CAIRO: Eight people were killed and three more injured when a six-story residential building collapsed in central Cairo on Tuesday, Egypt’s health ministry said.
Nine ambulances were dispatched to the scene as rescuers worked to “lift rubble and search for any wounded or bodies,” health ministry spokesman Hossam Abdel Ghaffar said in a statement.
“I woke up to a sound of a huge explosion,” Waleed Mohamed, 38, told AFP near the site of the rubble.
He said he and fellow neighbors ran “toward the building and saw it collapsed, the gas pipe exploded and everything was destroyed,” he said.
A restoration order had been issued in 1993 for the building, which was constructed in the 1960s in Cairo’s lower-middle income Al-Waili neighborhood, according to district head Ahmed Awad, state newspaper Al-Ahram reported.
But “the building’s residents had appealed the order and it was not executed,” the official said.
Neighbouring buildings were evacuated Tuesday as a precautionary measure, according to a statement from Cairo governorate.
A large number of the buildings in central Cairo have gone unrestored since they were built in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Greater Cairo — a sprawling metropolis home to over 26 million people — has seen a number of deadly building collapses in recent years, both due to the dilapidated state of some and, at times, failure to comply with building regulations.
Eight dead in Cairo building collapse: health ministry
https://arab.news/r6268
Eight dead in Cairo building collapse: health ministry

- The collapse of the six-story building in Cairo’s western neighborhood of Waili also injured three people
- The governor’s office said that prosecutors were investigating
Iran will reportedly share images of captured Israeli fighter jet pilots ‘soon’

- Tehran said on Friday that 2 Israeli F-35 pilots were in custody, one of them a woman
- Israel has not said whether it lost any pilots during initial surprise attack on Iranian targets 5 days ago
RIYADH: Iran will share images of captured Israeli F-35 pilots “soon,” the Tehran Times reported on Tuesday.
Authorities in Iran said on Friday that two Israeli fighter jet pilots were in custody, one of them a woman. Israel has yet to confirm whether any of its pilots were missing following the initial surprise attack on Iranian targets on Friday morning.
Missile and drone attacks by both countries against each other have continued every day since then, prompting growing fears that the fighting could spiral out of control and spark a major regional conflict.
Also on Tuesday, Iranian media reported that a “terrorist team” linked to Israel and armed with explosives had been arrested in a town southwest of Tehran.
What Israel’s bombing of Iran’s state broadcaster says about its targeting of journalists

- Israeli forces struck Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB on Monday, killing two staff and injuring others during a live broadcast
- Press freedom advocates say the Tehran strike echoes Israel’s pattern of targeting media in Gaza and the West Bank
LONDON: In what press freedom groups say is only the latest in a string of attacks on media workers, the Israeli military on Monday struck the headquarters of the state-owned Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting network in Tehran.
The attack, which interrupted a live broadcast, killed at least two members of staff — news editor Nima Rajabpour and secretariat worker Masoumeh Azimi — and injured several others, according to state-affiliated media.
In footage widely shared online, Sahar Emami, an anchor for the Islamic Republic of Iran News Network, was seen fleeing the studio as the screen behind her filled with smoke. Moments earlier, she had told viewers: “You hear the sound of the aggressor attacking the truth.”
The strike destroyed the building — known as the Glass Building — which burned through the night. Israel immediately claimed responsibility.
Defense Minister Israel Katz had issued a warning less than an hour earlier, calling IRIB a “propaganda and incitement megaphone,” urging up to 330,000 nearby residents to evacuate.
The attack drew swift condemnation from Iranian officials. Esmaeil Baqaei, spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, called it “a wicked act of war crime,” urging the international community to demand justice from Israel for its attack on the media.
NUMBER
70%
Israel is responsible for the majority of journalist killings globally in 2024, the highest number by a single country in one year since the Committee to Protect Journalists began documenting this data in 1992.
Source: CPJ
“The world is watching,” Baqaei wrote on X. “Israeli regime is the biggest enemy of truth and is the No#1 killer of journalists and media people.”
Over the past week, the long-running shadow war between Israel and Iran has escalated dramatically. On Friday, Israel launched a series of airstrikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities, including the Natanz enrichment site.
With the stated aim of preventing Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, the strikes caused significant damage to the country’s nuclear infrastructure and military command structure, with multiple high-ranking commanders killed.

