The Israeli military has expanded its evacuation order to the whole of Gaza City after sending tens of thousands of Palestinians fleeing from several of the city’s neighborhoods earlier this week.

It has also issued a notice saying it will be suspending inspections along two roads in Gaza City to allow civilians to reach humanitarian zones more easily and quickly as the city “will remain a dangerous combat zone.”

“We announce to you that Tariq Bin Ziyad and Omar Al-Mukhtar Streets are considered safe passages to cross west to Al-Rashid (Al-Bahr) Street and from there south. Al-Wahda and Khalil Al-Wazir streets are considered safe passages to cross east to the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood and the city roundabout, and from there to Salah Al-Din Street to the south,” an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) flier dropped on the city says.

Bassal added that several Palestinians are besieged in the Jordanian hospital and at Al-Aqsa University in the city, as the situation remains dangerous.

“Today, suddenly, all bakeries in Gaza are completely closed. It seems that there are instructions for them to do so, or that they fall in the red zone,” he added.

The IDF has been issuing evacuation orders affecting large parts of Gaza City since Sunday, urging 250,000 residents to head to “safe zones” further south, in Deir al-Balah and al-Zawaida.

The IDF has said that evacuation orders are necessary so that civilians don’t get caught up in its renewed operations in areas where Hamas is seeking to re-establish a presence. The IDF insists it goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties.

Hamas has said the evacuations threaten to return negotiations for a ceasefire and hostage deal to “point zero.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The daughter of Cameroon’s president said she hoped that by coming out as a lesbian she can help change laws that ban homosexuality in the country.

Brenda Biya, who lives between the United States and Switzerland, came out in an Instagram post on June 30.

In an interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien published on Tuesday, the 27-year-old said she had not come out to her family before she publicly posted a photo of her kissing her girlfriend.

“There are plenty of people in the same situation as me who suffer because of who they are,” she said. “If I can give them hope, help them feel less alone, if I can send love, I’m happy.”

Same-sex relations are punishable by up to five years in prison under Cameroon’s penal code.

Her father, Paul Biya, 91, who has led Cameroon for four decades, has not publicly commented on the matter.

Brenda Biya said the law punishing gay sex existed before her father came into power in 1982, and she hopes her story will lead to change in the legislation.

“It may be too soon for it to disappear completely but it could be less strict. We could first eliminate the prison sentence,” she said in the interview.

Bandy Kiki, a Cameroonian LGBT rights activist based in Britain, said she was happy for Biya, who she said had affirmed the existence of LGBT people in Cameroon.

“However, it highlights a harsh reality: anti-LGBT laws in Cameroon disproportionately target the poor,” she said.

“Wealth and connections create a shield for some, while others face severe consequences.”

At least 27 people have been killed and 53 have been injured in the strike, which hit the gate of the Al-Mutanabbi school complex, also known locally as the Al-Awda Schools, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.

“Part of the section is missing, showing a cutaway of the internals,” Ball tweeted.

“Using any munition, even of this size, will always incur risks in a densely populated area,” said Cobb-Smith, who is also a former British Army artillery officer.

A manhunt is underway in north London for a man suspected of being armed with a crossbow, after three women were killed Tuesday evening.

Police said they were searching for a 26-year-old man, named as Kyle Clifford, in connection with the deaths, who could be in north London or the neighboring county of Hertfordshire.

Police were called to a house in Bushey, Hertfordshire, on Tuesday evening, where they found three seriously injured women.

All the women, who are believed to be related, later died from their injuries, according to police. According to police, they are aged 25, 28 and 61, and were killed in what is believed to have been a “targeted incident.”

A crossbow is believed to have been used in the triple murder, though police said Wednesday that other weapons may also have been used.

Police have asked the public not to approach the suspect.

British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has said she is being kept “fully updated” by police on the ongoing manhunt.

“The loss of three women’s lives in Bushey last night is truly shocking. My thoughts are with the family & friends of those who have been killed & with the community,” Cooper wrote on X Wednesday.

“I am being kept fully updated. I urge people to support Hertfordshire Police with any information about this case,” she added.

A neighbor of the victims said she “would see them every day passing by and they would say good morning,” according to PA Media.

