Interestingly, the resolution said that terrorism “remains a persistent scourge” at a time when Pakistan is the council chair for the month of July. Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ishaq Dar, is the council president this month
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The UN Security Council has adopted a draft resolution to settle disputes peacefully and urged member states to utilise mechanisms outlined under Article 33 of the UN Charter, including negotiation, enquiry, and mediation.
“Peace is a choice, and the world expects the Security Council to help countries make that choice”, the UN Chief Antonio Guterres said during a debate on promoting international peace.
Interestingly, the resolution said that terrorism “remains a persistent scourge” at a time when Pakistan is the council chair for the month of July. Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ishaq Dar, is the council president this month.
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The resolution calls for enhancing efforts by all regional and sub-regional organisations for peaceful settlement of disputes and to strengthen cooperation between these organisations and the United Nations.
Dar rakes up Kashmir
“Multilateralism is not merely a diplomatic convenience, it is the need of the art. It is time to return to the spirit of San Francisco, where the Charter was born out of the ashes of war and with a hope for peace,” Dar said.
During his address, the Pakistani minister mentioned Kashmir as an “internationally recognised disputed territory” and called India’s decision to put the Indus Waters Treaty into abeyance “regrettable and unjustified.”
Dar pushed the UNSC to find a resolution for the Kashmir issue based on what he called relevant Security Council resolutions.
India hits back
Meanwhile, India has hit back at Dar’s statement at the UNSC, with Ambassador Harish saying, “On one hand, there is India — a matured democracy, a surging economy, a pluralistic and inclusive society. At the other extreme is Pakistan, steeped in fanaticism and terrorism, and a serial borrower from the IMF.”
“It ill behoves the member of the Council to offer homilies while indulging in practices that are unacceptable to the international community,” he added.
TEHRAN: Iran has no plans to abandon uranium enrichment while any move to re-impose international sanctions on Iran would not only be without legal ground but would also make the situation over its nuclear programme “more complex”, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi warned on Tuesday.
He expressed these views ahead of a meeting on Friday with three European states known as the E3 — Britain, France and Germany, which had announced plan to invoke a “snapback” mechanism if progress not achieved by the end of August.
The “snapback” mechanism is a process that would re-impose UN sanctions on Tehran that were lifted under a 2015 deal among six world powers in return for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programme though the US unilaterally decided to exit the deal in 2018, rendering it ineffective.
“We will express our position regarding the E3’s comments on the snapback mechanism, which we think lacks any legal ground,” Gharibabadi said, referring to Friday’s meeting in Istanbul.
Says snapcheck mechanism lacks legal ground
“Nonetheless, our effort will be to see if we can find common solutions to manage the situation.”
“It has been seven years that the nuclear deal is not being implemented by the Europeans, following the US departure from it. How can they argue that Iran is not following the deal when they themselves have not done so?” Gharibabadi added.
The three European countries along with China and Russia are the remaining parties to the 2015 nuclear deal from which the United States had already withdrawn.
Tehran hosted China and Russia officials to discuss its nuclear programme. The Friday meeting with E3 will be the first since Israel and the Unites Stated carried out strikes on nuclear facilities inside Iran, which claimed its nuclear programme is “solely meant for civilian purposes”.
For now, enrichment “is stopped because, yes, damages are serious and severe,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Fox News. “But obviously we cannot give up enrichment because it is an achievement of our own scientists,” he added, calling it a source of “national pride”.
US President Donald Trump responded to the comments on his platform Truth Social, saying Washington would carry out strikes again “if necessary”.
The 2015 agreement, reached between Iran and UN Security Council permanent members Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, plus Germany, imposed curbs on Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief.
However, it unravelled in 2018 when the United States, during Trump’s first term, unilaterally withdrew and re-imposed sweeping sanctions.
In recent weeks, the three European powers have threatened to reimpose international sanctions on Tehran, accusing it of breaching its nuclear commitments.
