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LONDON — Actor Prunella Scales, best known as acid-tongued Sybil Fawlty in the classic British sitcom “Fawlty Towers,” has died, her children said Tuesday. She was 93 and had lived with dementia for many years.

Scales’ sons, Samuel and Joseph West, said she died “peacefully at home in London” on Monday.

“Although dementia forced her retirement from a remarkable acting career of nearly 70 years, she continued to live at home,” her sons said. “She was watching ‘Fawlty Towers’ the day before she died.”

Scales’ career included early roles in a 1952 television version of “Pride and Prejudice” and the 1954 film comedy “Hobson’s Choice,” followed by her TV breakthrough starring opposite Richard Briers in “Marriage Lines,” a popular 1960s sitcom about a newlywed couple.

In “Fawlty Towers” she played the exasperated wife of hapless Basil Fawlty, played by John Cleese, whose efforts to run a seaside hotel inevitably escalated into chaos. Only 12 episodes were made, in 1975 and 1979, but it is regularly cited as one of the funniest sitcoms of all time.

Cleese remembered Scales as “a really wonderful comic actress” and “a very sweet lady.”

“I’ve recently been watching a number of clips of ‘Fawlty Towers’ whilst researching a book,” Cleese said in a statement. “Scene after scene she was absolutely perfect.”

Scales also starred as the small-town social powerhouse Elizabeth Mapp in “Mapp & Lucia,” a 1985 TV adaptation of E.F. Benson’s 1930s series of comic novels.

Later roles included Queen Elizabeth II in “A Question of Attribution,” Alan Bennett’s stage and TV drama about the queen’s art adviser, Anthony Blunt, who was also a Soviet spy. Scales played another British monarch in the one-woman stage show “An Evening with Queen Victoria.”

Scales was a versatile stage performer whose theater roles ranged from Shakespeare’s comedies to the morphine-addicted matriarch Mary Tyrone in a 1991 production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

But she remained best known for “Fawlty Towers.” In 2006, Scales was guest of honor at the reopening of the Gleneagles Hotel in the English seaside resort of Torquay, the establishment whose memorably rude owner had inspired Cleese to create Basil Fawlty after a stay there in the 1970s.

Scales was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2013. Between 2014 and 2019, she and her husband, actor Timothy West, explored waterways in Britain and abroad in the gentle travel show “Great Canal Journeys.” The program was praised for the way it honestly depicted Scales’ dementia.

West, her husband of 61 years, died in November 2024. Scales is survived by her sons, stepdaughter Juliet West, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Lawless writes for the Associated Press.

Israeli forces have killed 53 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip and levelled 16 buildings in Gaza City, including three residential towers, as they ramp up an offensive to seize the northern urban centre and displace its population.

At least 35 of the victims on Sunday were killed in Gaza City, according to medics.

Two more Palestinians also died of malnutrition in the Strip, according to its Ministry of Health, taking the death toll from hunger to 422 since the beginning of Israel’s war.

In Gaza City, the Israeli military marked the al-Kawthar tower in the southern Remal neighbourhood as a target, before launching missile strikes that destroyed the building two hours later. The relentless bombardment has forced tens of thousands to flee.

“We don’t know where to go,” said Marwan al-Safi, a displaced Palestinian. “We need a solution to this situation… We are dying here.”

The Government Media Office in Gaza condemned Israel’s “systematic bombing” of civilian buildings, saying the aim of the offensive was “extermination and forced displacement”.

In a statement, the office said that while Israel was claiming to be targeting armed groups, “the field realities prove beyond doubt” that Israeli forces were bombing “schools, mosques, hospitals and medical centres”, and destroying towns, residential buildings, tents and headquarters of various groups, including international humanitarian organisations.

The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, said in a post on X that 10 of the agency’s buildings have been hit in Gaza City in the past four days alone.

That includes seven schools and two clinics that were sheltering thousands of displaced people. “No place is safe in Gaza. No one is safe,” he wrote.

‘Nowhere in Gaza is safe’

As bombardments intensified, families were once again forced to flee south towards al-Mawasi, an area Israel has designated as a “safe zone” despite repeatedly attacking it.

Ahmed Awad told Al Jazeera that he had escaped northern Gaza on Saturday as “mortar shells rained down”. He described arriving at midnight to find “no water, no toilets, nothing. Families are sleeping in the open. The situation is extremely dire”.

