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In a small village on the coast of southern Morocco, women gather in a house to create collaborative works of textile art, and also earn a living.Several hunch over large canvasses, embroidering their latest piece at the women-only workshop, in the village of 400 people. Some of their works have been shown internationally.”This project has changed my life,” said Hanane Ichbikili, a 28-year-old former nursing student turned project creative director.”And yet I had never held an embroidery needle before,” she told AFP.Just 19 percent of Moroccan women hold steady jobs, according to official figures, and in rural areas they are particularly affected by poverty, unpaid labour and a lack of opportunity.An artist with roots in both Morocco and France has tried to make a difference.Margaux Derhy founded the workshop in 2022 in her father’s native village of Sidi R’bat, around 70 kilometres (45 miles) south of Agadir, to fulfil her “dream to make art with purpose”.The project uses textiles and old photographs to explore her family heritage before they left the country in the 1960s, turning sepia-toned portraits and scenes into large silk-and-linen canvases.The North African country was a protectorate of France before gaining its independence in 1956.- Creative process -The project is more than just personal for Derhy — it also provides local women in the small fishing village employment.”I wanted to be engaged on the ground,” said Derhy, adding that she hired 10 local women to work full-time for a monthly salary exceeding Morocco’s private-sector minimum wage of 3,045 dirhams ($330).The women’s hands glide over frames that were once used by Paris’s prestigious Maison Lesage, the world-famous embroidery house that has worked with some of the greatest names in fashion.The creative process is collaborative, with Derhy drawing an outline and the team then gathering to choose the threads and colour palette for each section.A canvas can take up to five months to complete.The finished works, priced at up to $5,620, have been shown in exhibitions in Marrakesh, Paris and Brussels. Future exhibits are planned for Casablanca’s L’Atelier 21 and Tabari Artspace Gallery in Dubai.The workshop has also helped to challenge perceived ideas about women in the village.”At first, some of the women had to hide to come because it was frowned upon,” said Khadija Ahuilat, 26, who oversees operations.- ‘A blessing’ -She said some people thought the project “was nonsense, and a woman should stay at home”.”But we managed to change that. I’m very proud to have contributed to this change, even if on a small scale.”Her mother, Aicha Jout, 50, a widow who once gathered mussels and raised livestock to support her family, is now one of the embroiderers.”It changes a lot for me to be here,” she said.”I love the idea of embroidering on pictures, but also of passing on the craft to other women.”Jout learned to embroider at the age of 12, and has trained the rest of her mostly single or widowed colleagues.”There aren’t really a lot of job opportunities here, so when the chance came I didn’t hesitate for a second,” said Haddia Nachit, 59, one of the workshop’s most efficient embroiders.Her nickname among the women is “TGV” — after France’s high-speed train.Seated next to Nachit, Fadma Lachgar, also 59, said the work allowed her to help her family.”Resuming embroidery at my age, after 20 years of stopping, is a blessing,” she said.

