Dec 28 (Reuters) – Twitter Inc suffered a major outage on Wednesday, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the popular social media platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online.
The incident is the social media site’s first apparent widespread service disruption since billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter as CEO in late October.
Downdetector, a website that tracks outages through a range of sources including user reports, showed more than 10,000 affected users from the United States, about 2,500 from Japan and about 2,500 from the UK at the peak of the disruption.
Most of the reports came from users stating they faced technical issues accessing the social network via web browser.
Reports of Twitter outages fell sharply by Wednesday evening, according to the website, with some users later commenting service had returned to normal.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment and the social network’s status page showed that all systems were operational.
Musk tweeted later on Wednesday that “Significant backend server architecture changes” had been rolled out and that “Twitter should feel faster”, but his post did not make any reference to the downtime reported by users.
During the outage, some users said they were unable to log in to their Twitter account via desktops or laptops. A smaller number of users said the issue also affected the mobile app and features including notifications.
Others took to Twitter to share updates and memes about the service disruption, with #TwitterDown trending as a hashtag on the social media site.
Some attempts to log in to Twitter from desktops prompted an error message saying: “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault. Let’s try again.”
Musk tweeted he was still able to use the service.
“Works for me,” Musk posted, responding to a user who asked if Twitter was broken.
The outage comes two months after Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter, which has been marked by chaos and controversy.
Hundreds of Twitter employees quit the social media company in November, by some estimates, including engineers responsible for fixing bugs and preventing service outages.
Thousands of Twitter users were also hit by a global outages in February and July, before Musk’s takeover.
Other big technology companies have also been hit by outages this year. In July, a near 19-hour service outage at Canada’s biggest telecom operator Rogers Telecommunications shut banking, transport and government access for millions.
Reporting by Akriti Sharma, Mrinmay Dey and Shubhendu Deshmukh in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Josh Horwitz in Shanghai; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri and Sam Holmes
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Turkey says out of question to take insurance risk
Yellen says oil from Kazakhstan should not be targeted
Ankara says most of waiting ships are EU vessels
ISTANBUL, Dec 9 (Reuters) – The number of oil tankers waiting in the Black Sea to pass through Istanbul’s Bosphorus Strait on the way to the Mediterranean rose to 20 on Friday, Tribeca shipping agency said, as Turkey held talks to resolve an insurance dispute behind the build-up.
Dismissing pressure from abroad over the lengthening queue, Turkey’s maritime authority said on Thursday it would continue to block oil tankers that lacked the appropriate insurance letters, and it needed time for checks.
The ship backlog is creating growing unease in oil and tanker markets and comes as the G7 and European Union introduce a price cap on Russian oil. Millions of barrels of oil per day move south from Russian ports through Turkey’s Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits into the Mediterranean.
The maritime authority said that in the event of an accident involving a vessel in breach of sanctions it was possible the damage would not be covered by an international oil-spill fund.
“(It) is out of the question for us to take the risk that the insurance company will not meet its indemnification responsibility,” it said, adding that Turkey was continuing talks with other countries and insurance companies.
It said the vast majority of vessels waiting near the straits were EU vessels, with a large part of the oil destined for EU ports – a factor frustrating Ankara’s Western allies.
The G7 group of nations, the EU and Australia have agreed to bar providers of shipping services, such as insurers, from helping to export Russian oil unless it is sold at an enforced low price, or cap, aimed at depriving Moscow of wartime revenue.
However, Turkey has had a separate measure in force since the start of the month requiring vessels to provide proof of insurance covering the duration of their transit through the Bosphorus strait, or when calling at Turkish ports.
KAZAKH OIL
Eight tankers were also waiting for passage through the Dardanelles strait into the Mediterranean, down from nine a day earlier, Tribeca said, making a total of 28 tankers waiting for southbound passage.
Most of the tankers waiting at the Bosphorus are carrying Kazakh oil and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Thursday the U.S. administration saw no reason that such shipments should be subjected to new procedures.
Washington had no reason to believe Russia was involved in Turkey’s decision to block ship transits, she added.
Turkey has had to balance its good relations with both Russia and Ukraine since Moscow invaded its neighbour in February. It played a key role in a United Nations-backed deal reached in July to free up grain exports from Ukrainian Black Sea ports.
