BAKU: Azerbaijan is to launch major military exercises near the breakaway Nagorny Karabakh region, its Defense Ministry said Friday, two months after fierce clashes with ethnic-Armenian separatists over the disputed territory.
The “operational-tactical exercise will be held from 19 to 24 of June with all the arms and services,” the Caucasus nation’s Defense Ministry said in a statement.
The drills will take place in “military ranges located in the (Karabakh) frontal zone, and in the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic, as well as the Azerbaijan sector of Caspian Sea set up,” the ministry said.
They will involve “about 25,000 servicemen, more than 300 tanks and armored combat vehicles, more than 100 rocket artillery launchers, up to 40 military aircraft and more than 30 air defense systems, ships of naval forces and special forces units.”
Fighting erupted in Nagorny Karabakh in early April, killing at least 110 people and wounding scores more before a Russia-mediated truce ended the worst of the violence.
The crisis has long festered, with dozens killed every year, but April’s fighting was the worst since a 1994 cease-fire turned it into one of Europe’s frozen conflicts.
Azerbaijan and Armenia have feuded over Nagorny Karabakh since Armenian separatists seized the landlocked territory in a war that claimed some 30,000 lives in the early 1990s.
Energy-rich Azerbaijan, whose military spending exceeds Armenia’s entire state budget, has repeatedly threatened to take back the breakaway region by force.
But Moscow-backed Armenia has vowed to crush any military offensive.
Azerbaijan to hold war drills near Nagorny Karabakh
Azerbaijan to hold war drills near Nagorny Karabakh
French publisher recalls dictionary over ‘Jewish settler’ reference
- The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks”
- The four books are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said
PARSI: French publisher Hachette on Friday said it had recalled a dictionary that described the Israeli victims of the October 7, 2023 attacks as “Jewish settlers” and promised to review all its textbooks and educational materials.
The Larousse dictionary for 11- to 15-year-old students contained the same phrase as that discovered by an anti-racism body in three revision books, the company told AFP.
The entry in French reads: “In October 2023, following the death of more than 1,200 Jewish settlers in a series of Hamas attacks, Israel decided to tighten its economic blockade and invade a large part of the Gaza Strip, triggering a major humanitarian crisis in the region.”
The worst attack in Israeli history saw militants from the Palestinian Islamist group kill around 1,200 people in settlements close to the Gaza Strip and at a music festival.
“Jewish settlers” is a term used to describe Israelis living on illegally occupied Palestinian land.
The four books, which were immediately withdrawn from sale, are subject to a recall procedure and will be destroyed, Hachette said, promising a “thorough review of its textbooks, educational materials and dictionaries.”
France’s leading publishing group, which came under the control of the ultra-conservative Vincent Bollore at the end of 2023, has begun an internal inquiry “to determine how such an error was made.”
It promised to put in place “a new, strengthened verification process for all its future publications” in these series.
President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday said that it was “intolerable” that the revision books for the French school leavers’ exam, the baccalaureat, “falsify the facts” about the “terrorist and antisemitic attacks by Hamas.”
“Revisionism has no place in the Republic,” he wrote on X.
Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, with 251 people taken hostage, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Authorities in Gaza estimate that more than 70,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces during their bombardment of the territory since, while nearly 80 percent of buildings have been destroyed or damaged, according to UN data.
Israeli forces have killed at least 447 Palestinians in Gaza since a ceasefire took effect in October, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
