presses

Sheinbaum calls for nationwide review of sexual harassment laws, as attack shines light on Mexico’s poor record on women’s safety.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has called for sexual harassment to be made a crime nationwide after being groped on the street while greeting supporters near the presidential palace in Mexico City.

Sheinbaum, 63, said on Wednesday that she had pressed charges against the man and would review nationwide legislation on sexual harassment following the attack by a drunk man who put his arm around her shoulder, and with the other hand touched her hip and chest, while attempting to kiss her neck.

Mexico’s first woman president removed the man’s hands before a member of her staff stepped between them. The president’s security detail did not appear to be nearby at the moment of the attack, which was caught on camera.

The man was later arrested.

“My thinking is: If I don’t file a complaint, what becomes of other Mexican women? If this happens to the president, what will happen to all the women in our country?” Sheinbaum told her regular morning news conference on Wednesday.

In a post on social media, the president said the attack was “something that many women experience in the country and in the world”.

Presenté una denuncia por el episodio de acoso que viví ayer en la Ciudad de México. Debe quedar claro que, más allá de ser presidenta, esto es algo que viven muchas mujeres en el país y en el mundo; nadie puede vulnerar nuestro cuerpo y espacio personal.

Revisaremos la… pic.twitter.com/jcs6FweI6q

— Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (@Claudiashein) November 5, 2025

Translation: I filed a complaint for the harassment episode that I experienced yesterday in Mexico City. It must be clear that, beyond being president, this is something that many women experience in the country and in the world; no one can violate our body and personal space. We will review the legislation so that this crime is punishable in all 32 states.

Sheinbaum explained that the incident occurred when she and her team had decided to walk from the National Palace to the Education Ministry to save time. She said they could walk the route in five minutes, rather than taking a 20-minute car ride.

She also called on states across Mexico to look at their laws and procedures to make it easier for women to report such assaults and said Mexicans needed to hear a “loud and clear, no, women’s personal space must not be violated”.

Mexico’s 32 states and Mexico City, which is a federal entity, all have their own criminal codes, and not all states consider sexual harassment a crime.

“It should be a criminal offence, and we are going to launch a campaign,” Sheinbaum said, adding that she had suffered similar attacks in her youth.

The incident has put the focus on Mexico’s troubling record on women’s safety, with sexual harassment commonplace and rights groups warning of a femicide crisis, and the United Nations reporting that an average of 10 women are murdered every day in the country.

About 70 percent of Mexican women aged 15 and over will also experience at least one incident of sexual harassment in their lives, according to the UN.

The attack also focused criticism on Sheinbaum’s security detail and on her insistence on maintaining a degree of intimacy with the public, despite Mexican politicians regularly being a target of cartel violence.

But Sheinbaum dismissed any suggestion that she would increase her security or change how she interacts with people following the incident.

At nationwide rallies in September to mark her first year in power, the president allowed supporters to embrace her and take selfies.

Hamas is pressing Israel to include prominent Palestinians in a prisoner-release list – part of a ceasefire deal that will also see hostages returned from Gaza.

Hamas’s insistence comes after the Israeli justice ministry published the names of 250 prisoners to be freed, but excluded seven high-profile prisoners, including Marwan Barghouti and Ahmad Saadat.

The men, who are serving sentences after being convicted of involvement in separate deadly attacks in Israel, have long been seen by Palestinians as symbols of resistance.

Twenty Israeli hostages are expected to be released before 12:00 (09:00 GMT) on Monday as part of the deal proposed by US President Donald Trump.

A senior Palestinian official familiar with the talks told the BBC that US envoy Steve Witkoff had promised to raise the exclusion of the Palestinian prisoners with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but Israel has firmly refused to include them.

It is not clear whether this could be a sticking point, or impact the timeline for the release of hostages from the Gaza Strip and Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

The releases are due to take place in the first phase of Trump’s ceasefire and hostage return deal, approved this week to end the two-year war in Gaza.

It is unclear how the hostages will be released this time – on previous occasions Hamas paraded them in public, infuriating Israel and many of its Western allies.

The bodies of deceased hostages will also be returned. It is thought that at least 26 hostages are deceased, with the fate of two others unknown.

Israel will also release about 250 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences in Israeli jails, and another 1,700 Palestinians from Gaza who have been detained.

Hamas had submitted a list of prisoners it wanted released that included Barghouti and Saadat.

Barghouti is serving five life sentences plus 40 years after being convicted in 2004 of planning attacks that led to five civilians being killed.

Opinion polls have consistently indicated that he remains the most popular Palestinian leader, and that Palestinians would vote for him in a presidential election ahead of the current Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas or Hamas leaders.

