TV News LIES

My cousin Ziyad was too young to die. He was sleeping at home in Khan Younis refugee camp when the bombs fell just before midnight on Friday. After they heard the explosion, my cousins Mohammed and Moatsem ran to save him, they told me, but he had already died in his bed. He was 44.

Ziyad was a social worker for Unrwa, working with vulnerable families in Gaza’s refugee camps. Every summer when I visited Gaza from my home in Canada, he would buy my little son candies from Asa’ad’s shop – now gone with Asa’ad (who was killed in October 2023) – insisting that Gaza’s candies were the best in the world.

At least 25 people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes across Gaza, including 11 in the bombing of a school turned shelter, the strip’s civil defence agency said, as Israel’s war against Hamas in the besieged Palestinian territory grinds on despite a new ceasefire proposal from Arab mediators.

Intense Israeli bombings hit several areas of Gaza on Wednesday, killing 11 in a school sheltering displaced people in al-Tuffah, a neighbourhood of Gaza City. The strike ignited a huge fire that claimed most of the casualties, said a civil defence spokesperson, Mahmoud Bassal.

The Qatari network Al Jazeera and Palestinian media broadcast footage of several bodies wrapped in white shrouds at al-Shifa hospital’s morgue, and women weeping over the body of a child.

Donald Trump has hit out at Volodymyr Zelensky for saying Ukraine would not recognise Russia's occupation of Crimea.

"This statement is very harmful to the peace negotiations with Russia," the US president said in a social media post, adding that a US brokered peace deal is on the horizon.

“He has nothing to boast about! The situation for Ukraine is dire — He can have Peace or, he can fight for another three years before losing the whole Country,” Mr Trump wrote.

It comes as high-level peace summit in London to discuss the terms of a Ukraine peace deal on Wednesday was abruptly downgraded after Mr Trump’s most senior diplomat snubbed the meeting.

Foreign ministers from France and Germany abandoned plans to travel to the UK for the talks after US secretary of state Marco Rubio announced he would not attend, citing “scheduling issues”.

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Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip killed at least 17 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and destroyed bulldozers and other heavy equipment that had been supplied by mediators to clear rubble. Separate strikes killed two people in Lebanon.

Also on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump spoke by phone, two weeks after the two met in Washington. Trump wrote on his social networking site Truth Social that the two spoke about trade and Iran, among other issues. “The call went very well—We are on the same side of every issue,” he wrote.

Netanyahu's office did not have an immediate comment, but his hastily-arranged visit to Washington was not deemed a rousing success after he appeared to fail to secure the support he wanted from Trump on issues such as stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, reducing Trump's tariffs, the influence of Turkey and the war in Gaza.

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Gunmen shot and killed at least 26 tourists on Tuesday at a resort in Indian-controlled Kashmir, police said in what appeared to be a major shift in a regional conflict in which tourists have largely been spared.

Police said it was a “terror attack” and blamed militants fighting against Indian rule. “This attack is much larger than anything we’ve seen directed at civilians in recent years,” Omar Abdullah, the region’s top elected official, wrote on social media.