"The Talk of the Town"
(CAIRO) — Dozens of tourists are feared missing after a diving boat sank off Egypt’s Red Sea coast, authorities said on Monday.
The Sea Story, as the boat is known, sank off the southeastern Egyptian town of Marsa Alam, near the Shaab Satayah area, which is popular for its coral reefs, the Red Sea Governorate said in a statement.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
ABC News’ Joe Simonetti contributed to this report.
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(LONDON) — Ukrainian authorities said that at least 23 people were injured and 41 buildings damaged by a Russian missile strike in the northeastern city of Kharkiv overnight into Monday, as Moscow’s troops launched a fresh offensive effort in the region and claimed battlefield gains all along the eastern front.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Telegram that the S-400 anti-aircraft missile impact in Kharkiv was part of a multi-pronged barrage against Ukrainian cities overnight. Kyiv, Odessa and Zaporizhzhia were all also targeted.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 145 drones, 71 of which were downed and 71 were lost during flight. One UAV flew into Belarusian airspace, the air force said.
The Russian Defense Ministry, meanwhile, claimed to have downed 23 Ukrainian drones over multiple regions. The ministry also said it downed eight ballistic missiles, though did not specify their type.
Vladislav Shapsha, the governor of Kaluga Oblast that borders Moscow Oblast to the southwest, said falling drone debris sparked a fire at a manufacturing facility. Ukraine’s General Staff, though, said its strikes destroyed the Kaluganefteproduct oil depot in the city of Kaluga.
“In total, since yesterday evening, Russia has used about one and a half hundred attack drones, aerial bombs and missiles against more than 10 of our regions,” Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram early Monday.
“These attacks by Russia on Ukrainian life can be stopped,” he added. “With pressure, sanctions, blocking the occupiers’ access to the components they use to create the tools of this terror, arms packages for Ukraine and a determination that must be unwavering.”
Only 19 miles from the Russian border, Ukraine’s “second city” of Kharkiv has faced near-constant attacks since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in early 2022.
Russian forces failed to encircle and capture Kharkiv during the opening weeks of the invasion, but fighting has continued along the shared border throughout the conflict.
Ukraine’s General Staff said in a post to Facebook on Monday that Russian forces launched assaults the settlement of Kozacha Lopan, around 2 miles from the border and 16 miles north of Kharkiv.
The Ukrainian Deep State Telegram military blogger reported that Russian forces also launched an amphibious operation across the Oskil River in eastern Kharkiv region, where Russian troops have been pushing towards the strategic objective of Kupyansk.
The Russian force established a foothold on the Ukrainian-controlled side of the waterway, Deep State wrote. The blogger’s claims could not be immediately be verified.
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(BEIRUT) — Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and other commanders were killed in Israeli airstrikes on Beirut, the group and Israeli officials confirmed on Saturday. After his death was confirmed, Israel continued firing strikes on the city.
An Iranian Revolutionary Guard general, Abbas Nilforoushan, was also killed in the Israeli strike that killed the Hezbollah leader, Iranian state media announced Saturday. Nilforoushan was the deputy commander for operations of the IRGC, and was sanctioned by the U.S. for his role in suppressing protests in Iran.
Israel said it struck over 140 Hezbollah targets overnight and into Saturday morning.
Israel also hacked the control tower system at the Beirut Airport on Saturday to warn an Iranian passenger plane that was headed for Beirut not to land there, a senior official at the Lebanon Ministry of Transport confirms to ABC News. The Lebanese Minister of Transportation then told the plane not to enter Lebanese airspace.
Israel used bunker busters — a munition designed to penetrate targets underground — in the strike that killed Nasrallah, targeting a location underground embedded under a residential building in the area of Dahieh in Beirut, according to an Israel official familiar with the strike. Israel said the strike was conducted while the group’s senior chain of command were operating from their headquarters.
“Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Hezbollah terrorist organization and one of its founders, was eliminated by the IDF, together with Ali Karki, the Commander of Hezbollah’s Southern Front, and additional Hezbollah commanders,” the IDF said in a statement issued on Saturday morning.
“During Hassan Nasrallah’s 32-year reign as the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, he was responsible for the murder of many Israeli civilians and soldiers, and the planning and execution of thousands of terrorist activities,” the IDF statement read. “He was responsible for directing and executing terrorist attacks around the world in which civilians of various nationalities were murdered. Nasrallah was the central decision-maker and the strategic leader of the organization.”
