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      Trump’s Gaza takeover won’t happen. But it has already changed the face of Israeli politics | Yair Wallach

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      When President Donald Trump issued an ultimatum to Hamas last week to release all hostages by noon on 15 February, warning that otherwise “all hell [will] break loose”, the Israeli right was ecstatic. Here was a chance to finally move ahead with the complete occupation and annihilation of the Gaza Strip. The families of Israeli hostages were petrified about the prospect of the ceasefire collapsing, yet members of the ruling coalition called to kill the deal. “We have international support, give the order!” demanded the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.But the order never came. Hamas abided by the agreement and freed three hostages; Israel then released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Trump shrugged and said that it was Israel’s decision. His envoy, Steve Witkoff, who visited Israel on Sunday, signalled that the direction of travel is not towards resuming hostility. Instead, the parties must now move to “substantive” negotiations over the second phase of the ceasefire, he said, leading to peace.In the whirlwind of the last four weeks, it is difficult to make sense of Trump’s approach to the Gaza Strip. On the one hand, the president is widely credited for pushing the parties to a ceasefire agreement, raising hopes among Israelis who want to see a return of the hostages and an end to the war. On the other, Trump embraced the hard-right Israeli vision of ethnically cleansing Gaza, through a forced “relocation” of its 2.2 million Palestinian residents, establishing a US real estate development that would turn the Strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.Some suspect this is merely a negotiation ploy that he hopes will pressure Arab states to take responsibility over Gaza, and to force Hamas into relinquishing control and influence. Even if this were the case, Trump’s rhetoric has already damaged international law. For the first time in many decades, the US has publicly proposed the forced displacement of millions of people as a geopolitical solution. As the genocide scholar Dirk Moses recently observed, this may mark the end of the postwar order, which defined such “transfers” of populations as war crimes that were banned by the Geneva conventions. While episodes of forced mass displacement have taken place in the second half of the 20th century, such as those in Yugoslavia or in Syria, these were never endorsed or championed by the White House.The legitimisation of ethnic cleansing could have a lasting impact in Palestine, Israel and beyond. Palestine’s history is instructive: in 1937, the Palestine Royal Commission administered by Britain proposed the forced displacement of over 200,000 Palestinians from the Galilee as part of its partition plan. Mainstream Zionist leaders had long ruled out transfers on this scale as unrealistic. But British backing for this idea gave it legitimacy. David Ben-Gurion, then the leader of the Jewish community in British-ruled Palestine, wrote in his diary: “This is a possibility we did not dream of; that we could not dream of in our wildest imagination.”Ben-Gurion understood that the details of the partition plan mattered far less than the principle of forced mass displacement. In the aftermath of the second world war, “population exchanges” were explicitly or tacitly accepted by the great powers as a necessary evil. Eleven years after the royal commission, Ben-Gurion oversaw the permanent expulsion and dispossession of two-thirds of Palestinians, in the Nakba of 1948.We can already see the effect of Trump’s rhetoric on Israeli society. Since October 2023, rightwing ministers and political activists have been calling for a euphemistic “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza, and yet Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had sought to keep a safe distance from such ideas. The idea of forced displacement was broadly considered so beyond the pale that mainstream pollsters did not even pose the question in their Israeli public opinion surveys.Yet shortly after his return from Washington DC, a gleeful Netanyahu lauded Trump’s “revolutionary vision for the day after Hamas”. “We see eye-to-eye with the US administration on … all our war goals”, he told the Knesset. The political commentator and radio host Amit Segal, who has been accused of serving as Netanyahu’s mouthpiece, quoted the Psalms verse: “We were like them that dream.” The verse refers to the return of Jews to Zion; now it was being used to celebrate the looming expulsion of Palestinians from the country.Strikingly, most centrist Israeli parties welcomed the plan. The former defence minister Benny Gantz commended Trump for his “creative, original and interesting thinking”. An opinion poll found that no less than 82% of Jewish Israelis supported the plan in principle; 52% thought it was feasible. Only 3% of Israeli Jews rejected the plan as “unacceptable and immoral”.Yet even if many Israelis favourably view the fantasy plan of a depopulated Gaza, there’s no appetite for the total war that would be required to materialise that plan. Opinion polls showed that Israelis are resolutely opposed to an immediate return to hostilities. After 16 months of war, there is widespread fatigue. The malnourished condition of the hostages that returned most recently, and the reports of torture they faced, was deeply alarming. Two-thirds of Israelis believe the ceasefire agreement should be upheld, and the safe return of the hostages should take priority.We can expect further ultimatums and confusion for the foreseeable future. Even if an immediate return to war has been averted, the risk of one is greater than ever. Trump has let the genie of mass expulsion out of the bottle. The ethnic cleansing of Gaza would require carnage and atrocities even beyond the horrifying scale of the last 17 months. Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan are unlikely to survive, and the reverberations would be felt throughout the region. This is a scenario that would not only mean the likely death of the hostages, but an increasingly theocratic Jewish republic premised upon destruction and conquest. If Israel heads down this route, it will not only be destroying Palestinians in Gaza, but condemning itself to an ever escalating war.

