Vehicle hitting crowd in Vancouver 'not an act of terrorism': Police
Vancouver police said they did not suspect "an act of terrorism" after a driver plowed into a street party on Saturday in the Canadian city, killing a number of people.
"At this time, we are confident that this incident was not an act of terrorism," police said in an X post early Sunday morning.
AFP
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Nahar Net
2 days ago
- Nahar Net
Gaza rescuers say Israeli fire kills 36, six near aid center
by Naharnet Newsdesk 08 June 2025, 10:46 Gaza's civil defense agency said Saturday that Israeli forces had killed at least 36 Palestinians, six of them in a shooting near a US-backed aid distribution center. The Israeli military told AFP that troops had fired "warning shots" at individuals it said were "advancing in a way that endangered the troops". The shooting deaths were the latest reported near the aid center run by the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF) in the southern district of Rafah, and came after it resumed distributions following a brief suspension in the wake of similar deaths earlier this week. Meanwhile, an aid boat with 12 activists on board, including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, was nearing Gaza in a bid to highlight the plight of Palestinians in the face of an Israeli blockade that has only been partially eased. Civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that at around 7:00 am (0400 GMT), "six people were killed and several others wounded by the forces of the Israeli occupation near the Al-Alam roundabout", where they had gathered to seek humanitarian aid from the distribution center around a kilometer away. AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls compiled by the civil defense agency or the circumstances of the deaths it reports. Samir Abu Hadid, who was there early Saturday, told AFP that thousands of people had gathered near the roundabout. "As soon as some people tried to advance towards the aid center, the Israeli occupation forces opened fire from armored vehicles stationed near the center, firing into the air and then at civilians," Abu Hadid said. The GHF said in a statement it had not distributed aid on Saturday because of "direct threats" from Hamas. Later Saturday, the Israeli army said an operation in Gaza City resulted in the killing of Asaad Abu Sharia, reportedly head of the Mujahideen Brigades. The armed group is close to Hamas ally Islamic Jihad that Israel has also accused over deaths of hostages seized from Kibbutz Nir Oz near the border. The army said he had taken part in the bloody attack on Nir Oz when Hamas launched its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. It said he was "directly implicated" in the killings of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, a family who became a symbol of seized hostages for many in Israel. - Activist boat nears Gaza - The GHF, officially a private effort with opaque funding, began operations in late May as Israel partially eased a more than two-month-long aid blockade. UN agencies and major aid groups have declined to work with it, citing concerns it serves Israeli military goals. On Saturday, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said that the overall toll for the Gaza war had reached 54,772, the majority civilians. The UN considers these figures reliable. The war was sparked by Hamas's October 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures. Israel has come under increasing international criticism over the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, where the U.N. warned in May that the entire population was at risk of famine. The aid boat Madleen, organized by an international activist coalition, was sailing towards Gaza on Saturday, aiming to breach Israel's naval blockade and deliver aid to the territory, organizers said. "We are now sailing off the Egyptian coast," German human rights activist Yasemin Acar told AFP, saying they expected to reach Gaza by Monday. The Palestinian territory was under Israeli naval blockade even before Hamas's October 2023 attack and the Israeli military has made clear it intends to enforce it. A 2010 commando raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara, which was part of a similar attempt to breach Israel's naval blockade, left 10 civilians dead. - Evacuation order - The Israeli military has stepped up its operations in Gaza in recent weeks in what it says is a renewed push to defeat Hamas, whose October 2023 attack sparked the war. On Saturday, the military issued evacuation orders for neighborhoods in northern Gaza, saying they had been used for rocket attacks. Also on Saturday, Hamas released a photograph of one of the remaining hostages, Matan Zangauker, appearing to be in poor health, with a warning that he would not survive. His mother, Einav Zangauker, speaking at a protest in Tel Aviv, said "I can no longer bear this nightmare. The angel of death, Netanyahu, continues to sacrifice the hostages". During the October 2023 attack, militants abducted 251 hostages, 55 of whom remain in Gaza, including 31 the Israeli military says are dead.
