Israel has killed Palestinian journalist Wafa Aludaini along with her family in a targeted airstrike.
On Monday, Wafa, along with her husband Mueir Aludaini, and their two children were martyred in an overnight attack. She was a prominent English speaking journalist working for international news outlets, residing in Deir-Al-Balah, central Gaza strip.
Many fellow journalists praised her dedication to bringing the stories of Gaza to the world.
Journalist Noor Harazeen shared pictures of Waffa and bid her farewell.
“Aludaini was well-known among European media outlets and conveyed the suffering of our people in English, which she was a master of,” Ahmed Abu Artema, a Palestinian journalist and friend of Aludaini, told Middle East Eye.
Pakistani journalist and an Executive Producer at Geo News, Hassam Ahmed, shared his experience of interaction with Wafa in a Facebook post in which he revealed that despite all the bombardments and cruelty, Wafa used to reply to him calmly, “We’re okay, we are under Allah’s protection.”
However, one day she said, “No. We are not okay.”
He said that he helplessly told her that all he can do as a journalist is raise his voice for them and she replied, “Your voices are all we need now.”
The death toll of Palestinian journalists has reached 174.
Newsweek reveals that, according to a report released by Israeli media, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s death was caused by suffocation from toxic fumes after an Israeli airstrike hit the bunker he was hiding in.
The report states that the deceased leader’s body was believed to have been pulled from the rubble after the building around him exploded.
There were no visible wounds on his body, suggesting it remained intact and that he died from suffocation due to the fumes.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah group on Saturday confirmed its leader Hassan Nasrallah had been killed, after Israel said it had “eliminated” him in an air strike a day earlier.
“Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General of Hezbollah, has joined his great, immortal martyr comrades whom he led for about 30 years,” Hezbollah said in a statement.
The statement confirmed he was killed with other group members “following the treacherous Zionist strike on the southern suburbs” of Beirut.
In the Lebanese capital Beirut, AFP journalists heard a passerby screaming, “Oh my God”, while women wept in the streets right after Hezbollah announced the news.
Gunfire could also be heard in Beirut, a gesture to mourn the fallen leader, a charismatic religious figure who is idolised by supporters.
An AFP correspondent saw a woman wearing a black veil on the street who yelled: “Don’t believe them, they’re lying, Sayyed is well” — a reference to Nasrallah.
Israeli jets pounded Beirut’s south and its outskirts throughout the night into Saturday in the most intense attacks on the Hezbollah stronghold since the group and Israel last went to war in 2006.
Nasrallah had rarely been seen in public since 2006.
He was elected secretary general of Hezbollah in 1992, aged 32, after an Israeli helicopter gunship killed his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati on Monday called for a ceasefire in the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah during a meeting with French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot in Beirut.
“The key to the solution is to put an end to the Israeli aggression against Lebanon and to revive the appeal launched by the United States and France… in favour of a ceasefire,” Mikati said, according to a statement from his office.
Barrot arrived in Beirut Sunday, the first foreign diplomat to visit Lebanon since Israel escalated its strikes against Hezbollah strongholds.
Mikati added that the “priority is applying resolution 1701” of the United Nations Security Council, which ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
The French envoy’s visit came as a deadly strike hit a building in the centre of the Lebanese capital.
Israeli strikes have been largely concentrated on Hezbollah’s strongholds in the south and east of the country and in south Beirut.
Pope Francis on Sunday slammed the “immoral” use of force in Lebanon and Gaza amid ongoing Israeli strikes in both places.
“A country that acts this way with force, no matter the country, and that acts in such an excessive manner, (lends itself to) immoral actions,” said Francis when asked about the consequences of Israeli airstrikes on civilians aboard a flight back to Rome from Belgium.
“Defence must always be proportional to the attack. When this is not the case, a dominating tendency appears that goes beyond morality,” the 87-year-old pontiff said in Italian.
“Even in war there is a morality to defend. War is immoral, but the rules of war indicate a form of morality,” Francis said.
“But when you don’t do this … you see the bad blood of these things,” he said.
The death of Hassan Nasrallah has sent shockwaves throughout Lebanon and the Middle East, where he has been a key political and military figure for more than three decades.
Israel has shifted the focus of its aggression from Gaza to Lebanon, where heavy bombing has killed more than 700 people and displaced around 118,000 over the past few days.
Israeli military announced on Saturday that Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah was killed in a massive strike on Beirut the previous night.