      Yair Wallach is a reader in Israeli studies and head of the Centre for Jewish Studies at Soas University of London

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      Netanyahu seeks to draw Trump into future attack on Iranian nuclear sites

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      Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that, with Donald Trump’s support, his government will “finish the job” of neutralising the threat from Iran, amid US reports that Israel is considering airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites in the coming few months.Trump has said he would prefer to make a deal with Tehran, but also made clear that he was considering US military action if talks failed, and his administration has laid down an early maximalist demand: Iranian abandonment of its entire nuclear programme.“All options are on the table,” the US national security adviser, Michael Waltz, told Fox News on Sunday. The new administration will only talk to Iran, Waltz added, if “they want to give up their entire programme and not play games as we’ve seen Iran do in the past in prior negotiations”.Earlier this month, Trump offered the Iranian regime a stark choice.“I would like a deal done with Iran on non-nuclear,” he told the New York Post. “I would prefer that to bombing the hell out of it.”In politics as in business, Trump’s vaunted “art of the deal” has relied heavily on bluster and threats, but analysts question how well that will work with Tehran. They also warn that the window for a diplomatic resolution to the standoff with Tehran will get narrower with each passing month, as Iranian nuclear capabilities progress, and Netanyahu works to persuade Trump to participate in joint strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities while it is at its most vulnerable.Israel’s prime minister has tried and failed to convince successive US administrations to take part in military action against Iran, including Trump’s. During his first term in the White House, Trump declined, in line with his aim of keeping the US out of foreign wars.In 2018, however, Trump did fulfil another Netanyahu request, withdrawing the US from a three-year-old multilateral agreement that had constrained Iran’s programme in return for sanctions relief. Since then, Iran has pushed forward with nuclear development and now produces increasing amounts of 60%-enriched uranium, which means it is a small technical step away from the production of weapons-grade fissile material.Tehran insists it has no intention of making a nuclear weapon and remains a member of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, could upend that policy if Iran’s nuclear sites came under threat.Israel and Iran launched a series of tit-for-tat attacks on each other last year, culminating in substantial Israeli airstrikes on 25 October that inflicted significant damage on Iran’s air defences.That damage, combined with Israel’s crippling campaign over the past year against Iran’s most important ally in the region, Hezbollah, has left Iran in its most militarily vulnerable state for decades.View image in fullscreenStanding alongside the new US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, on Sunday, Netanyahu made clear he wanted to take advantage of that vulnerability.“Over the last 16 months, Israel has dealt a mighty blow to Iran’s terror axis. Under the strong leadership of President Trump, and with your unflinching support, I have no doubt that we can and will finish the job,” he said.US intelligence agencies have been briefing reporters over the past week that they believe Israel is likely to attack Iranian nuclear sites in the first half of 2025. But the intelligence assessments also underlined Israeli reliance on US support in the form of aerial refuelling, intelligence and reconnaissance. US officials also said such strikes would, at most, set back Iran’s programme by a few months, and could trigger Tehran’s decision to take the decisive step towards making weapons-grade uranium.Whatever the misgivings in Washington, the Trump administration approved the sale earlier this month of guidance kits for bunker-busting BLU-109 bombs, likely to be essential in inflicting damage on Iran’s most deeply buried enrichment plant at Fordow.Netanyahu was the first foreign visitor to be invited to the White House after Trump’s re-election, and according to the Washington Post, the two leaders discussed “several possible levels of American backing, ranging from active military support for a kinetic strike – such as intelligence, refuelling or other assistance – to more limited political backing for a coercive ultimatum”.Raz Zimmt, a research fellow and Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said there was another clock ticking on diplomacy with Iran. Under the 2015 nuclear agreement, its remaining signatories, including the UK, France and Germany, can trigger a “snap back” of all international sanctions on Iran, but that leverage expires in October this year, giving European capitals the options of “use it or lose it”. If the mechanism is triggered, it could lead to a further escalation, Zimmt said.“I think there is a very limited diplomatic window of opportunity until August or September, to reach some kind of settlement between Iran and the US,” he said. “If there is no agreement by then … I think it will be much easier for Netanyahu to get not just a green light [from Washington] but perhaps some kind of military capabilities which will make it easier for Israel to achieve a broader and more effective impact.”Netanyahu regularly describes Trump as the “best friend” Israel ever had in the White House, a description echoed by Rubio and other administration officials, but that friendship will be put to a decisive test as Israel continues to press the case for an attack on Iran.Ariane Tabatabai, a Pentagon policy adviser in the Biden administration, said it would fuel “tension between the ‘restraint’ camp in the administration and the more traditional Republicans who are more inclined toward a more forceful approach to Iran”.“It’s not clear yet in these early days which group will have more influence in the inter-agency process and ultimately drive policy, but that’ll be a factor as well.” Tabatabai said.Trump prides himself in keeping the US out of foreign wars, but he has shown himself ready to take military action against Tehran, ordering the assassination by drone of a Revolutionary Guards commander, Qassem Suleimani, in Baghdad in January 2020.Saudi Arabia is reportedly offering to mediate to avoid a conflagration, but even if Trump wanted to hammer out a deal, argued Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, Trump’s browbeating style of negotiation could easily backfire when it came to Tehran.“The Trump style is he goes in heavy,” Vatanka said. “But Ali Khamenei has to be extremely careful how he responds to Trump so his personal image is not damaged.”“Iran has been weakened in the region – no doubt about it – but they still claim to be leading proponents of the Islamic cause who stand up to western bullying,” he added. “So what might work with certain countries in Europe or in Latin America will not necessarily work with the Iranian regime.” More

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      Trump’s plan for Gaza leaves Arab nations facing an impossible choice | Nesrine Malik

