Israeli occupation forces have conducted a large-scale arrest campaign since Wednesday, with at least 40 Palestinians detained across the occupied West Bank by yesterday morning. Among those arrested were a patient receiving treatment in a hospital and several former prisoners.

The arrests were primarily concentrated in the Hebron and Tubas governorates, with others reported across the majority of the West Bank, according to a joint statement from the Palestinian Prisoners Club and the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs.

Organisations dedicated to prisoners’ rights have been unable to verify the full extent of the arrests due to the ongoing military operations by occupation forces in the Tulkarm and Tubas governorates, including their respective refugee camps.

Since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on 7 October 2023, and amid the ongoing genocide and comprehensive aggression against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, Israeli occupation forces have arrested more than 10,700 Palestinians in the West Bank, including Jerusalem.

China is to raise the retirement age for the first time since 1978, as the world’s second-largest economy faces up to a sharply ageing population that will leave it short of workers.

The country will gradually extend the retirement age for all men from 60 to 63, for women in white-collar jobs from 55 to 58, and for women in blue-collar work from 50 to 55, state-owned news agency Xinhua reported on Friday.

The measures were approved by the standing committee of China’s rubber-stamp parliament on Friday. They will take effect in January and be phased in over 15 years in line with the principle of “small-step adjustments”, Xinhua said.

Dozens of kilograms of cocaine have been found in banana deliveries to four of a French supermarket chain’s stores, with police unsure who the intended recipient was.

Staff at Grand Frais branches in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region in eastern France were astonished to find between 40kg (88lb) and 50kg of drugs hidden under pallets of bananas and were anxious to reassure customers that the cocaine had not come into contact with the fruit.

Now detectives are attempting to solve the mystery of how the drugs, believed to have originated in Colombia, came to be in the pallets and – more importantly – for whom they were destined.

Three forensic experts that reviewed dossier on slain Turkish-American activist say bullet did not appear to have ricocheted off the ground as Israel said

Three separate forensic experts who viewed the autopsy report told Middle East Eye that the damage on Ezgi’s skull and the destruction within suggest that it was a direct hit.

Biden initially issued a muted statement backing the Israeli assessment that the bullet that killed Eygi appeared to have “ricocheted off the ground", but as criticism has grown about the incident and the US response, his administration has become more vocal.

The U.S. military has announced the sale of billions of dollars of missiles, bombs, and other weapons to Israel in the past year, as the campaign on Gaza grinds on. Now, the Department of Defense is also building aircraft facilities in Israel to accommodate American-made refueling tanker planes, according to newly issued public contracting documents reviewed by The Intercept.

The project includes new construction and upgrades of existing buildings, including one or more hangars, warehouses, and storage facilities, at an Israeli military base in the south of Israel, according to Army Corps of Engineers documents.

Of the 31 Abrams tanks the U.S. sent to Ukraine, six have been destroyed, according to Oryx, an independent analyst group that tracks casualties. The rest are now used only occasionally. At $10 million apiece, tanks like the Abrams are not easily replaced. Among other Western tanks sent to Ukraine, 12 of the 18 latest-model German Leopards have been destroyed or damaged, according to Oryx.

As soon as you get on the road, a drone spots you, and then you're being hit with artillery, mines, anti-tank missiles, drones, guided bombs," said a Ukrainian driver of one of the Abrams tanks whose call sign is Smilik.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20236035

Andrew Roth in Washington

Thu 12 Sep 2024 14.30 EDT

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20236367

Sunjeev Bery

September 11 2024, 2:02 p.m.

https://archive.is/oxGMq

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s rare move to keep two Navy aircraft carriers in the Middle East over the past several weeks has now ended, as the USS Theodore Roosevelt is heading home, according to US officials.

US commanders in the Middle East have long argued that the presence of a US aircraft carrier and the warships accompanying it has been an effective deterrent in the region, particularly for Iran. Since the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip began last fall, there has been a persistent carrier presence in and around the region — and for short periods they have overlapped to have two of the carriers there at the same time.

A Washington Post investigation has found that Eygi was shot more than a half-hour after the height of confrontations in Beita, and some 20 minutes after protesters had moved down the main road — more than 200 yards away from Israeli forces. A Palestinian teenager, who witnesses say was standing about 20 yards from Eygi, was wounded by Israeli fire; the IDF would not say if he was a target.

A photograph taken at 1:21 p.m. shows at least four Israeli soldiers at the top of the hill. Video and photos from the next several minutes show soldiers taking up positions on higher ground — including on the rooftop of Beita resident Ali Maali’s home, and near a military vehicle.

A video filmed at 1:22 p.m. shows the road next to the olive grove. A shot rings out.

“They’re shooting with regular guns!” an activist says off-camera in Japanese. Steven Beck, an audio forensic expert who consulted for the FBI and reviewed the footage for The Post, said the pop heard on the video was consistent with a gunshot — a finding corroborated by a second audio expert, Rob Maher.

A video filmed at 1:29 p.m. shows people loitering at the bottom of the hill; a man stands with his hands on his hips.

“They haven’t shot any more live rounds, no more tear gas, yet,” Chabbott, the American volunteer, says in another video filmed around the same time. For nearly 20 minutes after that, the scene remained relatively calm, Palestinians and volunteers said.

“Gunshot!” an unseen woman can be heard screaming in the background. She pleads for an ambulance. In the olive grove, Helen saw Eygi drop facedown to the ground beside her. The older woman rolled her over. Blood was pouring from the left side of Eygi’s head, she said, and she was unresponsive.

But one of the soldiers on the roof was “training his gun in our direction,” recalled Pollak, who was standing next to a dumpster that had been moved into the middle of the road at the bottom of the hill. He and other activists said he was the closest person to Israeli troops at the time, just over 200 yards away; Eygi was around 30 yards farther.

The IDF’s initial inquiry into Eygi’s death “found that it is highly likely that she was hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire which was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the riot.”

Yet the shots fired toward the activists, including the one that claimed Eygi’s life, came some 20 minutes after they had retreated to the bottom of the hill — more than two football fields away from the nearest Israeli soldiers.