attack by Houthi rebels on Saudi Arabia may prove to be more calamitous for the region than the world imagines
On Saturday, Houthi rebels launched a shocking and deadly attack on Saudi Arabia’s capital city, Riyadh. At the time of writing, the missile strike on King Khalid international airport has killed at least 13 people and left 300 injured, marking a significant turn in a regional conflagration that is only getting more intense. It was the single most deadly attack on any Gulf country since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran in February. In Saudi Arabia, a country that is unaccustomed to such fatalities, the death toll is bewilderingly high and likely to prompt a bloody response.
Over the past year, the Gulf has entered a new era of instability that is not temporary and cannot be reversed. This may feel like an overstatement – casualties have been relatively low, after all, compared with Gaza and Iran – but the gradual erosion of peace and security in places such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE has changed the region more dramatically than its leaders would like to acknowledge.
Álvarez vows to fight in Riyadh despite deadly strikes
Airport attacks leave at least 12 dead, hundreds hurt
Mexican seeks redemption after Crawford defeat
Canelo Álvarez intends to go ahead with his world title fight in Saudi Arabia later this month despite a series of deadly attacks on airports and other infrastructure in the kingdom, according to Turki al-Sheikh, the Saudi official who has become one of boxing’s most influential power brokers.
The Mexican superstar is slated to challenge the unbeaten Christian Mbilli for the WBC super-middleweight title in Riyadh on 31 October, three weeks after Saturday’s missile strike on the Saudi capital’s main international airport killed at least 12 people and wounded more than 300.
Unidentified projectile strikes King Khalid airport, killing one and injuring 11, as escalating attacks threaten to draw more countries into Yemen conflict
A projectile hit a passenger terminal at the airport in Riyadh on Sunday, the day after a deadly missile attack on the facility carried out by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebel group killed 13 people.
An unidentified projectile hit terminal 4 at King Khalid international airport, starting a fire, killing one person and injuring 11, according to Saudi civil aviation authorities. Air defences also intercepted a cruise missile in the vicinity of the airport. It was the latest of several attacks on the airport in the past week.
Eighty-four others still missing from vessel heading to Yemen with 305 people onboard, UN migration agency says
At least 139 people, including 15 children, have died after a boat carrying 305 migrants capsized off the coast of Djibouti, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.
Another 84 people are still missing after the incident, which, according to survivors, happened near Guhere, north of the fishing town of Obock, during the night of 8-9 October when the boat was travelling from Djibouti to Yemen.
A Saudi-led coalition spokesperson said that a projectile hit a passenger terminal building, causing a fire
Some more Gulf reaction to Houthi’s deadly airport attack and continued threats to target Saudi airspace.
In a significant message, the United Arab Emirates has issued a statement in solidarity with Saudi Arabia – expressing support for “all measures aimed at safeguarding the kingdom’s security and stability”.
The UAE message is improtant given the major rupture in relations this year between the two oil-rich kingdoms, first sparked by lingering divisions in Yemen, and made worse by the Iran War and arguments over oil prices which led to the UAE quitting OPEC (currently led by the Saudis) after six decades of membership.
Saturday’s incident comes amid an escalation of missile strikes by Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis on the kingdom. The airport has already been attacked twice this week, leaving four people dead and others wounded, and badly damaging an aircraft.
The Houthis have repeatedly attacked Saudi airports, oil facilities and tankers after a truce in their long-running war with Yemen’s Riyadh-backed government unravelled in July.
This is no scoffing matter. The accelerating proliferation of advanced nuclear weapons is bringing ‘end times’ closer by the day
Humankind has fearfully and sometimes joyfully anticipated the end of the world ever since it began. The Bible’s Book of Revelation speaks of “end times”, a period of tribulation, war, famine, plague, floods and environmental catastrophe that may seem a less absurd prospect today than perhaps it once did. Islam, too, posits a fateful day of judgment or day of reckoning. Christian evangelicals believe that, in the final rapture, a chosen few – the righteous or the “elect” – will be saved while sinners burn. It’s a minority view. Matthew’s gospel predicts most people will defy, ignore or ridicule warnings of imminent Armageddon. Peter, another of Jesus’s disciples, agreed: “In the last days, scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.” Yet such worldly scepticism does not mean a universal cataclysm is less likely. It may make it more probable.
Donald Trump’s blanket denials of the dangers ostensibly posed by artificial intelligence, whose uncontrolled development is seen by some as the latest harbinger of apocalypse, could be interpreted as fulfilling Peter’s prophecy. This US president, the nearest thing the world has to a one-man doomsday machine, is a great one for scoffing and evil desires. In Robert Harris’s 2019 novel, The Second Sleep, a worried scientist lists half a dozen ways the world might end. They include devastating climate change, pandemic disease, a giant asteroid collision with Earth, or some other overwhelming calamity. Few heed the fictional scientist’s fears. In the event, what destroys him and almost everybody else is a disturbingly plausible cyber crash – a global digital and internet meltdown.
Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator
Twenty arrested in first march since Ed Miliband declared UK’s position was that Israel’s occupation of West Bank was unlawful
Thousands of people have gathered in central London to express their support for Palestinians after three years of “genocide” carried out against them by Israel.
The demonstrators, many wearing keffiyehs and holding Palestine flags, gathered on the Embankment at midday on Saturday. Some carried placards reading “End the genocide” and “Free Palestine” as they marched towards parliament. A bride and groom appeared to be among those in attendance and a two-minute silence was held to reflect on the lives lost in Gaza.
