Category World News

Blast at housing complex near Iran’s Qom city injures several people

By in News, World News

At least seven people have been injured in an explosion at a residential building on the outskirts of the Iranian city of Qom, according to several Iranian news outlets.

At least five emergency vehicles were dispatched after Monday’s blast to the Nasim Pardisan residential complex to attend to the injured, Iran’s Student News Network (SNN) reported, quoting Dr Mohammad Javad Bagheri, head of Qom’s Emergency Services.

The state-affiliated Fars News Agency said the explosion happened at one of the buildings in the complex and damaged four residential units.

The explosion shattered windows of neighbouring buildings, and firefighting and police forces were deployed to the site, according to Fars.

Images and videos posted on social media showed several damaged vehicles next to the building.

Translation: An explosion in one of the residential complexes in Qom’s Pardisan left seven people injured.

According to the emergency services and fire department, the incident occurred on Monday morning and the probable cause was a gas leak.

Preliminary investigations indicated a gas leak may have caused the incident, but a detailed probe is being carried out to ascertain the source of the blast, Fars reported.

In recent days, some accounts on social media have linked such incidents across the country to last month’s Israeli war against Iran.

Fars quoted an unnamed official as saying people “should not worry about this narrative-building”, adding that if any hostile acts were to occur, “news of it would immediately be announced to the public.”

Similar explosions have been recorded across Iran since the June 24 ceasefire, which led to speculation that Israeli drone strikes launched from inside Iran might be responsible for the incidents. But authorities have rejected such speculation.

The latest incident came four days after an explosion occurred at a residential building in western Tehran’s Chitgar suburb, which was extensively bombed during the 12-day war. Many high-rise buildings in that district were built by Iran’s armed forces.

Authorities said the Chitgar explosion, which injured at least seven people, was also caused by a gas leak.

The next day, Iranian media reported the death of Ali Taeb, a senior Muslim scholar and veteran of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. No cause of death was provided, and officials have not commented.

Taeb was a former representative of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at the Sarallah Headquarters, the heart of the domestic security structure of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and a frequent target of Israeli attacks during the 12-day war.

He was also brother to Hossein Taeb and Mehdi Taeb, two senior figures within Iran’s theocratic establishment and the IRGC.

Lapid, Olmert slam Israel’s plans for ‘concentration camps’ in Gaza’s Rafah

By in News, World News

Two prominent Israeli politicians have criticised plans by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to set up what it calls a “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza, saying the proposal would amount to interning Palestinians in a “concentration camp”.

Former Prime Ministers Yair Lapid and Ehud Olmert levelled the criticism on Sunday as Israeli forces continued to bombard Gaza, killing at least 95 Palestinians over the course of the day.

Lapid, the leader of Israel’s biggest opposition party, told Israeli Army Radio that “nothing good” would come out of the plans to establish the “humanitarian city” on the ruins of the city of Rafah.

“It’s a bad idea from every possible perspective – security, political, economic, logistical,” he said.

“I don’t prefer to describe a humanitarian city as a concentration camp, but if exiting it is prohibited, then it is a concentration camp,” he added.

Lapid served as Israel’s prime minister for six months in 2022.

According to the Israeli government, the “humanitarian city” will initially house 600,000 displaced Palestinians currently living in tents in the overcrowded area of al-Mawasi along Gaza’s southern coast. But eventually, the enclave’s entire population of more than two million people is to be moved there.

Satellite images have shown Israeli forces have stepped up demolition operations in Rafah in recent months. On April 4, the number of destroyed buildings stood at about 15,800. By July 4, the number had gone up to 28,600.

Olmert, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2006 to 2009, also slammed the Israeli plan.

“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” he told the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper.

“If they [Palestinians] will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing,” he said. “When they build a camp where they [plan to] ‘clean’ more than half of Gaza, then the inevitable understanding of the strategy of this [is that] it is not to save [Palestinians]. It is to deport them, to push them and to throw them away. There is no other understanding that I have at least.”

Ethnic cleansing

Humanitarian officials also have said the plan for the internment camp in Rafah would lay the groundwork for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.

Philippe Lazzarini – head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, or UNRWA, which has been banned by Israel – asked last week if the plan would result in a “second Nakba”. The term refers to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes during the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel.

“This would de facto create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt for the Palestinians, displaced over and over across generations,” Lazzarini said, adding that it would “deprive Palestinians of any prospects of a better future in their homeland”.

The Israeli government insisted the transfer of Palestinians to the internment camp in Rafah would be “voluntary” while Netanyahu and United States President Donald Trump have continued to tout their proposal to forcibly transfer all of the Palestinians in Gaza out of the enclave.

Netanyahu said during a dinner with Trump last week that Israel was working with the US “very closely about finding countries that will seek to realise what they always say, that they want to give the Palestinians a better future”.

For his part, the US president said “we’ve had great cooperation from [countries] surrounding Israel” and “something good will happen” soon.

Israel’s neighbours and other Arab states, however, have roundly rejected any plans to displace Palestinians from Gaza, and so have the war-weary Palestinians of the coastal enclave.

The Reuters news agency, meanwhile, has reported that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private US- and Israeli-backed group distributing aid in Gaza, had floated plans to build large-scale camps called “humanitarian transit areas” inside and possibly outside the Palestinian territory.

The proposal, created sometime after February 11, outlines a vision of “replacing Hamas’ control over the population in Gaza” with the GHF describing the camps as places where Palestinians could “temporarily reside, deradicalize, re-integrate and prepare to relocate if they wish to do so”, according to Reuters.

