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US mediator Jared Kushner and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held talks Monday on the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire, as Washington intensified its efforts to ensure the fragile truce endures.Netanyahu, meanwhile, said Israel would enforce the ceasefire in Gaza as well as one in Lebanon with an “iron fist”.The truce in Gaza, in effect for a month now, has largely halted the war that erupted after Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.During the ongoing first stage, a series of prisoner and hostage exchanges took place over recent weeks.Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump who helped broker the ceasefire, met Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Monday as part of US efforts to stabilise the truce and lay the groundwork for its next phase.The two discussed some of the most sensitive aspects of phase two, Israeli government spokeswoman Shosh Bedrosian told journalists.”Together the two discussed phase one, which we are currently still in, to bring our remaining hostages, and the future of phase two of this plan, which includes the disarming of Hamas, demilitarising Gaza and ensuring Hamas will have no role in the future of Gaza ever again,” Bedrosian said.”Phase two also includes the establishment of the international stabilisation force and the details of which of course together are being discussed.”Hamas has repeatedly insisted that relinquishing its weapons is a red line.- ‘Iron fist’ -Israel and Hamas continue to accuse each other of violating the ceasefire in Gaza.Gaza’s health ministry said Israeli forces have killed at least 242 Palestinians in the territory since the ceasefire began on October 10.On Monday, the Israeli military said it killed two militants who approached the so-called “Yellow Line,” the boundary beyond which Israeli forces hold their positions in Gaza. Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties in accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify details provided by the ministry or the Israeli military.”Whoever seeks to harm us, we harm them,” Netanyahu said in parliament on Monday.”We are determined to enforce with an iron fist the ceasefire agreements where they exist against those who seek our destruction, and you can see what happens every day in Lebanon,” he said.Israel has kept up attacks on Lebanon, where it says it is targeting Hezbollah militants. It agreed a ceasefire to halt a war with the group last November, but has frequently bombed Lebanon since then.It said on Monday it had killed 15 Hezbollah members this month.Egypt, Qatar and Turkey are among the potential participants in the proposed international stabilisation force for Gaza, but the United Arab Emirates has indicated it is unlikely to join without a clear operational framework.”Under such circumstances, the UAE will probably not participate in such a force,” Emirati presidential adviser Anwar Gargash told the Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate Forum on Monday.Turkey has been keen to join, but Netanyahu has repeatedly said Israel would not allow it.”The prime minister said… there will be no Turkish boots on the ground,” Bedrosian said.Michael Milshtein, who heads the Palestinian studies program at Tel Aviv University, said the decision regarding the stabilisation force will ultimately rest with Trump.”There is a gap between the Israeli opinion and the American opinion but in the end, the only thing that matters is what Trump wants, not what Netanyahu thinks,” Milshtein told AFP.Turkey has been one of the most outspoken critics of the war in Gaza, and on Friday it issued arrest warrants accusing Netanyahu and several senior Israeli officials of genocide.- ‘We still do not feel safe’ -Since the truce began, Hamas has returned all 20 living hostages and the remains of 24 captives, including 21 Israelis. Four bodies of hostages killed in the October 2023 attack remain in Gaza.In exchange, Israel has freed nearly 2,000 prisoners and returned 315 bodies of Palestinian captives.The latest of those were the remains of 15 Palestinians handed over by Israel on Monday after Hamas a day earlier returned the remains of Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, killed in the 2014 Gaza war.Goldin, killed while attempting to destroy Hamas tunnels near Rafah, had been missing for 11 years.”Time has stood still,” his sister Ayelet Goldin said in a statement on Monday.Despite the progress in hostage returns, Gazans remain anxious about their future.”We still do not feel safe. Shooting continues… We try to protect our children from psychological trauma and to help them forget the war,” said Salma Abu Shawish, 40, a resident of Al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.”Life in Gaza is hard. We still lack food, and many families remain homeless. We only wish this nightmare would stop and never return.”

