Foreign News
Israeli forces pushing into south Gaza
Israeli ground forces are pushing into southern Gaza, after three days of heavy bombardment.
Initial reports from Israeli army radio effectively confirmed Israel has launched a ground operation to the north of Khan Younis. The BBC has also verified images of an Israeli tank operating near the city.
The head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) later told troops the IDF was also fighting “strongly and thoroughly” in south Gaza. Lt General Herzi Halevi was speaking to reservists from the Gaza division about military objectives and the IDF’s killing of Hamas commanders. He told the soldiers: “We fought strongly and thoroughly in the northern Gaza Strip, and we are also doing it now in the southern Gaza Strip”.
An IDF spokesman later confirmed Israel “continues to expand the ground incursion” across all of Gaza, including troops “conducting face to face battles with terrorists”.
Since a week-long ceasefire ended on Friday, Israel has resumed a large-scale bombing campaign on Gaza, which residents of Khan Younis have described as the heaviest wave of attacks so far.
The seven-day truce saw Hamas release 110 hostages being held in Gaza in return for 240 Palestinians being released from Israeli prisons.
On Sunday morning, the Israeli army issued evacuation orders for several districts of Khan Younis, urging people to leave immediately.
Israeli authorities believe members of the Hamas leadership are hiding in the city, where hundreds of thousands of people have been sheltering after fleeing fighting in the north in the early stages of the war.
A UN official has described a “degree of panic” he has not seen before in a Gaza hospital, after the Israeli military shifted the focus of its offensive to the south.
James Elder, from the children’s agency Unicef, described Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Younis as a “warzone”.
An adviser to Israel’s prime minister said Israel is making “maximum effort” to avoid killing civilians.
Mr Elder told the BBC he could hear constant large explosions close to the Nasser hospital and children were arriving with head injuries, terrible burns, and shrapnel from recent blasts. “It’s a hospital I’ve gone to regularly and the children know me now, the families know me now. Those same people are grabbing my hand, or grabbing my shirt saying ‘please take us somewhere safe. Where is safe?’.They are unfortunately asking a question to which the only answer is there is nowhere safe. And that includes for them, as they know, that hospital,” he said.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says more than 500 people have been killed since the bombing resumed. More than 15,500 people have been killed in the strip since the war began, the ministry also said.
Mohammed Ghalayini, a British-Palestinian who has stayed in Gaza, said the situation in the city was “beyond catastrophic”. “People have been, for 50 days or more, withstanding brutal Israeli onslaught and are very low on all resources – food, water, power and the sanitation and the waste services,” he told the BBC by phone, before the connection cut off.
The air pollution expert, who normally lives in Manchester, arrived in Gaza for a three-month visit to see his mother shortly before the 7 October attacks.
Israel began its retaliatory bombing of Gaza following Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel on 7 October, which saw around 1,200 people killed and 240 taken hostage.
Rockets have also been regularly fired at Israel from Gaza since fighting resumed on Friday. A 22-year-old man in the city of Holon, near Tel Aviv, was treated for minor shrapnel injuries on Saturday.
Hundreds of thousands of people have already fled the fighting to take shelter in Khan Younis, after Israel told them to leave the north of the strip.
The latest UN update says around 1.8 million people are internally displaced in Gaza.
Speaking to the BBC, the UN’s human rights chief, Filippo Grandi, said Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are being “pushed more and more towards a narrow corner of what is already a very narrow territory”.
The IDF has begun posting maps of areas set to be attacked online. It says these maps, along with other measures like phone calls and leaflets being dropped on Gaza by plane, will warn people to evacuate.
Speaking to the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s senior adviser Mark Regev said civilians are not targets and protecting them is made more difficult by Hamas “embedding its military terror machine” in civilian neighbourhoods. He says the IDF are trying to be “as surgical as we can in a very difficult combat situation”, and has given advance warning of attacks.
Separately, the IDF say they have destroyed 500 “terror tunnel” shafts used by Hamas in Gaza, out of the 800 they say have been found so far.
It also said around 10,000 air strikes on “terror targets” have been carried out by the air force “under the guidance of IDF soldiers on the ground” since the war began.
(BBC)
Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who snapped one of the most famous photographs taken in outer space, has died at the age of 90.
Officials say a small plane he was flying crashed into the water north of Seattle, Washington.
Anders’ son Greg confirmed that his father was flying the small plane, and that his body was recovered on Friday afternoon. “The family is devastated. He was a great pilot. He will be missed,” a statement from the family reads.
Anders – who was a lunar module pilot on the Apollo 8 mission – took the iconic Earthrise photograph, one of the most memorable and inspirational images of Earth from space.
Taken on Christmas Eve during the 1968 mission, the first crewed space flight to leave Earth and reach the Moon, the picture shows the planet rising above the horizon from the barren lunar surface.
Anders later described it as his most significant contribution to the space programme.
The image is widely credited with motivating the global environmental movement and leading to the creation of Earth Day, an annual event to promote activism and awareness of caring for the planet.
Speaking of the moment, Anders said: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing that we discovered was the Earth.”
Officials said on Friday that Anders crashed his plane around 11:40PDT (1940BST).
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said the 90-year-old was flying a Beechcraft A A 45 – also known as a T-34. The agency said that the plane crashed about 80ft (25m) from the coast of Jones Island.
