Houthis threaten U.S. ships if Washington joins strikes on Iran
June 21 (Reuters) - Yemen's Houthis will target U.S. ships in the Red Sea if Washington becomes involved in Israeli attacks on Iran, the group's military spokesperson said on Saturday.
In May, the U.S. and the Houthis agreed to a ceasefire under which neither side would target the other.
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The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Israeli-backed group seeks at least $30 million from US for aid distribution in Gaza
A U.S.-led group has asked the Trump administration to step in with an initial $30 million so it can continue its much scrutinized and Israeli-backed aid distribution in Gaza, according to three U.S. officials and the organization's application for the money. That application, obtained by The Associated Press, also offers some of the first financial details about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and its work in the territory. The foundation says it has provided millions of meals in southern Gaza since late May to Palestinians as Israel's blockade and military campaign have driven the Gaza to the brink of famine. But the effort has seen near-daily fatal shootings of Palestinians trying to reach the distribution sites. Major humanitarian groups also accuse the foundation of cooperating with Israel's objectives in the 20-month-old war against Hamas in a way that violates humanitarian principles. The group's funding application was submitted to the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the U.S. officials, who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The application was being processed this week as potentially one of the agency's last acts before the Republican administration absorbs USAID into the State Department as part of deep cuts in foreign assistance. Two of the officials said they were told the administration has decided to award the money. They said the processing was moving forward with little of the review and auditing normally required before Washington makes foreign assistance grants to an organization. In a letter submitted Thursday as part of the application, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation secretary Loik Henderson said his organization 'was grateful for the opportunity to partner with you to sustain and scale life-saving operations in Gaza.' Neither the State Department nor Henderson immediately responded to requests for comment Saturday. Israel says the foundation is the linchpin of a new aid system to wrest control from the United Nations, which Israel alleges has been infiltrated by Hamas, and other humanitarian groups. The foundation's use of fixed sites in southern Gaza is in line with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to use aid to concentrate the territory's more than 2 million people in the south, freeing Israel to fight Hamas elsewhere. Aid workers fear it's a step toward another of Netanyahu's public goals, removing Palestinians from Gaza in 'voluntary' migrations that aid groups and human rights organizations say would amount to coerced departures. The U.N. and many leading nonprofit groups accuse the foundation of stepping into aid distribution with little transparency or humanitarian experience, and, crucially, without a commitment to the principles of neutrality and operational independence in war zones. Since the organization started operations, several hundred Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded in near-daily shootings as they tried to reach aid sites, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. Witnesses say Israeli troops regularly fire heavy barrages toward the crowds in an attempt to control them. The Israeli military has denied firing on civilians. It says it fired warning shots in several instance, and fired directly at a few 'suspects' who ignored warnings and approached its forces. It's unclear who is funding the new operation in Gaza. No donor has come forward. The State Department said this past week that the United States is not funding it. In documents supporting its application, the group said it received nearly $119 million for May operations from 'other government donors,' but gives no details. It expects $38 million from those unspecific government donors for June, in addition to the hoped-for $30 million from the United States. The application shows no funding from private philanthropy or any other source.
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
BBC must reveal if money for axed Gaza film ‘ended up in the hands of Hamas'
BBC bosses are under pressure to establish whether licence payers' cash used to make a cancelled Gaza documentary ended up in the hands of Hamas. MPs and peers said the broadcaster must launch an investigation into the money spent on commissioning the film Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. The show was pulled from the schedules on Friday after its director branded Israel 'a rogue state that's committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing'. It is the second documentary about Gaza that the BBC has been forced to cancel, amid accusations that it is 'biased' against Israel in its reporting. The corporation was forced to apologise in February after it aired a 'propaganda' film that was narrated by the son of a leading Hamas minister. In light of that controversy it had already delayed the planned release of Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, and has now said it will not be shown at all. In a statement, the BBC said it had cancelled the show because it ' risked creating a perception of partiality ' about its coverage of Israel. Stuart Andrew, the shadow culture secretary, said the decision ' raises yet more serious questions over its coverage of events in Gaza'. 'The BBC must provide a full accounting of how it ended up commissioning the abandoned documentary and whether any money ended up in the bloody hands of Hamas terrorists during the production process,' he said. Lord Austin, a former Labour MP, said that staff responsible for commissioning the cancelled documentary should face disciplinary action if any wrongdoing took place. 'What we need to know is whether the makers of this programme paid Hamas terrorists or anyone linked to them,' he said. Call for 'urgent investigation' 'There must now be another urgent investigation to find out what has happened. When is the BBC going to start sacking those responsible for these appalling failures?' Baroness Deech, a crossbench peer, added: 'An urgent investigation is needed to assure the British public that its licence fee hasn't ended up in the hands of Hamas terrorists. 'Questions must be urgently answered. What went wrong at the BBC, whether Hamas received money for granting access to Hamas-run hospitals, and whether the national broadcaster has breached counter-terrorism legislation by funding a proscribed terror group.' The decision to pull the documentary came after Ramita Navai, its director, appeared on BBC Radio 4's Today programme to discuss it. She said: 'Israel has become a rogue state that's committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass-murdering Palestinians'. Last month, a letter signed by 600 people, including Harriet Walter, Miriam Margolyes, Maxine Peake and Juliet Stevenson, called for the release of the film. In a statement on Friday, the BBC said: 'For some weeks, the BBC has been working... to find a way to tell the stories of these doctors on our platforms. 'Yesterday, it became apparent that we have reached the end of the road with these discussions. 'We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC. 'Impartiality is a core principle of BBC News. It is one of the reasons that we are the world's most trusted broadcaster.' Gaza: Doctors Under Attack is the second film to have been pulled by the BBC, coming after controversy over Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone. That programme, created by production company Hoyo, was aired, before being removed from the BBC's iPlayer amid huge controversy. BBC bosses apologised after it emerged a major contributor was the son of Ayman Alyazouri, a Hamas minister, which was not disclosed to viewers. The corporation insisted it was not aware of the Hamas link, but Hoyo later claimed it was. A BBC spokesman said: 'We can confirm that no money spent on this documentary has been paid to Hamas. As we said yesterday, production of the documentary was paused in April, and any film made will not be a BBC film.'
