Peace agreement between the DRC and Rwanda is staggering in its ambition.
Trump’s push for peace in the DRC
Europe’s stock markets drop amid Trump’s tariff threats against EU, Mexico
Europe’s stock markets have dropped sharply as investors weigh United States President Donald Trump’s latest tariff threats against the European Union and Mexico.
Major European indices suffered heavy losses on Monday as EU ministers were set to discuss their response to Trump’s plans to impose a 30 percent tariff on the bloc’s goods from August 1.
Germany’s benchmark DAX had fallen nearly 0.9 percent as of 08:30 GMT, while France’s CAC 40, Italy’s FTSE MIB and Spain’s IBEX 35 were down 0.7 to 0.8 percent.
The pan-European STOXX 600 index dipped about 0.5 percent.
The United Kingdom’s FTSE 100 bucked the sell-off, rising about 0.2 percent.
In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell about 0.3 percent, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng edged up by about the same amount.
US futures, which are traded outside of regular market hours, fell early on Monday, with those tied to the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indices both dropping more than 0.5 percent.
Markets are on edge ahead of Trump’s August 1 deadline for US trading partners to reach trade deals or face steep tariffs.
Despite months of negotiations, the Trump administration has so far announced agreements with only the UK, China and Vietnam.
EU officials have threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs on US goods worth about 100 billion euros ($117bn) if Brussels and Washington are unable to reach a deal.
The EU is the US’s largest trading partner, with their two-way trade in goods and services amounting to 1.7 trillion euros ($2 trillion) in 2024, according to the EU statistics agency Eurostat.
On Sunday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the bloc would delay retaliatory tariffs on the US to August to give officials more time to reach an agreement with the Trump administration.
Blast at housing complex near Iran’s Qom city injures several people
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.
انفجار در یکی از مجتمعهای مسکونی پردیسان قم ۷ مصدوم برجا گذاشت.
به گفته اورژانس و آتشنشانی، حادثه صبح دوشنبه رخ داده و علت احتمالی آن نشت گاز بوده است.
🔗https://t.co/pg6uSrkMbW pic.twitter.com/Z8XP3ZbosU
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.
Nigerians “divided” over former President Buhari’s legacy
“The three promises Buhari made coming into power are still the issues bedevilling Nigeria today.”
Lapid, Olmert slam Israel’s plans for ‘concentration camps’ in Gaza’s Rafah
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”.
New Freedom Flotilla ship sets sail to challenge Gaza blockade
A new Freedom Flotilla ship, the Handala, has departed from Italy for an attempt to break Israel’s blockade on Gaza and deliver essential aid. The last vessel to make the journey, the Madleen, was seized by Israeli forces in international waters in June.