destroyed

‘Not only has our past been destroyed but so has our future.’ A Palestinian journalist broke down into tears as he returned to northern Gaza to find his family home as a pile of rubble. Many Palestinians returning to the area are finding nothing left but destruction following Israel’s war.

US President Donald Trump says Israeli captives held in Gaza will be released on Monday.

A few metres away from the piles of stones that were once the first homes as you entered their small village, three men sat on a traditional woven bed.

One of them was Hayat’s cousin, Mehboob.

“When the earthquake happened, my 13-year-old son Nasib Ullah was sleeping next to me. I woke up, got out of bed, and started looking for the torch. Then, suddenly, the whole room moved from the falling rocks. When I tried to reach my son, the wall and the floor slid down, and I couldn’t catch him,” the 36-year-old explained.

“[It was] worse than the day of judgement.”

“Houses collapsed, boulders from the mountain came crumbling down; you couldn’t see anything, we couldn’t see each other.”

Everyone was injured, he explained. Some had broken ribs and broken legs.

“In the dark, we took our kids who were still alive to the farmland below, where it was safer from the boulders.”

That night, he counted more than 250 tremors, he said: aftershocks that continue to shake the valley even weeks after the earthquake.

When daylight came, he tried to dig through the rubble to find his loved ones. “But my body didn’t want to work,” he said.

“I could see my son’s foot, but the rest of his body had disappeared under the rubble.”

His 10-year-old daughter, Aisha, had also been killed.

“It was the worst moment of my life,” he said.

It took two days for villagers and volunteers to recover the bodies.

When Hayat’s brother, Rahmat Gul, received a message from his brother telling him that the entire village was gone, he immediately rushed there from his home in Parwan province, some 300km (185 miles) away.

When he finally reached Aurak Dandila, the surviving villagers asked him to wrap Mehboob’s dead son in a blanket.

“Mehboob asked me to show him the face of his son, but I could not do it,” Rahmat Gul explained as Mehboob, sitting beside him, looked out over the farmland in the valley below.

Nearby, Hayat stood up and began pacing.

“God has taken my sons from me, and now I feel like I have left this world as well,” he said.

In Aurak Dandila, a small cornfield has become a graveyard. “Here is where we buried our loved ones,” Hayat said. The graves are marked by stones.

He remembers how he had urged Abdul Haq to stay in the village. “The next day, everything was gone, and he lost his life.”

Now, Hayat believes, “there is nothing left to live here for”.

“How can I continue living here?” he asked, pointing at the debris of what was once his home.

“The stones are coming from above; how can anyone live in this village?”

“We will settle somewhere else, and we will look for the mercy of God. If he has no mercy on us, then we will also die.”

Former state Sen. Ronald Calderon, once the most powerful member of a politically influential family, was sentenced Friday in Los Angeles to 42 months in prison after he pleaded guilty in a federal corruption case.

The Montebello Democrat, who served in the state Senate for eight years ending in 2014, admitted in a plea deal in June that he had accepted tens of thousands of dollars in bribes from undercover FBI agents and a hospital executive in return for official favors.

Federal prosecutors had asked for a five-year sentence for a charge for which the maximum possible penalty was 20 years. U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder, who handed down the sentence to Calderon, said five years was too severe but that a significant prison sentence was needed to punish Calderon and send a message to other elected officials that corruption will not be tolerated.

“The crime is significant,” she said during the court hearing. “This is a true public corruption case.”

In addition to three and a half years in prison, Calderon was sentenced to one year supervised release and 150 hours of community service, but no fine. Instead of having Calderon taken into custody immediately, Snyder granted him a reprieve, allowing him to surrender to prison officials in January.

“Mr. Calderon betrayed the public trust,” said U.S. Atty. Eileen Decker. “A basic premise of our society is that elected officials will not exchange their votes for monetary gain and that’s what Mr. Calderon did.”

Mark Geragos, Calderon’s attorney, suggested during the court hearing that his client should serve no time in prison. He alleged that the government had entrapped Calderon and raised the former lawmaker’s poor health. The former state senator’s legacy has been ruined by his guilty plea in the case, he added.

“This is going to be the opening paragraph of his obituary, unfortunately,” Geragos told Snyder.

When Snyder rebuffed Geragos’ appeal and said Calderon needed to spend some amount of time behind bars, Geragos switched tactics, asking her to consider a two-year sentence.

