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World leaders and people should respect Palestinians’ desire to remain in Gaza, the Palestinian envoy to the United Nations said Tuesday, after US President Donald Trump said he believed people from the territory should be resettled elsewhere “permanently.””Our homeland is our homeland, if part of it is destroyed, the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian people selected the choice to return to it,” said Riyad Mansour. “And I think that leaders and people should respect the wishes of the Palestinian people.”On Tuesday, Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, with the US leader saying he believed Palestinians should leave Gaza after an Israeli offensive that has devastated the territory and left most of it reduced to rubble.Speaking ahead of the meeting, Trump said he wanted a solution that saw “a beautiful area to resettle people permanently in nice homes where they can be happy.”At the United Nations, Mansour did not name Trump but appeared to reject the US president’s proposal.”Our country and our home is” the Gaza Strip, “it’s part of Palestine,” he said. “We have no home. For those who want to send them to a happy, nice place, let them go back to their original homes inside Israel, there are nice places there, and they will be happy to return to these places.”The war in Gaza erupted after Palestinian armed group Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, which resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.Israel’s retaliatory response has killed at least 47,518 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN considers these figures as reliable.The UN says more than 1.9 million people — or 90 percent of Gaza’s population — have been displaced by Israel’s offensive, with the bombing campaign having leveled most structures in the territory, including schools, hospitals and basic civil infrastructure.The start of a ceasefire deal, which included the release of hostages held by Hamas and prisoners held by Israel, on January 19 saw Palestinians rejoice, with many returning to homes that no longer stood.”In two days, in a span of a few hours, 400,000 Palestinians walking returned to the northern part of the Gaza Strip,” said UN envoy Mansour. “I think that we should be respecting the selections and the wishes of the Palestinian people, and the Palestinian people at the end will make the determination, their determination.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Donald Trump at the White House Tuesday for crucial talks on the truce with Hamas, as the US president suggested permanently resettling Palestinians from war-battered Gaza.”It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn’t want to return,” Trump said as he met Netanyahu in the Oval Office. “Why would they want to return? The place has been hell.”Trump earlier said Palestinians would “love” his plan to move them out of Gaza and into other Middle Eastern countries including Egypt and Jordan.Trump has claimed credit for securing the Israel-Hamas truce after more than 15 months of fighting and bombing, and he was likely to urge Netanyahu to move to the next phase of the ceasefire deal, aimed at a more lasting peace.Netanyahu said “we’re going to try” when asked by AFP how optimistic he was about moving on to phase two.”That’s one of the things we’re going to talk about. When Israel and the United States work together, and President Trump and I work together, the chances go up a lot,” Netanyahu said.The pair were later due to hold a joint press conference.Egypt and Jordan have flatly rejected Trump’s suggestion of moving Palestinians from Gaza. Gazans have also denounced Trump’s idea. “Trump thinks Gaza is a pile of garbage — absolutely not,” said 34-year-old Hatem Azzam, a resident of the southern city of Rafah.- ‘Beautiful piece of land’ -But in a break with previous US policy. Trump doubled down on his suggestion that Palestinians should get a “fresh, beautiful piece of land” in Egypt, Jordan, or other countries.”I think they’d love to leave Gaza if they had an option,” Trump said in the Oval Office ahead of his meeting with Netanyahu.Israel said hours ahead of the White House talks it was sending a team to mediator Qatar to discuss the second phase of the agreement.Palestinian group Hamas said Tuesday negotiations for the second phase had begun, with spokesman Abdel Latif al-Qanou saying the focus was on “shelter, relief and reconstruction”.Under the first six-week phase of the ceasefire, Palestinian militants and Israel have begun exchanging hostages held in Gaza for prisoners in Israeli custody.The war began when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, taking into Gaza 251 hostages, 76 of whom are still held in the Palestinian territory including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.Families of the Israeli hostages have been urging all sides to ensure the agreement is maintained so their loved ones can be freed.- ‘Maximum pressure’ -Trump said he would be pushing efforts towards a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia which froze with the Gaza war.But they will also be discussing Iran, which backs Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement.Ahead of the meeting Trump signed an order reinstating what he called the “maximum pressure” policy against Iran over allegations that the country is trying to develop nuclear weapons.Since the Gaza ceasefire took effect on January 19, Israel has launched a deadly operation against militants in the occupied West Bank’s north.UN aid agency UNRWA — which is now banned in Israel — warned that the heavily impacted refugee camp of Jenin was “going into a catastrophic direction”.On Tuesday, the Israeli army said a gunman killed two soldiers before being shot dead in an attack south of Jenin.Under the truce’s first phase, 18 hostages have been freed so far in exchange for some 600 mostly Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.The truce has also led to a surge of food, fuel, medical and other aid into Gaza, and allowed people displaced by the war to return to the north of the Palestinian territory.Hamas’s October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people on Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.Israel’s retaliatory response has killed at least 47,518 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN considers these figures as reliable.burs-dk/st