A Saudi doctor went on trial in Germany Monday accused of driving an SUV through a Christmas market, killing six people and wounding more than 300.Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen, a 51-year-old psychiatrist, was arrested next to the battered rental vehicle after the attack on December 20, 2024 in the eastern city of Magdeburg.Prosecutor Matthias Boettcher told the court that the accused wanted “to kill a large number of people” by driving the two-tonne vehicle “deliberately into a mass of pedestrians”.A nine-year-old boy and five women aged between 45 and 75 were killed.Abdulmohsen — a critic of Islam and an adherent of far-right views and radical conspiracy theories — was motivated by anger over “supposed insults and frustration”, Boettcher said.As the trial started, Abdulmohsen, with a long, greying beard, smiled as he was seated in a bullet-proof cubicle then followed the rest of the proceedings without visible emotion.He faces six counts of murder and 338 counts of attempted murder in a trial expected to last until at least March.To accommodate the hundreds of victims and witnesses, the trial is being held in a large temporary hall.Abdulmohsen faces life in prison if convicted.- ‘I drove the car’ -On Monday afternoon he addressed the court himself for around an hour and a half, admitting, “I am the one who drove the car” but did not show any remorse.The rest of his speech consisted of rambling diatribes against politicians, police and the media, as well as seemingly unrelated sections about religion, violence against women in Saudi Arabia and other topics.Occasionally he stopped to cry and blow his nose.At one point the presiding judge intervened to remind him to stay on the topic of the charges he faces.Abdulmohsen is due to continue addressing the court on Tuesday.Abdulmohsen arrived in Germany in 2006 and was granted refugee status 10 years later.Active as a migrant rights campaigner, he was also a prolific social media user, writing rambling posts critical of Islam and repeating far-right conspiracy theories.The spark for the attack seems to have been a court ruling against Abdulmohsen in a civil lawsuit brought by other refugee activists.The rampage, which came after another deadly attack at a Christmas market in Berlin in 2016, provoked a heated debate about the security of the festive installations.Some cities have cancelled the beloved winter tradition because of the cost of anti-terrorism measures.On Monday, the mayor of Magdeburg, Simone Borris, told a council meeting that state authorities had refused permission for the city’s Christmas market to open for now due to security concerns.- Market security concerns -The market, due to open on November 20, has been told to install access controls and barriers that can stop vehicles weighing up to 7.5 tonnes, the city administration said in a statement on its website.Potential security flaws at last year’s market are due to be examined as part of the trial.Magdeburg resident Birgit Lange, 57, told AFP that the attack had made her “more alert”.She said she would still be going to the Christmas market this year because “if we all hid away it wouldn’t help anyone.”The Magdeburg attack was one of several committed by foreign nationals that inflamed Germany’s debate on immigration in the run-up to a general election in February.That election saw the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) place second with a record 20 percent of the vote.The party is now riding high in opinion polls in Saxony-Anhalt state, of which Magdeburg is the capital, and observers say it has a real chance of taking control of a state for the first time in elections next year.As the trial began, Abdulmohsen held up a laptop with the words “Sept 2026” displayed on its screen, the date of the election.

Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa met US President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday for unprecedented talks, just days after Washington removed him from a terrorism blacklist.Sharaa, whose rebel forces ousted longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad late last year, is the first Syrian leader to visit the White House since the country’s 1946 independence.Formerly affiliated with Al-Qaeda, Sharaa’s group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), was itself only delisted as a terrorist group by Washington in July. Sharaa himself was taken off the list on Friday.”The president of Syria arrived at the White House… The meeting between President Trump and President al-Sharaa has also started,” the White House said in a statement.Unusually for the normally camera-friendly Trump, both the arrival and the meeting of the Syrian president were taking place behind closed doors without the media present.Trump said last week that Sharaa was doing a “very good job. It’s a tough neighborhood. And he’s a tough guy. But I got along with them very well and a lot of progress has been made with Syria.”Since taking power, Syria’s new leaders have sought to break from their violent past and present a more moderate image to ordinary Syrians and foreign powers.Sharaa’s White House visit is “a hugely symbolic moment for the country’s new leader, who thus marks another step in his astonishing transformation from militant leader to global statesman,” said Michael Hanna, US program director at the International Crisis Group.The interim president met Trump for the first time in Saudi Arabia during the US leader’s regional tour in May. At the time the 79-year-old Trump dubbed Sharaa, 43, a “a young, attractive guy.”- Terror blacklist removal -The US envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, said earlier this month that Sharaa may on Monday sign an agreement to join the international US-led alliance against the Islamic State (IS) group.The United States plans to establish a military base near Damascus “to coordinate humanitarian aid and observe developments between Syria and Israel,” a diplomatic source in Syria told AFP.Washington has also been pushing for some kind of pact to end decades of enmity between Syria and Israel, part of Trump’s wider goal to shore up the fragile Gaza ceasefire with a broader Middle East peace settlement.For his part, Sharaa is expected to seek US funds for Syria, which faces significant challenges in rebuilding after 13 years of devastating civil war.After his arrival in Washington, Sharaa over the weekend met with IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva over possible aid.He also played basketball with US CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper and Kevin Lambert, the head of the international anti-IS operation in Iraq, according to a social media post by Syria’s foreign minister.Sharaa’s jihadist past has caused controversy in some quarters but the State Department’s decision Friday to remove Sharaa from the blacklist was widely expected.State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said Sharaa’s government had been meeting US demands on working to find missing Americans and on eliminating any remaining chemical weapons.Sharaa’s trip comes weeks after he became the first Syrian president in decades to address the UN General Assembly in New York. Last week Washington led a Security Council vote to remove UN sanctions against him.The Syrian president has also been making diplomatic outreach towards Washington’s rivals. He met Russian President Vladimir Putin in October in their first meeting since the removal of Assad, a key Kremlin ally.