Germany said the Istanbul talks would be at the expert level, with E3, working “flat out” to find a sustainable and verifiable diplomatic solution. “If no solution is reached by the end of August… the snapback also remains an option for the E3,” said its foreign ministry spokesman, Martin Giese.
A clause in the 2015 agreement allows for UN sanctions on Iran to be re-imposed through a “snapback” mechanism in the event of non-compliance.
However, the agreement expires in October, leaving a tight deadline.
DHAKA: Grief gave way to anger in Bangladesh on Tuesday, a day after a fighter jet crashed into a school, killing 31 people, mostly children, in the country’s deadliest aviation accident in decades.
The pupils had just been let out of class when the Chinese-made F-7 BJI aircraft slammed into the private Milestone School and College in Dhaka on Monday. At least 31 people have died, up from the military’s earlier toll of 27.
More than 170 people were injured in the crash, with 69 of them still undergoing treatment at various hospitals. “Ten patients are in very critical condition,” Sayedur Rahman, from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, told reporters.
At a protest on the school campus, students accused the government of lying about the death toll and demanded a list of those injured. “There were hundreds of students in that academic building. We saw body parts strewn all over the ground. Where are they?” a 17-year-old student said. “When students and teachers asked this question to the military personnel, they roughed us up,” he said.
Military accused of roughing up protesting students
Some of the students carried placards that read: “We want justice” and “Where are the bodies of our brothers and sisters?” Students also stormed the national secretariat in Dhaka, prompting police to use batons and stun grenades, local media reported.
Press secretary Ahammed Foyez said that the government had agreed to meet the student’s demands. “We believe the demands raised by the students are legitimate and should be fulfilled,” Foyez said.
Barack Obama has broken his silence on calls from Donald Trump for him to be prosecuted by unequivocally rejecting his successor’s accusations that he tried to engineer a “coup” following Trump’s 2016 election victory by “manufacturing” evidence of Russian interference.
Obama’s office took the unusual step of issuing an emphatic refutation after Trump told reporters that his predecessor had “[tried] to lead a coup” against him and was guilty of “treason” over intelligence assessments suggesting that Russia had intervened to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the campaign.
“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” the statement said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”
The statement went on to criticize claims made in an 11-page document released last week by Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who said she was passing evidence of what she claimed was a “treasonous conspiracy” among Obama national security officials to the justice department, recommending their prosecution.
“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,” it said.
“These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”
Obama’s response followed a fusillade of accusations by Trump in the White House as he was meeting the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the son of the country’s former autocratic president, who was ousted in a popular “people’s power revolution” in 1986.
Asked by a reporter who should be the main target of the criminal investigation recommended in Gabbard’s report, Trump said: “Based on what I read, and I read pretty much what you read, it would be President Obama. He started it, and Biden was there with him. And [James] Comey [the former FBI director] was there, and [James] Clapper [the former director of national intelligence], the whole group was there.
“It was them, too, but the leader of the gang was President Obama, Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him?”
He went on: “This isn’t like evidence. This is like proof, irrefutable proof that Obama was sedatious [sic], that Obama … was trying to lead a coup, and it was with Hillary Clinton, with all these other people, but Obama headed it up.
“He’s guilty. This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined.”
Trump said Gabbard had told him she had “thousands of additional documents coming”.
“It’s the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever read. So you want to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense,” he said, in what appeared to be a coded appeal for supporters to drop their demands for the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 as he awaited trial on sex-trafficking charges.
But the Gabbard report, which accused the Obama administration of forcing spy agencies to alter their conclusions, conflated and misrepresented different issues to discredit the intelligence community’s assessment in 2017 that Russia sought to simultaneously help Trump and damage Clinton.
The assessment concluded that Russia did not engage in cyber-attacks against election infrastructure to change vote tallies, but found Moscow hacked and leaked documents from the Democratic National Committee to damage the Clinton campaign.
