Ethiopia
Eritrean troops have pushed deep into northern Ethiopia, according to media reports and eyewitness accounts, as a two-week old conflict in Ethiopia threatens to spread outside its borders. Fighting erupted between Ethiopian government forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TLPF) last month after the TPLF joined forces with the Oromo Liberation Army, the Fano militia in the Amhara region and four smaller groups in an effort to topple the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Analysts had feared that any significant deployment of forces from Eritrea, which Addis Ababa accuses of backing the TPLF, could lead to further regional escalation. Eritrea fought alongside the Ethiopian military in a previous war with the TPLF from 2020 to 2022 but relations have since deteriorated, with officials from landlocked Ethiopia regularly warning they must have access to the Red Sea, along which Eritrea has a coastline.
More from Africa News here.
West Bank
A Palestinian man was shot dead in the occupied West Bank during an attack by Israeli settlers on a group of Palestinians harvesting olives near the village of Burqa, according to the Palestinian health ministry. The dead man was identified locally as 44-year-old Ali Hassan Yusor al-Bazzari, and Reuters reported that his son Danial, 12, wept over his body at his funeral before it was draped in a Palestinian flag. The Israeli military said both settlers and soldiers opened fire and that the soldiers were responding to reports of a Palestinian throwing a rock at a settler, without saying why settlers were in the area. The attack was the latest incident in a campaign of settler violence during this year’s olive season, a deeply symbolic time for Palestinian communities, in which Israeli settlers have shot at farmers, chopped down olive trees and attacked journalists.
More from Reuters here.
Turkey
The mayor of Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city and a stronghold of the secular opposition, has defected to President Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party (AKP), gifting the ruling party an important mayoralty it had never won in an election. The city had been led by the opposition Republican People’s Party for more than two decades until Mayor Cemil Tugay joined the AKP in a ceremony attended by Erdogan in Istanbul today. The AKP suffered a string of defeats in mayoral elections in 2024 and, since then, many opposition mayors have been targeted on corruption charges they say are bogus. Dozens of mayors, including Istanbul's Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, are in prison awaiting trial.
More from AP here.