Striking a defiant tone throughout, Calderon, 59, refused to admit any wrongdoing or to apologize.

“My goal was always to do the right thing for California,” he said. “At no point did I intend to break the law.”

Faced with the prospect of going to trial on nearly two dozen charges that could have sent him to prison for many years, Calderon said he had been put in a “tough situation” when the government proposed its plea agreement.

He said he ultimately decided to plead guilty to one count of mail fraud in order to spare his family the ordeal of a trial, but persisted in his innocence, saying he never agreed to any quid pro quo to benefit himself or his family.

Calderon, his voice wavering with emotion at times, then told Snyder of the toll the case has taken on him and his family, saying he had “learned a hard lesson.”

Unemployed and tens of thousands of dollars in debt, he said he was not only banned from running for public office again but had been stripped of his real estate license and had been unable to get a job. His wife, he said, would likely have to declare bankruptcy and sell their house.

“I had so much potential for life after politics,” he bemoaned.

Professional relationships had been ruined as had his relationship with his brother, he said.

“My reputation is destroyed,” Calderon said.

Snyder was unmoved.

“I did not really hear Sen. Calderon accept responsibility or apologize,” she said. “It was really about himself.”

Snyder said that after listening to Calderon she was tempted to tack on several months to his sentence, but chose to stick with the 42 months.

Calderon learned his fate a month after his brother former state Assemblyman Tom Calderon was sentenced to a year in federal custody for laundering bribes taken by his brother.

Updates from Sacramento »

As part of the plea, Ronald Calderon admitted accepting trips to Las Vegas, jobs for his adult son and daughter and cash for him and Tom Calderon.

In exchange, Calderon advocated for legislation that would help a hospital owner. He also acknowledged that he had pushed for a law to give tax credits to independent films while an undercover FBI agent posing as a film producer showered him with bribes.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Mack E. Jenkins wrote a blistering brief urging the federal judge for a prison sentence for the former state senator, who had asked to be allowed to serve time in home detention or be released after the brief time he already served in jail.

“Here, defendant’s trafficking in his legislative votes (for, by contrast, over $150,000 in benefits) caused a reverberation of negative effects throughout California and put a stain not just on his career, but on the reputation of the state legislature,” Jenkins wrote.

“Here, defendant sold his vote not just to help pay for the expenses of living beyond his means, but for the more banal and predictable aims of corruption — fancy luxuries, fancy parties and fancy people,” Jenkins wrote, attaching to the file a photo Calderon took with rappers Nelly and T.I. at a Las Vegas event.

The Calderon family was a political dynasty for decades in California. A third brother, former Assemblyman Charles Calderon, was not implicated in the corruption scandal. Ronald Calderon’s nephew Ian Calderon is a state assemblyman and the last family member in state elected office. He was not alleged to have any part in the scheme.

The indictment of Ronald Calderon in 2014 was part of an ugly chapter for the state Senate, which saw two other members also suspended after being charged with crimes.

Former Democratic Sen. Leland Yee of San Francisco was sentenced in February to five years in prison for doing political favors in exchange for campaign cash in a separate scheme. Former Democratic state Sen. Roderick D. Wright served a brief jail sentence in 2014 after he was convicted of eight felony counts, including perjury and voting fraud, for lying about living in his state Senate district.

Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) said Friday that with the sentencing of Calderon, “the Senate can close the book on a very dark period in its history.

“But its lesson will not be forgotten — that those who seek to trade a sacred trust for self-enrichment will be disgraced and punished,” he added. “There is no room for corruption in this house of democracy.

Good government advocates, including Kathay Feng of California Common Cause, were generally supportive of the judge’s decision. “The sentence of three [and a half] years sends a message that bribery does not pay,” Feng said.

Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens), whose district overlapped Calderon’s and who had been first to call on Calderon to resign, said, “Today, our community received some justice for his crimes,” She added that the “dark cloud over our community will live with us longer than” Calderon serves in prison.

Patrick McGreevy reported from Sacramento and Joel Rubin reported from Los Angeles.

[email protected]; [email protected]

Follow @mcgreevy99 and @joelrubin on Twitter

ALSO

Sen. Ron Calderon surrenders to authorities in corruption case

Ex-Assemblyman Tom Calderon is sentenced to a year in federal custody in bribery case

Former state Sen. Ron Calderon’s guilty plea in corruption case marks blow to political dynasty

UPDATES:

4:30 p.m.: This article was updated with additional quotes.

Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki demanded to know whether an air-to-air missile fired by one of its F-16 fighters during last week’s Russian drone incursion destroyed a house. The calls for an investigation follow a Polish media report that an AIM-120C-7 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) missile fired at a drone went off course, causing the damage.

Regardless of what happened, Russia is ultimately to blame for the destruction because it launched the drones, Poland’s prime minister proclaimed.

Nawrocki “expects the government to promptly clarify the incident in the town of Wyry,” the Polish National Security Bureau (BBN) stated on X . “It is within the Government’s purview to utilize all tools and institutions to resolve this matter as quickly as possible.”

Shortly after the drone incursion became public, Polish officials showed pictures of a house in Wvyry that had been destroyed during the wave of about 19 drones.

“It was an AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missile from our F-16, which experienced a guidance system malfunction during flight and failed to fire,” the Polish RMF24 news outlet reported on Tuesday, citing an anonymous state security agency source. “Fortunately, it did not arm or explode because the fuse safety devices were activated.”

The publication said a former Polish military intelligence officer emphasized that the damage to the house was caused by kinetic impact. 

“There was no explosion, no detonation, as can be seen in the photos of the destroyed house,”  Lt. Col. Maciej Korowaj explained.

The AIM-120 has about a 40-pound blast fragmentation warhead.

While still unconfirmed, the RMF24 claim adds new context to initial reports that the remains of an AIM-120 were discovered among debris collected after the Russian drone flights into Poland. At the time, there were discrepancies about exactly where the missile remains were found and questions about who fired it.

“Seven unmanned aerial vehicles and the wreckage of one missile of unknown origin were found,” Karolina Galecka, a spokesperson for the Polish Ministry of the Interior, said on Sept. 10, after the wave of Russian drones subsided.

While the RFM24 report claims an F-16 fired the missile, Dutch F-35s, which also carry AIM-120s, took part in the counter-drone operation, as well.

As TWZ regularly points out, even the world’s best and most proven missiles fail. There are no exceptions to that rule. The rate at which it occurs can vary greatly, but missile technology is imperfect and misrepresented in the media as having almost shield-like abilities that aren’t reflective of reality. There is always a failure rate that must be assumed.

Doczekaliśmy się momentu w którym Polak może w swoim ogrodzie znaleźć resztki naszego albo holenderskiego pocisku powietrze – powietrze AIM-120 C-7 AMRAAM którym strzelano do rosyjskich dronów.

Gwoli jasności, tonie jest powód do radości

1/ pic.twitter.com/MavfmjGF4L

— Dawid Kamizela (@DawidKamizela) September 10, 2025

As we stated in our initial report on the drone flights, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that while at least three to four drones were shot down, another three to four appeared to have simply crashed in Polish territory.

On Tuesday, Tusk pointed the finger at Moscow for what happened to the home.

“All responsibility for the damage to the house in Wyrykach falls on the authors of the drone provocation, that is, Russia,” Tusk stated on X. “The appropriate services will inform the public, the government, and the president about all the circumstances of the incident after the proceedings are completed. Hands off Polish soldiers.”

Cała odpowiedzialność za uszkodzenia domu w Wyrykach spada na autorów dronowej prowokacji, czyli Rosję. O wszystkich okolicznościach incydentu odpowiednie służby poinformują opinię publiczną, rząd i prezydenta po zakończeniu postępowania. Łapy precz od polskich żołnierzy.

— Donald Tusk (@donaldtusk) September 16, 2025

BBN said that it is working to verify RMF24’s claims about the errant AIM-120 impact in part to ward off Russian disinformation that is a bit part of Moscow’s playbook.

“There is no consent for withholding information,” the bureau explained in its X post. “In the face of disinformation and hybrid warfare, the messages conveyed to Poles must be verified and confirmed.”

The bureau also expressed consternation that no official information was provided to the government about the missile claim.

“At the same time, the President emphasizes that he was not informed in this regard, nor was the BBN, and the matter was not presented or clarified at the National Security Council,” BBN noted.

In our previous stories about the drone wave into Poland, we noted that Tusk and other officials say Russia deliberately sent those weapons across the border during a massive attack on Ukraine. 

“The Russian provocation was nothing more than an attempt to test our capabilities and responses,” Nawrocki claimed on Sept. 11. “It was an attempt to check the mechanism of action within NATO and our ability to react. Thanks to the wonderful Polish pilots and our allies, Poland, which is in NATO, will neither fear nor be frightened by Russian drones.”

