Category World News

Aerial video shows extensive damage to government and commercial buildings in Nepal’s capital, where the army has taken charge after mass protests against government corruption and censorship led to the prime minister’s resignation.

Gaza City, Gaza Strip – On Friday morning, Abu Salah Khalil thought his biggest challenge that day would be finding his family’s next meal.

Sitting in Abu Saleh’s living room, three generations of his family deliberated over how to feed everyone.

The apartment of the 49-year-old father of four in Gaza City’s Mushtaha Tower had become a shelter for Abu Salah’s family members, including his elderly parents, his brother’s family, and his own wife and children – 17 people in total.

The family settled on making maqluba, layered vegetables and rice, but without the meat – there wasn’t any available. It would be their only meal of the day. Abu Salah’s nephew, meanwhile, was nervously studying for his high school graduation exams, due to take place online the next day. For the first time since Israel’s war began 22 months ago, Gaza’s students would sit for these exams.

“We woke up to a normal family atmosphere,” Abu Salah recalls.

He went out to buy vegetables and returned to boil coffee over a wood fire. But as the family drank their coffee, they heard screams in the hallway.

“We opened the door to ask what was going on,” Abu Salah says. “That’s when we heard the news: the tower would be bombed.”

They had just 30 minutes to evacuate the building.

In Gaza, a small coastal strip of land and one of the world’s most densely populated areas, many Palestinian families built their lives in high-rise residential towers.

Now, as Israeli forces intensify their assault to capture Gaza City, residential high-rises, many with apartments housing multiple displaced families, have become the latest targets, collapsing in moments and forcing residents into homelessness.

‘Neighbours were running’

The 12-storey Mushtaha Tower was the first of the high-rises in Gaza City that Israeli forces have destroyed since Friday.

There were eight apartments per floor – a vertical refuge for families, many already displaced numerous times.

As soon as Abu Salah and his family heard the warning, they started to flee the building. There was no time to collect any belongings. Since there was no electricity, the lift wasn’t working, so they had to take the stairs to descend six storeys.

Abu Salah’s father lost the use of both legs after the bombing of their previous home on Sea Street caused traumatic shock and paralysis. His mother, in her seventies, moves slowly.

“I carried my disabled father with my brother, while my wife helped my mother,” Abu Salah recounts. “In those moments, neighbours were running and screams filled the place, children crying and mothers not knowing which child to carry and which to drag.”

He barely noticed what was happening with his children, his eldest, a 19-year-old daughter, and his youngest, a toddler, as they climbed down the stairwell full of people. “I don’t know how my children got down or who carried my two-year-old son – I was occupied with my father and how to get him out of the house,” he says.

Once his family had made it out of the tower, Abu Salah wanted to return for some food and clothing, but his mother stopped him, fearing Israeli forces would bomb while he was inside. Minutes later came the final warning in a phone call to a resident: the building was going to be hit.

“They bombed it once and it remained standing, so we said ‘thank God’,” says Abu Salah, recalling how people cried while praying that the building wouldn’t collapse. The sound was deafening. “But minutes later came the second bombing that completely removed it. I wished I could embrace the house walls and tell them: stay strong and tall, don’t be affected by the missiles.”

Abu Salah says his only concern had been to get his family out safely, but when he saw the tower collapse, his “body began to tremble”.

His family is now living on the streets. “At night, we didn’t sleep from the shock. My children kept asking: ‘Where will we sleep? What do we put on the ground? Do we sleep on the bare floors?’”

‘Waiting to know our children’s fate’

On Saturday, Nadia Maarouf was outside her makeshift tent in Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood near the residential al-Soussi Tower. She was kneading dough and cooking beans with her daughters-in-law when they heard that a bombing was imminent.

A man came rushing down the street, telling people, “Al-Soussi Tower is threatened with bombing … evacuate the area.”

The 50-year-old and her family had fled Beit Lahiya in the north in May after their home was destroyed. “We had nothing left,” Nadia says sadly. “With great difficulty, we managed to buy some kitchen tools and pitch the tent. Everything here is expensive and if we lose it, we can’t replace it.”

When they heard about the bombing, her son, who lost his leg in shelling in Beit Lahiya, “started screaming: Get me out of here … I don’t want to die,” Nadia recounts, her voice choking with tears.

“We left everything and started running in the streets like madmen,” she recalls.

“I took my small grandson, two years old, and some clothes, and started running in the street. Each of us ran in a different direction – we no longer knew anything about each other. While running, I found a child from neighbouring tents crying, so I carried him with my other hand.”

