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  • Israeli settlers torch machinery in attack on Palestinian industrial zone

    Israeli settlers torch machinery in attack on Palestinian industrial zone

    A coordinated group of over 150 Israeli settlers originating from the adjacent Navitar outpost – an illegal settlement built on expropriated land belonging to the Palestinian town of Beita, located south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank – launched a brazen incursion on Monday into Beita’s core industrial zone, triggering widespread, costly destruction to critical local livelihood infrastructure.

    Witnesses and affected business owners confirmed the mob stormed the restricted industrial compound, hurling rocks at on-site Palestinian workers before systematically setting three heavy-duty excavators, multiple light commercial vehicles, and specialized stone-cutting workshop equipment ablaze. Ashraf Ghazaly, one of the most heavily impacted machinery owners, revealed that one of the destroyed excavators had been delivered just four days prior to the attack, with total verified losses across his personal assets alone surpassing 3.3 million Israeli shekels, equivalent to roughly $1 million. Ghazaly recounted that the group physically assaulted his brother and other on-duty staff, with no local residents able to intervene to halt the rampage.

    The assault unfolded in a quarry yard sited 2.5 to 3 meters below ground level, where settlers used portable ladders to bypass perimeter barriers, igniting targeted fires across multiple facilities in a matter of minutes. Ziad Ghazaly, a co-owner of a family-run industrial operation on the site, noted that even as local residents rushed to the scene to contain the flames, arriving Israeli military forces blocked all entry and exit points to the zone, directly obstructing firefighting efforts and preventing property owners from accessing their burning assets.

    This latest act of violence is far from an isolated incident: two prior raids on the Beita industrial zone in recent months saw settlers smash windows of heavy equipment and administrative offices, part of a pattern of 2 to 3 weekly settler provocations targeting the area. Abdul Rahman Salameh, a local stone-cutting workshop owner, explained that the attackers deliberately timed their incursion for the end of the workday, when nearly all staff had departed, leaving only 7 to 8 young family members on site. Five separate industrial facilities sustained major fire damage during the Monday raid. “The goal of these attacks is clear: to terrorize the owners and workers, forcing them to leave so that the settlers can seize more land and expand,” Salameh stated, emphasizing that local residents remain resolute in refusing to abandon their land, even as settler groups attempt to impose a new, violent status quo within Area B of the West Bank – a region formally under Palestinian Authority administrative control.

    The Beita industrial zone functions as a critical backbone of the northern West Bank’s construction supply ecosystem, hosting dozens of stone-cutting operations and supporting more than 500 direct workers, whose livelihoods sustain an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 total household members across the region. Omar Diriya, chairman of the Palestinian Union of Stone and Marble Industry, warned that the ongoing wave of targeted attacks on West Bank industrial sites represents a dangerous, unprecedented escalation against the entire Palestinian industrial sector, which already operates under severe structural economic strain from longstanding movement restrictions, military checkpoints, limited export access, and soaring production costs. Diriya added that nearly all local insurance policies exclude coverage for damage stemming from political conflict, leaving affected business owners with no path to financial restitution, and criticized the absence of formal government support schemes to compensate impacted operators and reinforce the resilience of at-risk industrial facilities.

    The Beita raid unfolds against a backdrop of a historic surge in documented settler violence across the occupied West Bank. Data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) records 397 separate settler attacks resulting in physical harm or property destruction between October 1 and October 26 of this year, marking the highest monthly total the agency has logged since it began systematic tracking of such incidents in 2006. Separate data from the Palestinian government’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission documents 1,369 total settler attacks across the West Bank in October, representing a 111 percent year-on-month increase from September’s recorded figures.

  • Eisenkot’s ‘disaster bloc’ edges closer to Israel’s next government

    Eisenkot’s ‘disaster bloc’ edges closer to Israel’s next government

    On a Sunday in early November 2026, Israeli head of state President Isaac Herzog formally nominated Gadi Eisenkot, the leading challenger to long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to undertake the high-stakes task of assembling a stable governing coalition for the country. The announcement capped 14 consecutive days of paralyzing political deadlock that followed a ballot widely framed as the most consequential national election in Israel’s 78-year history, which failed to deliver any faction a clear parliamentary majority.

    Under Israel’s unique proportional representation system, which has never produced a single-party majority government across its entire history, the president holds discretion to assign coalition-forming duties to a nominee who does not lead the party that secured the most votes. In this instance, Netanyahu’s long-dominant Likud faction took the largest share of seats in the October 27, 2026 election, but fell short of the 61 seats required to command a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. Eisenkot’s collective opposition bloc also failed to hit that critical threshold, creating the unprecedented impasse. Notably, the two Arab-majority parties representing Israel’s 2 million Palestinian citizens — the Joint List and Ra’am — secured a record combined 19 Knesset seats, a historic high that has reshaped the entire political calculus of coalition building.

