US President Trump and Russian President Putin began talks on the war in Ukraine at a US military base in Anchorage, Alaska, meeting with aides in front of a “Pursuing Peace” backdrop. They ignored reporters’ questions during a photo opportunity ahead of a joint press conference.
Palestinian residents of Gaza City have come under relentless Israeli bombardment as the military prepares for a major offensive to seize and ethnically cleanse the area, barring emergency workers from reaching people trapped in the residential Zeitoun neighbourhood.
Gaza civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal told Al Jazeera that the Israeli army had been firing at emergency vehicles trying to reach the wounded in Zeitoun on Friday, as Israeli quadcopters dropped leaflets threatening a forced displacement. Residents were told to leave sections of the eastern neighbourhood, where hundreds of homes have recently been destroyed.
Reporting from Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said Israel had been deploying “heavy artillery, drones and fighter jets”, with four neighbourhoods of Gaza City “reporting relentless bombardment shaking the ground day and night” as the military advanced its plans.
It was, he said, “a full dismantling of civilian life to ensure that people will never be allowed back into this area”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing to seize Gaza’s largest urban hub and forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to concentration zones, despite a wave of criticism from families of captives held in Gaza and their supporters, the Israeli security establishment, and a multitude of nations and organisations around the world.
As the military closed in on Gaza City, it also continued attacks on other parts of the enclave, killing 44 people, including 16 aid seekers desperately seeking sustenance for their families, according to medical sources who spoke to Al Jazeera.
Attacks included strikes on two hospitals, underscoring daily Palestinian pleas that no place in the besieged and bombarded enclave is safe. One person was killed at al-Shifa in Gaza City, which has been bombed and burned multiple times over the war. And at least two were killed at Deir el-Balah’s Al-Aqsa Hospital in an explosion preceded by a swarm of Israeli drones hovering over the hospital.
Amid the reports of further Israeli killing, Al Jazeera Arabic reported that a woman in the devastated Tuffah neighbourhood east of Gaza City retrieved the body of her brother and some remains of her father from the rubble of a bombed house.
The woman said that the bodies had been trapped along with 31 others since an air strike that had taken place 46 days earlier – the timeline indicating the attack occurred at the end of June. With no equipment to retrieve them under Israel’s harshly punitive blockade, it had been impossible to find them.
“What we are facing is too much. Too much torture and oppression. Torture, tiredness, and pain,” she said.
In parallel, aid seekers continued to be targeted near humanitarian distribution sites run by the GHF, with medical sources reporting 16 were killed on Friday.
The United Nations human rights office said at least 1,760 Palestinians had been killed while seeking aid in Gaza since late May – a jump of several hundred since its last published figures at the beginning of August.
Of the 1,760, 994 were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites and 766 along the routes of supply convoys. Most of the killings were committed by the Israeli military, the agency said in a statement. United States security contractors have also fired on aid seekers.
Meanwhile, as reports emerged that another child had died of Israeli-induced starvation in the enclave, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said nearly one in five young children in Gaza City were now deemed to be malnourished.
The starvation death toll has now reached 240, including 107 children, according to the Health Ministry.
The UN has said Gaza requires the equivalent of at least 600 trucks of aid entering daily to fight off the effects of man-made starvation caused by months of total Israeli blockade.
The Israeli army entity in charge of managing aid – Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories – claimed that it allowed 310 aid trucks to enter Gaza on Thursday. It said that more than 290 were collected and distributed by the UN and other international organisations.
International and Palestinian groups are reporting only one-sixth of the necessary 600 trucks a day are actually entering the territory where Israeli-backed gangs are engaged in looting.
As people battle extreme hunger, they are also enduring severe dehydration in the current heatwave, with record temperatures surpassing 40C (or 104F), and are resorting to drinking contaminated water.
US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin greeted each other today at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska — their first in-person encounter since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Brazil’s Supreme Court says it will hand down a verdict and sentence in former President Jair Bolsonaro’s coup trial early next month, in a case that has polarised the country and drawn in the ex-leader’s ally, United States President Donald Trump.
The court announced on Friday that the five-justice panel overseeing the proceedings will deliver decisions on the five charges between September 2 and 12. A coup conviction carries a sentence of up to 12 years.
Bolsonaro, under house arrest since August 4, is accused of orchestrating a plot to cling to power after losing the 2022 presidential election to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. He denies the allegations.
Prosecutors allege Bolsonaro led a criminal organisation that sought to overturn the election results.