Rosyjska prowokacja była niczym więcej tylko próbą testowania naszych zdolności i reagowania. Była próbą sprawdzenia mechanizmu działania w ramach NATO i naszych zdolności do reakcji.

Dzięki wspaniałym polskim pilotom oraz naszym sojusznikom, Polska, która jest w NATO, nie… pic.twitter.com/HhdW3uAu1T

— Karol Nawrocki (@NawrockiKn) September 11, 2025

Russian officials, meanwhile, claimed they did not target Poland.

In response to the incursions, NATO stood up Operation Eastern Sentry to help defend against future such events. The new effort will initially deploy a mixed force of fighter jets and an air defense frigate, but is eventually planned to expand to cover the region between the Arctic and the Black Sea, providing a bulwark against potential Russian drones and missiles.  You can read more about that in our initial story about Eastern Sentry here.

It didn’t take long for the new NATO operation to kick in, as jets were launched Saturday in Romania and Poland to counter suspected Russian drones. 

Romanian officials said two of its F-16 Vipers were sent aloft to intercept a Russian drone entering Romanian airspace at 6:05 p.m. local time on Saturday during another strike on neighboring Ukraine. The drone was not shot down.

The Romanian response, along with the one in Poland, marked the first activations of Eastern Sentry, a NATO spokesman told us on Saturday.

Whether the Polish home was destroyed by one of the nation’s air-to-air missiles or a Russian drone, the incident highlights the danger presented by drone incursions into an area just outside of an active war zone.

Contact the author: [email protected]

Satellite images show how Israel is obliterating large areas of Gaza City as its offensive intensifies, forcibly displacing one million Palestinians in its campaign of destruction.

A TEENAGER who stabbed a 16-year-old boy to death in a street attack can now be pictured for the first time.

L’Avian Peniston was just 14 when he killed 16-year-old Kennie Carter by stabbing him in the chest in Stretford, Greater Manchester, just over three years ago.

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The teen was found guilty in July last year for the “act of revenge” that killed Kennie.

Manchester Crown Court handed Peniston the equivalent of a life sentence, required to serve a minimum of 17 years in prison.

The boy could not be named due reporting restrictions at the time of the murder case as he was still 16.

However, as he has now turned 18, Peniston can be named for the first time.

This is despite applications to lift reporting restrictions following his conviction, which was rejected by the judge.

Young Kennie was walking home while on the phone to his older brother when Peniston – who was with a group of boys – pounced on him.

The boys had travelled three miles ‘looking for revenge’ after an argument with Kennie’s friends the day before.

Four teens reportedly travelled by tram to the block of flats they knew Kennie and his friends typically hang out.

They stole three bikes, where a witness heard them shout: “This is revenge.”

Kennie was inside the block of flats and headed home after hearing the boys were nearby, but passed by them on the road.

One of the boys in the group was heard shouting to Kennie: “You’re the one who had backed that pole innit.”

“Nah nah it weren’t me bro,” Kennie was heard to reply.

Peniston then killed the 16-year-old boy with a single stab wound to the chest, before running away from the scene with the group.

They did not give Kennie medical assistance or call an ambulance, and later abandoned the stolen bikes.

Kennie was found lying face down at 7pm after calling his brother to say: “Oh, they’ve stabbed me in the heart bro.”

Paramedics raced Kennie to Manchester Royal Infirmary but he was pronounced dead at 8.27pm on January 22, 2022.

During the sentencing last year, the judge Mr Justice Goose, said: “This was yet another killing of a young person with a knife against the backdrop of gang violence.

“Young males carrying knives in public in readiness to threaten and kill others is becoming all too common in our cities.

“The tragedy is that not only does it destroy the lives of the victims and their families, but also those who commit the offence.”

Kennie’s mum Joan said she had seen the boy “laugh and smirk” throughout a court hearing.

She said: “This shows me he had absolutely no remorse and broke my heart even more.

“No penalty or what the court can award will ever be enough in my eyes.

A heartbreaking statement was also read out on Joan’s behalf by her sister in court: “My son was chased down in the street and killed on his way home.

“At the time of his death he was just 16.

“For the last seven weeks we have had to listen to evidence of what happened to our son in graphic detail.

“How can we put into words how his death and the last two and a half years has affected us?”

“It is not just Kennie that died on 22 January 2022.