    This election marks the first time Israeli voters have cast ballots since the catastrophic October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack and the subsequent devastating 3-year war in Gaza, creating a uniquely fraught, high-stakes context for the political process that has left the country’s leadership void unresolved. Eisenkot, a former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff who only entered electoral politics in 2022 and founded his centrist Yashar party just 12 months ago, now has a statutory 28-day window to negotiate a working coalition, with a possible 14-day extension available if he can demonstrate tangible progress. The task before him is uniquely daunting: to unify a deeply fragmented set of opposition factions that have long held conflicting ideological positions, many of which explicitly promised during campaigning they would never enter a governing partnership with Arab-majority parties.

    To hit the 61-seat majority, Eisenkot’s proposed alliance of centrist and center-right parties — including Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad, Yair Golan’s Democrats, and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu — will almost certainly require formal or informal support from at least one of the two Arab-led factions, a compromise that runs directly counter to their pre-election public pledges. Ra’am has already publicly announced its willingness to back an Eisenkot-led government, but the 2021 precedent of a short-lived 12-month coalition that relied on Ra’am’s support collapsed under the weight of internal ideological tensions, casting doubt on the long-term viability of such a partnership. The 2018 Nation-State Law, which codifies that national self-determination in Israel is exclusive to Jewish people, creates additional structural barriers that make it legally and politically awkward for Arab parties to formally join a governing coalition.

    Adding another layer of complexity is the pivotal role of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, which have been core kingmakers in Netanyahu’s previous governing blocs, and whose non-negotiable demands around exemptions for ultra-Orthodox citizens from compulsory military service have long been a source of bitter national social division. Eisenkot, who has minimal national political experience and as recently as six months ago openly dismissed the idea of uniting disparate opposition factions and publicly criticized rival opposition leader Yair Lapid, faces widespread skepticism from Netanyahu’s Likud ranks, who have derided his loose collection of potential allies as a “disaster bloc.”

    Even if Eisenkot manages to clear the near-impossible hurdle of cobbling together a functional coalition, the incoming government will face cascading existential domestic and international challenges. Unresolved hostilities in Gaza, where Hamas retains significant armed capabilities, spreading regional conflict that now extends to Saudi Arabia, and escalating settler violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank all demand immediate coordinated policy action. The shifting landscape of U.S. politics, where Democratic control of both chambers of Congress during the remaining term of President Donald Trump has introduced unprecedented unpredictability to U.S.-Israel bilateral relations, adds another critical layer of external risk. Eisenkot has publicly acknowledged the scale of the task ahead, stating recently that “all of us will need to compromise” to break the deadlock, and vowing to do his utmost to be “worthy” of the historic mandate he has been granted.

  • ‘We woke up soaking wet’: Gaza’s displaced face another winter of floods and collapsed shelters

    ‘We woke up soaking wet’: Gaza’s displaced face another winter of floods and collapsed shelters

