Posts Tagged ‘ israeli ’
The Israel Defense Forces on Sunday announced the death of an Israeli-American soldier during combat in Lebanon.
Moshe Yitzhak Hacohen Katz, 22, originally from New Haven, Connecticut, is the fifth Israeli soldier to be killed since the beginning of the conflict with Iran on Feb. 28, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement.
The IDF said Katz was killed “in battle in Lebanon.”
At least 3,461 people have been killed in Iran by U.S.-Israeli strikes since the war began on Feb. 28, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported on Saturday.
The reported toll includes 1,551 civilians and 1,208 military personnel, while the status of 702 victims remains undetermined. According to HRANA, 236 of the victims were children.
ABC News cannot independently verify HRANA’s data. However, HRANA has been reliable in counting deaths during previous rounds of unrest in Iran. HRANA says their data is collected from a combination of field reports, local contacts, medical and emergency sources, civil society networks and open-source materials — including publicly available images, videos and official statements.
Official Iranian government channels have not been providing regular or comprehensive casualty figures from the current conflict. But the Iranian Health Ministry said on Saturday that 244 women and 231 children have been killed in the war so far, in a statement carried by the Islamic Republic News Agency.
U.K. police authorities supported the decision after classifying the game as a “high risk” public event.
The decision was made in line with “current intelligence and previous incidents, including violent clashes and hate crime offenses that occurred during the 2024 UEFA Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel-Aviv in Amsterdam,” said a statement Thursday from the West Midlands Police force, which covers Birmingham.
Following Starmer’s comments, West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster asked the Safety Advisory Group to review its decision to ban the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans.
“Any decision or recommendation, is ultimately a matter for the Birmingham City Council SAG and the independent, objective and impartial, operational policing judgment, of West Midlands Police,” Foster said.
The violence last year in Amsterdam cited by West Midlands police, which happened against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, drew global attention. Maccabi fans were among hundreds to march through central Amsterdam demonstrating in support of Israel before a game against the Dutch team Ajax. During the marches, flares were lit and Palestinian flags hung on some streets were torn down amid chants of “death to the Arabs” by some Maccabi Tel Aviv fans.
In the aftermath of that game, some local people in Amsterdam “actively sought out Israeli supporters to attack and assault them,” police authorities in the Netherlands said, sparking a furious reaction from the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the violence as a “premeditated antisemitic attack.”
Sixty-two people were arrested and five injured amid the unrest, Dutch police said at the time.
Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters do have a history of causing unrest at recent soccer games. A March report by an anti-racism group in Israel said the team’s fans were the most prolific in singing racist chants during games over the last league season, according to Israeli news outlet Ynet.
The decision to block Israeli visiting supporters also came just weeks after a deadly terror attack on a synagogue in the northeast England city of Manchester. Two Jewish men were killed and three others seriously injured during the attack, which happened on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish religious calendar.
Police later said one of the two victims was likely killed by police gunfire as officers raced to stop the suspect, who first rammed his car into people and then attacked with a knife outside the synagogue. Officers shot and killed the suspect, who investigators later identified as 35-year-old Jihad Al-Shamie, a British citizen of Syrian descent.
The ban on the Israeli soccer fans also comes in the wake of a suspected arson attack on a mosque in the town of Peacehaven, in southern Britain. Police said they are investigating that incident as a possible hate crime.
Birmingham, the U.K’s second largest city, has one of the largest Muslim populations in Britain.
President Donald Trump told ABC News on Tuesday morning he is “not happy” with either Israel or Iran after the opening hours of a nascent ceasefire between the two combatants were marred by reported exchanges. Trump said Iran and Israel both “violated” the ceasefire that he announced late on Monday.
Through last week, the president and his administration continued to push back on an early intelligence report suggesting that the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities may have only set Tehran’s nuclear program back by months.
Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer — a top adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — will arrive in Washington, D.C. on Monday for talks with President Donald Trump’s administration, an Israeli official told ABC News.
Dermer’s visit is expected to include discussions on the war in the Gaza Strip, the recent conflict with Iran and Netanyahu’s planned visit to the White House next month.
The Israeli airstrike on Tehran’s Evin Prison on June 23 killed 71 people, according to a spokesperson for the Iranian judiciary quoted by the semi-official Iranian ISNA News Agency.
Asghar Jahangir said Sunday that victims included “the prison’s administrative staff, conscripts, prisoners, families of prisoners who were at the prison to visit or pursue their cases in court and neighbors who lived near the prison.”
The Israeli strike on Evin was part of a wave of attacks on what Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said were “regime targets and government bodies in the heart of Tehran.”
The attack on the prison prompted criticism. Nobel Peace Prize laureate and imprisoned Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, for example, said the attack was “undoubtedly a clear example of a war crime.”
United Nations human rights spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan said Evin “is not a military objective and targeting it constitutes a grave breach of international humanitarian law.”
The Israel Defense Forces claimed the strike was conducted in a “targeted manner in order to avoid harming uninvolved people,” but families of prisoners have expressed serious concerns about the safety of their loved ones. Several accounts on Iranian media describe scenes in which civilians and prisoners were injured or killed.
There are also reports of prisoners being moved from Evin to other prisons in Tehran, raising concerns among families and human rights activists.
President Donald Trump does not believe Iran hid its enriched uranium before the U.S. launched strikes on its nuclear facilities, he told Fox News in an interview.
“I don’t think they did. No, first of all, it’s very hard to do. It’s very dangerous to do, it is very heavy, very, very heavy. It’s a very hard thing to do plus we didn’t give much notice because they didn’t know we were coming until just then. And nobody thought we’d go after that site because everybody said that site is impenetrable,” Trump said.
“They moved themselves, they were all trying to live, they didn’t move anything,” Trump said.
Senate Republicans did not agree to push forward a resolution on Friday that would block President Donald Trump’s ability to use additional military force against Iran without explicit authorization from Congress.
By a vote of 53-47, a motion to advance Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia’s measure invoking the 1973 War Powers Resolution failed, with Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania — a staunch supporter of Israel — joining Republicans in opposing it.
One Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, crossed party lines to support the measure, which would have needed just a simple majority of 51 votes to pass.
Seven Republicans currently serving in the Senate voted for a similar Iran resolution back in 2020 — a measure that was also championed by Kaine.
Ahead of the vote on Friday, one of those Republicans — Sen. Todd Young of Indiana – said that he “does not believe an Iran war powers resolution is necessary at this time,” in the wake of a security briefing held on Thursday by top members of Trump’s cabinet.
The resolution that failed on Friday would have required that any further hostilities with Iran have authorization by a declaration of war or an authorization of military force from Congress.
Kaine introduced the measure a few days before the U.S. bombed three of Iran’s critical nuclear sites.
On Friday during a speech on the Senate floor, Kaine said there is a prevailing need for the measure due to the shaky nature of the current ceasefire between Iran and Israel, which was announced by Trump earlier this week.
“I pray the ceasefire continues, but I fear we’re going to be back here on this floor,” he said. “And I hope when we are on this floor again, members of this body will stand for the proposition that has been part of our history — that war is too big an issue to allow one person to make the decision that sends our sons and daughters into harm’s way.”
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