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      Arab states are in a bind. King Abdullah of Jordan squirmed in the Oval Office last week, as the press asked him and Donald Trump about the latter’s Gaza plan. He is in a tight spot, wanting to keep Trump onside while at the same time not agreeing to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Immediately after, anonymous Egyptian “security sources” – not parties prone to leaking without strategic direction from President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi – said that Sisi would not accept an invitation to visit Washington as long as the Gaza displacement plan was on the agenda. Now, this was probably more for the Egyptian public’s consumption than for Trump’s benefit – Egypt is in no position to make an enemy of the new administration – but it nonetheless shows how hard it is for Trump to secure the acquiescence of even the US’s closest allies.Saudi Arabia also postponed a visit to the US once Trump announced his intentions for Gaza. And in a remarkable change of tune, Saudi, which before 7 October 2023 was en route to normalisation with Israel and is not usually a country to make heated statements, lost its patience. When Benjamin Netanyahu quipped that maybe it would like to take Palestinians from Gaza (“they have a lot of territory”, he said), Saudi state media unleashed a storm of invective against him. When Trump announced his plan, Saudi Arabian authorities immediately put out a statement rejecting it. So keen was the government to signal that rejection that it released the statement at 4am local time.Leaders are scrambling to calibrate their responses at an emergency summit on Thursday hastily convened in Saudi Arabia. But they will struggle to do so without landing themselves in hot water with Trump, members of the Arab public or global opinion on the illegality of the plan. “The current approach is going to be difficult,” the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ambassador to the US said when asked if his government could find “common ground” with Trump on Gaza. He might have got away with that. But perhaps feeling that it was a little too strong, he went on to say that “we are all in the solution-seeking business” and he doesn’t really “see an alternative to what’s being proposed”. The clip immediately started doing the rounds on social media as evidence of the UAE’s endorsement of ethnic cleansing. There is clearly no consensus on Trump’s Gaza approach, or even how to respond to it, between countries that make up a political bloc but have divergent interests.Time is running out. On Sunday, Marco Rubio kicked off a trip to Israel and the Middle East. Conversations that some have been avoiding on Trump’s home turf will have to happen there. A need to come up with a common line and strategy on behalf of Arab countries is now pressing. The task is to thread a needle: flattery of Trump and rejection of his Gaza plan are irreconcilable, and each time even a single head of state engages with Trump or is asked about Gaza, there is the risk of a comment that inflames feelings or infuriates the US emperor. The Arab summit seems a very long way away when every day brings another Trump gambit or threats to the end of the ceasefire in Gaza.The scramble is part of a bigger problem. Arab states are unable to settle on a position on Palestine. Before 7 October, normalisation agreements with Israel had been secured by some Arab nations and were under way with others, with Palestinian statehood a nominally plausible prospect subject to technical questions, even though in reality everyone knew it was more remote than ever. The war killed that plausibility, and Trump buried it.With the stakes so raised, it is impossible for Arab nations to engage with Israel and the US on Gaza and Palestine one way or the other without undoing something big. The political landscape is finely balanced. Egypt and Jordan are the most important parties when it comes to any displacement of Palestinians from Gaza due to their proximity, and would be most affected by any resettlement campaign. They are also big US foreign assistance recipients with weak economies and governments with shaky mandates. These payments and military aid are in part remuneration for these states being “stabilising” parties in the region, serving as buffers between Israel, Iran, Hamas and all proxies, absorbing refugees and facilitating the movement of US military assets through the region. Losing US aid weakens not only their economies, but also their militaries, security agencies and ability to maintain the patronages and oppressions needed to stabilise politics.But there are other calculations. Agreeing to a plan that involves the expulsion of Palestinians in essence turns all receiving and facilitating countries into parties to what will simply be a wider, differently configured Israel-Palestine conflict. Instead of the removal of Palestinians from Gaza being an end to something, it would be the beginning of something else, with the horror of mass displacement on top. It is unfathomable not only in cruelty and criminality, but also in terms of practicality: already, 35% of Jordan’s population are refugees. Also – and Trump can be forgiven for not getting his head around this, considering how invisible they are – people live in these countries, millions of them. They might not have a say in how their politics is run, but they have an opinion. That opinion has historically been managed but by no means erased. It’s not a safe bet to assume that the mass removal of Palestinians won’t set off something explosive, either in terms of popular discord, or its exploitation by competing political or even extremist players.In short, Arab governments are being forced to confront and settle a question that goes to the very soul of the contemporary region – what does Arab identity even mean any more? Is it just a group of countries that speak the same language and share borders, but with regimes and elites that have become too enmeshed with the west to be viable on their own terms? Or is there still some residual sense of agency in those regimes, some echo of political integrity and duty towards other Arabs?Beyond the existential, though, here is what Arab leaders should learn from Trump giving them orders about their territories and people: the price of their US-stabilised status quo is now so high that it makes less and less sense on a practical basis. To submit to Trump would be to accept full vassal status and summon new domestic challenges, and all for an unreliable benefactor. To defy him would entail a full-blown reconfiguration of politics in the region that might seem too colossal to contemplate. Arab political elites find themselves in this mortifying position because of their historic feebleness on Palestine: it is a concentrated expression of their own weakness, capture and shortsighted self-interest. The future of Gaza is no longer an issue that can be finessed while saving face indefinitely. Trump’s plan is a gateway to the final erosion of the integrity and sovereignty of the wider Middle East.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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      USAid cuts sow feeling of betrayal among Yazidis, 10 years after IS genocide