Another displaced Palestinian, AbedAllah Aram, said his family faced a “severe shortage” of clean water.

“Food is scarce, and inside these tents, people are hungry and malnourished. Winter is approaching, and we urgently need new tents. On top of that, this area cannot handle more displaced families,” he said.

A third man said he has been unable to find shelter in al-Mawasi despite arriving a week ago. He described his ordeal as unbearable.

“I have a large family, including my children, mother and grandmother. Not only are missiles raining down on us, but famine is devouring us too. My family has been on a constant journey of displacement for two years. We can no longer endure the ongoing genocidal war or hunger,” he said.

“Above all, we have no source of income to feed our starving children. Displacement is as painful as eviscerating one’s soul out of the body.”

UNICEF, meanwhile, said that conditions in al-Mawasi were worsening on a daily basis.

“Nowhere in Gaza is safe, including in this so-called humanitarian zone,” Tess Ingram, the agency’s spokesperson, told Al Jazeera from al-Mawasi. “The camp is becoming more and more crowded by the day.”

She recalled meeting a woman, Seera, who had been ordered to evacuate Gaza City while pregnant. “She went into labour in Sheikh Radwan and gave birth on the side of the road while trying to find help, whilst evacuation orders were being issued for that area,” Ingram said.

“She is one of so many examples of families who have come here and now are struggling to access the basics they need to survive.”

Doha summit condemns ‘barbaric’ Israel

Meanwhile, the political fallout from Israel’s strike on Hamas negotiators in Qatar last week, which killed five Hamas members and a Qatari security officer, has continued.

Izzat al-Rashq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said the “war criminal Netanyahu is attempting to shift the battle to the region, seeking to redraw the Middle East and dominate it in pursuit of mythical fantasies related to ‘Greater Israel’, which places the entire region on the brink of explosion due to his extremism and recklessness.”

He said the attack on Qatari soil was meant to “destroy the negotiation process and undermine the role of our sister state, Qatar”.

At a preparatory meeting ahead of a summit on Monday in Doha, Arab and Islamic leaders discussed ways to respond.

Reuters reported that a draft resolution seen at the meeting condemned Israel’s “genocide, ethnic cleansing, starvation, siege, and colonising activities”, warning that such actions threatened peace in the region and undermined efforts to normalise ties with Arab states.

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani called Israel’s attack on Doha on September 9 “barbaric” and urged fierce and firm measures in response.

Sheikh Mohammed said that Arab nations supported “lawful measures” to protect Doha’s sovereignty and called on the international community to abandon “double standards” in dealing with Israel.

Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said that “silence and inaction” had emboldened Israel to carry out crimes “with impunity”. He called on Arab and Islamic nations to hold Israel accountable for “evidenced war crimes”, including “killing civilians, starving the population and driving an entire population homeless”.

Adnan Hayajneh, a professor of international relations at Qatar University, told Al Jazeera that the regional mood had shifted. “The US has to wake up to the fact that you’ve got 2 billion Muslims around the world insulted, and it’s only the beginning. It’s not only the attack on Qatar, it is a continuation of destabilisation of the whole region,” he said.

US-Israeli relations

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that ties with the United States remained strong, despite Washington’s unease over the strike in Qatar. Hosting US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said that relations were “as strong and durable as the stones in the Western Wall”.

Rubio, before his departure, claimed that US President Donald Trump was “not happy” about the Israeli attack in Doha, but maintained that US-Israeli relations remained “very strong”.

Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut, reporting from Amman, Jordan, said that Washington was trying to manage the fallout.

“The US is surely going to do some damage control, saying that the strikes on Doha are not going to change the relationship with Israel, but some conversations will need to be had,” she said.

Meanwhile, Israeli ministers have pledged to continue pursuing Hamas leaders abroad. Minister of Energy Eli Cohen declared, “Hamas cannot sleep peacefully anywhere in the world,” including in NATO member state Turkiye.

Another minister, Ze’ev Elkin, said: “We will pursue them and settle accounts with them, wherever they are.”

Israeli media later reported that Mossad chief David Barnea had opposed the Qatar strike, fearing it would derail ceasefire negotiations. A columnist in the Israeli newspaper Maariv wrote that Barnea believed Hamas leaders “can be eliminated at any given moment”, but had warned that attacking Doha risked torpedoing a deal to release captives Hamas had taken from Israel during its attack on October 7, 2023.

