France 24 New wires A top Syrian official attended a conference in Paris Tuesday on the invitation of French lawmakers, angering the government days after he was banned from a similar meeting in Brussels.
Thousands of Syrian refugees in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley face displacement as a deadline to evacuate their informal tent camps expires on Saturday. Camp residents within a seven-kilometre radius of the Rayak airbase were given five days to remove their homes following an eviction order delivered orally earlier this week by the army. The move, reportedly taken for “security” reasons, would… Read more »
Iraqi forces gained fresh ground in door-to-door fighting in the Old City of Mosul, a military spokesman said on Monday, as the U.S.-backed offensive to capture Islamic State’s de facto capital in Iraq entered its seventh month. A Reuters correspondent saw thick smoke billowing over the Old City, near the Grand al-Nuri Mosque, from where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr… Read more »
The death toll from a bomb blast on a crowded Syrian bus convoy outside Aleppo reached at least 112 people, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Sunday. Syrian rescue workers the Civil Defence said that they had carted away at least 100 bodies from the site of Saturday’s blast, which hit buses carrying Shi’ite residents as… Read more »
Some 1,500 Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel launched a mass hunger strike on Monday to press for basic rights and shed light on the difficult humanitarian conditions inside Israeli prisons, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Center for Studies. The open-ended hunger strike, one of the largest in recent years, coincides with Palestinian Prisoners Day, annually commemorated on April 17…. Read more »