India’s main opposition party on Thursday condemned Prime Minister Narendra Modi for anti-Muslim comments in election campaign speeches that have heightened concerns over sectarian tensions in the world’s biggest democracy.
Modi remains popular across much of India and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is widely expected to win this general election when it concludes in early June.
Since voting began last month, the 73-year-old premier has stepped up his rhetoric targeting India’s main religious divide in a bid to rally voters.
He has referred in campaign rallies to Muslims as “infiltrators” and claimed the main opposition Congress party would redistribute the nation’s wealth to Muslims if it won.
P. Chidambaram, a former Indian finance minister and senior lawmaker for Congress, said Thursday that Modi was playing “his usual game of dividing Hindus and Muslims”.
“The world is watching and analysing the Indian prime minister’s statements, and they do not bring glory to India,” he added.
After Modi suggested that a former prime minister from Congress had planned for a separate “Muslim budget”, the party’s general secretary Jairam Ramesh condemned his statements as “nonsensical”.
“This is typical Modi bombast and bogusness,” he said Wednesday on social media platform X.
Since he swept to power a decade ago, Modi has sought to align India’s politics more closely with its majority faith, in defiance of the country’s officially secular constitution.
His cultivated image as a champion of Hinduism has made him roundly popular but has left many among the country’s 200-million-plus Muslim minority uneasy about their status and anxious about their futures.
Modi on Tuesday denied stoking religious tensions in a television interview with broadcaster News18.
“The day I start talking about Hindu-Muslim (divisions) will be the day I will lose my ability to lead a public life,” Modi said.
‘Vote jihad’
But at a campaign rally the following day, Modi accused Congress of planning to commit “vote jihad”, an implied suggestion that his opponents were rallying Muslims to vote against him.
India’s poll code prohibits sectarian campaigning and opposition parties lodged a complaint about an earlier Modi speech last month with the election commission, which has yet to announce any sanctions against the premier.
Other members of Modi’s party have been accused of matching his rhetoric and unfairly targeting Muslims during the election.
A BJP candidate in Hyderabad, Madhavi Latha, was widely condemned on social media Monday for demanding veiled Muslim women remove their facial coverings at a polling station so she could personally check that their appearances matched their identity documents.
Police in the southern city announced an investigation into the incident.
Israel said Thursday that five of its troops were killed by friendly fire in Gaza, as a rift emerged inside the war cabinet on how the Palestinian territory should be ruled in future.
The army said that the five soldiers were killed when two Israeli tanks mistakenly fired shells at the building they were in during operations in the northern Jabalia refugee camp on Wednesday.
“Five soldiers of the 202nd Paratrooper Battalion were killed last night in a mass casualty incident as a result of fire by our forces,” the military said, adding that seven other troops were wounded.
AFP reporters, witnesses and medics said Thursday that Israeli warplanes again targeted areas across Gaza overnight, including in Gaza City and its southern Zeitun area, Jabalia and the Nuseirat refugee camp.
The military’s main focus has been Rafah near the Egyptian border, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered an offensive in defiance of US warnings that more than a million civilians sheltering there could be caught in the crossfire.
Netanyahu on Wednesday argued that “we have to do what we have to do” and insisted that mass evacuations there had averted a much-feared “humanitarian catastrophe”.
Washington — long Israel’s main political, diplomatic and military supporter — has repeatedly urged its ally to take greater steps to protect and aid civilians, and to make a post-war plan for Gaza to avoid being mired in a long counter-insurgency campaign.
He posted a video of himself, face drenched in blood, explaining how he was attacked just outside his home. The caption of the video said, “Terrorists. They waited for me outside my house, six of them, and cut the gate wires to massacre me.”
Prominent Italian chef Gabriele Rubini (known as Chef Rubio) posted on his account on “X”, revealing that a group of zionists ambushed and attacked him outside his home over his support for Palestine.
“They waited for me outside my house, six of them, and cut the gate wires to… pic.twitter.com/xx6qWvvLQ2
A large group of his followers extended their heartfelt wishes to him and showed solidarity with him in a march. He thanked them by writing, “Thanks girls, thanks guys. We smile in the face of terrorists and continue straight until the liberation of Palestine”.
