TV News LIES

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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Five hundred Ukrainian defenders were recently returned from Russian captivity as a result of a large exchange under the 500 for 500 formula carried out by Ukraine and Russia. This is the largest exchange in the past six months. The last similar one on such a scale took place in the summer of 2025, when 1,000 Russians were exchanged for 1,000 Ukrainian defenders.

Throughout the last week, everyone had been anxiously awaiting news about their loved ones, since negotiations on exchanges usually take place in the Middle East and with the mediation of the United Arab Emirates. With the outbreak of war in Iran, many felt uncertain about further negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow.

However, the exchange did take place, and in two stages.

“This is one of the largest exchanges since the 1,000 for 1,000 exchange,” says representative of the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Petro Yatsenko.

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Thousands of cruise ship passengers remain stranded in the Gulf as a result of the war on Iran.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO), a UN-run agency, told AFP on Thursday that around 20,000 seafarers and 15,000 cruise ship passengers were trapped as the conflict has frozen travel.

"Beyond the economic impact of these alarming attacks, it is a humanitarian issue. No attack on innocent seafarers is ever justified," Arsenio Dominguez, the IMO’s secretary general, said.

"I reiterate my call for all shipping companies to exercise maximum caution when operating in the affected region," he added.

The freeze on travel is part of the growing number of industries that have been disrupted by the war in the Middle East, with tourism severely affected by the region-wide conflict.

In-bound arrivals have been projected to fall by as much as a quarter year-on-year in 2026, according to Global Forecasting.

As well as tourists, seafarers have been placed at risk. On Thursday, two Indian crew members were reported to have been killed in attacks on a tanker. Ashish Kumar and Dalip Singh were killed in strikes on a Palau-flagged oil tanker called Skylight in the Gulf of Oman.

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