“It’s really sad what’s happened, very shocking,” she added.

This is a breaking news story, and will be updated.

Aged just four, Julia Abu Zeiter suffers from a rare neurological disease that can be fatal without medication.

The nine-month war in Gaza nearly took Julia’s life, as the fighting and displacement cut off her access to treatment.

After an arduous journey, she was finally evacuated from the war-torn enclave on June 27, accompanied only by her 21-year-old aunt, Dareen Zeiter.

Julia suffers from a rare neurological disorder called alternating hemiplegia of childhood, or AHC. It causes recurrent episodes of paralysis and life-threatening seizures. No cure exists for the illness, which is estimated to occur in approximately one in a million births. Its patients are referred to as “human time bombs” and need to constantly be monitored for signs of an oncoming episode. As soon as it strikes, lifesaving measures must quickly be administered.

The two Palestinians were among around a dozen patients leaving the floating hospital to continue their treatment in the Emirati capital Abu Dhabi. Most of those patients are children, including two suffering from Leukemia.

Gaza’s ‘invisible victims’

Moored off the coast of Arish on the north coast of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the hospital is some 40 kilometers from Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza strip that now lies in ruins after Israel launched its ground operation there in May.

The city also housed the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, a crucial land bridge through which two-thirds of aid entering Gaza passed. The crossing has been closed since it was seized by the Israeli military.

The 100-bed UAE ship has received 2,400 injured Palestinians since February, according to the hospital director, Dr. Ahmed Mubarak.

Julia is “an invisible victim” of the war, Mubarak said, caught up in what Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, described as Gaza’s “silent killings, the result of deliberate deprivation.” The organization’s head of emergency programs, Mari Carmen Viñoles, said in May that Israel’s “blockades, delays, and restrictions on humanitarian aid and essential medical supplies” have made aid deliveries impossible.

Julia and Dareen are two of countless Palestinians displaced by the war in Gaza, which Israel launched in response to Hamas’ October 7 attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 others hostage, according to Israeli authorities.

Israel’s war has killed more than 38,000 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry there. Swathes of the enclave have been turned to rubble and almost the entire strip’s population of two million is internally displaced.

Julia and Dareen were forced to leave their home in northern Gaza when the war began. The four-year-old witnessed “explosions and shelling” throughout, her aunt said.

A punishing siege by Israel has choked the enclave, bringing humanitarian aid down to a trickle and preventing Gazans moving in and out. For Julia, this meant running out of her medication, which triggered a series of life-threatening seizures.

With the help of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), a US-based non-governmental organization, Julia was able to finally evacuate through Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing, Dareen said.

‘Hunger is what destroys us’

Down the hall of makeshift wards from Julia was Ibrahim, who was injured in his family home in Jabalya, northern Gaza, when an airstrike hit their building on November 21. He had turned seven that day.

Ibrahim was aboard the ship with his aunt, Alaa, 21. Alaa and Ibrahim were both injured in the airstrike, having survived after being pulled from the rubble, Alaa said. The aunt sustained critical burns, while Ibrahim broke his arm and leg, she said.

The boy’s injuries did not heal properly, requiring further treatment.

“Look, this is my dad,” Ibrahim said, holding up a photo of his father, who died during the airstrike, on his aunt’s phone.

Before losing their home and family, Alaa and Ibrahim remained in northern Gaza until April, when residents were experiencing severe hunger as aid struggled to reach them amid Israel’s military operations and what humanitarian aid officials said was increased lawlessness and looting of trucks there.

In mid-March, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessed that famine is “imminent” in northern Gaza and said it was projected to occur between then and May.

On Tuesday, the United Nations, citing a report by independent experts, said that the recent deaths of more Palestinian children due to hunger and malnutrition in Gaza indicates famine has spread across the entire strip, decrying Israel’s “intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people” as a “form of genocidal violence”.

While Julia and Ibrahim have made it out, millions of others remain trapped in the war zone, with few signs of a ceasefire deal in sight.

Nearly 26,000 children have been killed or injured in Gaza in six months, the aid group Save the Children said in April, just over 2% of Gaza’s entire child population.

