12/05/2025

MONDAY | MAY 12, 2025

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Gaza war casts shadow over Cannes film festival

Ukraine ready for truce talks

KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday he expects Moscow to commit to a 30-day ceasefire, adding that Kyiv was “ready” to meet Russia for direct truce talks. Zelensky was speaking after Russian President Vladimir Putin called on Kyiv to meet in Istanbul for talks on Thursday. “We propose to the Kyiv authorities to resume the talks that they broke off in 2022, and I emphasise, without any preconditions,” Putin said. Russia and Ukraine have not held direct talks since the start of Moscow’s invasion in February 2022. Since the Kremlin ordered troops into Ukraine, communication channels between the two sides have only been open for exchanges of prisoners of war and the bodies of the fallen. “We propose to start (negotiations) without delay in Istanbul,” Putin said. Turkiye President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron in a phone call yesterday that Turkiye is ready to host talks on a ceasefire and permanent peace between Russia and Ukraine. Erdogan said “a historic turning point” had been reached towards ending the war and that the opportunity should be seized. He said Turkiye was ready to make every contribution to ensure that a ceasefire and permanent peace could be reached between Russia and Ukraine, including hosting the negotiations. Turkiye also hosted negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in March 2022. The draft accords discussed in Istanbul at the time would have obligated Ukraine to give up its Nato ambitions and accept permanent neutral and nuclear-free status in return for security guarantees from the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France – the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. – AFP/Reuters MOSCOW: The head of British intelligence agency MI6 will be a woman for the first time, as the agency’s leadership is choosing one of three female candidates who have reached the final interview. Interviews for the post took place last week, and all three final candidates were women, two of them were MI6 officers, reorted The Times . The newspaper noted that the identity of only one of the three candidates is known – former UK ambassador to China Barbara Woodward, now the highest-ranking woman in the Foreign Office. It is noted that her candidacy has been criticised for being sympathetic to Beijing. The head of MI6, Richard Moore, is due to leave this fall after five years in charge. – Bernama EX-PANAMA PRESIDENT GRANTED ASYLUM PANAMA CITY: Former Panama president Ricardo Martinelli announced his arrival on Saturday in Colombia, where he has been granted asylum after spending 15 months at the Nicaraguan embassy to avoid a prison sentence for money laundering. The Panama government “granted the necessary safe conduct” for the “safe departure of the asylum seeker, Panamanian citizen Ricardo Alberto Martinelli Berrocal” to Colombia, which granted him asylum, Panama’s Foreign Ministry said. The 73-year-old supermarket tycoon, who was president from 2009 to 2014, was convicted of using stolen public money to buy a stake in a publishing house. Martinelli said he was “happy and content” to be in the Colombian capital Bogota. – AFP WOMAN TO HEAD MI6 FOR FIRST TIME

o Main character in documentary killed

The Cannes Film Festival expressed “its horror and deep sorrow at this tragedy”. Farsi said she had believed until the very end that Hassouna “would survive, that she would come, that the war would stop”. “But reality caught up with us.” In Gaza City, the enclave’s civil defence agency reported yesterday eight deaths, including four young children, in an Israeli airstrike on tents housing displaced people in the southern city of Khan Younis. Israeli fighter jets targeted three tents housing dozens of displaced people, killing “eight people, including four children aged two to five and two women”, said civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal. Video filmed by AFP shows rescuers in the dark evacuating bodies by ambulance, one of them in a white plastic body bag while the other was wrapped in a blanket, as well as a wounded baby. Bassal said the Israeli military also destroyed five houses with explosives in the east of Gaza City, in the territory’s north, and fired artillery at the Abassa area east of Khan Younis, without reporting any casualties. – AFP

From tomorrow’s opening ceremony onwards, audiences will be closely watching celebrities to see if they take a stand on the historical conflict. British movie star Tilda Swinton at the Berlinale festival in February lashed out at “internationally enabled mass murder” and “development of Riviera property”, in an apparent reference to Trump’s comments. Farsi’s documentary shines light on one of the lives lost. The filmmaker, a refugee from Iran, made Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk from video phone calls with Hassouna over more than 200 days of war. On April 15, she rang the young Palestinian to tell her the film had been selected for Cannes, and they immediately started trying to organise for her to attend the French festival. But the following day, an Israeli airstrike killed her. The Israeli military, which media freedom group Reporters Without Borders has accused of carrying out a “massacre” of Palestinian journalists, claimed it had targeted a Hamas member.

PARIS: Israel may ban international media from entering Gaza, but the war in the Palestinian territory will feature at the Cannes film festival, including in a documentary whose protagonist was killed in an airstrike. Fatima Hassouna, a 25-year-old Gazan photojournalist, is the main character in Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi’s documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. An airstrike killed Hassouna along with 10 relatives in her family home in Gaza on April 16, a day after she learnt the film had been selected for one of the festival’s sidebar sections. Only her mother survived. The documentary is likely to draw attention at a festival at which the conflict was already present last year, including when actor Cate Blanchett caused a stir with a dress that many saw as a nod to the Palestinian flag.

BR I E F S

Children gather amid the rubble of a school-turned-shelter in Jabalia on Saturday. – AFPPIC

Hamas releases video of two hostages TEL AVIV: Hamas released a video on Saturday showing two Israeli hostages alive in the Gaza Strip, with one of the two men calling for an end to the 19-month war.

bound and injured in the face in footage from the day of the Hamas attack, and his family have expressed concern about his health. Bohbot and Ohana, both abducted from the site of a music festival, are among 58 hostages held in Gaza since the 2023 attack, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead. Hamas also holds the remains of an Israeli soldier killed in a 2014 war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that the fate of three hostages presumed alive was unclear, without naming them. “We know with certainty that 21 hostages are alive ... and there are three others whose status, sadly, we do not know,” Netanyahu said. – AFP

crying out to be saved. “While all the people of Israel hear their calls, a handful of decision-makers refuse to listen”, echoing criticism of the Israeli government for failing to bring back the hostages. “How much more can we bear? How much more can they endure? “The fact that they are still there is a disgrace,” the family said. On Saturday, Israeli demonstrators calling for the release of the hostages and an end to the war gathered outside the Defence Ministry headquarters in the coastal city of Tel Aviv. AFP images showed some protesters holding pictures of hostages and placards that read “we can save the rest” and “all of them”. Bohbot, a Colombian-Israeli, was seen

The pair were identified by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum campaign group as Elkana Bohbot and Yosef Haim Ohana, who were kidnapped on Oct 7, 2023. The three-minute video shows one of the hostages, 36-year-old Bohbot, lying on the floor wrapped in a blanket. The second hostage, Ohana, 24, speaks in Hebrew, urging the Israeli government to end the war in Gaza and secure the release of all remaining captives – a similar message to statements made by other hostages. Bohbot’s family said “Elkana and Yosef are