Turkey’s maritime authority said that it was unacceptable to pressure Turkey over what it said were “routine” insurance checks and that it could remove tankers without proper documentation from its waters or require them to furnish new P&I ship insurance letters covering their journeys.
Reporting by Daren Butler, Can Sezer, and Jonathan Saul in London
Editing by Himani Sarkar, Clarence Fernandez, Jonathan Spicer and Frances Kerry
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COP27 climate summit ends after marathon weekend negotiations
Final deal delivers on creating historic climate finance fund
Negotiators say some blocked tighter emissions targets
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 20 (Reuters) – Countries closed this year’s U.N. climate summit on Sunday with a hard-fought deal to create a fund to help poor countries being battered by climate disasters, even as many lamented its lack of ambition in tackling the emissions causing them.
The deal was widely lauded as a triumph for responding to the devastating impact that global warming is already having on vulnerable countries. But many countries said they felt pressured to give up on tougher commitments for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order for the landmark deal on the loss and damage fund to go through.
Delegates – worn out after intense, overnight negotiations – made no objections as Egypt’s COP27 President Sameh Shoukry rattled through the final agenda items and gavelled the deal through.
Despite having no agreement for a stronger commitment to the 1.5 C goal set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, “we went with what the agreement was here because we want to stand with the most vulnerable,” Germany’s climate secretary Jennifer Morgan, visibly shaken, told Reuters.
When asked by Reuters whether the goal of stronger climate-fighting ambition had been compromised for the deal, Mexico’s chief climate negotiator Camila Zepeda summed up the mood among exhausted negotiators.
“Probably. You take a win when you can.”
LOSS AND DAMAGE
The deal for a loss and damage fund marked a diplomatic coup for small islands and other vulnerable nations in winning over the 27-nation European Union and the United States, which had long resisted the idea for fear that such a fund could open them to legal liability for historic emissions.
Those concerns were assuaged with language in the agreement calling for the funds to come from a variety of existing sources, including financial institutions, rather than relying on rich nations to pay in.
The climate envoy from the Marshall Islands said she was “worn out” but happy with the fund’s approval. “So many people all this week told us we wouldn’t get it,” Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner said. “So glad they were wrong.”
But it likely will be several years before the fund exists, with the agreement setting out only a roadmap for resolving lingering questions including who would oversee the fun, how the money would be dispersed – and to whom.
U.S. special climate envoy John Kerry, who was not at the weekend negotiations in person after testing positive for COVID-19, on Sunday welcomed the deal to “establish arrangements to respond to the devastating impact of climate change on vulnerable communities around the world.”
In a statement, he said he would continue to press major emitters like China to “significantly enhance their ambition” in keeping the 1.5 C goal alive.
FOSSIL FUEL FIZZLE
[1/7] A screen shows COP27 President Sameh Shoukry delivering a statement during the closing plenary at the COP27 climate summit in Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, November 20, 2022. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany
The price paid for a deal on the loss and damage fund was most evident in the language around emission reductions and reducing the use of polluting fossil fuels – known in the parlance of U.N. climate negotiations as “mitigation.”
Last year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, had focused on a theme of keeping the 1.5C goal alive – as scientists warn that warming beyond that threshold would see climate change spiral to extremes.
Countries were asked then to update their national climate targets before this year’s Egypt summit. Only a fraction of the nearly 200 parties did so.
While praising the loss and damage deal, many countries decried COP27’s failure to push mitigation further and said some countries were trying to roll back commitments made in the Glasgow Climate Pact.
“We had to fight relentlessly to hold the line of Glasgow,” a visibly frustrated Alok Sharma, architect of the Glasgow deal, told the summit.
He listed off a number of ambition-boosting measures that were stymied in the negotiations for the final COP27 deal in Egypt: “Emissions peaking before 2025 as the science tells us is necessary? Not in this text. Clear follow-through on the phase down of coal? Not in this text. A clear commitment to phase out all fossil fuels? Not in this text.”
On fossil fuels, the COP27 deal text largely repeats wording from Glasgow, calling up parties to accelerate “efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.”
Efforts to include a commitment to phase out, or at least phase down, all fossil fuels were thwarted.
A separate “mitigation work programme” agreement, also approved on Sunday, contained several clauses that some parties, including the European Union, felt weakened commitment to ever more ambitious emissions-cutting targets.
