LONDON: A bright green Mercedes with Qatari plates revs up outside Harrods, as shoppers from the Gulf state pour into the iconic department store. It is just another day under what the authorities in Doha are insisting to refer to as a “blockade.”
Indeed, the Qatari spending over the summer holidays, seen most notably in London’s poshest areas is in sharp contrast to the image local media is trying to portray as an inhuman, collective punishment of the Qatari people.
As the Eid Al-Adha holiday got under way, there was no shortage of supercars being paraded in the UK capital’s posh Knightsbridge district, home to the Qatar-owned Harrods department store and numerous upmarket boutiques.
That is despite the June 5 move by the Anti-Terror Quartet — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain — to impose a series of sanctions on Doha over the latter’s alleged support of terror groups.
The quartet views the move as a “boycott” — although Doha interprets it more harshly, as a “blockade” against it.
Yet there were few visible restrictions on moneyed Qataris in Central London over the past few days — with some supercar owners not even perturbed by the area’s parking regulations.
Despite the boycott, spending by Qataris in the UK is actually on the rise, figures obtained exclusively by Arab News show.
According to payments processing company Worldpay, spending in the UK by people with credit and debit cards registered in Qatar rose sharply after the June 5 boycott against the Gulf state.
Total spending in the UK with Qatar-registered cards rose by 6.4 percent in June compared to the year before, the figures show.
And during the week of the Eid Al-Fitr holiday in late June — another popular time for Gulf Arabs to travel — spending on Qatar-registered cards was up by a whopping 49 percent compared to earlier in the month, the Worldpay figures show. Spending using cards registered in Saudi Arabia rose by just 29.1 percent during the same period.
Worldpay said spending by Middle Eastern tourists was “particularly prolific” during the Eid celebrations at the end of June.
James Frost, an executive from the firm, attributed this partly to the slump in the value of the UK pound, as well as the Eid festivities.
“Sterling’s slump is continuing to attract visitors in their droves, safe in the knowledge that their holiday cash will stretch a little further. Eid provides a useful barometer for foreign spending more broadly. The latest figures from this year’s festival point toward a summer spending frenzy from overseas visitors looking to cash in on the weak pound,” he said in July.
Figures for the more recent Eid holiday are not yet available but — if the fleet of Qatar-owned supercars seen on the streets of Knightsbridge is anything to go by — it looks like it is accelerating.
“There are some ridiculous crazy cars,” one parking attendant in the area, who declined to be named due to company policy, told Arab News.
“You don’t even have to see them to know they are around, the noise they make tell you they are here. It’s always busy around the summer, they come here, have some fun and then go home.
“When I dish them out with parking fines they never complain, they just accept it with a smile, they usually have a load of friends with them and they probably don’t want to cause a fuss in front of them.”
Yet there have been numerous complaints from local residents over the supercar-driving tourists from Qatar and other Gulf Arab states that descend on London each summer.
One Knightsbridge resident, who did not wish to be named, told Arab News: “The racket they make is awful, they drive their cars around here and disturb the peace. It can be very annoying at times.”
What ‘blockade’? Lavish Qatari spending in London refutes claims of inhuman sanctions
What ‘blockade’? Lavish Qatari spending in London refutes claims of inhuman sanctions
Lebanon says Israeli strike on south wounds 3 people including a child
BEIRUT: Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli strike on a vehicle in south Lebanon on Saturday wounded three people, including a child, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah after two months of all-out war.
“An Israeli enemy strike on a car in Majdal Zoun wounded three people including a seven-year-old child,” the health ministry said in a statement.
West faces ‘reckoning’ over Middle East radicalization: UK spy chief
- MI6 head Richard Moore cites ‘terrible loss of innocent life’
- ‘In 37 years in the intelligence profession, I’ve never seen the world in a more dangerous state’
LONDON: The West has “yet to have a full reckoning with the radicalizing impact of the fighting, the terrible loss of innocent life in the Middle East and the horrors of Oct. 7,” the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6 has warned.
Richard Moore made the comments in a speech delivered to the British Embassy in Paris, and was joined by his French counterpart Nicolas Lerner.
Moore said: “In 37 years in the intelligence profession, I’ve never seen the world in a more dangerous state. And the impact on Europe, our shared European home, could hardly be more serious.”
Daesh is expanding its reach and staging deadly attacks in Iran and Russia despite suffering significant territorial setbacks, he added, warning that “the menace of terrorism has not gone away.”
In October last year, Ken McCallum, the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5, said his agency was monitoring for increased terror risks in the UK due to the Gaza war. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in over a year of fighting.
In Lebanon, a 60-day truce agreed this week between Hezbollah and Israel brought an end to a conflict that has killed thousands of Lebanese civilians.
Israel military strikes kill 32 Palestinians in Gaza, medics say
- Among the 32 killed, at least seven died in an Israeli strike on a house in central Gaza City
The Israeli military said it killed a Palestinian it accused of involvement in Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel in a vehicle strike in Gaza, and is investigating claims that the individual was an employee of aid group World Central Kitchen.
At least 32 Palestinians were killed in Israeli military strikes across Gaza overnight and into Saturday, with most casualties reported in northern areas, medics told Reuters.
Later on Saturday medics said seven people were killed when an Israeli air strike targeted a vehicle near a gathering of Palestinians receiving aid in the southern area of Khan Younis south of the enclave.