Stock markets managed to push higher on Tuesday but investors braced for volatility as President Donald Trump pressed on with tariffs against China after delaying duties on Mexican and Canadian imports.Beijing said it was imposing levies on imports of US energy, vehicles and equipment after Trump’s 10 percent tariffs came into effect.But Art Hogan of …

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US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said Palestinians would “love” to leave their embattled homeland in Gaza and live elsewhere if given an option.They would “love to leave Gaza,” he told reporters as he signed a raft of initiatives at the White House. “I would think that they would be thrilled.””I don’t know how they could want to stay. It’s a demolition site,” he said, more than 15 months after US ally Israel launched a punishing invasion of the territory in retaliation for attacks launched by Palestinian militant group Hamas. Trump spoke as he was due to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the truce with Hamas. He is likely to urge his ally to stick to the deal, parts of which have yet to be finalized. Trump has previously touted a plan to “clean out” Gaza, calling for Palestinians to move to Egypt or Jordan.Both countries have flatly rejected this, and on Tuesday their leaders stressed “the need to commit to the united Arab position” that would help achieve peace, according to the Egyptian presidency.”Well they may have said that, but a lot of people have said things to me,” Trump told the journalists at the White House Tuesday. Gazans have also denounced Trump’s idea, with residents in the southern city of Rafah telling AFP “we will not leave.”But Trump appeared undettered. “If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places, there’s plenty of money in the area for sure, I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza, which has had just decades and decades of death,” he said. When a reporter pressed him on where such places might be, he suggested they could be in Jordan, Egypt or “other places. You could have more than two.””You’d have people living in a place that could be very beautiful, and safe and nice. Gaza’s been a disaster for decades.”When another journalist asked if the United States would pay for such a move, he said that there were “plenty of people that would in the area, they have a lot of money,” and citing Saudi Arabia as one example. “They have no alternative right now,” he added, when an AFP journalist asked if such a move would amount to forcibly displacing Palestinians. “They’re there because they have no alternative. What do they have? It is a big pile of rubble right now…. I would think that they would be thrilled to do it.””I think they’d love to leave Gaza,” he said. “What is Gaza?”He said he did “not necessarily” support Israelis moving into the area instead.”I just support cleaning it up and doing something with it. But it’s failed for many decades. And somebody will be sitting here in ten years or 20 years from now and they’ll be going through the same stuff.” 

A former minister under ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has turned himself in, the interior ministry said Tuesday, making him one of the highest-profile figures captured by the new authorities.”The minister of interior in the government of the defunct regime, Mohammed al-Shaar, surrendered himself to the General Security Department,” an interior ministry statement said.Shaar, the target of US and EU sanctions, was interior minister from 2011 to 2018 at the height of Syria’s 13-year civil war.The security forces of the new authorities, which toppled the Assad government late last year, had been looking for Shaar and “raided sites where he had been hiding in the past few days”, the interior ministry said.Since 2011, Shaar has been under European Union sanctions for involvement in “violence against demonstrators” who took to the streets that year to demand democracy.The government’s brutal crackdown on the peaceful protests sparked a complex civil war that has killed more than 500,000 people and displaced millions.Shaar was also among top officials including Assad who were slapped with US sanctions in 2011.These aimed “to increase pressure on the Government of Syria to end its use of violence against its people and begin transitioning to a democratic system that protects the rights of the Syrian people”, according to the US Treasury.In 2012, a Lebanese lawyer filed a lawsuit against Shaar, accusing him of having ordered hundreds of killings in Tripoli in 1986 when he was in charge of security in the northern Lebanon port city.Also in 2012, Shaar survived two bomb attacks.In December, he sustained light wounds to the shoulder after a deadly suicide bombing at the ministry, a Syrian security source told AFP at the time.That attack was claimed by Al-Nusra Front, the jihadist precursor of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group which led the lightning rebel offensive that toppled Assad on December 8.And in July 2012, Shaar narrowly escaped death in a bombing that killed four senior security officials including the defence minister and Assad’s brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat.Assad himself has fled to Russia, an ally of his defunct government, and some former officials in his administration are also believed to have left Syria.

