
Israel intercepts missile fired from Yemen
The Israeli military said it had intercepted a missile launched from Yemen following the activation of air raid sirens in multiple regions across the country.
The launch from Yemen follows an Israeli military attack on Houthi targets in Yemen's Hodeidah port on Monday in its latest assault on the Iran-backed militants, who have been striking ships bound for Israel and launching missiles against it.

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Spectator
30 minutes ago
- Spectator
What the media doesn't tell us about Gaza
Sir Keir Starmer's apparent justification for threatening to recognise a Palestinian state by September is pictures. 'I think people are revolted at what they are seeing on their screen,' he said on Monday. On Tuesday, he spoke of 'starving babies, children too weak to stand, images that will stay with us for a lifetime'. Pictures, however grim, seem a weak basis for a massive constitutional change. Sir Keir is also assuming that the pictures in question are 'true'. Yet pictures, precisely because of their emotional impact, often undergo less editorial scrutiny than words and are frequently reproduced by other media unchecked. At the weekend, the New York Times put an eloquent picture of an emaciated little boy in his mother's arms on its front page headlined, 'Gazans are dying of starvation'. Similar coverage appeared in many British publications. According to research by David Collier, a pro-Israel journalist, the boy was not starving and a healthy-looking boy, probably his brother, had been cropped from the published versions, which were first put out by a state-run Turkish agency. Young Mohammed suffers from cerebral palsy and hypoxemia, Collier reports. Obviously, his chronic plight is made worse by the Gaza war. His mother, it seems, consented to the pictures to draw attention to his suffering, but she did not conceal the medical facts which explain his condition. Either deliberately, or lazily, the world's media omitted those facts, as the New York Times has now half admitted. Most of my trade are averse to any awkward story which challenges our dominant Middle Eastern narrative. The delivery of most food in Gaza is controlled by Hamas, Unrwa and similar agencies. They want to maintain this duopoly against newcomers like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and to blame Israel. This collusion is their business model. No doubt Israel is partially at fault, but this Hamas/UN combination are unreliable witnesses. A recent internal BBC editorial email, revealed in The Spectator by Jonathan Sacerdoti, directs its journalists to say that the GHF system 'doesn't work'. The sender never asks his journalists to find out why, yet what he calls 'the body count from the killings of Palestinians' could well have to do with Hamas's struggle to maintain their stranglehold. He adds that the opinion of 'the world's important NGOs suggests that [Israel] is failing on that responsibility'. Of course it does! Those NGOs always blame Israel. They never directly say that Hamas massacred 1,195 Israelis and others on 7 October 2023, or that they murder, rob and control the Gazan people. The depressing truth is that the main players have an interest in not telling us what is happening in Gaza. Among them must be counted most of the media. In this connection, I was surprised to see William Hague, in his Times column, describing Tom Fletcher, the UN head of humanitarian affairs, as 'not a person who exaggerates'. In May, Mr Fletcher said that 'There are 14,000 babies [in Gaza] who will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them,' an exaggeration so Trumpian that he later had to apologise. Now he says that the next few days are 'make or break' for Gaza because one in three people has not eaten for three days in a row. Mr Fletcher 'will have good evidence for that', writes Lord Hague. How can one know? Recently, I found myself in one of Horatio's Gardens. Horatio Chapple was a brave and much-loved boy who was killed by a polar bear on his school's Arctic expedition. Both his parents are doctors. The gardens laid out and planted in his memory are specifically in NHS hospitals dealing with spinal injuries. There are now eight of them, spread across the kingdom. I was visiting a friend in the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital near Oswestry. Already endangered by two earlier neck-breaks, he had fallen backwards off a gate and sustained a broken disc and vertebra, and more. Part of the hell of such an injury is having to lie still for many weeks without even being able to raise one's head, staring at the same bit of hospital ceiling. To the extent that the British climate permits, Horatio's Garden (the charity's name) addresses this problem. French windows open on to it and we easily wheeled bed and friend into it. The garden is divided into several 'rooms' created by hedges, and there are borders of flowers and plants that can be touched as your bed or wheelchair passes. 