Israeli soccer fans involved in ‘violent incident’ in Amsterdam: Officials
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(LONDON) — At least five people have been hospitalized and 62 others detained after a night of violence targeting Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam Thursday evening, authorities said.
The violence occurred after a UEFA Europa League match between the Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Club and the Dutch Ajax Football Club in Amsterdam on Thursday.
The Israeli National Security Headquarters told Israeli citizens staying in Amsterdam to “avoid movements in the street and shut oneself in hotel rooms.”
The Dutch Prime Minister, Dick Schoof, said the situation is now calm and that he is “horrified by the antisemitic attacks on Israeli citizens.” Israeli PM Netanyahu said he had been in touch with Schoof and called for increased security for Jewish communities in the Netherlands.
Tensions were rising in the lead up to the game last night, Amsterdam police on Wednesday night had reported a group of people pulled a Palestinian flag off the face of a building in the center of the city, and that police “prevented a confrontation” between a group of visitors and taxi drivers.
The Amsterdam Police have not yet commented on the incident but announced Wednesday evening that a “number of safety measures” had been taken before the match to ensure “that everything proceeds safely and orderly,” in a post on X.
Officials in Amsterdam said there will now be extra police on the move in the coming days and extra attention “for the extra security of Jewish institutions and objects.”
Amsterdam authorities will be holding a press conference at 12 p.m. on Friday where additional measures that will be taken today and in the coming days will be announced.
ABC News’ Ellie Kaufman and Victoria Beaule contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is accusing Russia of using Chinese satellites to photograph nuclear power stations in Ukraine as part of preparations to potentially strike them.
Zelenskyy made the accusation in an interview with ABC News’ Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts on Monday during a visit for the United Nations General Assembly this week in New York.
“The recent information is that, Russia has been using Chinese satellites and taking photos of the details of the objects on nuclear facilities,” Zelenskyy told Roberts. “And in our experience, if Russia takes photos of certain objects, then there is a threat of strikes against the nuclear objects.”
See more of Robin Roberts’ exclusive interview with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and first lady Olena Zelenska at 8:30 p.m. ET Wednesday on ABC News Live and streaming on Hulu on Thursday.
Zelesnkyy did not say whether the Chinese satellites that Russia has used were commercial satellites or controlled by the Chinese government.
He said he would share the information Ukraine has with leaders who can influence Russia, calling it “nuclear terror.”
Asked to comment on Monday, China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond.
If confirmed, the use of Chinese satellites to photograph Ukrainian nuclear plants would be another example of Russia turning to China for assistance in the war. It would also raise questions about the strength of Russia’s own satellite capabilities.
Since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has turned heavily to China for assistance in supporting its economy, as well as keeping its military running. Although China has so far stopped short of directly providing weapons to Russia, Western countries and Ukraine have become increasingly concerned about the growing scale of China’s support for Moscow despite U.S. and allied sanctions.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell last week warned the U.S. believes China is now providing direct assistance to Russia, supplying military components.
“These are not dual-use capabilities,” Campbell told reporters in Brussels, according to Politico.
“These are component pieces of a very substantial effort on the part of China to help sustain, build and diversify various elements of the Russian war machine,” he added. “We’re seeing efforts at the highest levels of both governments to try to both hide and protect certain elements of this worrisome collaboration.”
Zelensky’s allegation that the satellite imagery indicates Russia may be preparing to hit the nuclear plants follows similar warnings from his foreign minister last week.
“According to Ukrainian intelligence, [the] Kremlin is preparing strikes on Ukrainian nuclear energy critical objects ahead of winter,” foreign minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X on Saturday.
The attacks would focus on the transmission substations and other “open distribution devices” at the nuclear stations, he wrote.
“Damage to those facilities creates a high risk of a nuclear incident with global consequences,” he wrote, adding Ukraine’s security services had shared the intelligence with its partners and that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had been informed.
Before Russia’s invasion in 2022, Ukraine was operating four nuclear power stations. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has been under Russian occupation since the first months of the invasion, but the other three remaining plants continue to supply Ukraine with power.
Some experts believe that while Russia is unlikely to directly target the reactors of nuclear plants, its frequent attacks on transformer substations linked to the plants pose a serious and worsening threat.
