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Middle East crisis live: US launches new round of airstrikes to ‘swiftly punish’ Iran after American troops killed

Kuwait’s ministry of electricity, water and renewable energy said a power and water distillation plant was attacked by Iran for the second time in two days, causing a fire in some of its facilities. In a statement posted to social media, the ministry said the attack impacted a “large number of electricity generation units”, triggering emergency plans to mitigate the effects and “maintain the stability of the electricity grid”. It added that firefighters were working to extinguish the fire while the extent of the damage is being assessed. As my colleague Donna Ferguson notes in this story, Kuwait on Saturday accused Iran of targeting civilian sites and vital infrastructure in the country, such as a power and water desalination plant. Kuwait, which is extremely arid, relies on desalinated water for about 90% of its drinking water, so is extremely vulnerable to attacks from Iran.

‘Liberate the lidos!’ Who will win the war over Italy’s private beaches?

Walking along Italian beaches is like strolling through a rainbow. The sand will be subdivided into colours: for 50 metres or so the perfectly spaced parasols and deck chairs will be all red, then they become orange, then yellow, green and so on. These are the country’s famous bagni (lidos), formally known as concessioni balneari (bathing concessions). They’re simple but stylish. The sand is raked at dawn. The bar plays ambient music and serves negronis or fried squid. There will probably be a table-tennis table, or a beach volleyball area. Some have swimming pools. Everything about these lidos is orderly. Deck chairs are priced with the precision of theatre tickets, with spaces by the water often costing double those by the bar (in Milano Marittima this summer, on the less glamorous Adriatic coast, a parasol and two deck chairs cost €30 by the bar, but up to €60 by the water). Many families rent a space all summer, year after year. Sometimes you have to walk for a mile or two before finding a spiaggia libera, a beach free of private lidos where bathers are allowed to put their towels on the sand and plant their own parasol. Those “free beaches” are invariably in the remote and less attractive areas, near an estuary or an eyesore, or where the sand gives way to rocks. They often have a litter issue, with ice‑cream wrappers dumped in the sand. There are no lifeguards or loos. “This set-up is crazy,” says one Dutch holidaymaker I meet on a free beach near Naples. “I tried to sit down on the beach over there,” he points towards the private lidos, “and they shooed me away. And here,” he shrugs, “there’s no toilet, no shower, no bin … ” The fight between privatised and free beaches, and the issue of how to manage Italy’s almost 8,000km (4,971 miles) of coastline, has become a controversial topic in recent years. The country has about 30,000 lidos, and a 2022 report from Legambiente (an Italian environmental organisation) calculated that about 43% of Italy’s sandy coasts are now occupied by private businesses. Danilo Ruggiero, director of the Mare Libero (Free Sea) campaign, says: “Beaches have been transformed into little resorts – these complexes can include swimming pools, car parks, gyms, restaurants and clothes shops.” Ruggiero lives in Ostia, just west of Rome, where 80% of the town’s beach is what he calls “the united states of lidos”. “Defences have been built around the area – walls, gates, fences and hedges – to prevent access and block the view. Often, for several kilometres, you cannot even see the sea.” Tuscany and Romagna are the regions with the most densely privatised beaches. In Forte dei Marmi, on the west-facing sand of the Tuscan coast, 94% of the town beachfront is rented to resorts. Nearby, in Pietrasanta and Camaiore, it’s 98.8% and 98.4%, respectively. Until recently, Gatteo a Mare, on the Adriatic coast, didn’t have a single free beach; following public outrage, it does now have 1.4% of free beach – 10 metres of a total of about 700 metres. Because running a lido is a very profitable, often cash-in-hand operation, they are attractive investments for organised crime, and the campaign for more free beaches has often overlapped with a wider anti‑mafia pushback. But the beach issue also feeds into a question overwhelmed Italians are frequently asking themselves: how to combat the excesses of overtourism without turning beauty spots into theme parks? How can everyone enjoy the seaside if there’s just not enough space on the sand? *** Bacoli is a town that forms the very north‑western tip of the Gulf of Naples. It’s a stunning but unstable place: active and extinct volcanoes have created concentric circles of crater lakes and rocky peninsulas in the sea. The whole town sits on the bubbling magma of the Phlegraean Fields, with the roads and buildings frequently lifted or dropped by ground movement (called bradyseism), causing cracks and potholes. “Here,” Fabio Ciciliano, the national head of Italy’s civil protection department, tells me, “they’re not living on a volcano but inside one.” “It’s like the game of the goose,” laughs the town’s mayor, the long-haired, 39-year-old Josi Gerardo Della Ragione, bouncing his hand up and down to mean that, as with snakes- and-ladders, his town is battling the whims of fortune. Della Ragione – or Josi as he is universally known – has become nationally famous for his battle to liberate his town’s beaches from private profiteers. “Until recently,” he tells me, “our beaches were cluttered with illegal sheds, barbed wire, gates and intercoms.” Access to various beaches was through one compound or other. “You had to ring the intercom,” he explains, “and [their response was] I’ll open the gate if I know you.” The mayor says it’s a “clientelistic, friends-of-my-friends” arrangement that typifies the mindset here. The issue of beach access is felt particularly deeply in Naples because the city has the sea in its soul. No self‑respecting Neapolitan troubadour is without a tribute to O Mare in their repertoire. Naples port authority runs the allocation of concessions, and many feel that the distribution between public and private is very skewed: in Campania (the region surrounding Naples) the percentage of private concessions is 70%, and in Naples itself 95%. Della Ragione says many lidos gained their licences through paying fines. “They occupied a stretch of water and a stretch of beach,” he says. “At the end of the summer, they were fined by the port authority for unauthorised occupation.” Through what the mayor calls “legalised squatting”, the fines became a way of legitimising the occupation; abusivi storici (historical unauthorised occupants) is the judicial definition of many of the lidos he is now taking on. “It’s obvious that public property seized by force and bullying will be defended by force and bullying,” says Della Ragione. On one beach, Casevecchie, Della Ragione deployed heavy machinery to dismantle illegal buildings on public land. “We had to bring in bulldozers to demolish warehouses,” he says. “In one, we found the person running the warehouse with a chainsaw, heading towards the council workers. Those are the kind of crimes we’re dealing with.” Della Ragione has been in the fight for a long time. Seventeen years ago he co-created a social media campaign called FreeBacoli. He had a sideline as a sports journalist and is a skilled listener. He constantly denounced malfeasance in local government, leading to an arson attack on his family’s delicatessen. But in 2015, aged just 28, he was elected mayor with almost 65% cast. Although his administration fell after only a year in power, he came back in 2019. He has been Bacoli’s mayor for seven years now. What makes Bacoli unusual is that the town council owns more than a quarter of the 13 sq km land, of which 60% is coastal. Many appealing sites fell into the hands of the local mafia, the Camorra. Villa Ferretti is a 19th-century villa built next to Roman ruins that are still visible below the clear