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Items by Reuters
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FACTBOX – Who are the most prominent Palestinians held in Israeli jails?
Under the Gaza ceasefire deal, Israel has agreed to release Palestinians held in Israeli jails in return for freeing hostages taken by the Hamas group in their 7 October, 2023 attack. There is no final agreement on which prisoners will be released in return for hostages, in part because it is unclear how…
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FACTBOX – War-ravaged Gaza faces multi-billion dollar reconstruction challenge
Billions of dollars will be needed to rebuild Gaza after the war between Israel and the Palestinian group, Hamas, according to assessments from the United Nations. Israel and Hamas agreed to a deal to halt fighting in the enclave and swap Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners, an official briefed on the agreement…
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FACTBOX – Who’s in the frame to be Lebanon’s next president?
Lebanon’s parliament will attempt to elect a new head of state on Thursday, with officials seeing better odds of success in a political landscape shaken by Israel’s assault on Hezbollah and the toppling of the group’s ally, Bashar Al-Assad, in Syria. The post, reserved for a Maronite Christian in the sectarian power-sharing…
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Syria new leaders face economy decimated by war, sanctions
Syria’s economy has been decimated by more than a decade of civil war and sanctions that have severed it from the global financial system. Below is a round-up of the current state of the economy and how the conflict has reshaped trade and government finances. What is the state of…
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Iran’s Revolutionary Guards extend control over Tehran’s oil exports, sources say
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have tightened their grip on the country’s oil industry and control up to half the exports that generate most of Tehran’s revenue and fund its proxies across the Middle East, according to Western officials, security sources and Iranian insiders. All aspects of the oil business have come…
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What is the significance of the Golan Heights?
The Israeli government decided on Sunday to double its population on the occupied Golan Heights while saying threats from Syria remained despite the moderate tone of rebel leaders who ousted President Bashar Al-Assad. Israel captured most of the strategic plateau from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War and annexed it in 1981. After Assad fled Syria on…
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Demoralised and abandoned by allies: why Assad’s army failed to fight in Syria
Twenty-three-year-old Syrian military conscript, Farhan Al-Khouli, was badly paid and demoralised. His army outpost in scrubland near the rebel-held city of Idlib should have had nine soldiers but it just had three, after some had bribed the commanding officers to escape serving, he said. And, of the two conscripts with…
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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…
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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 Israel’s…
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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…
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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.…
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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…