Here is a summary of today's events so far:
Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli forces killed at least 12 people on Monday, including six in a clinic housing Palestinians displaced after 21 months of war.
US envoy Thomas Barrack said Monday he was satisfied by the Lebanese authorities’ response to a request to disarm Hezbollah, which was heavily weakened in a recent war with Israel.
Israel and Hamas are set to hold indirect talks in Qatar for a second day on Monday, aimed at securing a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza, ahead of a meeting in Washington between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.
Israel’s military said Monday it had apprehended members of an Iran-backed cell in southern Syria, the second such operation it has announced in the past week.
Israel’s military launched airstrikes early Monday targeting ports and facilities held by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, with the rebels responding with missile fire targeting Israel.
In a joint statement from the opening of the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, the leaders of the BRICS group of developing nations called attacks against Iran’s “civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities” a “violation of international law”.
We are now closing this blog but we will be covering the meeting between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu later at the White House in our US politics blog which you can follow here
Updated
Executions in Saudi Arabia surged last year to a record high, Amnesty International said Monday, as activists increasingly warn about the kingdom’s use of the death penalty in nonviolent drug cases.
Saudi Arabia executed 345 people last year, the highest number ever recorded by Amnesty in over three decades of reporting. In the first six months of this year alone, 180 people have been put to death, the group said, signaling that record likely will again be broken.
This year, about two-thirds of those executed were convicted on non-lethal drug charges, the activist group Reprieve said separately. Amnesty also has raised similar concerns about executions in drug cases.
Saudi Arabia has not offered any comment on why it increasingly employs the death penalty in the kingdom. Saudi officials did not respond to detailed questions from The Associated Press about the executions and why it is using the death penalty for nonviolent drug cases.
