Category News

Lebanon’s president says his country wants peace but not normalisation with Israel, as health authorities said an Israeli air strike killed one person in the south of the country.

As well as causing one death on Friday, the drone attack on a car in Nabatieh district wounded five other people, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.

It comes as Israel continues to launch regular strikes against sites in Lebanon, particularly in the south, despite a November 27 ceasefire agreement between it and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah.

Under the terms of the truce, Hezbollah had to retreat to the north of the Litani River, which is about 30km (20 miles) from the Israeli border, while Israel had to fully withdraw its troops, leaving only the Lebanese army and United Nations peacekeepers in the area.

However, Israel still occupies five strategic locations in southern Lebanon.

Speaking on Friday, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun expressed a desire for peaceful relations with his country’s neighbour. But he stressed that Beirut was not currently interested in normalising ties with Israel, something mentioned as a possibility by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar last week.

“Peace is the lack of a state of war, and this is what matters to us in Lebanon at the moment. As for the issue of normalisation, it is not currently part of Lebanese foreign policy,” said Aoun, who urged Israel to withdraw completely from Lebanon.

In a reference to the US’s ongoing call for Lebanon to fully disarm Hezbollah, the Lebanese president also expressed Beirut’s desire to “hold the monopoly over weapons in the country”, but he did not give further details.

Hezbollah, which is considerably weakened after more than a year of hostilities with Israel, has dismissed questions about disarmament.

“We cannot be asked to soften our stance or lay down arms while [Israeli] aggression continues,” its leader Naim Qassem told crowds in southern Beirut on Sunday.

On Wednesday, the Israeli military confirmed that some of its troops had entered southern Lebanon, with the army saying they sought to dismantle Hezbollah infrastructure and to stop the group from “reestablishing itself in the area”.

A new poll shows support for immigration in the United States has increased since last year, while backing for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants has gone down.

The survey, released on Friday from the research firm Gallup, suggests a shift in public opinion as President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown concludes its sixth month.

Gallup found that 79 percent of respondents say immigration is a “good thing” for the country — a record high that represents a 15-point increase from last year.

Among supporters of Trump’s Republican Party, the number rose sharply to 64 percent, up from 39 percent in 2024.

Only 38 percent of respondents said they back “deporting all immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home country”, down from 47 percent last year.

Support for expanding the US-Mexico border wall also went down to 45 percent, a drop of eight percentage points. The survey, conducted in June, featured interviews with 1,402 US adults.

“Americans have grown markedly more positive toward immigration over the past year, with the share wanting immigration reduced dropping from 55 percent in 2024 to 30 percent today,” Gallup said.

Trump made mass deportations a key promise of his 2024 re-election campaign, often using language to demonise migrants, including by using a poem to compare them to venomous snakes.

He seized on the public concern over the uptick in the number of undocumented immigrants who crossed into the US from Mexico in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, under Democratic President Joe Biden.

Since returning to the White House in January, he has launched an all-out campaign on immigration, including by gutting the refugee resettlement programme, unleashing agents to round up undocumented migrants and sending suspected gang members to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without due process.

The Trump administration also ended protected status for nationals of several countries, including Venezuela and Haiti, who had been shielded from deportation due to dangerous conditions in their homelands.

Meanwhile, it has been pushing to remove foreign students critical of Israel from the US.

But while the crossings have sharply decreased this year, it appears that the US public may have soured on the anti-immigration campaign.

“With illegal border crossings down sharply this year, fewer Americans than in June 2024 back hard-line border enforcement measures, while more favor offering pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the US,” Gallup said.

Trump’s immigration policies have sparked outrage and lawsuits, as well as accusations of executive overreach and violations of the US Constitution.

A majority of respondents in the Gallup survey — 62 percent — said they disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 36 percent said they approve.

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, described the findings of the survey as an “absolute bloodbath” for Trump.

Hundreds of mourners have attended the funeral of a Kenyan mask vendor killed by police, as opposition leaders demanded the resignation of President William Ruto over comments he made sanctioning the use of violence in recent protests.

The funeral of 22-year-old Boniface Kariuki, shot at point-blank range by an officer in riot gear during a rally against police brutality on June 17, took place Friday in his hometown of Kangema, some 100km (60 miles) northeast of Nairobi.

Kariuki, who died later in hospital, was selling masks at the rally. He is one of more than 100 people who have been killed across Kenya since last year, as police crack down on waves of protests. The demonstrations were initially sparked by proposed tax rises in 2024, but they reignited last month after the death of blogger Albert Ojwang in police custody.

The shooting of Kariuki was captured on film and shared widely across social media, highlighting police brutality in the country and galvanising anger towards a government many Kenyans see as corrupt and unaccountable.

“We are in sorrow,” said Edwin Kagia, 24, Kariuki’s friend and fellow vendor. “I used to hear that police kill people, but I could not imagine it would happen to my brother.”

Reporting from Kakuma in northern Kenya, Al Jazeera’s Catherine Soi said: “People are very angry about what is happening in Kenya. There’s a lot of impunity. They say there’s bad governance and police brutality is just on another level.”

President under pressure

Amid the grief over the vendor’s death, President Ruto came under increasing pressure to step down, two days after he called for police to shoot and “break the legs” of people found looting or damaging property during protests.

Opposition figure Kalonzo Musyoka said the president’s order was “against the constitution” and that he should “resign or be impeached”.

Human rights groups have called for restraint among police, as it emerged that more than 50 people were killed in two major demonstrations this year, according to the state-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.

Al Jazeera’s Soi said there had also been a “spate of abductions”.

“Kenyans are quite angry … because police officers are here to help Kenyans and to protect Kenyans, but that is not happening,” she said.

Four police officers are currently facing murder charges over the recent deaths of protesters.

Three officers were last month charged with the death of blogger Ojwang after a postmortem report stated that his injuries were not self-inflicted, as alleged by police.

On Thursday, an officer was charged with Kariuki’s murder. A plea hearing for the officer is set for July 28.

Several mothers of the young people who have been killed in protests since last year were present at the vendor’s burial.

Meanwhile, Kenya swore in a group of top electoral officials on Friday, hours after their approval by Ruto, following months of legal wrangling.

The appointment of a new chairman and six commissioners to the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission fills essential positions that had long been left vacant in a country with a long history of contentious and often violent elections.