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The Gabbard report used that first conclusion to suggest that a broader Russian influence operation did not occur, and cited Obama’s presidential daily brief in December 2016 that concluded there were no Russian hacks of election systems being pushed back as evidence of political interference in the assessment.
Assertions of Russian interference were subsequently borne out in the report published by the special counsel Robert Mueller, in 2019, and the bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report published the following year, led by Rubio, now secretary of state in Trump’s administration.
A former CIA analyst and national intelligence officer, Fulton Armstrong, told the Guardian in an email that Gabbard’s paper “was obviously written with a pre-ordained conclusion”.
“Even a quick read shows how the confusion between confidence and probability [over intelligence assessments] – even if not deliberate – leads to sloppiness and manipulation,” Armstrong said.
“The bigger problem is that Tulsi’s paper is such shit. Her reference to ‘deep state officials’ is amateurish, silly, and undercuts the whole damned document.
“She’s clever to use crappy precedents and confusion to make her case, but an issue like Russian manipulation of US elections, with so many analysts from diverse organizational cultures, is almost certainly going to leave enough offal on the floor that anyone who wanted to make a one-sided political slam job can find enough to fill an 11-page paper.”
At least 15 people, including a six-week-old baby, have starved to death in the last 24 hours in the besieged Gaza Strip, according to health officials, who say a wave of hunger that has loomed over the bombarded enclave for months is now finally crashing down.
Six-week-old Yousef’s family could not find baby formula to feed him, said his uncle, Adham al-Safadi.
“You can’t get milk anywhere, and if you do find any, it’s $100 for a tub,” he told the Reuters news agency.
Three other children were among the 15 people who died from starvation on Tuesday, including 13-year-old Abdulhamid al-Ghalban, who died in a hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, at least 101 people, including 80 children, have died from hunger and malnutrition since Israel launched its assault on Gaza in October 2023. Most of the deaths have come in the last few weeks.
Gaza has seen its food stocks run out since Israel cut off all supplies to the territory in March. Israel then partially lifted the blockade in May, allowing a trickle of aid supplies to enter the territory and be distributed by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), largely bypassing the United Nations.
More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since May while trying to get aid, mostly near the GHF distribution sites, according to the UN rights office.
The head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, Phillipe Lazzarini, said the aid distribution scheme was a “sadistic death trap”.
“The so called ‘GHF’ distribution scheme is a sadistic death trap. Snipers open fire randomly on crowds as if they are given a licence to kill,” Lazzarini said on Tuesday on X.
Israel accuses Hamas of siphoning off aid, without providing evidence of widespread diversion, and blames UN agencies for failing to deliver food it has allowed in.
The GHF has rejected what it said were “false and exaggerated statistics” from the UN.
‘Horror show’
Lazzarini also warned that the UN agency’s staff, as well as doctors and humanitarian workers, were fainting on duty in Gaza due to hunger and exhaustion.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the situation for the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza facing bombardment, malnutrition and starvation a “horror show”, with “a level of death and destruction without parallel in recent times.
“We are seeing the last gasp of a humanitarian system built on humanitarian principles,” Guterres told the UN Security Council. “That system is being denied the conditions to function.”
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, 101 people have died from hunger and malnutrition so far, including 80 children [Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu Agency]
Speaking to reporters, Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the director of Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, said malnourished Palestinians were arriving at Gaza’s remaining functioning hospitals “every moment”, and warned that there could be “alarming numbers” of deaths due to starvation.
“Hospitals are already overwhelmed by the number of casualties from gunfire. They can’t provide much more help for hunger-related symptoms because of food and medicine shortages,” said Khalil al-Daqran, the spokesperson for Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Deqran said some 600,000 people were suffering from malnutrition, including at least 60,000 pregnant women. Symptoms among those going hungry include dehydration and anaemia, he said.