“Even amid the complexities of war, how can we not grasp one universal truth: a child is a child,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said last month, calling for “a ceasefire (that) gets hostages home, and stops the killing of children.”

Dareen, Julia’s aunt, said the responsibility over her niece was too big to shoulder.

Arson at warehouses linked to arms for Ukraine. Surveillance cameras where NATO trains Ukrainian troops. Blunt vandalism of ministerial cars. Even an apparent, failed bomb plot.

Russia has been engaged in a “bold” sabotage operation across NATO’s member states for more than six months, targeting the supply lines of weapons for Ukraine and the decision-makers behind it, according to a senior NATO official.

Multiple security officials across Europe describe a threat that is metastasizing as Russian agents, increasingly under scrutiny by security services and frustrated in their own operations, hire local amateurs to undertake high-risk, and often deniable, crimes on their behalf.

The NATO official said they had observed “an unprecedented escalation and spread of Russia’s hybrid warfare” over the past six months, which included “physical sabotage” on the supply line of NATO weapons intended for Ukraine. “It is everything from point of production and origin, to storage, to those who are making decisions, to the actual delivery,” the senior NATO official said. “It is bold. Russia is attempting to intimidate (our) allies.”

Russia has dismissed the claims as unfounded but Russian sabotage and hybrid warfare will be on the agenda of the NATO 75th anniversary meeting in Washington, DC, which began Tuesday. Yet it is unclear how publicly member states will express their outrage at what analysts have called the Kremlin’s new “shadow war,” as they may be reluctant to provide Moscow with a propaganda win, or foment alarm at a series of security breaches across Europe.

Recent high-profile arrests have revealed the ad-hoc, clumsy nature of how the Kremlin’s intelligence operations have evolved since the start of the war in Ukraine. Last year, 14 Ukrainians and two Belarusians were arrested in Poland in one case on suspicion of working for Russian intelligence. A Ukrainian, who under Polish privacy law can be identified only as Maxim L., 24, was sentenced to six years after weeks of receiving tasks from a Russian handler, Andrzej, whom he had never physically met but encountered on the Telegram messaging app in February 2023.

Andrzej at first paid him $7 in digital currencies for spraying anti-war graffiti around Poland, Maxim said. Yet the tasks soon became darker.

‘Easy money… it seemed so insignificant’

He said he did not feel an obligation to fight for Ukraine after the Russian invasion in February 2022. “That country has never done anything for me,” he said. “I don’t believe that just because you are born in a certain country, you have to go to war for it. Don’t get me wrong: I am not pro-Russian, I am not pro-Ukraine. I am not pro-anything.”

Andrzej soon started sending Maxim location pins where he should plant surveillance cameras along the railway tracks near the border town of Medyka, through which military and humanitarian aid would flow to Ukraine. “I didn’t think any of it could cause any actual harm. It seemed so insignificant,” he said.

Andrzej later asked him to burn down the fence of a Ukrainian-owned transportation company in the eastern Polish town of Biala Podlaska, he said, which Maxim says he faked, taking a photograph of the fence with lumps of coal he had placed to mimic fire damage.

Yet Maxim’s slow realization that Andrzej was a Russian agent became complete, he said, when he was told to put cameras outside a base where Poland was training Ukrainian soldiers. “That’s when I knew it could be serious,” he said. “It made me feel uneasy. That was when I decided I’d quit. But I never got a chance. I got arrested the next day.”

Polish internal security agents arrested Maxim on March 3, 2023, after weeks of surveillance, sparked partially by the discovery of a gas station receipt Maxim had accidentally dropped on one of his operations, according to a Polish official. Multiple other arrests followed this, making it the largest known Russian espionage operation in Poland of recent times, raising concerns in Warsaw about the extent of Moscow’s infiltration. Two Russian citizens were detained last August on suspicion of recruiting to Wagner and a Polish man and two Belarusians this May for alleged arson.

Another Polish man was arrested in April 2024 for possessing ammunition, and surveilling Rzeszow Jasionka airport, a hub for moving NATO arms to Kyiv, in a suspected plot to assassinate Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who also frequently uses the facility.