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
The best outcome from the Iran conflict? Peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan
Two major conflicts – Ukraine and Iran – are creating seismic upheaval in the tightly meshed world of post-Cold War alliances around the world. The biggest losers in this lethal game of musical chairs will likely be smaller nations who can no longer rely on the protection and patronage of greater powers whose priorities have been radically realigned. The immediate result is a panicked race to seek new partners, a desperate rush of diplomatic blind dating in which those newly exposed smaller countries have very few cards to play other than to make painful concessions. This week's meeting between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia – the first ever official bi-lateral visit between the heads of these two countries is a case in point. Armenia has for decades turned its back on two of its immediate neighbours – Turkey and its ally Azerbaijan, with closed frontiers and no diplomatic relations. That has only been possible because of Yerevan's ability to depend on two other major regional powers – Iran to the south and Russia to the north. Those alliances created a confidence which translated into a fatal overreach when Armenia, three decades ago, invaded Azerbaijan and occupied a fifth of the Azerbaijani territory of Karabakh, forcibly expelling some 800,000 Azerbaijanis and establishing a mono-ethnic Armenian state. For a generation, Azerbaijan's attempts to regain its territory through negotiation and diplomacy, despite resounding support for their sovereign rights over Karabakh from the UN Security Council, came to nothing. Russia, the former colonial power, could always be relied on to preserve the frozen conflict in ways which maintained Moscow's grip on its 'near abroad'. Then came 2020. In that year cross-border tit for tat between the two neighbours became a full-blown 44-day conflict, with Azerbaijan liberating much of Armenian-occupied territory. In 2023 what was not returned three years earlier was finally secured by Azerbaijan. To Yerevan's utter dismay, in both 2020 and 2023 its long-standing patron and formal military ally in the Kremlin was nowhere to be seen. Russia's Western imperial ambitions had exhausted its ability to maintain its old role of Caucasian puppet master to the south. Armenia was left to sink or swim. Azerbaijan's combat victories, cemented with a ceasefire but still today without a peace treaty, can be read as definitive proof that Russia had left the stage as far as Armenia was concerned. That might have led Pashinyan to seek urgent reconciliation with Turkey. Instead, Yerevan doubled down on its relationship with its one remaining regional protector, Iran. Arguably he had no option: decades of virulent anti-Turkish domestic and international rhetoric would probably have made any pro-Ankara realignment fatal to his own government at that point. And why risk alienating your one remaining powerful friend, Iran, by reaching out to its long-standing opponent Turkey? Just as the Ukraine war provoked one crisis for Armenia, the Iran war has provoked a second. But this time Iran's troubles and dramatically exposed weakness, with the Islamic Republic itself now friendless in a world where its ally Assad has fallen and the leverage of its proxy Houthi, Hezbollah and Hamas militias has been decimated, have left Yerevan not with one but with zero dependable allies. Even Armenia's ability to call on its once powerful diaspora lobby groups in the US and France is no longer a realistic strategy in today's climate, given the deeply problematic Iran connection. This is the sequence of events which has left Armenia with literally nowhere to turn but Ankara. Pashinyan, an intelligent politician who has shown some ability to negotiate within the desperately narrow space afforded by the tensions of geopolitical reality and domestic nationalist opinion, will need every ounce of skill to emerge from the current talks with a result which has both substance and domestic credibility. For now, concessions – if he is wise to take them – are his best card. Turkey will not contemplate normalisation of still less supportive friendship with Armenia unless Yerevan formally commits to a peace deal with Azerbaijan. The country's President Ilham Aliyev has long maintained such a peace deal needs to entail a rewriting of the Armenian constitution to remove extra-territorial claims on Azerbaijan's internationally recognised sovereign territory, the establishment of a formal right to return of Azerbaijanis expelled from Armenia during the break-up of the Soviet Union, and agreement on a land corridor through Armenia (would earn huge income) enabling Azerbaijan and countries from Asia the swiftest land route to Europe. Some in Armenia will see these as too painful to concede. Wiser heads will see them for what they are: economic and diplomatic opportunities to move forward after over three decades of conflict. If Pashinyan can take this unpalatable medicine – and if by some miracle he can sell it to his electorate, Armenia stands to benefit. A chance of establishing new partnerships with more reliable neighbours, the enormous benefits of regional economic and energy integration after decades of impoverished isolation, a chance in fact for normalisation, peace and prosperity. The alternative is too foolhardy to contemplate.