Critics pointed to a section which they said undermined the Glasgow commitment to regularly renew emissions targets – with language saying the work programme would “not impose new targets or goals”. Another section of the COP27 deal dropped the idea of annual target renewal in favour of returning to a longer five-year cycle set out in the Paris pact.
“It is more than frustrating to see overdue steps on mitigation and the phase-out of fossil energies being stonewalled by a number of large emitters and oil producers,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said.
The deal also included a reference to “low-emissions energy,” raising concern among some that it opened the door to the growing use of natural gas – a fossil fuel that leads to both carbon dioxide and methane emissions.
“It does not break with Glasgow completely, but it doesn’t raise ambition at all,” Norway’s Climate Minister Espen Barth Eide told reporters.
The climate minister of the Maldives, which faces future inundation from climate-driven sea level rise, lamented the lack of ambition on curbing emissions.
“I recognise the progress we made in COP27” with the loss and damage fund, Aminath Shauna told the plenary. But “we have failed on mitigation … We have to ensure that we increase ambition to peak emissions by 2025. We have to phase out fossil fuel.”
Reporting by Valerie Volcovici, Dominic Evans and William James; Writing by Katy Daigle
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UAE, host of 2023 talks, says will keep producing fossil fuel
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 7 (Reuters) – World leaders and diplomats framed the fight against global warming as a battle for human survival during opening speeches at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt on Monday, with the head of the United Nations declaring a lack of progress so far had the world speeding down a “highway to hell”.
The stark messages, echoed by the heads of African, European and Middle Eastern nations alike, set an urgent tone as governments began two weeks of talks in the seaside resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh to figure out how to avert the worst of climate change.
“Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish,” U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres told delegates, urging them to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels and speed funding to poorer countries struggling under climate impacts that have already occurred.
Despite decades of climate talks so far, countries have failed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, and their pledges to do so in the future are insufficient to keep the climate from warming to a level scientists say will be catastrophic.
Land war in Europe, deteriorating diplomatic ties between top emitters the United States and China, rampant inflation, and tight energy supplies threaten to distract countries further away from combating climate change, Guterres said, threatening to derail the transition to clean energy.
“Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing. Global temperatures keep rising. And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible,” he said. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, also speaking at the event, said global leaders have a credibility problem when it comes to climate change and criticized developed nations’ ongoing pursuit of gas resources in Africa, which he described as “fossil fuel colonialism.”
“We have a credibility problem all of us: We’re talking and we’re starting to act, but we’re not doing enough,” Gore said.
French President Emmanuel Macron said that, while the world was distracted by a confluence of global crises, it was important not to sacrifice national commitments to fight climate change.
“We will not sacrifice our commitments to the climate due to the Russian threat in terms of energy,” Macron said, “so all countries must continue to uphold all their commitments.”
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the war was a reason to accelerate efforts to wean the world off fossil fuels.
“Climate security goes hand in hand with energy security, Putin’s abhorrent war in Ukraine, and rising energy prices across the world are not a reason to go slow on climate change. They are a reason to act faster,” he said.
UAE TO CARRY ON PUMPING OIL, GAS
While leaders tended to agree on the risks of global warming, their speeches revealed huge rifts, including over whether fossil fuels could play a role in a climate-friendly future, and who should pay for climate damage that has already occurred.
[1/7] United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres, Crown Prince and the Prime Minister of Bahrain Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Bulgaria’s President Rumen Radev, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Hassan Shoukry, Saudi Adel Al-Jubeir, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati and other leaders pose for a family photo during the COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt November 7, 2022. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem
Immediately after Guterres’ speech urging an end to the fossil fuel era, United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan took the stage and said his country, a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, would continue to produce them for as long as there is a need.
“The UAE is considered a responsible supplier of energy, and it will continue playing this role as long as the world is in need of oil and gas,” he said.
The UAE will host next year’s U.N. conference, which will attempt to finalise agreements made last year in Britain and at this year’s Egyptian talks.
Many countries with rich resources of oil, gas and coal have criticized the push for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, arguing it is economically reckless and unfair to poorer and less developed nations keen for economic growth.
“We are for a green transition that is equitable and just, instead of decisions that jeopardise our development,” said Macky Sall, president of Senegal and chair of the African Union.
Poorer countries that bear little responsibility for historic carbon emissions have also been arguing they should be compensated by rich nations for losses from climate-fueled disasters including floods, storms and wildfires.
Signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement had pledged to achieve a long-term goal of keeping global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold beyond which scientists say climate change risks spinning out of control.
Guterres said that goal was possible only if the world can achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. He asked countries to agree to phase out the use of coal, one of the most carbon-intense fuels, by 2040 globally, with members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development hitting that mark by 2030.
The head of the International Monetary Fund told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference that climate targets depend on achieving a global carbon price of at least $75 a ton by the end of the decade, and that the pace of change in the real economy was still “way too slow”.
The World Trade Organization, meanwhile, said in a report published on Monday that it should tackle trade barriers for low carbon industries to address the role of global trade in driving climate change.
Read more:
EXPLAINER-A field guide to climate jargon
FACTBOX-COP27: Major players at the U.N. climate talks in Egypt
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Reporting by William James, Valerie Volcovici and Simon Jessop; Editing by Richard Valdmanis, Katy Daigle, Barbara Lewis, Frank Jack Daniel, Deepa Babington and Lisa Shumaker
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CAIRO, Oct 23 (Reuters) – Egypt will develop a new currency indicator partly to wean people off the idea that the Egyptian pound should be pegged to the U.S. dollar, the new central bank governor said on Sunday.
Hassan Abdalla, appointed in August, told an economic conference that the central bank was also working to introduce currency hedging and had already finished futures contracts as it revamps its currency trading system.
The indicator would be based on a basket of several currencies and possibly gold, he said.
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“It is for the sake of the idea of pegging — and I’m not talking about the price, I’m speaking about the idea,” he said. “America is not my major trading partner. I don’t know why people are always fixated on the dollar.
“Part of our success will be in changing the culture and idea that we are pegged. We want to be seen against every currency.”
The Egyptian pound had been virtually fixed at about 15.70 pounds against the dollar for 18 months before the Ukraine crisis triggered a flight of billions of dollars out of Egyptian treasuries in a matter of weeks, prompting the central bank to devalue the currency in March and let it gradually weaken since then.
Egypt since March has been negotiating a financial support package with the International Monetary Fund, which has long urged it to adopt a more flexible exchange rate.
The Egyptian pound had strengthened against the euro, the British pound and the Turkish lira since the the Ukraine crisis. “But people don’t see all that,” Abdalla told the conference.
Despite the currency revamp, Abdalla said the central bank’s primary mission would be to get inflation, now running at 14%, under control.
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Reporting by Patrick Werr, Mahmoud Murad and Nayera Abdallah; editing by Diane Craft
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An aerial view of the Gulf of Suez and the Suez Canal are pictured through the window of an airplane on a flight between Cairo and Doha, Egypt, November 27, 2021. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
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CAIRO, Sept 1 (Reuters) – Tug boats refloated a ship that briefly ran aground in Egypt’s Suez Canal late on Wednesday, a source from the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) andstate TV reported.
The vessel had been blocking the southern section of the canal, two navigational sources said, but the SCA source said shortly afterwards that traffic had returned to normal.
There was no immediate statement about the incident from the SCA.
According to ship monitoring service TankerTrackers, the Aframax tanker Affinity V seemed to have lost control in the Suez Canal while heading southbound.
“She temporarily clogged up traffic and is now facing south again, but moving slowly by tugboat assistance,” TankerTrackers said on Twitter.
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Reporting by Yousri Mohamed and Yasmin Hussein; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Mark Porter and Christian Schmollinger
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GAZA/JERUSALEM, Aug 7 (Reuters) – Israel and Palestinian militants have agreed to a truce in Gaza from Sunday evening as mediated by Cairo, sources said, after a weekend-long pounding of Palestinian targets by Israel triggered longer-range rocket attacks against its cities.
An Egyptian security source said Israel had agreed to the proposal, while a Palestinian official familiar with Egyptian efforts said the ceasefire would go into effect at 20:00 (1900 GMT).
Spokespeople for Israel and Islamic Jihad, the faction it has been fighting in Gaza since clashes erupted on Friday, did not confirm this, saying only that they were in contact with Cairo.
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The flare-up, recalling preludes to previous Gaza wars, has worried world powers. However, it has been relatively contained as Hamas, the governing Islamist group in the Gaza Strip and more powerful force than Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad, has so far stayed out.
Gaza officials said 31 Palestinians, at least a third of them civilians, had so far been killed. The rockets have paralysed much of southern Israel and sent residents in cities including Tel Aviv and Ashkelon to shelters.
