Author: Finance for Sight

NEW YORK: Israel has not ruled out an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the coming months despite President Donald Trump telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. was for now unwilling to support such a move, according to an Israeli official and two other people familiar with the matter. Israeli officials have vowed to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and Netanyahu has insisted that any negotiation with Iran must lead to the complete dismantling of its nuclear program. U.S. and Iranian negotiators are set for a second round of preliminary nuclear talks in Rome on…

GAZA CITY: Hamas said Saturday that the fate of Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander remained unknown, while the body of a guard assigned to him had been recovered from the site of a recent Israeli strike. “We managed to retrieve the body of a martyr who was tasked with securing the prisoner Edan Alexander, but the fate of the prisoner and the rest of the captors remains unknown,” Hamas’s armed wing the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades said in a statement. On Tuesday, the group announced it had “lost contact” with the fighter unit holding Alexander following an Israeli air strike on their…

DUBAI: Iran and the United States will hold a new round of nuclear talks in Rome on Saturday to resolve their decades-long standoff over Tehran’s atomic aims, under the shadow of President Donald Trump’s threat to unleash military action if diplomacy fails. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff will negotiate indirectly through mediators from Oman, a week after a first round in Muscat that both sides described as constructive. Araqchi has arrived in Rome to attend the second round of the talks, according to a post on his Telegram account. He said in Moscow…

KINSHASA: At least 143 people died and dozens more went missing after a boat carrying fuel caught fire and capsized in the Democratic Republic of Congo, officials said on Friday. Hundreds of passengers were crowded onto a wooden boat on the Congo River in northwest DRC on Tuesday when the blaze broke out, according to Josephine-Pacifique Lokumu, head of a delegation of national deputies from the region. The disaster occurred near Mbandaka, capital of Equateur Province, at the confluence of the Ruki and the vast Congo river – the world’s deepest. “A first group of 131 bodies were found on…

MOSCOW: Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Friday cast doubt over the intentions of the United States a day before a second round of nuclear talks with Washington. The new round will come a week after the longtime foes held their highest-level negotiations since US President Donald Trump abandoned a landmark nuclear deal in 2018. “Although we have serious doubts about the intentions and motivations of the American side, in any case we will participate in tomorrow’s negotiations,” Araghchi said during a press conference in Moscow with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. Iran says nuclear agreement with the US is…

KHARKIV: A Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s northeastern city of Kharkiv killed one man inside his home and wounded at least 112 others, including nine children, on Friday, officials said. “This is how Russia began this Good Friday – with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, Shaheds – maiming our people and cities,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on X. Ihor Terekhov, the mayor of Ukraine’s second biggest city, said the attack damaged 21 apartment buildings, two schools, two kindergartens, a children’s arts centre and a factory, where the strike caused a fire. More than 5,000 windows were shattered in the attack,…

BEIRUT: Hezbollah “will not let anyone disarm” it, the Lebanese group’s leader Naim Qassem said Friday, as Washington presses Beirut to compel the movement to hand over its weapons. Hezbollah, long a dominant force in Lebanese politics, was left weakened by more than a year of hostilities with Israel sparked by the Gaza war, including an Israeli ground incursion and two months of heavy bombardment that decimated the group’s leadership. The fighting was largely brought to an end by a November ceasefire, but not before the group’s longtime leader and Qassem’s predecessor Hassan Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli air…

PARIS: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that Washington could soon exit efforts to reach a Ukraine ceasefire if it decided peace was not “doable”, after meeting European and Ukrainian officials in Paris. European powers have been seeking a seat at the table since US President Donald Trump’s shock decision to open talks with Russia to end the three-year-old war, which started with Moscow’s 2022 invasion. But Trump’s push for peace has stumbled, with Russian President Vladimir Putin rebuffing a complete truce. “The United States has been helping Ukraine over the last three years, and we want it…

GAZA CITY: Hamas on Friday urged the international community to exert immediate pressure to end Israel’s complete blockade of the Gaza Strip that has been in place since March 2. The appeal from the Hamas comes after the United Nations warned of worsening conditions and shortages of medicine and other essentials. “The international community is required to intervene immediately and exert the necessary pressure to end the unjust blockade imposed on our people in the Gaza Strip,” Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya said in a statement. Hamas on Thursday signalled its rejection of Israel’s latest truce proposal and called for…

GAZA CITY: Gaza’s civil defence agency said Friday that 15 people, including 10 from the same family, had been killed in two overnight Israeli strikes. Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said on Telegram that “our crews recovered the bodies of 10 martyrs and a large number of wounded from the house of the Baraka family and the neighbouring houses targeted by the Israeli occupation forces in the Bani Suhaila area east of Khan Yunis,” in the southern Gaza Strip. Hamas says open to talks as Israel keeps up Gaza strikes Bassal later announced that a separate strike hit two houses…