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LONDON: New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for waging a “genocidal war” in Gaza, and called for a ceasefire in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

The Democratic nominee later attended a vigil in Manhattan marking the two-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, The Guardian reported.

The event was hosted by Israelis for Peace, an anti-occupation group who have convened weekly demonstrations since 2023 to call for a ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages.

Mamdani’s statement said: “Two years ago today, Hamas carried out a horrific war crime, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and kidnapping 250 more.

“I mourn these lives and pray for the safe return of every hostage still held and for every family whose lives were torn apart by these atrocities.”

He highlighted a death toll in Gaza “that now far exceeds 67,000; with the Israeli military bombing homes, hospitals and schools into rubble.”

Mamdani added: “Every day in Gaza has become a place where grief itself has run out of language. I mourn these lives and pray for the families that have been shattered.”

The last two years of war has “demonstrated the very worst of humanity,” he said, calling for an end to Israeli “occupation and apartheid.”

BERLIN: Germany will grant police the power to shoot down rogue drones like those that have disrupted airports across Europe and that some European leaders have attributed to a hybrid war being waged by Russia.
The new law, agreed by the cabinet on Wednesday and awaiting parliamentary approval, explicitly authorizes the police to down drones violating Germany’s airspace, including shooting them down in cases of acute threat or serious harm.
Other techniques available to down drones include using lasers or jamming signals to sever control and navigation links. The new law comes after dozens of flights were diverted or canceled last Friday at Munich Airport, Germany’s second largest, leaving more than 10,000 passengers stranded, after rogue drone sightings. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said he assumed Russia was behind many of the drones flying over Germany last weekend, but none had been armed and were rather on reconnaissance flights. EU leaders have come to view Russia as a major threat to their continent’s security following Moscow’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine and their support of Kyiv. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called last month for what she described as a drone wall – a network of sensors and weapons to detect, track and neutralize intruding unmanned aircraft – to protect Europe’s eastern flank.
But some say the drones involved in recent incidents could also have been launched from within the EU. With the new law, Germany joins European countries that have recently given security forces powers to down drones violating their airspace, including Britain, France, Lithuania and Romania.
It states that to avert dangers posed by drones on the land, in the air or on water, police “may employ appropriate technical means against the system, its control unit, or its control link, if averting the danger by other measures would be futile or significantly impeded.”
Germany recorded 172 drone-related disruptions to air traffic between January and the end of September 2025, up from 129 in the same period last year and 121 in 2023, according to data from Deutsche Flugsicherung (DFS).
German military drills last month in the northern port city of Hamburg included a demonstration of how to neutralize a rogue drone.
Like a spider, a large military drone shot a net at a smaller one in mid-flight, entangling its propellers and forcing it to the ground, where a robotic dog trotted over to seek possible explosives.
Shooting down drones could be unsafe in densely populated urban areas, however, and airports do not necessarily have detection systems that can immediately report sightings.