Category: 2. World

(Reuters) – A Bangladesh Air Force fighter jet on a routine training mission crashed into a college and school campus in the capital Dhaka on Monday after what the military said was a mechanical failure. At least 31 people were killed, most of them children.

Here’s what we know about the F-7 BGI jet that went down:

WHAT ARE F-7/J-7 FIGHTER JETS?

The F-7 BGI, which crashed soon after take-off, is a lightweight fighter jet, the final and most advanced version of China’s Chengdu J-7/F-7 family, according to Jane’s Information Group.

The Chengdu J-7 is the licence-built version of the Soviet era MiG-21 and is used for training and limited combat roles. The F-7 is the export variant of J-7.

The South Asian country’s air force has operated F-7 variants since the 1980s. Dhaka signed a contract for 16 BGI version aircraft in 2011 and deliveries were completed by 2013 – the final batch of the manufactured jets.

PRODUCTION OF THE JETS

China manufactured the jets from 1965 to 2013, making it one of the longest-running fighter production lines there. Due to its affordability, the jet was widely exported, especially to developing nations.

The J-7 was fully decommissioned from the Chinese military by the end of 2023 but several countries still use the export variant.

WIDESPREAD USAGE OF F-7

Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, Iran and North Korea are among the countries that have used or still use variants of the F-7.

Pakistan is the largest operator of F-7 aircraft and has 66 of them, according to the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies.

Pakistan also has one of China’s most advanced warplanes, the J-10, and used it to launch air-to-air missiles to bring down at least two Indian fighter jets during the recent conflict between the two countries.

PAST INCIDENTS INVOLVING THE JETS

May 2025 – An Air Force of Zimbabwe pilot died when a F-7 crashed during a routine sortie in the Southern African nation.

June 2022 – A J-7 crashed into residential buildings in the Chinese city of Xiangyang in central Hubei Province, killing at least one person on the ground.

May 2022 – Two Iranian pilots died after their F-7 crashed during a training mission near Anarak, 200 km (125 miles) east of the city of Isfahan.

January 2022 – Two Pakistani Air Force pilots were killed when a FT-7 aircraft, a variant of the F-7, crashed.

There have been a number of other incidents with F-7 jets in Pakistan that resulted in deaths of pilots. 

Israel is facing intensifying international condemnation for its killing of starving Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and its attacks on humanitarian efforts, as the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said the “last lifelines keeping people alive [in the strip] are collapsing”.

An angry chorus of senior figures, among them the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, and a senior Catholic cleric, expressed on Tuesday a growing sense of global horror over Israel’s actions.

“I spoke again with [the Israeli foreign minister] Gideon Saar to recall our understanding on aid flow and made clear that IDF [Israel Defense Forces] must stop killing people at distribution points,” the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, wrote on X. “The killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible.”

She said “all options were on the table” if Israel does not deliver on aid pledges, but did not say what those options included.

According to UN officials on Tuesday, more than 1,000 desperate Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the end of May trying to reach food distributions run by the controversial US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) amid widening conditions of starvation in the Palestinian territory.

The comments came as Israeli forces attacked warehousing and staff accommodation in Deir al-Balah – Gaza’s main aid hub – belonging to the World Health Organization.

The Israeli strikes on WHO facilities came as Israel cancelled the work visa of Jonathan Whittall, the head of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) inside Gaza and the most senior UN aid official in the coastal strip.

Speaking to the UN security council on Tuesday, Guterres described the situation in Gaza as a “horror show” condemning the Israeli attacks on UN offices.

“Malnourishment is soaring and starvation is knocking on every door in Gaza,”Guterres said. “And now we are seeing the last gasp of a humanitarian system built on humanitarian principles. That system is being denied the conditions to function. Denied the space to deliver. Denied the safety to save lives.”

Guterres’ comments came hours after a hard-hitting joint statement on Monday by 27 western countries including the UK, France, Australia and Canada harshly criticising Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian aid and calling for an immediate end to the war.

Guterres said he “deplored the growing reports of children and adults suffering from malnutrition” as health officials in Gaza reported a further 33 deaths, including 12 children, in the past 48 hours.

Lammy amplified that message in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday, describing himself as “appalled [and] sickened” by what was happening in Gaza.

“These are not words that are usually used by a foreign secretary who is attempting to be diplomatic,” Lammy said.

“But when you see innocent children holding out their hand for food, and you see them shot and killed in the way that we have seen in the last few days, of course Britain must call it out.”

