International Glance
More than 50,000 protesters have marched on the US embassy in London demanding an end to US-Israeli strikes on Iran.
The march was organised by a coalition of groups, including Hands off Iran, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War, the Muslim Association of Britain, the Palestinian Forum in Britain and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Organisers said more than 50,000 demonstrators marched from Millbank to the US embassy in Vauxhall on Saturday afternoon.
It comes on the eighth day of the US-Israeli attack on Iran, shortly after President Donald Trump said the US would hit Iran "very hard" in the coming days.
Protesters were heard chanting "stop the bombing now, now, now" and "Keir Starmer be afraid, we will see you in The Hague".
More than 50,000 march in London against US-Israeli attack on Iran
Israel's closure of Al-Aqsa Mosque is an act of war
Within hours of the launch of the US-Israeli assault on Iran last weekend, both the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem were shut down. Israeli occupation forces expelled worshippers and justified the closures under the pretext of wartime “preventive measures”.
There are no bomb shelters in Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, nor are there public shelters. Among Palestinians in 1948 territories, around half of the population has no place to seek refuge from air attacks, according to figures from Israel’s own state comptroller.
Preventing worshippers from reaching the mosques, and instead confining them to their homes, markets, streets or workplaces, does not make them any safer. Amid the genocidal war in Gaza, the idea that Israeli authorities are concerned for the safety of any Palestinian is not merely laughable; it is stomach-turning.
The targeting of mosques through such measures stems, rather, from a vision of religious replacement espoused by Israel’s Zionist government and the Zionist right more broadly. Religious Zionists, who have become the dominant current in Israeli society, call the Al-Aqsa complex Temple Mount.
Adherents performs a mental act of erasure upon hearing this term. The same applies to the Ibrahimi Mosque, which the Zionist right regards as the Cave of the Patriarchs.
Nationwide alert sounded in Ukraine after Russian strikes kill seven in Kharkiv
At least 10 people, including two children, were killed and 10 injured in Kharkiv after Russia attacked Ukraine with ballistic missiles and drones overnight, officials said.
A countrywide air raid alert was issued at around 3am local time to warn people against incoming Russian projectiles.
Kharkiv oblast governor Oleh Syniehubov said fires were reported as a result of a ballistic missile attack, which killed four civilians and injured 10, including two children.
Explosions were first reported in Kyiv at around 1.30am local time, the Kyiv Independent reported, followed by more blasts at around 1.40am local time.
The attack came hours after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said he had visited the eastern front on Friday.
Zelensky said he gave awards to soldiers defending positions near Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka in the eastern Donetsk region where Russian forces were concentrated in preparation for a spring offensive.
Afghan allies, stranded at Qatar refugee camp, face 'hell' amid Iran war
Missile sirens ring out every few hours. Young children scream in terror. Fire lights up the sky.
For more than a thousand Afghan refugees trapped at a U.S.-run camp in Qatar, this is daily life since the United States and Israel started a war with Iran less than a week ago.
Since the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, these individuals have been awaiting resettlement in the United States at Camp As Sayliyah, a U.S. military base-turned refugee camp outside Qatar's capital of Doha.
Many of the 1,100 Afghan refugees in limbo at the base served alongside U.S. forces during the occupation of their country, and some 150 of them are family members of active duty U.S. servicemembers. They can no longer return to their homeland, where they would be at risk of persecution or death by the ruling Taliban government.
Dropsite News: Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Rejects Trump’s “Big Lie” About Why He Went to War
In an exclusive interview with Drop Site News, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Esmail Baghaei rejected President Donald Trump’s claim that he launched the war because Iran was “going to attack first,” calling it a “big lie.”
“There was no intention on the part of Iran to attack the United States,” he said. “They claim that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,” Baghaei added. “Did we come to the Gulf of Mexico to target Los Angeles and other U.S. cities? Or did they come 6,500 miles away to Iranian shores?”
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the U.S. decided to preemptively attack Iran because the White House knew Israel was going to begin bombing Iran and that Iran would strike back. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”
On Tuesday, Trump sought to recast the U.S. rationale and said that he believed Iran was going to launch an attack first. “They were going to attack if we didn’t do it. They were going to attack first—I felt strongly about that,” Trump said, charging that the Iranians “were getting ready to attack Israel. They were gonna attack others.”
‘We’ll run out of food this week’: Israel’s Iran war brings new Gaza siege
Israel closed all crossings into Gaza indefinitely when it attacked Iran, imposing a siege that has already pushed up food prices and threatens to plunge 2 million people into a new hunger crisis.
After more than two years of war, and with Israeli forces in control of about 60% of the territory, almost all of Gaza’s food must be brought in.
Humanitarian groups feeding much of the population say the supplies they had on Saturday, when the war began, will only last a few more days.
“If [the borders] stay closed, World Central Kitchen will run out of food this week,” said the organisation’s founder and chief, José Andrés, in a post on social media.
“We are cooking 1m hot meals every day. We need food deliveries every single day.”
One international food security expert said there was just a week’s supply of fresh food in Gaza.
Community bakeries that supply some of the most vulnerable people have only enough flour for about 10 days of bread, and there are about two weeks’ supply of aid parcels.
Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza last spring followed by extreme restrictions on food shipments. Together they caused a famine last summer.
Hundreds of people were also killed trying to reach the food distribution points of a new logistics organisation, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which only operated in Israeli-controlled areas.
'Asset or liability?': Gulf's US security dependence under scrutiny as Iran lands blows
US President Donald Trump said his “biggest surprise” since unleashing a war in the Middle East has been Iran’s attacks on the Arab Gulf states, which the US counts as some of its closest and richest partners.
“Unbelievable,” a former US intelligence official told Middle East Eye in response to Trump’s comment.
“It’s as if the US was operating and planning in a bubble for the last year. This is what Trump was warned of in conversations with Gulf rulers, and presumably his own intelligence briefings,” the person added.
Not even a year has passed since Trump gave a speech in Riyadh praising the “gleaming marvels” of the oil and gas-rich region’s cities, and now Iranian drones and ballistic missiles are slamming into those very towers and the energy infrastructure that made them possible.
In his May speech, Trump also trashed “interventionists”. His remarks were welcomed not only by ordinary people in the Gulf but also by its wealthy rulers, who are increasingly seeking to manage the region on their own - sometimes through violent means, as in Sudan, and at other times through negotiation.
Now, the US’s willingness to engage in an all-out war on the Islamic Republic as its Gulf allies take the retaliatory blows is shaking the foundations of their security partnership in the first place, analysts and officials in the Gulf say.
“To my knowledge, the US has not spelt out to leadership what our gain is if we join a full-scale war on Iran,” a Gulf official told MEE. “But the cost is obvious.”
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