Few expected United States President Donald Trump to abandon Israel during his second term in office, considering how supportive he had been of the Middle Eastern country in his first term. And yet, considering the still-mounting death toll from Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, and the international condemnation that has accompanied it, his continued full-throated support for Israel has unnerved some in the president's base.
The US military said it killed on Thursday five more alleged drug traffickers aboard two vessels in the Pacific Ocean, bringing the divisive campaign's death toll to over 100. The Trump administration has carried out such strikes in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September but has provided no evidence that the boats are involved in drug trafficking, prompting debate about the operations' legality.
Russia cannot escape paying the bill for its war in Ukraine, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said at the establishment of an International Claims Commission for Ukraine in The Hague on Monday. The commission, which will validate war damages in Ukraine to be paid by Russia, sends a message to future aggressors, Kallas said, that "if you start a war, you will be held to account".
After the US government placed sanctions on the United Nations' special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, her life turned upside down. Credit cards stopped working, she told Al Jazeera. A hotel reservation booked by the European Parliament was cancelled. Medical insurance was denied. For Albanese, the consequences of her work on Israel's genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza were not just professional they were personal, too.
Any peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine that includes an amnesty for war crimes could encourage other authoritarian leaders to attack their neighbours, Ukraine's only Nobel peace prize winner has warned. Oleksandra Matviichuk said the leaked 28-point US-Russia plan did not account for the human dimension and she supported President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's efforts to rewrite it in dialogue with White House. We need a peace, but not a pause that provides Russia a chance to retreat and regroup, the Kyiv-based human rights lawyer said.
Iran is taking its first faltering steps to boost its dismal soft power abilities, spotting a slim opening to improve regional relations after Donald Trump's June bombing campaign and Israel's attack on Hamas negotiators in Qatar unsettled Gulf states. The tentative foreign policy tweaks are born in part of necessity: much of Iran's network of regional military alliances has been dismantled in recent years.
In September, the Financial Times published an editorial headlined A world without rules. That view was premised on two incidents: Israel's launch of a missile strike on a building that hosted Hamas officials in Qatar; and the flight of 19 Russian drones into Polish airspace. This flouting of the previous rules-based order, the FT said, was now producing a kind of anarchy and a proliferation of violence.
The United States conducted another attack on an alleged drug trafficking boat in the eastern Pacific on Saturday, killing three people aboard, the Pentagon said on Sunday. Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and carrying narcotics, the US Southern Command announced in a post on social media. The announcement said the boat was in international waters when it was struck by the Southern Spear joint taskforce.
The UK's reported decision to restrict intelligence-sharing with the Pentagon on suspected drug-traffickers' boats in the Caribbean is a modest yet symbolic act of resistance to Donald Trump's imperialist revival. Britain is said to have objected to repeated, lethal US airstrikes on alleged smugglers off Venezuela's coast which have been widely condemned as illegal extrajudicial killings amounting to murder. The strikes appear to foreshadow direct US attacks on Venezuela itself.
The United States had evidence last year that Israeli officials discussed how their soldiers sent Palestinians into tunnels in Gaza that the Israelis believed were potentially lined with explosives, two former US officials have told the Reuters news agency. The information was shared with the White House and analysed by the intelligence community in the final weeks of former President Joe Biden's administration, the officials said.
The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is the most expensive warship in the world. It is more than 330 meters long, and cost $13 billion (11 billion) to build. The colossal ship and its escort vessels are currently bound for the Caribbean at the behest of US President Donald Trump. It has dozens of fighter jets and helicopters on board, and will provide support for the US ships and units already stationed in the region.
Israel must allow aid into Gaza, and its restrictions on doing so over the past two years have put it in breach of its obligations, the UN's top court has found. The stinging advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice in The Hague also found that Israel had a duty not to impede the supply of aid by UN organisations including the beleaguered UN Palestinian relief agency Unrwa, which has been in effect banned from the territory since January.
Only a decolonised plan centred on Palestinian sovereignty can bring lasting peace to Gaza. United States President Donald Trump's 20-point Gaza peace plan offers some constructive proposals on hostages, humanitarian aid, and reconstruction. Yet it is marred by an unmistakable colonial framework: Gaza is to be overseen by Trump himself, with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other outsiders cast as trustees for Palestinian governance, while Palestinian statehood is deferred indefinitely.
George Mitchell, the great US advocate for the Northern Ireland peace agreement, described diplomacy as 700 days of failure and one of success. In Gaza, tragically, there have been 730 days of failure and none of success. Indeed, the destruction, the death toll and the spillover of the conflict into other countries is a monument to shame diplomacy and what remains of international law. Arguably, it is the profession's lowest point since 1939.