water of Pozzuoli bay. There’s a public beach – maybe less than 100 metres long – just to the right of the villa’s balconies. The Ferretti family were rich Genoans, but the villa eventually fell into hands of the Pariante family, a notorious Camorra clan, who closed public access to a beach. The property was seized by the Italian Anti-Mafia Investigation Division in 1995 and transferred to the municipality of Bacoli in 2003. In 2016, the town’s council transformed the beach and garden into a public park and created an outdoor theatre, restoring public access to the beach and leasing the villa to the University of Naples Federico II. In many ways, Della Ragione’s position on beaches is no different from his broad political vision. “What we’ve tried to do,” he says, “is to give the city back to its citizens, based on the idea that the public administration does not hand out favours and does not engage in patronage.” It’s a vision of politics that sometimes struggles to put down roots in southern Italy where, according to Della Ragione, the “public good” is seen “as a cake to be divided up among friends, voters and relatives”. Miseno beach is another flashpoint in Bacoli. It’s a curving finger of sand just over half a mile long. But you can’t get to it from the modern road named after Pliny the Elder. There are triumphal arches leading to private resorts, and free parking for members, but unless you know where the narrow corridors are between those resorts you will struggle to see, let alone stand on, the sand. “They’re all military beaches,” says Della Ragione. “There’s the navy with one resort, the air force with another, the Italian army with two, and the coastguard with one.” If you include the nearby Guardia di Finanza resort, that makes about 100,000 sq metres of Miseno sand given over to exclusive use. But when you finally find an alleyway between military installations, it’s worth it. The water is cool and clear, and the famous islands – Procida, Ischia and Capri – feel so close you could swim to them. To the left, there are a dozen caves, once used as storage by the Roman navy. Two thousand years ago these saltwater lakes and embracing bays turned Bacoli into the chosen port for Rome’s elite fleet, the Classis Misenensis. Underground aqueducts ushered freshwater directly to the sailors from a reservoir – the Piscina Mirabilis – whose ceiling had circular skylights casting oblique beams on to the water. So this has always been a militarised zone. But on Miseno’s beach the military presence is nothing to do with training and drills, only deck chairs and economics. In the military lidos, un pezzo (“a piece”, either a deck chair or a parasol) costs only €3 (plus free parking). In the non-military lidos each “piece” will cost €7 in the low season, €10 in the high (and no parking). “We’re being undercut,” says one barman of a non‑military lido, who bemoans the unfair competition. The managers of the military resorts are not in uniform. They’re local lads who are unconnected to the military: they offer coffee at 60 cents – half what it costs elsewhere – and say anyone is welcomed to eat in their subsidised restaurants. They are so used to the unfair advantage, they don’t even seem to notice it. Eventually you come to a shell of a building, chained closed but full of graffiti. This is the “free beach”. It seems almost deliberately grotty, with wet wipes and straws in the sand. The issue of litter is an argument the private operators often refer to; it is, they say, inevitable that public beaches will be dirty. But the vibe here is different. Instead of perpendicular seating, there are various groups sitting round a Bluetooth speaker. I speak to a man called Marco and wonder about the grottiness. “We have to fight a cultural battle,” he says. “Because when I go to certain free beaches there’s no bin and people put cigarette butts and bottle tops in the sand. It needs a bit of education, a bit of culture … ” *** For years, activists from Mare Libero have held flashmobs and beach occupations in hotspots where access is being constantly restricted. Donn’Anna beach, just west of Naples, had been gated since 1999. Citizens could only access it at the discretion of the keyholder, the manager of a lido called Bagno Elena. Even if one got access, finding a free space in the height of summer would be almost impossible: of the beach’s 4,490 sq metres, only 290 were considered free. The Naples chapter of Mare Libero waged a campaign to “liberate” the beach, organising sit-ins and arguing in court that a closed gate was in contravention of access rights. Naples port authority appealed against the gate’s removal but lost its case. In February 2026, the Campania regional administrative court upheld Mare Libero’s cause and Donn’Anna beach is finally freely accessible, a victory that Mare Libero is hoping to replicate along the peninsula. In these tense spaces, Della Ragione is offering a sort of socialist optimism: his battle for beach access is part of his plan to re-common all the land in the town council’s possession. “The sum of every individual interest is less than the common good,” he says. Della Ragione has an unusual skill set. He combines the communication skills of an influencer (constantly being quoted and photographed in his tricolour sash, and sharing his personal phone number online in emergencies) with the bureaucratic abilities of an elderly lawyer. His comms come across as both natural and calculated. “In this age of communication, if you don’t say you’ve done something, it’s as if you hadn’t done it. You have to do it and you have to say you’ve done it.” But his high visibility is also an insurance: what he’s doing is dangerous (he has received death threats) and his national notoriety affords him some protection. Although the mayor seems revolutionary, he’s also a stickler for formality. He refuses to receive people in shorts, and local people tell stories, possibly apocryphal, of groups of visitors sharing one pair of trousers outside the mayor’s offices. When I go to a local boutique and explain why I have to buy a pair, the owner of the shop laughs: “This happens all the time.” When you walk around the town with Della Ragione, people constantly approach and ask to shake his hand. Others wave and call out, “Sindaco!” (mayor). The adulation is constant. And if you talk to anyone in town – shopkeepers, bathers, friends – they express real love for “Josi”. “Fa bene,” everyone says (more or less, “He’s doing a good job”). And you can feel what Bacolesi are trying to create here. At sunset, teenagers play canoe-polo on Miseno’s saltwater lake. There’s a new beach volleyball court on the retaken Casevecchie sand, its floodlights powered by solar panels. At midnight, toddlers move waist-high chess pieces for their parents, who are playing with ice‑creams in their hands. “It’s a positive micro-story of a slow and widespread regeneration,” Klarissa Pica, a research fellow at Venice’s IUAV university, wrote in her doctoral thesis, Territorio Mare (Territorial Waters). “We don’t want any war with ‘the forces of order’,” says Della Ragione, chuckling at the absurdity of the idea, “but we do want an account with reality: these are private clubs that take away from the idea that the beach is for everyone. In 2026 this is absolutely intolerable.” *** This evolution of lidos from tiny booths into mega resorts has taken almost a century. In the early 20th century, the Italian state began renting rectangles of sand (part of the demanio, or state property) to businesses that sold coffee and liqueurs and rented chairs. It wasn’t somewhere the wealthy went: they drank in the grand cafes of the main square or on their own boats. Even after 1945, Italy’s long beaches weren’t glamorous. They were associated with warfare – littered with shrapnel and abandoned military equipment – or with wilderness. They were windswept spaces for driftwood, loners, lovers and criminals. But what had started as small kiosks grew as tourism boomed from the 1960s onwards. Bagni began building seating areas, erecting outbuildings, plumbing in showers