While Gaza has widespread shortages of goods due to the Israeli restrictions, baby formula, in particular, is in critically short supply, according to aid groups, doctors and residents.
In a statement, Hamas said it was time to “break the restrictions” and allow for more aid to enter Gaza, adding that it was surprised by the “silence” of Arab and Islamic countries in light of the “systematic genocide and criminal starvation” in the enclave.
Deadly attacks continue
Medical sources told Al Jazeera that at least 81 other Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza on Tuesday, including 31 people who were seeking aid.
Mahmoud Bassal, the spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defence, said Israeli strikes on the Shati refugee camp west of Gaza City killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 50.
In Gaza City, an Israeli attack on a building housing displaced Palestinians killed 15 people, including six children, according to a source at al-Shifa Hospital.
Palestinians carry wounded people after Israeli forces attack a crowd gathered to receive aid at the Zikim crossing in northern Gaza [Hamza ZH Qraiqea/Anadolu]
Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said Israeli air strikes hit residential clusters in the eastern part of the city, particularly the Zeitoun neighbourhood. A “group of people” was hit, he said.
The attacks come a day after Israeli tanks pushed into southern and eastern parts of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza for the first time since the deadly assault began.
According to Mahmoud, “many Palestinians are unable to go back to their homes as they are in the firing line of heavy artillery”, despite claims by the Israeli army that it has concluded its assault in Deir el-Balah.
“Quadcopters and surveillance drones also hover over the area, creating an atmosphere of intimidation and fear,” Mahmoud said.
The Civil Defence agency’s Bassal said two people were killed in Deir el-Balah on Tuesday.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that between 50,000 and 80,000 people were living in the area, which, until the Israeli offensive this week, had been considered the only relatively safe area in the tiny Strip.
Some 30,000 were living in displacement camps.
OCHA said that nearly 88 percent of the entire Gaza Strip was now either under evacuation threats or within Israeli militarised zones, forcing the population into an ever-shrinking space.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, meanwhile, accused Israeli troops of entering its staff residence and forcing women and children to evacuate, as they handcuffed, stripped and interrogated male staff at gunpoint.
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has killed nearly 60,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to health officials.
The US has said it will leave the United Nations’ culture and education agency Unesco, accusing it of supporting “woke, divisive cultural and social causes”.
Unesco’s Director General Audrey Azoulay described the decision as “regrettable” but “anticipated”.
The move is the latest step in the Trump administration’s efforts to cut ties with international bodies, after removing the US from the World Health Organization and Paris Climate Agreement, as well as cutting funding for foreign relief efforts.
Unesco has 194 member states around the world, and is best known for listing world heritage sites. The US’ decision will take effect from December 2026.
The state department said Unesco’s “globalist, ideological agenda for international development” was “at odds with our America First foreign policy”.
It also described the inclusion of the Palestinians in Unesco in 2011, as “highly problematic, contrary to US policy, and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization”.
Those claims “contradict the reality of Unesco’s efforts, particularly in the field of Holocaust education and the fight against antisemitism,” the organisation’s head Audrey Azoulay said.
“This decision contradicts the fundamental principles of multilateralism, and may affect first and foremost our many partners in the United States of America— communities seeking site inscription on the World Heritage List, Creative City status, and University Chairs,” she added.
The Unesco head said the agency had been preparing for Washington’s move, diversifying its sources of funding. Currently, she said, Unesco was getting about 8% of its budget from the US.
In 2017, during his first presidency, Trump pulled the US out of Unesco but the decision was later reversed under Joe Biden’s administration.
During the Obama administration, in 2011, the US halted $60m in funds that had been earmarked for Unesco.
A state department spokesperson at the time said former President Barack Obama’s hand was forced due to a US law that prohibited the transfer of funds after Unesco granted the Palestinian Authority full membership.
The Paris-based UN agency was set up in November 1945 – shortly after World War Two – to promote peace and security through global co-operation in education, arts, sciences and culture.
