الكاتب: kafej

Israel releases 30 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 10 Israeli hostages, according to mediator Qatar.

Hamas has released 12 more hostages, the Israeli military and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have said, as a shaky truce continues to hold in Gaza.

The ICRC said that it successfully facilitated the release and transfer of 12 hostages out of Gaza via the Rafah crossing with Egypt on Tuesday, the fifth day of an extended six-day truce between Israel and the Palestinian armed group in Gaza.

The Israeli army said 10 Israelis and two Thai nationals had arrived in Israel.

In exchange for the release of the 10 Israelis, 30 Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli prisons later, according to Qatar, a key mediator in the Israel-Hamas deal.

The agreement provides for the possibility of extending the truce in return for the release of a further 10 captives each day.

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Club said 15 women and 15 minors would be released.

Among them was 14-year-old Ahmad Salayme.

“The first day of the war there were a number of beatings, female inmates were beaten,” Salayme said in an interview with Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Jamjoom.

“They told me no celebrations, and on the day of my release I’m not allowed to leave my house, raise any signs or banners, use a megaphone,” he added. “And if I break any of these rules I will be taken back.”

“We are very happy but our happiness is incomplete because we mourn those who are lost, those who are wounded and those who are missing,” he said, referring to the Palestinians in Gaza.

Before his arrival, the boy’s relatives, his friends and journalists had been huddling in the living room in Ras al-Amoud, a neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, in silence as Israeli security forces were outside.

Israeli authorities have warned the families of Palestinian women and children being released as part of the Gaza truce against celebrating their return home.

Qatar said that of the 10 Israelis released, there were nine women and one minor. It said one of those freed has Austrian citizenship, two have Argentinian citizenship, and one has Filipino citizenship.

About 240 captives were seized as Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel on October 7, killing approximately 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials. Dozens of hostages have since been released, the vast majority through the Israel-Hamas deal that is set to expire early on Thursday.

In addition to the exchanges, the deal includes a cessation of hostilities in Gaza and an increase in humanitarian aid to the territory which Israel had bombarded and besieged for more than seven weeks.

More than 15,000 people have been killed in the Israeli air and ground assault, including more than 6,000 children, according to Palestinian officials. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced amid dire humanitarian conditions.

The country also expected to host the World Cup in 2034 achieves the latest in a series of victories for Gulf states on international events.

The Expo 2030 world’s fair will be held in Riyadh in another hosting victory for a Gulf country after Qatar put on football’s World Cup last year.

South Korea’s Busan and Italy’s Rome were also in the running to host the world’s fair, a once-every-five-year event that attracts millions of visitors and billions of dollars in investment.

Saudi Arabia’s capital won 119 votes, Busan 29 and Rome 17, results from 182 members of the Paris-based Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) showed on Tuesday. Saudi Arabia needed to garner two-thirds of the votes to win in the first round.

The Italian contestants were scathing in their criticism of the result.

“This huge result for Saudi was unexpected in those proportions,” Giampiero Massolo, head of the Italian Expo bid, told reporters. “It is no longer about the merits but about transactions.”

“Yesterday it was a soccer championship. Tomorrow it will be the Olympics,” he added.

Saudi Arabia, as the only declared candidate, is set to host the 2034 World Cup and is also planning an Olympics bid.

Riyadh had enlisted football star Cristiano Ronaldo, who plays for the capital’s Al Nassr club, to persuade BIE members in a video shown before the vote. The city has proposed to host the event from October 2030 to March 2031.

The win is the icing on the cake for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitious Vision 2030 programme, which aims to wean the country off its oil dependency.

“We had a fantastic team of ministers going around the world, engaging our counterparts in a very, very active way to understand what they expected, what they were looking for and what we should deliver in order to gain their trust,” Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud said.

Critics said the crown prince wants to use the expo to improve his country’s image after the 2018 murder of prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a team of Saudi agents.

Shiri Bibas and her children, four-year-old Ariel and 10-month-old Kfir are yet to be released and there has been no word of them.

Their family has been told they might have been passed on by Hamas to another group in Gaza.

Live updates: Hostages handed over in latest exchange; Hamas invites Elon Musk to Gaza

Speaking to Sky News, Shiri’s cousin Yifat said the wait is agonising.

She said: “What are these groups? We reach a dead end every time we try to figure out why Hamas is having so much trouble getting them back or whether that means if they’re alive or not.

“It’s really frustrating. It feels very far away, although it’s really close by. Hamas is ruling over the strip, and I hope that whichever group is holding them will oblige and will give them [back]. They said that they’re going to move those hostages into Hamas hands, so I hope those groups will do that as well.”

