Israel orders evacuations in northern Gaza as Trump calls for war to end

By Nidal Al-Mughrabi Reuters  The Israeli military ordered Palestinians to evacuate areas in northern Gaza on Sunday before intensified fighting against  Hamas , as U.S. President Donald Trump called for an end to the  war  amid renewed efforts to broker a ceasefire. “Make the deal in Gaza, get the hostages back,”  Trump  posted on his Truth Social platform early on Sunday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was due to hold talks later in the day on the progress of Israel’s offensive. A senior security official said the military will tell him the campaign is close to reaching its objectives, and warn that expanding fighting to new areas in Gaza may endanger the remaining Israeli hostages. But in a statement posted on X and text messages sent to many residents, the military urged people in northern parts of the enclave to head south towards the Al-Mawasi area in Khan Younis, which Israel designated as a humanitarian area. Palestinian and U.N. offi...

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan settle border dispute that sparked deadly clashes

 Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, two ex-Soviet Central Asian states, said on Friday that they had resolved a decades-old border dispute that had sparked clashes between different ethnic groups that had killed over a hundred people.

Top security officials from both countries signed an agreement setting down the state borders over more than 970 km (600 miles) after resolving disputes over certain sections. The document must now be signed by the countries’ presidents.

Two days of skirmishes in border regions killed more than 100 people in September 2022 and prompted the evacuation of about 140,000 residents. Similar clashes in April 2021 killed about 20 people and injured more than 200.

“The border demarcation between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is taking place after two quite bloody conflicts and this complicates the problem,” Temur Umarov, a Central Asian expert at the Berlin Carnegie centre, told Reuters.

“This is a sensitive political issue. If the documents agreed on are published, they will become of considerable public interest and groups in both countries could well oppose the newly-agreed borders.”

Border issues in Central Asia have persisted since the Soviet era, when authorities made demarcations that sought to reflect the ethnic make-up of specific regions.

But settlements in which other groups were predominant often found themselves on the wrong side of a border.

Both Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan host Russian military bases and maintain close ties with Moscow.

Tajikistan, with a population of 10 million and Kyrgyzstan, with more than seven million, are among the poorest countries in a region subject to unrest.

A civil war in newly-independent Tajikistan in the 1990s, pitting Russian-backed government troops against Islamist and other groups, killed tens of thousands of people.

SOURCE: REUTERS AND AGENCIES



from The Times Of Earth https://ift.tt/rLfwdGy

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