and loos, digging pools and fencing sports areas and restaurants. In the pines behind the sand, many created parking spaces and campsites. Some of it was legal, some not. The rental agreements of these spaces were invariably “rollover” ones, renewing automatically. Until 2020, the minimum annual rent for a beach resort was a paltry €364 and, according to Italy’s court of auditors’ report for 2016-20, the state received only €101.7m a year from these lidos, a tiny sum for an industry estimated to generate €7-8bn. The image problem for lidos is that they’re seen to be profiting from ancient privileges that have made running a bagno blissfully profitable. Many resorts cater for weddings, birthdays, baptisms and graduations, and some have been revealed to be taking more in an evening than they pay in annual rent. It has been calculated that the average annual profit of a beach resort is still a tidy €260,000. This was all supposed to end in 2006, when the EU’s Bolkestein directive obliged member countries to offer coastal concessions for a “limited duration, and through an open public selection procedure, based on non-discriminatory, transparent and objective criteria”. The directive was meant to break up protectionist practices and open up the beaches to internal competition. But successive Italian governments have avoided implementing the legislation by issuing proroghe (extensions) to delay any tender process. First there was an extension until 2012, then until 2015, then it was moved to 2020. In 2018, the “yellow-green” government (the League-Five Star Movement coalition) passed a law extending the status quo (of lido’s renting the sand long-term) until 2033. Recently, the Italian state has attempted to make things fairer. It raised the minimum annual rent for a beach concession to €2,500 and then €3,225.50. Beach resorts pay VAT at 22% rather than, as with all other tourist operators, the discounted rate of 10%. The lidos also pay IMU, the Italian property tax, usually only required of actual owners, although that has caused its own problems: according to Ruggiero, “those who manage beach concessions believe that they’re in some way owners. And if the owner sees you going into their space, you’re perceived as an intruder in their own house.” The beach debate tends to pan out along clear left-right lines. For the left, it’s an obvious example of public ownership and access. Italy’s large rump of former socialists and communists say that the perversity of capitalism is revealed by even shade being commercialised. For the activists of Mare Libero, freeing beaches isn’t a frivolous campaign, but a civil rights one informed by ecology and inclusion. Pica believes that beaches are an issue of spatial, as well as social, justice. She sees in these struggles an echo of Roman law’s concept that “res communis omnium” (“a thing common to all”) should be considered “res extra commercium” (“a thing outside commerce”). For the right, though, these concessions are a vital and patriotic pillar of one of Italy’s most important industries: tourism. The sector accounts for 9.6% of the country’s GDP, according to a 2023 study by Italy’s National Institute of Statistics. Of the country’s almost 477 million tourists (both internal and external), 39.2% spend time at the sea, and no patriotic politician wants to mess with such a buoyant industry. Neither Giorgia Meloni (the prime minister), nor Matteo Salvini (the League leader in coalition with Meloni), nor Roberto Vannacci (a retired army general who is a rising star of the far right and outside the government) ever criticise the status quo of beach resorts. Some have even invested in them: Daniela Santanchè, the scandal-hit former minister of tourism, was a shareholder in Flavio Briatore’s Twiga (a luxury lido in Forte dei Marmi); and Massimo Casanova – a former MEP for the League – owns Papeete (another luxury resort) in Milano Marittima, where Salvini is a regular. The bagni do have an important role to play, they claim: protecting beach safety. “In Italy we’re fortunate to have half the drownings that they do in France,” says Antonio Capacchione, the president of SIB, the Italian union of balneari. According to Capacchione, that’s largely down that to the fact that lidos have a humanitarian obligation to provide lifeguard services and would face manslaughter charges if they neglected safety regulations. Defenders of the lido system also argue that in an era of overtourism, they play a role in protecting the coastline. Certain cities and towns in Italy are, given post-Covid travel mania, unrecognisable. The number of beds available to tourists in Venice recently surpassed the number of locals’ beds. Trevi fountain in Rome is now imposing bookings and €2 tickets. That’s happening on the beaches, too. Punta is one of Sardinia’s prize beaches: its petiteness – just a dusting of sand between rocky outposts and a transparent sea – is what makes it so appealing. And it undeniably needs protection from thousands of visitors who come with drones, tents, picnics and charcoal (a fire last year torched dozens of cars). So, in June, Villasimius town council announced it would charge visitors €10 and limit numbers to 150 people and 70 cars. Controversially, personal parasols couldn’t be brought on to the beach unless the party included a person over 65 or under 10. After national outrage – and many jokes about this being the only valid reason to bring children or grandparents on holiday – Villasimius council increased the numbers to 190 people and 90 cars. But the outrage went to the heart of the debate about how to protect a fragile coastline from being overwhelmed by vehicles and humans. It’s also, obviously, an ecological question. With rising sea levels, ever-increasing meteorological violence and scorching temperatures, Italy’s coastline is acutely vulnerable to erosion, pollution, drought and forest fires. *** Despite the ferocity of the debate, all sides agree on one thing: that the simple, sandy beach holds a cherished place in the memories and identities of Italians. For millions, my family included, deck-chair-and-parasol slumming has been how the long school holidays are lived. “From June to September,” Pica says, “pensioners have their beach umbrella at the same beach, with the same beach operator, and they’re surrounded by all their beach friends – so, for them, that’s what enjoying the seaside is all about.” “I’ve been coming here for 30 years,” says one sunbather I talk to in a lido in Cuma, just north of Bacoli. She’s a retired woman looking after her two grandchildren. “I’ve known all my neighbours” – she points at the deck chairs all round her – “for decades.” It’s clear that Italians, on the whole, expect their beach experience to be curated, predictable and orderly. It is uncertain what will happen next in the standoff between the EU and Italy. According to Capacchione, any tender process should contain clauses covering compensation (“indennizzo”) for investments in infrastructure, and a stipulation that preferential treatment be given to bidders with consolidated experience in the sector. That, to Ruggiero, sounds like a stitch-up. “As regards compensation: the concession is fixed term, so once it has expired – and you have made full use of it until the very end – why should I compensate you? It’s like someone saying, ‘I rent a house and then claim compensation’ – compensation for what?” The “experience clause” is even more problematic for Ruggiero. “Given that the market has been frozen, who else can claim to have experience in running beachside businesses other than those who have been running them up to now?” He summarises the current government’s position as: “I can’t grant you an extension, but I’ll make sure you win the tenders.” It is, he says, a very Italian solution to the problem. • Tobias Jones lives in Parma. He is the author of Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football. To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Per Elisa, the TV adaptation of his book Blood on the Altar, is streaming on ITVX. • Additional research by Bruno Abate