“Our whole family has been destroyed by this mindless violence.”

She added: “They have taken away our Kennie from his loving family and our lives are destroyed forever.”

Three other teens were also jailed after being found guilty of manslaughter.

Latif Ferguson, who already turned 18 but was 15 at the time, was sentenced to five years’ detention in a young offenders’ institution.

Two 16-year-olds were sentenced to four years’ detention following a lengthy trial at Manchester Crown Court.

Six other teenagers, then aged between 15 and 19, were found not guilty of charges related to Kennie’s death

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Israel has completely destroyed more than 1,000 buildings in the Zeitoun and Sabra neighbourhoods of Gaza City since it started its invasion of the city on August 6, trapping hundreds under the rubble, the Palestinian Civil Defence says.

The agency said in a statement on Sunday that ongoing shelling and blocked access routes are preventing many rescue and aid operations in the area.

Emergency workers continue to receive numerous reports of missing people but are unable to respond, while hospitals are overwhelmed by the toll of the attacks, it added.

“There are grave concerns about the continued incursion of Israeli forces into Gaza City, at a time when field crews lack the capacity to deal with the intensity of the ongoing Israeli attacks,” the Civil Defence said.

“There is no safe area in the Gaza Strip, whether in the north or south, where shelling continues to target civilians in their homes, shelters, and even in their displacement camps.”

Israeli tanks have been rolling into the Sabra neighbourhood as Israel moves to fully occupy Gaza City, forcing close to 1 million Palestinians there southwards.

The Civil Defence’s assertion appears to confirm fears that Israel is planning to fully demolish Gaza City, as it did in Rafah, a campaign that rights advocates say could be aimed at removing all Palestinians from Gaza.

At least three people, including a child, were among the latest victims killed in an attack on a residential apartment on al-Jalaa Street in Gaza City, according to a source in the enclave’s emergency and ambulance department.

The area, where famine has been declared, has been under relentless Israeli bombardment over the last several weeks. Residents reported explosions echoing nonstop through the neighbourhoods, while several buildings were also blown up further north, in the ravaged Jabalia refugee camp.

At least 51 people were killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza on Sunday, including 27 in Gaza City and 24 aid seekers, medical sources told Al Jazeera.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health said eight more people died of Israeli-induced hunger as starvation in the enclave intensifies, raising deaths from malnutrition to 289 people, including 115 children, since the war began.

Israeli forces have been routinely opening fire on hungry Palestinians as they attempt to secure meagre aid parcels at the controversial, Israeli and US-backed GHF sites.

‘Impossible’ to stay alive

Commenting on the worsening humanitarian situation, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), said that famine is the “last calamity” hitting Gaza, where people are experiencing “hell in all shapes”.

“‘Never Again’ has deliberately become ‘again’. This will haunt us. Denial is the most obscene expression of dehumanisation,” Lazzarini wrote on X.

He added that it was time for the Israeli government to allow aid organisations to provide assistance, and for foreign journalists to be allowed into the enclave.

Gaza’s Ministry of Interior warned against Israeli plans to forcibly displace residents from Gaza City and the northern governorates, urging people against leaving their homes despite heavy bombardment.

The ministry called on residents to remain in their communities, or if threatened, to move only to nearby areas rather than relocate to the south.

“We urge citizens and displaced persons residing in Gaza City not to respond to the occupation’s threats and terrorism, and to refuse to be displaced and move to the remaining areas of the central and Khan Younis governorates,” it said.

“There is no safe place in any of the governorates of the Gaza Strip, and the occupation commits the most heinous crimes daily, even bombing the tents of displaced persons in areas it falsely claims are humanitarian or safe.”

Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary, reporting from Deir el-Balah, said Palestinians are nonetheless fleeing areas in Gaza City “under intensive Israeli air strikes and also attacks by quadcopters”.

“We met a couple of these families, and they said that it was [nearly] impossible for them to stay alive as they were fleeing and quadcopters were opening fire on whatever was moving in that area,” Khoudary said.

“Some Palestinians made it safely and were able to flee, but others were trapped in those areas and are unable to leave,” she added.

Leading rights groups and UN experts have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.

Food intended to feed 27,000 starving children in Afghanistan and Pakistan will soon be incinerated in the wake of President Donald Trump’s closure of the United States’ aid agency.

A senior US official on Wednesday said nearly 500 tonnes of high-energy biscuits, to be used as emergency food for malnourished young children, expired this month while sitting in a warehouse in Dubai.