Barghouti remains a senior figure in the Fatah faction that dominates the PA, which governs parts of the occupied West Bank not under Israeli control.

Saadat, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted in 2008 of heading an “illegal terrorist organisation” and involvement in attacks, including the assassination of an Israeli minister in 2001.

Among the 250 prisoners set to be released is Iyad Abu al-Rub, an Islamic Jihad commander convicted of orchestrating suicide bombings in Israel that killed 13 people in the early 2000s.

According to the Israeli justice ministry, he will be released either to Gaza or deported abroad.

The BBC understands that Hamas is also pushing for some possible additional prisoner releases. These relate to Palestinian prisoners who were released years ago as part of an exchange for the hostage Gilad Shalit – and then were rearrested after 7 October.

Hamas argues that since they were part of a previous hostage exchange, they should not be included in the 250 figure.

In Israel, hospitals are preparing for the release of hostages as families await their return.

The first phase of the Israel-Hamas deal saw a ceasefire take effect on Friday and Israeli forces partially withdraw from parts of Gaza. Hundreds of aid trucks a day are now expected to enter. The next phases are still being negotiated.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have returned from southern Gaza to Gaza City, weeks after fleeing the Israeli offensive that destroyed much of the city.

Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defence agency has said it is conducting recovery operations and pulling bodies from the rubble, with Palestinians still missing across the territory.

Israel’s war on Gaza was triggered by the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage.

Since then, 67,682 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry says.

Additional reporting by Mallory Moench

Israel is ploughing ahead with a plan to build what critics have described as a “concentration camp” for Palestinians on the ruins of Rafah in southern Gaza, in the face of a growing backlash at home and abroad.

The suggestion, first mooted by Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz earlier this month, anticipates an area that could accommodate an initial group of some 600,000 already displaced Palestinians in Gaza, which would then be expanded to accommodate all of the enclave’s pre-war population of some 2.2 million people. It would be run by international forces and have no Hamas presence.

Once inside Katz’s self-styled “humanitarian city”, Palestinians would not be allowed to leave to other areas in Gaza, but would instead be encouraged to “voluntarily emigrate” to other unspecified countries, the minister said.

Katz’s plan has already received significant criticism. Labelled a “concentration camp” by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and illegal by Israeli lawyers, it has even been criticised by the military that will be responsible for implementing it, with the military’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, reportedly calling it “unworkable” with “more holes in it than cheese”.

Internationally, a British minister said he was “appalled” by the plan, while Austria and Germany’s foreign ministers expressed their “concern”. The United Nations said it was “firmly against” the idea.

But members of the Israeli government have defended the idea, and leaks continue to emerge in the Israeli media over the debate surrounding it within the government – with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly asking only for a plan that was speedier and less costly than a plan presented by the Israeli army.

An Al Jazeera investigation has found that Israel has recently increased the number of demolitions it is conducting in Rafah, possibly paving the way for the “humanitarian city”.

Long planned

Depopulating Gaza has long been an ambition of some of Israel’s more hardline settler groups, who believe themselves to have a divine mandate to occupy the Palestinian territory. The Israeli far-right was encouraged to press ahead with the idea when United States President Donald Trump suggested in February that Palestinians in Gaza could be displaced and moved elsewhere.

Since then, both Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have backed calls for displacement.

When Netanyahu announced in May the creation of the controversial US-backed GHF, a body intended to deliver limited aid into the enclave his forces had been besieging since early March, Netanyahu referred to a future “sterile zone” that Gaza’s population would be moved into, where they would be allowed aid and food.

Later the same month, Smotrich, who has criticised the current plan as too costly but is not opposed to the idea in principle, also suggested that plans were under way to push Gaza’s population into a camp.

Addressing a “settlement conference” in the occupied West Bank, Smotrich told his audience that what remained of Gaza would be “totally destroyed” and its population pressed into a “humanitarian zone” close to the Egyptian border, foreshadowing the language used by Katz.

Part of the Israeli plan

Israeli political analyst Nimrod Flashenberg told Al Jazeera that – for the Israeli government – there was merit to the plan, both from a security perspective, and “from the perspective of ethnically cleansing” Gaza, and providing an end goal that Israel’s leaders could define as a success.

“As I understand it, parts of the military regard removing civilians from the [non-Israeli controlled parts] of Gaza and concentrating them in a single space as an ideal first step in locating and eliminating Hamas,” Flashenberg said of the Palestinian group that Israel has failed to eliminate in 21 months of conflict, despite the killing of more than 58,000 people.

