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Thousands protested Saturday against Israel’s siege of Gaza on the sidelines of the Venice Film Festival, seeking to move the spotlight from movie drama to real-world trauma.Organised by left-wing political groups in northeast Italy, the demonstration began in the early evening a few kilometres from the festival where George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Emma Stone have walked the red carpet in recent days.”The entertainment industry has the advantage of being followed a lot, and so they should take a position on Gaza,” Marco Ciotola, a 31-year-old computer scientist from Venice, told AFP at the rally.”I don’t say that everyone needs to say ‘genocide’, but at least everyone needs to take a position, because this is not a political situation. This is a human situation.””We all know what is happening and it’s not possible that it carries on,” said Claudia Poggi, a teacher holding a Palestinian flag as people shouted “Stop the Genocide!” and “Free Palestine”.The Gaza war was one of the main talking points in the lead-up to the festival due to an open letter denouncing the Israeli government and calling on the festival to speak out against the war more clearly. The letter, drafted by a group called Venice4Palestine, has garnered more than 2,000 signatures from film professionals, including directors Guillermo del Toro and Todd Field, according to organisers.A similar initiative was organised at the Cannes Film Festival in May.”The objective of the letter was to bring Gaza and Palestine to the core of the public conversation in Venice and that is what has happened,” Venice4Palestine co-founder and director Fabiomassimo Lozzi told AFP.”We are amazed at the amount of reaction,” he added.”It was like people in our business were just waiting for someone to raise our voice.”- Boycott -The collective — but not the open letter — had also asked the festival to disinvite Israeli actor Gal Gadot and Britain’s Gerard Butler over their past support for the Israeli military.The festival has ruled out such a move — they are not expected in any case — but Lozzi defended the proposed boycott.”I believe that it’s justified in the same way I believed about 40 years ago that it was justified boycotting artists who performed in South Africa at the height of the apartheid system,” he said.Israel invaded Gaza nearly two years ago and has killed at least 63,025 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that the UN considers reliable.The United Nations has declared a famine in the territory caused by Israel’s blockade on the territory of nearly two million people.The war was sparked by Hamas a October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The Red Cross warned on Saturday that any Israeli attempt to evacuate Gaza City would put residents at risk, as Israel’s military tightened its siege on the area ahead of a planned offensive. Gaza’s civil defence agency said that since dawn Israeli attacks had killed 47 people in the territory already devastated by nearly 23 months of war.Israel is under increasing pressure to end its offensive in Gaza where the great majority of the population has been displaced at least once and the United Nations has declared a famine.But despite the calls at home and abroad for an end to the war, the Israeli army is readying itself for an operation to seize the Palestinian territory’s largest city and relocate its inhabitants. “It is impossible that a mass evacuation of Gaza City could ever be done in a way that is safe and dignified under the current conditions,” International Committee of the Red Cross President Mirjana Spoljaric said in a statement. The dire state of shelter, healthcare and nutrition in Gaza meant evacuation was “not only unfeasible but incomprehensible under the present circumstances”.  The Israeli military has declared Gaza City a “dangerous combat zone”, without the daily pauses in fighting that have allowed limited food deliveries elsewhere.The military did not call for the population to leave immediately, but a day earlier COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry body that oversees civil affairs in the Palestinian territories, said it was making preparations “for moving the population southward for their protection”.- ‘Escalation’ -Gaza’s civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP 47 people had been killed in Israeli bombing since dawn.The army did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the figure.Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties in accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify the tolls and details provided by the civil defence agency or the Israeli military.Bassal said 12 people were killed when an Israeli air strike hit “a number of displaced people’s tents” near a mosque in the al-Nasr area, west of Gaza City.The army did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Umm Imad Kaheel, who was nearby at the time, said children were among those killed in the strike, which had “shaken the earth” and filled the sky with smoke.”People were screaming and panicking, everyone running, trying to save the injured and retrieve the martyrs lying on the ground,” the 36-year-old said.The civil defence agency said 10 people were killed by Israeli fire as they waited near food distribution centres in the central and southern Gaza Strip.A journalist working for AFP on the northern edge of Gaza City reported he had been ordered to evacuate by the army, adding conditions had become increasingly difficult, with gunfire and explosions nearby. – ‘All night’ -The United Nations estimates that nearly a million people currently live in Gaza governorate, which includes Gaza City.Abu Mohammed Kishko, a resident of the city’s Zeitoun neighbourhood, told AFP the bombardments the previous night had been “insane”.”It didn’t stop for a second, and we didn’t sleep all night,” the 42-year-old said.”We also couldn’t breathe properly because of the smoke bombs — we were suffocating,” he added.Kishko said that, like many residents, he had not heeded Israel’s evacuation warning because he had nowhere safe to go. The government’s plans to expand the war have also drawn opposition inside Israel, where many fear they will jeopardise the lives of the remaining hostages held by Palestinian militants in Gaza. “Military pressure kills hostages,” said a statement from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum ahead of a weekly protest in Tel Aviv.The Israeli army, whose troops have been conducting ground operations in Zeitoun for several days, said two of its soldiers had been wounded by an explosive device “during combat in the northern Gaza Strip”.Hamas’s October 2023 attack, which triggered the war, resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.Of the 251 hostages seized during the attack, 47 are still being held in Gaza, around 20 of whom are believed to be alive.Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 63,371 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that the United Nations considers reliable.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi touched down in the Chinese city of Tianjin on Saturday evening, Indian TV networks showed, a day before a summit that will be attended by leaders from more than 20 countries. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation gathering will be held in the northern port city on Sunday and Monday, days before a massive military parade in nearby Beijing to mark 80 years since the end of World War II.North Korea’s Kim Jong Un will be among some 26 world leaders slated to attend the parade, though Modi was not on a list of attendees for the parade published by Chinese state media on Thursday.Modi’s visit — his first to China since 2018 — comes straight after a trip to Japan, which pledged to invest $68 billion in India.China and India, the world’s two most populous nations, are intense rivals competing for influence across South Asia and fought a deadly border clash in 2020.A thaw began last October when Modi met with Chinese President Xi Jinping for the first time in five years at a summit in Russia.The SCO comprises China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Belarus. Another 16 countries are affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners”.Xi began welcoming leaders including Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and Egyptian Premier Moustafa Madbouly on Saturday.Russian President Vladimir Putin is also due to arrive in Tianjin ahead of the summit.China and Russia have used the SCO — sometimes touted as a counter to the Western-dominated NATO military alliance — to deepen ties with Central Asian states.Other leaders including Iranian and Turkish presidents Masoud Pezeshkian and Recep Tayyip Erdogan will also attend the bloc’s largest meeting since its founding in 2001.United Nations chief Antonio Guterres met Xi on Saturday and discussed “the need to strengthen multilateralism and reform international institutions, in particular the global financial architecture”, according to a UN readout of the meeting.- Bilateral meetings -Multiple bilateral meetings are expected to be held on the sidelines of the summit.The Kremlin said on Friday that Putin will discuss the Ukraine conflict with Erdogan on Monday.Turkey has hosted three rounds of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine this year that have failed to break the deadlock over how to end the conflict, triggered when Moscow launched its invasion of its pro-European neighbour in February 2022.Putin will also meet with his Iranian counterpart Pezeshkian to discuss Tehran’s nuclear programme on Monday, a meeting that comes as Iran faces fresh Western pressure.Britain, France and Germany, known as the E3, triggered a “snapback” mechanism on Thursday to reinstate UN sanctions on Iran for failing to comply with commitments made in a 2015 deal over its nuclear programme.Russia’s foreign ministry warned that the reimposition of sanctions against Iran risked “irreparable consequences”.Tehran and Moscow have been bolstering political, military and economic ties over the past decade as Russia drifted away from the West.Relations between them grew even closer after Russia launched its offensive against Ukraine.