Thameen Al-Kheetan, a UN human rights office spokesperson, said: “Over 1,000 Palestinians have now been killed by the Israeli military while trying to get food in Gaza since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation started operating.

“As of 21 July, we have recorded 1,054 people killed in Gaza while trying to get food; 766 of them were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites and 288 near UN and other humanitarian organisations’ aid convoys.”

The head of the UN’s main agency for Palestinians, Unrwa, on Tuesday described Gaza as a “hell on earth”.

Philippe Lazzarini said Unrwa’s own staff, as well as doctors and humanitarian workers, were fainting on duty owing to hunger and exhaustion as Israel limited access to life-saving humanitarian aid, and that many were surviving on a single small meal a day.

“Caretakers, including Unrwa colleagues in Gaza, are also in need of care now – doctors, nurses, journalists, humanitarians, among them Unrwa staff, are hungry. Many are now fainting due to hunger and exhaustion while performing their duties,” he said in a statement at a media briefing in Geneva.

The UN World Food Programme on Monday said its assessments showed a quarter of the population of Gaza was facing “famine-like” conditions and almost 100,000 women and children were suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

The most recent assessment of hunger in Gaza by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a group that includes the World Food Programme and the WHO, said about 10% of the territory’s population – 244,000 people – were facing catastrophic levels of hunger and 93% were experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity.

Separately, the Roman Catholic church’s most senior cleric in the Holy Land said the humanitarian situation in Gaza was “morally unacceptable”, after visiting the wartorn Palestinian territory.

“We have seen men holding out in the sun for hours in the hope of a simple meal,” Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, told a news conference. “It’s morally unacceptable and unjustified.”

Irish premier Micheál Martin also called for the war in Gaza to end, describing the images of starving children as “horrific”. Mr Martin called for a surge in humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza.

In a social media post, he said: “The situation in Gaza is horrific. The suffering of civilians and the death of innocent children is intolerable.

“I echo the call by foreign ministers of 28 countries for all hostages to be released, and for a surge in humanitarian aid. This war must end and it must end now.”

Despite the high-profile criticism in recent days, aid agencies have criticised the lack of meaningful action by the governments who signed the joint statement, including the UK, against Israel.

Kristyan Benedict, of Amnesty International UK, said the British government’s “failure to take robust measures to prevent genocide is no accident”, adding that “as a state party to the genocide convention, the UK has a legal duty to prevent and punish genocide – a duty it is failing miserably to uphold”.

The growing international furore came as Israeli troops pushed into the city of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where a number of international aid organisations are based, in what appeared to be the latest effort to carve up the Palestinian territory with military corridors.

Deir al-Balah is the only city in the Gaza Strip that has not experienced major ground operations or suffered widespread devastation in 21 months of war, leading to speculation that the Hamas militant group holds large numbers of hostages there.

A number of French cities have imposed night-time curfews on young people following a spate of violence linked to drug trafficking.

Nîmes in the south was the latest to bring in measures, which authorities said were meant to prevent under 16s from being “exposed to violence” and to “contain tensions”. Additional police units will also be sent in.

Over the course of the last month several shootings – one in broad daylight – left one person dead and several injured.

Last week the body of a 19-year-old man was found partially burned on the outskirts of Nîmes.

Announcing the curfew – in force between 21:00 and 06:00 – mayor Jean-Paul Fournier said the situation had become “untenable” and that drug traffickers had created a “climate of fear and terror”.

Deputy mayor Richard Schieven said the curfew would protect minors not involved in the drug trade “but also those aged 12 or 13 who are exploited by drug traffickers”.

Béziers, 120km (75 miles) to the south-west, has had a curfew in place for children under 13 between 23:00 and 06:00 since last year and expanded it to under 15s in certain areas last March. “No 10-year-old out on the street at 02:00 is up to anything but mischief,” said mayor Robert Ménard in 2024.

Despite the measures, Béziers continues to be plagued by violence. At the weekend balaclava-clad youths lured police and then attacked them with fireworks, local media reported.

A similar incident occurred in Limoges in southwestern France. The city has also imposed curfew measures for under 13s for the duration of the summer holidays – but following violence involving 100 people at the weekend Mayor Émile Roger Lombertie said the results of the measures were “not good”.

“We had disturbances by young people, nobody managed to intercept and arrest them, and the curfew was useless,” Lombertie said, adding that more police was needed to enforce the measures.

Two years ago the there was outrage in Nimes when a 10-year-old boy was killed by a bullet in the Pissevin area of the city.

The latest developments confirm a growing trend that has seen drug violence expand beyond Marseille – the long-time epicentre of gang wars in France.

