The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has harshly attacked Israel during the large pro-Palestinian rally this Saturday in Istanbul before tens of thousands of people, in a speech where he accused the West of being the “main culprit of the massacre that is taking place in Gaza” and warned that his country is ready to “present Israel to the world as a war criminal.”

“Because Israel,” Erdogan insisted, “is committing war crimes”. The president, however, expressed his sympathies to the victims of the Hamas attack that sparked the conflict on October 7, and assured that his country “is saddened by the death of any civilian, but Israel does not care.”

“It is clear,” he continued regarding the Israeli response to the enclave, “that every country has the right to defend itself, but I wonder where justice is when there seems to be no defense other than a vicious and open massacre in Gaza.”

The president of Turkey then proceeded to applaud “the determination of the people of Gaza” in their firmness in remaining in their homes despite Israeli warnings for them to escape to the south amid a wave of airstrikes or , as the president has described, “bombings by the oppressors.”

Likewise, Erdogan also recalled the resolution approved last Friday by the UN General Assembly in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza, which he interpreted as a plebiscite on international opinion about Israel.. Supported by the 145 in favor that promoted the resolution, the president has assured that Israel is losing support to the point that it is in danger of ending up isolated.

“Israel, you are condemned to be left alone,” the president warned in his speech, reported by the Turkish news agency Anatolia, before dedicating a final blow to the Western community that “has mobilized its politicians and media to legitimize the massacre of innocent people in Gaza.

The Israeli response

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel, Eli Cohen, announced this Saturday the call for consultations of his diplomatic corps in Turkey to “reevaluate bilateral relations” in a decision taken shortly after the very harsh speech of the Turkish president.

Cohen announced the decision on his X account, formerly Twitter. “In the context of the harsh statements from Turkey,” he explained without mentioning Erdogan by name, “I have ordered the return of Turkey's diplomatic representatives to carry out a reassessment of relations between Israel and Turkey.”

The minister has not specified whether he will return all or part of his diplomatic mission to Israel after Erdogan's statements.

After this speech, Israel's Energy Minister, Israel Katz, denounced that Erdogan has shown “his true face”. “Muslim Brotherhood man supports Hamas and Islamic State terrorism. Not even his kufiya covers the shame,” Katz posted on X, formerly Twitter.

Muslim Brotherhood man supports Hamas and Islamic State terrorism

The Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, has highlighted that “a snake will always be a snake”. “He has tried to improve his image, but he is still an anti-Semite,” Erdan highlighted, according to Israeli Army Radio.

It should be remembered that the last major diplomatic crisis between Israel and Turkey occurred in 2010, when the Israeli Army killed ten activists in an assault on the 'Mavi Marmara' ship, which was part of the so-called Freedom Flotilla that was trying to circumvent the imposed blockade. against the Gaza Strip.

The situation continued until 2022, when Israel announced the full reestablishment of diplomatic relations and the appointment of ambassadors.

The leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, proposed this Saturday the release of all hostages held in Gaza in exchange for the release of all Palestinian prisoners imprisoned in Israel.

“We are willing to immediately close a prisoner exchange agreement that includes the release of all our prisoners held in your prisons in exchange for the release of all the prisoners held by the resistance,” Sinwar said, quoted by Israeli media.

Sinwar thus joins the position expressed this Saturday by Abu Obeida, the spokesperson for the Ezzedin al Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, although Sinwar's intervention is especially relevant because it is his first public appearance since the beginning of the current conflict.. Of the 230 hostages that Hamas took, four have been released and dozens are believed to be in the hands not of Hamas, but of Islamic Jihad.

The working hypothesis is that only when Hamas feels the sword at its throat will it want to reach agreements

A spokesman for the Israeli Armed Forces, Daniel Hagari, responded by calling Sinwar's words “psychological terrorism cynically used by Hamas to exert pressure.”

“Nothing is on the table regarding the kidnapped. Sinwar can't say anything. Speak through intermediaries. Hamas does not communicate directly with Israel and we will continue to do everything possible to free the hostages,” he added, according to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth.

Another military source cited by the newspaper assures that “Hamas does not want an agreement. You don't have to believe what they say. They want to delay the ground operation. That is why we have decided to expand the operation. “It was a unanimous decision by the entire Government.”

“The working hypothesis is that only when Hamas feels the sword at its throat will it want to reach agreements. They understand that Israel has red lines and that there is no possibility of Israel emptying its prisons. “That's not going to happen,” he argued.