    As unforgiving winter storms swept across the besieged Gaza Strip in early November 2026, tens of thousands of displaced Palestinian families already grappling with three years of devastating Israeli military operations faced a new wave of life-threatening hardship. For 48-year-old Nahla al-Majdoub and her household of eight, the latest downpour marked the total destruction of the flimsy makeshift tent they had called home for nearly two years at Gaza’s port, after their original northern Gaza residence was flattened during Israel’s ground invasion.
    The family was fast asleep when the tempest struck, jolting awake to the roar of thunder and frigid rainwater gushing through gaps in their tent’s tattered tarpaulin, pooling rapidly across the muddy ground beneath them. Soaking wet and surrounded by rising water, Majdoub and her children were left screaming in helpless despair as she scrambled to bail out the incoming flood, a futile effort against the relentless downpour. When gale-force winds began tearing chunks of the tent’s covering loose, she called on neighbouring camp residents to help reinforce the structure and pile sand around its perimeter, but the damage was irreversible. As the family rushed to evacuate to a nearby neighbour’s sturdier shelter, the remaining tarpaulin ripped free entirely, and the tent collapsed with one of Majdoub’s daughters still trapped inside. Every single one of their meagre belongings – clothes, mattresses, and personal possessions – was completely waterlogged, leaving the family wearing the same damp, cold garments for four straight days after they found temporary refuge with local neighbours.
    This latest disaster compounds years of unthinkable suffering for Majdoub, who sustained critical injuries in an Israeli air strike back in October 2025 while out shopping for groceries for her family. Shrapnel from the missile tore through her intestines, requiring multiple emergency surgeries that left her dependent on costly weekly medication costing 170 shekels to manage her condition, a treatment she can no longer afford amid the enclave’s economic collapse. The persistent cold of the winter storm has amplified her chronic pain, and she lives in constant fear for her seven-year-old daughter Aya, who lives with diabetes and lacks access to consistent medical care or warm, safe shelter. “Our greatest dream right now is nothing more than a strong tent that can keep the rain out and shield us from the freezing cold,” Majdoub shared, noting that her family cannot afford to replace their shelter every time a winter storm hits, and often relies on the kindness of neighbours to feed her children.
    Thirty-three-year-old Sameh Doghomoush, his wife Sana, and their three young sons are another family pushed to the brink by the extreme weather. The family has been occupying their partially destroyed home in Gaza City’s al-Sabra neighbourhood since the start of the war, and after witnessing last year’s winter flooding, Doghomoush spent two days and his last remaining savings buying extra tarpaulins to patch gaping holes in his shattered roof and reinforce crumbling exterior walls, even positioning basins and pots under the largest leaks to catch rainwater. All of their careful preparation was rendered useless within hours of the first storm surge, as floodwaters poured through broken windows and the fractured roof, leaving the entire family soaked, shivering, and stranded in darkness through the night. All three of his young sons developed severe colds from exposure, and Doghomoush said his household has never received a single tent or emergency shelter supply from aid groups, despite repeated pleas for support. Before the war, the family lived comfortably in their 180-square-metre home, owned a thriving fish restaurant and a private car, and regularly took their children to amusement parks and bought them new clothes and school supplies. Today, he cannot even afford the basic food, warm clothing, or textbooks his children beg for, and lives in terror that his already structurally compromised home could collapse under the weight of the saturated soil, trapping his family inside. “We have endured death from bombardment, starvation, and helplessness for years – now we are fighting to survive the cold, too,” Doghomoush said, calling on the international community to pressure Israel to open border crossings and allow critical shelter supplies into the enclave.
    Official data from the Gaza Government Media Office confirms that more than 70,000 tents housing hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians were fully flooded in the first 12 hours of the recent storm, with collapsing sand embankments and toppling half-damaged walls killing five people, injuring dozens more, and leaving two others unaccounted for. Initial estimates place the total financial damage from the storm at over $3 million, with officials warning that tens of thousands of buildings already weakened by years of Israeli airstrikes now face imminent collapse as rainwater saturates the ground beneath their foundations. The statement noted that Israel has systematically destroyed over 90 percent of Gaza’s core infrastructure, including sewage networks, forcing displaced populations to crowd into high-risk displacement camps that are uniquely vulnerable to catastrophic flooding. Municipal civil defence teams are working around the clock to respond to the disaster, but are crippled by critical shortages of heavy equipment, fuel, and resources, with the volume of aid permitted to enter Gaza remaining a tiny fraction of what the 2.2 million residents of the enclave require. The Gaza Government Media Office issued an urgent appeal to the international community to move beyond symbolic statements of condemnation and take tangible action to force open border crossings, calling for an immediate shipment of more than 100,000 winter-resistant tents, tens of thousands of prefabricated temporary housing units, and construction materials to repair destroyed drainage and sewage systems.
    Independent Palestinian political analyst Talal Abu Rokbeh emphasized that the deliberate restriction of shelter supplies and other critical humanitarian aid by Israeli authorities is a deliberate tactic to escalate pressure on Gaza’s Palestinian population, while the international community’s prolonged silence has made it complicit in the ongoing human suffering. He noted that Israel is actively attempting to reframe the decades-long Palestinian struggle for self-determination and statehood as a purely humanitarian crisis, diverting global attention away from the political solutions required to end the conflict. Abu Rokbeh added that any meaningful shift in United States policy toward Gaza must be measured by concrete, on-the-ground milestones: the empowerment of the Palestinian technocratic committee to govern Gaza, the deployment of an international stabilization force, full Israeli withdrawal from the 70 percent of Gaza territory it has occupied in recent months, and a massive, sustained increase in allowed aid deliveries. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, roughly 65 percent of Gaza’s total population – around 1.4 million people – currently reside in flimsy tents or other makeshift, unprotected shelters as the harsh winter season progresses.

  • UK awards deals worth millions to firms linked to illegal Israeli settlements

    UK awards deals worth millions to firms linked to illegal Israeli settlements

    A joint probe by Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye has uncovered that the UK government has issued a total of £10.7 million (equivalent to $14.4 million) in public procurement contracts to multiple companies with documented links to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, a development that comes weeks after Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband formally unveiled strict, cross-government sanctions targeting settlement activity during a parliamentary address on 8 September.

    During his September speech, Miliband delivered a stark public warning to entities involved in settlement operations, stating explicitly: “To those who finance or facilitate illegal settlements, let me say this: you will face the full force of UK sanctions. Settlements are illegal.” Yet behind the scenes, government insiders confirm the full sanctions package has not yet been enacted, with a projected implementation timeline stretching up to nine months from the initial announcement.