Under questioning by lawmakers, Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary of state in charge of management, tied the decision to the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which closed its doors on July 1.

“I think that this was just a casualty of the shutdown of USAID,” Rigas said, adding that he was “distressed” that the food went to waste.

Aid officials managed to save 622 tonnes of the energy-dense biscuits in June – sending them to Syria, Bangladesh and Myanmar – but 496 tonnes, worth $793,000 before they expired this month, will be destroyed, according to two internal USAID memos reviewed by Reuters, dated May 5 and May 19, and four sources familiar with the matter.

The wasted biscuits will be sent to landfills or incinerated in the United Arab Emirates, two sources said. That will cost the US government an additional $100,000, according to the May 5 memo verified by three sources familiar with the matter.

Trump has said the US pays disproportionately for foreign aid, and he wants other countries to shoulder more of the burden. His administration announced plans to shut down USAID in January, leaving more than 60,000 tonnes of food aid stuck in stores around the world, Reuters reported in May.

The food aid stuck in Dubai was fortified wheat biscuits, which are calorie-rich and typically deployed in crisis conditions where people lack cooking facilities, “providing immediate nutrition for a child or adult”, according to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat, said lawmakers had specifically raised the issue of the food with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in March. In May, he promised lawmakers that no food aid would be wasted.

“A government that is put on notice – here are resources that will save 27,000 starving kids, can you please distribute them or give them to someone who can?

“Who decides, no, we would rather keep the warehouse locked, let the food expire, and then burn it?”

Rigas said that the US remained the world’s largest donor, and he promised to learn further details about the biscuits.

“I do want to find out what happened here and get to the ground truth,” he said.

The US is the world’s largest humanitarian aid donor, amounting to at least 38 percent of all contributions recorded by the UN. It disbursed $61bn in foreign assistance last year, just over half of it via USAID, according to government data.

The Trump administration notified Congress in March that USAID would fire almost all of its staff in two rounds on July 1 and September 2, as it prepared to shut down. In a statement on July 1 marking the transfer of USAID to the State Department, Rubio said the US was abandoning what he called a charity-based model and would focus on empowering countries to grow sustainably.

The WFP says 319 million people have limited access to food worldwide. Of those, 1.9 million people are gripped by catastrophic hunger and on the brink of famine, primarily in Gaza and Sudan.

A British-Israeli defence lawyer at the International Criminal Court linked to a Netanyahu adviser delivered message to Karim Khan. 

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, has been warned that if arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are not withdrawn, he and the ICC would be “destroyed”, the Middle East Eye (MEE) reports.

The warning was delivered in May to Khan by Nicholas Kaufman, a British-Israeli defence lawyer at the court linked to a Netanyahu adviser who said the Israeli leader’s legal adviser told him he was “authorised” to make Khan a proposal that would allow Khan to “climb down the tree”, the news website said.

According to a note of the meeting on file at the ICC and seen by MEE, Kaufman told Khan to apply to the court to reclassify the warrants and underlying information as “confidential”.

This, it was suggested, would allow Israel to access the details of the allegations, which it could not do at the time, and challenge them in private – without the outcome being made public.

Kaufman warned Khan that if it emerged Khan was applying for more arrest warrants for far-right Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich over their promotion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, then “all options would be off the table.”

Kaufman told Khan: “They will destroy you, and they will destroy the court.”

The ICC issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu, Gallant and Hamas leader Mohammed Deif in November on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent genocidal war in Gaza. Deif has since been confirmed dead.

Since then, the Israeli defendants are internationally wanted suspects, and ICC member states are under legal obligation to arrest them although several have been wary to agree to it.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory, hit out this month against countries that have allowed Netanyahu to fly over their airspace en route to the United States, suggesting that they may have flouted their obligations under international law.

Albanese said the governments of Italy, France and Greece needed to explain why they provided “safe passage” to Netanyahu, who they were theoretically “obligated to arrest” as an internationally wanted suspect when he flew over their territory on his way to meet US President Donald Trump for talks.

All three countries are signatories of the Rome Statute, the treaty that established The Hague-based ICC in 2002.

Kaufman told MEE: “I do not deny that I told Mr Khan that he should be looking for a way to extricate himself from his errors. I am not authorised to make any proposals on behalf of the Israeli government nor did I.”