Since Israel began its war on Gaza after the Hamas attack, at least 64,871 Palestinians have been killed and 164,610 injured, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.

Separately, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Israel’s Ministry of Defence is treating about 20,000 wounded soldiers, with more than half suffering from psychological trauma and estimates suggesting that by 2028, the figure could rise to 50,000.

Eight 375ft-tall cooling towers crashed to the ground yesterday in the largest simultaneous demolition of its kind.

Hundreds of people watched the structures’ tumble at Cottam Power Station in Retford, Notts, one of the last coal-fired stations in Britain.

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The towers were flattened in 10 seconds, sending a huge cloud of dust into the air.

The power station shut in 2019.

The historic moment marked the largest simultaneous demolition of cooling towers ever carried out.

The coal-fired complex, which opened in 1968, was capable of generating enough electricity for 3.7 million homes.

Originally designed for just 30 years of use, it remained operational until 2019 when it was decommissioned by EDF Energy.

The demolition, the ninth at the EDF-owned site, is part of a phased clearance.

Other parts of the site, including its chimney stack, have already been destroyed.

The project is expected to be complete by early 2026.

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LAS VEGAS — The Clippers team Brook Lopez grew up watching as a young kid in Southern California is not that same franchise anymore.

These Clippers are about putting a winning product on the court and about putting together the right talent to win games — and that is what sold Lopez on signing with them.

“It’s crazy to see, but it’s very cool — seeing the climb, the ascent,” Lopez said Monday afternoon at a news conference hours before the Clippers and Lakers played each other in an NBA Summer League game at Nevada Las Vegas. “I’m a Cali boy. I grew up in the Valley, in North Hollywood. Obviously things were very different back then and to see where the Clippers have come now, it’s just astonishing, it’s beautiful. I’m glad to be a part of it and hopefully I can help take them even further up.”

Lopez decided not to return to the Bucks after seven seasons in Milwaukee and opted not to sign with the Lakers, joining the Clippers on a two-year, $18-million deal.

He liked the idea of playing with Kawhi Leonard, James Harden and Ivica Zubac, a former teammate when they played on the Lakers in 2017-18, and for Clippers coach Tyronn Lue. Lopez also had a connection with Lawrence Frank, the Clippers’ president of basketball operations. Frank was the coach of the New Jersey Nets when Lopez was there.

“Looking at my options, I was just thrilled the Clippers reached out and were one of them,” Lopez said. “They’ve been a great team for quite a while now. They have a ton of great players, obviously Hall of Famers, All-Stars, great young players. My guy Zubi! And there is a great chance to win a championship here.”

Clippers center Ivica Zubac, right, blocks a shot by Denver Nuggets guard Jamal Murray in Game 3 of the first round of the NBA playoffs on April 26.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Over the course of his career, Lopez has been a starting center. He played in 80 games last season with the Bucks, averaging 31.8 minutes per game. And he was still productive at 37, averaging 13 points, 5.0 rebounds, 1.8 assists, 1.9 blocks, while shooting 50.9% from the floor and 37.3% from three-point range.

But Zubac has emerged as one of the top centers in the NBA, even making the NBA’s All-Defensive second team.

Out of the 1,105 regular-season games Lopez has played, he has started in 1,064. With the Clippers, however, he’ll likely come off the bench.

“I’m just trying to come in and help the team win,” Lopez said. “Whatever that may look like, that’s what I’m here to do. Wherever my minutes may come from when I’m on the court, the beginning of the game, middle of the game, end of the game, I’m trying to be out there trying to help my team win and beat the other team on the court.”

Because he can stretch the floor with his outside shooting, the 7-foot-1 Lopez can see a world in which he and 7-0 Zubac are on the court playing together.

“I think we complement each other extremely well,” Lopez said. “Obviously, we’ll be very big. I think we’ll be great defensively, just dominating the paint, sealing the paint off. And then offensively, we complement each other there as well. I’ll spread the floor for him, give him all the room in the paint to go wild.”

When the Bucks visited the Clippers last season, Lopez got to see the Intuit Dome.

He was impressed by the arena that Clippers owner Steve Ballmer built and that also played a role in his decision.

“He texted me right away, (saying) how excited he was to have me on the team,” Lopez said. “I told him the same thing back. I’m excited to win and I think that’s what we’re all here for and it’s going to be so much fun.”