According to the interior ministry, 110 people died in France and more than 300 others were wounded in drug-related violence in 2024.

Justice Minister Gérard Darmanin and Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau have long insisted on the need to fight the scourge of the drugs trade.

Earlier this year they steered a bill through parliament which resulted in two maximum-security jails for drug barons, a new, dedicated branch of the prosecutors’ office, extra powers for investigators, and a special, protected status for informers.

Darmanin said on Tuesday that “the first 17 drug-traffickers, among them the most dangerous in our country”, were transferred to a high-security jail at Vendin-le-Vieil in northern France.

A wave of arson and gun attacks at French prisons in the spring was widely pinned on drugs gangs hitting back at the government’s crackdown.

The US will quit the United Nations’ culture and education agency Unesco, the US state department has said, as Donald Trump continues to pull out of international institutions.

“Unesco works to advance divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the UN’s sustainable development goals, a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy,” a state department spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, said.

The move is a blow to the Paris-based global organisation, founded after the second world war to promote peace through international cooperation in education, science and culture.

The decision is part of the president’s second-term drive to pull the US out of a series of global bodies, including leaving the World Health Organization (WHO), halting funding to the Palestinian relief agency Unrwa and withdrawing from the UN human rights council, as part of a review of US participation in UN agencies.

A US withdrawal, to take effect in December 2026, will be a blow to Unesco’s work on education, culture and combating hate speech. But officials at the Unesco headquarters in Paris had been braced for a potential US departure during Trump’s second term. The US provides about 8% of the body’s total budget, making the financial impact of Washington’s departure less severe than for other organisations, such as the WHO, for which the US is by far the biggest financial backer.

The White House deputy spokesperson Anna Kelly told the New York Post: “President Trump has decided to withdraw the United States from Unesco – which supports woke, divisive cultural and social causes that are totally out of step with the commonsense policies that Americans voted for in November.”

In February, the White House had announced a 90-day review of the US membership of Unesco, saying in a statement that the global body had “demonstrated failure to reform itself, has continually demonstrated anti-Israel sentiment over the past decade, and has failed to address concerns over mounting arrears”.

Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is best known for designating world heritage sites including the Grand Canyon in the US and the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. It also has a large cultural and education programme to promote intercultural dialogue.

The US was a founding member of Unesco in 1945, but this latest departure will be the third time it has quit.

Washington first withdrew in 1983 under Ronald Reagan, whose administration said the global organisation had anti-western bias and “has extraneously politicised virtually every subject it deals with”. It rejoined under George W Bush in 2003, with the White House saying it was happy with Unesco reforms.

Trump pulled the US out of Unesco in 2017, during his first term as president. His administration cited what it called “mounting arrears, the need for fundamental reform in the organisation, and continuing anti-Israel bias”.

The US returned to Unesco in 2023 under Joe Biden. The Biden administration said it was crucial to rejoin in order to counter “Chinese influence”. Beijing had become the organisation’s biggest financial backer in Washington’s absence. As a condition of readmission, the US agreed to pay about $619m in unpaid dues and make contributions to programmes supporting education access initiatives in Africa, Holocaust remembrance and journalists’ safety.

In 2011, Unesco voted to admit Palestine, which is not formally recognised by the US or Israel as a UN member state. The Barack Obama White House had cut Unesco contributions, resulting in the US owing millions in arrears to the organisation.

Audrey Azoulay, the director general of Unesco, said: “However regrettable, this announcement was anticipated and Unesco has prepared for it.”
Azoulay said she “deeply” regretted Trump’s decision to leave, saying the move “contradicts the fundamental principles of multilateralism”.

She said the reasons given by the US for leaving were the same as during Trump’s first term, and she disputed them. “These claims contradict the reality of Unesco’s efforts, particularly in the field of Holocaust education and the fight against antisemitism.”

Azoulay said Unesco had undertaken structural reforms and diversified its funding sources, so “the decreasing trend in the financial contribution of the US has been offset”. Unesco was not considering cutting jobs due to the US departure, she added.

Raed Jamal sends the message shortly after he returns, empty-handed, from an aid distribution point to his tent in the al-Mawasi displacement camp in south-west Gaza. “The tanks came and started firing. Three boys near me were martyred,” says the 36-year-old, who has four children. “I didn’t even get anything, just two empty boxes.”

Jamal’s journey involved a long walk to and from a former residential neighbourhood bulldozed by Israeli forces and turned into one of four militarised aid distribution centres run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is based in Delaware in the US.