    In the interim window between the public policy pledge and the rules coming into effect, public procurement approvals have already gone out to firms named on the United Nations official database of entities engaged in settlement-related activities. Two contracts totaling £87,900 ($118,000) were granted to Motorola Solutions and its local subsidiaries to supply communications technology for UK police forces. The UN has long flagged Motorola Solutions for its settlement ties, with multiple independent verifications confirming Israeli security forces deploy the company’s surveillance and communications hardware across security infrastructure in the occupied West Bank.

    The largest chunk of the awarded funding, roughly £10.4 million ($14.5 million) spread across 14 separate contracts, went to three subsidiaries of global construction materials giant Heidelberg Materials for road maintenance and resurfacing projects across England. The parent company’s Israeli arm, Hanson Israel, owns and operates the controversial Nahal Raba quarry in the West Bank, a site built entirely on land expropriated from adjacent Palestinian villages.

    Two smaller additional contracts were also issued in this period: an £84,000 ($113,000) award to Thomas & Adamson International Limited, a subsidiary of French engineering firm Egis, which the UN has listed for providing core utility and operational services that sustain illegal settlements, a designation Egis has formally disputed; and a £98,000 ($131,000) contract to Breas Medical, a firm owned by Chinese conglomerate Fosun International that also appears on the UN’s settlement activity registry.

    Internal government tensions over the shape of the upcoming sanctions regime have also come to light, per anonymous senior UK officials who spoke to Middle East Eye on condition of anonymity last month. Insiders note that even if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaves office, the current UK administration remains committed to rolling out the full set of sanctions, including restrictions on firms that support settlement construction and real estate expansion. But multiple cross-party sources from government and the ruling Labour Party have raised alarms that a cohort of civil servants are erecting administrative “blockages” in an explicit attempt to weaken the final sanctions framework. Leaks from inside the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office confirm some officials are pushing to narrow the sanctions scope to target only Israeli firms tied to settlements, excluding complicit British companies entirely. These same officials have also proposed carve-outs for any firms that operate primarily within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, even if they run secondary operations in occupied Palestinian territory. If adopted, these revisions would drastically curtail the reach of Miliband’s original announcement, limiting sanctions only to entities whose core business is conducted exclusively inside illegal West Bank settlements.

    Despite the internal pushback, sources close to the Foreign Secretary confirm Miliband is unwavering in his commitment to implement the full, unwatered-down sanctions package as initially outlined. When fully enacted, the rules will mandate all UK banks, pension funds and asset managers to divest holdings in companies operating in illegal settlements, and bar all British financial institutions from issuing mortgages, insurance policies or any other financial products that directly support settlement expansion.

    Requests for comment submitted to the UK Cabinet Office regarding the timing of the public contracts and the ongoing internal disputes over sanctions implementation have not received a response at the time of publication.

  • Missiles intercepted over Saudi Arabia as Houthi attacks prompt emergency measures

    Missiles intercepted over Saudi Arabia as Houthi attacks prompt emergency measures

    Recent weeks have witnessed a sharp, daily surge in armed exchanges between the Saudi-led military coalition and Yemen’s Houthi movement, officially known as Ansar Allah, triggering sweeping emergency precautionary measures across Saudi territory and exacerbating a long-running humanitarian catastrophe inside Yemen.

    The Saudi-led coalition, which has waged a years-long military campaign against Houthi forces in Yemen, confirmed that its air defense systems successfully neutralized multiple incoming ballistic missiles targeting both the kingdom’s southern border regions and the capital city of Riyadh, in addition to shooting down an explosive-laden drone over the oil-rich Eastern Province, a critical hub for Saudi Arabia’s energy infrastructure.

    The wave of persistent Houthi aerial assaults has upended routine civilian life across Saudi Arabia’s most populated regions. In an official notice distributed to parents on Monday, Riyadh education authorities announced a mandatory shift to fully remote learning for all city public schools starting the following Tuesday, as a protective precaution, with no public timeline provided for a return to in-person classroom instruction. For three straight consecutive days starting that Tuesday, Riyadh residents received urgent mobile phone emergency alerts notifying them of active aerial threats and instructing all civilians to immediately move to secure indoor shelter; each alert was lifted within minutes after air defense units eliminated the incoming hazards. Large swathes of Saudi private and public sector employers have already transitioned to long-term remote work arrangements to minimize civilian exposure to potential strikes. The disruption to daily life follows a deadly Houthi assault targeting Riyadh’s international airport on October 11, which prompted a full temporary suspension of flight operations. While a limited, partial resumption of commercial flights has since been permitted, Houthi officials have issued a public warning declaring the majority of Saudi Arabia’s national airspace unsafe for civilian air travel.

