27/05/2025

TUESDAY | MAY 27, 2025

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52 killed in Israeli strikes, including 33 in a school o Military says it hit ‘key terrorists’ missile

MOSCOW: The Kremlin yesterday said President Donald Trump’s claim that Vladimir Putin had “gone absolutely crazy” might be due to emotional overload, but thanked the US leader for his assistance in launching Ukraine peace negotiations. Trump made the remark after Russia unleashed its largest aerial attack of the war and said he was weighing new sanctions, though he also scolded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “We are really grateful to the Americans and to President Trump personally for their assistance in organising and launching this negotiation process,”Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said when asked about the remarks. “This is a very crucial moment, which is associated, of course, with the emotional overload of everyone absolutely and with emotional reactions.” Ukrainian regional officials and emergency services said yesterday Russia attacked the country for a third night in a row, a day after the biggest aerial attack of the war so far killed at least 12 people. mountain Mont Blanc, beating a mark that had stood for over a decade. Vedrines’ effort on Saturday to reach the 4,809m peak from Chamonix and then return to the resort was three minutes faster than that set by Spanish ultra-running icon Kilian Jornet in 2013. Having set out just before 9am, Vedrines, 32, a specialist in rapid alpine-style ascents, completed the round trip from the church in Chamonix at 1,043m to the summit of Mont Blanc in a whirlwind 4 hours, 54 minutes and 41 seconds. “I never thought I was capable of it, I really lacked the confidence to attempt it,” the climber said. Jornet ran to the summit while Vedrines, who also holds the record for a speed ascent of K2 in Pakistan, mixed trail-running and skiing. “Bravo, what a show. The artist,” Jornet wrote in tribute on social media. – AFP HEAD OF GAZA AID GROUP RESIGNS WASHINGTON: The head of a US-backed aid group for Gaza announced his resignation, saying it was impossible to do his job in line with principles of neutrality and independence, as the organisation vowed to start delivering assistance yesterday. The Gaza Humanitarian foundation (GHF), based in Geneva since February, has promised to distribute some 300 million meals in its first 90 days of operation. But the UN and international aid agencies have said they will not cooperate with the group, amid accusations it is working with Israel while lacking any Palestinian involvement. In a statement by the GHF, executive director Jake Wood said he felt compelled to leave after determining the organisation could not fulfil its mission in a way that adhered to humanitarian principles. – AFP NEW MONT BLANC CLIMB RECORD SET PARIS: French climber Benjamin Vedrines broke the record for the fastest ascent and descent of western Europe’s highest

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Throughout the war sparked by the Oct 7, 2023 attack, Israel has accused Hamas and its allies of using civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals as command centres, claims the groups have denied. Another strike killed at least 19 people “after the warplanes targeted the Abd Rabbo family’s home early this morning in the town of Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip”, Bassal said. Israel has expanded its Gaza offensive, activating tens of thousands of reservists as it aims for the defeat of Hamas. The military said yesterday that over “the past 48 hours, the (air force) struck over 200 targets throughout the Gaza Strip, including terrorists, weapon storage facilities, sniper and anti-tank

