Category: Middle East
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Both the US and Iran are attacking oil tankers, and both call the other’s attacks war crimes. What the law of naval warfare actually says about when a merchant ship stops being a protected civilian object — and where each side’s legal argument is weakest.
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US forces struck three Iranian crude carriers after the IRGC fired ballistic missiles at two American warships. Iran says it damaged a carrier and a destroyer; that is unconfirmed. What each side claims, what can be verified, and why the war has moved onto the water.
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Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon on Sunday killed at least four people and injured around twenty, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The Lebanese presidency says a hospital was destroyed. The Israeli military says it hit a Hezbollah command centre inside a building formerly used as a hospital.
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Twelve people were sentenced to death in Egypt for drug trafficking, in one paragraph of wire copy. The treaty Egypt has signed limits capital punishment to the most serious crimes — and the body that interprets it says drug offences are not among them.
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The president called the confrontation with Iran “small potatoes” a day before strikes killed five in Kermanshah. Whether an operation counts as hostilities is not just a figure of speech — it is the legal hinge the War Powers Resolution turns on.
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Britain’s foreign secretary wants “more decisive action” on Gaza. The instruments a British government actually holds are countable, and each comes with an announcement attached. None has been made.
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American strikes have killed five members of the IRGC Aerospace Force in Kermanshah — a city about a thousand kilometres from the Strait of Hormuz. The target set is widening from the units at the strait to the organisation behind them.
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US Central Command says it struck three Iranian oil tankers on Friday after the Revolutionary Guard fired at two American navy vessels. Tankers are not bases: they carry civilian crews from countries with no part in this.
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Sixty people were killed in a single day of fighting in south-west Yemen, including six civilians on a bus in Taiz. The offensive is moving toward Bab al-Mandab, and almost nobody is reporting it.
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A Hezbollah drone was launched and shot down, injuring no one. The Israeli strikes that followed killed three people in southern Lebanon and wounded more than twenty. Both sides say they remain committed to the ceasefire.