The Egyptian security source said earlier that the proposed truce was to take effect at 2100 GMT.
On Sunday morning, Islamic Jihad extended its range to fire toward Jerusalem in what it described as retaliation for the overnight killing of its southern Gaza commander by Israel – the second such senior officer it has lost in the fighting.
“The blood of the martyrs will not be wasted,” Islamic Jihad said in a statement.
The salvo came as religious Jews were fasting in an annual commemoration of two Jerusalem temples destroyed in antiquity. Israel said its Iron Dome interceptor, whose success rate the army put at 97%, shot down the rockets just west of the city.
Palestinians gather at the scene where senior commander of Islamic Jihad militant group Khaled Mansour was killed in Israeli strikes, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, August 7, 2022. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
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Palestinians dazed by another surge of bloodshed – after outbreaks of war in 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and last year – picked through the ruins of houses to salvage furniture or documents.
“Who wants a war? No one. But we also don’t like to keep silent when women, children and leaders are killed,” said a Gaza taxi driver who identified himself only as Abu Mohammad.
“An eye for an eye.”
Israel put the onus was on Islamic Jihad to stop shooting. “Quiet will be answered with quiet,” an army spokesman said.
In another potential flashpoint, Jews marking the Tisha Be’av fast visited the site where their ancient temples once stood – the Al Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem’s Old City.
The scheduled visits affront Palestinians for whom Al Aqsa is a national as well as a religious symbol. Video circulated online showed some Jews trying to pray in defiance of Israeli regulations, as police moved in to stop them and Muslim worshippers shouted in protest. read more
Israel launched what it called pre-emptive strikes on Friday against what it anticipated would be an Islamic Jihad attack meant to avenge the arrest of a leader of the group in the occupied West Bank. Arrest sweeps against the group have continued in that territory.
The hundreds of rockets fired by Islamic Jihad in response are the reason for the continuing operation, according to Israeli security cabinet minister Gideon Saar.
“To the extent that Islamic Jihad wants to protract this operation, it will regret it,” he told Israel’s Army Radio.
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Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta and by Ahmed Mohamed Hassan in Cairo; writing by Dan Williams; editing by Mark Heinrich and John Stonestreet
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Nidal Al-Mughrabi
Thomson Reuters
A senior correspondent with nearly 25 years’ experience covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict including several wars and the signing of the first historic peace accord between the two sides.
Fourteen killed, at least 110 wounded -Palestinian Health Ministry
At least 160 rockets fired toward Israel -military
Israel killed Islamic Jihad commander in Gaza on Friday
GAZA/JERUSALEM, Aug 6 (Reuters) – Israel struck in Gaza and Palestinians fired rockets at Israeli cities on Saturday after an Israeli operation against the Islamic Jihad militant group ended more than a year of relative calm along the border.
Israel on Friday killed one of the group’s senior commanders in a surprise daytime air strike on a high-rise building in Gaza City which drew rocket salvoes in response. read more
On Saturday, Israel said it struck Islamic Jihad militants preparing to launch rockets and militant posts. Additional bombings targeted five houses, witnesses said, sending huge clouds of smoke and debris into the air as explosions rocked Gaza City.
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Palestinian militants fired at least 160 rockets across the border, setting off air raids sirens and sending people running to bomb shelters as far as the central Israeli city of Modiin, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Islamic Jihad said it had targeted Israel’s main international gateway, Ben Gurion Airport, but the rocket fell short near Modiin, around 20 kilometres (12 miles) away, and the Civil Aviation Authority said the airport was operating as usual with flight routes adjusted.
Most of the missiles were intercepted and there were no reports of serious casualties, according to the Israeli ambulance service.
Egyptian, U.N. and Qatari efforts to end the fighting were underway. Further escalation would largely depend on whether Hamas, the Islamic militant group which controls Gaza, would opt to join the fighting.
The Israeli strikes have killed 14 Palestinians, including at least four more Islamic Jihad militants and a child, and have wounded at least 110 people, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
Islamic Jihad did not provide precise details on how many of its members had been killed and signalled no immediate ceasefire. “The time now is for resistance, not a truce,” a group official told Reuters.
Overnight, the Israeli military said it had apprehended 19 Islamic Jihad militants in raids in the Israeli-occupied West Bank while targeting the group’s rocket manufacturing sites and launchers in Gaza.
