As brightly coloured kites climb above Burin, a Palestinian village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, children race across a sun-baked hillside, watching their creations soar into the sky. Behind them, the red-roofed houses of Har Bracha, an Israeli settlement, overlook the village below. Established in 1983, the settlement, illegal under international law, is one of several that encircle Burin, a village of a few thousand people. Palestinians and solidartiy activists fly kites towards the Israeli settelment of Har Bracha from the village of Burin, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank on July 10, 2026. —AFP Every summer since 2009, residents have gathered on this hill for a kite festival, held on land that has been partly lost after being illegaly occupied by settlers. “We want to tell the settlers that this is our land, this is our sky. If we can’t reach those lands anymore, our kites can,” Ghassan Najjar, one of the festival’s organisers, told AFP. While the festival is primarily for children, it also...
US President Donald Trump faced questions about the security of his new Air Force One plane gifted by Qatar, after he took an older jet home from a NATO summit this week. The billionaire president has been unable to contain his excitement over the retrofitted Boeing 747-8 aircraft, which took him to Ankara on its maiden trip outside the United States. Trump then abruptly announced in Turkiye that he would send the aircraft ahead to a British airbase saying the decision was made to allow US troops to tour the luxury plane. The New York Times reported on Friday that the new plane lacked the same security countermeasures boasted by the older jet, including anti-missile defenses. US media also reported that the Secret Service had advised the switch. Speculation was fueled by the fact that US hostilities had flared again with Iran, which borders Turkey, and because journalists on the old plane out of Ankara were also told to keep their window blinds down, a step normally reserved for war zones. Trump himself denie...