Israeli military offensives in two West Bank refugee camps have displaced nearly 5,500 Palestinian families since December, local and UN officials said Tuesday, amid escalating violence in the occupied territory.The Israeli military describes its ongoing operations as “counterterrorism” efforts aimed at rooting out Palestinian militancy.Jonathan Fowler, spokesman for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), said an estimated 2,450 to 3,000 families have been displaced from the Tulkarem refugee camp.Faisal Salama, head of the camp’s popular committee, estimated that 80 percent of its 15,000 residents have been displaced.Both Salama and Fowler said that obtaining precise figures is challenging because of the security situation within the camp and its fluctuating population.”The displaced people from the camp are scattered in the suburbs and in the city of Tulkarem itself,” Salama told AFP.He said that six people had been killed and dozens wounded since the offensive began on January 25.”The bombing of residential homes in the camp continues, along with destruction and bulldozing of everything.”The Israeli army told AFP that it had “eliminated three terrorists” in Tulkarem since the January 21 start of the operation it dubbed “Iron Wall”.Salama also reported that the violence has severely restricted the movement of goods into the camp.”There is a shortage of water, no electricity, no communication and a lack of essential supplies such as milk for children, diapers, and medicine,” he added.Displacement has similarly been severe in Jenin, also in the northern West Bank, where the military launched its intensive assault last month.Fowler reported that 3,000 families — around 15,000 people — have fled Jenin refugee camp since December, initially when Palestinian security forces staged their own operation against militants and then later because of the Israeli offensive.Displacement has surged in recent days after the military assault inflicted further destruction on the camp.The Israeli military said it had demolished 23 buildings in a single coordinated detonation in the Jenin camp on Sunday.Both the Tulkarem and Jenin refugee camps are known strongholds of Palestinian militancy.A gunman attacked an Israeli military checkpoint in the northern West Bank at Tayasir on Tuesday, fatally wounding two soldiers before troops shot him dead, the military said.The Palestinian health ministry reported on Tuesday that 70 people had been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank this year, 38 of them in Jenin.Israel’s military says its forces had killed “approximately 55 terrorists” across the West Bank in January, without specifying the locations.Its West Bank operations intensified following a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip on January 19.The Palestinian health ministry says Israeli troops and settlers have killed at least 884 Palestinians, including many militants, in the West Bank since the Gaza war began on October 7, 2023.Over the same period, at least 32 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian attacks or during Israeli military raids in the territory, official Israeli figures show.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets Donald Trump Tuesday to discuss the truce with Hamas, as the US president’s Middle East envoy said war-battered Gaza would remain uninhabitable for years.After Trump claimed credit for securing the Israel-Hamas truce after more than 15 months of fighting and bombing, he was likely to urge his ally Netanyahu to stick to the deal — parts of which have yet to be finalised.Israel said hours ahead of the White House talks it was sending a team to mediator Qatar to discuss the second phase of the agreement, which could lead to a more permanent end to the war.Palestinian group Hamas said Tuesday negotiations for the second phase had begun, with spokesman Abdel Latif al-Qanou saying the focus was on “shelter, relief and reconstruction”.Trump has touted a plan to “clean out” Gaza, calling for Palestinians to move to Egypt or Jordan.Both countries have flatly rejected this, and on Tuesday their leaders stressed “the need to commit to the united Arab position” that would help achieve peace, according to the Egyptian presidency.Gazans have also denounced Trump’s idea.”Trump thinks Gaza is a pile of garbage — absolutely not,” said 34-year-old Hatem Azzam, a resident of the southern city of Rafah.”Trump and Netanyahu must understand… we will not leave.”Before the leaders’ meeting, Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff told reporters that “when the president talks about ‘cleaning it out,’ he talks about making it habitable”.Witkoff said it was “unfair” and “preposterous” to suggest Gaza can be rebuilt and made habitable within five years of the war’s end.- ‘Redrawn the map’ -Under the ceasefire, Palestinian militants and Israel have begun exchanging hostages held in Gaza for prisoners in Israeli custody.The war began when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, taking into Gaza 251 hostages, 76 of whom are still held in the Palestinian territory including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.Families of the Israeli hostages have been urging all sides to ensure the agreement is maintained so their loved ones can be freed.Relatives of the youngest hostages, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, pleaded Monday for information on the two boys and their mother, Shiri, after their father Yarden Bibas was released in the latest swap.”We miss you so much and are waiting for you,” said Ofri Bibas, Yarden’s sister.Netanyahu, the first foreign leader hosted by Trump since his return to office, said before leaving for Washington that Israel had “redrawn the map” of the Middle East since the war began and drew in regional allies of Hamas.”I believe that working closely with President Trump we can redraw it even further, and for the better,” he said.Trump may seek to offer Netanyahu incentives to stick to the truce, such as reviving efforts towards a normalisation deal with Saudi Arabia which froze with the Gaza war.Trump said Sunday talks with Israel and other Middle Eastern countries were “progressing” — before warning that he had “no assurances” that the Gaza truce would hold.