The Chef later posted a selfie with a swollen eye and making a victory sign. The post said, “Thank you all for the support”. It went on to explain, “In the end, stitches on my head where they gave me the hammer, cuts and abrasions where they hit me with bricks, fracture of the facial orbit where the 60 targeted punches ended up.” He pledged to not stop talking about the oppression faced by Gazans, “And we start again”, he asserted, “A hug to the Jewish community.”
Grazie a tutte e tutti per il sostegno. Alla fine punti in testa dove mi hanno dato la martellata, tagli ed escoriazioni dove mi hanno preso a mattonate, frattura dell’orbita facciale dove sono finiti i 60 pugni mirati, e si ricomincia. Un abbraccio alla comunità ebraica ✌ pic.twitter.com/9sVzX3Wt72
Residents of conflict-hit Sudan are “trapped in an inferno of brutal violence” and increasingly at risk of famine due to the rainy season and blocked aid, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for the country warned Wednesday.
Tens of thousands of people have died and millions have been displaced since war broke out in April 2023 between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
“Famine is closing in. Diseases are closing in. The fighting is closing in and there’s no end in sight,” Clementine Nkweta-Salami told a press conference.
The grim situation is only expected to worsen, with “just six weeks before the lean season sets in, when food becomes less available, and more expensive.”
Noting that more than four million people are facing potential famine, Nkweta-Salami added that the onset of the country’s rainy season means that “reaching people in need becomes even more difficult.”
The area’s planting season also “could fail if we aren’t able to procure and deliver seeds for farmers,” she said.
And “after more than a year of conflict, the people of Sudan are trapped in an inferno of brutal violence.”
“In short, the people of Sudan are in the path of a perfect storm that is growing more lethal by the day,” Nkweta-Salami warned, adding that the humanitarian community needs “unfettered access to reach people in need, wherever they are.”
The United Nations has expressed growing concern in recent days over reports of heavy fighting in densely populated areas as the RSF seeks control of El-Fasher, the last major city in the western Darfur region not under its control.
“Right now the humanitarian assistance they rely on can’t get through,” Nkweta-Salami said.
More than a dozen UN trucks loaded with medical equipment and food, which left Port Sudan on April 3, have still not reached El Fasher, she said, “due to insecurity and delays in getting clearances at checkpoints.”
Ireland is certain to recognise Palestinian statehood by the end of May, the country’s foreign minister said Wednesday, without specifying a date.
“We will be recognising the state of Palestine before the end of the month,” Micheal Martin, who is also Ireland’s deputy prime minister, told the Newstalk radio station.
In March the leaders of Spain, Ireland, Slovakia and Malta said in a joint statement that they stand ready to recognise Palestinian statehood.
Ireland has long said it has no objection in principle to officially recognising the Palestinian state if it could help the peace process in the Middle East.
But Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has given the issue new impetus.
Last week EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Spain, Ireland and Slovenia planned to symbolically recognise a Palestinian state on May 21, with others potentially following suit.
But Ireland’s Martin shied Wednesday from pinpointing a date.
“The specific date is still fluid because we’re still in discussions with some countries in respect of a joint recognition of a Palestinian state,” said Martin.
“It will become clear in the next few days as to the specific date but it certainly will be before the end of this month.
“I will look forward to consultations today with some foreign ministers in respect of the final specific detail of this.”
Last month during a visit to Dublin by Spanish premier Pedro Sanchez, Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris said the countries would coordinate the move together.
“When we move forward, we would like to do so with as many others as possible to lend weight to the decision and to send the strongest message,” said Harris.
Israeli genocide in Gaza has killed more than 35,000 people in the besieged strip, mostly women and children, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Dozens of Israelis reportedly stormed the compound of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site, and raised the Zionist flag.
Footage verified by Al Jazeera and released by Anadolu English shows a man holding the flag as an Israeli police officer speaks with him calmly and does not forcibly escort him from the compound.