“Hassan Nasrallah is dead,” military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani announced on X (formerly Twitter).
Captain David Avraham, another military spokesman, also confirmed to AFP that the Hezbollah chief had been “eliminated” following strikes on Friday on the Lebanese capital.
A source close to the Lebanese group meanwhile told AFP on condition of anonymity that contact with Nasrallah had been lost since Friday evening.
Contact with the group leader had been lost for two days and he had been rumoured killed during Israel’s last war with Hezbollah in 2006, the source said, adding that he later re-emerged unscathed.
Israeli media has also claimed that Zainab Nasrallah, the daughter of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, has been martyred in the latest attack on Lebanon.
A report by Israeli new channel claimed the martyrdom of Zainab Nasrallah in an Israeli attack on Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut but this news has not yet been confirmed by Hezbollah or the Lebanese authorities.
Zainab Hassan Nasrallah was recognized as a strong voice in Lebanon for supporting Hezbollah and for her family’s sacrifices.
In an interview to Al-Manar TV in 2022, while discussing the reaction of her parents to the martyrdom of her brother Hadi, Zainab Hassan Nasrallah said that not one tear fell from her parents’ eyes upon the martyrdom of her brother.
As per Israeli military statement, the strikes also killed Ali Karake, commander of Hezbollah’s southern front, and an unspecified number of other Hezbollah commanders.
Who will replace Nasrullah?
Adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Ali Larijani has said that Hezbollah is ready to launch an alternative leadership movement if Nasrallah is dead. Talking about other commander and leaders in line, Ali Larijani said that Israel has crossed the “red line”, the situation has become very serious.
In case of the martyrdom of the Hezbollah leader, alternative leadership is ready to run the movement, said Larijani in a recent presser. On the other hand, the Iranian news agency Tasnim News Agency claimed that the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, was safe in the Israeli attack.
Thousands sleep on the streets as Israel strikes Beirut
Thousands of residents in Beirut’s densely-packed southern suburbs camped out overnight in streets, public squares and makeshift shelters after Israel ordered them out before its jets attacked the so-called Hezbollah stronghold.
“I expected the war to expand, but I thought it would be limited to (military) targets, not civilians, homes, and children,” said south Beirut resident Rihab Naseef, 56, who spent the night in a church yard.
AFP photographers saw families spend the night in the open, scenes unheard of in Lebanon’s capital since the Hezbollah and Israel last went to war in 2006.
“I didn’t even pack any clothes, I never thought we would leave like this and suddenly find ourselves on the streets,” Naseef said.
Israeli jets pounded Beirut’s south and its outskirts throughout the night, and Beirut woke up to the aftermath of a night at war, smoke billowing from blazes in several places.
‘What will happen?’
“I’m anxious and afraid of what may happen. I left my home without knowing where I’m going, what will happen to me, and whether I will return,” Naseef said. Despite a night of intense strikes, the extent of the devastation and the casualty toll was still unclear early Saturday.
Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television broadcast footage from southern Beirut that showed flattened buildings, streets filled with rubble and clouds of smoke and dust above the area known as Dahiyeh.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister on Friday announced an “international alliance” to press for Palestinian statehood, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
Prince Faisal bin Farhan said the “International Alliance to implement the two-state solution” included Arab and Islamic countries, as well as European partners, the Saudi Press Agency said.
The Gaza crisis has revived talk of a “two-state solution” of Israeli and Palestinian states living in peace side by side, but analysts said the goal seems more unattainable than ever.
The hard-right Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains implacably opposed to Palestinian statehood.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, paused US-brokered talks on recognising Israel after the Israeli invasion of Gaza in October last year.
Earlier this month, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman toughened his tone, explicitly saying that an “independent Palestinian state” is a condition for normalisation.
A senior official of the Saudi-based Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) said the new coalition “consists mainly of Islamic and Arab members of OIC plus some European countries”.
“There will be meetings in Arab and European countries to discuss the practical execution of the initiative and a conference later this year in Riyadh,” added the official, who asked to remain anonymous.
Prompting Israeli anger, Ireland, Norway and Spain announced their recognition of a Palestinian state in May. Slovenia followed, bringing the number of countries that recognise a Palestinian state to 146 out of the 193 United Nations member states.
Prince Faisal said the nearly year-long Gaza conflict could not be justified by Israel as “self-defence”.