However, “we understand that there is a price we will have to pay, but we are not going to go bankrupt.” “The families of the hostages understand that the decisive moment is approaching. We have to reach a point where there is an agreement on the table and the next step will be to approve it,” he explained.

This Saturday, Israel reached a new phase of the war against Hamas with the entry of Israeli ground forces into Gaza and an intensification of bombings on the Strip.. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described it with these words: “The ground in Gaza shook. We attack above and below the ground, we attack terrorist agents of all ranks, in all places. The orders to the forces are clear: the operation will continue until a new order,” he warned.

According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this is the beginning of a “second phase”, which aims to “destroy the military and government capacity of Hamas and return the hostages to their homes,” he stressed. in an official appearance from Tel Aviv.

For the Israeli president, “the war within the Gaza Strip will be hard and long, but we are prepared. This is our second war of liberation. We will fight to protect the country. And we will do it by land, sea and air. “We will eliminate the enemy above and below the ground,” he said, referring to Hamas.. “This is the mission of my life… in your name and in the name of all,” he added.

As Gaza continues to suffer its worst bombing in three weeks, the situation has reached, in the words of the UN, “a new level of violence and pain” following the interruption of internet and other telecommunications as a result of the intensification of attacks, which has further isolated the civilian population.

“Civilians cannot receive updated information on where to access humanitarian aid,” or which are the most and least dangerous places in the Strip, has warned the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk.. Likewise, journalists inside Gaza are also unable to report on the situation in that Palestinian territory, while contact with UN workers and other NGOs on the ground has also been lost.

Similarly, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, has called for an urgent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas to facilitate the arrival of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, where the situation is “desperate” while still “under a complete blackout”. “Too many civilians, including children, have been killed. This contravenes International Humanitarian Law,” Borrell asserted.

For now, Israel has ignored calls for a ceasefire and has continued to warn Gazans to move south of the enclave.. “To the people of northern Gaza and Gaza City: time is running out. Go south for your own safety. This is not a simple precautionary measure; “It is an urgent warning for the safety of civilians,” warned Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari in a message posted on Twitter.

Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed himself in a similar way in his televised appearance: “Again, I tell the civil society of Gaza to evacuate to the south,” said the Prime Minister of Israel, pointing out that Hamas “commits war crimes because they use people as human shields and hospitals as headquarters and fuel depots.

The hostages kidnapped by Hamas are another open front for Netanyahu, who this Saturday also met with his relatives after they had been demanding negotiations for days to bring back their loved ones. According to the Israeli Army, Hamas has in its possession 229 hostages that it kidnapped during the attack on October 7 against Israel.. This Saturday, the Islamist group has requested the release of all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in exchange for the release of those kidnapped.

“My heart hurts when I meet with the families of the hostages. I have assured them that we would exhaust all avenues to get their loved ones back home.. Their situation is a crime against humanity,” he stressed.

However, Netanyahu has not taken any responsibility for the Hamas attacks of October 7.. “When the war is over we will answer all questions. There has been terrible negligence. There will be no stone left on stone. Now my mission is to save the country,” he concluded.

The Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah claimed responsibility this Saturday for two simultaneous rounds of attacks against Israeli military positions, the first since the Jewish State announced on Friday night an expansion of its ground operations against Gaza and launched its worst bombings in three weeks.

This afternoon, Hezbollah attacked two posts located in northern Israel with artillery and other “appropriate weapons”, while its fighters launched a simultaneous action with guided missiles against a third position, the armed movement reported in a series of statements.

Also at the same time there was another attack with unspecified “appropriate weapons” and with which the group claimed to have inflicted “direct” blows.

This group had already promised that the moment Israel began ground operations in Gaza, it would begin attacks in northern Israel.‏

Simultaneous actions

At 6:00 p.m. local time (5:00 p.m. Spanish peninsular time), the Shiite formation once again launched a round of two simultaneous actions against a military barracks and a “congregation of occupation soldiers” that was located near it, according to two notes released this afternoon by Hezbollah.

These are the first actions that the group officially takes credit for since Israel announced on Friday night an expansion of its ground operations against the Gaza Strip and carried out its largest bombing raids since the start of the war on October 7.

Since shortly after the outbreak of that conflict, Hezbollah and Israeli forces have been engaged in parallel attacks across the divide between both countries, where actions claimed by Palestinian factions present in Lebanese territory have also taken place.

