From Berlin to Karachi, thousands demonstrate in support of either Israel or the Palestinians

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Demonstrators wave Israeli flags and hold placards with the portaits of Israeli hostages as they march to mark the 100th day of the hostages' captivity during the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on January 14, 2024 in Berlin. (AFP)
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Updated 15 January 2024
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From Berlin to Karachi, thousands demonstrate in support of either Israel or the Palestinians

  • Opposing demonstrations either demanded the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas or called for a cease-fire in Gaza

KARACHI, Pakistan: From Berlin to London and Limassol to Karachi, tens of thousands of people took to the streets Sunday to mark the 100th day of Israel’s war with Hamas. Opposing demonstrations either demanded the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas or called for a cease-fire in Gaza.
In the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, protesters waved Palestinian flags or wore the keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian scarf, to express their solidarity with Palestinians in a rally organized by the country’s largest religious political party, Jamaat-e-Islami.
The party’s Karachi chief, Hafiz Naeem Ur Rehman, called on the US to stop backing Israel and compensate Palestinians for their losses. He also criticized Muslim leaders and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation for not doing enough to help stop the war.
“Resolutions will not solve this problem,” Rehman said, adding that all “conscientious people” should support South Africa’s action to launch legal action against Israel for allegedly committing genocide in Gaza.
Karachi resident Ishrat Zahid took Muslim leaders to task for “peacefully sleeping in their homes (but) not even thinking about protesting.”
“This is why we have gathered here, to tell our Palestinian brothers and sisters that we are with them,” he said.
In the heart of the British capital, thousands of people chanted “Bring them home now” in a demonstration to demand the freedom of 132 remaining hostages taken by Hamas militants in the Oct. 7 attacks that also killed some 1,200 Israelis and touched off the war.
Gaza health authorities say the death toll in the enclave has already eclipsed 23,000 people, roughly 1 percent of the Palestinian territory’s population. Thousands more remain missing or badly wounded, while 80 percent of the population has been displaced.
Protesters in London held posters with photos and the words “100 days in hell” to express their solidarity with Israel.
Ayelet Svatitzky, the sister of a hostage still in captivity, warned “there is no more time” for those captured, and called for their release ahead of the 100th day since Hamas launched its attack on Israel.
“My biggest fear is, I don’t know how long it’s going to last, I don’t know how long he can hold on and I don’t know what his condition is,’’ she said of her brother Nadav Popplewell, 51, one of two UK nationals who remain hostage.
Popplewell was captured alongside his 79-year-old mother, Channah Peri. Though Peri was released during a November cease-fire, Svatitzky’s elder brother, Roi Popplewell, was found dead near his home just after the attacks.
The demonstration comes just a day after thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated in London, Dublin and Edinburgh, calling for a permanent cease-fire in the conflict — part of a global day of action involving 30 countries.
In a reflection of ongoing tensions, members of the crowd Sunday had to wait in line to get their bags searched before entering the square. Barricades were erected on the square’s perimeter, lined by police officers and security guards.
A similar demonstration was held in Berlin, where pianist Igor Levit played a yellow piano as part of an initiative to keep the memory of the Israeli hostages alive.
Played in public places from Tel Aviv to Tokyo, the yellow grand piano aimed to bring to mind 22-year-old hostage Alon Ohel, a pianist who was abducted by Hamas militants during the Oct. 7 attack on the Nova Music Festival.
Alon’s mother Idit Ohel who was on hand for the demonstration said the piano is symbolic of “something bigger.”
“Music is something that is beyond Religion. Beyond gender. And it’s something that we can understand,” she said.
In the French capital, several hundred protesters converged in the city center holding placards with the faces of Israeli hostages, singing for their release around a large banner strewn on the ground reading, “Bring them home now!”
About 100 motorcyclists waved Israeli flags and sported stickers of Israeli hostages on their bikes as they cruised around Paris in a ride to express support for Israel. The motorcycle ride followed an earlier, pro-Israeli bicycle procession around the city with cyclists waving Israeli flags and chanting “Free the hostages.”
On Cyprus’ southern coastline outside the town of Limassol, several hundred protesters waved Palestinian flags and held placards outside the entrance of a British air force base calling for a “Free Palestine” and an end to the “siege of Gaza.”
Protesters handed authorities at RAF Akrotiri a petition demanding an end to the use of the air base as a launchpad for airstrikes in the region and the alleged transfer of arms to Israel from there.
British aircraft had taken off from RAF Akrotiri — one of two military bases that Britain maintains in Cyprus — to strike Houthi targets in Yemen in recent days.
A British Ministry of Defense spokesperson said that no UK aircraft have delivered any lethal cargo to Israel and that the UK government is “focused on getting significantly more aid to Gaza” after delivering about 96 tons of British and Cypriot aid from Cyprus to Egypt for the people in the Palestinian enclave.
In neighboring Turkiye, about 2,000 marchers waved Palestinian and Turkish flags in Istanbul while paying homage to nine Turkish soldiers who were killed in northern Iraq last week.
Similar demonstrations organized by Turkiye’s Humanitarian Relief Foundation were held in other Turkish cities. Foundation representative Osman Delibas linked the war in Gaza and hostilities in Iraq. Turkiye holds Kurdish militants in Iraq responsible for the death of its soldiers.
“Those who supported terrorist organizations and unleashed them on us are the same ones who committed genocide in Gaza,” state-run Anadolu news agency quoted Delibas as saying.
At the Vatican, Pope Francis told the faithful in St. Peter’s Square that modern warfare is “a crime against humanity” because it “sows death among civilians and destroys cities and infrastructure.” In his weekly appearance at the Vatican window overlooking the Square, the pope lamented that “arms continue to kill and destroy” when at the start of the year “we exchanged wishes for peace,” urging people not to forget those who “suffer the cruelty of war” around the world especially in Ukraine, Palestine and Israel.
In Lisbon, Portugal, ballet dancer Irina Almeida joined several thousand marchers to demand a cease-fire in Gaza as they made their way from the US to the Israeli embassies, chanting “Yes to peace” and “No to war.”
“It’s not about 100 days, it’s 75 years,” said Almeida. “This is the 21st century and this should have never happened in the history of humankind, let alone at a time when we say we are so developed.”


