The Israeli parliament has pushed forward an amendment proposing the death penalty for any Palestinian convicted of killing Jewish citizens. It must pass a second and third reading before becoming law.
About 30 minutes into a new documentary featuring testimonies of Israeli soldiers about being deployed to Gaza, a soldier reflects on the enclave after months of sustained Israeli war on it: “Terrible heat. Sand. Stench. And dogs wandering around in packs. They eat dead bodies … It’s horrifying … It’s a kind of zombie apocalypse. No trees. No bushes. No roads. There’s nothing.”
The documentary, Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War, shown on UK network ITV on Monday, featured Israeli soldiers, some speaking of shame at having participated in what they concede is a genocide, others unflinchingly detailing the nature of that war.
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Included are the details of a firing policy that takes little to no account of cause, the wholesale destruction of property and homes, the systematic use of human shields, drone warfare and indiscriminate killing tied to a weaponised system of aid.
“People don’t think about it,” one participant, credited as Eli, tells the camera. “Because if you do think about it, you’ll want to kill yourself.
“When you take a moment to try and think about it, you want to scream,” he says, his face blacked out to obscure his identity.
Through its two years of genocidal war on Gaza, Israel has killed more than 69,000 people and injured hundreds of thousands more. International agencies say it will be decades before the enclave recovers, if it ever does.
Israel’s own intelligence suggests that 83 percent of those it has killed in Gaza were civilians.
“‘There are no civilians in Gaza,’ you hear it all the time,” Daniel, a commander with an Israeli tank unit, said. Another contributor, Major Neta Caspin, described a conversation with her brigade’s rabbi.
“[He] sat down next to me and spent half an hour explaining why we must be just like they [Hamas] were on 7 October 2023. That we must take revenge on all of them, including civilians … that this is the only way,” she said.
Hamas’s armed wing led an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, during which 1,139 people died and about 250 were taken captive.
Armoured Corps Captain Yotam Vilk described the suspension of all rules for firing on civilians – that they must have the means, intention and ability to pose a threat to Israeli soldiers.
“There’s no such thing as means, intent and ability in Gaza,” Vilk explained. “It’s just ‘a suspicion of walking where it’s not allowed’,” he said, describing the overcrowded and chaotic interior of Gaza, where the precise limits on movement were known predominantly to Israeli troops alone.
“Anyone who crosses the line is automatically incriminated and can be put to death,” Vilk added.
Throughout its war, Israel has denied the growing number of accusations of war crimes from multiple bodies, claiming that it has investigated any credible allegations.
However, in August, a report by UK monitor Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) showed that, of the limited investigations into accusations of war crimes by military investigators, including the killing of 15 paramedics in April, few have resulted in any action.
Responding to Israeli denials that it did not use human shields, tank commander Daniel was clear that the army “is lying”.
“It’s called the ‘mosquito protocol’,” he said of the routine practice of seizing Palestinian civilians, strapping an iPhone to them and using them to explore suspected Hamas holdouts remotely.
“Every company has its own ‘mosquito’,” he said, referring to captured Palestinians as insects. “That’s three Palestinians per battalion, nine to 12 per brigade, then dozens, if not hundreds, per division.”
Some soldiers in his unit decided to release two teenage human shields they had captured out of concern they were breaking international law, Daniel recalled, adding that a senior officer said at the time: “Soldiers don’t need to know about international law, just the ‘[Israeli military] spirit’.”
Through its two years of war on Gaza, Israel has destroyed or damaged 92 percent of its housing stock and displaced at least 1.9 million people, according to the UN, many multiple times.
All the institutions, from universities to hospitals, that make up a society have been targeted for destruction. Social media videos uploaded by Israeli soldiers show an orgy of violence, with Palestinian homes and belongings ransacked and held up for ridicule by soldiers.
“You feel that every day could be your last and that you can do anything,” one conscript who only gave his name as “Yaakov” said. “Not out of revenge, but just because you can.”
Other participants talked of routinely burning Palestinian homes or celebrated their bulldozing.
Speaking from the illegal Israeli settlement of Beit El in the occupied West Bank, rabbinical judge Avraham Zarbiv – the subject of a war crimes complaint to the International Criminal Court – boasted of driving a bulldozer to destroy people’s homes and belongings during his time in Gaza.
