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Items by Reuters
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An elaborate global system exists to prevent famine. It’s failing.
Twenty years ago, Somalia was headed for catastrophe. Conflict, drought and government collapse threatened to plunge 200,000 people into famine. But relief groups lacked enough food for everyone and had no consistent way of identifying those most at risk of starvation. A man angered about his clan’s limited share of...
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World Food Programme’s troubles in Sudan hurt hunger relief efforts, alienated donors, says internal report
Serious problems in the UN World Food Programme’s response to the Sudan crisis are hampering the organisation’s ability to alleviate hunger in the war-torn country and damaging its reputation with donors, according to a recent internal report seen by Reuters. As the UN’s main food-aid distributor, the WFP is struggling...
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Saudi Arabia abandons pursuit of US defence treaty over Israel stalemate
Saudi Arabia has abandoned its pursuit of an ambitious defence treaty with Washington in return for normalising relations with Israel and is now pushing for a more modest military cooperation agreement, two Saudi and four Western officials told Reuters. In a drive to get a wide-ranging mutual security treaty over...
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What does the US-brokered truce ending Israel-Hezbollah fighting include?
Israel and Lebanese armed group, Hezbollah, are set to implement a ceasefire on Wednesday as part of a US-proposed deal for a 60-day truce to end more than a year of hostilities. The text of the deal has not been published and Reuters has not seen a draft. Israel’s security cabinet has approved...
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Calls for Minister's firing could tip Israel into constitutional crisis
A petition by a group of non-governmental organisations for the Supreme Court to order the dismissal of far-right National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has caused a rift in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and could plunge Israel into a constitutional crisis. In a letter to Netanyahu last week, Attorney-General, Gali Baharav-Miara, asked...
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Reactions to the ICC warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders
These are reactions to the International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, and Hamas commander, Ibrahim Al-Masri, who is believed to be dead. The warrants are for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October,...
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Did Israel meet US Gaza aid requirements? Israel, UN respond
The United States, on Tuesday, said Israel is not currently impeding humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip and, therefore, is not violating US law, avoiding restrictions on US military aid. Israel has said it met most of the 16 specific demands put forward by Washington but was still discussing some items. International aid groups,...
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Sudan's RSF chases civilians out of villages in violent raids
Salma Abdallah was recuperating from a caesarean section and tending to her one-month old baby when soldiers from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) barged into her home in Sudan’s eastern Al-Jazira state late last month. They accused her of loyalty to the army and its allies, their rivals in an...
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Who was Hashem Safieddine, once seen as the future Hezbollah leader?
Hashem Safieddine, whose killing was confirmed by Hezbollah today, briefly helped run Lebanon’s strongest military and political force as the presumed successor to its slain leader Hassan Nasrallah, until he, too, was assassinated by Israel. His death marked Israel’s latest heavy blow to Hezbollah, an organisation facing its biggest crisis...
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After Sinwar's death, Israel aims to lock in strategic gains before US election
The killing of Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, a mastermind of the attack that ignited the war in the Gaza Strip, marked a major triumph for Israel. But Israeli leaders are also seeking to lock in strategic gains that go beyond military victories – to reshape the regional landscape in...
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How Israel’s bulky pager deceived Hezbollah
The batteries inside the weaponised pagers that arrived in Lebanon at the start of the year, part of an Israeli plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerfully deceptive features and an Achilles’ heel. The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small but potent charge of plastic explosive and...
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Countdown to Middle East war? How the region can step back from the brink
With Israel poised to attack Iran, having already blindsided friends and foes alike with its blitz against Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, all the talk is of an inexorable slide towards a new, pan-Middle Eastern war. Yet brakes remain to halt a regional fall into a wider conflagration that would lock Israel...
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‘Prepare for attack, with best regards’: Houthis issue email alert to shipping fleets
On a warm spring night in Athens, shortly before midnight, a senior executive at a Greek shipping company noticed an unusual email had landed in his personal inbox. The message, which was also sent to the manager’s business email address, warned that one of the company’s vessels travelling through the...
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Who still uses pagers anyway?
As mobile phones became the world’s main communications tool, pagers, also known as beepers because of the sound they make to notify users about incoming messages, were largely rendered obsolete, with demand plunging from their 1990s heyday. But the tiny electronic devices remain a vital means of communication in some...
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What is the UNGA and what will world leaders talk about?
Every September, world leaders travel to New York to address the start of the annual United Nations General Assembly session. The six days of speeches to mark the beginning of the 79th session will start on 24 September. Who speaks when? When the United Nations was formed in 1945 following World...
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FACTBOX - Gaza's huge reconstruction challenge: key facts and figures
Billions of dollars will be needed to rebuild Gaza when the war between Israel and Palestine ends, according to assessments from the United Nations. Here is a breakdown of the destruction in Gaza from the conflict prompted by the 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas fighters from the long-besieged Palestinian enclave. How...
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Jordan's Islamists, buoyed by anger over Gaza, seek to shake up parliament in election
Jordan’s main opposition, buoyed by anger over Israel’s war against the Palestinians in Gaza, says that it expects its Islamist candidates to win enough seats in Tuesday’s parliamentary election to challenge the country’s pro-Western stance, a result that could stir up the kingdom’s staid political scene. The opposition Islamic Action...
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Coke and Pepsi boycott over Gaza boosts Muslim countries' local versions
Coca-Cola and rival Pepsi have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over decades building a demand for their soft drinks in Muslim-majority countries. Now, both face a challenge from local versions of cola in those countries due to consumer boycotts that target the globe-straddling brands as symbols of America,...
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Gaza teen amputee recalls nightmare of losing arms in Israel strike
Teenager Diaa Al-Adini was one of the few Palestinians who found a functioning hospital in war-ravaged Gaza after he was wounded by an Israeli strike. But he did not have much time to recuperate after doctors amputated both of his arms. Al-Adini, 15, suddenly had to flee the overwhelmed medical...
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What's behind the war that has driven Sudan to famine?
A civil war that erupted in Sudan in April last year has unleashed waves of ethnic violence, created the world’s largest internal displacement crisis and pushed at least one area in Darfur into famine. What triggered the violence? Tensions had been building for months before fighting between Sudan’s army and...
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Somalia's bomb disposal experts face down fear to save lives
Wearing a bulky protective suit and helmet, Mohamed Ahmed inches towards the truck where explosives wired to a mobile phone have been planted in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. Fortunately for Ahmed, a police officer, this is a training exercise and the device is a dummy. Bombings using this technique, or suicide...
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Girls in Gaza cut off their hair for lack of combs
When girls complain to Gaza paediatrician Lobna Al-Azaiza that they have no comb, she tells them to cut off their hair. It’s not just combs. Israel’s blockade of the territory, ravaged by ten months of war, means there is little or no shampoo, soap, period products or household cleaning materials. Waste...
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Haniyeh's last words: 'If a leader leaves, another will come'
As if he knew his time had come, Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh’s last words to Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Ali Khamenei, before he was assassinated in Tehran were a Koranic verse about life, death, immortality and resilience. It is Allah who gives life and causes death. And Allah is all-aware of...
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Khaled Meshaal, who survived Israeli assassination attempt, tipped to be new Hamas leader
Khaled Meshaal, tipped to be the new Hamas leader, became known around the world in 1997 after Israeli agents injected him with poison in a botched assassination attempt on a street outside his office in the Jordanian capital, Amman. The hit against a key senior figure of the Palestinian group,...