If Shiri Bibas and her children have been passed on to another group, it will explain why they haven’t been released and complications.

“I think they’re playing games with the psychological games,” said Yifat.

“It’s brutal. But what can you expect from a terror organisation that did such horrendous things? It’s amazing that a baby became some sort of a card or, you know, a winning card or a trophy holding him hostage like this to get more arms or, I don’t know, fuel for their missile launchers.”

The extension to the truce is due to end late on Wednesday night. Intense talks are going on behind the scenes to extend it further and public statements by both sides suggest that might be possible.

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Yifat says she would support an extension in the ceasefire if it resulted in more hostages being released.

She said: “Every last one, all 240, everyone should be back home with their families. We are only one story.

“There’s a lot of mothers, a lot of children waiting for their parents that are being held captive. Every family of someone who was abducted, lost someone, lost their grandparents, and they don’t know it yet.

“I can’t stop thinking about Kfir, what he is eating, is he bathing, is he hitting his milestones?

“You see those children coming back and hearing the stories about how they didn’t eat anything. Almost nothing. He needs his baby formula, he needs his nutritions. Every day counts in this matter. Every day counts.

“You know, if we wait another day, maybe we will lose him.”

The 86-year-old pontiff is recovering from the flu and inflammation of respiratory tract.

Pope Francis has cancelled his trip to the United Arab Emirates for a United Nations climate summit on doctors’ orders as he recovers from the flu and lung inflammation, the Vatican says.

Francis, 86, was scheduled to leave on Friday to address the Conference of the Parties (COP28) in Dubai on Saturday. He would have become the first pontiff to address a UN climate conference.

He also was set to inaugurate a faith pavilion on Sunday on the sidelines of the event.

On Tuesday, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said Francis’s health was improving after the flu and inflammation of his respiratory tract had forced him to cancel his audiences on Saturday, but the doctors advised him not to travel to Dubai.

The pope agreed not to travel “with great regret”, according to the Vatican statement, which added that it would look into ways that the leader of the world’s Roman Catholics could contribute to the climate discussions remotely.

Francis, who had part of one lung removed as a young man, came down with the flu last week and had a CT scan. The Vatican subsequently said the test had ruled out pneumonia.

On Sunday, he skipped his traditional appearance at his studio window overlooking St Peter’s Square to avoid the cold. Instead, he gave the traditional noon blessing in a televised appearance from the chapel in the Vatican hotel where he lives and asked a priest to read his written daily reflections out loud.

The pope had to postpone a trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan in 2022 because of knee inflammation. He was able to make that journey early this year.

When asked about his health in a recent interview, Francis responded in what has become his standard line: “Still alive, you know.”

A tantric yoga guru has been arrested in France on suspicion of indoctrinating female followers for sexual exploitation.

The leader of the Atman Yoga Federation, a multinational organisation with a presence in the UK, was detained after a police raid in Paris on Tuesday morning, according to the Associated Press, quoting an anonymous French judicial source.

Only identified in French law as Gregorian B, the Romanian national is reportedly known internationally as a yoga tutor and author.

According to AP’s source, an investigation was launched after accusations of psychological manipulation and sexual exploitation within his organisation, which is also known as the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA).

The 71-year-old is being charged with human trafficking, organised kidnapping, rape, and organised abuse of weakness by members of a sect, officials said.

There is also an Interpol notice against him from Finland, where he is wanted for alleged human trafficking.

Some 175 police officers were involved in the raids in France, which resulted in 40 other arrests in Paris, Seine-et-Marne, Val-de-Marne, and the Alpes-Maritimes regions.

The operation was focused on locations used by the organisation, where women said they were indoctrinated and coerced into sexual practices.

French officials said the locations were known as “ashrams”, and served as accommodation for women selected by the defendant for initiation into tantric yoga.

Gregorian B founded MISA in 1990, and it eventually became known as the Atman Yoga Federation, which is headquartered in Cambridgeshire.

The French investigators say they found evidence students were coerced into sexual activities which included being in explicit videos which were used for profit, the source told the Associated Press, which were said to have been carried out under the pretence of tantric yoga teachings.

Sky News has contacted the Atman Federation for a response to the accusations but has yet to receive a response.

On Atman’s UK website, it says that the accused guru “and the yoga school he founded, MISA (the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute), have been and still are target of great defamations and severe abuses of human rights”.

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Tantric practices relate to sex and power, and are rooted in Hindu and Buddhist teachings.

Gregorian B was on a list of Europe’s most wanted in 2016.