Israel on Friday said Hamas must accept a hostage deal in Gaza or “be annihilated”, as US President Donald Trump announced that a ceasefire agreement was “very close”.It came amid dire conditions on the ground, with the United Nations warning that Gaza’s entire population was at risk of famine. Defence Minister Israel Katz said Hamas must agree to a ceasefire proposal presented by US envoy Steve Witkoff or be destroyed, after the Palestinian militant group said the deal failed to satisfy its demands.”The Hamas murderers will now be forced to choose: accept the terms of the ‘Witkoff Deal’ for the release of the hostages — or be annihilated.”Israel has repeatedly said that the destruction of Hamas was a key aim of the war.Negotiations to end nearly 20 months of war in Gaza have so far failed to achieve a breakthrough, with Israel resuming operations in March following a short-lived truce.In the United States, Trump told reporters “they’re very close to an agreement on Gaza”, adding: “We’ll let you know about it during the day or maybe tomorrow.”Food shortages in Gaza persist, with aid only trickling in after the partial lifting by Israel of a more than two-month blockade.Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency, called Gaza “the hungriest place on Earth”.”It’s the only defined area — a country or defined territory within a country — where you have the entire population at risk of famine,” he said.Later, the UN condemned the “looting of large quantities of medical equipment” and other supplies “intended for malnourished children” from one of its Gaza warehouses by armed individuals.Aid groups have warned that desperation for food and medicine among Gazans was causing security to deteriorate.- ‘Crusade’ against Israel -Israel has doubled down on its settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, while defying calls from French President Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders for a two-state solution.This week Israel announced the creation of 22 new settlements in the Palestinian territory, which Israel has occupied since 1967.London said the move was a “deliberate obstacle” to Palestinian statehood while Egypt called it “a provocative and blatant new violation of international law and Palestinian rights”.The 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which includes Egypt, also condemned Israel’s decision.On Friday, Katz vowed to build a “Jewish Israeli state” in the West Bank.Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territory are considered illegal under international law and seen as a major obstacle to a lasting peace in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Katz framed the move as a direct rebuke to Macron and others pushing for recognition of a Palestinian state.Macron on Friday said that recognition of a Palestinian state, with some conditions, was “not only a moral duty, but a political necessity”.Israel’s foreign ministry accused the French president of undertaking a “crusade against the Jewish state”.Separately, a diplomatic source told AFP that Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan would make the first visit of its kind to the West Bank on Sunday.- ‘Children in pieces’ -The White House announced on Thursday that Israel had “signed off” on a new ceasefire proposal submitted to Hamas.The Palestinian group said the deal failed to satisfy its demands, but stopped short of rejecting it outright, saying it was “holding consultations” on the proposal.Gaza’s civil defence agency told AFP that at least 45 people had been killed in Israeli attacks on Friday, including seven in a strike targeting a family home in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip.Palestinians sobbed over the bodies of their loved ones at Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital following the strike, AFPTV footage showed.”These were civilians and were sleeping at their homes,” said neighbour Mahmud al-Ghaf, describing “children in pieces”.The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but said separately that the air force had hit “dozens of targets” across Gaza over the past day.The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said on Friday that at least 4,058 people had been killed since Israel resumed operations on March 18, taking the war’s overall toll to 54,321, mostly civilians. Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, also mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.Of the 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s attack, 57 remain in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.

President Donald Trump has slashed US aid and vowed a major rethink on helping the world. A controversial effort to bring food to Gaza may offer clues on what’s to come.Administered by contracted US security with Israeli troops at the perimeter, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) is distributing food through several hubs in the war-ravaged Gaza Strip.An officially private effort with opaque funding, the GHF began operations on May 26 after Israel completely cut off supplies into Gaza for over two months, sparking warnings of mass famine.The organization said it had distributed 2.1 million meals as of Friday. The initiative excludes the United Nations, which has long coordinated aid distribution in the war-ravaged territory and has infrastructure and systems in place to deliver assistance on a large scale.The UN and other major aid groups have refused to cooperate with GHF, saying it violates basic humanitarian principles, and appears crafted to cater to Israeli military objectives.  “What we have seen is chaotic, it’s tragic and it’s resulted in hundreds of thousands of people scrambling in an incredibly undignified and unsafe way to access a tiny trickle of aid,” said Ciaran Donnelly, senior vice president of international programs at the International Rescue Committee (IRC).Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said his aid group stopped work in Gaza in 2015 when Hamas militants invaded its office and that it refused to cooperate in Syria when former strongman Bashar al-Assad was pressuring opposition-held areas by withholding food.”Why on earth would we be willing to let the Israeli military decide how, where and to whom we give our aid as part of their military strategy to herd people around Gaza?” said Egeland.”It’s a violation of everything we stand for. It is the biggest and reddest line there is that we cannot cross.” – Sidelining UN -The UN said that 47 people were injured Tuesday when hungry and desperate crowds rushed a GHF site — most of them by Israeli gunfire — while a Palestinian medical source said at least one person had died.The Israeli military denied its soldiers fired on civilians and the GHF denied any injuries or deaths. Israel has relentlessly attacked Gaza since Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.Israel has vowed to sideline the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA, accusing it of bias and of harboring Hamas militants.UNRWA said that nine out of thousands of staff may have been involved in the October 7 attack and dismissed them, but accuses Israel of trying to throw a distraction.John Hannah, a former senior US policymaker who led a study last year that gave birth to the concepts behind the GHF, said the UN seemed to be “completely lacking in self-reflection” on the need for a new approach to aid after Hamas built a “terror kingdom.””I fear that people could be on the brink of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good instead of figuring out how do we take part in this effort, improve it, make it better, scale it up,” said Hannah, who is not involved in implementing the GHF.Hannah, a senior fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, defended the use of private contractors, saying that many had extensive Middle East experience from the US-led “war on terror.””We would have been happy if there were volunteers from (other) capable and trusted national forces… but the fact is, nobody’s volunteering,” he said.He said he would rather that aid workers coordinate with Israel than Hamas.”Inevitably, any humanitarian effort in a war zone has to make some compromises with a ruling authority that carries the guns,” he said.- Legitimacy issue -Hannah’s study had discouraged a major Israeli role in humanitarian work in Gaza, urging instead involvement by Arab states to bring greater legitimacy.Arab states have balked at supporting US efforts as Israel pounds Gaza and after Trump mused about forcibly displacing the whole Gaza population and constructing luxury hotels.Israel and Hamas are negotiating a new Gaza ceasefire that could see a resumption of UN-backed efforts.Aid groups say they have vast amounts of aid ready for Gaza that remain blocked.Donnelly said the IRC had 27 tons of supplies waiting to enter Gaza, faulting the GHF for distributing items like pasta and tinned fish that require cooking supplies — not therapeutic food and treatment for malnourished children.He called for distributing relief in communities where people need it, instead of through militarized hubs.”If anyone really cares about distributing aid in a transparent, accountable, effective way, the way to do that is to use the expertise and infrastructure of aid organizations that have been doing this for decades,” Donnelly said.