Donald Trump evaluating whether US should join Saudi strikes against the Iran-backed Yemeni rebels
Yemen’s Houthis have launched a missile attack on Riyadh’s international airport in Saudi Arabia, killing at least 12 people and leaving hundreds wounded, the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority has said.
Operations at King Khalid international airport in Riyadh were suspended as ambulances rushed to the airport. More than 300 people were reported injured in the deadliest attack in any Gulf Arab country since the start of the Iran war.
A whirlpool of violence has engulfed everywhere from Lebanon to Yemen. Meanwhile, the west has destroyed any political authority it once had
There was a world before 7 October, 2023, and now there is a world after. For Gaza, for Israel, for the wider Middle East, and for everyone else too. Not all hinge points in history are obvious at the time. Three years on from the day it began, and precisely one year since a supposed ceasefire was agreed, this one is now impossible to ignore.
The before-and-after pictures tell part of the story. An update to Google Maps, released last week, underscores just what three years of relentless Israeli military onslaught has done to Gaza. Satellite images show how entire towns have been reduced to rubble. Mosques and hospitals, visible three years ago, have now disappeared. Meanwhile the once-empty shoreline is now crammed with tents. This is what it looks like when an attempt has been made to destroy a people.
Steve Bloomfield is the former international editor of the Observer
Hammam al-Hammami is believed to have been targeting the passenger terminal at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv
The co-pilot who tried to seize control of a passenger jet flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv last week was planning to launch a suicide attack targeting the passenger terminal at Israel’s international airport, prosecutors in the United Arab Emirates said on Friday.
Hammam al-Hammami attacked the plane’s Indian pilot with an emergency axe, but failed to prevent his badly injured colleague from opening the cockpit’s security door to allow passengers to overpower his assailant.
Jasmine Jobson goes the distance as the British-Somalian boxer battling pain from her past and her family’s disapproval in a heavyweight, tick-the-boxes production
The true-life success story of boxer Ramla Ali is confidently told in this capable picture from screenwriter Ursula Rani Sarma and documentary director Anthony Wonke, in his feature-film debut. Ali is the British-Somali boxer who escaped to the UK from the Somali civil war with her family as a refugee, and in 2021 became the first person to box for Somalia at Olympic Games. The boxing significance of her last name is actually not mentioned in the film – and I never noticed it until it flashed up in a kind of “fight card” intertitle before her first competitive bout.
She is fiercely played by Jasmine Jobson, from TV’s Top Boy; her supportive white Muslim-convert husband Richard – a hugely important figure in enabling Ramla to break away from her disapproving family and do as she wants – is played by Finn Cole, and her abusive trainer Clinton is Gershwyn Eustache Jr. This is a film that takes you through the classic boxing-movie scenes fluently enough: the nervous first appearance in the gym, the overbearing quasi-parental coach, the heartstopping fight debut. It was good to see the traditional closeup of post-fight sore fists in the ice-bucket. All in all, the film works better than Giant, the recent biopic of British-Yemeni boxer Prince Naseem, who is in fact briefly mentioned here.
While I condemn the Israeli government’s actions against the Palestinian people, and I am not a Zionist myself, Zionism as defined by the motion is only one political interpretation and completely ignores ancient religious and cultural definitions held by many Jews who also condemn the current Israeli government.
It’s easier to blame brutes and sadists for extreme violence. But as we see in the documentary, modern genocides are fueled by people who are uncomfortably recognizable
Werner Best, a senior SS official and jurist who helped organize the Nazi death squads that murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, is also known for his statement: “We must destroy the enemy without hating him.” He belonged to a younger generation of Nazi technocrats, who despised the foul-mouthed, beer-bellied, brown-shirted “old fighters” of the Nazi party in the 1920s, and believed in organizing genocide neatly and dispassionately. After the fall of the regime, Best escaped justice for the rest of his long life, dying peacefully in Germany in 1989. His chilling statement came to my mind while I was watching the film NAZA.
I grew up in Tel Aviv and have visited there often in recent years. That is why the interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, which make up this documentary, felt strangely familiar. The conversations are conducted at night on rooftops, and the camera scans the cityscape, lingering on apartment windows as their inhabitants watch TV and make dinner. The landscape was intimately recognizable, and I felt a natural affinity with those people living their lives. I also recognized the way the interviewees talked – their speech patterns and choice of words. They reminded me of my son, who served more than a decade ago in the intelligence unit many of them might have belonged to.
While Israel’s actions against Palestinians intensify public anger, the bloc remains paralysed along familiar fault lines
When the British government announced sweeping sanctions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements and condemned “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank by state-backed “settler terrorists”, some EU diplomats hoped this dramatic shift in UK government policy towards Israel would have a galvanising effect on the rest of Europe. So far, it has not.
Although France and Canada joined the UK in pledging to ban goods from illegal settlements and impose sanctions on “those who facilitate them or profit from them”, there has not yet been a wider ripple effect.
Last week, Egyptian authorities arrested the journalists, from the independent factchecking and investigative platform Matsadaash, accusing them in a statement of being unlicensed and producing false news on behalf of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.
Attack is deadliest in kingdom since it launched major military offensive with allies against Houthis in Yemen
Three Saudi citizens have been killed and several other people were wounded in attacks targeting Riyadh airport for which Yemen’s Houthis claimed responsibility, Saudi officials have said.
The attack late on Thursday was the deadliest in Saudi Arabia since the kingdom and allied forces in neighbouring Yemen launched a major military offensive last weekend against the Iran-backed Houthis.
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