Category: 2. World

Deadly explosion at weapons depot comes as army has been dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon.

At least six Lebanese soldiers have been killed in an explosion as they were inspecting a weapons depot in southern Lebanon, the military has announced.

In a statement on Saturday, the Lebanese army said the unit was dismantling the contents of the depot in the Wadi Zibqin area, in the Tyre region, when the explosion occurred. It said other soldiers were injured but did not specify how many.

“An investigation is underway to determine the cause of the incident,” the statement said.

The Lebanese army has been working with the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon (UNIFIL) to dismantle Hezbollah military infrastructure as part of a ceasefire deal with Israel that came into force in November.

The deadly explosion comes as the Lebanese government this week approved United States-backed plans to disarm Hezbollah – a move the Lebanese group has rejected, saying such demands serve Israeli interests.

It also comes just days after Andrea Tenenti, a spokesperson for UN peacekeepers in Lebanon, said troops had “discovered a vast network of fortified tunnels” in the same area.

UN spokesperson Farhan Haq had told reporters that peacekeepers and Lebanese troops found “three bunkers, artillery, rocket launchers, hundreds of explosive shells and rockets, anti-tank mines and about 250 ready-to-use improvised explosive devices”.

🧵 Lebanese army soldiers work alongside @UNIFIL_ peacekeepers every day to restore security and stability to south Lebanon. pic.twitter.com/8s5EkNAdSh

— Diodato Abagnara (@DiodatoAbagnara) August 9, 2025

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said in a social media post on Saturday that “Lebanon mourns” the soldiers who were killed “while fulfilling their national duty”.

Diodato Abagnara, head of the UNIFIL mission, also expressed condolences to the troops and their families.

“Several dedicated Lebanese soldiers were killed and others injured, simply doing their job to restore stability and avoid a return to open conflict,” Abagnara wrote on X.

“Sincere wishes for a full and fast recovery for the injured. Peacekeepers will continue to support the Lebanese Armed Forces and their work to restore stability, however we can.”

LONDON: Tech giant Microsoft is investigating how an elite Israeli military intelligence unit is using its Azure cloud service after an investigation revealed extensive ties between the two entities.

There are mounting concerns that Israeli staffers working at Microsoft’s facility in the country may have concealed major details from upper management about the nature of the sensitive military collaboration, The Guardian reported on Saturday.

Unit 8200, Israel’s military surveillance agency, is broadly comparable to the National Security Agency in the US.

Through its former head, who resigned in the wake of the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, the unit carried out extensive efforts to migrate data to Microsoft’s Azure cloud storage service.

It was part of a broader plan to execute mass surveillance of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, as revealed by a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.

Unit 8200 chiefs aimed to intercept and record a million phone calls per hour from across the Occupied Territories, using the information to develop an extensive archive and history of Palestinian day-to-day life.

Sources from the unit who spoke to the investigation said some of the data gathered from the intercepted calls was used to identify targets for strikes in Gaza.

Now, senior executives from Microsoft are reportedly assessing the nature of information held by Unit 8200 on their servers.

Sources familiar with the situation told The Guardian that Microsoft’s leadership is deeply concerned that Israel-based staff may have hidden key details about their relationship with Unit 8200, and how the surveillance operation uses data stored on Azure.

In May, Microsoft claimed in a review of its relationship with the Israel Defense Forces that there was “no evidence to date” that Azure had been “used to target or harm people” in Gaza.

That claim, however, is understood to have been based on assurances from Microsoft’s Israel-based staff.

But senior executives at its US headquarters are beginning to doubt the accuracy of the information provided to them by Israeli staff, The Guardian reported.

They are also questioning whether Israeli employees may have felt more bound by their national loyalties than to Microsoft, causing them to conceal key information on behalf of the military.

The Guardian, using leaked documents from Microsoft, identified several of the tech firm’s Israel-based employees who were involved in managing projects with Unit 8200. All had previously posted online that they had served in, or were reservists for, the elite unit.

Microsoft has yet to launch another formal review into its ties to the Israeli military. A spokesperson said the company “takes these allegations seriously, as shown by our previous independent investigation.

“As we receive new information, we’re committed to making sure we have a chance to validate any new data and take any needed action.”

The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, and the US vice-president, JD Vance, held a meeting with Ukrainian and European partners in Britain on Saturday to discuss the drive for peace in Ukraine.