The GHF sites – Tal al-Sultan, Saudi neighbourhood, Khan Younis and Wadi Gaza – are located in evacuation zones, which means civilians seeking food have to enter areas they have been ordered to leave. According to GHF’s Facebook page, the sites remain open for as little as eight minutes at a time, and in June the average for the Saudi site was 11 minutes. These factors have led to accusations from NGOs that the system is dangerous by design. The Unrwa chief, Philippe Lazzarini, has said “the so-called mechanism … is a death trap costing more lives than it saves.”

The system favours the strongest, so it is mostly men who travel along the designated routes. Then they wait – often for hours – for a centre to open. Finally, there is a dash into the centre of the zones and a scramble to grab a box.

At every stage, those seeking aid pass Israeli tanks and troops, as quadcopters fly above. In another clip shared by Jamal he ducks as bullets pass overhead.

“We have purged our hearts of fear,” Jamal says of his near daily walks to the site. “I need to bring food for my children so they don’t die of hunger.”

A new system, and near daily deaths

GHF, a startup organisation with no experience of distributing food in complex conflict zones, employs US mercenaries at the sites, which opened in May. They replaced 400 non-militarised aid points run under a UN system that Israel claimed had to be shut down because Hamas was diverting aid from it. No evidence for this has been provided.

Since May, more than 1,000 people have died while seeking food from the centres and other humanitarian convoys, according to the UN.

The sites’ opening times are usually announced in posts on a Facebook account and, more recently, messages sent through a Telegram channel. A WhatsApp channel was also set up in the first weeks. People have been warned not to approach the centres until they open.

As the chart below shows, for the site Jamal visited, the amount of time between the site’s opening time being announced and the opening itself decreased dramatically in June.

Mahmoud Alareer, a 27-year-old living in a tent in western Gaza City, says the opening time announcements for the aid site he uses – Wadi Gaza – have become useless, because of the distance from where he is living. Instead, he travels to the edges of the site in the middle of the night and gambles on it opening at 2am, as it has on every visit so far.

First he climbs on to the back of a truck for the long ride south from Gaza City through the militarised Netzarim corridor. Then he waits in the dark until Israeli forces allow him to enter. “You get there and you slowly, slowly advance,” he says. “You always know that it could be you who gets shot, or it might be someone next to you.”

Alareer says chaos always ensues when the aid point opens, as people start running towards the packages, which are left in the middle of the distribution zone. People trip over craters and tangled wires.

GHF has faced severe criticism from the humanitarian community due to the dangers posed to Palestinians both at the sites and on the roads around them. In early July, more than 170 NGOs called for GHF to be shut down, accusing it of violating the principles of humanitarian aid, and calling for the resumption of non-militarised aid in Gaza.

Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF) emergency coordinator in Gaza, Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, says night-time distributions are particularly dangerous because so many roads in southern Gaza have been made unrecognisable by Israeli bombing, making it hard for Palestinians to stick to routes designated by GHF.

Zabalgogeazkoa is scathing about the GHF system. “This is not humanitarian aid,” he says. “We can only think that it was designed to cause damage to the people seeking aid.”

GHF and the IDF have been approached for comment.

GHF has previously said the UN figures for deaths around distribution sites are “false and misleading”. It has also defended its operations more generally and accused its critics of engaging in a “turf war” over humanitarian supplies. It says it bears no responsibility for deaths outside the perimeters of its sites.

The Israeli military has previously acknowledged firing warning shots at Palestinians who it says have approached its forces in a suspicious manner. It has also disputed some of the death tolls provided by the Palestinian authorities.

Palestinians’ unmet aid needs

GHF runs only four sites to feed 2 million people, in a territory where extreme hunger is widespread and food security experts have warned of looming famine. According to figures released by Gaza’s health ministry 33 people have died due to starvation and malnutrition since Sunday.

It says it has delivered more than 85 million meals “via roughly 1,422,712 boxes” since its operations began. According to these figures, each box would provide a family with about 60 meals. The organisation has posted photos of GHF-marked boxes that have items such as flour, potatoes, beans and oil. However, Palestinians in Gaza have shared pictures showing open boxes at GHF sites containing a smaller range of items.

Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, says she could not comment on the specific logistics of GHF, but that aid should go beyond food and should include water, cooking gas or other cooking facilities. “If you look at Gaza now … people have been deprived of everything that sustains life: shelter materials, fuel, cooking gas, hygiene materials, everything that one needs to feel dignified, to have some sort of semblance of normality,” she says.

