Asia

“Justice has been long delayed, but it must not be denied,” China’s Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser Ma Xinmin told the court in The Hague in the Netherlands on Thursday.

Egypt does not want to be seen as facilitating ethnic cleansing through the permanent resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza.

Hamas wants a complete ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dismissed the demands as "bizarre."

Netanyahu's plan envisages Israeli security control "over the entire area west of Jordan" from land, sea and air "to prevent the strengthening of terrorist elements" in occupied West Bank and Gaza.

The fishermen were arrested on February 7 off the coast of the Delft islet in Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka.

Maryam, 50, is also senior vice president of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party. She is considered to be the political heir of PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif.

The chairman of the House of Representatives committee on China arrived on the self-ruled island with four other US lawmakers.

Tensions were also rising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where three Palestinian gunmen on Thursday opened fire on morning traffic at a highway checkpoint, killing one person and wounding five others, Israeli police said.

On Wednesday, the Association of Rape Crisis Centres in Israel, an umbrella body that fights sexual violence, said that sexual assaults on October 7 matched "patterns of wartime sexual violence documented in literature".

A study by the UN children’s agency warned that one in six children in the north are acutely malnourished.

On February 17, a senior Pakistani bureaucrat alleged that the chief election commissioner and the chief justice were involved in “poll-rigging” in the elections and resigned from his post.

About the reasons for the change, sources said it was being done to counter the Chinese aggression along the LAC.

The last time the relics were taken out of the country was in May 2023, when they were exhibited at an exposition in Mongolia.

Taiwan's coast guard said a boat carrying four people was fishing about one nautical mile away from Kinmen, which Taiwan has claimed as a restricted area largely for military purpose.

Five elections will take place in South Asian countries this year, and most will likely return incumbent parties to power. It is not yet clear if Sri Lanka will follow suit.

Though independents backed by jailed Imran Khan's PTI won the maximum no of seats in Parliament, PML-N and PPP announced they would form a coalition govt.

The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 13-1 with the United Kingdom abstaining, reflecting the strong support from countries around the globe for ending the war.

This was the fifth round of discussions between PML-N and PPP coordination committees to end the political stalemate after the February 8 elections resulted in a hung Parliament.

US circulated a rival UNSC resolution that supports a temporary cease-fire in Gaza linked to the release of all hostages, and calls for the lifting of all restrictions on the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The EU countries also reiterated their calls for Israel not to launch an assault on the Gaza city of Rafah, which has become the main shelter zone in the stricken territory.