ISLAMABAD – The Pakistan army on Friday claimed that they have killed at least 30 suspected militants while attempting to cross the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
In a statement, the military said that the movement of a group of militants trying to infiltrate through the Pakistan-Afghanistan border was detected by the security forces in the general area of Hassan Khel in the North Waziristan tribal district, near the Afghan border.
“Our troops effectively engaged and thwarted the Indian-sponsored Khawarij’s attempt to infiltrate. As a result of precise and skillful engagement, all thirty Indian-sponsored Khawarij were sent to hell,” it said in the statement.
A large quantity of weapons, ammunition, and explosives was also recovered from the militants.
The Pakistani military said the Afghan interim Taliban administration “needs to check” and prevent the use of Afghan soil by “foreign proxies” for orchestrating terrorist activities against Pakistan.
There was no immediate reaction from New Delhi or Kabul to the statement from the Pakistani military.
Last week, at least 13 Pakistani soldiers were killed in a suicide bombing in North Waziristan, in the country’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province near the Afghan border, while 14 terrorists were killed by the military in subsequent operations.
Islamabad accuses Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants, who are allegedly based in Afghanistan, of carrying out terrorist attacks in Pakistan, while Kabul denies that such attacks are launched from its soil.
People wave Palestinian flags during a protest after British lawmakers voted to ban pro-Palestinian campaign group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization, outside Downing Street in London, Britain, July 2, 2025. REUTERS
LONDON, July 4 – A co-founder of pro-Palestinian group Palestine Action asked a London court on Friday to pause a British government decision to ban it under anti-terrorism laws, a move her lawyers said was an “authoritarian abuse” of the law.
Huda Ammori, who helped found Palestine Action in 2020, asked London’s High Court to stop the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, before a full hearing of her case that banning Palestine Action is unlawful later this month.
British lawmakers this week decided to ban the group in response to its activists breaking into a Royal Air Force base and damaging two planes, a protest against what it says is Britain’s support for Israel.
Proscription would make it a crime to be a member of Palestine Action that carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison. Proscribed groups under British law include Islamic State and al Qaeda.
Palestine Action has increasingly targeted Israel-linked companies in Britain with direct action.
Critics of the government’s decision, including some United Nations experts and civil liberties groups, say damaging property does not amount to terrorism.
“This is the first time in our history that a direct action, civil disobedience group which does not advocate for violence has been sought to be proscribed as terrorists,” Ammori’s lawyer, Raza Husain, told the court.
Husain described the government’s decision as “an ill-considered, discriminatory, authoritarian abuse of statutory power that is alien to the basic tradition of the common law”.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, Britain’s interior minister, said this week that “violence and serious criminal damage has no place in legitimate protests”.
Husain said that “one may disagree with what Palestine Action do and think that criminal damage, trespass and burglary are wrong”, but that designation the group as a terrorist organisation was “an abuse of language”.
A decision on whether to pause Palestine Action’s impending proscription is expected later on Friday.
TOKYO, July 4 – An 81-year-old woman was killed Friday in an apparent bear attack at her home in Iwate Prefecture, northeastern Japan, local media reported.
At around 7:40 a.m. local time, police received a call from a man who said that when he visited his mother’s home in Kitakami City, he found her lying on the floor in the living room and bleeding, newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported.
First responders rushed to the scene and the elderly woman was confirmed dead, the report said.
According to police, Seiko Takahashi, in her usual clothing, had suffered multiple injuries, including those believed to have been caused by animal claws, on her head and throughout her body.
Multiple footprints believed to be from a bear were found inside the house, which is located in a rural area with rice fields, the report said.
Police are investigating the possibility that she was attacked by the animal.
ABUJA, July 4 – Jihadist groups have killed 28 people in two separate attacks in northern Nigeria, media reported on Thursday, citing the military and residents.
Militants from the jihadist group Lakurawa raided a village in Nigeria’s northwestern Sokoto state on Wednesday, killing 17 people, residents said. The attackers stormed the village, “shooting indiscriminately” in what locals believe was a reprisal for the killing of three jihadists by vigilantes in a failed raid on the community days earlier.
Another 11 were killed Thursday when jihadists from Islamic State West Africa Province attacked the border town of Malam Fatori and opened fire on a camp for internally displaced people, said Lieutenant Colonel Olaniyi Osoba of the Multinational Joint Task Force, a multinational military coalition fighting jihadists in the region.
Osoba said 20 others were wounded and taken to a hospital in Bosso across the border in Niger.
According to the United Nations, jihadist violence has killed over 40,000 people and displaced around 2 million in northeastern Nigeria since 2009.