Harvard to hold graduation in shadow of Trump ‘retribution’

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Harvard to hold graduation in shadow of Trump ‘retribution’

  • Thursday’s commencement comes as Donald Trump piles unprecedented pressure on Harvard
  • Students wearing black academic gowns tour through Cambridge with photo-taking family members
CAMBRIDGE, United States: Harvard is due to hold its annual graduation ceremony Thursday as a federal judge considers the legality of punitive measures taken against the university by President Donald Trump that threaten to overshadow festivities.
Thursday’s commencement comes as Trump piles unprecedented pressure on Harvard, seeking to ban it from having foreign students, shredding its contracts with the federal government, slashing its multibillion-dollar grants and challenging its tax-free status.
Harvard is challenging all of the measures in court.
The Ivy League institution has continually drawn Trump’s ire while publicly rejecting his administration’s repeated demands to give up control of recruitment, curricula and research choices. The government claims Harvard tolerates antisemitism and liberal bias.
“Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper,” Trump said Wednesday.
Harvard president Alan Garber, who told National Public Radio on Tuesday that “sometimes they don’t like what we represent,” may speak to address the ceremony.
Garber has acknowledged that Harvard does have issues with antisemitism, and has struggled to ensure that a variety of viewpoints can be safely heard on campus.
“What is perplexing is the measures that they have taken to address these (issues) don’t even hit the same people that they believe are causing the problems,” Garber told NPR.
Basketball star and human rights campaigner Kareem Abdul-Jabbar addressed the class of 2025 for Class Day on Wednesday.
“When a tyrannical administration tried to bully and threaten Harvard to give up their academic freedom and destroy free speech, Dr. Alan Garber rejected the illegal and immoral pressures,” he said, comparing Garber to civil rights icon Rosa Parks.
Madeleine Riskin-Kutz, a Franco-American classics and linguistics student at Harvard, said some students were planning individual acts of protest against the Trump policies.
“The atmosphere (is) that just continuing on joyfully with the processions and the fanfare is in itself an act of resistance,” the 22-year-old said.
Garber has led the fight-back in US academia after Trump targeted several prestigious universities including Columbia which made sweeping concessions to the administration in an effort to restore $400 million of withdrawn federal grants.
A federal judge in Boston will on Thursday hear arguments over Trump’s effort to exclude Harvard from the main system for sponsoring and hosting foreign students.
Judge Allison Burroughs quickly paused the policy which would have ended Harvard’s ability to bring students from abroad who currently make up 27 percent of its student body.
Harvard has since been flooded with inquiries from foreign students seeking to transfer to other institutions, Maureen Martin, director of immigration services, said Wednesday.
“Many international students and scholars are reporting significant emotional distress that is affecting their mental health and making it difficult to focus on their studies,” Martin wrote in a court filing.
Retired immigration judge Patricia Sheppard protested outside Harvard Yard on Wednesday, sporting a black judicial robe and brandishing a sign reading “for the rule of law.”
“We have to look at why some of these actions have been filed, and it does not seem to me seemly that a president would engage in certain actions as retribution,” she told AFP.
Ahead of the graduation ceremony, members of the Harvard band sporting distinctive crimson blazers and brandishing their instruments filed through the narrow streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts – home to the elite school, America’s oldest university.
A huge stage had been erected and hundreds of chairs laid out in a grassy precinct that was closed off to the public for the occasion.
Students wearing black academic gowns also toured through Cambridge with photo-taking family members, AFP correspondents saw.