Khan and his wife, Dato Shyamala Alagendra, who also attended the meeting with Kaufman, both confirmed this to be a threat, according to the note of the meeting seen by MEE.

Netanyahu’s office did not respond to requests for comment from MEE.

At the time of the meeting, Khan was facing investigation over sexual misconduct claims. Two weeks later, Khan stepped down on indefinite leave after the publication by The Wall Street Journal of new allegations of sexual assault.

Khan has strenuously denied all the allegations against him.

MEE revealed details of Khan’s meeting with Kaufman on May 1 at a hotel in The Hague.

Kaufman is an ICC defence lawyer whose current work includes representing Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines currently in ICC custody. He was arrested on an ICC warrant over allegations that “crimes against humanity” were committed during what his government called its “war on drugs”.

Ukraine’s Security Service said it deployed special drones to attack the Russian Kirovske military airfield in Crimea.

Ukraine said it carried out an overnight drone strike on the Kirovske airfield in Crimea and claimed that multiple Russian helicopters and an air defence system were destroyed in the strike.

According to a Ukraine Security Service (SBU) statement, the drones targeted areas where Russian aviation units, air defence assets, ammunition depots and unmanned aerial vehicles were located. The agency claimed that Mi-8, Mi-26, and Mi-28 helicopters, as well as a Pantsir-S1 missile and gun system were destroyed.

“Secondary detonations continued throughout the night at the airfield,” the SBU said, calling the strike part of broader efforts to disrupt Russian aerial operations. “The enemy must understand that expensive military equipment and ammunition are not safe anywhere – not on the line of contact, not in Crimea, and not deep in the rear.”

The Russian defence ministry said more than 40 Ukrainian drones were shot down overnight and Saturday morning over Crimea.

At the same time, Ukrainian officials said two people were killed and 14 others were wounded during a Russian drone strike on the port city of Odesa.

Odesa Governor Oleg Kiper said on Telegram that those who were killed were due to a drone strike on a “residential building”. Among the 14 injured, “three of them children”, Kiper added.

The governor of the southern Kherson region, Oleksandr Prokudin, said that one person was killed and three others were wounded in Russian strikes during the past day.

“Russian troops targeted critical and social infrastructure and residential areas in the region,” Prokudin added.

Territorial gains

Amid the latest attacks, Russia’s defence ministry said it had taken control of the settlement of Chervona Zirka in the eastern Donetsk region, which Moscow has claimed is part of Russia since an illegal election in late 2022.

After direct talks between Russia and Ukraine in Turkiye this month to end the war, which began in 2022, both sides were unable to come to a mutual understanding.

Moscow has said any territory taken during the war must be retained. Kyiv has staunchly rejected any peace proposal that calls for it to give up land to Russia.

On Friday, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said that the two countries’ demands were “absolutely contradictory”.

“That’s why negotiations are being organised and conducted, in order to find a path to bringing them closer together,” Putin said at a press conference in Minsk, Belarus. He added that the two sides would “continue further contact” after prisoner exchanges agreed at the Istanbul talks had been completed.

Russia and Ukraine have conducted several prisoner-of-war swaps since agreeing to free more than 1,000 captured soldiers.

The US bombed Iran’s nuclear sites Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan on June 22.

United States President Donald Trump has insisted that the strikes on several of Iran’s nuclear sites last week “completely destroyed” the facilities, rejecting US media reports citing a Pentagon assessment that the attacks only set Tehran’s nuclear programme back by a few months.

An initial intelligence evaluation suggested that the US bombardment failed to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN reported on Tuesday, citing officials familiar with the military intelligence report from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

Two people familiar with the assessment had told CNN that Iran’s “enriched uranium was not destroyed” and the centrifuges were “largely intact”.

Another source told the US broadcaster that, according to the assessment, enriched uranium had been moved before the US strikes on Sunday.

Trump has maintained that the US strikes destroyed nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.

“Fake news CNN, together with the failing New York Times, have teamed up in an attempt to demean one of the most successful military strikes in history,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform.

“The nuclear sites in Iran are completely destroyed!” he wrote.

When reporters asked him about Iran rebuilding its nuclear programme on Tuesday, Trump said: “That place is under rock. That place is demolished.”

The White House said the intelligence assessment was “flat-out wrong”.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN in a statement: “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”

Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy to the Middle East, also dismissed the intelligence report.