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      During the first Trump administration, Mike Pence, the vice-president, pledged hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly through USAid and the state department, to help Christians and other religious minorities who were persecuted by Islamic State and – in the case of the Yazidis – suffered a genocide.But under the second Trump administration, the same figures who championed the rights of religious minorities have fallen silent or actively participated in the destruction of USAid, cutting crucial aid to support the same communities they once helped – who now feel abandoned by the US.That has had an immediate effect on the ground, according to activists and current and former USAid employees, who said the cutoff in aid has paused work among still traumatised communities and sown a feeling of betrayal 10 years after the genocide.View image in fullscreenIn Sinjar, the Iraqi town where thousands were massacred by IS, the freeze has halted operations to provide water and electricity, primary healthcare centres, the construction of schools, community centres and other basic infrastructure at a time when thousands of Yazidis are returning home after more than a decade in Syrian refugee camps. In one case, electricity transformers already delivered had to be put into storage because of the stop-work order, leaving a community without reliable electricity.“It was a shock that USAid was frozen for helping those communities that the US had helped to survive. [Before], US help was omnipresent,” said Mirza Dinnayi, a prominent Yazidi human rights activists who runs the House of Co-Existence (HOC) multicultural community center in Sinjar.He said that USAid, which provided the vast majority of humanitarian funding to the area, had been was a “pillar of stabilisation and normalisation”.“They had a crucial role in his first administration for recognising the Yazidi genocide and supporting US aid to help Iraq,” said Dinnayi. “Minority rights and religious freedoms were supported in the first administration. I’m wondering why the second administration is not aware about that.”View image in fullscreenCharities supporting Christian minorities, such as Catholic Relief Services (CRS), have also been directly affected by the work stoppage, including their programs in Iraq’s Nineveh Plains area and among Christian communities, according to people familiar with their work in the area. CRS, a top recipient of funds from USAid, is facing up to 50% layoffs this year and has begun shutting down programs that account for half of the organization’s $1.5bn budget, according to an email obtained by the National Catholic Reporter.“I see a lot of harm in the abrupt way that this assistance has stopped,” said a former USAid employee in Iraq.Meanwhile in Washington, a coterie of conservatives – many with former ties to Pence and USAid – have now allied with Elon Musk’s effort to take down the agency.One of them is Max Primorac, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, who authored Project 2025’s chapter on USAid recommending a blueprint to downsize the agency. He is set to testify before the House foreign affairs committee on Thursday at a hearing titled the “USAid betrayal”.Primorac did not respond to a request for an interview sent through the Heritage Foundation.View image in fullscreenPrimorac is one of a number of prominent conservatives who supported Pence’s initiative to support religious minorities but have now gone on record backing the aid freeze. Others include Pence himself, vice-president JD Vance, secretary of state Marco Rubio, and Pete Marocco, the Trump ally and USAid skeptic who nonetheless protected funding to religious initiatives under Pence. Marocco even reportedly led operations with his Patriot Group International to exfiltrate Yazidis in 2016.From late 2018 to early 2019, Primorac traveled to Erbil and northern Iraq as Pence’s special envoy, “overseeing a multi-agency genocide recovery effort to assist religious minority returns”, according to his current biography on the Heritage Foundation’s website.Colleagues said he arrived with a dim view of USAid but that he came to support at least some of the efforts the agency was making in the field.“He had a couple of visits to areas where we worked and I think that changed him a bit in a positive way,” said a USAid employee.Now, the person said, “for someone who really believed in his mission supporting religious minorities, he does not seem to be paying attention or advocating for a way forward.”Primorac later boasted that he had led a “$400m counter-genocide program… to spur the return of Iraqi Christians to their ancient homeland” and excoriated the Biden administration for turning its back on Iraq’s “traumatised” Christians.“Under the Trump administration, I led a counter-genocide program in Iraq to help Christian and Yazidi victims recover from IS’s campaign of extermination,” he wrote in another article for Newsweek. “We provided these traumatized religious minorities with humanitarian aid, [and] psycho-social help.”Now he has become one of the leading voices calling for the agency’s dissolution, authoring a recent Fox News editorial “how USAid went woke and destroyed itself”. An advance copy of his testimony to the House set for Thursday did not reference his work in Iraq.Former colleagues say they share some of Primorac’s criticisms of USAid but were perplexed by his full-scale repudiation of their work, the programs he previously cooperated with.View image in fullscreen“If we are going to achieve meaningful reform in the foreign assistance system, we need honest dialogue, and it’s important for me to acknowledge that I share some of his critiques about USAid,” said a person who leads a major USAid funded project in Iraq.“I only wish that [Primorac] would approach the conversation in a similar way, acknowledging all of the great work that USAid has achieved – especially in Iraq.”The change reflects how top Republicans are hedging their views under the Trump administration and a campaign led by Musk to eviscerate the agency, which he has called “criminal” and “corrupt”.Current and former USAid members in the field said that they have heard nothing from their former supporters in the US, and have effectively been cut out of systems that would give crucial information on budgets and projects meant to support communities.“It’s quite puzzling, to be honest,” said one former USAid employee in Iraq.Meanwhile, the onslaught in Washington has continued. At the International Religious Freedom Summit last week, vice-president JD Vance denounced USAid for promoting “atheism” while boasting of “bringing relief to Yazidis, Christians and other faith communities facing genocidal terror from Isis” in the past.“It was perplexing to hear the vice president champion these initiatives while, at the same time, funds for efforts like these are literally being turned off,” wrote Adam Nicholas Phillips, the lead administration official at USAid working on faith-based partnerships during the Biden administration.“Maybe the attacks on USAid are just misinformed and will be righted. Maybe there is a bold plan to invest in foreign assistance. I take administration officials at their word and I’m praying these decisions are reversed with haste.” More

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      Wednesday briefing: Inside the US president’s chaos machine

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      Good morning.Few words can fully capture the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency. Dizzying? Unrelenting? Disorienting?Trump’s team has described its strategy as “flooding the zone” – in essence, overwhelming the opposition, the media and the public with a torrent of executive orders, mass dismissals of federal staff and the suspension of trillions in national funding. The logic is simple: create too much chaos for the media to cover, and make your critics struggle to keep up.How long the White House can sustain this approach remains uncertain – as does the question of how soon the systematic purge of government employees will translate into real consequences for the public.Dismantling the systems of government with brute force will inevitably yield blunt consequences. Take US foreign aid, which was, in Elon Musk’s words, put through the “wood chipper”: a 90-day funding freeze abruptly halted medical trials for cholera, malaria, HIV and tuberculosis. The department of education recently got this treatment, after Musk’s department of government efficiency (Doge) terminated nearly $1bn worth of its contracts.If the newsletter catalogued everything Trump has done so far, the scroll bar on your screen would all but disappear. Instead, today’s newsletter focuses on four recent developments. That’s right after the headlines.Five big stories

      Middle East | Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel will resume fighting in Gaza if Hamas does not release more hostages by noon on Saturday, endorsing a threat by Donald Trump that could shatter the three-week-old ceasefire between the two sides.