Russia “can and has extensively struck the transformer substations that deliver energy to the nuclear power plants and distribute power from the reactors to the rest of the country,” Dr. Jack Watling and Darya Dolzikova wrote in a report from the British defense think tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), this month. “Not only do such attacks prevent the distribution of energy from the remaining unoccupied reactors to the rest of the grid, but they also pose a serious nuclear safety risk.”
Damage to the transformers can disconnect the plants from off-site power supplies, disrupting the functioning of key reactor systems, but also preventing them from offloading energy to the grid, sometimes prompting emergency shutdowns of reactors, they wrote.
Russia’s campaign to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has inflicted heavy damage, with Ukrainian and Western officials warning the country faces an extremely difficult winter. Russian strikes have cut Ukraine’s capacity to generate energy by more than half, according to Ukrainian officials and independent experts.
Ukraine’s pre-war generation was between 32 to 25 gigawatts (GW) of power. But now the country struggles to produce just 9 GW, according to the RUSI report. Authorities this summer have imposed rolling blackouts to preserve the grid, with most Ukrainians already living without power for many hours a day.
(LONDON) — Russia and Ukraine each launched more than 100 attack drones, most of which were intercepted, overnight into Thursday, military officials said.
Ukraine’s air defenses shot down at least 78 of the 105 Russian Shahed drones launched overnight at several regions, including Kyiv, the country’s air force said in an update. Fifteen regions were targeted, Ukraine said.
“The air attack was repulsed by aviation, anti-aircraft missile troops, electronic warfare units and mobile fire groups of the Air Force and the Defense Forces of Ukraine,” the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in a statement early Thursday.
It was unclear if there were injuries in Kyiv, Serhiy Popko, head of the city’s administration, said on the messaging app Telegram.
Russia’s air-defense systems shot down some 113 Ukrainian drones in four regions, including the Kursk region, the Russian Ministry of Defense said. The Ukrainian attack had been “thwarted” the military said.
At least 73 Ukrainian drones were destroyed over the Belgorod region, which borders Kharkiv, Ukraine, Moscow said.
Ukrainian officials also said missiles had been fired late Wednesday toward residential areas in Kharkiv, where they struck at least one apartment building.
At least eight people were wounded in that strike, officials said. A 3-year-old child was among the injured, Ihor Terekhov, Kharkiv’s mayor, said on Telegram.
People attending a funeral for victims of Tuesday’s pager attacks in Lebanon react after an explosion in a store, in southern Beirut, Sept. 18, 2024. (ABC News)
(LONDON) — Israel launched a series of strikes on Hezbollah targets Thursday as the war against the Lebanon-based group widened in the wake of two consecutive days of deadly explosions triggered in wireless devices.
Israel said it hit at least 30 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, including a weapons storage facility, adding it will continue to “operate against the threat of the Hezbollah.”
“The IDF is currently striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon to degrade Hezbollah’s terrorist capabilities and infrastructure,” the Israeli army said Thursday afternoon. “The Hezbollah terrorist organization has turned southern Lebanon into a combat zone. For decades, Hezbollah has weaponized civilian homes, dug tunnels beneath them, and used civilians as human shields.”
Two large sonic booms shook buildings in Beirut on Thursday as Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah delivered a speech on this week’s device explosions. The IDF strikes come as Nasrallah said the use of the devices in civilian areas crossed all laws and red lines.
“This criminal act is a major terrorist operation, an act of genocide and massacre and amounts to a declaration of war,” Nasrallah said.
“The only way to return the displaced to the north is to stop the aggression on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. What you are doing will increase the displacement of the displaced from the north and will remove the opportunity for their return,” Nasrallah said.
The last two days of explosions in Lebanon, triggered remotely with explosives inside pagers or walkie-talkies, have killed at least 37 people and wounded 2,931, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Al-Abyad said in a press conference Thursday.
Prior to announcing the strikes, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu restated his intention of returning tens of thousands of displaced Israelis to their homes in the north of the country, parts of which have been emptied by the threat of Hezbollah attacks.
Two IDF soldiers were killed by Hezbollah rockets in the north on Thursday, the army said.
“This is a new phase of the war, it includes opportunities but also significant risks. Hezbollah feels that it is being persecuted and the sequence of military and defense actions will continue,” Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Thursday following the airstrikes.
