The UK has dropped more aid into Gaza today – bringing the total amount dropped in by parachute to more than 100 tonnes.
Twelve tonnes of ready-to-eat meals, water, rice, tinned goods and flour were dropped along Gaza’s northern coastline on pallets attached to parachutes by RAF and British Army personnel from A400M transport planes.
It is the 11th airdrop since the UK struck a deal with Jordan allowing it to drop aid by air into Gaza via Royal Air Force planes for the first time in late March.
Before that, UK aid had been airdropped by Jordanian planes after deliveries to northern Gaza by land and sea became a struggle due to the violence and chaos.
The United Nations (UN) says northern Gaza is already in a state of “full-blown famine”.
The UK has now airdropped more than 100 tonnes of aid into Gaza since the Israel-Hamas war began on 7 October.
It says drop zones are regularly surveyed by personnel to ensure civilians are not harmed when the aid lands after flying an hour from Amman, Jordan.
Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said the UK’s commitment to delivering large quantities of aid to Gaza is “unwavering” and shows “where our focus lies over the coming weeks and months”.
“We continue to pressure Israel to fully open Ashdod Port as well as more land crossings,” he said.
Mr Shapps also mentioned the deployment of support ship RFA Cardigan Bay last month to the Eastern Mediterranean, which is providing accommodation to hundreds of American soldiers and sailors building a temporary pier off the Gazan coast to facilitate aid deliveries.
Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron said delivering aid by air was essential but the full amount of aid needed can only be delivered into Gaza by land.
“We continue to pressure Israel to fully open Ashdod Port as well as more land crossings,” he said.
Despite Israel saying it reopened the key entry point of Kerem Shalom in southern Gaza on Wednesday, the UN said no aid has entered Gaza and there is no one to receive it on the Palestinian side because of ongoing fighting.
Once the temporary pier is built, it is expected to be able to facilitate the delivery of 90 truckloads of aid into Gaza and 150 when it is fully operational.
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The Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt has been closed since Israel’s military took control of the Palestinian side early on Tuesday as part of a wider offensive targeting Hamas in the southernmost parts of Gaza.
Aid officials said the flow of aid had been halted despite it being one of the main supply routes in the effort to prevent famine.
The war in Gaza has driven around 80% of the territory’s population of 2.3 million people from their homes and caused vast destruction to buildings across several cities.
More than 34,900 people have now been killed in Gaza since the start of the conflict, according to the Hamas-run health ministry there.
The war began on 7 October when Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting about 250 others.
Israel says around 100 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others are still being held by militants.
There are mechanisms to protect the regime in events like this and the Revolutionary Guard, which was founded in 1979 precisely for that purpose, will be a major player in what comes next.
In the immediate term, vice-president Mohammed Mokhber will assume control and elections will be held within 50 days.
Mokhber isn’t as close to the supreme leader as Raisi was, and won’t enjoy his standing, but he has run much of Khamenei’s finances for years and is credited with helping Iran evade some of the many sanctions levied on it.
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Drone footage of helicopter crash site
Raisi’s successor will most likely be the chosen candidate of the supreme leader and certainly another ultra-conservative hardliner – a shift back to the moderates is highly unlikely.
Likewise, we shouldn’t expect any significant change in Iran’s foreign activities or involvement with the war in Gaza. It will be business as usual, as much as possible.
However, after years of anti-government demonstrations following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, this might be a moment for the protest movement to rise up and take to the streets again.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has died after the helicopter he was travelling in crashed in a mountainous area of northwest Iran.
Rescuers found the burned remains of the aircraft on Monday morning after the president and his foreign minister had been missing for more than 12 hours.
“President Raisi, the foreign minister and all the passengers in the helicopter were killed in the crash,” a senior Iranian official told Reuters, asking not to be named.
Iran‘s Mehr news agency reported “all passengers of the helicopter carrying the Iranian president and foreign minister were martyred”.
State TV said images showed it had smashed into a mountain peak, although there was no official word on the cause of the crash.
“President Raisi’s helicopter was completely burned in the crash… unfortunately, all passengers are feared dead,” an official told Reuters.
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President of Iran killed in crash
As the sun rose, rescuers saw the wreckage from around 1.25 miles, the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Pir Hossein Kolivand, told state media.
Iranian news agency IRNA said the president was flying in an American-made Bell 212 helicopter.
Mr Raisi, 63, who was seen as a frontrunner to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran’s supreme leader, was travelling back from Azerbaijan where he had opened a dam with the country’s president.
Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, also died in the crash.
The governor of East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards were also said to have been on board when the helicopter crashed in fog on Sunday.
Iranian media initially described it as a “hard landing”.
The chief of staff of Iran’s army had ordered all military resources and the Revolutionary Guard to be deployed in the search, which had been hampered by bad weather.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was among the first to react to the news of Mr Raisi’s death.
“India stands with Iran in this time of sorrow,” he said in a post on X.
A helicopter carrying Iran’s president crashed during bad weather on Sunday.
But who is Ebrahim Raisi – a leader who faces sanctions from the US and other nations over his involvement in the mass execution of prisoners in 1988.
The president, 63, who was travelling alongside the foreign minister and two other key Iranian figures when their helicopter crashed, had been travelling across the far northwest of Iran following a visit to Azerbaijan.
Mr Raisi is a hardliner and former head of the judiciary who some have suggested could one day replace Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Because of his part in the sentencing of thousands of prisoners of conscience to death back in the 1980s, he was nicknamed the Butcher of Tehranas he sat on the so-called Death Panel, for which he was then sanctioned by the US.
Both a revered and a controversial figure, Mr Raisi supported the country’s security services as they cracked down on all dissent, including in the aftermath of the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini – the woman who died after she was arrested for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly – and the nationwide protests that followed.
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The months-long security crackdown killed more than 500 people and saw over 22,000 detained.
In March, a United Nations investigative panel found that Iranwas responsible for the “physical violence” that led to Ms Amini’s death after her arrest for not wearing a hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities.
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The president also supported Iran’s unprecedented decision in April to launch a drone and missile attack on Israel amid its war with Hamas, the ruling militant group in Gaza responsible for the 7 October attacks which saw 1,200 people killed in southern Israel.
Involvement in mass executions
Mr Raisi is sanctioned by the US in part over his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 at the end of the bloody Iran-Iraq war.
Under the president, Iran now enriches uranium at nearly weapons-grade levels and hampers international inspections.
Iran has armed Russia in its war on Ukraineand has continued arming proxy groups in the Middle East, such as Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
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He successfully ran for the presidency back in August 2021 in a vote that got the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history as all of his potentially prominent opponents were barred from running under Iran’s vetting system.
A presidency run in 2017 saw him lose to Hassan Rouhani, the relatively moderate cleric who as president reached Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
‘Very involved in anything’
Alistair Bunkall, Sky News’s Middle East correspondent, said the president is “a major figure in Iranian political and religious society” but “he’s not universally popular by any means” as his administration has seen a series of protests in the past few years against his and the government’s “hardline attitude”.
Mr Raisi is nonetheless “considered one of the two frontrunners to potentially take over” the Iranian regime when the current supreme leader dies, Bunkall said.
He added the president would have been “instrumental” in many of Iran’s activities in the region as he “would’ve been very involved in anything particularly what has been happening in Israel and the surrounding areas like Lebanon and Gaza and the Houthis over the last seven and a bit months”.