      Economy | Nationwide, Britain’s biggest building society, has waded into a row over whether the government should cut tax breaks on cash Isas, arguing such a move would reduce the availability of mortgages for first-time buyers.

      AI | The US and the UK have refused to sign the Paris AI summit’s declaration on “inclusive and sustainable” artificial intelligence, in a blow to hopes for a concerted approach to developing and regulating the technology.

      Assisted dying | The Labour MP Kim Leadbeater has said her assisted dying bill for England and Wales will still have the strongest safeguards in the world despite the removal of a requirement for scrutiny from a high court judge. Opponents derided the change as “rushed and badly thought out”.

      Housing | Rogue landlords in England will face curbs on how much housing benefit income they can receive if their properties are substandard, Angela Rayner has said as she announced an extra £350m for affordable housing.
      In depth: Four fronts of Trump chaos, and where they go nextView image in fullscreen‘Geopolitical blackmail’ in the Middle EastLate on Monday, Hamas announced a delay in the further release of Israeli hostages, citing violations of last month’s ceasefire agreement. Among the grievances listed are delays in allowing displaced persons to return to northern Gaza and continued shelling and gunfire.However, as this Guardian report highlights, the warning comes amid increasingly hardline stances from the US and Israel regarding Gaza’s long-term future. Last week, Trump’s incendiary remarks suggesting the US could “take over” the Gaza Strip and that the Palestinian population should be relocated were widely condemned as an endorsement of forced displacement amounting to ethnic cleansing. His response to Hamas has only heightened tensions in the region, with the president declaring that “all hell is going to break out” if all remaining Israeli hostages are not returned on Saturday.Earlier this week, Trump (pictured above with Jordan’s King Abdullah II in 2018) reinforced his stance on depopulating Gaza, suggesting he could cut aid to Jordan and Egypt if they refused to permanently absorb most of Gaza’s Palestinian population. Both nations, though reliant on US aid and trade, have flatly rejected the proposal, calling it a red line. Experts say, however, that their economic dependence leaves them vulnerable to “geopolitical blackmail”. Jordanian officials, in particular, fear that postwar plans for Gaza could increase the likelihood of West Bank annexation. Jason Burke’s piece delves deeper into these concerns.Jordan’s King Abdullah met yesterday with Trump, becoming the first Arab leader to do so since his comments about forcibly displacing Palestinians from Gaza. The president continued to double down on his position, saying that the US had the authority to “take” Gaza, despite the king making clear his country was firmly opposed. Trump did seem to slightly walk back his position on withholding aid from countries like Jordan to get his way on Gaza, insisting that he was not using it as a threat: “I think we’re above that.”Bethan McKernan has a helpful explainer on what all of this means for the state of the ceasefire.Ukraine’s futureView image in fullscreenSpeaking to reporters last week about the three-year war in Ukraine, Trump said: “I want to end this damn thing.” He is eager to be seen as the peacemaker, not least because it would mean there is no reason to continue to spend so much on aid for Ukraine. There is also the not-so-small matter of his longstanding ambition to win the Nobel peace prize.In an interview with the New York Post, Trump said he had spoken with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, over a negotiated settlement and suggested that Russian negotiators are keen to meet with US counterparts.A bit of insight came, perhaps, when Trump cast doubt over Ukraine’s future sovereignty, suggesting the country “may be Russian someday”, a few days before his vice-president, JD Vance, meets with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy (above). However, Trump has not ruled out continued US support for Ukraine’s war effort – provided there is a financial return. His price: $500bn in rare minerals. Ukraine is rich in resources such as lithium and titanium, crucial for electronics manufacturing. Zelenskyy has been leveraging the country’s vast natural reserves in diplomatic talks with Trump, though the idea of tying military aid to resource extraction has already drawn sharp criticism.For more on this, read Shaun Walker’s excellent interview with Zelenskyy from Kyiv.Musk, Altman and the AI arms raceOpenAI’s Sam Altman has not only caught the president’s attention but has outmanoeuvred Elon Musk by positioning OpenAI at the heart of the government’s emerging artificial intelligence strategy.Musk, the world’s richest man, responded as he often does: by attempting to buy control. Leading a consortium of investors, he made an unsolicited $97.4bn offer for OpenAI, which was recently valued at $157bn. Altman swiftly rejected the offer, posting on X: “No thank you, but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”The move comes just weeks after Altman and Musk clashed publicly, following Musk’s criticism of Trump’s Stargate initiative – a $500bn project involving OpenAI and Altman.‘Diplomatic love bombing’ in the UKView image in fullscreenIn the UK, Trump’s tendency to hold grudges and wield power ruthlessly against those he perceives as enemies has not gone unnoticed. Over the past few months, the Labour government has taken a conciliatory approach towards his administration, hoping that Trump’s transactional nature will either yield diplomatic and economic benefits – or at the very least, keep Britain out of his crosshairs.Several Labour ministers have softened their stance on the president, as has the prime minister. Peter Mandelson, the UK’s ambassador to the US (above), has publicly walked back his previous criticism of Trump, admitting that his remarks describing the president as “a danger to the world” were “ill-judged and wrong”. In a Fox News interview, Mandelson instead praised Trump’s “dynamism and energy”, adding, in an interview with the BBC, that Britain must respect Trump’s “strong and clear mandate for change”.Political correspondent Eleni Courea has written that the UK’s “diplomatic love bombing” appears to be paying off – Trump recently remarked that Keir Starmer “has been very nice” and that the two leaders are “getting along very well”. (Courea’s full piece is well worth a read.)skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYet the UK prime minister’s reluctance to antagonise Trump has led to a muted response on even the most controversial policies, such as the forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza. Ultimately, none of these efforts change the fundamental reality that Trump is “fickle and reactive”, as his decisions are seemingly driven primarily by what serves his interests at any given moment.For the latest on Donald Trump – and there will be more – keep an eye on the Guardian’s homepage.What else we’ve been readingView image in fullscreen