The summit comes before a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin set for next Friday in Alaska. In a comment that that was met with pushback from Kyiv, the US president said that an end to the war must involve “some swapping of territories”. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, stressed early on Saturday that “Ukrainians will not give their land to occupiers”.

Trump has agreed to meet the Russian president even if he refuses to meet Zelenskyy, adding to fears Ukraine could be sidelined in negotiations.

A White House official said later on Saturday that Trump was open to holding a trilateral summit in Alaska with Putin and Zelenskyy, but that it was planning a bilateral meeting with Putin at the Russian’s president’s request.

In a Telegram post on Saturday in which he emphasised Kyiv must be represented for any peace deal to be viable, Zelenskyy wrote: “Any decisions that are without Ukraine are at the same time decisions against peace. They will not bring anything. These are dead decisions. They will never work.”

The meeting between Lammy and Vance took place at Chevening in Kent. The Guardian understands it was held at the request of the US.

On Saturday evening, Lammy posted on X that he had held a meeting with Vance, Andriy Yermak, the head of the office of the Ukrainian president, Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s defence minister, and European national security advisers.

“The UK’s support for Ukraine remains ironclad as we continue working towards a just and lasting peace,” he said.

Zelenskyy said on Saturday evening that the meeting of security advisers from Ukraine and its partner countries had been constructive, adding that Kyiv’s arguments were heard and dangers were taken into account.

Zelenskyy said officials from Britain, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Finland and Poland took part in the meeting, aiming to consolidate positions to achieve a ceasefire.

“The path to peace for Ukraine should be determined together and only together with Ukraine, this is key principle,” he said in his evening address.

On Saturday evening the leaders of the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Poland and Finland, and the president of the EU Commission, released a joint statement declaring that the path to peace could not be decided without Ukraine.

“We welcome President Trump’s work to stop the killing in Ukraine, end the Russian Federation’s war of aggression, and achieve just and lasting peace and security for Ukraine,” they said.

“We are convinced that only an approach that combines active diplomacy, support to Ukraine and pressure on the Russian Federation to end their illegal war can succeed.

“We stand ready to support this work diplomatically as well as by upholding our substantive military and financial support to Ukraine.”

On Saturday morning Starmer and Zelenskyy had talked by phone. A No 10 spokesperson said: “Both leaders welcomed president Trump’s desire to bring this barbaric war to an end and agreed that we must keep up the pressure on Putin to end his illegal war.” The statement added that Starmer had reiterated “his unwavering support for Ukraine and its people” during the call.

Zelenskyy communicated with Trump and European leaders in recent days as news broke that the US leader and Putin were planning to meet. On Friday Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said there could be a “freeze” in the conflict.

If the summit goes ahead between Trump and Putin, it will be the first time a US president has met the Russian leader since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The last meeting Putin had with a US president was with Joe Biden in Geneva in June 2021.

Iran has arrested 20 people it alleges are operatives of Israel’s Mossad spy agency in recent months, the judiciary said on Saturday, warning that they will face no leniency and will be made an example of.

On Wednesday, Iran executed a nuclear scientist named Rouzbeh Vadi, who was convicted of spying for Israel and passing on information on another nuclear scientist killed in Israel’s air strikes on Iran in June, state media reported.

Judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangiri told reporters in Tehran on Saturday that charges against some of the 20 suspects arrested had been dropped and they were released. He did not give a number.

Read More: Iran holds US accountable for attacks on nuclear sites

“The judiciary will show no leniency toward spies and agents of the Zionist regime, and with firm rulings, will make an example of them all,” Jahangiri was quoted as saying by Iranian media.

He said full details would be made public once investigations were complete.

Executions of Iranians convicted of spying for Israel have significantly increased this year, with at least eight death sentences carried out in recent months.

Also Read: Israel faces backlash over Gaza plan
 

Israel carried out 12 days of air strikes on Iran in June, targeting Iran’s top generals, nuclear scientists, nuclear installations, as well as residential neighbourhoods. Iran responded with barrages of missiles and drones on Israel.

Rights group HRANA reported 1,190 Iranian deaths during the 12-day Israeli attacks, including 436 civilians and 435 security personnel.

Israel said 28 were killed in Iran’s retaliatory attack.

Radioactive water from the base that holds the UK’s nuclear bombs was allowed to leak into the sea after old pipes repeatedly burst, official files have revealed.

The radioactive material was released into Loch Long, a sea loch near Glasgow in western Scotland, because the Royal Navy failed to properly maintain a network of 1,500 water pipes on the base, a regulator found.