The Israeli rhetoric was punctuated by the two waves of explosions in Lebanon.
Pager devices exploded on Tuesday prompting chaos in the capital Beirut and across the Hezbollah militant group’s southern heartland. On Wednesday, walkie-talkies exploded, some during funeral processions being held for militants killed in Tuesday’s explosions.
An ABC News source confirmed that Israel was behind the Tuesday pager attacks. Israeli leaders have not publicly commented on either round of explosions.
The Lebanese Health Ministry said 12 people were killed and 2,323 wounded in Tuesday’s pager detonations, and another 25 people were killed and 608 wounded in Wednesday’s walkie-talkie blasts, according to Al-Abyad.
The Lebanese health minister told reporters that he does not want to comment on security and political matters, but he said “it is certain that what happened in terms of aggression is considered a war crime, as the majority of the injuries were recorded in civilian areas and not in the battlefield, and the government is doing its duty and has called for a meeting of the U.N. Security Council, and human rights organizations are doing their duty on this issue.”
Hezbollah said 20 of its members were killed in Wednesday’s walkie-talkie explosions. Another 11 were killed in Tuesday’s pager explosions in Lebanon and Syria, bringing the overall death toll for the group to 31.
The Iranian-backed group blamed Israel for both waves of explosions and vowed a “reckoning.”
The militant group claimed several retaliatory strikes into Israel this week — including on Thursday morning — with Israel Defense Forces warplanes and artillery responding.
Cross-border fire has been near-constant since Oct. 8, when Hezbollah began attacks in protest of the Israel Defense Forces operation into the Gaza Strip — the response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 infiltration attack into southern Israel.
But as Gallant told reporters on Wednesday, “I believe that we are at the onset of a new phase in this war.”
A source confirmed to ABC News on Wednesday that Israel’s 98th Division is being deployed from Gaza battlefields to the north of the country.
“We are determined to change the security reality as soon as possible,” Maj. Gen. Ori Gordin, head of the IDF’s Northern Command, said. “The commitment of the commanders and the troops here is complete, with peak readiness for any task that will be required.”
The war, U.S. officials have long warned, could spiral into a broader conflict involving Iran — a prime benefactor of both Hezbollah and Hamas.
Notable casualties demonstrated the multinational nature of the crisis. A detonating pager injured at least 14 people in Syria, where both Hezbollah and Iranian forces have been active for several years in support of its President Bashar al-Assad.
Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amini, was also among the thousands injured, Iranian officials said. Tehran “will duly follow up on the attack against its ambassador in Lebanon,” the country’s ambassador to the United Nations said in a letter to U.N. leaders on Wednesday.
Israel and Iran have already exchanged significant strikes since Oct. 7. Israel assassinated a top Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi in Syria in April and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July. Iran fired a huge barrage of drones and missiles toward Israel in response to Zahedi’s killing.
This week’s bombings in Lebanon raised the possibility of further action, whether overt or covert. Police announced on Thursday that an Israeli citizen was arrested on suspicion of working with Iranian intelligence to assassinate leaders including Netanyahu and Gallant.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated U.S. appeals for calm during a press conference in Egypt on Wednesday, where he traveled for fresh Gaza cease-fire talks.
“Broadly speaking, we’ve been very clear, and we remain very clear about the importance of all parties avoiding any steps that could further escalate the conflict that we’re trying to resolve in Gaza,” Blinken said.
A conflict spreading to other fronts, he added, is “clearly not in the interest of anyone involved.”
The U.S., Blinken and other American officials said, were not involved in or pre-briefed on the remote explosions that rocked Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Gallant spoke with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin three times in two days, the latest conversation on Wednesday reaffirming the “unwavering U.S. support for Israel in the face of threats from Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah, and Iran’s other regional partners” and the need for de-escalation, a Pentagon readout said.
U.S. officials were notified by Israeli counterparts on Tuesday that they were planning an operation against Hezbollah, but did not provide any details about what they were going to do, U.S. officials said.
ABC News’ Ghazi Balkiz, Will Gretsky, Morgan Winsor, Luis Martinez, Shannon K. Kingston, Ellie Kaufman, Nasser Atta, Jordana Miller and Marcus Moore contributed to this report.