'Above us only sky', as the Lennon song says, but better than that, because also house martins, swifts etc and the sun, which my friend worships. It was a joy to watch him photosynthesise. This particular hospital has a pre-history as a TB sanatorium, where fresh air was regarded as vital. It is lovely to see that principle reapplied for different reasons. I felt how much it mattered that such gardens exist: nature becoming the best nurse. I hope that at the funeral of the late, great Tom Lehrer, they play what he called his 'survival hymn', 'We'll all go together' (1959), which envisages the collective funeral of the human race caused by nuclear Armageddon: 'Universal bereavement,/ An inspiring achievement,/ Yes, we all will go together when we go.' Not all his words will be acceptable, I fear, to any congregation from 21st-century Harvard, where he worked. The song ends: 'And we will all go together when we go./ Ev'ry hottentot and ev'ry eskimo./ When the air becomes uranious,/ And we will all go simultaneous… Yes we all will go together when we go.' Nowadays those two ethnicities are rebranded Khoekhoe and Inuit. Lehrer could have found an ingenious rhyme to handle the problem. A numerical change would also be required. Lehrer sings: 'We will all bake together when we bake./ There'll be nobody present at the wake./ With complete participation/ In that grand incineration,/ Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.' Today, make that 8.2 billion.


The Guardian
31 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Trump backs Israel and rebukes Starmer over Palestinian state recognition
Donald Trump has doubled down on his backing for Israel after having appeared to give a green light to the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, to recognize a Palestinian state. Amid signs of mounting opposition among his Maga base to Israel's military operation in Gaza, Trump criticized Starmer's plan to grant recognition as 'rewarding Hamas' even after having not taken issue with it when the pair met in Scotland this week. Talking to journalists onboard Air Force One on his return to Washington, Trump said the US was 'not in that camp', referring to Starmer's pledge, which followed a similar declaration by Emmanuel Macron, the French president, days earlier that France would formally recognize Palestinian statehood. 'We never did discuss it,' Trump said, in reference to Starmer's announcement. He added: 'You're rewarding Hamas if you do that. I don't think they should be rewarded.' His comments were in line with the US state department, whose spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, called the recognition decision 'a slap in the face' to victims of Hamas's deadly 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the current war. But they contrasted with his restrained stance when he and Starmer met at Turnberry in Scotland on Monday, after the UK prime minister said Britain would give recognition by September unless Israel met certain conditions, including allowing for a ceasefire in Gaza and allowing UN food aid to enter the territory to feed its population. 'I'm not going to take a position, I don't mind him taking a position,' Trump told reporters when asked if he objected to Starmer's move. The US president's response to Starmer seemed markedly softer than his riposte after Macron's statehood announcement last week, which angered Israel and its supporters. 'What he says doesn't matter,' Trump told reporters at the White House. 'He's a very good guy. I like him, but that statement doesn't carry weight.' The initial softer public posture toward Starmer came as Trump publicly contradicted Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, over conditions in Gaza, which numerous international aid agencies have described as famine. Netanyahu had said that, in contrast to the aid group assessments and searing images of hungry children, no one was starving in Gaza. Asked if he agreed, Trump said: 'Based on television, I would say 'not particularly', because those children look pretty hungry to me. There's real starvation, you can't fake that.' Some of Trump's most prominent supporters have become increasingly vocal in their criticism of Israel's conduct, amid polling evidence that Americans generally are losing sympathy for a country that has traditionally been viewed as one of the US's closest allies. Steve Bannon, Trump's former adviser and still one of his leading cheerleaders with his War Room podcast, told Politico that the president's condemnation of the food situation in Gaza would hasten Israel's loss of support among his base. 'It seems that for the under-30-year-old Maga base, Israel has almost no support, and Netanyahu's attempt to save himself politically by dragging America in deeper to another Middle East war has turned off a large swath of older Maga diehards,' Bannon said. 'Now President Trump's public repudiation of one of the central tenets of [Netanyahu's] Gaza strategy – 'starving' Palestinians – will only hasten a collapse of support.' Another Trump supporter, the far-right Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, became the latest – and perhaps most surprising – public figure to label Israel's actions in Gaza 'genocide'. 