The incident follows rallying calls made by Beyadenu, an organisation that says it aims “to strengthen the Jewish People’s connection” to the holy site, for the Israeli flag to be raised at the mosque on May 14, reported Al Jazeera.
Palestinians regard the day as the Nakba – or the “catastrophe” – which led to the creation of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
The storming of the compound is a regular occurrence even though entering any part of it is forbidden for Jews due to the sacred nature of the site.
Simultaneously, videos have surfaced of Israeli forces brutally manhandling a young boy trying to enter the mosque at the Damascus gate of Jerusalem. In previous years, Israeli forces have also attacked Palestinian worshippers inside the mosque.
Videos and pictures of extremist groups from Israel vandalising aid trucks for Gaza have emerged online where children could be seen throwing aid packages in the garbage.
Meanwhile, more than 450,000 Palestinians have now fled southern Rafah city with another 100,000 evacuating the north as Israel’s military steps up ground incursions.
Israeli jets bombed the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, killing scores of people including children. In the north, Israeli tanks, bulldozers, and armoured vehicles.
A French road safety association said Monday it had launched a campaign urging men to drive like women, aiming to cut traffic deaths while debunking the sexist stereotype that men are better behind the wheel.
“Drive Like A Woman”, runs the slogan on the ads, seen mostly in metro stations and posted online, from the association Victims and Citizens.
“A look at the data tells you that there’s no truth” to the stereotype that men are better drivers, the association said in a statement.
Some 84 percent of deadly road accidents were caused by men, it said, citing a governmental road safety report.
Victims and Citizens, which assists people injured in traffic accidents and runs awareness campaigns, said it hoped to prompt a change in the “mentality of men and therefore in their behaviour”.
According to the government report, 93 percent of drivers causing an accident under the influence of alcohol were men.
“Driving like a woman just means one thing, staying alive,” the ad campaign said.
Close to 3,200 people died in road accidents in France last year, with early data for this year pointing to a possible increase in 2024.
India Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday formally submitted his candidacy to recontest the parliamentary seat for the Hindu holy city of Varanasi in a general election he is widely expected to win.
The marathon six-week poll concludes next month, and the 73-year-old premier used the election formality as a campaign event that paid deference to the country’s majority faith.
Varanasi is the spiritual capital of Hinduism, where devotees from around India come to cremate deceased loved ones by the Ganges river, and the premier has represented the city since sweeping to power a decade ago.
Hundreds of supporters had gathered outside a local government office to greet Modi when he arrived to lodge his nomination.
Footage showed the premier handing over his candidacy paperwork, flanked by a Hindu mystic.
“It’s our good fortune that Modi represents our constituency of Varanasi,” devout Hindu and farmer Jitendra Singh Kumar, 52, told AFP while waiting for the leader to emerge.
“He is like a God to people of Varanasi. He thinks about the country first, unlike other politicians.”
Modi, who has made acts of religious worship a central fixture of his premiership, had spent the morning visiting temples and offering prayers at the banks of the Ganges.
Tens of thousands of supporters had lined the streets of Varanasi to greet Modi as he arrived in the city on Monday atop a flatbed truck, waving to the crowd from atop a flatbed truck as loudspeakers blared devotional songs.
Many along the roadside waved saffron-coloured flags bearing the emblem of his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), throwing marigold flowers at the procession as it passed by.
‘Not wanted’
Modi and the BJP are widely expected to win this year’s election, which is conducted over six weeks to ease the immense logistical burden of staging the democratic exercise in the world’s most populous country.
Varanasi is one of the last constituencies to vote on June 1, with counting and results expected three days later.
Since the vote began last month, Modi has made a number of strident comments against India’s 200-million-plus Muslim minority in an apparent effort to galvanise support.
He has used public speeches to refer to Muslims as “infiltrators” and “those who have more children”, prompting condemnation from opposition politicians and complaints to India’s election commission.
The ascent of Modi’s Hindu-nationalist politics despite India’s officially secular constitution has made the Muslims in the country increasingly anxious.