According to residents and a Hamas source, the vehicle targeted near a crowd receiving flour belonged to security personnel responsible for overseeing the delivery of aid shipments into Gaza.
Among the 32 killed, at least seven died in an Israeli strike on a house in central Gaza City, according to a statement from the Gaza Civil Defense and the official Palestinian news agency WAFA early on Saturday.
The Gaza Civil Defense also reported that one of its officers was killed in attacks in northern Gaza’s Jabalia, bringing the total number of civil defense workers killed since October 7, 2023, to 88.
Earlier on Saturday, WAFA reported that three employees of the World Central Kitchen, a US-based, non-governmental humanitarian agency, were killed when a civilian vehicle was targeted in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.
The World Central Kitchen has not yet commented on the incident.
Syria’s military ‘temporarily’ withdraws from Aleppo to prepare for counteroffensive
- Syrian military confirms militants enter Aleppo, says dozens of soldiers killed
AMMAN: The Syrian military said on Saturday that dozens of its troops had been killed during a militant attack in northwestern Syria and that militants had managed to enter large parts of Aleppo city, forcing the army to redeploy.
The Syrian military statement was the first public acknowledgement by the army that insurgents led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham had entered the government-held city of Aleppo in a surprise attack that began earlier this week.
“The large numbers of terrorists and the multiplicity of battlefronts prompted our armed forces to carry out a redeployment operation aimed at strengthening the defense lines in order to absorb the attack, preserve the lives of civilians and soldiers, and prepare for a counterattack,” the army said.
The insurgent attack marks the most significant challenge in years to President Bashar Assad, jolting the frontlines of the Syrian civil war that have largely been frozen since 2020.
The Syrian military statement said that the insurgents had not been able to establish fixed positions in Aleppo city due to the army’s continued bombardment of their positions.
Two Syrian military sources said earlier that Russian and Syrian warplanes targeted insurgents in an Aleppo suburb on Saturday. Russia deployed its air force to Syria in 2015 to aid Assad in the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011.
The insurgent force began its surprise offensive earlier this week, sweeping through government-held towns and reaching Aleppo nearly a decade after government forces backed by Russia and Iran drove militants from the city.
Speaking on Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow regarded the militant attack as a violation of Syria’s sovereignty. “We are in favor of the Syrian authorities bringing order to the area and restoring constitutional order as soon as possible,” he said.
Israel says it struck Hezbollah weapons smuggling sites in Syria, testing a fragile ceasefire
- ‘Military infrastructure’ at the Syria-Lebanon border being used by Hezbollah for weapons smuggling
TEL AVIV: Israeli aircraft struck Hezbollah weapons smuggling sites along Syria’s border with Lebanon, the Israeli military said Saturday, testing a fragile, days-old ceasefire that halted months of fighting between the sides but has seen continued sporadic fire.
The military said it struck sites that had been used to smuggle weapons from Syria to Lebanon after the ceasefire took effect, which the military said was a violation of its terms. There was no immediate comment from Syrian authorities or activists monitoring the conflict in that country. Hezbollah also did not immediately comment.
The Israeli strike, the latest of several since the ceasefire began on Wednesday, came as unrest spread to other areas of the Middle East, with Syrian insurgents breaching the country’s largest city, Aleppo, in a shock offensive that added fresh uncertainty to a region reeling from multiple wars.
The truce between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah, brokered by the United States and France, calls for an initial two-month ceasefire in which the militants are to withdraw north of Lebanon’s Litani River and Israeli forces are to return to their side of the border.
The repeated bursts of violence — with no reports of serious casualties — reflected the uneasy nature of the ceasefire that otherwise appeared to hold. While Israel has accused Hezbollah of violating the ceasefire, Lebanon has also accused Israel of the same in the days since it took effect.
Many Lebanese, some of the 1.2 million displaced in the conflict, were streaming south to their homes, despite warnings by the Israeli and Lebanese militaries to stay away from certain areas.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported that an Israeli drone attacked a car in the southern village of Majdal Zoun. The agency said there had been casualties but gave no further details. Majdal Zoun, near the Mediterranean Sea, is close to where Israeli troops still have a presence.
The military said earlier Saturday that its forces, who remain in southern Lebanon until they withdraw gradually over the 60-day period, had been operating to distance “suspects” in the region, without elaborating, and said troops had located and seized weapons found hidden in a mosque.
Israel says it reserves the right under the ceasefire to strike against any perceived violations. Israel has made returning the tens of thousands of displaced Israelis home the goal of the war with Hezbollah but Israelis, concerned Hezbollah was not deterred and could still attack northern communities, have been apprehensive about returning home.
Hezbollah began attacking Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, in solidarity with the Palestinian militant group Hamas and its assault on southern Israel the day before. Israel and Hezbollah kept up a low-level conflict of cross-border fire for nearly a year, until Israel escalated its fight with a sophisticated attack that detonated hundreds of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah fighters. It followed that up with an intense aerial bombardment campaign against Hezbollah assets, killing many of its top leaders including longtime chief Hassan Nasrallah, and it launched a ground invasion in early October.
More than 3,760 people have been killed by Israeli fire in Lebanon during the conflict, many of them civilians, according to Lebanese health officials. The fighting killed more than 70 people in Israel — over half of them civilians — as well as dozens of Israeli soldiers fighting in southern Lebanon.