As has been happening daily, Israel also attacked southern Lebanon this Saturday, including an action against Hezbollah's military infrastructure that its Army argued was a response to three launches previously carried out from Lebanese territory.

The escalation has raised fears that Lebanon will become a second front in the Gaza war, as the Lebanese government maintains contacts domestically and internationally to try to contain the situation.

This Saturday, Israeli planes dropped leaflets over Gaza City warning its inhabitants that the area is now “a battlefield” while bombing from the air increases.

“To the people of the Gaza Strip: Gaza City is now a battlefield. The shelters there and in the north are not safe,” read the leaflets, in which Gazans are ordered to “evacuate immediately” to the south.

Previously, the Israeli military spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, sent a message to civilians in the north of the Strip and Gaza City to immediately move south in the face of the Army's ground advance and the intensification of bombing.

“To the people of northern Gaza and Gaza City: time is running out. Go south for your own safety. This is not a simple precautionary measure; “It is an urgent warning for the safety of civilians,” says Hagari in the statement, recorded on video and spread on X (formerly Twitter) and other networks.

“Hamas puts your lives in danger”

In the message, Hagari states that the Islamist group Hamas, which has de facto controlled the strip since 2007, “puts your lives in danger by hiding weapons and troops in schools, mosques and hospitals.”

The objective of the military operation in Gaza, says the Israeli Army spokesperson, is to “neutralize the threat of Hamas”, whose armed wing was the author of the attacks against Israeli territory on the 7th.

“We are going to destroy” the Hamas threat “with precision and intensity,” stresses Hagari, who also comments that “humanity remains shocked by the massacre committed on the 7th and that we will not forget, just as we do not forget the kidnapping of more than 200 Israelis.” “.

According to Hamas, 7,703 people have been killed in Gaza and 18,967 have been injured by the bombings that Israel has carried out since the terrorists' surprise raid took the lives of 1,400 people.. Another 229 were kidnapped and have remained in the hands of the Islamist group ever since.

A false bomb alert has led to the evacuation of the area around the Colosseum in Rome for several minutes, after a person left a backpack there and walked away.

After a few moments of confusion, the Colosseum Archaeological Park reported on social networks that the alarm had been removed and that the backpack inspected contained only water bottles.

The authorities were alerted after some passers-by observed a person leave his backpack and walk away, although according to local media it could have been one of the street vendors present in the tourist areas of the Italian capital.

Once the adhesive tape that cordoned off the area was removed, to which a police anti-explosive unit moved, the tourists applauded and began to enter the archaeological park again.

This is the third false alarm that Rome has experienced since the escalation of hostilities in the Middle East has raised the anti-terrorist alert in European cities.

Last week there were moments of panic at Termini central station, when an alarm started ringing by mistake for five minutes; and a day before, the Jewish school in Rome in Portico Di Ottavia was evicted due to a false telephone threat.

The Italian Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani, then recalled that “the level of alert on terrorism in Italy has already been raised” and that for the moment “there are no direct threats”, although there could always be a lone fundamentalist.

The Ministry of the Interior also reinforced the police presence in Jewish neighborhoods and “sensitive” areas of the country, some of which already had military surveillance posts for years.

At least 28 people died this Saturday and another 60 were injured after a bus collided with a large number of cars on the highway that connects Cairo with the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, in northern Egypt, according to Egyptian security sources.

The accident took place in the province of Al Behera, in the Nile Delta, where a fuel leak caused the bus to skid and collide with “a large number” of vehicles, causing a fire after which up to At the moment 28 dead, according to the head of the Security Department of said province, Mahmud al Hueidy.

According to the informant, around twenty ambulances have been mobilized to treat those injured in the accident, while a team from the Attorney General's Office also attended to carry out an investigation.

Likewise, teams from the Traffic Department are working to clear kilometer 134 of the highway towards Cairo and facilitate the access of more ambulances and the resumption of circulation.

Images shared on social networks showed more than a dozen cars on fire, some of them burned, and dozens of bloodied people in the middle of this highway, one of the most important in Egypt.

Traffic accidents in Egypt are common due to excessive speed and poor road conditions, and usually leave many injured and dead because passengers do not usually wear seat belts.

According to the official Egyptian statistics agency CAPMAS, traffic accidents claimed the lives of 7,101 people across the country in 2021, compared to 6,164 deaths recorded a year earlier, an increase of 15.2%.

Israel's siege on Hamas terrorists is closing. The ground intervention of the Hebrew troops is imminent in Gaza, where the objective is to neutralize the network of underground tunnels that the Islamists have under the Strip.

