LONDON: Senior Hamas official Khaled Mashal has said the terrorist group was aware of the ramifications of its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and added Palestinian lives would need to be sacrificed in order to win “liberation.”

Speaking in a fractious interview with Al-Arabiya host Rasha Nabil, Mashal praised the “ingenious” Hamas attack and called it “legitimate resistance” to Israeli occupation.

ISTANBUL: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi had a phone call on Friday to discuss what the Turkish presidency said were human rights violations by Israel in the Gaza Strip and how to deliver humanitarian aid.
Erdogan told Egypt’s El-Sisi that “Western silence” on the bombing of hospitals, schools, and places of worship was worsening the situation for Gaza, the president’s office said in a statement.

AL-MUKALLA: Hans Grundberg, the UN’s Yemen envoy, on Thursday, urged the Yemeni government and the Houthis to return to the negotiating table in order to reach a peace agreement and end the conflict as he and other regional and international mediators intensified their efforts.

UNITED NATIONS, US: The UN’s special envoy for Somalia on Thursday issued a stark warning to the Security Council about a sharp uptick in civilian casualties suffered last year in the violence-wracked Horn of Africa country.
Catriona Laing, a British diplomat who took up the UN post earlier this year, said both the insurgency by jihadist Al-Shabab militants and clashes in the breakaway Somaliland region were to blame.

WASHINGTON: As the Israel-Hamas war intensifies, the United States Thursday launched a visa waiver program allowing Israelis wishing to visit the United States for 90 days or less to come without applying for a visa.
The US announced Sept. 27 that it was admitting Israel into the visa waiver program, adding the country to a select group of 40 mostly European and Asian countries whose citizens can travel to the US for three months without visas.