“Self-defence cannot justify the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, the practice of systematic destruction, forced displacement (and) the use of starvation as a tool of war,” Prince Faisal told a ministerial meeting on the Palestinian crisis, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
Pope Francis said Friday that the Catholic Church must “seek forgiveness” over the “scourge” of child sexual abuse, during a visit to Belgium where the Church’s dark past looms large.
In a speech before political and civil society leaders that opened his three-day visit to the country, Francis denounced the “tragic instances of child abuse” as a stain on the Church’s legacy.
“It is our shame and our humiliation,” Francis told the gathering at the Laeken Palace royal residency.
“The Church must be ashamed and must seek forgiveness,” he said.
The 87-year-old pontiff is due to meet with a group of clerical sexual assault victims in Brussels in the afternoon, as part of a three-day stay in the European nation tarred by decades of scandals and cover-ups.
The meeting with around 15 victims, taking place at 6:30 pm (1630 GMT) at the Vatican’s diplomatic mission, was being held with the “utmost discretion”, according to the Belgian church.
It was arranged after a hard-hitting documentary last year put Belgium’s abuse scandal back on the front pages, prompting many new victims to come forward.
In an open letter published by Le Soir newspaper this month, some demanded the pope address paedophilia and set up a process for financial reparations.
“Words alone are not enough. Concrete measures must also be taken,” Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said in a preamble to the pope’s speech.
The pontiff said the abuse scandal was “a scourge that the Church is addressing firmly and decisively by listening to and accompanying those who have been wounded, and by implementing a prevention programme throughout the world”.
Forced adoptions
Francis has made combating sexual assault in the Church a main mission of his papacy, and insisted on a “zero tolerance” policy in the wake of wide-reaching abuse scandals around the world.
During his speech, Francis also said he was “saddened” to learn about a forced adoptions scandal in Belgium that saw institutions run by nuns give up the babies of thousands of underage girls and unmarried women.
“We see how the bitter fruit of wrongdoing and criminality was mixed in with what was unfortunately the prevailing view in all parts of society at that time,” he said.
Belgium’s HLN news site estimates that up to 30,000 children were taken from their mothers in Belgium between 1945 and the 1980s.
Bishops in Belgium apologised in 2023 and requested an independent investigation after fresh testimonies emerged from women and people claiming to have been “sold” by the Catholic Church to their adoptive family.
Child sexual abuse and forced adoptions have “badly damaged trust” between the Church and society, De Croo said.
In a sign of the work yet to be done, the program of an open-air mass concluding Francis’s trip on Sunday had to be changed at the last minute after it emerged that the closing hymn was composed by a priest accused of sexual abuse.
The blunder prompted the head of the Belgian bishops’ conference, Archbishop Luc Terlinden, to admit that the Church needed to get better at keeping a tab on cases and perpetrators.
“This represents a great challenge for us, but we must think about it seriously with the help of lawyers and psychologists,” he told a local broadcaster. The composer, who died this month, reportedly settled a sexual abuse case in 2002.
On the wane
The Argentinian pope arrived in Belgium on Thursday evening after spending the day in neighbouring Luxembourg, where he made a plea for international diplomacy amid flaring conflicts across the globe.
He was welcomed by King Philippe and Queen Mathilde, who hosted him on Friday morning, and he will head on to meet with academics at the Catholic university of Leuven in Dutch-speaking Flanders — whose 600th anniversary next year is the official reason for Francis’s visit.
On Saturday, during what is his 46th trip abroad, Francis will meet the clergy at the vast Basilica of the Sacred Heart before holding discussions with students at Louvain-la-Neuve in French-speaking Wallonia, notably on climate issues.
The last papal visit to Brussels was in 1995, when John Paul II attended the beatification of Saint Damien, who dedicated his life to lepers.
Nearly 65 percent of Belgium’s population is Christian, including 58 percent who are Catholic, according to figures from Louvain university.
But their numbers are on the wane, reflecting a decline across Europe.
During his weekly general audience, Francis said he hoped his visit could be “the opportunity for a new impetus of faith”.
Five people were arrested in India for the killing of a seven-year-old boy in an alleged ritual sacrifice aimed at bringing good fortune to a public school, police said Friday.
The victim was found dead in his bed on Sunday night at the hostel where he lived in the city of Hathras, not far from the country’s famed Taj Mahal.
Instead of alerting authorities, police said that school director Dinesh Baghel hid the body in the trunk of his car.
Police officer Himanshu Mathur told AFP that the boy was killed before a black magic ceremony conducted by Baghel’s father.
“The boy was meant to be taken to an altar as part of a ritual but got killed before the ceremony could be completed,” he said.