“We are made to feel as if we are not wanted in this country,” Shauqat Mohamed, who runs a tea shop in the city, told aFP.
“If the country’s premier speaks of us in disparaging terms, what else can we expect?” the 41-year-old added.
India’s six-week election resumed Monday including in Indian-occupied Kashmir, where voters were expected to show their discontent with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cancellation of their disputed territory’s semi-autonomy and the security crackdown that followed.
Modi remains popular across much of India and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is widely expected to win the poll when it concludes early next month.
But his government’s decision in 2019 to bring IOK under its direct rule — and the subsequent clampdown — have been deeply resented among the region’s residents, who will be voting for the first time since the move.
“What we’re telling voters now is that you have to make your voice heard,” said former chief minister Omar Abdullah, whose National Conference party is campaigning for the restoration of IOK’s former semi-autonomy.
“The point of view that we want people to send out is that what happened… is not acceptable to them,” he told AFP.
IOK has been divided between India and Pakistan since their independence in 1947. Both claim it in full and have fought two wars over control of the Himalayan region.
Rebel groups opposed to Indian rule have waged an insurgency since 1989 on the side of the frontier controlled by New Delhi, demanding either independence or a merger with Pakistan.
India accuses Pakistan of backing the insurgents, a charge that Islamabad denies.
The conflict has killed tens of thousands of soldiers, rebels and civilians in the decades since, including a spate of firefights between suspected rebels and security forces in the past month.
‘Referendum’
Violence has dwindled since the Indian portion of the territory was brought under direct rule five years ago, a move that saw the mass arrest of local political leaders and a months-long telecommunications blackout to forestall expected protests.
Modi’s government says its cancelling of IOK’s special status has brought “peace and development”, and it has consistently claimed the move was supported by Kashmiris.
But his party has not fielded any candidates in the IOK valley for the first time since 1996, and experts say the BJP would have been roundly defeated if it had.
“They would lose, simple as that,” political analyst and historian Sidiq Wahid told AFP last week, adding that Kashmiris saw the vote as a “referendum” on Modi’s policies.
The BJP has appealed to voters to instead support smaller and newly created parties that have publicly aligned with Modi’s policies.
But voters are expected to back one of two established IOK political parties calling for the Modi government’s changes to be reversed.
“I voted for changing the current government. It must happen for our children to have a good future,” civil servant Habibullah Parray told AFP.
“Everywhere you go in Kashmir today you find people from outside in charge. Everyone wants that to change.”
In rural districts outside Srinagar, the region’s biggest city, army soldiers patrolled roads in convoys of bulletproof vehicles.
Several polling booths around the constituency had more than two dozen paramilitary troops guarding voter queues.
Boycotts called by rebel groups left few Kashmiris willing to participate in past elections, with just over 14 percent of eligible voters in Srinagar casting a ballot during the last national poll in 2019.
By mid-afternoon on Monday nearly 30 percent of people in the constituency had voted, with booths still open for several more hours.
Nearly one billion voters
India’s election is conducted in seven phases over six weeks to ease the immense logistical burden of staging the democratic exercise in the world’s most populous country.
More than 968 million people are eligible to vote in India’s election, with the final round of polling on June 1 and results expected three days later.
Voter turnout elsewhere in India has so far declined significantly from 2019, according to election commission figures.
Analysts have blamed widespread expectations that Modi will easily win a third term and hotter-than-average temperatures heading into the summer.
India’s weather bureau has forecast more hot spells in May and the election commission formed a taskforce last month to review the impact of heat and humidity before each round of voting.
CNN has published and aired a damning report with the help of Israeli whistleblowers working at the Sde Teiman detention camp in Israel. The exposé has revealed systemic abuses by the military, including prisoners being restrained, blindfolded, and forced to wear diapers.
Israel’s military base, which is now a detention center in the Negev desert, was photographed twice by an Israeli worker of a scene that he says continues to haunt him.
Picture showed rows of men in gray tracksuits sitting on paper-thin mattresses, ringfenced by barbed wire. The detainees were blindfolded, their heads hanging heavy under the harsh glare of floodlights.