“I post a lot of videos,” he says, before cutting to one showing him driving a bulldozer, destroying homes in clear contravention of international law.
“Until the end, until victory, until settlement. We will not give up until this village is wiped out,” he says in the video, telling the camera how his video “lift[s] soldiers’ spirits”.
Continuing his comments, Zarbiv claimed credit for pioneering the tactic of destroying entire homes that is now commonplace.
“We changed the conduct of an entire army,” he bragged. “Rafah is flattened. Jabalia is flattened. Beit Hanoon is flattened. Shujayea is flattened. And Khan Younis is flattened.”
Cheered on by a media and a public that a film participant, platoon sergeant Yaakov, described as neither knowing nor wanting to know what was happening in Gaza, another soldier described the experience of sitting in a basement, half-dressed, killing Palestinians remotely via drone.
Any life that was not Israeli meant little, Eli said, with Yaakov separately describing how soldiers at the private US-Israeli aid programme, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), would “open fire, even if they don’t see a concrete threat”.
Some of the participants acknowledged they had taken part in genocide; others accepted the pain they caused.
“All mosques, almost all hospitals, almost all universities, every cultural institution has been destroyed,” Yaakov told the camera.
“You’ve destroyed a society. You don’t have to kill them one by one to destroy every sign of the society that once existed there.
US President Donald Trump has threatened the BBC with a $1bn lawsuit over the editing of a 2021 speech he gave shortly before protesters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump’s threat on Monday evening is the latest turn in a saga which has embroiled the corporation for the past week, following the leak of a memo which criticised the BBC’s impartiality in a number of areas of its coverage.
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In particular, the memo, which was written by a former BBC journalist and independent consultant to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board, Michal Prescott, singled out the misleading editing of Trump’s speech, which was featured in a Panorama documentary aired shortly before the US election last year.
The leaked memo has prompted outrage, mostly from right-wing media organisations and politicians, and prompted the resignations of Director-General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness on Sunday.
As a public broadcaster that is funded by a mandatory licence fee for all households in possession of a television, the BBC faces intense scrutiny from all sides of the political divide, with some claiming it is too conservative in its coverage, and others saying it is too left-leaning.
The organisation has also weathered several scandals in recent years over the behaviour of some of its presenters, as well as complaints from its journalists over its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.
This year, it was forced to drop former professional footballer and sports commentator Gary Lineker over a pro-Palestine Instagram post that was widely seen as anti-Semitic.
Some media insiders say this is all part of a push by right-wing figures in the BBC to reassert control over the BBC’s editorial content. Speaking to Radio 4’s flagship Today news programme on Monday, David Yelland, former editor of the Sun newspaper, said Davie and Turness were the victims of a “coup”.
The Guardian newspaper cited a “BBC insider” who said that board member Robbie Gibb, who is a personal friend of Prescott, had “led the charge”.
Gibb also served as director of communications for Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May and was an editorial adviser at the right-leaning GB News, before being appointed by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson to the BBC board in 2021. Gibb also sits on the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) along with BBC chair and committee head Samir Shah, Tim Davie and independent director Caroline Thomson.
The BBC, responding to queries from the Guardian, said Gibb was only one of the four board members who approved Prescott as a consultant to EGSC. Prescott, in his memo, said he had no political affiliations.
This is a timeline of events leading up to the Trump Panorama documentary scandal this week.
Some of the dates highlighted here are taken from a letter sent by chair Samir Shah to parliament on Monday, and from the memo sent by Michael Prescott to BBC board members.
An hour-long BBC Panorama documentary titled, Trump: A Second Chance? was broadcast one week before the US presidential elections.
In it, two separate parts of a speech made by Trump before the Capitol Hill riots in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, were spliced together by editors.
This editing gave the impression that Trump had actively encouraged the riots, which turned violent. The edited clip showed Trump saying, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
However, transcripts from Trump’s speech show that he first said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.”
Then, nearly an entire hour later, he said, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He was not directly referencing the march on the Capitol in the second part, and the Panorama documentary did not include a part where Trump said he wanted supporters to “peacefully” make their voices heard.
Concerns about the editing of the Trump speech were raised at a meeting of the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board (EGSB). However, this was raised as part of general reflections on coverage of the elections, according to Samir Shah.