- West Bank violence -Since the ceasefire took effect on January 19, Israel has launched a deadly operation against militants in the occupied West Bank’s north.UN aid agency UNRWA — now banned in Israel — warned that the heavily impacted refugee camp of Jenin was “going into a catastrophic direction”.”Parts of the camp were completely destroyed in a series of detonations by the Israeli forces,” said UNRWA spokeswoman Juliette Touma.UN and Palestinian officials said Israel’s operations have pushed more than 5,000 families out of Jenin and another refugee camp in the northern West Bank since December.On Tuesday, the Israeli army said a gunman killed two soldiers before being shot dead in an attack south of Jenin.Asked how he viewed a possible annexation of the West Bank, Trump did not rule this out, telling reporters that Israel was “a small country in terms of land”.Under the Gaza truce’s ongoing 42-day first phase, 18 hostages have been freed so far in exchange for some 600 mostly Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.The truce has also led to a surge of food, fuel, medical and other aid into Gaza, and allowed people displaced by the war to return to the north of the Palestinian territory.Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,210 people on Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.Israel’s retaliatory response has killed at least 47,518 people in Gaza, the majority civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN considers these figures as reliable.burs-ser/ami/srm

US President Donald Trump and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are expected to hold direct talks after announcing tit-for-tat tariffs in an escalating trade war, US officials said Tuesday.Beijing said it was imposing levies on imports of US energy, vehicles and equipment in a return salvo minutes after Trump’s threatened tariffs on Chinese goods came into …

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Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday hailed Syria’s Ahmed al-Sharaa for his “strong commitment” to fighting terror as the newly installed interim president made his first visit to Turkey.Sharaa flew to Ankara from Saudi Arabia where he had sought Riyadh’s support to fund Syria’s reconstruction and revive its economy after 13 years of civil war.”I would like to express our satisfaction for the strong commitment my brother Ahmed al-Sharaa has shown in the fight against terrorism,” Erdogan said after the pair held talks. Ankara has had a years-long connection with Sharaa and was a key backer of the push by his Islamist-led rebels that ended up toppling Bashar al-Assad on December 8. Since then, Turkey has extended its full support for his new administration, offering operational and military help in fighting “terror groups” still active in Syria.It has repeatedly called for action to root out both Islamic State (IS) group militants as well as the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).The SDF is seen by many in the West as crucial to keeping jihadists at bay, but Turkey views it as a terrorist outfit and has threatened military action against it if it does not disband. “I told (Sharaa) we are ready to provide the necessary support to Syria in the fight against all kinds of terrorism, whether it be Daesh or the PKK,” Erdogan said, using the Arabic acronym for IS. He also reiterated Turkey’s offer to help run prisons holding IS fighters in northeastern Syria, which are currently run by the SDF. – ‘Join forces’ -Ankara accuses the SDF of having ties to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long insurgency on Turkish soil.”For the safety of our countries and our region, we have no other option than to join forces towards the same goal,” he said.Sharaa said Turkey and Syria were “working together on … a joint strategy to confront security threats in the region” to ensure the safety of both countries. He also said they had discussed “threats that prevent territorial unity in northeastern Syria” in a clear reference to the SDF, which runs a semi-autonomous Kurdish-led administration that controls swathes of the northeast.Damascus’ new rulers have rejected any form of Kurdish self-rule and urged the SDF to hand over their weapons.Inviting Erdogan to visit Syria “at the earliest opportunity”, Sharaa hailed Turkey for its willingness to take in millions of Syrians who fled during the civil war, saying his nation would “never forget (Turkey’s) historic stance”.”That significant support is still tangible through Turkey’s ongoing efforts to ensure the success of the current leadership in Syria politically and economically,” he said. Last month, Syria’s top diplomat Asaad al-Shaibani pledged that Damascus would never allow its territory to be used as a staging ground for threats against Turkey, saying the new leadership would “work on removing these threats”. 