The Polish plots join a series of incidents across Europe which, when viewed together, portray the widescale ambition of Moscow’s operations. Russia was “likely” behind an arson attack that hit Poland’s largest shopping center in May, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said, and suspicions have been voiced about another fire at an ammunition factory, south of the capital, in June. Czech officials have voiced concerns at Russian involvement in the hacking and disruption of its railways last year.

Last month, a suspicious fire hit a metals factory for a defense manufacturer outside Berlin, and a 26-year-old pro-Russian Ukrainian was arrested after blowing himself up with a homemade bomb near Paris Charles de Gaulle airport. A warehouse fire in East London in March led to two men being charged by London’s Metropolitan Police Service with arson and assisting a foreign intelligence service, namely Russia.

While the incidents have not all been definitively linked to Russian intelligence, they have been unified by the apparent involvement of amateurs, or petty criminality aimed at spreading fear or disruption.

A ‘pretty dangerous game’

The senior NATO official said Russian sabotage on NATO states amounted to a “pretty dangerous game, if (Russia believes) these things are always below the threshold of armed conflict,” that would not trigger the NATO Article 5 stipulation that an attack on one member state is an attack on the entire alliance. “Finding where that line is, is a difficult and dangerous calculation to make,” the official said, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s beleaguered invasion of Ukraine shows the Kremlin head was not always getting good military advice.

Russia is using the “full gamut” of hybrid operations, the official added. “We see everything from high-end operations in Europe, where we have seen as much as 400,000 euros ($433,000) paid for some type of intelligence activity, to some places where thugs are being hired for a couple of thousand euros.”

A similar threat has grown on Russia’s border with NATO, in Estonia, where 10 suspected Russian agents were arrested in February after the interior minister’s car was vandalized. The incident was a high-profile peak in what Estonian officials have said is a years-long campaign by Moscow to destabilize its tiny NATO neighbor, about a fifth of whose population of 1.3 million is Russian-speaking, according to a 2021 analysis by the EU.

Recent months have seen GPS jamming impede civilian aircraft landings, and even the buoys that demark part of Russia’s border with Estonia disappear, amid a short-lived call from Moscow for the maritime frontiers to be reassessed.

He said the operations were moving “towards physical attacks” and suggested the war in Ukraine might lead to more aggressive Russian tactics in the months ahead, if operatives were redeployed to the Baltic areas from the war.

“We have to face the facts. Russia is big enough to have resources to fight a war against Ukraine and also maintain its security operations against European countries… against us. There are people who take part in the war against Ukraine, and then they are rotated to some other region or area. They have more experience. Their mindset is more violent. They are perhaps not so patient anymore trying to get results.”

A former soldier who was sexually assaulted while serving in Japan’s military has reached a civil settlement with three of her convicted attackers in a case that exposed a widespread culture of harassment in the country’s self-defense force.

The settlement, initiated by the three former soldiers who were found guilty of sexual assault by a Japanese court in December, includes them apologizing and paying a sum of money, Rina Gonoi said on her X account on Tuesday. She did not disclose the amount of money involved.

“Today, I would like to announce that a settlement has been reached in the civil trial with the three perpetrators who were found guilty in the criminal trial,” Gonoi said.

Gonoi pursued both criminal and civil cases in the courts, including the civil lawsuit in which she is seeking compensation from the government and five former members of the Japan Self-Defense Force (JSDF) for emotional stress caused by sexual abuse, public broadcaster NHK reported.

“I am relieved that the three years of fighting came to an end and I’m feeling three years’ worth of exhaustion all at once, but I will take care not to get sick,” Gonoi said on her Instagram account on Tuesday night.

She had previously reached a settlement with another of the five former members of the JSDF in the civil case, and the trial will continue against the government and the remaining former members, NHK reported.

Gonoi said she endured physical and verbal sexual abuse on a daily basis for more than a year while serving in the JSDF, and vowed to bring her tormentors to justice when she left the military in June 2022.

Authorities initially seemed unwilling to believe her but Gonoi’s refusal to be silenced eventually prompted prosecutors to reopen investigations in a sweeping probe into sexual harassment across the JSDF.