      First Edition’s own Archie Bland and his partner, Ruth Spencer, write damningly about a new Netflix feelgood film that offers astounding but ultimately false hope to families of those with severe cerebral palsy. “Lucca’s World perpetuates the idea that children like our son are broken and must be repaired, rather than whole people who deserve every chance to live full and happy lives,” the pair write. Charlie Lindlar, acting deputy editor, newsletters

      Mehdi Hasan is blistering on the Republicans and their dog whistling about DEI and the liberal media’s enabling on the issue. The right do not have good faith critiques of diversity policies, Hasan writes: “This is the weaponisation of a three-letter term to denigrate Black people and pretend the political and economic advancement of minority communities over the past 60 years was a mistake”. Nimo

      Jeff Ingold has a unique playlist. Standing (as of now) at 75 songs, the roughly six-hour set list comprises one song for every man with whom Ingold has slept. The result is a meaningful musical extravaganza that transports Ingold through the deep relationships and fleeting romances of his life. “When most people hear Candle in the Wind, they think of Diana. Me? A threesome I had with a couple in south London.” Charlie

      After Kendrick Lamar’s stellar Super Bowl performance, what is left for Drake (besides his millions), many of us wonder. Ben Beaumont Thomas explains that though the rapper has endured a public evisceration, he can still regain his relevance – and perhaps even his cool. Nimo

      “Not so much drifting slowly downwards as nose-diving at a frightening rate.” After last weekend’s galling defeat to Italy in the Six Nations, Robert Kitson is frank about the worrying state of Welsh rugby in this week’s edition of the Breakdown newsletter (sign up here!). Charlie
      SportView image in fullscreenFootball | Jude Bellingham put Real Madrid 3-2 ahead with the last kick of the game to give his side an advantage in the Champions League playoff against Manchester City. More Champions League resultsRugby | Wales have appointed Cardiff’s Matt Sherratt as interim head coach after Warren Gatland’s second spell as head coach abruptly ended on Tuesday. Gatland has paid the price for Wales’s dismal recent record, having presided over the worst losing run in the country’s 144-year international rugby history.Football | Sam Kerr has been found not guilty of racially aggravated harassment after calling a police officer “fucking stupid and white” when he doubted her claims of being “held hostage” in a taxi. The captain of the Australian women’s football team and Chelsea’s star striker faced up to a maximum sentence of two years in prison.The front pagesView image in fullscreen“Zelenskyy: Europe cannot protect Ukraine without Trump’s support” – an exclusive interview is the Guardian’s lead story. “Court gives Gazans right to settle in UK” reports the Telegraph while the Mirror says “Left to rot” as it investigates NHS dental care or the lack of it. “Judge tweak hits support for assisted dying bill” reports the Times while the Express insists “MPs must back ‘crucial’ right to die law”. “Absurd we cannot sack rogue cops” is the Metro’s splash while the i has “UK savings rates cut by 30 banks – and first mortgage deals under 4%”. Top story in the Financial Times is “‘Trump trades’ backfire as greenback weakens and bond yields come down” while the Mail splashes on “Labour’s new borders watchdog will WFH … in Finland!”.Today in FocusView image in fullscreenWhy giving up the Chagos Islands could cost Britain £9bnEleni Courea discusses the UK’s historic deal to sign sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, and why some inside the Labour party are now regretting it. Campaigner Olivier Bancoult outlines why he hopes the deal will go aheadCartoon of the day | Martin RowsonView image in fullscreenThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badView image in fullscreenEstablished in 1942, the Women’s Timber Corps saw upwards of 15,000 young women work during the second world war as “lumberjills”. Aged between 17 and 24, they assumed roles traditionally filled by men in Britain’s forests, felling trees to aid the war effort. Joanna Foat’s new book, The Lumberjills, tells their story through stunning archive photography – and this gallery gives an enthralling taste.Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every SundayBored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

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      Revelations of Israeli spyware abuse raise fears over possible use by Trump

