Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar killed in Gaza by IDF forces, Israel says
(LONDON) Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, Israel Foreign Minister Israel Katz said.
The IDF initially said it was “checking the possibility” that the Hamas leader was among three killed in Gaza and were working to confirm identification through dental images and DNA testing.
The 62-year-old has served as Hamas’ leader in Gaza since 2017 and assumed leadership of the group’s Political Bureau after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran this July.
He has been credited as the mastermind behind the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that led to the deaths of 1,200 people, the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history.
President Joe Biden had been briefed on Israel’s investigation into whether Israel killed Sinwar, according to a senior administration official.
The Israelis also notified U.S. Department of Defense officials, including Secretary Lloyd Austin, about Sinwar’s potential death, a U.S. defense official said per a pool report.
In 1989, an Israeli court sentenced Sinwar to four life sentences for his role in killing suspected Palestinian informers and plotting to murder two Israeli soldiers.
Sinwar spent the following 22 years in prison before becoming one of more than 1,000 Palestinian detainees released in 2011 in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held hostage by Hamas for five years.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(LONDON) — Russia launched a major missile and drone attack into Ukraine overnight into Tuesday coinciding with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the U.S. this week, where the Ukrainian leader is seeking American and international support for Kyiv’s “victory plan.”
Ukraine’s air force wrote on Telegram that four missiles — one Iskander-M, two Kh-59/69s and one of undetermined type — were fired into northern and central Ukraine overnight,
Russia also launched 81 Shahed attack drones, the air force said, of which 66 were shot down and 13 blocked by radio jamming.
“The main direction of the attack is the north and center of Ukraine,” the air force wrote.
Ukraine’s Energy Ministry, meanwhile, noted that energy facilities in six regions of the country were attacked, resulting in local power outages.
Ukraine’s southern city of Zaporizhzhia also came under fire on Monday evening, according to regional governor Ivan Fedorov. One person was killed, he wrote on Telegram.
The latest strikes come as Zelenskyy tries to bolster support for Kyiv’s war plan during his visit to the U.S. for meetings with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington, D.C., as well as appearances at the U.N. General Assembly in New York City.
During a sit-down interview with ABC News’ Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts, Zelenskyy said the war with Moscow is “closer to an end” than many believe.
“The plan of victory is strengthening of Ukraine,” he added. “That’s why we’re asking our friends, our allies, to strengthen us. It’s very important.”
President Vladimir Putin, Zelenskyy said, is “afraid” of the recent Ukrainian occupation of parts of Russia’s western Kursk region.
“His people saw that he can’t defend — that he can’t defend all his territory,” Zelenskyy said.
Ukraine, Zelenskyy added, can only “push Putin to stop the war” from a “strong position.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov responded by saying that Russia will only end the war when its goals are achieved.
“Any war one way or the other finishes with peace,” Peskov told reporters, as reported by Russian state media. “For us there is no alternative to achieving our goals. As soon as our goals are achieved one way or the other, the special military operation will end.”
Ukraine is continuing its own long-range strikes against Russian military and industrial targets, while pressing its partners for permission to use Western-supplied weapons in such operations.
Russia’s Defense Ministry reported 13 “thwarted” drone infiltrations overnight into Tuesday — seven over Belgorod region, five over Kursk and one over Bryansk regions.
On the battlefield, meanwhile, Russian forces continued attacks in eastern Ukraine, increasingly threatening Ukraine’s hold on the city of Vuhledar in southeastern Donetsk Oblast, which Moscow has been attempting to seize since the early weeks of the invasion.
Ukrainian military bloggers reported that Russian forces may have broken through the defenders’ flanks near the city, which is already largely destroyed and empty of civilians.
Developments there reflect the broader difficult situation for Ukraine in the east, where its forces are trying to hold back a creeping Russian advance while inflicting heavy casualties.
(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.
(LONDON) — Two Americans are among those still missing after a superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday, ABC News has confirmed.
Christopher and Neda Morvillo are among six people still unaccounted for who were aboard the U.K.-flagged Bayesian vessel which sank during a violent storm.
Christopher Morvillo is a partner at law firm Clifford Chance and represented the yacht’s owner — British tech tycoon Mike Lynch — in his recent fraud case brought by Hewlett Packard. He is a former assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.
The search resumed Tuesday morning for the six people missing from the Bayesian. Among the bodies that may be trapped inside the vessel are those of Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah.
Some of the 15 people who were rescued are either still recovering or have now left the hospital.