Rescuers search for victims after a ferry sank in the waters off Jembrana, Bali, Indonesia, Friday, July 4, 2025. AP
GILIMANUK, Indonesia – Indonesian authorities intensified on Friday a search operation for 30 people missing after a ferry sank near the tourist island of Bali.
The KMP Tunu Pratama Jaya sank almost half an hour after leaving Ketapang port in East Java late Wednesday for a trip of about 5 kilometers (3 miles) to Bali’s Gilimanuk port.
The search and rescue operation was halted Thursday evening due to visibility problems and resumed on Friday morning with more than 160 rescuers including police and soldiers, said Ribut Eko Suyatno, the deputy chief of operations at the National Search and Rescue Agency.
Three helicopters and a thermal drone were deployed to conduct an aerial search over the waters of the Bali Strait, while about 20 vessels were mobilized for the sea search, Suyatno said. As weather forecasts predict high waves and rough waters around the Bali Strait on Friday, he said at least three navy ships to being deployed to replace small boats.
Videos and photos released by the agency showed rescuers looking desperately from rescue boats in the waters but no new survivors.
The agency released the names of 29 survivors and six people confirmed dead late Thursday. It didn’t release names of the missing, but according to the passenger manifest there were 30 people missing.
On Friday, survivors were being treated at Bali’s Jembrana Regional Hospital, while the bodies have been handed over to the families for funerals. Distraught relatives gathered at the port office in Gilimanuk, hoping for news of missing family members.
Indonesian authorities are investigating the cause of the accident. Survivors told rescuers there appeared to be a leak in the engine room of the ferry, which was carrying 22 vehicles including 14 trucks.
Ferry tragedies occur regularly in Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, with weak enforcement of safety regulations often to blame.
Fifteen people were killed after a boat capsized off Indonesia’s Sulawesi in 2023, while another ferry sank in rough seas near Bali in 2021, leaving seven dead and 11 missing.
In 2018, an overcrowded ferry sank with about 200 people on board in a deep volcanic crater lake in North Sumatra province, killing 167 people.
In one of the country’s worst recorded disasters, an overcrowded passenger ship sank in February 1999 with 332 people aboard. There were only 20 survivors.
An explosion of a drone lights up the sky over the city during a Russian drone and missile strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine July 4, 2025. REUTERS
KYIV, July 4 – Russia pummelled Kyiv with drones in an all-night attack, injuring at least 14 people, damaging railway infrastructure and setting buildings and cars on fire throughout the city, authorities in the Ukrainian capital said early on Friday.
More than eight hours into air raid alerts and just before they were called off at 5 a.m. (0200 GMT) Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that 12 of the injured were hospitalised.
Damage was recorded in six of Kyiv’s 10 districts on both sides of the Dnipro River bisecting the city and falling drone debris set a medical facility on fire in the leafy Holosiivskyi district, Klitschko said on the Telegram messaging app.
Residents stand near an apartment building, damaged during Russian drone and missile strikes, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine July 4, 2025. REUTERS
The attacks were the latest in a series of Russian air strikes on Kyiv that have intensified in recent weeks and included some of the deadliest assaults of the war on the city of three million people.
A North Korean military guard post, loudspeaker, top left, and South Korean army soldiers, bottom right, are seen from Paju, South Korea, near the border with North Korea, on June 12, 2025. AP
SEOUL, South Korea – An unidentified North Korean man crossed the heavily fortified land border separating the two Koreas and is in South Korean custody, the South’s military said Friday.
The South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the military identified and tracked the individual near the central-west section of the military demarcation line and conducted a “guiding operation” before taking the person into custody Thursday night.
It said authorities plan to investigate the border crossing and did not immediately say whether they view the incident as a defection attempt.
The Joint Chiefs said it notified the U.S.-led United Nations Command about the incident and had not detected any immediate signs of unusual military activity by the North.
According to the Joint Chiefs, a South Korean military team approached the unarmed North Korean man after detecting him and, after identifying themselves as South Korean troops, guided him safely out of the mine-strewn Demilitarized Zone that divides the two Koreas.
Border tensions have flared in recent months as the two Koreas traded Cold War-style psychological warfare, with North Korea sending thousands of trash-filled balloons toward the South and South Korea blasting anti-Pyongyang propaganda through loudspeakers.
Since taking office last month, South Korea’s new liberal President Lee Jae Myung has made efforts to rebuild trust with North Korea, halting the frontline loudspeaker broadcasts and moving to ban activists from flying balloons carrying propaganda leaflets across the border.
Lian Al-Za’anin, center, is comforted by relatives as she mourns the loss of her father, Rami Al-Za’anin, who was killed while heading to an aid distribution hub, at the morgue of the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, on Thursday, July 3, 2025. AP
TEL AVIV, Israel – Israeli airstrikes and shootings killed 94 Palestinians in Gaza late Wednesday and Thursday, including 45 who were attempting to get much-needed humanitarian aid, hospitals and the Health Ministry said Thursday.