U.N. ENVOY CONCERNED
Shahir, one of four disabled Palestinian siblings from Shamalakh family, is assisted near the rubble of their home after it was destroyed in an Israeli air strike, amid Israel-Gaza fighting, in Gaza City August 6, 2022. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
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Around 2.3 million Palestinians are packed into the narrow coastal Gaza Strip, with Israel and Egypt tightly restricting movement of people and goods in and out of the enclave and imposing a naval blockade, citing security concerns.
Israel stopped the planned transport of fuel into Gaza shortly before it struck on Friday, crippling the territory’s lone power plant and reducing electricity to around 8 hours per day and drawing warnings from health officials that hospitals would be severely impacted within days.
The frontier had been largely quiet since May 2021, when 11 days of fierce fighting between Israel and militants left at least 250 in Gaza and 13 in Israel dead.
The U.N. Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland said he was deeply concerned about the violence and the Western-backed Palestinian Authority condemned Israel’s attacks.
Gaza streets were largely deserted on Saturday afternoon. At the site where top Islamic Jihad commander Tayseer al-Jaabari was killed, rubble, glass and furniture were strewn along the street.
A neighbour, Mariam Abu Ghanima, 56, said the Israeli military did not issue a warning before the attack as it has done in previous rounds of violence.
A spokesperson for the military said the force had made efforts to avoid civilian casualties in the surprise attack, which had used precision means to target a specific floor of the building.
Israel has imposed special security measures in its southern territories near Gaza and is preparing to call up some 25,000 military personnel, according to Army Radio and the streets in towns near the border were empty.
Tensions rose this week after Israeli forces arrested an Islamic Jihad commander in the West Bank, drawing threats of retaliation from the group.
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said Friday’s strikes thwarted an immediate and concrete attack by Islamic Jihad, which is backed by Iran and designated as a terrorist organisation by the West.
Some Israeli political analysts said the military operation provided Lapid with an opportunity to bolster his security credentials ahead of a Nov. 1 election.
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Writing by Maayan Lubell; editing by Robert Birsel and Jason Neely
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Nidal Al-Mughrabi
Thomson Reuters
A senior correspondent with nearly 25 years’ experience covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict including several wars and the signing of the first historic peace accord between the two sides.
DUBAI, Aug 1 (Reuters) – Ayman al-Zawahiri succeeded Osama bin Laden as al Qaeda leader after years as its main organiser and strategist, but his lack of charisma and competition from rival militants Islamic State hobbled his ability to inspire sizeable attacks on the West.
Zawahiri, 71, was killed in a U.S. drone strike, U.S. President Joe Biden said on live television on Monday evening. U.S. officials said the attack took place on Sunday in the Afghan capital Kabul. read more
In the years following bin Laden’s death in 2011, U.S. air strikes killed a succession of Zawahiri’s deputies, weakening the veteran Egyptian militant’s ability to coordinate globally.
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He had watched as al Qaeda was effectively sidelined by the 2011 Arab revolts, launched mainly by middle-class activists and intellectuals opposed to decades of autocracy.
Despite a reputation as an inflexible and combative personality, Zawahiri managed to nurture loosely affiliated groups around the world that grew to wage devastating insurgencies, some of them rooted in turmoil arising from the Arab Spring. The violence destabilised a number of countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
But al Qaeda’s days as the centrally directed, hierarchical network of plotters that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, were long gone. Instead, militancy returned to its roots in local-level conflicts, driven by a mix of local grievances and incitement by transnational jihadi networks using social media.
Zawahiri’s origins in Islamist militancy went back decades.
The first time the world heard of him was when he stood in a courtroom cage after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981.
“We have sacrificed and we are still ready for more sacrifices until the victory of Islam,” shouted Zawahiri, wearing a white robe, as fellow defendants enraged by Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel chanted slogans.
Zawahiri served a three-year jail term for illegal arms possession, but was acquitted of the main charges.
A trained surgeon – one of his pseudonyms was The Doctor – Zawahiri went to Pakistan on his release where he worked with the Red Crescent treating Islamist mujahideen guerrillas wounded in Afghanistan fighting Soviet forces.
During that period, he became acquainted with bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi who had joined the Afghan resistance.