‘We hear your voices’: inside the Church of England’s debate over Palestine

Father Fadi Diab, a prominent Palestinian Anglican priest from Ramallah, watched quietly as the Church of England debated whether to formally hear a document describing Israel as a “colonial enterprise” that had inflicted a “genocidal war on Gaza”. The motion passed overwhelmingly among bishops, clergy and laity – all three houses of the General Synod – last week. Diab, who helped write the document at the centre of the debate, described the moment as “surreal”. “It was very moving and very emotional,” he said. “I think members of synod wanted to say: ‘We hear your voices, we feel your pain, and we want to stand with you in your struggle.’” For many Palestinian Christians, the vote marked a significant shift in the Church of England’s engagement with their community. But the moment came amid warnings from Jewish leaders that the language at the heart of the report risked straining decades of Christian-Jewish dialogue. The motion centred on Kairos Palestine II (A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide), a report published last year by Palestinian Christian leaders drawn from across denominations calling for an urgent global Christian response to the war in Gaza and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Co-written by Diab, it describes Israel’s actions using terms including genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism. Originally drafted to ask synod to “receive” the report, the motion was amended during the debate so members instead agreed to “hear” it. Speaking during the debate, Sarah Mullally, the archbishop of Canterbury, acknowledged concerns raised by Jewish organisations and explained that hearing Palestinian Christians’ experiences did not mean endorsing every aspect of the report. “It does mean that we listen with compassion, and stand in solidarity with them amidst the many injustices they face,” she said. Before the debate, the Board of Deputies of British Jews urged synod to reject the report, and released its own briefing that said it “directly undermines the struggle against antisemitism”, and the UK’s chief rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, and the co-chairs of Progressive Judaism said it risked harming Christian-Jewish relations. Jewish leaders argued the report went beyond criticising the Israeli government and its military campaign in Gaza, and instead questioned Zionism and what they described as core elements of Jewish history, including longstanding Jewish connection to the land. Rabbi Charley Baginsky, a co-chair of Progressive Judaism, said she understood the Church of England must grapple with the experiences of Palestinian Christians who do not feel their voices are being heard. “We recognise that as well, and we absolutely do not want to play any part in stopping those voices from being heard,” she said. “Where we’d be very strong is that this is not the vehicle by which to do that because of the entrenchment of antisemitic tropes within it [the document], and within the nature of wiping out the experiences of what it means for Jews and Israelis to be in relationship with the land.” Baginsky did, however, welcome the continued engagement by the church on the matter, adding: “As always, the challenge for all of us in faith relationships is: how do we stay in the room and hear things that are difficult? How do we make sure the parameters around conversation are ones that are open to conversations? “I think the problem with the language in Kairos II is that it closes down conversation.” Georgina Bye, a co-director of the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ), the oldest interfaith charity in the UK, said that, while she understands the document comes from a place of trauma and distress, she was concerned by the “lack of nuance” with some of terms used, and said that “the document disparages dialogue”. “For us, it’s a balancing act,” Bye added. “We want to uplift and hear the voices of Palestinian Christians, amplify their distress and stand with them, while also being aware of the context we’re living in here in the UK.” Bye said she was grateful that the amendments changed “receive” to “hear”, and that a number of people stood up during the debate and asked to look at the issue more holistically. “Ultimately, Kairos II is presenting a perspective,” she said. “If we really want to understand and grapple with something as complex as what’s going on in the Middle East, we have to expose ourselves to lots of different perspectives and narratives so we can better understand how we move forward and build peace.” Richard Sewell, the Residentiary Canon of St George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem, who functions as a link between the church in England and the Anglican community in Palestine, described the report as “a cry for help from our brothers and sisters in Palestine and Israel”. He insisted the Church of England had a duty to directly hear the voice of the suffering church in Palestine, Israel and the wider region. “People ask: ‘Why are you raising these painful issues which are going to cause so much distress?’ Because our brothers and sisters in the Diocese of Jerusalem and across different denominations are pleading with the wider church to engage with them,” Sewell said. The debate marked one of Mullally’s first significant interventions as leader of the church. The motion was first introduced several years earlier and, according to Sewell, there had been growing frustration over repeated delays before it reached the synod floor. Weeks earlier, Mullally had visited Diab’s congregation in Birzeit, in the occupied West Bank. Sewell said the Palestinian Christian community had been “delighted” by her visit. “It would have been easy for her to say: ‘Actually, the time’s not quite right, so we won’t come.’ But I was deeply encouraged that she was not put off by the circumstances,” he said. Reflecting on the visit during the synod debate, Mullally said she had seen settlements expanding “at unprecedented rates”, and that Palestine, including Christian villages such as Taybeh, was “on the brink of disappearing”. “Against this desperate backdrop we are called to a new and active solidarity,” she said. Diab said Kairos II had been born out of “the existential threats facing the Christian community” caused by the war in Gaza and decades of military occupation. He described conditions in the occupied Palestinian territories as the worst they had ever been. He defended the language in the report, including the terms genocide and apartheid, saying they reflected the findings of human rights organisations. “The reality is that the state of Israel continues to confiscate occupied Palestinian land and build settlements on it. “We are not inventing words. We are describing what is happening on the ground.” Diab urged more people to visit the occupied territories. “Many simply do not know what is happening,” he said. “We know many people whose views changed after visiting because once you experience crossing checkpoints, once you experience humiliation, you begin to understand what it means to live under military occupation for nearly 60 years. “That is why Palestinian theologians produced this document: to say we cannot remain silent any longer, and that the world needs to hear our cry because the situation is extremely serious.”

