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Israel’s Netanyahu Says Iran Will ‘Pay Heavy Price’ After Hospital Hit

Published

4 months ago

June 19, 2025

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran would “pay a heavy price” after a hospital in southern Israel was hit during an Iranian missile attack on Thursday, while his defence minister said Iran’s supreme leader would be “held accountable”.

“This morning, Iran’s terrorist dictators fired missiles at Soroka Hospital… and at civilians in the centre of the country. We will make the tyrants in Tehran pay a heavy price,” Netanyahu said in a post on X.

The Soroka Hospital in the southern town of Beersheba was left in flames following an early morning barrage of “dozens” of Iranian ballistic missiles, with impacts also reported in two Israeli towns close to coastal hub Tel Aviv.

Speaking at the scene of the hospital, director Shlomi Kodesh said that a surgical building which had been evacuated in the past few days was hit, adding that 40 people had sustained injuries.

“Several wards were completely demolished and there is extensive damage across the entire hospital with damage to buildings, structures, windows, ceilings across the medical centre,” he told journalists.

Iran said it was targeting an Israeli military and intelligence base, not the health facility.

The latest escalation came on the seventh day of deadly exchanges between the two countries, with US President Donald Trump maintaining suspense about whether Washington will enter the war alongside Israel.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has rejected Trump’s demand for an “unconditional surrender”, despite claims from the US leader that “Iran’s got a lot of trouble and they want to negotiate”.

– ‘Never surrender’ –

Trump has left his intentions on joining the conflict deliberately ambiguous, saying Wednesday: “I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

“The next week is going to be very big,” he added, without further details.

Any US involvement would be expected to involve the bombing of a crucial underground Iranian nuclear facility in Fordow, for which special bunker-busting bombs have been developed.

The White House said Trump would receive an intelligence briefing on Thursday, a US holiday. Top US diplomat Marco Rubio is set meet his British counterpart for talks expected to focus on the conflict.

“I have ideas as to what to do, but I haven’t made a final (decision),” Trump said. “I like to make the final decision one second before it’s due, because things change. Especially with war.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had told aides on Tuesday he had approved attack plans but was holding off to see if Iran would give up its nuclear programme.

Trump told reporters that Iranian officials “want to come to the White House”, a claim denied by Tehran.

The US president had favoured a diplomatic route to end Iran’s nuclear programme, seeking a deal to replace the 2015 agreement he tore up in his first term.

But since Israel unleashed the campaign against Iran last week, Trump has stood behind the key US ally.

– Nuclear sites –

On Thursday morning, Israel said it had carried out dozens of fresh raids on Iranian targets overnight, including the partially built Arak nuclear reactor and a nuclear facility in Natanz that has been struck previously.

The Israeli military said the Arak site on the outskirts of the village of Khondab in central Iran had been hit “to prevent the reactor from being restored and used for nuclear weapons development”.

There was also a “near-total national internet blackout” in Iran on Wednesday, a London-based watchdog said, with Iran’s Fars news agency confirming heavier internet restrictions after initial curbs imposed last week.

The military campaign has sparked calls for a return to diplomacy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that a deal to guarantee both Israel’s security and Iran’s desire for a civilian nuclear programme was possible.

“I believe it would be good for all of us together to look for ways to stop the fighting and seek ways for the participants in the conflict to find an agreement,” he told foreign journalists at a televised event.

He said Iran had not asked Russia for military help.

– Daily barrages –

An Israeli military official, who asked not to be named, said Wednesday that Iran had fired around 400 ballistic missiles and 1,000 drones since the conflict began on Friday.

About 20 missiles had struck civilian areas in Israel, the official added.

Iranian strikes have killed at least 24 people and injured hundreds since they began, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Monday.

Iran said Sunday that Israeli strikes had killed at least 224 people, including military commanders, nuclear scientists and civilians.

Both countries have not issued an updated official toll since then.

Israel says its surprise air campaign is aimed at preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Iran had been enriching uranium to 60 percent — far above the 3.67-percent limit set by the 2015 nuclear death but still short of the 90-percent threshold needed for a nuclear warhead.

Israel has maintained ambiguity on its own atomic activities, but the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute says it has 90 nuclear warheads.

Related Topics:Iran Iran-Israel war Israel Netanyahu

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UK Police Hunt Asylum Seeker Mistakenly Freed For Sex Offence

Published

6 hours ago

October 25, 2025

Editor

UK police were still hunting Saturday for an Ethiopian asylum seeker and convicted sex offender whose crimes sparked a wave of anti-immigration protests and who was accidentally released from prison.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “appalled” by Friday’s “totally unacceptable” error that saw 38-year-old Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu freed rather than sent to an immigration detention centre.

“This man must be caught and deported for his crimes,” the UK leader added.

Kebatu had served the first month of a one-year sentence for sexually assaulting a teenage girl and a woman, but was reportedly due to be deported when the Prison Service mistake occurred.

Kebatu’s high-profile case earlier this year in Epping, northeast of London, sparked demonstrations in various English towns and cities where asylum seekers were believed to be housed, as well as counter-protests.

Justice Secretary David Lammy said late Friday night that Kebatu was “at large in London” after he was seen boarding a train to the capital in Chelmsford, eastern England.

Essex Police, which is leading the search with the help of London’s Metropolitan Police, said Saturday that “inquiries are continuing at pace this morning to locate and arrest” him.

“Officers worked throughout the night to track his movements, including scouring hours of CCTV footage,” the force added, noting “it is not lost on us that this situation is concerning to people”.

The Telegraph reported he was wrongly categorised as a prisoner due to be released on licence and handed a £76 ($101) discharge grant.

The father of Kebatu’s anonymous teenage victim told Sky News that “the justice system has let us down”.

Police arrested the asylum seeker in July after he repeatedly tried to kiss a 14-year-old girl and touch her legs, and made sexually explicit comments to her.

He also sexually assaulted an adult woman, placing a hand on her thigh, when she intervened to stop his interactions with the girl.

At the time, Kebatu was staying at Epping’s Bell Hotel, where scores of other asylum seekers have been accommodated, and which became the target of repeated protests.

Headline

UK Is A Home, Not Hotel, Kemi Badenoch Tells Immigrants, Starmer’s Govt

Published

2 days ago

October 23, 2025

Editor

UK Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch has slammed Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government over its immigration policy, declaring that Britain is “a home, not a hotel.”

Badenoch accused Labour of weakening the country’s borders and enabling mass automatic citizenship.

In a 1:11-minute video posted on her official X account on Friday, Badenoch claimed Labour’s proposed reforms could allow up to two million immigrants to automatically qualify for British citizenship starting next year.

“From next year, two million immigrants can automatically claim British citizenship. Two million people! That’s nearly twice the population of Birmingham. That’s massive,” Badenoch said in the video.

Badenoch noted that the Conservative Party has introduced a deportation bill to bring immigration down.

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Among the measures she endorsed in the video were deporting all foreign criminals, mandatory age checks, no more pretending to be kids, tougher visa rules and salary thresholds, disapplying the Human Rights Act to immigration cases, and no more abusing human rights laws to judge deportations. Make asylum support repayable, and no permanent right to stay in the UK if you’ve relied on benefits.

“Until that’s law, we won’t fix this. Labour should adopt it now. It’s time to get tough. That’s what the Conservatives’ Deportation Bill delivers, and we’re going to go further. Our country is a home, not a hotel. And if we don’t defend it, no one else will.”

In the caption that came with the video, she tweeted, “Labour has blocked every single measure we’ve put forward to cut immigration and stop abuse of the system.

“Now they’re pushing one half-arsed proposal — it’s weak; it won’t work. It’s time they stopped playing games and backed our Deportation Bill.”

Headline

King Charles To Pray With Pope Leo In Historic Vatican Visit

Published

3 days ago

October 23, 2025

Editor

King Charles III will on Thursday meet Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican and make history as the first head of the Church of England to pray publicly with the pontiff for five centuries.

The 76-year-old monarch, who is the supreme governor of the Church of England, arrived in Rome on Wednesday evening with his wife, Queen Camilla, for what Buckingham Palace described as a “historic” state visit.

It will be Charles’s first meeting with Leo since the US-born pope took over as head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics in May, following the death of Pope Francis.

The royals will arrive at the Apostolic Palace at 10.45am (0845 GMT) for private talks with the pope.

The king and queen will then join an ecumenical service at midday (1000 GMT) in the Sistine Chapel led by Pope Leo and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, currently the senior cleric of the Church of England.

Broadcast live by Vatican media, it will be the first time a reigning English or British monarch has prayed publicly with a pope since English king Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534.

Triggered by the pope’s refusal to annul the king’s marriage so he could marry another woman, the schism made the monarch head of the separate Church of England.

Thursday’s service, held beneath Michelangelo’s spectacular ceiling frescoes, will be centred on conservation and protecting the environment, a cause championed by Charles.

It will bring together Catholic and Anglican traditions, with the choir from the Sistine Chapel joined by that from Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, one of the king’s residences.

– Schism –

The religious break between London and Rome remains, even if there has been a significant rapprochement in recent decades.

In 1961, the late Queen Elizabeth II, Charles’s mother, became the first British monarch to visit the Holy See since the split.

The law was changed in 2013 so that marrying a Catholic would no longer disqualify someone from becoming monarch — although they still have to be a Protestant themselves.

The rapprochement is important because “Anglicanism was born in reaction to the Catholic Church, and therefore in opposition,” said Hyacinthe Destivelle, a French priest and member of the Vatican’s dicastery (department) for promoting Christian unity.

This is no longer the case, despite “theological differences in recent decades”, he told AFP.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England — the mother church of the world’s 85-million-strong Anglican community — ordains women and allows priests to marry.

Sarah Mullally was recently named the first female archbishop of Canterbury, the Church’s top cleric, although she has yet to officially take up her post.

– Royal Confrater –

Charles and Queen Camilla are also set to take part in a service at the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, one of four major papal basilicas, which has historic links with the English crown.

The king will be made a “Royal Confrater” of the basilica and presented with a specially designed seat for use by him and future British monarchs.

Charles has visited the Vatican several times and met privately with Pope Francis on April 9, just days before the pontiff’s death.

The king sent his son and heir, William, to the funeral and his brother, Prince Edward, the Duke of Edinburgh, to Leo’s inauguration mass.

The visit comes as the Catholic Church celebrates the Jubilee, a year-long event held every 25 years, which has drawn millions of pilgrims to the Vatican.

It also comes at a delicate time for Charles, following new revelations about his brother Prince Andrew, who is mired in a scandal surrounding late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Andrew announced on Friday that he would relinquish his title as Duke of York, reportedly under pressure from Charles. He had already stepped back from royal duties in 2019.

AFP