Families wept over the bodies from a strike that hit a tent camp during the night as displaced people slept in southern Gaza. At least 13 members of a single family were killed, including at least six children under 12.
“My children, my children … my beloved,” wailed Intisar Abu Assi, sobbing over the bodies of her son and daughters and their young children. Another woman kissed the forehead of a dead little girl wrapped in a blanket on the floor of the morgue at Nasser Hospital in the city of Khan Younis.
In central Gaza, a boy stroked the face of his dead sister, 6-year-old Heba Abu Etiwi, in a morgue at Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital. The girl and another of her brothers were among eight people killed when a strike Wednesday evening hit near a stand selling falafel.
A separate strike on a school in Gaza City sheltering displaced people also killed 15 people.
The toll from strikes emerged as more Palestinians were killed in near-daily shootings while trying to obtain aid.
Five were killed on the roads leading to food-distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the newly created, secretive American organization backed by Israel to feed the Gaza Strip’s population. Another 40 were killed while waiting for trucks carrying U.N. aid in several locations around Gaza, according to hospital officials.
Witnesses have said Israeli troops regularly unleash barrages on crowds of Palestinians trying to reach the GHF sites. Witnesses have also reported troops opening fire when crowds of people mass near military-run zones of Gaza, waiting for U.N. trucks to enter.
More than 500 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded since the food-distribution sites opened in May.
The Israeli military, whose forces are deployed on the roads leading to the sites, says it fires warning shots to control crowds or at Palestinians who approach its troops. Armed U.S. contractors guard the sites.
AMNESTY SAYS ISRAEL USING STARVATION AS A WEAPON
Amnesty International on Thursday issued a report saying Israel was continuing to “use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war … as part of its ongoing genocide.”
It said the GHF distribution system appeared intended only to “placate international concerns” even as Israel allows in only a small amount of food for the U.N. to distribute separately.
“By maintaining a deadly, dehumanizing and ineffective militarized ‘aid’ scheme, Israeli authorities have turned aid-seeking into a booby trap for desperate starved Palestinians,” it said.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry denounced the Amnesty report, saying the organization has “joined forces with Hamas and fully adopted all of its propaganda lies.”
Israel has rejected allegations it is committing genocide in Gaza in the war with Hamas, and it is challenging the accusation filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice.
Amnesty accused Israel last year of committing genocide, saying it has sought to deliberately destroy Palestinians by mounting deadly attacks, demolishing vital infrastructure and preventing the delivery of food, medicine and other aid.
Israel intends for GHF to replace the U.N. humanitarian network, which has delivered massive amounts of aid to Palestinians throughout the war. Israel contends that Hamas siphons off large amounts of aid from that system, a claim that the U.N. and aid groups deny. They have rejected GHF, saying it cannot deliver enough aid, endangers Palestinians and is being used by Israel to carry out its war goals.
Local Syrian sources told Al Mayadeen on Thursday night that, in a significant development, an Israeli force consisting of three armored vehicles entered the village of Rakhla in the western Damascus countryside, near the Lebanese border opposite the town of Yahmor in the Rashaya district. This was the first incursion of its kind into the area.
An Israeli special forces force carried out an airdrop in the Yafour area of the Damascus countryside, approximately 10 kilometers from the capital, with three helicopters participating, according to sources.
In detail, the landing targeted a site belonging to the former Syrian Republican Guard, where the search operation lasted for five hours before the force departed via helicopter.
Syrian sources also reported that another Israeli force entered the village of Saysoun in the Yarmouk Basin area of the western Daraa countryside, in six military vehicles.
The source added that a force of three vehicles penetrated a former Syrian army position near the village of Ain Dhakar in the Yarmouk Basin.
In addition, “Israel’s” occupation forces have constructed a new forward military outpost within Syrian territory, marking the tenth such site since the fall of then-President Bashar al-Assad’s control, according to Israeli media outlet i24.
The i24 report states that these outposts are distributed between two positions on Mount Hermon and eight across the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The latest position was reportedly completed on Tuesday.
The 7006th Battalion of the Israeli military is responsible for building and maintaining this latest outpost, as part of broader efforts to entrench “Israel’s” military presence in the occupied territories.
Brigadier General Ali Fazli, deputy coordinator of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), confirmed on Thursday that Iran has been preparing for any potential confrontation with the enemy for years.
In a remarkable statement, Fazli noted that the “Sejil” missile took “Israel” by surprise during the war, revealing that Iranian missile capabilities used did not exceed 25% of the actual capacity.
Fadli also said, “We are in our best position today in 45 years, and we have not yet opened the door to any of the missile cities.”
