Fifty-seven soldiers who had been held captive by locals in the mountains of Colombia since the weekend have been freed in a military operation, the Colombian defence minister has said. The minister, Pedro Sánchez, said that not a single shot had been fired in what he dubbed “Operation Justice”. The soldiers were seized in the...
Eleanor Lawson BBC Midlands Today BBC Dave Pettifer is one of hundreds of UK veterans joining a legal claim When Dave Pettifer was a Royal Marines commando, he fought in the jungle, endured the Arctic tundra and completed three tours of Afghanistan. He faced many threats – but he never thought hearing loss would be...
Colombia’s military says 57 soldiers have been kidnapped by civilians in the country’s south-western Micay Canyon area. It says 31 soldiers were seized on Saturday while the rest were abducted on Sunday by a group of more than 200 people. The military says the civilians are acting under pressure from dissidents of the Farc rebel...
Ukraine and Russia have completed an exchange of dead bodies – the final stage of a deal to bring home fallen soldiers. Kyiv said Moscow handed over 1,245 bodies on Monday, bringing the total to 6,057 in the past few days. It said it was now verifying whether all the bodies were indeed of Ukrainian...
The bodies of 1,212 Ukrainian soldiers have been returned from Russia, Kyiv says, as part of a prisoner exchange agreement between the warring countries. In return Russia received 27 bodies, Moscow’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said. The prisoner exchange deal was the only tangible result of peace talks in Turkey last week, with both sides...
A Russian missile strike on a training exercise in Ukraine’s Sumy border region has killed six servicemen and wounded more than 10 others, says Ukraine’s National Guard. Russia’s defence ministry had earlier released a video purporting to show an Iskander missile attack on a training camp, and state news agency Tass said up to 70...
A damning new report reveals how Israel is systematically making Gaza unlivable. The independent news outlet +972 Magazine has spoken to Israeli soldiers who describe how they have been using bulldozers and explosives to intentionally flatten Gaza. In the southern city of Rafah, 73% of buildings are completely destroyed, with only about 4% of the...
Yogita Limaye BBC News Reporting fromEastern Ukraine BBC Some soldiers like Kozak believe too many people have been killed to hand over land to Russia Big plumes of smoke are visible on a screen that’s providing a live feed from Ukrainian drones hovering over the outskirts of the eastern city of Pokrovsk, one of the...
Yogita Limaye reporting from the Donetsk region BBC Asked about a ceasefire, 26-year-old soldier Max told the BBC “you don’t think about things like that here.” Hours into the ceasefire Russia had called for, we drove into the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine to see what, if any, impact it was having. The Ukrainian military...
Benin’s government has admitted that 54 soldiers were killed by suspected jihadists in the country’s north last week near the borders with Burkina Faso and Niger. The authorities had previously said that only eight soldiers were killed. The revised figure makes it the deadliest known attack since insurgents began operating in northern Benin at the...
Nobody knew about the COVID-19 virus in particular at the time, but there is plenty of evidence that it was circulating in Wuhan in mid-2019, and US soldiers who participated in the World Military Games held in Wuhan in October 2019. But as part of a Congressionally mandated investigation, the Biden administration was required to...
The bodies of three US soldiers, missing for six days, have been found in a muddy swamp near the Lithuanian city of Pabradė, where they were taking part in military drills, the US Army has confirmed. Rescue teams are still searching for a fourth soldier. “The soldiers we have lost in this tragedy were not...
The Lithuanian army says it is searching for four US soldiers missing for two days during drills in the Baltic state amid reports they had died. The four soldiers and their tracked vehicle had gone missing on Tuesday afternoon near the border with Belarus, the military said earlier. The US Army said the vehicle had...
Sebastian Usher Middle East correspondent Thomas Mackintosh BBC News Getty Images Hamdan Ballal poses with Rachel Szor after they won Best Documentary Feature Film for No Other Land at the Oscars A Palestinian Oscar winner has been attacked by Israeli settlers, activists who witnessed the event say, before being detained by the Israeli military. Hamdan...
On 24 March, Israeli far-right Zionist settlers in the occupied West Bank attacked and lynched Hamdan Ballal, who co-directed the Oscar-winning No Other Land. Occupation soldiers then abducted him from the ambulance that had come to treat him for his injuries. Hamdan Ballal: lynched and abducted At the time of writing, there had been “no...