22/07/2025

TUESDAY | JULY 22, 2025

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told Israeli fire kills 93 aid seekers Microsoft, France work on digital Notre-Dame o Pope slams barbarity of Gaza war Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar accused him of spreading lies. Prime Minister Benjamin

warning shots “to remove an immediate threat posed to them” as thousands gathered near Gaza City. The UN said earlier this month that nearly 800 aid-seekers had been killed since late May, including on the routes of aid convoys. In Gaza City, Qasem Abu Khater, 36, said he had rushed to try to get a bag of flour but instead found a desperate crowd of thousands and “deadly overcrowding and pushing”. “The tanks were firing shells randomly at us and Israeli sniper soldiers were shooting as if they were hunting animals in a forest,” he said. “Dozens of people were martyred right before my eyes and no one could save anyone.” The WFP condemned violence against civilians seeking aid as “completely unacceptable”. Israel on Sunday withdrew the residency permit of head of the OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) office in Israel, Jonathan Whittall, who has repeatedly condemned the humanitarian conditions in Gaza.

military and displaced Palestinians sheltering in the Deir el-Balah area to move south immediately due to imminent operations in the area. Whole families were seen carrying what few belongings they have on packed donkey carts heading south. “They threw leaflets at us and we don’t know where we are going and we don’t have shelter or anything,” one man said. The displacement order was “another devastating blow to the already fragile lifelines keeping people alive across the Gaza Strip”, the UN OCHA said on Sunday. According to the aid agency, 87.8% of Gaza is now under displacement orders or within Israeli militarised zones, leaving “2.1 million civilians squeezed into a fragmented 12% of the Strip, where essential services have collapsed”. The army’s latest announcement prompted concern from families of hostages held since Oct 7, 2023 that the Israeli offensive could harm their loved ones. – AFP residents

PARIS: Microsoft is teaming up with the French government to create a digital replica of Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral, France’s most visited monument, the tech company’s president, Brad Smith, said yesterday. The 862-year-old Gothic masterpiece was reopened last December after a five-year restoration following a devastating fire in 2019. A digital replica will serve as a record of the building’s architectural details, Microsoft said. It will also provide a virtual experience for visitors and those unable to visit. The cathedral became a symbol of Paris and France after Victor Hugo used it as a setting for his 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame . Last year, Microsoft worked with Iconem, a French company that specialises in digitalisation of heritage sites, on a digital replica of St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. “One of the things we learned from the work at St Peter’s is how a digital twin can help support the maintenance of a building. Because you capture a digital record of every centimetre and what is there and what it looks like,” Smith said. “A digital twin will provide an enormously valuable record that I believe people are going to be using 100 years from now.” Since 2019, Microsoft has digitally preserved heritage sites and events including ancient Olympia, Mont Saint-Michel and the 80th Anniversary of the Allied Beach Landings in Normandy. – Reuters AIRSTRIKES TARGET HOUTHI SITES TEL AVIV: The Israeli military attacked sites in Hodeidah, Yemen yesterday. Defence Minister Israel Katz said the army was “forcefully countering any attempt to restore the terror infrastructure previously attacked”. Al Masirah TV reported that the Yemeni port was attacked, without providing any details. The Israeli military said the port had been used to transfer weapons from Iran, which are then used to attack Israel. “As I have made clear – Yemen’s fate is the same as Tehran’s. The Houthis will pay a heavy price for launching missiles,” he said. Earlier this month, the Houthis claimed responsibility for an attack on the Greek ship Eternity C that killed four people onboard. – Reuters RUSSIA FAVOURS NEW ROUND OF TALKS MOSCOW: The Kremlin said yesterday that Moscow was in favour of a new round of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine but the two sides’ positions were diametrically opposed so there was a lot of diplomatic work to be done. Its spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that as soon as there was a definitive understanding of the date for the next round of talks then Moscow would announce it. “There is our draft memorandum, there is a draft handed over by the Ukrainian side. There is to be an exchange of views and talks on these two drafts, which are diametrically opposed,” Peskov said. – Reuters

Netanyahu on Thursday expressed his regret to Pope Leo XIV after what he described as a “stray” munition killed three people sheltering at the Holy Family Church in Gaza City. At the end of the Angelus prayer on Sunday, the pope slammed the “barbarity” of the Gaza war and called for peace, days after the Israeli strike on the territory’s only Catholic church. The strike was part of the “ongoing military attacks against the civilian population and places of worship in Gaza”, he added. The Catholic Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, held mass at the Gaza church on Sunday after travelling to the devastated territory in a rare visit on Friday. Most of Gaza’s population of more than two million people have been displaced at least once during the war and there have been repeated evacuation calls across large parts of the coastal enclave. On Sunday morning, the Israeli

GAZA CITY: Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli forces opened fire on crowds of Palestinians trying to collect humanitarian aid on Sunday, killing 93 people and wounding dozens. Eighty were killed as truckloads of aid arrived in the north, while nine others were reported shot near an aid point close to Rafah in the south, where dozens of people lost their lives just 24 hours earlier. Four were killed near another aid site in Khan Younis, also in the south, said agency spokesman Mahmud Basal. The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said its 25-truck convoy carrying food aid “encountered massive crowds of hungry civilians which came under gunfire” near Gaza City, soon after it crossed from Israel and cleared checkpoints. Israel’s military disputed the death toll and said soldiers had fired

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Palestinians take delivery of aid supplies in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on Sunday. – REUTERSPIC

Iran lawmaker links regional security to sanctions

DUBAI: Iran could withhold security commitments if European states invoke a UN mechanism to reimpose international sanctions on the Islamic Republic, a member of Iran’s parliamentary national security commission said yesterday. “We have many tools in our disposition. We can withhold our commitment to security in the region, Persian Gulf and Hormuz Strait as well as other maritime areas,” Abbas Moqtadaei said in reference to Tehran’s potential counter-measures

programme, in parallel to indirect nuclear negotiations between Tehran and Washington. Israel’s attack on Iran last month led to the suspension of such talks. “Europe is not in a position to endanger itself in the Hormuz Strait when it is itself in political, economic and cultural conflict with Russia, China and even the United States,” Moqtadaei said. In a letter to the UN secretary general, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on Sunday that the E3

to the reimposition of sanctions. He was speaking ahead of a meeting on Friday between Iranian deputy foreign ministers and British, French and German diplomats in Istanbul. The three European states, known as E3, have said they would restore sanctions on Iran by the end of next month if the country did not enter productive talks on its nuclear programme with Western powers. E3 countries and Iran have held inconclusive talks on Tehran’s nuclear

lack the legal standing to invoke the mechanism, arguing that their stance on Israeli and US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities last month made them no longer participants to a 2015 nuclear deal to which the snapback mechanism is linked. The three European countries, along with China and Russia, are the remaining parties to the nuclear pact, from which the US withdrew in 2018, that lifted sanctions on Iran in return for restrictions on its nuclear programme. – Reuters