The Times of Israel is liveblogging Saturday’s events as they happen.
Kyiv mayor says 8 wounded in ‘massive’ Russian drone and missile attack
Russia attacks Ukraine’s capital Kyiv with drones and missiles, triggering fires, strewing debris in districts throughout the city and injuring at least eight people, the city’s mayor says.
Reuters witnesses see and hear successive waves of drones flying over Kyiv, and a series of explosions jolted the city.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko says two residents require hospital treatment and that air defense units are in action.
Klitschko says fragments from one drone struck the top floor of an apartment building in the Solomyanskyi district on the west bank of the Dnipro River, which bisects the city. One apartment building is on fire in the area as is one non-residential building.
Timur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv’s military administration, says a fire also broke out on two floors of an apartment building in Dniprovskyi district on the opposite bank.
Officials also report a fire in Obolon in the city’s northern suburbs and fallen debris on a shopping center in the same area. They say drone fragments hit the ground in a number of other widely separated neighborhoods.
An air alert remains in effect more than two hours after it was first declared.
The overnight strikes follow several days of Ukrainian drone attacks — some 800 attacks — on targets inside Russia, including capital Moscow.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had vowed on Friday to respond to those attacks.
After Trump announcement, Treasury Department says US formally lifting Syria sanctions
WASHINGTON — The United States has lifted comprehensive economic sanctions on Syria, marking a dramatic policy shift following the end of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and opening the door for new investment in the war-torn country.
Syria must “continue to work towards becoming a stable country that is at peace, and today’s actions will hopefully put the country on a path to a bright, prosperous and stable future,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says in a statement.
The move formalized a decision announced by US President Donald Trump last week.
IDF says it targeted armed gunmen spotted near aid trucks in central Gaza this morning
The IDF says it targeted several armed Palestinians — some of them Hamas operatives — who were spotted next to humanitarian aid trucks in the central Gaza Strip early this morning in a drone strike.
In response to a query by The Times of Israel, the IDF says that it targeted the gunmen after identifying them near the trucks, adding “the aid was not hit as a result of the strike.”
The statement doesn’t elaborate on how the army knew that only some of the armed operatives targeted were Hamas members.
Hamas claimed that the targeted gunmen were “members of the aid security and protection teams… who were performing purely humanitarian tasks,” and that six were killed in the strike.
A military source denies Hamas’s allegation that the targets were local security, saying, “This is a false and unfounded claim.”
“This is another example of the cynical use by terror organizations in the Gaza Strip of civilians and humanitarian aid infrastructure that enters the area. The IDF will allow humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, while making every effort to ensure that the humanitarian aid does not reach terror organizations,” the IDF adds in its response.
While critics argue that armed guards are needed to secure aid to prevent looting, given the desperate need for food in Gaza, Israel in the past has targeted gunmen unless their operations are coordinated. But aid groups say that many of their requests to coordinate the transportation of trucks go unanswered by Israel.