The case includes accusations that the plot involved plans to kill Lula and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is presiding over the trial. They have presented messages, handwritten notes and other material they say document the conspiracy.
Defence lawyers counter that no coup attempt was carried out and that Bolsonaro allowed the presidential handover to take place, undermining claims he tried to block it.
The five charges against Bolsonaro include attempting a coup, participation in an armed criminal organisation, attempted violent abolition of the democratic order, and two counts linked to destruction of state property.
Two separate five-justice panels operate within Brazil’s top court. Justice de Moraes, a frequent target of Bolsonaro’s supporters, sits on the panel hearing the case. Although Bolsonaro appointed two justices during his 2019–2022 presidency, both serve on the other panel.
The Supreme Court headquarters in Brasilia was one of the targets of a rioting mob of supporters known as “Bolsonaristas”, who raided government buildings in January 2023 as they urged the military to depose Lula, an insurrection attempt that evoked Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.
The rioting also prompted comparisons to Brazil’s 1964 military coup, a dark era that Bolsonaro has openly praised.
The trial has captivated Brazil’s divided public. Tensions deepened when Trump linked a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian imports to his ally’s legal battle, calling the proceedings a “witch hunt” and describing Bolsonaro as an “honest man” facing “political execution”.
The Trump administration has also sanctioned Justice de Moraes and imposed further trade restrictions on Brazil, a move widely criticised in the country as an assault on national sovereignty.
Trouble flares involving police, government supporters and anticorruption groups.
Violence in Serbia has erupted, involving government supporters, police and anticorruption demonstrators who have been on the streets for months, demanding elections
President Aleksandar Vucic says the protests are part of a foreign plot to oust him.
Why has violence flared up – and what’s next?
Presenter: Adrian Finighan
Guests:
Mirko Dautovic – International affairs commentator for Balkan media
Florian Bieber – Professor of Southeast European history and politics at Graz University
Russia has made gains in Ukraine’s Donetsk region before President Vladimir Putin’s high-stakes meeting with his United States counterpart Donald Trump in Alaska, raising fears that it may have increased its leverage amid talks aimed at ending the war.
In advance of Friday’s summit in Anchorage, Moscow’s army pounded away at Ukraine’s industrial heartland, attempting to seize the flashpoint town of Pokrovsk, a key highway and rail junction in eastern Donetsk, after repeated attempts to breach its defensive line during the week.
As Putin and Trump prepared to meet, battlefield analysis site DeepState said that Pokrovsk was partially encircled. In recent days, Russian forces had reportedly seized the village of Yablunivka and the settlement of Oleksandrohrad – both in Donetsk.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has rejected Putin’s demands that Kyiv withdraw from the remaining 30 percent of Donetsk that it still controls, played down the Russian advances, saying on X that his forces were “countering” and “increasing the pressure” on the “occupier”.
“The Russian army continues to suffer significant losses in its attempts to secure more favourable political positions for the Russian leadership at the meeting in Alaska. We understand this plan and are informing our partners about the real situation,” he said.
Reporting from Kyiv, Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford said that “small groups of Russian forces” had “pushed through gaps in Ukrainian defensive lines in that area, taking around 10 kilometres [6.2 miles] of territory”.
Russia illegally annexed Donetsk in 2022, along with Luhansk, both of which form the eastern Donbas region, Kherson and Zaporizhia areas.
In other fighting on Friday, Russia launched a ballistic missile into Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, killing one and wounding at least one other person, according to regional governor Serhiy Lysak.
The city of Dnipro is a logistics hub for Ukrainian forces, and the Dnipropetrovsk region borders the combat zone and is regularly shelled by Russian forces.
Also on Friday, Ukraine’s military said it had struck the Syzran oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region, one of the biggest in oil company Rosneft’s network, in an overnight attack.
Samara’s regional governor said a drone attack caused a fire at an unspecified “industrial enterprise” in his region, but that it had been put out quickly.
The Ukrainian military also said it struck the Caspian port of Olya in Russia’s Astrakhan region on Thursday, hitting a ship that had been transporting drone parts and ammunition from Iran to Russia.
Facing regular Russian missile and drone attacks, Ukraine has directed the majority of its deep strikes against Russian oil refineries and unspecified “storage facilities” this year, according to new General Staff data published on Friday.
The Ukrainian military did not confirm if it used drones, as usual, for its latest two long-range attacks. It says its deep strike campaign aims to degrade Russia’s capacity to wage the full-scale war it launched in February 2022.