Nadia, who lived with 17 family members, was “afraid we had forgotten someone in the tent … My heart was breaking from fear.”

Only half an hour passed from the time they heard about the tower being a target until it was bombed, Nadia says.

“We were waiting to know our children’s fate: had they all gotten out? Was anyone injured?”

After the building was flattened, Nadia and her family located their destroyed tents. “We started digging with our hands and moving stones to get our belongings out. We no longer had money to buy anything new.”

Dust and rubble blanketed the entire area, and Nadia found it difficult to breathe when she reached the site.

“I don’t know how my feet helped me run and escape,” she says. “My whole body was trembling, and my heartbeats were louder than the bombing sound.”

‘A small city’

Israeli forces also destroyed Al-Ru’ya Tower on Sunday.

Sarah al-Qattaa says the tower, which her husband, Ahmed Shamia, an engineer, designed, was a “living memory pulsing with every moment we lived”.

The tower reflected Ahmed’s architectural dreams for Gaza City, says Sarah: a tower sitting amid streets full of life, universities, and offices.

“From the first moment Ahmed drew the tower’s design lines, he wanted it to be a modern facade reflecting the city’s spirit,” she recalls.

“He saw in every corner an opportunity to tell a story of beauty. He chose colours carefully.”

Her husband, who was killed in an Israeli attack in May, had his office in the tower overlooking the sea, and kept all his projects and sketches there.

“His soul was attached to the tower,” Sarah says. If he had witnessed its collapse, it wouldn’t have just been “stones collapsing, but an entire lifetime breaking and personal history disappearing under rubble.”

Israel has destroyed at least 50 buildings during its recent campaign to seize Gaza City, according to the Palestinian Civil Defence.

Akram al-Sourani, a Palestinian writer from Gaza, says home isn’t just walls and a ceiling but an accumulation of life and memories.

These towers weren’t luxury or architectural choices, he says, but “a necessity imposed by narrow space and population density”.

He lamented the loss of these stacked households in a viral poem shared on social media where he described the families of 50 apartments leaving behind an “elevator with a thousand stories” and the objects of their lives – a Barbie doll, a bathrobe behind a bathroom door, a backgammon table, internet bills.

“The tower isn’t just a building, it’s an entire neighbourhood, a small city teeming with life. It has apartments, neighbours, elevators and daily stories,” he explains. “Every corner carries a tale.”

Washington, DC – The Israeli attack against Hamas leaders in Qatar has prompted familiar headlines in the United States about the president being unhappy with Israel.

Over the past two years, as the US has provided Israel with billions of dollars to help fund the war on Gaza, there have been numerous stories about the White House – under both Joe Biden and Donald Trump – being frustrated with Israeli conduct.

But the attack on a US partner that works closely with Washington on various issues and hosts one of the largest US military bases in the Middle East was a major escalation.

Still, Trump’s response has so far been muted. On social media, he said he felt “very badly” about the location of the attacks and later told reporters he was “not thrilled” by Israel’s actions.

It took the White House hours to address the assassination attempt on Tuesday, and when it did, it stopped short of condemning the attack. “Unilaterally bombing inside Qatar, a sovereign nation and close ally, does not advance Israel or America’s goals,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said. “However, eliminating Hamas, who have profited off the misery of those living in Gaza, is a worthy goal.”

Experts say Trump’s failure to take a firmer position will likely further erode Washington’s credibility in the region and raise questions about the broader ties between the US and the Gulf.

“The response was contradictory, did not make sense, lacked in diplomacy and it lacked in substance,” said Khalil Jahshan, the executive director of the Arab Center Washington DC. “It is not befitting a superpower.”

Trump later reiterated Leavitt’s statement, saying he promised Qatar’s emir that such an attack would not happen again.

But less than 24 hours later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his envoy to the US both appeared to threaten Qatar with further attacks.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the State Department still has not commented on the attack, despite the status of Qatar as a major non-Nato ally of the US.

Red lines crossed

The White House initially said the US informed Qatar of the attack before it happened, but after Doha quickly denied the claim, Trump later acknowledged that by the time his envoy Steve Witkoff spoke to Qatari officials, it was “too late”.

The assassination attempt failed to kill Hamas’s top leaders but killed six people, including a Qatari security officer.

Doha described the Israeli attack as “treacherous”, noting that the Hamas leaders who were targeted were discussing Trump’s own ceasefire proposal, and their meeting was not a secret.

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute, said the Israeli attacks cast doubt over the US role as a broker in the region, noting that Washington was similarly negotiating with Tehran when Israel attacked Iran in June.