Prescott raised concerns, Shah said, but the committee also heard from the news department, which said it was edited to “better convey the message of the speech”. Feedback was sent to the Panorama team, but no formal action was taken, Shah said.
Prescott later wrote in his memo that EGSC consultant David Grossman also delivered a report during the meeting showing the BBC had been biased in its coverage of Trump, and appeared to favour Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris.
In February, the UK’s media regulator, Ofcom, said a BBC documentary about Palestinian children living through Israel’s war on Gaza had broken rules on impartiality as it was narrated by the 13-year-old son of a deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas-run government.
Five days after it was broadcast, the BBC removed the documentary, Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone, from its online streaming platform.
According to Prescott’s memo, a senior member of the news team again defended the Panorama editing, saying, “There was no attempt to mislead the audience about the content or nature of Mr Trump’s speech before the riot at the Capitol. It’s normal practice to edit speeches into short form clips.”
Prescott added that Turness also justified the editing at this meeting.
In his memo, Prescott said he emailed Samir Shah the following day to explain his concerns, saying, “This is a very, very dangerous precedent. I hope you agree and take some form of action to ensure this potentially huge problem is nipped in the bud.”
Prescott said he received no reply.
This was undertaken by Chris Saul, a legal consultant who has been tasked with previous reviews of the transparency of BBC processes since 2019. The specific issues he was asked to report on for this review, and the outcomes, are unclear.
At some point after this, Prescott sent his detailed memo to all board members along with a cover letter stating his “despair” at being ignored by senior news leaders.
The memo accused the BBC of “misleading” edits, and claimed the BBC Arabic service had shown anti-Israel bias by over-emphasising stories critical of Israel. Prescott’s memo said BBC coverage was “misrepresenting” the number of women and children killed in Gaza, and also wrongly presented coverage on starvation in the besieged enclave.
At one point, Prescott appeared to take a swipe at Al Jazeera: When a senior news member defended BBC Arabic in meetings, saying it was almost as trusted as Al Jazeera, Prescott questioned if Al Jazeera “is the gold standard” the BBC should aspire to.
The memo further criticised what he called the BBC’s “one-sided” trans rights coverage, claiming stories highlighting women’s rights organisations and others who were critical of the trans rights movement had been suppressed.
In July, an internal BBC investigation found that the documentary, Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone, which was removed from its website in February, had breached its editorial guidelines on accuracy.
More than 100 journalists working for the BBC wrote a letter protesting this and claimed they were being forced to “do Israel’s PR”.
“We believe the refusal to broadcast the documentary ‘Gaza: Medics Under Fire’ is just one in a long line of agenda driven decisions,” the journalists wrote. “It demonstrates, once again, that the BBC is not reporting ‘without fear or favour’ when it comes to Israel.”
Shah said he met Prescott afterwards to discuss “next steps”.
This was the first time the contents of the memo entered the public domain. The right-wing broadsheet newspaper accused the BBC of doctoring the Trump speech and reported that Prescott had revealed “systemic problems” which BBC management had failed to address.
Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee, led by Conservative chair Caroline Dinenage, wrote to Samir Shah requesting access to Prescott’s full report, and demanding to know what actions had been taken by the BBC in response to the memo when it was first sent.
Dinenage also requested an update about the EGSC review, which began in June. “The BBC clearly has serious questions to answer regarding both its editorial standards and the way in which concerns are handled by senior management,” Dinenage wrote in the letter.
She added that members of parliament “need to be reassured that those at the very top of the BBC are treating these issues with the seriousness they deserve”.
In a statement, a BBC spokesperson said, “While we don’t comment on leaked documents, when the BBC receives feedback, it takes it seriously and considers it carefully.”
According to reporting by the Guardian newspaper, Gibb was present at this meeting and was one of the board members who pressed CEO Turness over Prescott’s claims. Gibb had also pressed Turness on the memo in an earlier board meeting, The Guardian reported.
The parliamentary website announced that Michael Prescott would give evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee on Wednesday, November 12 at 10am, as the UK government prepared to launch a review of the BBC generally in advance renewal of its Royal Charter, which sets the terms for its operations, and which is due in 2027. In a later update, the session was postponed to an as-yet-undisclosed date.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt criticised the BBC in an interview with The Daily Telegraph following the leak. Leavitt said watching the BBC on her trips to the UK “ruins” her day and that the BBC is “100 percent fake news” and a “propaganda machine”.