The armaments depot at Coulport on Loch Long is one of the most secure and secretive military sites in the UK. It holds the Royal Navy’s supply of nuclear warheads for its fleet of four Trident submarines, which are based nearby.

Files compiled by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa), a government pollution watchdog, suggest that up to half the components at the base were beyond their design life when the leaks occurred.

Sepa said the flooding at Coulport was caused by “shortfalls in maintenance”, resulting in the release of “unnecessary radioactive waste” in the form of low levels of tritium, which is used in nuclear warheads.

In one report in 2022, the agency blamed the leaks on the navy’s repeated failure to maintain the equipment in the area devoted to storing the warheads, and said plans to replace 1,500 old pipes at risk of bursting were “sub-optimal”.

The leaks are revealed in a cache of confidential inspection reports and emails given to the investigative website the Ferret and shared with the Guardian, which Sepa and the Ministry of Defence fought to keep secret.

They were released on the orders of David Hamilton, the Scottish information commissioner, who polices Scotland’s freedom of information laws, after a six-year long battle by reporters for access to the files.

The UK government insisted the files had to be kept secret for national security reasons, but in June Hamilton ruled that most had to be released. He said their disclosure threatened “reputations” not national security.

They were released in August following a further delay after the MoD asked for more time to review them, citing “additional national security considerations”.

Nuclear warheads are fitted on to the UK’s supply of Trident missiles at Coulport where the missiles are loaded on to Vanguard class submarines before they head to sea for secret patrols as part of the UK’s nuclear deterrent.

The UK’s nuclear weapons fleet has been based at Faslane on a neighbouring loch called Gare Loch since the early 1960s. Tritium is regularly replenished in the warheads to maintain the performance of the weapons.

The Sepa files show there had been a pipe burst at Coulport in 2010 and a further two in 2019. One leak in August 2019 released “significant amounts of water” that flooded a nuclear weapons processing area, where it became contaminated with low levels of tritium and passed through an open drain that fed into Loch Long.

While Sepa said radioactivity levels in that incident were very low and did not endanger human health, it found there were “shortfalls in maintenance and asset management that led to the failure of the coupling that indirectly led to the production of unnecessary radioactive waste”.

After an internal investigation and a Sepa inspection, the MoD promised 23 actions to prevent more bursts and floods in March 2020. It accepted that its lack of preparedness had caused “confusion”, “a breakdown in access control” and a “lack of communication of the hazards”.

However, there were two further pipe bursts in 2021, including one in another area that also held radioactive substances, prompting another inspection by Sepa in 2022. Progress on completing the 23 remedial actions “had been slow and delayed in many cases”, Sepa said. “The events have highlighted shortcomings in asset management across the naval base.”

David Cullen, a nuclear weapons expert with the defence thinktank Basic in London, said the repeated pollution incidents were shocking and the attempts to keep them secret were “outrageous”.

He said: “The MoD is almost 10 years into a nearly £2bn infrastructure programme at Faslane and Coulport, and yet they apparently didn’t have a proper asset management system as recently as 2022. This negligent approach is far too common in the nuclear weapons programme, and is a direct consequence of a lack of oversight.”

Coulport is exempt from civilian pollution controls because it is a military base, but Sepa said it was committed to ensuring the base operated “in accordance with standards equivalent to those in environmental regulations, to protect both the environment and the public”.

Sepa said it was “satisfied” that Coulport and Faslane had made “substantial improvements to asset management and maintenance” since these incidents, which had not been repeated.

It published data on radioactive discharges from Coulport and Faslane every year, along with assessments of the environmental impacts. It insisted those discharges were “of no regulatory concern”.

An MoD spokesperson said it placed “the upmost importance on our responsibilities for handling radioactive substances safely and securely. There have been no unsafe releases of radioactive material into the environment at any stage.”

LONDON (Reuters) – More than 50 people protesting against Britain’s decision to ban the Palestine Action group were arrested outside parliament on Saturday, London’s Metropolitan Police said.

Officers made arrests after crowds, waving placards expressing support for the group, gathered in Parliament Square, the force said on X.

In July, British lawmakers banned Palestine Action under anti-terrorism legislation after some of its members broke into a Royal Air Force base and damaged planes in protest against Britain’s support for Israel.

The ban makes it a crime to be a member of the group, carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison.

The co-founder of Palestine Action, Huda Ammori, last week won a bid to bring a legal challenge against the ban.