TV News LIES

A pro-Ukraine political campaign committee has launched to boost lawmakers who are supportive of the country as it attempts to fend off Russia’s invasion.

The new group, dubbed American Ukraine PAC, is headed by Jed Sunden, the founder of Kyiv Post, the oldest English-language newspaper in Ukraine, which he owned from 1995 to 2009.

“We want to raise money in support of congressmen who support Ukraine,” Sunden told The Hill. The PAC aims to raise “money for their campaigns.”

Israeli negotiators are expected to arrive in Qatar on Sunday amid intense new efforts to bring the war in Gaza to at least a temporary halt, after Hamas abandoned key ceasefire demands last week following a series of setbacks.

In recent days, the militant organisation has been disappointed by the failure of its calls for a wave of protest during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, angered by the appointment without consultation of a new prime minister by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and suffered the possible death of a key military commander in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza.

On Friday, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said he had approved plans for a military assault on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, which is Hamas’s last main stronghold but also now home to more than 1 million people, mostly displaced from elsewhere in the territory.

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Benjamin Netanyahu has approved plans for an attack on Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, where more than a million people displaced from elsewhere in the territory have sought shelter, officials in Israel have said.

The decision was made as a ship towing a barge loaded with food arrived off Gaza on Friday. It was a test run for a new aid route by sea from Cyprus into the devastated Palestinian territory, where famine looms after five months of Israel’s military campaign.

Any attack on Rafah is likely to cause civilian casualties and worsen an already acute humanitarian crisis across Gaza.

Germany’s foreign affairs minister, Annalena Baerbock, tweeted: “A large-scale offensive in #Rafah cannot be justified. Over a million refugees have sought protection there and have nowhere to go. A humanitarian truce is needed immediately so that more people don’t die and the hostages are finally released.”

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In an ostentatious show of unity designed to ease the tensions between France and Germany over the threat posed by a resurgent Russia, leaders of Europe’s three leading military powers agreed to step up the worldwide purchase of ammunition for Ukraine and improve their offer of long-range artillery.

The hastily arranged meeting in Berlin between France, Germany and Poland did little to disguise the fact that Paris and Berlin now hold different perspectives on the twin spectres of Russian military advances in Ukraine and the US Congress’s refusal to approve substantial further military aid for Kyiv.

The clash in approach – predominantly between the newly hawkish French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the perennially cautious German chancellor, Olaf Scholz – was laid bare in a dramatic French TV interview on Thursday night in which Macron said Europe’s security, even Europe’s existence, was at risk.

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