Russia pounds Kyiv for five hours in one of its biggest ballistic missile attacks

Russia has carried out one of its biggest-ever ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv, launching a five-hour raid that left at least one person dead and seven injured, with fires and damage across the city. Ukrainian officials said the capital was hit with about 40 Iskander-M and hypersonic Zircon missiles. Residents heard an air raid siren sound at 1.30am. There was the sound of air defences, followed minutes later by a series of booms and explosions. Houses in Kyiv’s historic centre shook, and car alarms blared, as dozens of missiles arrived in less than an hour. There was a second air raid siren at 6.30am, with more impacts reported. A three-storey building caught fire in the central Shevchenkivsky district. Rescuers dug out several people trapped inside and recovered a body. Four other areas were hit, with fires reported at office and residential buildings and a dormitory. Residents sheltering inside Lukyanivska metro station posted footage after the ceiling in the ground-floor vestibule collapsed because of a massive blast wave. The station is temporarily closed. “According to preliminary information, one person was, sadly, killed as a result of the attack,” the city military administration said on Telegram. Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said seven people were wounded. Kyiv’s military said it had shot down 18 missiles in Sunday’s attack, which was aimed primarily at the Ukrainian capital. It added that 108 out of 125 drones had also been downed. Russia has been firing drones and missiles at Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities almost daily since it launched its full-scale 2022 invasion. Zelenskyy ⁠said last week that the US and Ukraine had reached a political agreement on licences to make the prized Patriot interceptors, adding that he hoped production could begin by the end of the year. Ukraine’s own stocks of interceptors appear to have dwindled. But the mounting Russian ‌attacks in the fifth year of Moscow’s full-scale war are heaping pressure on Kyiv’s foreign partners to accelerate supply of anti-ballistic defences. “Protection against ballistic missiles is our constant and top priority right now,” Zelenskyy said on X on Sunday. “Interceptors are needed every day.” The attacks come amid big anti-government protests in Kyiv after Zelenskyy’s decision to sack the country’s popular and modernising defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov. Demonstrators want Fedorov reinstated and the Soviet-style commander-in-chief, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, sacked instead. At ‌one location in western Kyiv, emergency workers picked through smouldering debris and doused bombed-out apartments. A ‌resident who identified himself as Vlad told Reuters he had been inside his apartment when a blast tore off his balcony door, which smashed him in the head. “My grandmother lives with me, and she can’t walk. How could I run away and leave her behind?” he said. Rescue workers pulled four people from a burning private home in the Sviatoshynskyi district, while in the Shevchenkivskyi district they rescued residents from a burning three-storey building. A fire in a non-residential building was also contained. One person was later found dead. Firefighters also responded to blazes in the Solomyanskyi, Desnianskyi and Dnipro districts. There have also been attacks on Russia. On Saturday, Ukraine sent attack drones to destroy e-commerce warehouses in the Moscow and Tambov regions, killing eight people and causing major fires. Earlier on Saturday Russian strikes killed five people and wounded almost 20 in several regions. “In response to Russian strikes on our civilian infrastructure and on our cities and communities, two major logistics facilities were hit – in the Moscow and Tambov regions,” Zelenskyy said. The Ukrainian president alleged the centres were used “to supply sanctioned components for drone production and navigation equipment”. According to the United Nations, June was the deadliest month for civilians in Ukraine since April 2022, with at least 293 people killed. Talks on ending Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II remain frozen, while fighting at the front is effectively at a standstill.