The broad investigation led by Japan’s defense ministry found that Gonoi had suffered physical and verbal sexual harassment daily between late 2020 and August 2021.

Japan’s struggles with gender inequality, which were highlighted during the #MeToo campaign, are well documented. The country ranks bottom of all G7 nations and 125th out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forum’s index for gender inequality.

Not backing down

As a child, Gonoi said she saw JSDF members as heroes. She grew up wanting to be like them after women officers in particular came to her rescue following the deadly 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that decimated her hometown of Higashi-Matsushima in Japan’s northern prefecture of Miyagi.

“They’d comment on my body and the size of my breasts. Or they’d come up to me in the hallways and suddenly hug me in the corridor. That kind of thing happened daily,” Gonoi recalled of her time in the station.

The last straw came in August 2021, when Gonoi said she was pinned to a dormitory floor as several senior male officers simulated sexual intercourse. It was this incident that convinced her to report her assailants.

When she reported the alleged abuse to military authorities, two investigations were launched, but both were dropped on grounds of a lack of evidence – prompting her to take the battle to social media.

Going public was a rare move in a country where sexual assault survivors can face backlash for raising their voices.

But it paid off, as the social media scrutiny pressured the JSDF into a rethink.

The defense ministry eventually launched a broad investigation into sexual harassment across the JSDF that found Gonoi had suffered physical and verbal sexual harassment daily between late 2020 and August 2021.

The case reached the highest levels, with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida saying during a parliamentary meeting in October 2022 that he understood sexual harassment cases were handled inappropriately by the JSDF and the ministry.

Last December, a Japanese court ruled that the three men had committed forcible indecency against Gonoi.

The court sentenced the trio to two years in prison with a suspended sentence, NHK reported, which could allow them to avoid jail time if they do not commit a crime over a two-year period.

The landmark decision was an encouraging sign but “the country still has a long way to go to change both the criminal justice system and the culture of victim-blaming that undermines the credibility of survivors,” according to Amnesty International’s East Asia researcher Boram Jang.

“Rina Gonoi dared to speak out to break the cycle of impunity for gender-based violence in Japan. This is a rare victory not just for her, but for all victims and survivors of sexual assault in Japan, many of whom suffer in silence,” Jang said in a statement after the ruling.

Russia has promised to discharge Indian nationals who were “misled” into joining its army to fight in Ukraine, India’s foreign secretary said Tuesday.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi “strongly raised the issue of early discharge” to Russian President Vladimir Putin during his two-day trip to Moscow this week, stressing the need to bring all Indians home “as early as possible,” Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra told reporters in a news briefing.

“The Russian side promised the early discharge of all Indian nationals from the service of the Russian army,” he said.

By some estimates, Russia has been sending thousands of foreign men to fight in Ukraine since Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of its southwestern neighbor in February 2022.

Many of them are young men from South Asia, enticed by the prospect of steady employment and higher salaries in Russia. In Nepal, prominent opposition lawmaker and former foreign minister Bimala Rai Paudyal told parliament earlier this year that between 14,000 and 15,000 Nepalis were fighting on the front lines, citing testimony from men returning from Ukraine.

The Russian government last year announced a lucrative package for foreign fighters to join the country’s military, including a monthly salary of at least $2,000 and a fast track to Russian citizenship – but the Kremlin has not said how many foreigners it has recruited under the plan.

In early March, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said it had busted major human trafficking networks that were duping men into Russian military jobs, with 35 such cases identified.

“The trafficked Indian Nationals were trained in combat roles and deployed at front bases in Russia-Ukraine War Zone against their wishes,” the CBI statement said.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Kwatra said he does know the precise number of Indians recruited to fight for Russia in Ukraine, but anticipates it is between 35 and 50 people.

Of those, 10 Indian nationals have already returned to India, he said.

“Now, the two sides will work on it and see how expeditiously we can get them back into the country,” Kwatra said.

India has no law preventing its citizens from serving in a foreign state’s military.

Imran Mohammad said an employment agency had enticed his brother Asfan Mohammed with an offer for helper and security jobs in the Russian army, saying he could get a Russian passport and national card within a year.

Instead, Asfan was sent to the battlefield in Ukraine and was killed in combat.

