Rwandan President Paul Kagame has cautiously welcomed a United States-brokered peace deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), while suggesting Kigali will retaliate if provoked. Speaking at a news conference in Kigali on Friday, Kagame said Rwanda remained committed to the agreement but questioned whether Kinshasa would uphold its part of the deal. 

The United Nations Human Rights Council has rejected Eritrea’s attempt to shut down an independent investigation into alleged rights abuses, in a move hailed as vital to preventing impunity. Eritrea’s rare bid to scrap the mandate of the UN special rapporteur on its human rights record was defeated on Friday, with only four votes in favour, 25 against, and 18 abstentions. 

Three former El Salvador military officers were given lengthy prison sentences over the 1982 killings of four Dutch journalists during the country’s civil war. It means former Defense Minister Gen. José Guillermo García, 91, former treasury police director Col. Francisco Morán, 93, and Col. Mario Adalberto Reyes Mena, 85, will likely die in custody. 

A Kurdish militant group that has waged a long-running insurgency in Turkey announced its fighters in northern Iraq will begin handing over their weapons, marking the first concrete step toward disarmament as part of a peace process. 

A special tribunal has sentenced Bangladesh’s former leader Sheikh Hasina to six months in jail after she was found in contempt of court for allegedly claiming she had a license to kill at least 227 people. Wednesday’s sentence was the first in any case against Hasina since she fled to India during a mass uprising last year that toppled her 15-year rule. 

Airstrikes and shootings killed 94 Palestinians in Gaza overnight, including 45 who were attempting to get much-needed humanitarian aid, hospitals and the Health Ministry said. Israel’s military did not immediately comment on the strikes. 

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has called on countries to cut off all trade and financial ties with Israel, including a full arms embargo, and withdraw international support for what she termed an “economy of genocide”.

On June 8, Colombia woke up to the grim news that Miguel Uribe Turbay, a 39-year-old senator and presidential hopeful for the right-wing Centro Democrático party, had been gravely wounded after being shot. More than three weeks have passed since the attack and Uribe remains in critical condition, while Colombians, concerned about renewed democratic instability, have found themselves haunted by ghosts from the past.

A court in Algeria upheld French-Algerian author Boualem Sansal’s five-year prison sentence in a case that has raised alarm over freedom of expression in Algeria and pushed tensions with France to the brink. The ruling denies a request made by prosecutors at an appeal hearing last week. They asked a judge to give Sansal the maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.