Anders also served as the backup pilot to the Apollo 11 mission, the name of the effort that led to the first Moon landing on July 24, 1969.
Following Anders’ retirement from the space programme in 1969, the former astronaut largely worked in the aerospace industry for several decades. He also served as US Ambassador to Norway for a year in the 1970s.
But he is best remembered for the Apollo 8 mission and the iconic photograph he took from space.
“In 1968, during Apollo 8, Bill Anders offered to humanity among the deepest of gifts an astronaut can give. He traveled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves,” Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
Mark Kelly, a former astronaut who now serves as a US Senator for the state of Arizona, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that Anders “inspired me and generations of astronauts and explorers. My thoughts are with his family and friends”.
[BBC]
A Chinese spacecraft carrying rock and soil samples from the far side of the Moon has lifted off from the lunar surface to start its journey back to Earth, according to state media.
The achievement on Tuesday is a world first and the latest leap for Beijing’s decades-old space programme, which aims to send a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030.
The Xinhua News Agency, citing the China National Space Administration (CNSA), said that the ascender of the Chang’e-6 probe took off at 7:38am local time on Tuesday (23:38 GMT) and entered a preset orbit around the moon.
It described the move as “an unprecedented feat in human lunar exploration history”.
The Chang’e-6 probe was launched last month and its lander touched down on the far side of the Moon on Sunday. It used a drill and robotic arm to dig up soil on and below the Moon’s surface, according to Xinhua.
After successfully gathering its samples, the Chang’e-6 unfurled China’s national flag for the first time on the far side of the Moon, it said.
The agency cited the CNSA as saying that the spacecraft stowed the samples it had gathered in a container inside the ascender of the probe as planned.
[Aljazeera]
China says its uncrewed craft has successfully landed on the far side of the Moon – an unexplored place almost no-one tries to go.
The Chang’e 6 touched down in the South Pole-Aitken Basin at 06:23 Beijing time on Sunday morning (22:23 GMT Saturday), the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said.
Launched on 3 May, the mission aims to collect precious rock and soil from this region for the first time in history. The probe could extract some of the Moon’s oldest rocks from a huge crater on its South Pole.
The landing was fraught with risks, because it is very difficult to communicate with spacecraft once they reach the far side of the Moon. China is the only country to have achieved the feat before, landing its Chang’e-4 in 2019.
After launching from Wenchang Space Launch Center, the Chang’e 6 spacecraft had been orbiting the Moon waiting to land. The lander component of the mission then separated from the orbiter to touch down on the side of the Moon that faces permanently away from Earth.
During the descent, an autonomous visual obstacle avoidance system was used to automatically detect obstacles, with a visible light camera selecting a comparatively safe landing area based on the brightness and darkness of the lunar surface, the CNSA was quoted as saying by state-run Xinhua news agency.
The lander hovered about 100m (328ft) above the safe landing area, and used a laser 3D scanner before a slow vertical descent. The operation was supported by the Queqiao-2 relay satellite, the CNSA said.
Chinese state media described the successful landing as an “historic moment”. The state broadcaster said “applause erupted at the Beijing Aerospace Flight Control Center” when the Chang’e landing craft touched down on the Moon early on Sunday morning.
The lander should spend up to three days gathering materials from the surface in an operation the CNSA said would involve “many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty”. “Everyone is very excited that we might get a look at these rocks no-one has ever seen before,” explains Professor John Pernet-Fisher, who specialises in lunar geology at the University of Manchester.
He has analysed other lunar rock brought back on the American Apollo mission and previous Chinese missions. But he says the chance to analyse rock from a completely different area of the Moon could answer fundamental questions about how planets form.
Most of the rocks collected so far are volcanic, similar to what we might find in Iceland or Hawaii. But the material on the far side would have a different chemistry . “It would help us answer those really big questions, like how are planets formed, why do crusts form, what is the origin of water in the solar system?” the professor says.
The mission aims to collect about 2kg (4.4lb) of material using a drill and mechanical arm, according to the CNSA.
The South Pole–Aitken basin, an impact crater, is one of the largest known in the solar system.
From there, the probe could gather material that came from deep inside the lunar mantle – the inner core of the Moon – Prof Pernet-Fisher says.
The Moon’s South Pole is the next frontier in lunar missions – countries are keen to understand the region because there is a good chance it has ice.
The capsule in the last Chinese moon mission, Chang’e 5, brought back soil and rocks in 2020 (BBC)
Access to water would significantly boost the chances of successfully establishing a human base on the Moon for scientific research.
If the mission succeeds, the craft will return to Earth with the precious samples on board a special return capsule.
The material will be kept in special conditions to try to keep it as pristine as possible.
Scientists in China will be given the first chance to analyse the rocks, and later researchers around the world will be able to apply for the opportunity too.
This is the second time China has launched a mission to collect samples from the Moon.
In 2020 Chang’e 5 brought back 1.7kg of material from an area called Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon’s near side.
China is planning three more uncrewed missions this decade as it looks for water on the Moon and investigates setting up a permanent base there.
Beijing’s broader strategy aims to see a Chinese astronaut walk on the moon by around 2030.
The US also aims to put astronauts back on the moon, with Nasa aiming to launch its Artemis 3 mission in 2026.
(BBC)
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