“Certainly, the US as a state that can negotiate in good faith is being called into question,” he told Al Jazeera.

Coates Ulrichsen stressed the significance of the Israeli attacks, which he said crossed “strong red lines” that will be difficult to uncross.

He said the Israeli attacks upended the assumption that Gulf countries are beyond Israel’s military reach due to their defence partnerships with the US.

Coates Ulrichsen drew parallels between the Israeli assassination attempt in Doha and the 2019 drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities, which Riyadh blamed on Iran – a charge Tehran denied.

Trump, then during his first term, did not come to Saudi Arabia’s help after that attack, prompting several Gulf states to de-escalate tensions with Iran, culminating in the restoration of diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tehran in 2023, brokered by China.

“We have to wait and see what the consequences of this attack will be, but they could be just as consequential potentially if they contribute to the perception in the Gulf that the US security umbrella and deterrence is in question,” Coates Ulrichsen said.

Trump visited the Gulf region in May, and heaped praise on Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as he said he secured trillions of dollars in investments from the three countries.

During the visit, Trump rebuked US military interventions and portrayed himself as a peace president.

The Doha attack, however, and the US response to it “contradict” Trump’s promises to the region, Jahshan said.

“What Trump put in jeopardy is whatever is remaining – which is not much, by the way – of US credibility,” Jahshan told Al Jazeera.

Netanyahu lauds Trump

Despite the official line that the US is irked by the attack on Doha, Netanyahu joked about the strikes during a ceremony at the US embassy in Israel shortly after they took place.

He said he had planned to be at the event earlier but was “otherwise engaged”, referring to overseeing the air attacks in Qatar.

On Thursday, Netanyahu appeared for a photo-op with US Ambassador Mike Huckabee to name a beach promenade in a coastal town in Israel after Trump.

The Israeli prime minister also appeared to praise Trump’s call for ethnically cleansing Gaza and turning it into the Riviera of the Middle East.

“President Trump spoke to me several times about beachfront property. He said to me, you have wonderful beachside properties here. He’s talking about one that’s a bit to the south here, in Gaza,” he said, according to his office.

He later renewed his threat to target Hamas leaders in Qatar.

“I say to Qatar and all nations who harbour terrorists, you either expel them or you bring them to justice – because if you don’t, we will,” he said.

Who knew what when?

Washington has failed to reveal when or how exactly it knew the attacks were happening. Trump said his administration was notified by the military, suggesting he did not pre-approve the attacks.

But Jahshan said it would not have been possible politically or militarily for Israel to carry out the attack without a US green light.

The US military has military assets, radars and air defences across the Middle East. And both Israel and Qatar are part of the US military’s Central Command area of responsibility.

Jahshan noted that the building struck by Israel is less than 20 miles (32km) away from the largest US airbase in the region – Al Udeid in Qatar.

“They must have cleared it with the US. Netanyahu is aggressive, but he is not that stupid,” he told Al Jazeera.

For his part, Coates Ulrichsen highlighted that the public reporting indicates that the US did not give prior blessings to the attacks, but he said the issue will likely be a key point of discussion between Washington and the Gulf.

“Behind the scenes, conversations today between Gulf leaders and US counterparts will be really honing in on who knew what and when, and what precisely was the chain of events,” he said.

“Were there to be any suggestion that the US either had full knowledge of Israel’s plans or somehow greenlit them, that would be incredibly damaging to US-Gulf security and defence and political relations.”

‘Opportunity for peace’?

Despite the global outcry, Trump said the attack on Doha could serve as an “opportunity for PEACE”. And Jahshan said he did not disagree.

He said any escalation can potentially be an off-ramp to end conflict, but he stressed that the Trump administration does not appear to be ready, or even capable, of engaging in the necessary diplomacy to use the Doha attacks to end the war on Gaza.

The problem, he said, is the “asymmetrical” nature of the US-Israel relationship, where Washington remains committed to unconditional support for Israel no matter what it does.

“The US has hundreds of allies around the world, but none has this predicament where the national interest of the client state supersedes the national interest of the superpower,” Jahshan told Al Jazeera.

Trump himself had said that attacking Qatar does not serve US interests.

Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, underscored that the US continues to provide Israel with arms to conduct its wars across the entire region.

“Striking a major non-NATO US ally like this, in the midst of negotiations that are being supported and brokered by the United States, against officials who are being hosted in Qatar originally at the request of the United States, is a level beyond anything even I expected,” Duss told Al Jazeera in a TV interview.