The IDF said that they will continue to operate “against anyone who promotes and engages in terrorism against the State of Israel and its people.”
Hezbollah called the killing of its leader and the targeting of residential buildings in Beirut “a cowardly terrorist act, a massacre and a heinous crime.” The group vowed to “continue its jihad in confronting the enemy, supporting Gaza and Palestine, and defending Lebanon and its steadfast and honorable people.”
Despite the strike targeting Nasrallah on Friday and massive overnight strikes on Lebanon, Hezbollah continues to fire rockets and missiles into Israel. So far, they have released seven statements on attacks toward Israel on Saturday.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke to his Israeli counterpart, Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, twice regarding the strikes on Lebanon and “expressed full support for Israel’s right to defend itself and its people against Iranian backed terrorist groups,” Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement Saturday
“The Secretary made it clear that the United States remains postured to protect U.S. forces and facilities in the region and committed to the defense of Israel,” Ryder said.
Tensions have continued to rise between Israel and Hezbollah in recent days with Israeli officials saying they are preparing for a ground invasion into Lebanon. Israel has targeted and killed several high level Hezbollah officials since it began its attacks on Lebanon.
In recent days Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it will continue fighting against Hezbollah “with full force,” warning Iran — which backs Hezbollah — and the entire Middle East.
“There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach. And that is true of the entire Middle East,” Netanyahu said, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly.
“If you strike us, we will strike you,” Netanyahu said, addressing Iran.
The leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, released a statement that didn’t comment on the death of Nasrallah, but insisted that “the resistance” will not be destroyed. The “fate of the region” will be decided by the “resistance forces and at the head of them is Hezbollah,” he said in a statement.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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(RIO DE JANEIRO) — Scientists have quantified how much more fire-prone South America has become in recent decades, as several parts of the continent experience severe wildfires.
Some regions in South America are experiencing many more days with extreme fire conditions, putting some of the continent’s most important ecosystems — such as the Amazon rainforest and the Gran Chaco forest — in grave danger of a single spark starting an uncontrollable wildfire, according to a study published Thursday in Communications Earth & Environment journal.
Since 1970, the number of days per year that are extremely hot, dry and have conditions of high fire risk, such as heavy winds, have tripled — even quadrupled — in some parts of South America, the researchers found. Millions of square kilometers have experienced the high increase to fire risk, Raul Cordero, a climate scientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study, told ABC News.
A concurrence of a drought and heat wave is a “horrible” cocktail for the onset of a wildfire, Cordero said. While the conditions have existed in South America before, the frequency at which the fire-risk days are happening today “cannot be compared what used to be normal in the 80s,” Cordero said.
“If somebody sets a fire, it’s going to make it quite hard to control the propagation of that fire,” Cordero said.
The researchers calculated the number of days per year that each 30-by-30 kilometer grid cell on the South American continent experienced simultaneous hot, dry and flammable extremes between 1971 and 2022. The extremes for each condition were measured by daily maximum temperature records, 30-day rainfall averages and daily fire weather index records, according to the paper.
The frequency of these simultaneous extremes increased across the entire continent during the time frame, the data showed.
There are four fire-prone “hotspots” in South America that researchers found to have particularly increasing risk for fire: the Amazon rainforest in most of its nine-country span; the border between Venezuela and Colombia; the Gran Chaco, the second-largest forest on the continent located in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay; and central Chile, which experienced severe wildfires in February, Cordero said.
The main driver to the increase of fire conditions is climate change, Cordero said.
Places like the Amazon rainforest have been experiencing persistent drought for the last two decades, while the global temperature has been increasing simultaneously, he said.
When agricultural fires are set, it gives way for the fires to get out of control, and fast, Cordero said. Agricultural fires are typically set by farmers aiming to clear the land before the next season but also for illegal activity, such as logging, he said.
“Because of the weather conditions are so extreme, they set the fire, and then the propagation on the fire can’t be controlled,” he said. “That’s the problem.”
In addition, the warm El Niño phase increased the fire risk in the northern Amazon region, while the cooler La Niña phase led to increased fire risk in central South America, the paper found.
Several parts of South America are currently experiencing record-breaking wildfires, including the Amazon rainforest, the Cerrado tropical savanna and the Pantanal wetlands.
Further deforestation in the region will lead to more severe wildfires in the future, experts say.
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