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“Who can say their nation would have behaved better in the same circumstances?” Despite being over four hours long, his film struck a chord with a generation, drawing crowds to the cinemas at a time when documentaries were rarely shown on the big screen. Ophuls was born Hans Marcel Oppenheimer in Frankfurt, Germany on Nov 1, 1927, to German actress Hilde Wall and director Max Ophuls. He fled to France with his father and the film directors Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang, before escaping across the Pyrenees mountains and arriving in the United States in 1941. He grew up in Hollywood, going on to serve as a GI in Japan in 1946. Returning to France in 1950, he started out as an assistant director, working on his father’s last film Lola Montes in 1955. He made an unsuccessful entry into fiction with Banana Skin in 1963, starring the star duo of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, before shifting to documentary when hired by French public television. Hotel Terminus - The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie won him an Oscar for best documentary in 1989. – AFP additional terrorist sites”. It also said it had detected three projectiles launched from Gaza toward communities in Israel yesterday, as the country prepared to celebrate Jerusalem Day, an annual event marking its capture of the city’s eastern sector in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. “Two projectiles fell in the Gaza Strip and one additional projectile was intercepted by the (air force) before crossing into Israeli territory,” it said. US President Donald Trump, whose administration has strongly backed Israel in its campaign, said Sunday he wanted to “see if we can stop that whole situation as quickly as possible”. The same day, as Arab and European nations gathered to seek an end to the conflict, Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares called for an arms embargo on Israel. He also called for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza “massively, without conditions and without limits, and not controlled by Israel”, describing the territory as humanity’s “open wound”. Israel last week partially eased an aid blockade on Gaza that had exacerbated widespread shortages of food and medicine. COGAT, the Israeli Defence Ministry body that coordinates civilian affairs in the Palestinian territories, said that “107 trucks belonging to the UN and the international community carrying humanitarian aid ... were transferred” into Gaza on Sunday. But critics charge that is nowhere near enough, and just a fraction of the aid that was shipped in during a two-month ceasefire. – AFP

GAZA said devastating Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip killed at least 52 people yesterday, 33 of them in a school turned shelter. The civil defence agency said many of the casualties at the school in Gaza City were children, while the Israeli military said the site was housing “key terrorists”. Israel has stepped up a renewed offensive, drawing international condemnation as aid trickles in following a nearly three-month blockade that has sparked severe food and medical shortages. World leaders meeting in Spain called for an end to the “inhumane” and “senseless” war, while aid CITY: Rescuers

groups said the trickle of aid is not nearly enough to staunch the hunger and health crises. In Gaza City, civil defence agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said an early-morning strike on the Fahmi Al-Jarjawi school, where people were sheltering, killed “at least 33, with dozens of injured, mostly children, including several women”. The Israeli military said it had “struck key terrorists who were operating within a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control centre embedded in an area that previously served as the ‘Faami Aljerjawi’ School”, adding that “steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians”.

A Palestinian inspecting the damage at a school sheltering displaced people, following an airstrike, in Gaza City, yesterday. – REUTERSPIC

Kremlin links Trump remark to emotional overload

Filmmaker Marcel Ophuls dead at 97 PARIS: Oscar-winning filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, who blew the lid off the myth that France resisted its World War II Nazi occupiers in The Sorrow and the Pity , has died aged 97, his family said yesterday.

The air raid alert lasted six hours in Kyiv, said Tymur Tkachenko, head of the city’s military administration. Tkachenko reported damage in one city district. There was no comment from Russia on the attacks. The Kremlin says it is conducting a “special military operation”. The surrounding Kyiv region was under drone and missile attack, the region’s military administration said. It reported damage in three of the region’s districts. Russian drone strikes caused fires and destruction in private households in the southern Odesa region, Ukraine’s Emergency Service said. A residential building was destroyed, the emergency services said, adding that the fire had been extinguished. Regional governor Oleh Kiper said a 14-year-old boy was injured in the attack. In the western region of Khmelnytskyi, far from the frontline, the governor said a combined Russian attack damaged private households and enterprises, but there were no civilian casualties. – Reuters

Ophuls, who was the son of renowned German Jewish director Max Ophuls, “died peacefully on May 24”, his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert said in a statement. Ophuls rocked France with 1969’s The Sorrow and the Pity , about the occupied French provincial city of Clermont Ferrand during the time of the collaborationist Vichy regime. It quietly demolished one of the country’s most cherished myths – that France and the French had always resisted the Germans – and was banned from public television until 1981. Through a jigsaw of interviews and newsreels, it showed how collaboration with the Nazis was widespread, from the humblest hairdresser to the top of high society. Ophuls played down his feat, stressing that he was not trying to judge France, and was just working on a TV commission. “For 40 years, I’ve had to put up with

Ophuls at a party in 1963. – AFPPIC

all this bullshit about it being a prosecutorial film. It doesn’t attempt to prosecute the French,”he said.