In a column in the right-wing Daily Mail newspaper, Johnson accused Director-General Tim Davie of failing to provide any explanations about the issue of impartiality at the BBC following the leak.
“No one has even come close to resigning,” he wrote.
Johnson accused the BBC of being a “sort of mouthpiece for Hamas”, and added that until Davie responded to the memo, “I am simply going to stop paying my licence fee and suggest you do the same.”
Director-General Tim Davie said “ultimate responsibility” lay with him, and that he had decided to resign after “reflecting on the very intense personal and professional demands of managing this role over many years in these febrile times”.
Chief executive of BBC News, Deborah Turness said the “buck stops with me”. She added that “while mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong”.
Trump reacted triumphantly to the news of the resignations on his Truth Social network.
He wrote: “The TOP people in the BBC, including TIM DAVIE, the BOSS, are all quitting/FIRED, because they were caught ‘doctoring’ my very good (PERFECT!) speech of January 6th. Thank you to The Telegraph for exposing these Corrupt “Journalists.” These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election. On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for Democracy!”
The BBC chair and head of the EGSC, Shah responded to Parliament’s letter of November 4.
Shah said many of the issues Prescott raised were already under review.
He pushed back against claims by Prescott that management had not acted on the points raised regarding the Trump documentary.
Shah wrote, “There was concern expressed by members of the Committee as well as Mr Prescott of the way programme was edited. However, the EGSC also heard from BBC News that the purpose of editing the clip was to convey the message of the speech made by President Trump so that Panorama’s audience could better understand how it had been received by President Trump’s supporters and what was happening on the ground at that time.”
He said he met with Prescott after an October 17 board meeting to discuss the issues and next steps.
Shah apologised for the BBC’s “error of judgement” over the editing of Trump’s speech, but said there was no institutional bias at the BBC.
He also laid out steps being taken to review the issues Prescott had raised and to overhaul the EGSC more generally.
US President Donald Trump threatened a $1bn lawsuit via a letter to the BBC from his counsel, Alejandro Brito, alleging “malicious, disparaging” edits.
The letter demanded a retraction of the documentary, an apology, and payments to “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused”.
The broadcaster has been given until Friday 22:00 GMT to respond or, Trump’s lawyer said, he will be: “left with no alternative but to enforce his legal and equitable rights, all of which are expressly reserved and are not waived, including by filing legal action for no less than $1,000,000,000 in damages. The BBC is on notice. PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY”.
Eight people have been arrested in Turkiye and more than 1,000 players have been suspended as a wide-ranging investigation into alleged betting on football matches rocks the country’s football federation.
Turkish authorities formally arrested Eyupspor Chairman Murat Ozkaya, a top-tier club chairman, and seven others on Monday, while the Turkish Football Federation (TFF) suspended 1,024 players pending disciplinary investigations. Of the suspended players, 27 compete in the country’s top-tier Super Lig, notably Galatasaray defender Eren Elmali, who also represents the Turkish national team.
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In a statement Galatasaray said it was “monitoring” the process and waiting for the investigation to be completed. Elmali said that his suspension was linked to a bet made on a team that was not his own five years ago, and that he had not made a bet since.
Those swept up in the probe are accused of abuse of power and match-fixing, among other charges.
The scandal came to light at the end of October, when the TFF announced that an investigation had revealed that 371 of the 571 active referees in its professional leagues had betting accounts, and 152 of them were actively gambling.
One referee had bet 18,227 times and 42 referees had bet on more than 1,000 football matches each. Others were found to have bet only once.
The third and fourth divisions in Turkiye, in which more than 900 of the suspected players compete, have been suspended for the last two weeks.
The moves come after the TFF earlier this month suspended 149 referees and assistant referees after an investigation found that the officials working in the country’s professional leagues were betting on football matches.
Islamabad, Pakistan – Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has blamed India for the “suicide attack” that struck outside the district and sessions court building in Islamabad on Tuesday afternoon.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said at least 12 people were killed and hospital authorities confirmed more than 30 wounded, including at least five in critical condition.