“These brokers duped the boys and put their lives in danger,” Imran said, referring to Asfan and other Indians sent to war.

In neighboring Nepal, lawmakers have called on the Russian authorities to provide figures for its nationals fighting in Ukraine.

“It’s the Nepalis and other foreign fighters that are actually fighting in the front of war zones. The Russians position themselves a few hundred meters back as support,” said Suman Tamang, after he returned from Russia.

The Nepalis who fought for Russia said they had received only brief training before being sent into combat.

“I didn’t join the Russian military for pleasure. I didn’t have any job opportunities in Nepal. But in hindsight, it wasn’t the right decision,” Khadka said. “We didn’t realize we would be sent to the front lines that quickly and how horrible the situation would be.”

Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital likely took a direct hit from a Russian missile on Monday, a United Nations assessment has found, as NATO agreed to strengthen Kyiv’s air defenses in the wake of the attack.

Russia has repeatedly denied targeting the hospital in Kyiv and alleged, without evidence, that a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile caused the blast. But a UN human rights official said evidence suggested Moscow’s forces were responsible for the deadly strike.

“Analysis of the video footage and assessment made at the incident site indicates a high likelihood that the children’s hospital suffered a direct hit rather than receiving damages due to an intercepted weapons system,” Danielle Bell, head of the UN’s Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, told reporters Tuesday.

Bell said the attack damaged the intensive care, surgical and oncology wards at Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt hospital, which has been vital in the care of some of the sickest children from across the country, adding that Ukrainian officials have since transferred 600 children to other hospitals.

“This terrible attack shows that nowhere is safe in Ukraine,” Bell added.

Two adults were killed in the strike and 16 others – including seven children – were injured, according to Ukrainian officials, as Russia launched a brazen daytime aerial assault on targets in cities across Ukraine during morning rush hour, killing at least 43 people in total.

The strikes across Ukraine were “strongly” condemned by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, while the UN’s human rights chief Volker Turk called for “prompt, thorough and independent investigations” into the attacks.

The Russian attacks came as NATO leaders gathered in Washington, where the United States and NATO allies agreed to give Ukraine more Patriot batteries and additional systems to strengthen Kyiv’s air defenses, members of the defense alliance said in a joint statement on Tuesday.

US President Joe Biden also announced plans to supply new air defenses to Ukraine in a speech opening the NATO summit – providing much-needed support for the country at a critical juncture in its defense against Russia’s invasion.

During his speech on Tuesday, Biden vowed that “the United States will make sure that when we export critical air defense interceptors, Ukraine goes to the front of the line.”

‘Targeted attack by Russia’

Images and video from the aftermath of the strike on the Kyiv hospital show children with cancer being treated outside the facility and an injured toddler with blood on his face and arms.

The UN’s monitoring mission said it was likely that a KH-101 cruise missile launched by Russia struck the children’s hospital. It made the determination “based on video footage, which shows the technical specification of the type of weapon that was used” and that such footage “shows the weapon directly impacting the hospital rather than being intercepted in the air,” Bell said.

A military expert who visited the site following the blast said the damage is “consistent with a direct hit,” according to Bell.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in Washington on Tuesday that “Russia always knows where its missiles hit. Always.”

On Tuesday, Russia’s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia reiterated Moscow’s denial that it had targeted the children’s hospital.

“We have not bombed the children’s hospital,” Nebenzia said at a special meeting of the UN Security Council (UNSC) convened following the attack. “If this had been a Russian strike, there would have been nothing left of the building at all. All the children and most of the adults would have been killed, not wounded.”

But the US also blamed Russia for the hospital strike. US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the UNSC meeting that the Russian “attack makes abundantly clear: Putin is not interested in peace.”

Kyiv described the strike as a “targeted attack by Russia,” with the Ukrainian State Security Service (SBU) saying a Russian long-range cruise missile struck the facility.

“Relevant evidence has already been found at the scene of the tragedy: in particular, fragments of the rear part of the Kh-101 missile with a serial number and part of the steering wheel of the same missile,” the SBU said.

SBU chief Vasyl Maliuk vowed the agency would respond to what he said were Russian war crimes.