    The tit-for-tat escalation of hostilities has inflicted catastrophic new harm on Yemeni civilian populations, worsening one of the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crises. Houthi-controlled Yemeni health authorities, speaking via the pro-Houthi Almasirah television network, reported that a weekend Saudi aerial strike on the Alshariyah neighborhood in the Bani Hushaysh district, east of Yemen’s capital Sanaa, killed at least 44 people and wounded 40 more. Among the confirmed fatalities are 21 children and 10 women, according to the Sanaa-based Ministry of Health, which added that local search and rescue teams are still working to locate missing civilians trapped under collapsed building rubble. The intensification of Saudi airstrikes across populated Yemeni areas in recent weeks has pushed hundreds of thousands of additional people into forced internal displacement, stretching already depleted humanitarian aid resources to breaking point across the war-torn country.

  • Israel kills 14-year-old Palestinian boy in West Bank, wounds two others in Gaza

    Israel kills 14-year-old Palestinian boy in West Bank, wounds two others in Gaza

    Palestinian health authorities confirmed on Tuesday that a 14-year-old Palestinian teenager, identified as Moataz Iyad, was fatally shot by Israeli military personnel during a security operation in the village of Burqa, located in the occupied West Bank’s northwest region outside Nablus. According to official statements, Israeli security forces are currently withholding the minor’s remains, preventing the family from conducting a proper burial. Two additional teenage Palestinians sustained gunshot wounds in the same incident: a 17-year-old suffered life-threatening injuries to his abdomen and pelvis, while a 19-year-old was struck in the hand, as verified by the Palestinian official news agency Wafa. Witness and agency reports further detail that Israeli troops detained the slain boy’s father on site, blocked emergency ambulances from accessing the wounded for a critical window, and briefly took three volunteer paramedics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society into custody. The Israeli military formally acknowledged that its soldiers discharged live fire in the Burqa area, releasing an official statement claiming the gunfire was deployed to “neutralize a threat” and that multiple confirmed hits were recorded during the exchange.

    This deadly incident unfolds against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of settler violence sweeping across the occupied West Bank, where coordinated Israeli military raids and extremist settler assaults have inflicted widespread casualties on Palestinian communities, displaced entire families, and destroyed civilian property. Data compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) documents more than 2,060 settler attacks resulting in Palestinian injuries or property destruction across roughly 300 West Bank communities between the start of 2026 and October 12 of this year. The rate of violence has spiked sharply in recent weeks: between September 29 and October 12 alone, OCHA recorded 244 separate attacks impacting 113 communities, averaging 17 violent incidents per day. During this two-week window, five Palestinians were killed and 246 others – 22 of them children – sustained injuries at the hands of Israeli forces or settlers, with three of the fatalities directly attributed to settler assaults. Independent conflict monitoring group the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) noted in a September 2026 analysis that the current year has already become the most violent on record for settler-related hostilities in the West Bank since the organization began tracking incidents in 2016. ACLED data shows that cases of settlers opening fire with live weapons reached 203 in the first nine months of 2026, surpassing the full-year total of 185 recorded for 2025. A separate October 2026 report from UNICEF confirms that at least 1,216 Palestinians, including 263 children, have been killed in the West Bank (encompassing East Jerusalem) since the outbreak of the latest regional conflict in October 2023, with thousands more sustaining permanent injuries.

    Parallel to the West Bank developments, new reports of Israeli ceasefire violations have emerged from the Gaza Strip, 12 months after a formal truce was implemented on October 10, 2025. Local medical and on-the-ground sources speaking to the Anadolu Agency confirmed that Israeli gunfire wounded two Palestinians in southern Gaza on the same Tuesday as the West Bank killing: one was a fisherman targeted off the coast of Khan Younis, and the second was a young boy near a displacement camp’s tent settlement in the Batn al-Samin area. Wafa’s independent reporting corroborated the attack on fishing vessels, noting that Israeli naval craft opened fire on small fishing boats operating off Khan Younis, wounding the fisherman and damaging two vessels, while Anadolu’s sources added that two of the boats were completely set ablaze. Multiple witnesses also reported sustained artillery shelling and heavy live gunfire in zones south and east of Khan Younis, while local administrative sources confirmed that Israeli military vehicles carried out a ground incursion southeast of the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza, during which troops demolished multiple Palestinian homes and other civilian infrastructure in the surrounding area. Gaza’s Ministry of Health released updated figures on Monday documenting that more than 1,613 Palestinians have been killed and 5,833 wounded by Israeli attacks in Gaza since the 2025 ceasefire went into effect. Cumulative data tracking the full scale of the conflict in Gaza since October 2023 shows the total Palestinian death toll has now exceeded 74,000, with over 175,000 people recorded as injured. This report is part of Middle East Eye’s independent, on-the-ground coverage of the Middle East, North Africa, and adjacent regions.

