International Glance
The frequency and intensity of hate crimes and terrorist acts against Palestinian Christians - including pilgrims, worshippers, clergy, nuns, Christian property, holy sites and religious symbols - carried out by Israeli extremists are steadily increasing.
These attacks are not the isolated or spontaneous incidents that Israel portrays them as to evade responsibility as a government and a state. They are premeditated crimes, committed by individuals and groups - including members of the police and military - who draw their ideological framework from extremist Religious Zionist doctrine, particularly the Hardal (Haredi Leumi, or nationalist Haredi) movement, an ultra-Orthodox nationalist current whose leading figures form part of the current governing coalition headed by Bezalel Smotrich. This ideology also has historical and biblical roots.
These crimes include verbal abuse; spitting at worshippers, holy sites and their entrances; physical violence; storming holy places and cemeteries and vandalising or desecrating them; destroying statues, gravestones and graves; writing racist slogans; throwing stones; theft, looting and arson against property; and occupying buildings and converting them for other uses.
These attacks are carried out across all areas under Israeli control but are particularly concentrated in the Old City of Jerusalem and its quarters, especially the Via Dolorosa and the Armenian Quarter. They also affect other Christian towns in the West Bank, the Palestinian communities within Israel's 1948 borders, and Gaza.
Ukraine is improving the quality of its international military support package, as Denmark has agreed to supply 15,000 long-range artillery rounds.
On Wednesday night Britain's most notorious anti-Islam activist was hosted at the Oxford Union by a Palestinian student from Gaza who said she was upholding his right to free speech, before roundly defeating him in a debate on Islam.
Iran’s top joint military command said on Saturday morning that it will close the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil trading corridor, due to ongoing Israeli strikes in Lebanon during a ceasefire agreement.
Norway's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has proposed a bill to ban trade with Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine, declaring them an impediment to peace.
Kyiv came under repeated Russian attacks in the early hours of Thursday, as ballistic missile threats were followed by a new wave of strike drones, Ukrainian officials said.
