World roundup: July 22 2024

Stories from Bangladesh, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

July 22, 1456: The Siege of Belgrade ends

July 22, 1946: Members of the Irgun, a Zionist terrorist group that was one of the predecessors of the modern Likud party, bomb the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and kill 91 people in the process. Their target was the headquarters of the British mandatory authority and the attack was meant as a response to the British arrest of hundreds of Zionist militants in Operation Agatha in late June. Most Zionist leaders condemned Irgun, which in turn blamed British authorities for not evacuating the hotel despite telephoned warnings about the bomb.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli military (IDF) ordered the evacuation of several locations in and around the Gazan city of Khan Younis on Monday, including part of the coastal al-Mawasi area that it had previously designated a protected humanitarian zone. It then attacked those areas, killing at least 70 people. The IDF claims it had intelligence that Palestinian militant groups were assembling in and firing rockets from those locations and insists that it gave people adequate time to leave before it began its assault. The Mawasi order effectively shrinks the protected zone there from 65 square kilometers to 48 square kilometers, to accommodate an estimated 1.7 million displaced people. As has been well established by this point, there’s nowhere else for those people to go.