TV News LIES

A series of Israeli airstrikes killed at least 32 people across Gaza City on Saturday as Israel expanded its offensive and urged Palestinians to leave the area, medical staff reported.

Among the dead were 12 children, according to the morgue at Shifa Hospital, where the bodies were brought.

In recent days, Israel has escalated strikes across Gaza City, destroying several high-rise buildings it accused Hamas of using for surveillance. On Saturday, the military said it targeted another tower used by Hamas in the city. It has ordered civilians to evacuate as part of an operation aimed at seizing control of Gaza’s largest urban center, which it says is the group’s last stronghold. Hundreds of thousands of residents remain in the city, many already facing famine conditions.

Overnight and into Saturday morning, one strike in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood killed 10 members of a single family, including a mother and three children, health officials said. The Palestinian Football Association confirmed that Mohammed Ramez Sultan, a player for Al-Helal Sporting Club, was killed along with 14 members of his family in the strikes. Images showed explosions followed by thick plumes of smoke.

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President Trump reupped his call for NATO members to stop buying Russian oil amid a wider sanctions push in hopes of forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin to halt the war in Ukraine. 

The president said Saturday morning he is “ready” to impose “major” sanctions on Russia when other NATO nations do the same — and when all of them halt their purchases of Moscow’s oil.

“As you know, NATO’S commitment to WIN has been far less than 100 percent, and the purchase of Russian Oil, by some, has been shocking! It greatly weakens your negotiating position, and bargaining power, over Russia,” the president wrote on Truth Social. 

“Anyway, I am ready to ‘go’ when you are. Just say when? I believe that this, plus NATO, as a group, placing 50 percent to 100 percent TARIFFS ON CHINA, to be fully withdrawn after the WAR with Russia and Ukraine is ended, will also be of great help in ENDING this deadly, but RIDICULOUS, WAR,” he added. 

Trump indicated in a Friday “Fox and Friends” interview that his patience with the Russian leader is “running out fast.”

Also on Friday, Canada hosted a meeting of G7 finance ministers. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reiterated Trump’s call for G7 nations to slap tariffs on countries buying Russian oil if they are “truly committed” to ending the three-and-a-half-year conflict in Eastern Europe. 

Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer also welcomed “commitments” to increase sanctions pressure and “explore using immobilized Russian sovereign assets to further benefit Ukraine’s defense.”

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Palestinian Oscar-winning director Basel Adra said that Israeli soldiers conducted a raid at his West Bank home on Saturday, searching for him and going through his wife’s phone.

Israeli settlers attacked his village, injuring two of his brothers and one cousin, Adra told The Associated Press. He accompanied them to the hospital. While there, he said that he heard from family in the village that nine Israeli soldiers had stormed his home.

The soldiers asked his wife, Suha, for his whereabouts and went through her phone, he said, while his 9-month-old daughter was home. They also briefly detained one of his uncles, he said.

As of Saturday night, Adra said he had no way of returning home to check on his family, because soldiers were blocking the entrance to the village and he was scared of being detained.

Israel’s military didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Adra has spent his career as a journalist and filmmaker chronicling settler violence in Masafer Yatta, the southern reaches of West Bank where he was born. After settlers attacked his co-director, Hamdan Ballal, in March, he told the AP that he felt they were being targeted more intensely since winning the Oscar.

As of Saturday night, Adra said he had no way of returning home to check on his family, because soldiers were blocking the entrance to the village and he was scared of being detained.

Israel’s military didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Prince Harry has made a surprise visit to Kyiv after an invitation from the Ukrainian government, saying he wanted to do “everything possible” to help the recovery of the thousands of military personnel who have been seriously injured in the three-year war against Russia.

During the trip to the Ukrainian capital, he and a team from his Invictus Games Foundation are set to detail new initiatives to support the rehabilitation of the wounded, with the eventual aim of providing help to all areas of the country.

Earlier this year it was estimated that the Ukraine war had already left 130,000 people with permanent disabilities – and the government has now put rehabilitation through sport at the heart of its policy for helping veterans.

Speaking to the Guardian on an overnight train to the capital, the Duke of Sussex said: “We cannot stop the war but what we can do is do everything we can to help the recovery process.”

He added: “We can continue to humanise the people involved in this war and what they are going through. We have to keep it in the forefront of people’s minds. I hope this trip will help to bring it home to people because it’s easy to become desensitised to what has been going on.”

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A former Israeli army commander, Herzi Halevi, has confirmed that more than 200,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured in the war in Gaza, and that “not once” in the course of the conflict were military operations inhibited by legal advice.

Halevi stepped down as chief of staff in March after leading the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for the first 17 months of the war, which is now approaching its second anniversary.

The retired general told a community meeting in southern Israel earlier this week that more than 10% of Gaza’s 2.2 million population had been killed or injured – “more than 200,000 people”. That estimate is notable as it is close to the current figures provided by Gaza’s health ministry, which Israeli officials have frequently dismissed as Hamas propaganda, though the ministry figures have been deemed reliable by international humanitarian agencies.

The current official toll is 64,718 Palestinians killed in Gaza and 163,859 injured, since the start of the war on 7 October 2023. Many thousands more are feared dead, with their bodies buried in the rubble. At least 40 people were reported killed on Friday in Israeli strikes, mostly around Gaza City.

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In the early hours of December 27, 2024, the walls of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza shook as Israeli forces dropped bombs nearby. By sunrise, bulldozers had flattened the earth leading to the entrance and Israeli tanks were closing in. Snipers surrounded the complex. Inside, 350 patients, doctors, nurses and their families huddled in the hallways.

“I thought it was the last day of my life,” Abdel Moneim Al-Shrafi, a nurse in his early twenties, told Al Jazeera’s documentary program Fault Lines.

At around 6 a.m., a voice from a quadcopter hovering over the hospital summoned Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the acting director of the Kamal Adwan Medical Complex. His wife of more than 30 years, Albina, watched as he climbed through rubble to reach an Israeli tank a block away. “He went to them in his white coat,” she said. “He was going to them confident that he had not done anything wrong.”

A photo of Dr. Abu Safiya approaching the tank has become an iconic symbol of Israel’s merciless assault on Gaza—and of Palestinian resilience. He returned to the hospital shortly afterwards. By nightfall, Kamal Adwan had been emptied and shut down by the Israeli military. Dr. Abu Safiya and all the men inside were detained.

Dr. Abu Safiya has been in Israeli custody ever since without formal charge or trial in inhumane conditions.

That raid marked the final act in an 80-day siege on Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last standing hospital in northern Gaza. Dr. Abu Safiya became its acting director early in 2024 after its previous director was detained in another raid and the hospital was temporarily closed. “Dr. Hussam felt it was impossible not to have a hospital in the north,” said Rawiya Tanboura, 32, a nurse who had worked with him since 2019. “I think he was afraid that every person that would die in the north would die because he left.” Much of the hospital had been destroyed, but Dr. Abu Safiya reconvened what remained of its staff and reopened it.

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