While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, Oct 27, 2024
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Palestinians queuing for water in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip, on Oct 26.
PHOTO: AFP
Situation in northern Gaza ‘catastrophic’, says WHO chief
The World Health Organisation chief warned on Oct 26 of a disastrous situation in the north of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, with “intensive military operations unfolding around and within health care facilities”.
“The situation in northern Gaza is catastrophic,” Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X, warning that “a critical shortage of medical supplies, compounded by severely limited access, are depriving people of life saving care”.
He pointed in particular to the situation at Kamal Adwan, northern Gaza’s last functioning hospital, which was stormed by Israeli forces on Oct 25, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
The ministry charged that the raid on the facility in the Jabalia camp, where Israel launched a major operation earlier in October, left two children dead.
Ukraine’s Zelensky asks allies for more resolve
A string of Russian attacks killed and injured civilians in widely separated parts of Ukraine, prompting President Volodymyr Zelensky to issue a new call to Kyiv’s allies on Oct 26 to intensify pressure on Moscow.
Rescue teams in the central city of Dnipro completed operations on Oct 25 after Russian missile attacks that killed five people, including a child, and injured more than 20. A Russian glide bomb killed one person and injured three on Oct 26 in Kostiantynivka, near the front line in Donetsk region, the regional governor said.
Russian shelling killed two people in a small town west of the Ukrainian-held southern city of Kherson. And in Kyiv, a drone struck a high-rise apartment building on Oct 25 west of the city centre, killing a teenage girl.
N. Korea’s Ukraine involvement raises regional security risks
The deployment of North Korean troops to help Russia in its war against Ukraine is unlikely to have a significant impact on the fighting on the ground but could affect security interests in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, analysts say.
Growing military ties between Moscow and Pyongyang are a major concern for Washington and Brussels as Russian leader Vladimir Putin presses ahead with his efforts to build an anti-Western alliance.
“The conflict is becoming international,” said Mr Pascal Dayez-Burgeon, a North Korea expert and former French diplomat in Seoul.
Ruling party wins pivotal Georgia election, early results show
Georgia’s most powerful man won a parliamentary election on Oct 26, according to early official results, a blow to those Georgians who hope for closer integration with Europe in a vote billed as a choice between the West and Russia.
Georgian Dream’s billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, the opposition, and foreign diplomats had cast the election as a watershed moment that would decide if Georgia moves closer to the West or leans back towards Russia amid Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Early official results with 70 per cent of precincts counted, representing the majority of votes cast, showed the ruling party had won 53 per cent of the vote, the electoral commission said. The results do not include most ballots cast by Georgians living overseas.
Scammers swipe 20 tonnes of cheddar in UK cheese ‘heist’
British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver on Oct 26 urged cheese lovers to help police catch scammers who conned a London dairy out of 20 tonnes of English and Welsh cheddar.
Mr Oliver described the theft as a “brazen heist of shocking proportions”.
The appeal comes after the Neal’s Yard Dairy said it delivered more than 950 wheels of cheddar to the alleged fraudster posing as a wholesale distributor for a major French retailer before realising it had been duped.
