An aid ship carrying goods for the blockaded Gaza Strip and backed by Asian activists has set sail from the Syrian port of Latakia for Egypt, a Palestinian official in Damascus said on Sunday.
Khaled Abdel-Majid, a spokesman for Palestinian groups based in Syria, said the boat had left Latakia on Saturday and was en route to the the Egyptian port of al-Arish, where the aid would be off-loaded for transportation overland to Gaza.
He said 112 activists had arrived in Egypt on Sunday to link up with the aid convoy.
Several Asian charity organizations, mainly from India, were behind the initiative, Abdel-Majid had said earlier.
A dozen activists would be on board the Salam, which means “Peace” in Arabic, from Asian countries that included Iran, Japan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, he had said.
“The ship has been the target of Israeli provocations” since sailing into international waters, Abdel-Majid said on Sunday.
“The Israeli naval vessels have questioned the captain about the nature of the aid [on board],” Abdel-Majid said, adding that some of the activists on board had also been questioned.
“We are watching it [the ship] very closely,” an Israeli military spokesperson in Jerusalem said, without giving further details.
The boat is carrying US$1 million of medicine, foodstuffs and toys, as well as four buses and 10 power generators for hospitals, Abdel-Majid said.
Israel has imposed a crippling blockade on Gaza since Palestinian groups captured one of its soldiers in June 2006. It reinforced it a year later after Islamist Hamas seized control of the coastal enclave following deadly fighting with the Fatah faction of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Israel eased the blockade after its May 31 raid on a flotilla of aid ships seeking to sail to Gaza that killed nine activists and drew international condemnation.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS