Day: May 16, 2025

Another 7 percent increase in Israeli displacement orders for Gaza, along with militarized zones, makes 71 percent of the Strip restricted areas for Palestinians, UN humanitarians said on Thursday. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the displacements with intensified hostilities resulted in further deaths and destruction of civilian infrastructure along with an aid blockade lasting one month and a half. OCHA said that in addition to ongoing bombardment, another three displacement orders were issued by the Israeli military covering 7 percent of the Gaza Strip's total area. Wednesday's order for six neighborhoods in North Gaza governorate overlaps with parts of the zones covered under Tuesday's displacement orders. The office said preliminary estimates ...

More than 170,000 Afghan refugees have returned to their home country over the past 42 days, spokesman for the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation Abdul Mutalib Haqqani said. "A total of 170,937 refugees returned to their country, Afghanistan, from April 1 to May 12, and out of these, 128,048 refugees returned from Pakistan, and the remaining from Iran and Türkiye," the local private media outlet Tolonews quoted Haqqani on Thursday night as saying. Pakistan, according to the official, has also released 3,372 Afghan nationals from prisons over the period and repatriated them to their homeland. Nearly 2 million Afghan refugees, mostly from the neighboring Pakistan and Iran, have returned to Afghanistan over the past year and the return of refugees continues.

A jihadist raid on a military base in northeast Nigeria near the border with Cameroon killed five troops from a multinational coalition Friday, two military sources told AFP. Fighters from the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) stormed the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) base housing Nigerian and Cameroonian troops in the town of Wulgo in a pre-dawn attack, engaging troops in a gunfight, the two sources said. "Four Nigerian soldiers and a Cameroonian soldier were killed in the fighting," a Nigerian military source said. "Nine of the terrorists were also killed," the officer said. The militants forced the troops to abandon the base after overwhelming them, said a second officer, who gave the same toll. The attack came two months after a similar raid on the same...

US President Donald Trump said on Friday he would like to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin "as soon as we can set it up", during a business roundtable in Abu Dhabi. "As soon as we can set it up I would actually leave here and go," Trump said in response to a question about meeting the Russian leader. Trump has repeatedly said he was willing to travel to Turkey to join the first direct Russian-Ukrainian peace talks in more than three years, insisting "nothing's going to happen" before he meets the Russian president face-to-face. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky travelled to Turkey but said he would not attend the talks, after his Russian counterpart declined his calls for face-to-face negotiations. Zelensky had dared Putin to show up and negotiate directly to prove he...

Donald Trump on Friday said the United States would have the situation in Gaza "taken care of", telling reporters that people were starving in the besieged Palestinian territory. "We're looking at Gaza. And we're going to get that taken care of. A lot of people are starving," the president told reporters. The brief comments came as Trump concluded his final leg of a multi-day tour of the Gulf countries. Israel has imposed a blockade for over two months on Gaza, leading UN agencies and other humanitarian groups to warn of shrinking fuel and medicine supplies to the territory of 2.4 million Palestinians. It has also repeatedly denied that there is a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Trump's remarks came a day after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio voiced openness to any ...

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Friday that the last hospital in Gaza providing care for heart disease and cancer patients ceased operations following an Israeli strike. In a post on X, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that Tuesday's attack inflicted “severe damage†on the European Hospital in Khan Younis, rendering it inaccessible. He said that it is now out of service, and a WHO team had to urgently evacuate medical personnel during the assault. Tedros emphasized that the hospital's closure halted critical services including neurosurgery, cardiac care, and cancer treatment - services that are not available elsewhere in Gaza. He stressed that the shutdown also ends the hospital's function as a key hub for medical evacuations, further strain...

India, Japan notify WTO of possible retaliation against U.S. tariffs India and Japan have recently notified the World Trade Organization (WTO) of potential retaliatory measures in response to U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum. The European Union(EU) and Britain had submitted similar notifications to the WTO earlier. WTO documents show that both India and Japan argue that the U.S. tariffs, imposed since March 2018, constitute safeguard measures under the WTO Agreement on Safeguards, although they were not officially notified by the United States to the WTO. In line with this agreement, the two countries, respectively, stated that they reserve the right to suspend concessions and other obligations by imposing additional tariffs on selected U.S. imports. India estimates that the...