To do this, Israel plans to use an innovative device called a 'sponge bomb'. These weapons are based on a liquid emulsion, a chemical compound that is dropped into a tunnel and then rapidly expands and hardens, trapping terrorists and ensuring safe routes for Israeli commandos as they search for hostages.

As reported by the Daily Mail, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have already tested these portable devices in a replica of Gaza, a model of the urban network of tunnels where they are soon expected to fight, and which has been built in the Urban Warfare Training Center in the Negev Desert.

These pumps have a metal partition that separates the two volatile liquids, which react immediately when they come into contact.. The material is highly dangerous, says this media.

The United States has already used weapons that shoot sticky foam as a non-lethal way to incapacitate enemies when American troops were deployed in Somalia in the mid-1990s, although the results were ambiguous.

Hamas tunnels under Gaza are estimated to measure hundreds of kilometers. Recently, Yocheved Lifshitz, an 85-year-old hostage recently freed by terrorists, said: “It looked like a spider's web, many, many tunnels,” adding: “We walked kilometers underground.”

The Israel Defense Forces published a video this Saturday showing the movement of its tanks within the Gaza Strip, controlled by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

This is the first image released by Israel of its armored cars inside the Palestinian enclave, since on Friday night the Army announced that it was expanding its ground operations in Gaza.

The recording is 40 seconds long and is edited, as it has different shots of its tanks, some in color, others in black and white, in an area where there are no homes.

In these images you can see dozens of armored cars, sometimes moving and other times stationary, and in one of them you can see one of the vehicles firing.

Israeli Army spokesman Daniel Hagari reported late on Friday that his forces were going to expand ground operations in the Strip from that moment on, in parallel with the intense bombing of the enclave.

This announcement was accompanied by the complete shutdown of the internet and mobile telephony inside Gaza.

In recent hours, the al-Qasam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, have stated that they are facing a “ground assault” by Israeli troops in the north of the Strip, where “intense fighting” is taking place.

Israel preparations

Before the announcement, Israel had been carrying out small ground incursions for two consecutive days, located in small areas of Gaza, waiting for the large-scale military ground offensive that they had been announcing for almost three weeks to take place.

The war between Israel and Hamas began on October 7 after the Islamist group's attack on Israeli soil, which left 1,400 dead, 5,000 injured and more than 200 kidnapped and taken to Gaza.

In retaliation, the Israeli Army has been bombing Gaza ever since, causing more than 7,300 deaths and nearly 19,000 injuries.

The official Iranian news agency IRNA announced this Saturday the death of the young Armita Geravand, the teenager hospitalized since the beginning of this month after suffering an alleged attack in the Tehran subway at the hands of agents of the 'Moral Police' for not wearing the veil.

“Unfortunately, the brain damage caused him to go into a coma and he died a few minutes ago,” IRNA said.. The state agency stated that the young woman received “extensive medical treatment during her 28 days of hospitalization in a special care unit.”

The official version, released by IRNA, indicates, on the other hand, that the young woman suffered a sudden drop in tension while waiting on the platform of the Shohada metro station in the Iranian capital, Tehran.

Security images released by IRNA show how Garavand and two friends enter one of the capital's metro cars and then two of them leave carrying the third, a video that the authorities have used to demonstrate that no attack occurred.

Amnesty International, however, stated that the video has been manipulated with frame acceleration in four sections and there are gaps of more than three minutes in the recording made public.

The Kurdish human rights organization Hengaw, based in Oslo, has reported that the young woman was attacked for not wearing the Islamic veil, mandatory in the country since 1983.

Geravand had been brain dead for several days, official Iranian media also reported last weekend, and there was no hope of recovery.

As part of the event, a journalist from the Shargh newspaper sent to the scene to cover the events was detained, although she was later released.

The case is similar to that of the young Mahsa Amini, who died a little over a year ago after being detained by the so-called morality police for not wearing the Islamic veil properly, a death that the authorities attributed to natural causes.

His death sparked strong protests that for months called for the end of the Islamic Republic and only disappeared after a repression that caused 500 deaths, the arrest of at least 22,000 people and in which seven protesters were executed, one of them in public.

The first anniversary of Amini's death was commemorated on September 16 amid strong repression and a huge deployment of security forces, and only timid protests took place.

In recent months, the Iranian government has been trying to reimpose the use of the veil, with the presence of patrols in the streets, the denial of services and the approval of a law that toughens punishments for not covering one's hair.