The Times of Israel is liveblogging Saturday’s events as they happen.
IDF targeted Hezbollah arms caches and rocket launchers in Lebanon strikes overnight
The IDF said Friday night it carried out airstrikes in southern Lebanon, saying it targeted Hezbollah military sites.
The sites had been used to store weapons and rocket launchers, the military said, adding that the strikes were carried out due to the sites posing a threat to Israel.
“The weapons and the rocket launchers in the military sites posed a threat to the State of Israel and constituted a blatant violation of the understandings between Israel and Lebanon,” the IDF said.
US carries out first firing squad execution since 2010
A South Carolina man convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat was put to death by firing squad Friday in the first such execution in the United States in 15 years.
Brad Sigmon, 67, was executed by a three-person firing squad at the Broad River Correctional Institution in the state capital Columbia, South Carolina prison spokeswoman Chrysti Shain says.
Shain says the fatal shots were fired at 6:05 p.m. and Sigmon was pronounced dead by a physician at 6:08 p.m.
Journalists who witnessed the execution from behind bulletproof glass said Sigmon was wearing a black jumpsuit with a small red bullseye made of paper or cloth over his heart and was strapped into a chair in the death chamber.
In a final statement read out by his attorney, Gerald “Bo” King, Sigmon said he wanted to send a message of “love and a calling to my fellow Christians to help us end the death penalty.”
A hood was then placed over Sigmon’s head. About two minutes later, the firing squad — volunteers from the South Carolina Department of Corrections — fired their rifles through a slit in a wall about 15 feet (five meters) away.
Sigmon had a choice between lethal injection, the firing squad or the electric chair.
Islamic nations adopt Arab counter to Trump’s Gaza takeover plan
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation adopts the Arab League’s counter-proposal to US President Donald Trump’s plan to take over Gaza and displace its residents, two ministers say.
“The emergency ministerial meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation adopted the Egyptian plan, which has now become an Arab-Islamic plan,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty says, in comments echoed by his Sudanese counterpart.