According to the World Food Programme (WFP), nearly a third of Gaza’s population is going several days without food, and 470,000 people are expected to face the most severe levels of hunger between May and September this year.

The WFP has also warned that dietary diversity declined sharply in May and continued to worsen in June.

Damage to farmland over the course of the war has only increased Palestinians’ reliance on aid. A study published this year using satellite imagery to assess damage to farmland found up to 70% of tree crops had been damaged.

A Unosat assessment from April found that 71.2% of Gaza’s greenhouses had been damaged. This sequence shows damage to greenhouses and orchards in Beit Lahiya.

In late March, dozens of bakeries supported by the WFP halted production due to the Israeli blockade. A handful briefly resumed bread production in May when some trucks were allowed into the territory, as this timeline shows.

Jamal reiterates that he has no choice but to return to his nearest GHF site, despite the dangers. “I have gone four days in a row and not brought anything back, not even flour – nothing,” he says. “Sometimes you just can’t beat the others. But what else can we do, our life is a struggle.”

Ukraine’s new prime minister said she’s likely to seek more financing from the International Monetary Fund as she sets out to shore up the nation’s fiscal needs with no end in sight to Russia’s war.

Yuliia Svyrydenko, a 39-year-old ally of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy who became Ukraine’s second female head of government last week, laid out the budget squeeze in stark terms. Global donors have so far earmarked only half of the estimated $75 billion that the war-strained budget requires over the next two years, she said.

TURKIYE: Deep in the mountains of Turkiye’s southeastern Hakkari province, bordering Iran and Iraq, Kurdish livestock owners and farmers have gradually returned with their animals after decades of armed conflict between Kurdish militants and the Turkish army.

“We’ve been coming here for a long time. Thirty years ago we used to come and go, but then we couldn’t come. Now we just started to come again and to bring our animals as we want,” said 57-year-old Selahattin Irinc, speaking Kurdish, while gently pressing his hand on a sheep’s neck to keep it from moving during shearing.

On July 11 a symbolic weapons destruction ceremony in Iraqi Kurdistan marked a major step in the transition of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) from armed insurgency to democratic politics – part of a broader effort to end one of the region’s longest-running conflicts.

The PKK, listed as a terror group by Turkiye and much of the international community, was formed in 1978 by Ankara University students, with the ultimate goal of achieving the Kurds’ liberation. It took up arms in 1984.

The conflict has caused 50,000 deaths among civilians and 2,000 among soldiers, according to Turkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Alongside with several other men and women, Irinc practices animal husbandry in the grassy highlands at the foot of the Cilo Mountains and its Resko peak, which stands as the second-highest in the country with an altitude of 4,137 meters (13,572 feet).

A place of scenic beauty, with waterfalls, glacial lakes and trekking routes, Cilo has gradually opened its roads over the past few years to shepherds and tourists alike as the armed conflict with PKK died down on the backdrop of peace negotiations.

But the picturesque mountains had long been the scene of heavy fighting between the Turkish army and PKK fighters who took advantage of the rough terrain to hide and strike. It left the Kurdish farmers often at odds with the army.

“In the past we always had problems with the Turkish soldiers. They accused us of helping PKK fighters by feeding them things like milk and meat from our herd,” another Kurdish livestock owner, who asked not to be named, said, rejecting such claims.

“Now it’s calmer,” he added.

Although the peace process brought more openness and ease to the region, tensions did not vanish overnight.

Checkpoints remain present around the city of Hakkari, and also to the main access point to the trekking path leading to Cilo glacier, a major tourist attraction.

“Life is quite good and it’s very beautiful here. Tourists come and stay in the mountains for one or two days with their tents, food, water and so on,” said farmer Mahir Irinc.

But the mountains are a hard, demanding environment for those making a living in their imposing shadow, and the 37-year-old thinks his generation might be the last to do animal husbandry far away from the city.

“I don’t think a new generation will come after us. We will be happy if it does, but the young people nowadays don’t want to raise animals, they just do whatever job is easier,” he lamented.

An open truck carrying more than a dozen Kurdish women made its way to another farm in the heart of the mountains, where sheep waited to be fed and milked.

The livestock graze at the foot of the mountains for three to four months, while the weather is warm, before being brought back to the village.

“We all work here. Mothers, sisters, our whole family. Normally I’m preparing for university, but today I was forced to come because my mother is sick,” explained 22-year-old Hicran Denis.

“I told my mother: don’t do this anymore, because it’s so tiring. But when you live in a village, livestock is the only work. There’s nothing else,” she said.