  • Arrests made in Mohamed Al Fayed probe in France, police say

    Arrests made in Mohamed Al Fayed probe in France, police say

    A cross-border collaborative probe led by British and French law enforcement agencies has resulted in the first ever arrests linked to widespread sexual abuse and human trafficking allegations against the late Mohamed Al Fayed, former owner of luxury retail landmark Harrods and Paris’ iconic Ritz Hotel. As confirmed in a confidential Metropolitan Police communication shared directly with survivors of the alleged abuse, coordinated raids unfolded across three high-profile properties on 13 and 14 October 2026, with UK Met officers deployed to France to participate alongside their French counterparts.

    The targeted locations included the world-famous Ritz Paris in the city’s 1st arrondissement, the late tycoon’s former Saint-Tropez residence Villa Sainte-Thérèse, and the historic Villa Windsor in Paris’ 16th arrondissement, a property once associated with the British royal family that is still held by the Al Fayed estate. French authorities confirmed that multiple suspects were taken into custody for formal questioning, with custody restrictions lifted immediately post-interview to allow forensic teams to conduct full analysis of large volumes of digital evidence and physical materials seized during the searches. The entire investigation remains under the official oversight of the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office, with ongoing close liaison between French investigative teams and UK law enforcement counterparts.

    The case first gained widespread public attention in September 2024, when a BBC documentary and accompanying podcast published allegations from over 20 women detailing sexual assault and violent abuse at the hands of Al Fayed, with multiple survivors describing attacks occurring at the very properties targeted in the October 2026 raids: one woman recounted being sexually assaulted at the Ritz Paris, while another shared testimony of being raped at Villa Windsor. In the two years following the documentary’s release, more than 400 additional alleged victims and witnesses have come forward to legal representatives supporting survivors of the abuse.

    Survivor advocacy groups have responded to the breakthrough operation with a mix of cautious celebration and continued calls for more rigorous action. The Justice for Fayed and Harrods Survivors coalition hailed the joint operation as a landmark, long-overdue development, while urging authorities to extend the same level of thorough investigative scrutiny to every remaining property once owned by Al Fayed across all jurisdictions, to ensure no relevant evidence of coordinated offending is missed. The group emphasized that its core priority is identifying and pursuing accountability for every individual who enabled, covered up, or assisted Al Fayed’s pattern of abuse during his decades at the helm of his luxury property and retail empire. Separately, advocacy organization No One Above highlighted that French authorities have classified the case as a structured organized human trafficking probe led by specialist investigative units, and publicly called for the UK’s Metropolitan Police to cede control of the parallel UK-based investigation to the National Crime Agency, arguing that the Met has failed to match the rigor of the French investigation two years after the first public allegations were released.

  • Managerial ‘inconsistency’ hurting Ghana – Hughton

    Managerial ‘inconsistency’ hurting Ghana – Hughton

    As Ghana’s men’s national football team, the Black Stars, heads into two high-stakes back-to-back 2027 Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) qualifiers against Somalia, the squad is operating under the temporary leadership of Kim Bjorkegren – the Swedish coach who previously led Ghana’s women’s national side, the Black Queens, since January 2025. The interim appointment follows the shock mutual departure of Portuguese manager Carlos Queiroz, whose second, very short-lived tenure at the helm ended after just a handful of matches that yielded two consecutive opening Group C defeats: a 2-0 loss to Ivory Coast in Bouake, and a chastening 4-2 home defeat to The Gambia in Accra last month.

    Veteran former Black Stars head coach Chris Hughton has now called for sweeping changes to end the crippling cycle of short-term managerial churn that has plagued the West African football powerhouse for nearly six years. Speaking to BBC Sport Africa on the sidelines of the Best of Africa Awards, Hughton emphasized that consistent, long-term coaching tenures are non-negotiable for sustained team performance. “When you have inconsistency in the amount of time a manager stays, it’s never good,” Hughton noted. “You want that consistency in the players, and the players want that consistency in what they see in the manager.” He added that frequent coaching sackings breed a corrosive culture in squads, where players adopt a dismissive attitude knowing a poor run of results will lead to the manager being removed rather than the group taking collective accountability for performance.

    Queiroz’s chaotic recent tenure underscores the GFA’s ongoing managerial missteps. The 73-year-old, a former long-time assistant to Manchester United legend Sir Alex Ferguson, was first appointed by the Ghana Football Association (GFA) in April, where he led the Black Stars to the last 32 of the recent FIFA World Cup, earning a creditable goalless draw against England in the group stage before exiting the tournament after a narrow 1-0 loss to Colombia. He announced his departure shortly after that World Cup exit, only to be unexpectedly reappointed by the GFA in early September, with the federation hailing his decades of high-level international experience leading national sides including Portugal, Iran, South Africa, Egypt, Colombia, Qatar and Oman. His second spell lasted less than a month, cut short after the two disastrous opening Afcon qualifiers that left Ghana at the bottom of their group.