US envoy Jared Kushner and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held talks Monday on the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire, as Washington intensified its efforts to ensure the fragile truce endures.The truce, in effect for exactly a month now, has largely halted the war that erupted after Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.During the ongoing first stage, a series of prisoner and hostage exchanges took place over recent weeks.Kushner met Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Monday as part of US efforts to stabilise the ceasefire and lay the groundwork for its next phase.The two discussed some of the most sensitive aspects of phase two of the agreement, Israeli government spokeswoman Shosh Bedrosian told journalists.”Together the two discussed phase one, which we are currently still in, to bring our remaining hostages, and the future of phase two of this plan, which includes the disarming of Hamas, demilitarising Gaza and ensuring Hamas will have no role in the future of Gaza ever again,” Bedrosian said.”Phase two also includes the establishment of the international stabilisation force and the details of which of course together are being discussed.”Hamas has repeatedly insisted that relinquishing its weapons is a red line.Egypt, Qatar and Turkey are among the potential participants in the proposed international stabilisation force coordinated by Washington, but the United Arab Emirates has indicated it is unlikely to join without a clear operational framework.”Under such circumstances, the UAE will probably not participate in such a force,” Emirati presidential adviser Anwar Gargash told the Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate Forum on Monday.Turkey has been keen to join, but Netanyahu has repeatedly said Israel would not allow it.”The prime minister said… there will be no Turkish boots on the ground,” Bedrosian said.Turkey has been one of the most outspoken critics of the war in Gaza, and on Friday it issued arrest warrants accusing Netanyahu and several senior Israeli officials of genocide.- ‘We still do not feel safe’ -Since the truce began, Hamas has returned all 20 living hostages and the remains of 24 captives, including 21 Israelis. Four bodies of hostages killed in the October 2023 attack remain in Gaza.In exchange, Israel has freed nearly 2,000 prisoners and returned 315 bodies of Palestinian captives.The latest of those were the remains of 15 Palestinians handed over by Israel on Monday after Hamas a day earlier returned the remains of Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, killed in the 2014 Gaza war.Goldin, killed while attempting to destroy Hamas tunnels near Rafah, had been missing for 11 years.”Time has stood still. It still feels like he just left and is already coming back,” his sister Ayelet Goldin said in a statement on Monday.”How do you process fighting for a brother who’s gone? How do you fight for a soldier who went into battle, fighting to bring him home, when in reality he’ll return in a casket? How are you supposed to feel? I still don’t know,” she said.Despite the progress in hostage returns, Gazans remain anxious about their future.”We still do not feel safe. Shooting continues … we try to protect our children from psychological trauma and to help them forget the war and its effects,” said Salma Abu Shawish, 40, a resident of Al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.”Life in Gaza is hard. We still lack food, and many families remain homeless. We only wish this nightmare would stop and never return.”Israel and Hamas continue to accuse each other of violating the ceasefire.On Monday, the Israeli military said it killed two militants who approached the so-called “Yellow Line,” the boundary beyond which Israeli forces hold their positions in Gaza. Gaza’s health ministry claimed Israeli forces have killed at least 242 Palestinians in the territory since the ceasefire began.Media restrictions in Gaza and difficulties in accessing many areas mean AFP is unable to independently verify details provided by the ministry or the Israeli military.