Militant attacks hit Mozambique as Total readies to resume gas project

Updated 35 min 9 sec ago
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Militant attacks hit Mozambique as Total readies to resume gas project

  • TotalEnergies paused its multi-billion-dollar liquefied natural gas project in 2021
  • TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanne said that the security situation had ‘greatly improved’

MAPUTO: A series of attacks in northern Mozambique this month point to a resurgence of violence by Daesh-linked militants as energy giant TotalEnergies prepares to resume a major gas project, analysts say.
The group terrorized northern Mozambique for years before brazenly vowing in 2020 to turn the northern gas-rich Cabo Delgado province into a caliphate.
TotalEnergies paused a multi-billion-dollar liquefied natural gas project there in 2021 following a wave of bloody raids that forced more than a million people to flee.
The insurgency was pushed to the background by a months-long unrest that followed elections in October.
But there has been a new wave of violence. In May, the Islamists attacked two military installations, claiming to kill 11 soldiers in the first and 10 in the second.
A security expert confirmed the first attack and put the toll at 17. There was no comment from the Mozambican security forces.
There were two dramatic strikes earlier – a raid on a wildlife reserve in the neighboring Niassa province late April killed at least two rangers, while an ambush in Cabo Delgado claimed the lives of three Rwandan soldiers.
Also unusual was a thwarted attack on a Russian oceanographic vessel in early May that the crew said in a distress message was launched by “pirates,” according to local media.
“Clearly there is a cause and effect because some actions correspond exactly to important announcements in the gas area,” said Fernando Lima, a researcher with the Cabo Ligado conflict observatory which monitors violence in Mozambique, referring to the $4.7 billion funding approved in mid-March by the US Export-Import Bank for the long-delayed gas project.
“The insurgents are seeing more vehicles passing by with white project managers,” said Jean-Marc Balencie of the French-based political and security risk group Attika Analysis.
“There’s more visible activity in the region and that’s an incentive for attacks.”
Conflict tracker ACLED recorded at least 80 attacks in the first four months of the year.
The uptick was partly due to the end of the rainy season which meant roads were once again passable, it said.
TotalEnergies chief executive Patrick Pouyanne said last Friday that the security situation had “greatly improved” although there were “sporadic incidents.”
The attack that stalled the TotalEnergies project in 2021 occurred in the port town of Palma and lasted several days, sending thousands fleeing into the forest.
ACLED estimated that more than 800 civilians and combatants were killed while independent journalist Alex Perry reported after an investigation that more than 1,400 were dead or missing.
Rwandan forces deployed alongside the Mozambique military soon afterwards, their number increasing to around 5,000, based on Rwandan military statements.
The concentration of forces in Cabo Delgado “allows insurgents to easily conduct operations in Niassa province,” said a Mozambican military officer on condition of anonymity.
The raid on the tourist wildlife lodge straddling Cabo Delgado and Niassa provinces was for “propaganda effect,” said Lima, as it grabbed more international media attention than hits on local villages that claim the lives of locals.
Strikes on civilians, with several cases of decapitation reported, often fall under the radar because of the remoteness of the impoverished region and official silence.
“More than 25,000 people have been displaced in Mozambique within a few weeks,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said last week.
This was in addition to the 1.3 million the UN said in November had been displaced since the conflict began in 2017.
“The renewed intensity of the conflict affects regions previously considered rather stable,” said UNHCR’s Mozambique representative Xavier Creach.
In Niassa, for example, about 2,085 people fled on foot after an attack on Mbamba village late April where women reported witnessing beheadings.
More than 6,000 people have died in the conflict since it erupted, according to Acled.


East Timor deports ex-Philippine lawmaker wanted in 2023 killings

Updated 36 min 48 sec ago
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East Timor deports ex-Philippine lawmaker wanted in 2023 killings

  • Former Philippines congressman allegedly masterminded a March 2023 attack that killed then-provincial governor Roel Degamo and nine others
  • “The Government hereby informs that Arnolfo Teves Jr. will be deported from Timor-Leste”

MANILA: East Timor deported an Interpol-wanted Filipino murder suspect on Thursday whose case the government has linked to its aspirations to join the regional ASEAN bloc, after more than two years of political wrangling.

Former Philippines congressman Arnolfo Teves allegedly masterminded a March 2023 attack that killed then-provincial governor Roel Degamo and nine others.