    Hughton, whose own time leading the Black Stars was also truncated, knows firsthand the challenges of short tenures. The former Tottenham Hotspur defender, who won two FA Cups and a UEFA Cup during his playing career and managed top-flight English sides including Newcastle United, Norwich City and Brighton & Hove Albion, was first named the GFA’s technical director in February 2022, promoted to head coach a year later, and sacked in January 2024 after the team failed to escape their group at the 2023 Ivory Coast Afcon. He is just one of five different full-time managers to lead the Black Stars over the past six years, alongside Charles Akonnor, Milovan Rajevac, Otto Addo and Queiroz – with Addo even taking on two separate spells in charge during that window. The last manager to hold the Black Stars post for a sustained period was Kwesi Appiah, now head coach of Sudan, who spent 33 months in the role between April 2017 and January 2020. No Ghana manager has come close to that length of tenure since legendary Afcon-winning coach Fred Osam-Duodu in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

    Hughton warned that Ghana now faces a very real risk of missing a second consecutive Afcon finals, after failing to qualify for the 2025 edition entirely, a stark fall from grace for a side that was long considered one of Africa’s continental heavyweights. He noted that the country’s decline has been accelerated by underinvestment in domestic football infrastructure and a surge in competitiveness across the entire African football landscape. “Many years ago Ghana were at a level that was, if not the best team in Africa, certainly right up there,” Hughton explained. “You’ve seen the emergence of so many other good African nations that have made the competition levels that much higher.” He called for direct government investment to revitalize the struggling local domestic league, which once produced a steady pipeline of elite homegrown talent. Today, Hughton points out, local pitches are poorly maintained, fan attendance at domestic matches has collapsed, and local supporters prioritize the English Premier League over their own national league, even as they remain deeply loyal to the Black Stars.

    Ghana’s recent World Cup record remains a bright spot amid the broader turbulence: the side has qualified for five of the last six World Cup tournaments dating back to their 2006 debut in Germany, advancing to the knockout stage three times including a historic quarter-final run in 2010 in South Africa. The Black Stars also qualified smoothly for the upcoming 2026 World Cup co-hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States, losing only one of 10 group matches under former manager Otto Addo to top their qualifying pool. Queiroz’s early Afcon qualifying woes were compounded by a spate of high-profile player withdrawals, with first-choice stars including Mohammed Kudus, Antoine Semenyo, Jordan Ayew and Baba Rahman pulling out of the initial squad, followed by multiple replacement call-ups. Hughton noted that mass player unavailability is a major setback for any side, and that the GFA must work to avoid such disruptions going forward.

    With the team’s 2027 Afcon qualifying hopes hanging by a thread, interim coach Bjorkegren faces immense pressure to deliver maximum points from the two upcoming fixtures against Somalia. As Ghana’s 43-year wait for a first Afcon title since 1982 drags on, Hughton argues that locking in a stable, long-term coaching structure is the critical first step to rebuilding the once-dominant Black Stars program.

  • Australia doomed to live with stench of sandpapergate

    Australia doomed to live with stench of sandpapergate

    A long-simmering scandal that seared the reputation of Australian cricket eight years ago has exploded back into public view, triggered by high-profile batter Usman Khawaja’s newly released autobiography *Sabr*, which revives unresolved questions about the full scope of the 2018 Cape Town ball-tampering incident once dubbed “sandpapergate”.
    The 2018 saga, which saw Cameron Bancroft caught hiding sandpaper to rough up the match ball, resulted in heavy, career-altering bans for then-captain Steve Smith, David Warner, and Bancroft himself, and prompted the tearful resignation of head coach Darren Lehmann. For years, rumors have swirled that the three sanctioned figures were far from the only members of the 2018 touring squad aware of the tampering plot, but no public figure with direct first-hand experience had ever laid those suspicions out formally until Khawaja’s book launch this week.
    Careful to avoid explicit individual accusations and potential legal repercussions, Khawaja frames his claims around collective team accountability, stating repeatedly across book excerpts, Instagram posts, and a Tuesday interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the full 2018 squad bears shared responsibility for the incident, rather than letting the blame rest solely on the three penalized players. He notes he was never interviewed as part of Cricket Australia’s (CA) original 2018 investigation, and his motivation for speaking out stems in large part from longstanding loyalty to his childhood friend Warner, who bore one of the harshest penalties of the scandal.
    The revelations have split public and player opinion, creating a clear stalemate eight years on. Former fast bowler Chadd Sayers, a member of the 2018 Cape Town squad, has come out in full support of Khawaja and Warner, while key figures including ex-coach Darren Lehmann and star pace bowler Mitchell Starc have reaffirmed their longstanding denials of any prior knowledge of the tampering plot. CA chief executive Todd Greenberg publicly stated Tuesday that he sees no “compelling reason” to reopen the original investigation, a position that has drawn widespread criticism given Khawaja’s unconfirmed allegation that a member of the 2018 backroom staff actively encouraged Bancroft to tamper with the ball — a claim that has never been formally probed, and which former assistant coach David Saker (named by many observers as the referenced staff member) has previously pushed to have addressed via the full, never-released Cape Town investigation files.
    The allegations cast a particularly long shadow over Australia’s legendary current quartet of fast and spin bowlers: Mitchell Starc, the all-time leading left-arm Test wicket-taker, Nathan Lyon, cricket’s most successful orthodox finger-spinner, Josh Hazlewood, and current captain Pat Cummins, who have combined to take nearly 1700 Test wickets and lead Australia to recent Ashes and World Cup triumphs. The four have stood by a 2021 joint statement asserting they had no knowledge that a foreign substance was brought onto the field to alter the ball’s condition, but critics have questioned how elite professional bowlers, who closely monitor ball condition to plan their deliveries, could have missed the distinct swirling marks Khawaja says sandpaper leaves on leather. Former Australia captain Michael Clarke has warned that continued inaction to resolve these open questions will leave Australian fans unable to “trust what’s real”, pointing out that two consecutive Australian captains have already lost their posts in disgrace over unrelated off-field and on-field scandals. For now, the saga leaves Australian cricket trapped in a persistent “sandpaper limbo”, with no clear path to resolving the unaddressed claims, no public release of the original investigation records, and a lingering reputational stench the sport’s governing body has so far declined to fully eradicate.