Taking over the leadership of Islamic Jihad in Egypt in 1993, Zawahiri was a leading figure in a campaign in the mid-1990s to overthrow the government and set up a purist Islamic state. More than 1,200 Egyptians were killed.
Egyptian authorities mounted a crackdown on Islamic Jihad after an assassination attempt on President Hosni Mubarak in June of 1995 in Addis Ababa. The greying, white-turbaned Zawahiri responded by ordering a 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. Two cars filled with explosives rammed through the compound’s gates, killing 16 people.
In 1999, an Egyptian military court sentenced Zawahiri to death in absentia. By then he was living the spartan life of a militant after helping Bin Laden to form al Qaeda.
A videotape aired by Al Jazeera in 2003 showed the two men walking on a rocky mountainside – an image that Western intelligence hoped would provide clues on their whereabouts.
THREATS OF GLOBAL JIHAD
For years Zawahiri was believed to be hiding along the forbidding border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
This year, U.S. officials identified that Zawahiri’s family – his wife, his daughter and her children – had relocated to a safe house in Kabul and subsequently identified Zawahiri at the same location, a senior administration official said.
He was killed in a drone attack when he came out on the balcony of the house on Sunday morning, the official said. No one else was hurt.
Zawahiri assumed leadership of al Qaeda in 2011 after U.S. Navy Seals killed bin Laden in his hideout in Pakistan. Since then he repeatedly called for global jihad, with an Ak-47 as his side during video messages.
In a eulogy for bin Laden, Zawahiri promised to pursue attacks on the West, recalling the Saudi-born militant’s threat that “you will not dream of security until we live it as a reality and until you leave the lands of the Muslims”.
As it turned out, the emergence of the even more hardline Islamic State in 2014-2019 in Iraq and Syria drew as much, if not more, attention from Western counter-terrorism authorities.
Zawahiri often tried to stir passions among Muslims by commenting online about sensitive issues such as U.S. policies in the Middle East or Israeli actions against Palestinians, but his delivery was seen as lacking bin Laden’s magnetism.
On a practical level, Zawahiri is believed to have been involved in some of al Qaeda’s biggest operations, helping organise the 2001 attacks, when airliners hijacked by al Qaeda were used to kill 3,000 people in the United States.
He was indicted for his alleged role in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The FBI put a $25 million bounty on his head on its most wanted list.
PROMINENT FAMILY
Zawahiri did not emerge from Cairo’s slums, like others drawn to militant groups who promised a noble cause. Born in 1951 to a prominent Cairo family, Zawahiri was a grandson of the grand imam of Al Azhar, one of Islam’s most important mosques.
Zawahiri was raised in Cairo’s leafy Maadi suburb, a place favoured by expatriates from the Western nations he railed against. The son of a pharmacology professor, Zawahiri first embraced Islamic fundamentalism at the age of 15.
He was inspired by the revolutionary ideas of Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, an Islamist executed in 1966 on charges of trying to overthrow the state.
People who studied with Zawahiri at Cairo University’s Faculty of Medicine in the 1970s describe a lively young man who went to the cinema, listened to music and joked with friends.
“When he came out of prison he was a completely different person,” said a doctor who studied with Zawahiri and declined to be named.
In the courtroom cage after the assassination of Sadat at a military parade, Zawahiri addressed the international press, saying militants had suffered from severe torture including whippings and attacks by wild dogs in prison.
“They arrested the wives, the mothers, the fathers, the sisters and the sons in a trial to put the psychological pressure on these innocent prisoners,” he said.
Fellow prisoners said those conditions further radicalised Zawahiri and set him on his path to global jihad.
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Editing by Howard Goller, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Stephen Coates
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
CAIRO, July 3 (Reuters) – Egypt’s Red Sea Governorate issued an order to shut down several Red Sea beaches on Friday after a 68-year-old Austrian woman was killed in a shark attack earlier that day, off the coast of Sahl Hasheesh, according to two security sources.
The victim was transferred to a local private hospital right after the attack, a source at the Red Sea Health Affairs Directorate told Reuters. He added that there were attempts to resuscitate her, but she died due to circulatory failure, which is a sudden drop in blood pressure resulting from her injuries and blood loss.
A security source also added that the woman had been living in Egypt over the past five years with her Egyptian husband.
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Reporting by Ahmed Mohamed Hassan; Writing by Farah Saafan; Editing by Louise Heavens
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.