Flashenberg added that the plan would effectively create an “ethnic cleansing terminal”, from which, once people were separated from their original homes, “it makes it easier to move them elsewhere”.

“Of course it complicates ceasefire negotiations, but so what?” Flashenberg said, referring to the ongoing talks aimed at bringing about an initial 60-day ceasefire. “Nothing has really changed. It’s possible, of course, that with work on the concentration camp under way, Hamas might still accept the ceasefire and hope that things might change.”

“It’s part of their entire mentality,” Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the Israeli parliament representing the Hadash-Ta’al party, said. “They really do believe that they can do anything: that they can move all of these people around as if they’re not even humans. Even if imprisoning just the first 600,000 people suggested by Katz is inconceivable. How can you do that without it leading to some kind of massacre?”

“That they’re even talking about criminal acts without every state in the world condemning them is dangerous,” she added.

But lawyers in Israel have questioned the legality of the move. Military lawyers are reported to have “raised concerns” that Israel might face accusations of forced displacement, and an open letter from a number of Israeli legal scholars is more explicit, slamming the proposal as “manifestly illegal”.

‘Nothing humanitarian’

According to the United Nations, at least 1.9 million people, about 90 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population, have been displaced as a result of Israeli attacks. Many have been displaced multiple times.

Earlier this month, Amnesty concluded that, despite the militarised delivery of limited aid into the strip, Israel is continuing to use starvation as a weapon of war. According to the rights agency, the malnutrition and starvation of children and families across Gaza remain widespread, with the healthcare system that might typically care for them pushed to breaking point by Israel.

“Humanitarian city? I despise all these euphemisms. There’s nothing humanitarian about this. It’s utterly inhumane,” Yossi Mekelberg, a senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, said. “There would be nothing humanitarian about the conditions that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would be pushed into or about the idea you can only leave by going to another country.”

“This has to be condemned and there has to be consequences,” he continued.  “It’s not true when people say there’s no international community any more. If you trade with Israel, cooperate militarily or diplomatically with it, you have leverage. The US has leverage, the EU [European Union] has leverage. All these actors do.”

“By shrugging your shoulders and saying it’s just anarchy,” he concluded, “you’re handing the keys to Smotrich, Katz and Netanyahu and saying there’s nothing you can do.”

Talks lay groundwork for a summit between EU and Chinese leaders in Beijing on July 24 and 25.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief has urged China to end restrictions on the export of rare earth elements and warned that Chinese firms’ support for Russia’s war in Ukraine posed a serious threat to European security.

The statement from Kaja Kallas came on Wednesday after a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Brussels.

The EU is seeking to improve its relations with China amid United States President Donald Trump’s tariff war, which has rocked major trading powers.

But instead of improvements, a trade spat has only deepened between Brussels and Beijing over alleged unfair practices by China. The 27-nation bloc is also railing against the flow of vital tech to Russia’s military through China.

On Wednesday in her meeting with Wang, Kallas “called on China to put an end to its distortive practices, including its restrictions on rare earths exports, which pose significant risks to European companies and endanger the reliability of global supply chains”, a statement from her office said.

On trade, Kallas urged “concrete solutions to rebalance the economic relationship, level the playing field and improve reciprocity in market access”.

She also “highlighted the serious threat Chinese companies’ support for Russia’s illegal war poses to European security”.

China says it does not provide military support to Russia for the war in Ukraine. But European officials say Chinese companies provide many of the vital components for Russian drones and other weapons used in Ukraine.

Kallas called on China “to immediately cease all material support that sustains Russia’s military industrial complex” and support “a full and unconditional ceasefire” and a “just and lasting peace in Ukraine”.

Wednesday’s discussions were to lay the groundwork for a summit between EU and Chinese leaders on July 24 and 25. European Council President Antonio Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will travel to China for the summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang.

Earlier in the day, Wang also met Costa as part of those preparations.

In that meeting, Wang called on both sides to respect each other’s core interests and increase mutual understanding, adding that “unilateralism and acts of bullying have seriously undermined the international order and rules”, according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement.

Besides discussions on improving bilateral ties, Kallas and Wang also discussed the situation in Iran.

While both leaders welcomed the de-escalation between Israel and Iran, Kallas said she had “urged Iran to immediately restart negotiations on its nuclear programme and that Europe stands ready to facilitate talks”, according to a statement from her office.

Kallas and Wang also “agreed on the importance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as the cornerstone of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime”.

The EU, the United Kingdom, France and Germany are parties to a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that the United States abandoned in 2018, which they hope to revive. Iran has always said its nuclear programme is peaceful and denies seeking a weapon.