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The blast occurred as Islamabad hosted several international conferences and while sports events were also under way nearby. The Sri Lankan cricket team, which was attacked in March 2009 by gunmen in Pakistan, was playing a one-day international match in Rawalpindi, about 10km (6 miles) from the court.
The suicide attack marked a dramatic escalation of violence at a time when the military was focused on rescuing hundreds of cadets held by fighters in a separate incident at Cadet College in South Waziristan, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, near the Afghan border.
The assault on the college in Wana, the district capital, occurred a day earlier when an explosives-laden car rammed the campus entrance. Security forces say at least 300 cadets have been rescued so far and that operations to free the remainder are ongoing.
On Tuesday, another bomb in Dera Ismail Khan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, injured at least 14 security personnel.
Sharif blamed India for both the Islamabad and Wana incidents without offering evidence. “Both attacks are the worst examples of Indian state terrorism in the region. It is time for the world to condemn such nefarious conspiracies of India,” he said.
A day earlier, a car explosion in New Delhi killed at least 13 people. India’s Home Minister Amit Shah said on X that India would “hunt down each and every culprit behind this incident”.
Here is what we know so far about the Islamabad blast.
The suicide bomber struck after 12:30pm (07:30 GMT) at the entrance of the District Judicial Complex on Srinagar Highway, one of Islamabad’s main arteries.
Opened three years ago, the complex handles thousands of litigants and draws large numbers of lawyers daily. The complex has several gates, with a side entrance used primarily by judges and a main gate for litigants.
Key political and civic institutions – the Parliament, Supreme Court, and offices of the president and prime minister – are about 15km (9 miles) away.
The Jamaa-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway faction of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) armed group, claimed responsibility for the attack.
The TTP, an ideological ally of the Afghan Taliban, itself denied any role in the Islamabad attack.
Pakistan has suffered a series of attacks from the TTP in recent years that have led to the deaths of hundreds of security officials and civilians. Pakistan has repeatedly accused the Afghan Taliban of sheltering the TTP, a charge Kabul denies. The TTP are at the centre of recent tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan, including a series of deadly cross-border clashes.
Pakistan’s capital, however, has largely stayed peaceful in recent years. The last major attack in Islamabad was in December 2022, when a car rammed a police post and a police officer died. The TTP had claimed responsibility for that attack.
As Islamabad’s main district court, the judicial complex sees thousands of litigants visiting the court premises for their various cases. Thousands of lawyers also come to the complex for their daily duties.
Raja Aleem Abbasi, a member of the Islamabad Bar Council, was taking a break in the main courtyard when the blast shook the compound.
“It was a deafening blast, and complete chaos and panic set in. As we regained composure, I saw the head of the suicide bomber, which had flown from outside, rolling just in front of me, merely a few feet away,” a shaken Abbasi told Al Jazeera.
Abbasi, 60, said hundreds tried to flee, but the main entrance was blocked. “Soon, the entrance used for the judges was open for the public, allowing us to escape,” he added.
He estimated about 2,000 people were on the premises when the device detonated.
Mushahid Dawar, another lawyer, said he had left the compound on his motorcycle minutes before the blast but returned when he heard it.
“I had left for the office from the court when I heard the blast, and instinctively I turned back. However, as I saw so many bodies strewn on the road, I just could not bear the sight and decided to leave,” Dawar told Al Jazeera.
The attacks coincide with a fraught period in Pakistan-Afghanistan ties. The two neighbours were locked in a week of clashes last month before Qatar and Türkiye mediated a ceasefire in Doha on October 19.
Follow-up talks in Istanbul have, however, failed to resolve differences, and negotiations collapsed again over the weekend following the third round of talks.
Pakistan long enjoyed close ties with the Afghan Taliban and many Pakistanis welcomed the militants’ return to power in August 2021.
But relations have soured, largely over Pakistan’s accusations that Kabul has provided sanctuary to the TTP, an armed group that emerged in 2007 and has waged a sustained campaign against Islamabad.
Besides the TTP, Pakistan also accuses Afghanistan of sheltering the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and the ISIL affiliate in Khorasan Province (ISKP). The Taliban government denies responsibility for Pakistan’s internal security concerns.