Amena Mohamed can’t stop smiling as she prepares to board a bus home to Wad Madani, in Sudan’s central Al-Jazira state, more than a year after she fled brutal fighting there.”I can’t describe the feeling, we’re so happy,” she told AFP in the southeastern state of Gedaref, where over a million people sought shelter from the battles between the regular Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), at war since April 2023.Wrapped in a vibrant orange headscarf, she said she did not care that “there’s still problems with the water and electricity”, as long as she could return to her sons.In December 2023, they stayed behind with their ailing father, sending the family’s women off to escape as the RSF descended on Wad Madani.In the months that followed, over a million people fled brutal paramilitary violence documented by local monitors, including summary executions, systematic sexual violence and sieges laid to entire villages.When in January the military recaptured Wad Madani, celebratory chants of “we’re going back” erupted in displacement centres across the country, including the de facto capital on the Red Sea, Port Sudan.On Monday, an AFP correspondent in Port Sudan reported around 70 buses, carrying an estimated 3,500 displaced people, leaving for Wad Madani.By Tuesday, state governor Al-Taher Ibrahim had “received hundreds of returnees” to the city from western Al-Jazira alone, the official state news agency reported.Thousands more departed from the southeastern cities of Gedaref and Kassala, local officials told AFP.- ‘God protect us’ -Ruqayya Ibrahim, also preparing for the 250-kilometre (155 mile) trip from Gedaref, told AFP she had “grown so tired of displacement”.Asked whether she knew what state her home in Wad Madani was in, she said “it’s been looted”, but that hadn’t dulled her desire to return.In addition to killing tens of thousands of people and causing mass atrocities against civilians, the war in Sudan has created the world’s largest internal displacement crisis — with 11.5 million people currently having fled their homes.Even in relatively safe areas controlled by the army — namely the country’s east and north — infrastructure collapse and insufficient services have caused a rapidly worsening humanitarian crisis.In Gedaref alone, far from any fighting, nearly a million people are facing crisis levels of hunger, according to the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.Mary Lupul, humanitarian director at aid group Save the Children, told AFP she had seen “some of the skinniest children” she has ever encountered in Gedaref.”Parents are making heart-wrenching decisions, deciding which of their children to feed,” she said.Cradling her baby — born in displacement — in a star-speckled blanket, Tamador al-Sayed told AFP she had fled to safety by foot, tuktuk and truck nearly all the way to the border with South Sudan, before making it to Gedaref.Now, her family could finally “relax”, she said.”We’re happy for our homes and our families and our loved ones and our neighbours,” she told AFP.But despite the long-awaited homecoming, all is not yet well in Al-Jazira.Communication services have not been fully restored, and most of the state has been without electricity for over a year.In the wake of Wad Madani’s recapture, local monitors and the UN reported minority communities were being targeted and civilians accused of collaborating with the RSF, by militias allied with the army.Still, many are anxious to return.”God protect us,” Sayed said, praying the same joy of return would soon be felt by all Sudanese.