Global stocks finished mixed on Friday after President Donald Trump put US-China trade tensions back on the boil by claiming Beijing had “totally violated” an agreement with Washington.His social media post came hours after US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said trade talks with China aimed at putting to bed sky-high mutual tariffs — currently suspended …

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US President Donald Trump signaled renewed trade tensions with China Friday, arguing that Beijing had “totally violated” a tariff de-escalation deal, while saying he expects to eventually speak with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.Trump’s comments came after US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that trade talks with China were “a bit stalled,” in an interview with …

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The United Nations condemned Friday a group of “armed individuals” for raiding warehouses in the Palestinian territory of Gaza and looting large amounts of medical supplies.The group “stormed the warehouses at a field hospital in Deir al-Balah, looting large quantities of medical equipment, supplies, medicines, nutritional supplements that was intended for malnourished children,” said Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.The stolen aid had been brought into war-ravaged Gaza just a day earlier, he said.”As conditions on the ground further deteriorate and public order and safety breaks down, looting incidents continue to be reported,” he said.But Dujarric highlighted the difference between Friday’s event and the looting two days earlier of a UN World Food Programme (WFP) warehouse by “starving” Palestinians, desperate for aid.”This appeared to be much more organized and much different from the looting we’d seen… in the past days,” he said.”This was an organized operation with armed men.” Since the beginning of last week, Israel has begun to allow a trickle of aid into the Palestinian territory, after a total blockade imposed on March 2.The UN has warned that the aid allowed through so far was “a drop in the ocean” of the towering needs in Gaza, after the blockade created dramatic shortages of food and medicine.The UN humanitarian agency warned Friday that “100 percent of the population (are) at risk of famine.”Gaza has been decimated by Israel’s punishing military offensive on the territory, which has killed at least 54,321 people, mostly civilians, according to health ministry figures the UN considers reliable.It has also reduced much of the territory to rubble, destroying hospitals, schools, residential areas and basic road and sewage infrastructure.Israel launched its offensive in response to an unprecedented Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, also mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.- Only five trucks -On Thursday, “we and our humanitarian partners only managed to collect five truckloads of cargo from the Palestinian side of the Kerem Shalom crossing,” Dujarric said.”Another 60 trucks had to return to the crossing due to intense hostilities in the area.”He rejected Israeli allegations that the UN was not collecting available aid.”It was no longer safe to use that road,” which Israel’s military had asked aid organizations to use, he said, stressing that there are “a lot of armed gangs” operating there.The five trucks that did make it through on Thursday were carrying medical supplies for the Deir al-Balah field hospital.And most of those supplies “were looted today, very sadly and tragically,” Dujarric said.