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      Even as WhatsApp celebrated a major legal victory in December against NSO Group, the Israeli maker of one of the world’s most powerful cyberweapons, a new threat was detected, this time involving another Israel-based company that has previously agreed contracts with democratic governments around the world – including the US.Late in January, WhatsApp claimed that 90 of its users, including some journalists and members of civil society, were targeted last year by spyware made by a company called Paragon Solutions. The allegation is raising urgent questions about how Paragon’s government clients are using the powerful hacking tool.Three people – an Italian journalist named Francesco Cancellato; the high-profile Italian founder of an NGO that aids immigrants named Luca Casarini; and a Libyan activist based in Sweden named Husam El Gomati – announced they were among the 90 people whose mobile phones had probably been compromised last year.More is likely to be known soon, when researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which investigates digital threats against civil society and has worked closely with WhatsApp, is expected to release a new technical report on the breach.Like NSO Group, Paragon licenses its spyware, which is called Graphite, to government agencies. If it is deployed successfully, it can hack any phone without a mobile phone user’s knowledge, giving the operator of the spyware the ability to intercept phone calls, access photographs, and read encrypted messages. Its purpose, Paragon said, was in line with US policy, which calls for such spyware to only be used to assist governments in “national security missions, including counterterrorism, counter-narcotics, and counter-intelligence”.In a statement to the Guardian, a Paragon representative said the company had “a zero-tolerance policy for violations of our terms of service”. “We require all users of our technology to adhere to terms and conditions that preclude the illicit targeting of journalists and other civil society leaders,” the representative said.The company does appear to have acted swiftly in response to the cases that have emerged so far. The Guardian reported last week that Paragon had terminated its contract with Italy for violating the terms of its contract with the group. Italy had – hours before the Guardian’s story broke – denied any knowledge of or involvement in the targeting of the journalist and activists, and said it would investigate the matter.David Kaye, who previously served from 2014 to 2020 as a special rapporteur on freedom of expression and opinion said the marketing of military-grade surveillance products, such as the kind made by Paragon, comes with “extraordinary risks of abuse”.“Like the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, it is easy for governments easily to avoid basic principles of rule of law. Though not all the details are known, we are seeing the likelihood of scandalous abuse in the case of Italy, just as we have seen that in other contexts across Europe, Mexico and elsewhere,” Kaye said.The issue seems particularly relevant in the US. In 2019, during the first Donald Trump administration, the FBI acquired a limited license to test NSO Group’s Pegasus. The FBI said the spyware was never used in a domestic investigation and there is no evidence that either the Trump or Joe Biden administrations used spyware domestically.In the face of increasing reports of abuse, including use of NSO’s spyware against American diplomats abroad, the Biden administration put NSO on a blacklist in 2021, saying the company’s tools had enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression and represented a threat to national security.Biden also signed an executive order in 2023 that discouraged the use of spyware by the federal government and allowed it to be used in limited circumstances.It was therefore a surprise when it was reported by Wired last year that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency had – under the Biden administration – signed a $2m one-year contract with Paragon. The contract was reportedly paused after the news became public and its current status is unclear. Ice did not respond to a request for comment.A Paragon representative said the company was “deeply committed to following all US laws and regulations” and that it was fully compliant with the 2023 executive order signed by Biden. The person also pointed out that Paragon was now a US-owned company, following its takeover by AE Industrial Partners. It also has a US subsidiary based in Virginia, which is headed by John Fleming, a longtime veteran of the CIA who serves as executive chair.Unlike its predecessor, however, the new US administration has publicly stated that it will seek to use the levers of government against Trump’s perceived political enemies. Trump has repeatedly said he would try to use the military to take on “the enemy from within”. He has also singled out career prosecutors who have investigated him, members of the military, members of Congress, intelligence agents and former officials who have been critical of him, for potential prosecution. He has never explicitly stated that he would use spyware against these perceived rivals.Researchers like those at Citizen Lab and Amnesty Tech are considered the leading experts in detecting illegitimate surveillance against members of civil society, which have occurred in a number of democracies, including India, Mexico and Hungary. More

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      For many Palestinian Americans, Trump’s Gaza plan evokes legacy of displacement

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      For Palestinian Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, like Zaynah Jadallah and her family, displacement and loss have become central elements of her family heritage.Her family members were teachers in Al-Bireh in what is now the occupied West Bank during the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes and land by Zionist paramilitaries, and then the Israeli army, in the war surrounding Israel’s creation.“They fled the attacks in two cars for Jordan. One of the cars made it, the other was bombed and they were burned alive,” she says.“None of them survived.”So when Donald Trump, standing alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, suggested last week that Palestinians in the devastated Gaza Strip leave their homes and that it be turned into a “riviera” for “the people of the world”, comments he has since doubled down on, Jadallah was livid.“The president of the United States calling for ethnic cleansing and the continued genocide of Palestinians,” she says.“It’s outrageous.”For many Palestinian American residents of Dearborn such as Jadallah, the responses to the US president’s proposals follow a similar line: defiance, anger, but not much in the way of surprise.“He has a history of being loyal to the Zionist movement of genocide and colonizing [of the] the Palestinian people,” she says.“It wasn’t surprising, but it was outrageous.”A photo on the front cover of the Dearborn-published Arab American News’s 1 February edition portrays thousands of Palestinians walking along a sea front to their destroyed homes in northern Gaza. The caption reads: “The Great March of Return”.“Gaza’s history is one of both pain and pride,” reads the newspaper’s lead article on the topic.It continues: “It stretches back to ancient civilizations and includes great resistance against invasion, such as the three-month siege by Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army in 332 BCE.”Trump’s announcement upended decades of international consensus and threatened fragile talks to extend a delicate ceasefire in Gaza. It was met with glee by much of the Israeli prime minister’s ruling coalition and other far-right elements in Israel.More than half of Dearborn’s 110,000 residents are of Arab heritage, making it home to one of the largest Arab communities outside the Middle East. Many Palestinian American residents have lost family members during Israel’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip, which killed more than 46,000 people.“Nobody is really shocked. Everybody is disgusted,” says Amer Zahr, a Palestinian American comedian and activist whose family was displaced from Nazareth, Jaffa and Akka (Acre) during the Nakba.“I’m really angry at the notion that we’re talking about the thing that Trump said on Tuesday like it’s new or novel or unique. It is not,” he says.“It is the policy of Israel to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, and that policy has been fully supported and funded by the United States.”He also finds that it’s only when Trump makes such comments that liberals and the Democratic party “finally reject the notion of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”.“I guess it has a different ring to it when Trump says it.”Trump won more votes in November’s presidential election in Dearborn than the Democratic party’s Kamala Harris or Green party candidate Jill Stein, the first time a Republican party candidate won the city in 24 years.While Harris declined to campaign in Dearborn, Trump had lunch at the Great Commoner, a café owned by an Arab American businessperson, just days before the election.“A lot of people [in Dearborn] voted for him secretly,” Zahr says. “They are the ones who have gone silent now.” Zahr voted for Stein.But some are doubling down on their support, not inclined to take Trump’s words at face value. Bishara Bahbah, a Palestinian American born and raised in Jerusalem, campaigned extensively in Michigan and other swing states through the group formerly called Arab Americans for Trump. (The group changed its name last week to Arab Americans for Peace.) He says Trump’s comments were just a “testing of the waters”.“I think the president threw out this idea as a trial balloon. There can never be a displacement of Palestinians from their homeland. It’s counterproductive,” he says.While members of his family were forced to flee Jerusalem during the Nakba in 1948, and he himself has since been banned from living in the city of his birth, Bahbah continues to believe peace in the Middle East is Trump’s main goal.“I know the president wants a legacy of peace and wants to be known as a peacemaker. For him to do that, the only path is a two-state solution which he told me he would support.”He says he has faced a backlash for supporting Trump that has included “messages on X that could be interpreted as death threats”, but that he’s been told by Trump’s advisers that Trump did not mean to suggest that Palestinians in Gaza be forcibly removed from their homes and land.“I believe that the president will come to the conclusion that what he said publicly is just not workable,” he says. He says the rebrand of his group to Arab Americans for Peace, announced hours after Trump’s comments, had been in the works for months.For Jadallah, Trump’s alleged plans for Israel to turn over the Gaza Strip to the US are an obvious contradiction to what he campaigned for president on.“It really shows his intention to serve a foreign government before the American people, right?” she says.“Because if he wants an America first agenda, he would talk about how we can spend our hard-earned tax dollars to improve our healthcare systems and our schools.”She says the resilience Palestinians in Gaza have shown following 15 months of bombardments and continued displacement lead her to believe that it’s highly unlikely that Trump’s plan to remove people from Gaza would succeed.“They’ve endured genocide, hunger, been displaced multiple times from the north to the south,” she says.“There’s still 2 million people residing in Gaza and they’ve told us that they don’t want to leave because they are the rightful owners of the land.” More

