Wednesday, Jul 17th
Last update07:04:06 AM GMT
International Glance
A hostage video released Wednesday by the military wing of Hamas appears to show a statement by an American-Israeli man who was kidnapped on Oct. 7, marking the first time the militant group has released a video showing one of the five Americans it is holding captive.
The video is also the first time that Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 24, has been seen alive since the day of the Hamas-led attack on Israel, during which some 1,200 people were killed.
Ukraine has taken American Abrams M1A1 battle tanks off the frontline, partly because of Russian drone tactics, Pentagon officials have said. The US agreed to send 31 Abrams to Ukraine in January 2023. Five have been lost to Russian attacks.
The proliferation of drones means “there isn’t open ground that you can just drive across without fear of detection”, a senior defence official said on Thursday. “Now, there is a way to do it,” he said. “We’ll work with our Ukrainian partners, and other partners on the ground, to help them think through how they might use that, in that kind of changed environment now, where everything is seen immediately.”
The Ukrainians have not adopted tactics that could have made the tanks more effective, one of the US defence officials said, such as in combined-arms warfare, training for which was provided by the US in Germany. Russian forces have sustained heavy losses of their own tanks and armoured equipment due to highly effective surveillance and attacks by Ukrainian drone warfare units.
The U.S. provided Ukraine with powerful long-range ballistic missiles for the first time earlier this month, and its military has already used them twice in the last week against Russian forces, according to three U.S. officials.
The first strike was about 100 miles inside Crimea’s border on the morning of April 17, targeting a Russian military airfield, according to the officials. The Ukrainian military used the U.S.-provided Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS, for the second time Tuesday night, targeting Russian forces east of the southeastern Ukrainian town of Berdyansk in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, officials said.
Nimer Saddy al-Nimer is 12. His first name means "Tiger" in Arabic. Wavy locks of sandy brown hair rest just above his large brown eyes. He's skinny and tall for his age. He calls himself a "soccer addict," he's a fan of FC Barcelona, and Lionel Messi is his hero. He'd pretend to be the Argentine superstar when he played pickup games with his friends in the alleys behind the mosque near his home in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City.
But that was before the war.
Nimer now lies inside a makeshift tent propped up by two-by-fours. The roof is a sheet of transparent plastic. The walls, old billboards and other scrap found here among the refugee camps of Rafah, on the opposite side of the Gaza Strip from his home.
The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, has said he was “horrified” by reports of mass graves containing hundreds of bodies at two of Gaza’s largest hospitals.
Palestinian civil defence teams began exhuming bodies from a mass grave outside the Nasser hospital complex in Khan Younis last week after Israeli troops withdrew. A total of 310 bodies have been found in the last week, including 35 in the past day, Palestinian officials have said.
“We feel the need to raise the alarm because clearly there have been multiple bodies discovered,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights.
She described bodies “buried deep in the ground and covered with waste”, adding that “among the deceased were allegedly older people, women and wounded”, including some bound and stripped of their clothes.
A Russian missile strike that broke in half a 240-metre (787-foot) television tower in Kharkiv on Monday is part of a deliberate effort by Moscow to make Ukraine's second largest city uninhabitable, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged the US Senate to rapidly ratify the long-delayed military aid package passed by Congress over the weekend, warning that his country was preparing its defences amid fears there could be a large Russian offensive before the fresh supplies reach the frontline. “We really need to get this to the final point. We need to get it approved by the Senate … so that we get some tangible assistance for the soldiers on the frontline as soon as possible, not in another six months,” he said.
In the interview with US television network NBC, he also said that Saturday’s vote showed Ukraine would not be “a second Afghanistan”, whose pro-western government collapsed during an US-led pull out in the summer of 2021. Zelenskiy said his immediate priorities were air-defence systems such as the US-made Patriots and long-range missiles such as Atacms, which can travel up to 186 miles (300km) and which the House has called on the Pentagon to provide promptly.
Page 30 of 177