  • French wartime resistance heroine Solange Alexandre dies aged 104

    French wartime resistance heroine Solange Alexandre dies aged 104

    One of France’s last surviving World War Two Resistance icons, Solange Alexandre, passed away at the age of 104 at a care facility in Le Mans, leaving behind a legendary legacy of grassroots anti-Nazi resistance that defied both gender norms and the brutality of the German occupation. A rare female commander in the French underground movement, Alexandre built and led her own 30-person combat network alongside her future first husband, orchestrating acts of sabotage, sheltering stranded Allied aircrew, and leading direct assaults on occupying forces in the wake of the 1944 D-Day Normandy landings.
    Born Solange Dubuisson in 1922 in the western French department of Sarthe, Alexandre was raised in a deeply patriotic household scarred by the losses of the First World War: her mother’s first husband had been killed in combat, and her own father sustained severe wounds in 1917, imbuing her from childhood with an unshakable commitment to French sovereignty. The turning point for her came in June 1940, when she tuned into General Charles de Gaulle’s historic London radio broadcast urging the French people to reject surrender to Nazi Germany. Though she had never heard de Gaulle’s name before, she resolved immediately to join the fight, writing later in her memoirs that the call to action felt like a personal mandate.
    She was soon recruited by a Tunisian-born French army veteran and family friend, Saïd Belhaffaf, who was already active in the Resistance. Operating under the codename Corlay, she traversed the rural roads surrounding Le Mans exclusively by bicycle – the only viable mode of transport in an era of strict petrol rationing and no mobile communications – to collect intelligence, deliver top-secret messages between Resistance cells, and evade German patrols. In 1943, she met her first husband Guy Déliot, a gendarme who had deserted his post rather than carry out orders to arrest Jewish civilians targeted by the Nazi regime.
    As the long-awaited Allied invasion loomed in April 1944, the pair established the Pas-de-Boeuf Resistance network near the town of Ruillé-sur-Loir, retreating to hidden forest encampments known locally as the maquis, where sympathetic local farmers supplied their small unit of roughly 30 fighters. The group included escapees from German forced labour programmes, survivors of a previously destroyed Resistance cell, and two downed Allied airmen – one American and one Canadian. Alexandre often recalled that she narrowly avoided capture by the Gestapo on two separate occasions, slipping away from raiding parties before they could identify her as a Resistance leader.
    In the months following the D-Day landings, her unit carried out targeted sabotage of German supply lines and engaged occupying troops directly, and she went on to participate in the September 1944 liberation of Tours. By the end of the war, she had earned the rank of sub-lieutenant in the French Interior Forces (FFI), the official armed wing of the domestic Resistance.
    In the post-war decades, Alexandre worked as a schoolteacher and accompanied her first husband on his postings as a gendarmerie officer across multiple French overseas territories, until he was killed in the line of duty in Martinique in 1960. She remarried in 1981, and spent much of her later life advocating for the memory of ordinary Resistance fighters who never received public recognition for their sacrifices. Notably, she twice rejected France’s highest state honour, the Légion d’Honneur, insisting that she had only fulfilled her basic duty as a citizen and that many of her fallen comrades were far more deserving of the award. She finally agreed to accept the decoration in 2024, telling officials at the ceremony that she saw it as a tribute to all uncelebrated Resistance members rather than a personal accolade, noting that she was proud to receive it even if she only had a short time left to live.
    Following news of her death, President Emmanuel Macron led a wave of national tributes, sharing a message on social media that read: “She said she only ever did her duty. But her duty was our freedom. France will never forget. Thank you.”