The whistleblower told CNN about the conditions these men were kept in, detailing that they are forbidden from speaking to each other, so they mumble to themselves.
“We were told they were not allowed to move. They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.” Guards were instructed “to scream uskot” – shut up in Arabic – and told to “pick people out that were problematic and punish them,” the report laid out.
Where is Sde Teiman?
Sde Teiman is located some 18 miles from the Gaza frontier and is split into two parts: enclosures where around 70 Palestinian detainees from Gaza are placed under extreme physical restraint, and a field hospital where wounded detainees are strapped to their beds, wearing diapers and fed through straws. “They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings,” said one whistleblower, who worked as a medic at the facility’s field hospital. “(The beatings) were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” said another whistleblower. “It was punishment for what they (the Palestinians) did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”
Why is it a paradise for medical interns?
The whistleblowers give a peek into the very common practice of amputation of prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained by constant handcuffing. The detention centre is also called “a paradise for interns” because sometimes underqualified medics perform procedures here and learn through practice.
Accounts of Palestinians held in the Israeli detention centre
CNN interviewed Dr. Mohammed al-Ran who headed the surgical unit at Northern Gaza’s Indonesian hospital, one of the first to be shut down and raided as Israel carried out its aerial, ground and naval offensive.
He was arrested on December 18, he said, outside Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, where he had been working for three days after fleeing his hospital in the heavily bombarded north.
He was stripped down to his underwear, blindfolded and his wrists tied, then dumped in the back of a truck where, he said, the near-naked detainees were piled on top of one another as they were shuttled to a detention camp in the middle of the desert.
“We looked forward to the night so we could sleep. Then we looked forward to the morning in hopes that our situation might change,” said Dr. Mohammed al-Ran, recalled.
Al-Ran was held in a military detention center for 44 days, he told CNN. “Our days were filled with prayer, tears, and supplication. This eased our agony,” said al-Ran.
Punishment for speaking to each other
A prisoner who committed an offense such as speaking to another would be ordered to raise his arms above his head for up to an hour. The prisoner’s hands would sometimes be zip-tied to a fence to ensure that he did not come out of the stress position.
For those who repeatedly breached the prohibition on speaking and moving, the punishment became more severe. Israeli guards would sometimes take a prisoner to an area outside the enclosure and beat him aggressively, according to two whistleblowers and al-Ran.
Unleashing dogs as form of “the nightly torture”
That whistleblower and al-Ran also described a routine search when the guards would unleash large dogs on sleeping detainees, lobbing a sound grenade at the enclosure as troops barged in. Al-Ran called this “the nightly torture.”
“While we were cabled, they unleashed the dogs that would move between us, and trample over us,” said al-Ran. “You’d be lying on your belly, your face pressed against the ground. You can’t move, and they’re moving above you.”
The same whistleblower recounted the search in the same harrowing detail. “It was a special unit of the military police that did the so-called search,” said the source. “But really it was an excuse to hit them. It was a terrifying situation.”
“There was a lot of screaming and dogs barking.”
Strapped to beds in the hospital
“If you imagine yourself being unable to move, being unable to see what’s going on, and being completely naked, that leaves you completely exposed,” the whistleblower said. “I think that’s something that borders on, if not crosses to, psychological torture.”
Another whistleblower said he was ordered to perform medical procedures on the Palestinian detainees for which he was not qualified.
Response of IDF
The Israeli Defence Forces did not directly deny accounts of people being stripped of their clothing or held in diapers. Instead, the Israeli military said that the detainees are given back their clothing once the IDF has determined that they pose no security risk.
Two Palestinian prisoners associations said last week that 18 Palestinians – including leading Gaza surgeon Dr. Adnan al-Bursh – had died in Israeli custody over the course of the war.
Sde Teiman and other military detention camps have been shrouded in secrecy since their inception. Israel has repeatedly refused requests to disclose the number of detainees held at the facilities, or to reveal the whereabouts of Gazan prisoners.