Iran has retaliated with missile barrages targeting Israeli cities and military bases. Civilian casualties have mounted on both sides, and major cities like Tehran and Tel Aviv have experienced widespread panic and disruption.
The Israeli attack on IRIB shows media workers are not exempt from the violence.
Sara Qudah, regional director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said she was “appalled by Israel’s attack on Iran’s state television channel,” noting that the lack of international censure “has emboldened it to target media elsewhere in the region.”

Loreley Hahn Herrera, lecturer in global media and digital cultures at SOAS University of London, echoed this view.
“The exceptional status through which Western powers have historically shielded Israel has allowed it to systematically commit international law and human rights violations without ever being held accountable or suffer any legal, financial, military or diplomatic repercussions,” she told Arab News.
“This has indeed emboldened Israel to attack not only Palestine and Iran. In the last months, Israel has broken the ceasefire in Lebanon, bombed Yemen, and Syria as well.”

Israel’s treatment of media workers in combat zones has long been documented by press freedom organizations. Despite repeated calls for accountability, Israel has consistently evaded consequences.
“Israel has a sophisticated political communication strategy which rests on its hasbara (propaganda) that has worked hand in hand with its material strategies to control the public spaces in the West through repeating narratives about victimhood and its right to defend itself,” Dina Matar, professor of political communication and Arab media at SOAS, told Arab News.
Monday’s strike in Tehran closely mirrors Israel’s record in Gaza and the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023. Under the banner of “eliminating terrorists,” Israel has killed at least 183 journalists in Palestine and Lebanon, according to CPJ. Others put the figure closer to 220.

A separate report published in April by the Costs of War project at Brown University described the Gaza conflict as “the worst ever for journalists.”
Titled “News Graveyards: How Dangers to War Reporters Endanger the World,” the study concluded that more journalists have been killed in Gaza than in all major US wars combined.
The report was swiftly attacked by Israeli nationalists, who dismissed it as “garbage” and factually flawed for not linking the journalists killed to militant activity.

“There is no policy of targeting journalists,” a senior Israeli officer said last year, attributing the deaths to the scale and intensity of the bombardment.
But Herrera disagrees.
“Israel is not only targeting journalists, it is targeting the families of the journalists as a strategy to deter their coverage and punish them for reporting the war crimes Israel commits on a daily basis in occupied Palestine,” she said.

Herrera cited several examples where Israel appeared to punish journalists by targeting their families. One case was that of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, who was broadcasting live when he learned that his wife, daughter, son, and grandchild had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in October 2023.
A more recent case involved photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, who was killed alongside several family members. Both attacks, Israel claimed, were aimed at Hamas operatives, but critics say they reflect a broader strategy of silencing coverage through collective punishment.
Yet accusations of Israel’s targeting of journalists precede the last 20 months.

“Israel has a long and documented history of targeting Palestinian journalists,” said Matar, pointing to the 1972 assassination of writer Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut.
A prominent Palestinian author and militant, Kanafani was considered to be a leading novelist of his generation and one of the Arab world’s leading Palestinian writers.
He was killed along with his 17-year-old niece, Lamees, by an explosive device planted in his car by Mossad, in one of the first known extrajudicial killings for which the Israeli spy agency ever claimed responsibility.

More recently, in May 2022, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead by an Israeli soldier during a raid in Jenin, despite wearing a press vest. Initial Israeli claims blaming Palestinian fire were quickly disproven by independent investigations and the UN.
A 2025 documentary identified the suspected shooter, but no one has been held accountable.
Foreign media workers have also been killed. In 2014, Italian journalist Simone Camilli and his Palestinian colleague Ali Shehda Abu Afash died when an unexploded Israeli bomb detonated while they were reporting in Gaza.