The GHF is the main group that the Israeli military currently permits to distribute food in Gaza.

The group had set up four distribution sites in southern and central Gaza but currently operates a single point near Rafah. Since its operations began at the end of May, Israeli forces have killed at least 800 Palestinians seeking aid at the GHF’s sites.

Israel wants the GHF to supplant the United Nations in Gaza and take over all aid operations.

Human rights groups and experts say the GHF is also part of Israeli plans to push the Palestinian population to the south and eventually out of the Gaza Strip.

Omar Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, told Al Jazeera that the killings at the GHF sites and now the plan for the internment camp make it clear that “Israel’s ultimate goal here is the physical destruction of Gaza, the engineered collapse of Palestinian society there and the forcible depopulation of the entirety of the Strip.”

He said Israel’s plan was to concentrate the Palestinian population and put “pressure on them so their choice on a daily basis is between starvation and being shot”.

Historic Grand Canyon lodge burns to ashes in wildfire at US national park

By in News, World News

Wildfires have engulfed a historic lodge, destroying it and dozens of other structures along the Grand Canyon’s North Rim in the state of Arizona in the southwestern United States, park officials say.

Rangers were forced to close access to that part of the Grand Canyon National Park on Sunday. Superintendent Ed Keable said the Grand Canyon Lodge was consumed by flames.

He said a park visitor centre, petrol station, wastewater treatment plant, administrative building and employee housing were also among the 50 to 80 structures lost.

Two wildfires are burning at or near the North Rim. They are known as the White Sage Fire and the Dragon Bravo Fire. The latter is the one that destroyed the lodge and other structures.

Started by lightning on July 4, the Dragon Bravo Fire was initially managed by authorities with a “confine and contain” strategy. However, due to hot temperatures, low humidity and strong winds, it grew to 20 square kilometres (7.8 square miles), fire officials said.

No injuries have been reported so far.

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs urged the federal government late on Sunday to investigate the National Park Service’s response to the wildfire.

“They must first take aggressive action to end the wildfire and prevent further damage,” she said in a post on X. “But Arizonans deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park.”

Millions of people visit the park annually with most going to the South Rim. The North Rim is open seasonally. It was evacuated on Thursday because of the wildfire and will remain closed for the rest of the season, the park said in a statement.

The Grand Canyon Lodge was often the first prominent feature that visitors would see, even before viewing the canyon.

“It just feels like you’re a pioneer when you walk through [the lodge],” said Tim Allen, an Arizona resident and yearly visitor to the Grand Canyon. “It really felt like you were in a time gone by.”

Caren Carney, another visitor to the park evacuated with her family, said she was heartbroken to hear that such a “magical place” had burned down.

Firefighters at the North Rim and hikers in the inner canyon were also evacuated on Saturday and Sunday. The park said that beside the fire risk, they could also potentially be exposed to chlorine gas after the treatment plant burned.

Aramark, the company that operated the lodge, said all employees and guests were safely evacuated. “As stewards of some of our country’s most beloved national treasures, we are devastated by the loss,” spokesperson Debbie Albert said.

One of the greatest wonders of the natural world, the Grand Canyon is the result of the Colorado River eating away at layers of red sandstone and other rock for millions of years, leaving a gash up to 30km (18 miles) wide and more than 1.6km (1 mile) deep.

‘Inexcusable’: US Senate report faults Secret Service for Trump shooting

By in News, World News

A United States Senate inquiry into an attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump at a campaign rally last year has blamed the Secret Service for “inexcusable” failures in its operations and response and called for more serious disciplinary action.

The report, released on Sunday, a year after a 20-year-old gunman opened fire on Trump, accused the presidential protection service of a pattern of negligence and communications breakdowns in planning and executing the rally.

On July 13, 2024, a gunman shot the then-Republican Party presidential candidate during a campaign rally in the town of Butler in the state of Pennsylvania, grazing his ear.

One bystander was killed and two people in addition to Trump were wounded before a government sniper killed the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks.

“What happened was inexcusable and the consequences imposed for the failures so far do not reflect the severity of the situation,” said the report released by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The shooting energised Trump’s bid to return to the White House as his campaign used a photo of him bloodied and pumping his fist as he was hurried offstage to woo voters.

‘Complete breakdown’

The report did not shed new light on the gunman’s motive, which still remains a mystery, but accused the Secret Service of “a cascade of preventable failures that nearly cost President Trump his life”.

“The United States Secret Service failed to act on credible intelligence, failed to coordinate with local law enforcement,” said the committee’s Republican chairman, Rand Paul.

“Despite those failures, no one has been fired,” he added.

“It was a complete breakdown of security at every level – fuelled by bureaucratic indifference, a lack of clear protocols and a shocking refusal to act on direct threats.

“We must hold individuals accountable and ensure reforms are fully implemented so this never happens again.”

The Secret Service identified communications, technical and human errors and said reforms were under way, including improving coordination between different law enforcement bodies involved in security at events and establishing a division dedicated to aerial surveillance.

Six unidentified staff have been disciplined, according to the agency. The punishments ranged from 10 to 42 days of suspension without pay, and all six were put into restricted or nonoperational positions.

Days before the assassination attempt’s anniversary, Trump said “mistakes were made” but he was satisfied with the investigation.

On Sunday, Trump told reporters, “God was protecting me,” adding that he did not like to think “too much” about the assassination attempt.

“It’s a little bit of a dangerous profession being president, but I really don’t like to think about it too much,” he said.