Baghel and his father were arrested along with three other teachers at the school, Mathur added.
Mathur did not give further details on how the child had died, and local media reports said the body was undergoing a post-mortem examination.
India’s National Crime Records Bureau lodged 103 cases of human sacrifice in the country between 2014 and 2021.
Ritual killings are usually conducted to appease deities and are more common in tribal and remote areas, where belief in witchcraft and the occult is widespread.
Last year, police arrested five men for the 2019 murder of a 64-year-old woman who was killed and decapitated with a machete after visiting a temple in India’s remote northeast.
Police said the alleged ringleader had been conducting a religious rite to mark the anniversary of his brother’s death.
El Cosmico, a unique hotel and campground in the Texan desert town of Marfa, is building the world’s first 3D-printed hotel.
Using cutting-edge technology, this project will feature 43 new hotel units and 18 residential homes on 60 acres. They have partnered led by Austin-based 3D-printing company ICON and arhirects from the Barke Ingels Group.
A rendering of a 3D-printed residence at El Cosmico hotel and campground in Marfa, Texas, U.S., in this undated handout image. ICON/Handout via REUTERS
The initial units of the hotel will feature 3.7 meter high walls, a three-bedroom residence and a single-room hotel.
El Cosmico’s owner, Liz Lambert, highlighted the design and its flexibilty, saying, “Most hotels are contained within four walls and a lot of times you are building the same unit over and over and over again.”
He said. “I’ve never been able to build with such little constraint and such fluidity … just the curves, and the domes, and the parabolas. It’s a crazy way to build.”
ICON print technician John McDonald monitors the Vulcan 3D printer as it lays down the walls for a 3D-printed hotel and residence in Marfa, Texas, U.S., September 10, 2024. REUTERS/Evan Garcia/File Photo
ICON’s CEO, Jason Ballard, explained saying this process requires continuous adjustments according to weather conditions, ensuring the material’s strength and durability.
Experts like Milad Bazli warned that this technology opens new doors for innovative construction, but it could impact skilled labour jobs in remote areas.
The construction of El Cosmico is set to be completed by 2026, with a price range between $200 and $450 per night.
A pet-loving part-time musician is fast becoming a global star by gently poking fun at Donald Trump for suggesting that Haitian immigrants are making a meal of America’s cats and dogs.
“Eating the cats”, a parody song by The Kiffness which sets to music Trump’s extraordinary claims during the US presidential debate that migrants in Ohio “are eating the dogs, eating the cats”, has been viewed more than 8.7 million times on YouTube alone in 12 days.
“People of Springfield please don’t eat my cat,” pleads the South African singer, whose real name is David Scott. “Why would you do that?/ Eat something else.”
He then helpfully holds up a card suggesting a range of other mostly veggie options, including broccoli, avocados and poached eggs.
The singer, who has been slowly building a following for his feel-good songs about pets and children — because “they tend to unite people” — has seen his popularity soar since he got his singing claws into Trump.
Although he insists he is not attacking anybody, just giving some cat- and dog-friendly dietary advice.
“I think music has a powerful way of taking away negative energy and polarising feelings, especially with someone like Donald Trump, who is such a polarising figure,” he told AFP before his band gave a concert in Paris.
“I want my music to unite people. And I think that’s why I moved towards music that included animals. Because animals unite people,” said the 36-year-old from Cape Town.
The video, which has been watched by millions more on social media, shows Trump’s rival Kamala Harris reacting to his widely-derided claims during their debate earlier this month. A couple of cats and dogs also chip in with vocals, and equally incredulous looks.
Scott said all the earnings from the song are going to help pets and stray cats and dogs in Springfield, with more than $20,000 already raised.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he told AFP. “The interest has been overwhelming from both sides, from Democrats, from Republicans.”
He said the song was not “laughing at the situation, it’s saying that you can rise above it… and just see the humour in things,” said the musician, who describes himself on X as a “Christian, husband, father (and) part-time musician”.
Springfield’s mayor, police and Ohio’s Republican governor have all said there is no evidence to back up Trump’s claims that Haitian migrants were eating the city’s pets.
But that has not stopped his running mate JD Vance — an Ohio senator — from doubling down on the claims, despite being widely mocked.
“My constituents are telling me firsthand that they’re seeing these things,” an unapologetic Vance told CNN.
This prompted Haitian groups in Springfield to file charges against Trump and Vance Wednesday over the threats to their community since the pair amplified the false online rumours.