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      Trump’s Gaza plan suggests his pro-settler advisers are in the ascendant

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      When Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington this week, his first stop was to meet evangelical Christian leaders, who have cheered on Israel in the war in Gaza in an alliance with the country’s pro-settler rightwing government. For both constituencies, Israel’s right to annex the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank is a matter of faith and, they hope, a matter of time.Both constituencies cheered this week as Donald Trump announced his half-baked plan to “take over” Gaza, an idea he had only tinkered with before Tuesday evening, when it tumbled out to the obvious surprise of his closest aides.While most observers were shocked that the US president was in effect advocating for the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, the conservative alliance of Israel and the United States sees an opportunity to accelerate the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and its eventual annexation.“What has changed now is that Trump has said that it is US policy to support this as an end goal,” Matt Duss, the executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy, said of the Trump proposal. “And then of course it will just hop over to the West Bank, no question.”Israel’s pro-settler right wing immediately hailed Trump’s announcement. Bezalel Smotrich, the country’s ultranationalist finance minister, quoted a biblical passage about the return of Jewish pilgrims to Israel, writing: “Thank you President Trump. Together, we will make the world great again.”Itamar Ben-Gvir, who left Benjamin Netanyahu’s shaky coalition government because of the ceasefire with Hamas, said: “When I said this time and again during the war, that this was the solution to Gaza, they mocked me.”Under Joe Biden, saying that Gaza had been rendered unliveable would have been seen as a condemnation of Israel’s military campaign. But Trump, ignoring the Israeli assault that has been described as a “domicide” and led to the hollowing out of Gaza’s cities, simply went ahead and said it.The New York Times reported that the idea had been germinating among Trump and his close allies for weeks, and accelerated after his envoy Steve Witkoff travelled to the area and said: “There is almost nothing left of Gaza.” Yet Trump surprised his aides and even Netanyahu with the proposal, the paper reported, calling it “little beyond an idea inside the president’s head”.Trump’s plan may be a nonstarter and a distraction from more immediate questions of the second round of ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas. But it marks a serious shift towards some of the pro-settler advisers that he has elevated, including his nominee for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who said on Fox News in January: “There was a Palestinian state. It was called Gaza. Look how that turned out.”Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, has a record of hardline pro-Israel rhetoric and previously said Israel has a rightful claim to the West Bank, which he refers to by its Hebrew and biblical name of Judea and Samaria. Huckabee has refused to call the settlements by that name, insisting they be called “communities” or neighbourhoods. He has denied that the West Bank, seized by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 six-day war, is under military occupation.In a sign of growing ties between the US Christian right, the Israeli right and the pro-settler movement, Huckabee was in the audience when Netanyahu met leaders from America’s evangelical community during his trip to Washington this week.Also at the meeting with Netanyahu was John Hagee, the televangelist and founder of Christians United for Israel who has backed Israel’s expansion as a route toward Armageddon, after which “there will be 1,000 years of perfect peace, no presidential elections, no fake news, none of all of this nonsense”.In the US, Christian Zionists have tied their support for Israel’s claim to Palestinian lands to the book of Genesis, in which it says that God blesses those who bless Israel, and curses those who curse it.Hagee once claimed he had persuaded Trump to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by telling him at a White House dinner that Jesus was coming back to Jerusalem to “set up His throne on the Temple Mount where He will sit and rule for 1,000 years of perfect peace”.Trump has offered other tokens to pro-settler groups, including the repeal of Biden administration sanctions against individuals and groups accused of expansion and violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.The situation may indicate that in the circles of those who surround him, pro-settler figures are ascendant. They include Huckabee and Elise Stefanik, the US ambassador-designate to the UN, who during a confirmation hearing said she supported statements by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich that Israel had a “biblical right to the entire West Bank”.Others, including Witkoff, represent a wing of Trump’s supporters who are less hawkish on Israel and more focused on cutting transactional deals across the world.Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel organisation, said before the summit that Trump had two choices: the “dealmaker route” or the “screw-it path”. For Saudi Arabia to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, he said, Trump would have to at least seek to restrain Israel from expanding settlements in the West Bank.But, Ben-Ami said: “If he’s going down the screw-it path – ‘I don’t really care what anybody thinks, and I want Greenland and Panama and they can have the West Bank’ – then we’re in a different world.” More