Israel threatens to seize ancient water reservoirs near Bethlehem

Israel is threatening to seize ancient water reservoirs near Bethlehem, in what would be a significant escalation in an intensifying campaign for control of West Bank land and the Middle East’s historical narrative. Since Israel’s extremist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, made an explicit threat in May to “erase” the agreements that confirmed Palestinian ownership of Solomon’s Pools more than 30 years ago, Israeli settlers and troops have stepped up their presence around the spectacular site. The pools date back as far as the second century BCE, though the main construction was carried out by the Romans a century later as part of a vast engineering project of two reservoirs, aqueducts and tunnels to supply water to Jerusalem 8 miles (13km) away. A third monumental basin was added under Ottoman rule, when a fort was also built to safeguard the water supply. During the Mandate period from 1923 to 1948, the British authorities modernised the system with metal pipes and pumps. The pale stone Mandate-era pumping station now stands abandoned in the wooded hills of the area and the pools, more than 10 metres deep in places, no longer funnel water to Jerusalem, but have become the main source of recreation in the area. On a recent afternoon, children from the neighbouring villages of Artas and al-Khader took running jumps off the stone walls of the middle pool into the deep green water, while a handful of men fished amid the reeds off the ramparts on the other side. On Fridays and holidays, families come from Bethlehem, 2 miles (3.5km) to the north-east, to spend the evening, bathe and picnic. As the city has become hemmed in by new settlements on all sides, the pools are increasingly a sanctuary for Bethlehemites. “It’s the only place now in all Bethlehem that you can find somewhere to sit and to enjoy the water, the shade, the green space – and now they are trying to steal it,” said Mahmoud Jaber, a local activist and horticulturist from Artas, who uses water from the local springs to grow vegetables. Although a district of the Efrat settlement looms above the pools, they only came under immediate threat in May when Smotrich and another hardline Israeli politician, Zvi Sukkot, had police drive Palestinians away from the area so they could be filmed swimming in the middle pool. “This is our land,” Smotrich declared, and Sukkot echoed his call for Israel to take over the site. Since then, incursions from settlers have become more frequent and on 10 July Israeli soldiers carried out an unprecedented raid, firing teargas while children swam in the pools. The pressure campaign has sparked outrage in Palestine not just because of the archaeological importance of the three rectangular pools which – with a combined capacity of 250,000 cubic metres – constitute one of the biggest water systems surviving from the ancient world. It also represents a new frontal assault on the Palestinian Authority (PA). Under the second Oslo Accord of 1995, Solomon’s Pools was made part of the wider Bethlehem area classified as Area A, under Palestinian civil and police control. The division of the West Bank into areas A, B (Palestinian civil and Israeli military control), and C (full Israeli administration) was intended to be a halfway stage to eventual Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territory and the creation of a Palestinian state. That aim has long since been renounced by the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his far-right coalition, who have accelerated the spread of Israeli settlements across the West Bank in an attempt to cripple an independent Palestine at birth. Throughout that years-long campaign, Area A has mostly been considered inviolable, until a security cabinet edict in February this year asserting Israeli control over the Rachel’s Tomb historical site inside Bethlehem. The seizure of Solomon’s Pools would set a further precedent, suggesting that parts of Area A could be appropriated at will in ad hoc decisions by ministers. When he visited the pools in May, Smotrich said that leaving such a “magnificent ancient water site” under Palestinian control had been “one of the terrible mistakes” of the Oslo Accords. “We are working hard to repair the terrible damage caused by the Oslo Accords disaster,” he said. “This site is being weaponised in order to erode and basically cancel the Oslo agreement,” said Alon Arad, an Israeli archaeologist and executive director of Emek Shaveh, an organisation set up to protect ancient sites. He added: “There are 6,000 ancient sites in West Bank and only a [fraction] out of them represent any connection to Jewish heritage.” It is not clear if and when the Israeli coalition will try to seize Solomon’s Pools, but archeologists and local Palestinians are braced for more incursions as Israel’s October elections approach. Meanwhile, the justification for a takeover has been laid down by hardline Israeli propagandists, who argue that the PA has allowed Solomon’s Pools to fall into disrepair. The site is crumbling in some places and a few patches of discarded water bottles and other litter could be seen in one corner of the middle pool. The PA Waqf, the religious endowment which owns the site, had ambitions to develop it for tourism, but those aspirations were crushed when Smotrich withheld the PA’s tax and excise revenues, starving it of funds. The other rationalisation advanced for an Israeli takeover is that Solomon’s Pools is uniquely Jewish. Writing on the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs website earlier this month, reserve Lt Col Maurice Hirsch said that the site was “by its very name, of Jewish historical significance and importance”. Solomon’s Pools, however, is a historical misnomer. King Solomon, if he existed (a subject of debate), is thought to have ruled Israel and Judah about 800 years before work started on the reservoirs. The first two pools were built in the time of another Jewish king, Herod the Great, a Roman client ruler, but like many ancient sites in Israel and Palestine, Solomon’s Pools show the overlain traces of successive eras and empires. Local Palestinians maintained the name over the centuries, but Eman al-Titi, the head of Bethlehem’s tourism and antiquities department, said it came to refer to the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, who restored Jerusalem’s walls and water supply in the 16th century. “Archaeological sites should never become instruments of political conflict,” al-Titi said. “This issue extends beyond control of the land itself. It also involves attempts to reshape history and promote a single historical narrative that does not reflect the archaeological evidence or the many civilisations that have contributed to Palestine’s rich cultural heritage over thousands of years.”