Nahar Net
5 days ago
- Nahar Net
After decades in Assad jails, political prisoner wants justice
by Naharnet Newsdesk 05 June 2025, 11:51 Syrian fighter pilot Ragheed Tatari was 26 when he was arrested. Now 70, the country's longest-serving political prisoner is finally free after Bashar al-Assad's fall, seeking justice and accountability. Tatari, arrested in 1981 and sentenced to life behind bars, was among scores of prisoners who walked free when longtime ruler Assad was overthrown on December 8 in an Islamist-led offensive. He has made it out alive after 43 years in jail, but tens of thousands of Syrian families are still searching for their loved ones who disappeared long ago in Syria's hellish prison system. "I came close to death under torture," Tatari told AFP in his small Damascus apartment. Since a military field court gave him a life sentence for "collaborating with foreign countries" -- an accusation he denies -- Tatari was moved from one prison to another, first under late president Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar who succeeded him in 2000. Showing old pictures of him in his pilot uniform, Tatari said he was not seeking revenge, but stressed that "everyone must be held accountable for their crimes". "We do not want anyone to be imprisoned" without due process, said Tatari. More than two million Syrians were jailed under the Assad dynasty's rule, half of them after anti-government protests in 2011 escalated into civil war, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor. The Britain-based monitor says around 200,000 died in custody. Diab Serriya, co-founder of the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Saydnaya Prison, said that Tatari was "the longest-serving political prisoner in Syria and the Middle East". Rights group Amnesty International has called the notorious Saydnaya prison outside Damascus a "human slaughterhouse". Tatari had been detained there, but he said his 15 years in the Palmyra prison in the Syrian desert were the most difficult. - 'Wished for death' - The Palmyra facility operated "without any discipline, any laws and any humanity", Tatari said. Detainees were "not afraid of torture -- we wished for death", he added. "Everything that has been said about torture in Palmyra... is an understatement." "A guard could kill a prisoner if he was displeased with him," Tatari said, adding that inmates were forced under torture to say phrases like "Hafez al-Assad is your god", although he refused to do so. In 1980, Palmyra witnessed a massacre of hundreds of mostly Islamist detainees, gunned down by helicopters or executed in their cells after a failed assassination attempt on Hafez al-Assad. Tatari said he was completely disconnected from the outside world there, only learning of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union through a prisoner who had returned from a hospital visit. In Sweida prison in the south, where Tatari was transferred after the 2011 revolt began, some inmates had phones that they would keep hidden from the guards. "The cell phone gets you out of prison, it makes you feel alive," he said, recalling how he used to conceal his device in a hole dug in his cell. But after his phone was discovered, he was transferred to a prison in Tartus -- his final detention facility before gaining freedom. - Dreams of escape - Tatari was one of several military officers who were opposed to Syria's intervention in Lebanon in 1976, and to the violent repression in the early 1980s of the Muslim Brotherhood, Syria's main opposition force at the time. "Many of us were against involving the army in political operations," he said. After two of his fellow pilots defected and fled to Jordan in 1980, he escaped to Egypt and then on to Jordan. But he returned when security forces began harassing his family and was arrested on arrival. His wife was pregnant at the time with their first and only son. For years, the family assumed Tatari was dead, before receiving a proof of life in 1997 after paying bribes, a common practice under the Assads' rule. It was then that Tatari was finally able to meet his son, then aged 16, under the watchful eye of guards during the family's first authorized prison visit that year. "I was afraid... I ended the meeting after 15 minutes," Tatari said. His wife has since died and their son left Syria, having received threats at the start of the protest movement, which had spiraled into war and eventually led to Assad's overthrow. During his time behind bars, Tatari said he "used to escape prison with my thoughts, daydreams and drawing". "The regime getting toppled overnight was beyond my dreams... No one expected it to happen so quickly."
LBCI
6 days ago
- LBCI
UN says 'deadly attacks' around Gaza aid sites 'a war crime'
United Nations' human rights chief Volker Turk said on Tuesday that "deadly attacks" on civilians around aid distribution sites in the Gaza Strip constituted "a war crime." "Deadly attacks on distraught civilians trying to access the paltry amounts of food aid in Gaza are unconscionable," Turk said. "Attacks directed against civilians constitute a grave breach of international law and a war crime." AFP