“This retribution will be both legal and moral,” he said.

Listening to music, smoking hookah, and getting a Western-style haircut are all punishable acts under the suffocating rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan, according to a new UN report.

The Taliban’s so-called morality police have curtailed human rights – disproportionately targeting women and girls – creating a “climate of fear and intimidation,” said the report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) published Tuesday.

The Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (MPVPV), established by the Taliban when it seized power in 2021, is charged with legislating and enforcing the Taliban’s strict interpretations of Islamic law.

Those interpretations include a ban on activities deemed to be “un-Islamic” including displaying images of humans and animals and celebrating Valentine’s Day. Moreover, the report said, the Taliban’s instructions are issued in a variety of formats – often only verbally – and are inconsistently and unpredictably enforced.

When the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021 in a lightning takeover following the chaotic withdrawal of US-led troops after two decades of war, the radical Islamist group appeared keen to distance itself from its earlier period of rule in the 1990s, presenting itself as more moderate.

However, this report found many of the same rules of that era have been revived, despite the Taliban’s earlier pledge to honor women’s rights within the norms of “Islamic law.”

Between August 15, 2021, and March 31, 2024, the UN documented at least 1,033 instances where Taliban officers had used violence to enforce their rules.

“The de facto MPVPV reportedly has a broad mandate and various enforcement methods have been used, including verbal intimidation, arrests and detentions, ill treatment and public lashing,” said the report, which was compiled using public announcements and documented reports of human rights violations.

The Taliban’s violations against women and girls are so severe that one senior UN official recently said they could amount to “crimes against humanity.” This report details how the MPVPV is enforcing rules on the way women dress and access public places.

The Taliban has arbitrarily shuttered women-owned businesses, made it illegal for women to appear in movies, closed women’s beauty salons and restricted access to birth control, the UN report said.

Women in Afghanistan are not allowed to access parks, gyms and public baths – sometimes the only way to get hot water in the winter – and must be accompanied by a male guardian (a mahram) when traveling more than 78 kilometers (48.5 miles) from their homes, according to the report.

While women must wear a hijab, men must also follow rules about beard length and hairstyles.

In December 2023, the morality police closed 20 barbershops for one night after barbers allegedly shaved and trimmed beards, as well as Western-style haircuts, the report said. The Taliban denied claims two barbers were detained for two nights. The report said they were only released after promising not to give those haircuts again.

UN says Taliban is legally obligated to protect human rights

Afghanistan is party to seven international human rights instruments and as a result is legally obliged to protect and promote the human rights of its citizens, the UN report pointed out.

These rules violate a slew of human rights, from the right to work and attain a living, to the rights of freedom of movement and expression, to sexual and reproductive rights, the report added.

In a statement, the Taliban called the UN’s criticism “unfounded” and said the report’s authors were “attempting to evaluate Afghanistan from a Western perspective, which is incorrect.”

“Afghanistan should be assessed as a Muslim society, where the vast majority of the population are Muslims who have made significant sacrifices for the establishment of a Sharia system,” the statement said.

However, reports from Afghanistan suggest the Taliban’s repressive control over women has led to a sharp rise in suicide attempts.

Among the Taliban’s list of prohibitions, according to the report, is the public display of human and animal images, which it deems “un-Islamic.”

This law has resulted in the removal of advertising signage and the covering of shop mannequins, the report said. The UN reported some cases where NGOs were told to remove human images from materials meant to alert children or other people with limited literacy about the risk of unexploded artillery and other public health issues.

Media is heavily restricted, and residents live in a surveillance state, the report added.

“People’s right to privacy is violated through searches for prohibited items in their phone or cars, having their attendance at mosques recorded, or being required to show proof of family relationship in public places.”

The Taliban met with top UN officials and global envoys in Qatar in June in a two-day conference that excluded Afghan women, sparking outcry from human rights groups.

In a press conference after the meeting, Rosemary DiCarlo, the UN’s under-secretary-general for political and peacebuilding affairs, called the discussions “frank” and “useful,” and said that the “concerns and views of Afghan women and civil society were front and center.”

This was the third UN meeting about Afghanistan in Doha, but the first the Taliban has attended.