Ukraine war briefing: Strikes devastate Russian warehouses ‘used for drones’

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian long-range strikes hit two drone supply hubs in the Moscow and Tambov regions of Russia. Russian officials and news reports described them as warehouses of the online retailer Wildberries: one in the town of Kotovsk in the Tambov region, about 360km (220 miles) from the border with Ukraine, and another in the city of Elektrostal, about 50km (30 miles) east of Moscow. Zelenskyy said: “These facilities were used by the aggressor to supply sanctioned components for the production of drones and navigation equipment.” Elektrostal is a major centre for metallurgy and machine-building Zelenskyy said: “In response to Russian strikes on our civilian infrastructure and on our cities and communities, two major logistics facilities were hit – in the Moscow and Tambov regions.” The Tambov regional governor, Yevgeny Pervyshov, said seven night shift workers were killed at the warehouse in Kotovsk and 25 others wounded. Serhii Kuzan, a Ukrainian military analyst, told the BBC that Wildberries was a vital supplier to the Russian army of dual-use and sanctioned goods and electronics. One more person was killed and another wounded in a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s Belgorod region on Saturday afternoon, according to local authorities. Ukraine’s general staff said Kyiv’s forces hit a fuel depot in Noginsk that supplies the Russian armed forces. The military also reported hitting two tankers, two floating cranes and a tugboat in the Black and Azov seas, saying the vessels were used to transport oil, fuel and military cargo. Separately, the military said it struck a Russian Project 10410 Svetlyak-class patrol ship in Kerch, describing it as the second vessel of that class hit in two days, as well as a railway bridge over the Bila River near Sabivka in the occupied Luhansk region that it said Russia used for military logistics. Russian missiles hit Kyiv ⁠and the surrounding region early on Sunday, ⁠killing at ⁠least one person and injuring nine others as fires ⁠broke out across the city, officials said. Powerful explosions ‌rocked the capital ‌as Ukraine’s air force warned ‌of a ballistic missile threat. Fires broke out at a dormitory, a residential block and a supermarket, said the Kyiv mayor, Vitali ‌Klitschko. Several non-residential buildings and warehouses were struck, while parked cars and office buildings were set on ⁠fire. Two people were injured in the Kyiv region, ‌according to the military administration, and warehouses were damaged. Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Ruslan Kravchenko, said investigators had recovered key evidence in the case of the attempted assassination of the Ukrainian businessman Vadym Iermolaiev in Monaco. Specialists from Ukraine’s security services restored a surveillance-camera recording that suspects had allegedly attempted to destroy. According to the prosecutor general, the surveillance camera had been installed near the crime scene to obtain confirmation that the alleged contract killing had been carried out. He said the recovered footage was among key pieces of evidence in the investigation. Protesters have continued in Kyiv calling for the dismissal of Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, after Zelenskyy removed the popular defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov to placate Syrskyi. The Ukraine president defended his decision, saying there had been a “challenging dialogue” between Fedorov and Syrskyi. On the ground at one of the protests, the Guardian’s Luke Harding has filed a video report. Russia ⁠launched an attack ⁠on ⁠Ukraine’s Odesa port infrastructure on Saturday, ⁠hitting a vessel under the ⁠Antigua and ‌Barbuda ‌flag and killing ‌one person, said the regional governor, Oleh Kiper. Three people ⁠were injured, he added, while buildings, storage tanks and warehouses were damaged. North Korea’s foreign minister, Choe Son Hui, flew to Moscow for talks with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, state media reported on Sunday. North Korea has sent missiles and munitions for Russia to use in its war against Ukraine, while thousands of North Korean troops have died on the frontlines. Analysts say that in return, Moscow is sending financial aid, military technology, food and energy to the pariah state. In April, the North Korean ruler, Kim Jong-un, pledged to help Russia win its “sacred” war. Botswana says an “alarming” number of its nationals are being forced into combat in Russia’s war against Ukraine after falling for deceptive recruitment schemes. Several African countries have said the same in recent months. Botwswana’s foreign ministry said: “The ministry continues to receive heartbreaking calls from Batswana already on the frontline, describing the perilous conditions they face.” In mid-February, the All Eyes on Wagner collective published the names of more than 1,400 Africans it said Moscow had recruited between January 2023 and September 2025 to fight in Ukraine, adding that more than 300 had died. The biggest contingents were from Egypt, Cameroon and Ghana. A Russian soldier was shown on video mocking African recruits as “disposables” before their departure for the frontline, where it is estimated that in some areas Moscow’s recruits survive only 20-35 minutes on average before being killed or maimed by drones.

