geneva_convenience

AMMAN/ISTANBUL, April 4 (Reuters) - Turkey scoped out at least three air bases in Syria where it could deploy forces as part of a planned joint defence pact before Israel hit the sites with air strikes this week, four people familiar with the matter said.

The bombardment signals the risks of a deepening rift between two powerful regional militaries over Syria, where Islamist rebels have installed a new government after toppling former leader Bashar al-Assad in December.

April 5 (Reuters) - Israel has detained two British members of parliament and refused entry to the officials who were visiting as part of a parliamentary delegation, British Foreign Minister David Lammy said in a statement late on Saturday.

Sky News, citing a statement from the Israeli immigration ministry, says that the detained parliamentarians are Labour MPs Yuan Yang and Abtisam Mohamed, who were rejected because they were suspected of plans to “document the activities of security forces and spread anti-Israel hatred.”

“I have made clear to my counterparts in the Israeli government that this is no way to treat British Parliamentarians, and we have been in contact with both MPs tonight to offer our support,” Lammy said.

“Border czar” Tom Homan is facing a backlash in his own hometown of Sackets Harbor, New York, after an immigration raid swept up a mother and her three school-aged children.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection took the family and three others into custody on March 27 in an early-morning raid on a dairy farm in Sackets Harbor, a small hamlet on the shores of Lake Ontario, on the western edge of New York’s North Country region. Within days, the mother and her children had been whisked away to Karnes County Immigration Processing Center, a privately operated Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Texas that accommodates families, according to people familiar with the family’s case.

Donald Trump’s 10% tariff on all imports from many countries, including the UK, has come into force after 48 hours of turmoil.

US customs agents began collecting the unilateral tariff at US seaports, airports and customs warehouses at 12.01am ET (04:01 GMT), with higher levies on goods from 57 larger trading partners due to start next week – including from the EU, which will be hit with a 20% rate.

Several prominent Muslim scholars have issued a rare religious decree or "fatwa", calling on all Muslims and Muslim-majority countries to wage "jihad" against Israel after 17 months of devastating war against Palestinians residing in the besieged enclave.

Ali al-Qaradaghi, the secretary general of the International Union Of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), an organisation previously led by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, called on all Muslim countries on Friday “to intervene immediately militarily, economically and politically to stop this genocide and comprehensive destruction, in accordance with their mandate”.

“The failure of the Arab and Islamic governments to support Gaza while it is being destroyed is considered by Islamic law to be a major crime against our oppressed brothers in Gaza,” he said in the decree comprising some 15 points.

Qaradaghi is one of the region’s most respected religious authorities and his decrees carry significant weight among the world’s 1.7bn Sunni Muslims.

Under pressure from the Israeli government, a speech by Israeli-German philosopher Omri Boehm at an event marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany was cancelled.

In a statement on X, Israel's embassy to Germany described the decision to invite Boehm to the event as "a blatant insult" to the remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust. As reasons, they cited his comparison of the Holocaust to the Palestinian Nakba and his description of Yad Vashem as "an instrument of political manipulation."

Oil prices continued their free fall on Friday as the market absorbed a double whammy of shocks after US President Donald Trump announced sweeping global tariffs and the Opec+ alliance decided to massively increase crude production.

The price of Brent, the international benchmark, has dropped more than 11 percent in two days, plunging from $74 per barrel at the beginning of this week to about $66 per barrel. The drop has put crude prices at their lowest levels since 2021.

The sell-off shows how Trump’s trade war is already unleashing secondary effects on the Middle East.

China has hit back hard against Donald Trump’s “bullying” tariffs, raising fears that the escalating trade war could trigger a global recession and prompting fresh turmoil in financial markets.

Beijing retaliated on Friday with punitive 34% additional tariffs on all goods imported from the US – mirroring the US decision and exacerbating a sell-off on global stock markets.

Almost $5tn (£4tn) has been wiped off the value of global stock markets since Trump’s Rose Garden address on Wednesday evening, analysts calculated.

Palestinian Territory – The nature of Israel’scrimes in the Gaza Strip must be denounced, particularly the crimes’ horrifying scope, methodical execution, and wide-ranging effects, which surpass those of armed groups like ISIS.

Israeli occupation forces detonated a robot today (Thursday 3 April 2025) rigged with tonnes of explosives in the heart of the densely populated Shuja’iyya neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City.

The explosion occurred in an area packed with displaced civilians, though there was no military necessity and no combat activity in the vicinity.

This act embodies the conduct of existing terrorist organisations, even surpassing them in brutality and disregard for human life, and bears no resemblance to the conduct of a state bound by international law, regardless of any attempts to distort or evade it.

Palestinian Territory – The nature of Israel’scrimes in the Gaza Strip must be denounced, particularly the crimes’ horrifying scope, methodical execution, and wide-ranging effects, which surpass those of armed groups like ISIS.

Israeli occupation forces detonated a robot today (Thursday 3 April 2025) rigged with tonnes of explosives in the heart of the densely populated Shuja’iyya neighbourhood in eastern Gaza City.

The explosion occurred in an area packed with displaced civilians, though there was no military necessity and no combat activity in the vicinity.

This act embodies the conduct of existing terrorist organisations, even surpassing them in brutality and disregard for human life, and bears no resemblance to the conduct of a state bound by international law, regardless of any attempts to distort or evade it.

An Israeli man who claimed to have heroically rescued hundreds of people from Hamas fighters on 7 October 2023 has been exposed as an outright liar who made up stories “from beginning to end.”

The debunking of Rami Davidian’s fabrications by a high-profile mainstream Israeli journalist is highly significant.

Davidian, who was a star witness in Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 October atrocity propaganda film Screams Before Silence, also claimed to have seen dozens of dead victims of alleged rapes on that day, some with objects inserted into their genitals.