“All three of those had most, if not all, the centrifuges damaged or destroyed in a way that it will be almost impossible for them to resurrect that programme,” Witkoff told Fox News on Monday night.

“In my view, and in many other experts’ views who have seen the raw data, it will take a period of years.”

Witkoff also called the leaking of the report “treasonous”.

“It ought to be investigated. And whoever did it, whoever is responsible for it, should be held accountable,” he added.

Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi said an information war is under way.

“There are clearly figures in Washington who are very keen to leak a very preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency bombing assessment,” he said.

He noted that White House reporters received a press statement, saying the “leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear programme”.

“This is the first moment we are seeing, post-bombing, of the information landscape and how this information will be used and what effect it might have on Donald Trump going forward,” Rattansi said.

Aref Shamtan, 73, chose to erect a tent near his decimated home in northwest Syria instead of remaining in a displacement camp following the overthrow of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad.

“I feel good here, even among the rubble,” Shamtan said, sipping tea at the tent near his field.

Upon returning with his son after al-Assad was toppled in December, Shamtan discovered his village of al-Hawash, situated amid farmland in central Hama province, severely damaged.

His house had lost its roof and suffered cracked walls. Nevertheless, “living in the rubble is better than living in the camps” near the Turkish border, where he had resided since fleeing the conflict in 2011, Shamtan explained.

Since al-Assad’s downfall after nearly 14 years of war, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration reports that 1.87 million Syrians who were refugees abroad or internally displaced have returned to their places of origin.

The IOM identifies the “lack of economic opportunities and essential services” as the greatest challenge facing returnees.

Unable to afford rebuilding, Shamtan decided approximately two months ago to leave the camp with his family and young grandchildren, and has begun planting wheat on his land.

Al-Hawash had been under al-Assad’s control and bordered front lines with neighbouring Idlib province, which became a stronghold for opposition groups, particularly Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the opposition fighters that spearheaded the offensive that toppled the former president.

“We cannot stay in the camps,” Shamtan maintained, even though “the village is all destroyed … and life is non-existent,” lacking fundamental services and infrastructure.

“We decided … to live here until things improve. We are waiting for organisations and the state to help us,” he added. “Life is tough.”

Local official Abdel Ghafour al-Khatib, 72, has also returned after escaping in 2019 with his wife and children to a camp near the border.

“I just wanted to get home. I was overjoyed … I returned and pitched a worn-out tent. Living in my village is the important thing,” he stated.

“Everyone wants to return,” he noted. However, many cannot afford transportation in a country where 90 percent of the population lives in poverty.

“There is nothing here – no schools, no health clinics, no water and no electricity,” al-Khatib said while sitting on the ground in his tent near what remains of his home.

The conflict, which erupted in 2011 following al-Assad’s brutal suppression of antigovernment protests, killed more than 500,000 people and displaced half of Syria’s pre-war population either internally or abroad, with many seeking refuge in Idlib province.

According to the International Organization for Migration, more than six million people remain internally displaced.

May 19 (UPI) — The Ukrainian military said Monday that the Security Service of Ukraine attacked a Russian facility in the Black Sea with the use of drones.

The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, posted to Telegram Monday that “with the help of surface and air drones,’ it destroyed “enemy radars and warehouses” built on gas production platforms.

The post also included a video of the attack that showed the approach of the drones from a drone’s point of view before a long-distance view of an explosion on the Russian structure.

“Within one special operation, SBU specialists used two types of drones that demonstrated the effectiveness of paired work,” The SBU said.

The assault was carried out by the 13th Main Directorate of the SBU’s Military Counter-Intelligence Department and used both aerial and naval drones to target what the Telegram post described as “Russian military infrastructure placed on Ukrainian offshore drilling rigs,” known as the Boyko towers.

A Russian Neva radar system, stored supplies and living quarters were reportedly destroyed in the attack.

The attack destroyed a Russian Neva-B radar system used for monitoring aerial and surface activity, as well as supply storage and living quarters on the platform, the SBU reported. Neva-B radar systems can track as many as 200 targets at one time and is intended to warn of incoming attacks on infrastructure.

The SBU purports that through the use of drones, it has so far been able to attack 11 Russian warships and the “Crimean Bridge,” a reference to the Kerch Strait Bridge, which linked Crimea to the Russian mainland and was attacked by Ukraine in October of 2022.

“We once again reminded the enemy that [there is no place for Russian rubbish] in the Black Sea,” the Security Service of Ukraine added.