Two US troops killed and one missing in Jordan after Iranian attacks

The US retaliated against Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) after two American troops were killed and one was missing in Jordan when Tehran launched a wave of attacks against US allies in the Middle East. Iran’s attacks came as the renewal of US strikes on Iran entered a second week and fighting escalated over the strait of Hormuz. The US military said on Saturday that it “targeted Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces that launched attacks against US service members in Jordan on July 17”. US Central Command said also hit were “Iranian military coastal surveillance and air defence facilities, maritime capabilities and missile and drone storage sites”. On Friday the US military said it had carried out the seventh consecutive night of strikes on Iran since Donald Trump declared their temporary ceasefire agreement “over”, while the signature of Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, was “worthless and invalid”. A statement attributed to Khamenei, who has remained unseen since the war began, warned of “unforgettable lessons” if the US continues attacks. Kuwait on Saturday accused Iran of targeting civilian sites and vital infrastructure in the country, such as a power and water desalination plant. Kuwait, which is extremely arid, relies on desalinated water for about 90% of its drinking water. The country was forced to close its airspace briefly as it intercepted Iranian missiles and drones, and said several Kuwaiti firefighters and a worker were injured while battling blazes sparked by Iranian strikes. Bahrain also activated its air sirens on Saturday, warning residents to shelter after it detected possible incoming drones or missiles, while Jordan’s state-run Petra news agency said that the kingdom’s air defence systems had downed Iranian missiles. The Iranian attacks on US allies in the region came in response to US attacks on civilian infrastructure including bridges and power facilities. The secretary general of the Gulf Cooperation Council condemned Iran’s attacks on Kuwait, saying strikes on civilian infrastructure amounted to “war crimes”. “Iran’s actions constitute a highly dangerous escalation, a grave violation of international law and the United Nations (UN) Charter, as well as war crimes requiring international accountability and prosecution, given the deliberate targeting of infrastructure and civilian facilities,” Jasem Mohamed al-Budaiwi said in a statement. Reports also indicate Iran targeted an oil facility in Kuwait, resulting in a number of injuries and “significant material losses”, the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation told reporters. “The repeated targeting of these vital facilities reveals a systematic hostile approach targeting civilian sites and vital infrastructure that endangers the lives and safety of civilians,” the foreign ministry of Kuwait said. Late on Friday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said two oil tankers directed by “deceptive American intelligence agencies” had exploded after hitting mines in the strait of Hormuz. The US military said that claim was false. The IRGC also said on state television they had “stopped” four ships trying to transit the critical waterway, and had destroyed at least two US fighter aircraft and three other aircraft during a missile and drone attack early on Saturday on a US base in Azraq, Jordan. A US military support centre at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait was hit and a US radar facility at Ali Al Salem airbase in the country was destroyed, the IRGC said. The IRGC also targeted a site in Bahrain where US combat aircraft were gathered at Sheikh Isa airbase and an intelligence datacentre, Iranian state media reported. US Central Command said that its strikes, which began at 7pm on Friday, were designed to “continue degrading Iranian military capabilities”. The US managed to hit Iranian “surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage, and maritime capabilities” overnight, US military said on Saturday morning. Iranian media reported explosions heard or strikes carried out in the cities of Sirik, Ahvaz and Yazd. US strikes have killed 50 people and wounded more than 500 since hostilities resumed, according to Iran’s health ministry. The country acknowledged there had been successful US “attacks on power infrastructure” for the first time on Friday when the Iranian energy ministry issued a call for people to use less power in southern provinces “experiencing extreme heat”. The ministry did not specify what was hit. Maj Gen Mohsen Rezaee, a senior military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, said Tehran will resume “full-scale offensive operations” if US strikes against it continue for another two or three days. “Iran will no longer limit itself to retaliatory, like-for-like responses … and no political border will be safe,” Rezaei said, according to the Iranian news agency IRIB.

Lashes, langers, bozzers and belly bachelors: a new book decodes Cork’s local slang

If Des MacHale had to nominate a favourite from the lexicon of insulting and inexplicable terms that comprise Cork slang, it would have to be “langer”. Depending on tone and context it can mean idiot, drunkenness or penis, a versatility that baffles outsiders and further enhances the word’s value. “Langer is an absolutely beautiful word. I’m very fond of it,” says MacHale. Hence its inclusion in the title of his new book, Langers & Lashes: A Compendium of Cork Slang, which bills itself as the most comprehensive collection of the crude, playful, savage and ingenious wordplay that inflects speech in Ireland’s second city. “It’s an extraordinarily rich area that most dictionaries avoid,” MacHale says. “It’s a very real phenomenon of language that hasn’t been taken terribly seriously until now.” In a foreword, the publisher, Mercier, said it had added explanatory notes to highlight some terms’ “historical context and outdated social views” and that inclusion did not imply endorsement. “By retaining these terms as artefacts of the past, we aim to encourage contemporary Cork speakers to embrace the city’s renowned wit while rejecting harmful stereotypes.” Sex, drink and religion are common motifs. A “premature ejaculator” – a term attributed to the late Cork actor and comedian, Niall Tóibín – is a fellow who must go to the gents after drinking only three pints. “Immaculate conception” describes drinkers who dodge paying their round. “Lash” is an attractive woman. Cork – known in Ireland as the rebel county and also the people’s republic of Cork – uses local slang more than other parts of the island, says MacHale. “Cork slang is very different from Dublin slang, and from Belfast, and from Galway. It’s much more extensive.” MacHale is an unlikely chronicler. The 80-year-old academic is from County Mayo and his background is not language but mathematics. “I’ve been here for about 55 years so I’m still regarded as a blow-in.” The University College Cork emeritus professor has authored dozens of books on puzzles and humour, including a book of Kerryman jokes that continues to sell 50 years after it was first published. “A mathematician likes to collect, classify and put things together,” MacHale explained. His Cork slang credentials are bolstered by having five Cork-born children, including the actor Dominic MacHale, who plays Sergeant Healy in the BBC sitcom Young Offenders, which is about hapless delinquents. For the compendium MacHale drew on two earlier books about Cork slang, which are no longer in print, and conversations with Cork residents. “Nearly everybody you meet has got a new word,” he says. “I’m not sure why but women seem to be a lot better at remembering the words and using them than men.” Under A, there is “all-a-bah”, a warning you give when someone is about to vomit. A person who is “all Gillette” is dolled-up. Brussels sprouts are “balls of the cabbage”. To be ill is to feel “like a small hospital” or to be “barely above ground”. A “wooden suit” is a coffin. “Bazz” is female pubic hair, not to be confused with “bazzer”, a cheap, self-administered haircut, or “bozzer”, an attractive person. To “be doggy wide” is to be very careful. A “belly bachelor” is an opportunist who cultivates friendships for free meals. To tell someone to get lost, you say: “bite the back of me bollix”. To “lob the gob” is to try to kiss someone. A “martyr for the quare thing” is someone with a strong libido. To “fertilise the stars” is to urinate in a field and to “raise the froth” is to urinate copiously. A “dullamoo” – derived from ag dul amú, Irish for getting lost – is an unreliable person and a “gedgemeen” is a small, unhappy person. Not all the terms were necessarily coined in Cork but are commonly heard there, said MacHale. “Tosser” – defined as a synonym for “langer” – made a controversial appearance in parliament this week. During a clash with the taoiseach, Micheál Martin, the opposition leader, Mary Lou McDonald, said: “Jesus, he really is a tosser,” a remark that entered the official Dáil record.