'It's the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct 7th in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza,' she posted on X. The comments came as a new Gallup poll showed support among Americans for Israel's actions in Gaza down to 32%, the lowest since the organization began asking the question in November 2023 – a month after the murderous Hamas raid that killed almost 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians and led to another 250 to be taken hostage. Israel's military response has led to about 60,000 Palestinians being killed, according to the Gaza health ministry. While Gallup's poll showed support for Israel's offensive still high, at 71%, among Republicans, Thom Tillis, a GOP senator for North Carolina who plans to step down at the next election, said Gaza could be a political problem for Trump, the Hill reported. 'I think that the American people at the end of the day are a kind people. They don't like seeing suffering, nor do I think the president does,' Tillis said. 'If you see starvation, you try to fix it.' Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, told Fox News that Trump's backing for Netanyahu remained unshaken. 'Let me assure you that there is no break between the prime minister of Israel and the president,' he told Fox News. 'Their relationship, I think, [is] stronger than it's ever been, and I think the relationship between the US and Israel is as strong as it's ever been.' Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff is due to visit Israel on Thursday, where he will meet with officials 'to discuss next steps in addressing the situation in Gaza', a US official told AFP.


The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Canada will recognize a Palestinian state in September in latest push against Israel's Gaza policies
Canada will recognize a Palestinian state in September, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Wednesday, the latest in a series of symbolic announcements that are part of a broader global shift against Israel's policies in Gaza. Carney convened a Cabinet meeting to discuss the situation in the battered Palestinian territory. He said it came after he discussed the crisis with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer who announced a similar move on Tuesday. Leaders are under mounting pressure over the issue as scenes of hunger in Gaza have horrified so many across the world. 'The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable,' Carney said. 'Canada intends to recognize the State of Palestine at the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025," Carney also said. He added that the intention is predicated on the Palestinian Authority 'holding general elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part, and to demilitarize the Palestinian state.' Carney said he's 'not in any way or shape minimizing that scale of that task.' 'Clearly that's not a possibility in the near term,' the prime minister said, adding that Canada has joined the efforts of other states to 'preserve the possibility of a two state solution." Much has to happen before a democratic viable state is established,' he said. Pressure to formally recognize Palestinian statehood has mounted since French President Emmanuel Macron announced last week that his country will become the first major Western power to recognize a Palestinian state in September. As with France and the United Kingdom, Canadian recognition would be largely symbolic, but it's part of a push by countries against Israel and could increase diplomatic pressure for an end to the conflict. More than 140 countries recognize a Palestinian state, including a dozen in Europe. Macron's announcement last week made France the first Group of Seven country — and the largest in Europe — to say it would take that step. Canada has long supported the idea of an independent Palestinian state existing alongside Israel, but has said recognition should come as part of a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict. Iddo Moed, Israel's ambassador to Canada, said Israel 'will not bow to the distorted campaign of international pressure against it.' 'We will not sacrifice our very existence by permitting the imposition of a jihadist state on our ancestral homeland that seeks our annihilation,' he said in a statement, a referring to the Palestinian militant group Hamas that seized power in Gaza in 2007. Hamas started the war with its attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which militants killed around 1,200 people and abducted 251 others. They still hold 50 hostages, including around 20 believed to be alive and held in Gaza. Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, which doesn't distinguish between militants and civilians and operates under the Hamas government. The U.N. and other international organizations see it as the most reliable source of data on casualties. 'Recognizing a Palestinian state in the absence of accountable government, functioning institutions, or benevolent leadership, rewards and legitimizes the monstrous barbarity of Hamas," Moed said. "It punishes Israeli and Palestinian victims of Hamas, vindicates Hamas."