Egypt and Greece sought to ease tensions over the historic St Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai peninsula on Friday after a controversial court ruling said it sat on state-owned land.Cairo has denied that the ruling threatens the UNESCO world heritage landmark, a pilgrimage and tourism site, after Greek and church authorities warned the sacred site’s status was at risk.St Catherine’s monastery was established in the sixth century at the biblical site of the burning bush in the southern mountains of the Sinai peninsula, and is the world’s oldest continually inhabited Christian monastery.A court in Sinai ruled on Wednesday in a land dispute between the monastery and the South Sinai governorate that the monastery “is entitled to use” the land and the archaeological religious sites dotting the area, all of which “the state owns as public property”.The ruling comes with a government development project underway to boost visitor numbers to the area, which is popular with pilgrims and adventure tourists looking to climb Mount Sinai.But on Friday, in a phone call with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said Cairo was “fully committed to preserving the unique and sacred religious status of Saint Catherine’s monastery, and ensuring it is not violated”.The Greek premier’s office said Mitsotakis emphasised the importance of “preserving the pilgrimage and Greek Orthodox character of the monastery and resolving the issue in an institutional manner”, based on an agreement between the two countries.A Greek delegation is due to visit Egypt next week, the government in Athens said.Sisi’s office has defended the court ruling, saying that it “consolidates” the site’s sacred status, after the head of the Greek Orthodox church in Athens denounced it.Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens called the court ruling “scandalous” and an infringement by Egyptian judicial authorities on religious freedoms.- Tourism development -The Saint Catherine area, which includes the eponymous town and a nature reserve, already a popular tourist site, is undergoing major development under a controversial government project aimed at ramping up visitor numbers.Observers say the project has harmed the reserve’s ecosystem and threatened both the monastery and the local community.Archbishop Ieronymos warned that the monastery’s property would now be “seized and confiscated”, despite “recent pledges to the contrary by the Egyptian president to the Greek prime minister”.The ruling has drawn the condemnation of the region’s other Greek Orthodox patriarchates in Jerusalem and Istanbul.The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem said in a statement on Friday that it was “deeply troubled” and asserted its jurisdiction over and protection of the monastery.It said the monastery was granted a letter of protection from the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century which was reaffirmed by the Ottoman Sultan Selim II in the 16th century.The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople said it was “disappointed and saddened” by the ruling and called on the Egyptian government to respect longstanding tradition and agreements with the monastery.In a statement to Egypt’s state news agency, the foreign ministry in Cairo later said rumours of confiscation were “unfounded”, and that the ruling “does not infringe at all” on the monastery’s sites or its religious and spiritual significance.Greek government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis said “Greece will express its official position … when the official and complete content of the court decision is known and evaluated”.He confirmed both countries’ commitment to “maintaining the Greek Orthodox religious character of the monastery”. 

The mother of jailed Egyptian-British activist Alaa Abdel Fattah is close to death after 242 days on hunger strike, her daughter warned Friday.Laila Soueif, 69, was hospitalised Thursday in London with “critically low” blood sugar, having resumed her full hunger strike last week.Doctors gave “her proteins that help the body produce glucose”, her anxious daughter Sanaa Seif said outside St Thomas hospital in London.”It worked for a couple of hours” but the “bottom line is, we’re losing her, and… there is no time,” Seif added, saying her mother was still refusing to accept glucose.UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer “needs to act now, not tomorrow, not Monday. Now, right now,” she said.”It’s a miracle that we still have her, I’m really proud of her, and I want to remind Keir Starmer (of) his promise to us.”Soueif’s son Abdel Fattah was arrested in Egypt in September 2019 and sentenced to five years in prison on charges of “spreading false news” after sharing a Facebook post about police brutality.The 43-year-old writer and activist has become a symbol of the plight of thousands of political prisoners languishing in Egyptian jails.A United Nations panel of experts on Wednesday determined his detention was arbitrary and illegal and called for his immediate release.Soueif has been on hunger strike since September 29, 2024, the day her son was expected to be released after completing his five-year prison sentence.Abdel Fattah, who has spent most of the past decade behind bars, has also been on hunger strike himself since March 1 after learning his mother had been hospitalised with dangerously low blood sugar and blood pressure.Following her February hospitalisation, Soueif decided to ease her strike after Starmer said he had pressed for her son’s release in a call with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.She began consuming 300 calories a day through a liquid nutritional supplement, still going without food until last week, when she returned to consuming only rehydration salts, tea without sugar and vitamins.Her family says she has lost over 40 percent of her bodyweight since September.Last week, Starmer’s office again said the prime minister had pressed for Abdel Fattah’s release in a call with Sisi.A key figure in the 2011 uprising that toppled longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak, he has been detained under successive administrations since.Soueif’s daughter said she had been in contact with the UK foreign ministry. “They know she’s dying. They know in detail how she’s dying,” she said, visibly upset.A foreign ministry spokesperson told AFP they were “concerned to hear of Laila’s hospitalisation” and continued to press for Abdel Fattah’s release.