In 2003, Welsh documentarian James Miller was fatally shot by Israeli forces while filming in Rafah.
A year earlier, Italian photojournalist Raffaele Ciriello — on assignment for Corriere della Sera — was shot dead by Israeli gunfire in Ramallah during the Second Intifada, becoming the first foreign journalist killed in that conflict.
No one has been held accountable in any of these cases.
“The reason behind Israel’s targeting and killing of journalists is to send a clear message and instill fear of reporting Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the West Bank, as it can carry the consequence of death and/or injury,” said Herrera, who noted Israel’s refusal to allow international media into Gaza as part of a wider strategy to monopolize the narrative.
“This is an attempt to minimize or flat out stop any negative coverage of Israeli actions in Gaza and the rest of the occupied territories,” she said. “Israel does not want international media, and particularly Western media, to cover their genocide campaign and their ongoing and systematic war crimes … and push further the delegitimization of Israel.”
While Israel has so far refused to grant broader media access to the enclave, Western news organizations and human rights groups have attempted to push back against the Israeli narrative, arguing that affiliation with outlets like Al-Aqsa TV or Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB does not justify extrajudicial killings.
“News outlets, even propagandist ones, are not legitimate military targets,” the Freedom of the Press Foundation said in a statement on Monday. “Bombing a studio during a live broadcast will not impede Iran’s nuclear program.”
As the conflict with Iran escalates, incidents like Monday’s bombing are likely to face growing scrutiny. For many observers, Israel’s actions are becoming increasingly indefensible, and international tolerance for such attacks may be nearing its limit.
“The international community has played an important role in allowing Israel to act in this manner,” said Herrera.
“Since its establishment in 1948, and even before that though the Balfour Declaration in 1917, the West has protected Israel in the international relations arena.
“The best example of this is the use of the US veto in the UN Security Council or the ever-present declarations that Israel ‘has a right to defend itself’ by European and American political leadership.
“Until the international community effectively implements sanctions, stops funding and arming Israel, we will only continue to witness Israel’s brazen violations of international and human rights law.
“We cannot expect Israel to self-regulate because Israel is not a democracy. Its political and legal systems are subservient to the Zionist ideology of colonization and racial supremacy, and will act to satisfy these aims.”
UAE warns against ‘miscalculated actions’ in Israeli-Iranian conflict, calls for immediate ceasefire
UAE warns against ‘miscalculated actions’ in Israeli-Iranian conflict, calls for immediate ceasefire

- Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan says Emirati leadership is dedicated to promotion of stability, prosperity and justice
- He highlights ‘the risks of reckless and miscalculated actions that could extend beyond the borders’ of Israel and Iran
LONDON: As military exchanges between Israel and Iran continued on Tuesday for a fifth consecutive day, the UAE’s minister of foreign affairs, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, warned of the wider threat posed by the continuing conflict and called for an immediate ceasefire.
“There is no alternative to political and diplomatic solutions,” he said, calling on the UN and its Security Council to intervene and halt the escalating violence.
He also highlighted “the risks of reckless and miscalculated actions that could extend beyond the borders” of Israel and Iran, the Emirates News Agency reported.
The UAE believes “a diplomatic approach is urgently required to lead both parties toward deescalation, end hostilities, and prevent the situation from spiraling into grave and far-reaching consequences,” he added.
The goal of international diplomacy, he said, must be to immediately halt hostilities, prevent the conflict from spiraling out of control, and mitigate its effects on global peace and security.
The UAE condemned the Israeli airstrikes on Iran that began on Friday, which have targeted nuclear sites, military leaders, intelligence chiefs and atomic scientists. Iran has responded by firing ballistic missiles at Israeli towns and cities along the Mediterranean, including Tel Aviv, Rishon LeZion and Haifa.
Sheikh Abdullah said the Emirati leadership is dedicated to the promotion of stability, prosperity and justice, and he stressed the urgent need for wisdom in a region long embroiled in conflicts.
“The UAE believes that promoting dialogue, adhering to international law and respecting the sovereignty of states are essential principles for resolving the current crises,” he added.
“The UAE calls on the United Nations and the Security Council to fully uphold their responsibilities by preventing further escalation, and taking urgent and necessary measures to achieve a ceasefire and reinforce international peace and security.”
At least 60 people feared missing in two deadly shipwrecks off Libya, IOM says

- IOM says shipwrecks happened off the Libyan coast
CAIRO: At least 60 people were feared missing at sea after two deadly shipwrecks off the coast of Libya in recent days, the International Organization for Migration said on Tuesday.
Russia says Israel attacks on Iran are illegal, notes Iran’s commitment to NPT

- The statement said Moscow was waiting for the International Atomic Energy Agency to provide “unvarnished” assessments of the damage caused to Iranian nuclear facilities by Israeli attacks
MOSCOW: Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday denounced continued Israeli attacks on Iran as illegal and said a solution to the conflict over Tehran’s nuclear program could only be found through diplomacy.
A ministry statement posted on Telegram noted Iran’s “clear statements” on its commitment to adhere to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and its willingness to meet with US representatives.
The statement also said Moscow was waiting for the International Atomic Energy Agency to provide “unvarnished” assessments of the damage caused to Iranian nuclear facilities by Israeli attacks.