Regional powers including China, Iran and Russia have urged the Taliban to act against the TTP. That message was reiterated at the Moscow Format consultations in early October, attended by Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban’s foreign minister.
Shortly after the blast, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif wrote on X that the country was “in a state of war”.
“Anyone who thinks that the Pakistan Army is fighting this war in the Afghan-Pakistan border region and the remote areas of Balochistan should take today’s suicide attack at the Islamabad district courts as a wake-up call: this is a war for all of Pakistan, in which the Pakistan Army is giving daily sacrifices and making the people feel secure,” he wrote.
The year 2025 has seen shifting regional alignments. Relations between Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban, once close, now stand at a breaking point, despite the current year seeing several attempts to patch up the relationship.
Pakistan appointed an ambassador to Kabul and engaged in multiple diplomatic dialogues, but relations have deteriorated.
India, which long treated the Taliban as a Pakistani proxy and shunned contact, has, on the other hand, strengthened its diplomatic and strategic ties in recent years, as witnessed by a visit by Afghanistan’s foreign minister to India last year.
Islamabad has historically accused New Delhi of stoking unrest in Balochistan and has more recently alleged Indian support for the TTP, charges India rejects.
Analysts warn that if tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan remain unresolved, instability is likely to spill across borders and provoke further attacks inside Pakistan’s cities.
Ihsanullah Tipu Mehsud, a security analyst in Islamabad, said the TTP has the capability to strike major cities but has largely concentrated its operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
“The Pakistani Taliban believe that if they continue attacking security personnel in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, they can weaken the control of administration and that will allow them opportunity to capture parts of the province, where they can make their bases,” Mehsud told Al Jazeera.
Indian police are investigating a deadly car explosion in New Delhi under an anti-terrorism law, officials have said, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to apprehend those responsible for what he called a “conspiracy” behind the blast.
Police were still to give details on Tuesday on what caused the explosion near the Indian capital’s historic Red Fort, but officials said that the case had been registered under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, India’s main “anti-terrorism” law, giving investigators broader powers to detain suspects.
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India’s “anti-terrorism” force, the National Investigation Agency, is leading the probe, the home affairs ministry said.
Monday’s explosion in a Hyundai i20 car has killed at least 12 people and injured 20, although there is some confusion over the exact number of dead due to the condition of the bodies of the dead after the blast.
The explosion, outside a busy metro station near one of India’s most iconic sites, was the first significant security incident since a shooting attack in April that left 26 dead in Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir, sparking clashes with Pakistan.
“I assure everyone that the agencies will get to the bottom of the entire conspiracy,” Modi said, in a speech during a state visit to neighbouring Bhutan, without giving further details.
“All those involved will be brought to justice.”
Reporting from close to the site of the blast, journalist Ishan Garg said the explosion had “shaken the sense of security” of Indians in the capital and further afield.
“The blast has sent the entire nation into a state of alert,” Garg told Al Jazeera, as he stood in front of the cordoned-off site of the explosion near the historic Red Fort, where investigators are carrying out their work.
He said heavy security had been deployed in the heart of the Indian capital, while the city’s borders were also under tight scrutiny.
Officials in states including Rajasthan and Odisha said they were ramping up security in the wake of the blast.
Indian media outlets, citing police sources, reported that investigators believe the explosion may be linked to raids on a suspected “terror” cell and the seizure of a large cache of explosive material in the city of Faridabad hours before the blast.
Faridabad, an industrial district in the neighbouring Haryana state, lies just 30km (18 miles) from the area in Delhi where Monday’s blast took place.
Prior to the blast, a large cache of explosives was reportedly seized in Faridabad, while in Indian-administered Kashmir, two Kashmiri doctors were arrested, including one from Faridabad. The car involved in the explosion was linked to one of the arrested doctors, according to reports.
Citing police sources, the Press Trust of India news agency reported that police had traced the route of the vehicle involved in the explosion from Faridabad to New Delhi’s Red Fort, using CCTV footage and data from a toll plaza to map out its 11-hour route.
According to the agency, the vehicle was first seen outside Asian Hospital in Faridabad, before it was seen crossing a toll plaza and entering Delhi at 8:13am (02:43 GMT).
At 3:19pm (09:49 GMT), the car entered a parking area near the Red Fort, where it remained for nearly three hours.