AFP journalists saw him boarding a turboprop plane with Philippine Air Force markings that then took off from Presidente Nicolau Lobato International Airport.

Teves was detained at a driving range in the capital Dili last year, but a Timorese court blocked his extradition. The Philippines justice secretary suggested the decision may have been bought, saying it was “obvious that some people are making money out of this.”

In an abrupt turnaround, East Timor announced Teves’ impending deportation late on Wednesday, saying his continued presence represented a security risk.

“The Government hereby informs that Arnolfo Teves Jr. will be deported from Timor-Leste,” it said in a statement, using the country’s alternate name.

It added that East Timor’s “imminent full accession” to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) had reinforced its responsibility to collaborate regionally on legal matters.

On Thursday, the Philippines’ Department of Justice said it was preparing a team to facilitate Teves’ repatriation based on deportation documents from East Timor.

Ex-lawmaker Teves is the prime suspect in the murder of Degamo, the former governor of Negros Oriental province.

Degamo had been distributing aid at his home in Pamplona when six people carrying rifles and dressed in military fatigues entered the compound and opened fire on March 4, 2023.

The killings came months after Degamo was declared winner of a disputed vote, unseating Henry Teves, the ex-lawmaker’s brother.

Arnolfo Teves was expelled from the House of Representatives after refusing to return to the Philippines to face murder charges.

On Wednesday, Teves’ son Axl posted videos on social media of his father being dragged away by Timorese police, claiming he had been “kidnapped.”

Degamo’s widow Janice, meanwhile, called the arrest a “significant step toward justice.”


Thai, Cambodian army chiefs to meet over border clash

Updated 29 May 2025
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Thai, Cambodian army chiefs to meet over border clash

  • A Cambodian soldier was killed on Wednesday during an exchange of gunfire with the Thai army at the border
  • Cambodia and Thailand have long been at odds over their more than 800-kilometer-long border

BANGKOK: The military chiefs of Thailand and Cambodia will meet Thursday, both governments said, after a Cambodian soldier was killed in a border clash.

Thailand’s Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra told reporters on Thursday that “both sides should remain calm and discuss to see what we can agree,” and called for peaceful discussion.

Her Cambodian counterpart Hun Manet wrote on Facebook that he hoped the meeting between the two army commanders “will yield positive results.”

Thai Defense Minister Phumtham Wechayachai told journalists the talks will be held on Thursday afternoon, adding that there had been a “misunderstanding by both sides.”

A Cambodian soldier was killed on Wednesday during an exchange of gunfire with the Thai army at the border, a Cambodian army spokesman said.

His death – a rare fatality along the long-sensitive frontier – came after Cambodian and Thai leaders attended a Southeast Asian summit where the regional ASEAN grouping vowed greater cooperation.

Thailand’s military said Wednesday that its soldiers fired in response to gunshots from Cambodia’s border force, leading to an exchange lasting around 10 minutes before the Thai side said the Cambodians requested a ceasefire.

Cambodian Royal Army spokesman Mao Phalla confirmed the clash on Wednesday, but said Thai soldiers had attacked Cambodian troops who were on border patrol duty in northern Preah Vihear province.

“Our soldier died in the trenches. The Thais came to attack us,” Mao Phalla said.

Cambodia and Thailand have long been at odds over their more than 800-kilometer-long (500-mile) border, which was largely drawn during the French occupation of Indochina.

Bloody military clashes between the Southeast Asian neighbors erupted in 2008 over the Preah Vihear temple near their shared border.

The row over a patch of land next to the 900-year-old temple led to several years of sporadic violence, resulting in at least 28 deaths before the International Court of Justice ruled the disputed area belonged to Cambodia.

In February, Bangkok formally protested to Phnom Penh after a video of women singing a patriotic Khmer song in front of another disputed temple was posted on social media.

On Thursday, influential former Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen – Hun Manet’s father, and an ally of Paetongtarn’s father, ex-Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra – urged calm and a peaceful resolution to the ongoing border issues between the two countries.

Paetongtarn traveled to Cambodia in April for a two-day visit, during which she met Hun Manet to discuss cross-border cooperation on issues such as online scams and air pollution.


Navy plane crashes in South Korea

Updated 29 May 2025
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Navy plane crashes in South Korea

SEOUL: A navy plane has crashed in the southern city of Pohang in South Korea, a local government official said on Thursday.
The crash happened at around 1:50 p.m. (0450 GMT), the official at the Pohang city government said.
Four people were on board the patrol plane which crashed in the mountains on the east coast, the Yonhap News Agency reported, citing authorities.
Smoke was seen from the location where the plane appeared to have crashed, Yonhap said, citing a civilian witness.