[2025, August 24: [/b] Many years ago the Aga Khan IV said he would mediate in the Palestine matter but only if both parties asked him. Now, kids in Gaza have made a video of them asking for the intervention of the Aga Khan V in humanitarian aid to the children of Gaza.
VIDEO: https://ismaili.net/timeline/2025/2025-08-25-gaza.mp4
THE MIDDLE EAST
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swamidada786
- Posts: 237
- Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2025 8:56 pm
Re: THE MIDDLE EAST
6 Sep, 2025 21:16
HomeWorld News
Israel backs away from West Bank annexation plan after UAE warning – WaPo
West Jerusalem was taken by “surprise” by the admonition, the Washington Post has reported
Press / Mamoun Wazwaz
A public warning from the United Arab Emirates prompted the Israeli government to drop a planned discussion on annexing the West Bank, the Washington Post has reported. A senior UAE diplomat reportedly told Israeli media earlier this week that such a move would be a “red line” that would block Israel’s path to regional integration.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to discuss the issue at a major government meeting on Friday, according to local media. On Wednesday, UAE special envoy Lana Nusseibeh told the Times of Israel that annexation would “foreclose the idea of regional integration.”
“For every Arab capital you talk to, the idea of regional integration is still a possibility, but annexation to satisfy some of the radical extremist elements in Israel is going to take that off the table,” she stated.
The UAE was the first Arab nation to normalize relations with Israel in over a quarter century under the Abraham Accords brokered by President Donald Trump during his first term in office.
Israeli ministers call on Netanyahu to annex West Bank
Read more Israeli ministers call on Netanyahu to annex West Bank
The public warning from Abu Dhabi “came as a surprise,” an Israeli official told the Post, calling the situation “very unusual.”
On Thursday, the issue of annexation was removed from the Israeli ministerial meeting agenda, according to the newspaper.
Washington has not taken a stance on the issue so far. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described potential annexation as “not a final thing” earlier this week, adding that he was “not going to opine on that.”
The West Bank returned to the spotlight earlier this year after a group of Israeli ministers urged that the territory be formally annexed. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed control could be asserted at any moment.
Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and has been actively building settlements there – which is widely regarded as illegal by the international community. It was close to annexation in 2020 but dropped the idea in exchange for normalizing relations with the UAE and Bahrain.
https://www.rt.com/news/624223-israel-w ... ation-uae/
HomeWorld News
Israel backs away from West Bank annexation plan after UAE warning – WaPo
West Jerusalem was taken by “surprise” by the admonition, the Washington Post has reported
Press / Mamoun Wazwaz
A public warning from the United Arab Emirates prompted the Israeli government to drop a planned discussion on annexing the West Bank, the Washington Post has reported. A senior UAE diplomat reportedly told Israeli media earlier this week that such a move would be a “red line” that would block Israel’s path to regional integration.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to discuss the issue at a major government meeting on Friday, according to local media. On Wednesday, UAE special envoy Lana Nusseibeh told the Times of Israel that annexation would “foreclose the idea of regional integration.”
“For every Arab capital you talk to, the idea of regional integration is still a possibility, but annexation to satisfy some of the radical extremist elements in Israel is going to take that off the table,” she stated.
The UAE was the first Arab nation to normalize relations with Israel in over a quarter century under the Abraham Accords brokered by President Donald Trump during his first term in office.
Israeli ministers call on Netanyahu to annex West Bank
Read more Israeli ministers call on Netanyahu to annex West Bank
The public warning from Abu Dhabi “came as a surprise,” an Israeli official told the Post, calling the situation “very unusual.”
On Thursday, the issue of annexation was removed from the Israeli ministerial meeting agenda, according to the newspaper.
Washington has not taken a stance on the issue so far. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described potential annexation as “not a final thing” earlier this week, adding that he was “not going to opine on that.”
The West Bank returned to the spotlight earlier this year after a group of Israeli ministers urged that the territory be formally annexed. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed control could be asserted at any moment.
Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and has been actively building settlements there – which is widely regarded as illegal by the international community. It was close to annexation in 2020 but dropped the idea in exchange for normalizing relations with the UAE and Bahrain.
https://www.rt.com/news/624223-israel-w ... ation-uae/
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swamidada786
- Posts: 237
- Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2025 8:56 pm
Re: THE MIDDLE EAST
Reuters
Saudi Arabia, nuclear-armed Pakistan sign mutual defence pact
Maha El Dahan and Saeed Shah
Updated Thu, September 18, 2025 at 4:13 AM CDT·
DUBAI/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan signed a mutual defence pact late on Wednesday, significantly strengthening a decades-old security partnership a week after Israel's strikes on Qatar upended the diplomatic calculus in the region.
The enhanced defence ties come as Gulf Arab states grow increasingly wary about the reliability of the United States as a security guarantor.
Asked whether Pakistan would now be obliged to provide Saudi Arabia with a nuclear umbrella, a senior Saudi official told Reuters: "This is a comprehensive defensive agreement that encompasses all military means."
Pakistan is the only nuclear-armed, Muslim-majority nation, and also fields the Islamic world's largest army, which it has regularly said is focused on facing down neighbouring foe India.
The agreement was the culmination of years of discussions, the Saudi official said when asked about the timing of the deal. "This is not a response to specific countries or specific events but an institutionalisation of long-standing and deep cooperation between our two countries," the official added.
Israel's attempt on September 9 to kill the political leaders of Hamas with airstrikes on Doha, while they were discussing a proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza that Qatar is helping to mediate, infuriated Arab countries.
Before the Gaza war, Gulf monarchies - U.S. allies - had sought to stabilise ties with both Iran and Israel to resolve longstanding security concerns. Over the past year, Qatar has been subjected to direct hits twice, once by Iran and once by Israel.
Israel is widely understood to possess a sizeable nuclear arsenal but maintains a policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying possessing such weapons.
Pakistan had said its nuclear weapons are only aimed, as a deterrent, against India, and its missiles are designed with a range to hit anywhere to its east in India.
NUCLEAR UMBRELLA
Pakistani state television showed Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom's de facto ruler, embracing after signing the agreement. Also there was Pakistan's army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, regarded as the country's most powerful person.
"The agreement states that any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both," a statement from the Pakistani prime minister's office said.
Pakistan's decades-old alliance with Saudi Arabia - the site of Islam's holiest sites - is rooted in shared faith, strategic interests and economic interdependence.
Pakistan has long had soldiers deployed in Saudi Arabia, currently estimated at between 1,500 and 2,000 troops, providing operational, technical and training help to the Saudi military. That includes assistance to the Saudi air and land forces.
Saudi Arabia has loaned Pakistan $3 billion, a deal extended in December, to shore up its foreign exchange reserves.
The Saudi deal comes months after Pakistan fought a brief military conflict with India in May.
India's ministry of external affairs spokesperson, Randhir Jaiswal said in a post on X on Thursday that India was aware of the development, and that it would study its implications for New Delhi's security and for regional stability.
The senior Saudi official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged the need to balance relations with Pakistan and India, also a nuclear power.
"Our relationship with India is more robust than it has ever been. We will continue to grow this relationship and seek to contribute to regional peace whichever way we can."
Pakistan and India fought three major wars since the two countries were carved out of British colonial India in 1947.
After they both acquired nuclear weapons in the late 1990s, their conflicts have been more limited in scale because of the danger of nuclear assets coming into play.
(Reporting by Saeed Shah in Islamabad and Maha El Dahan in Dubai; additional reporting by Sudipto Ganguly in Mumbai; Writing by Yousef Saba and Ariba Shahid; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Christian Schmollinger and Andrew Heavens)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ar ... 59064.html
Saudi Arabia, nuclear-armed Pakistan sign mutual defence pact
Maha El Dahan and Saeed Shah
Updated Thu, September 18, 2025 at 4:13 AM CDT·
DUBAI/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan signed a mutual defence pact late on Wednesday, significantly strengthening a decades-old security partnership a week after Israel's strikes on Qatar upended the diplomatic calculus in the region.
The enhanced defence ties come as Gulf Arab states grow increasingly wary about the reliability of the United States as a security guarantor.
Asked whether Pakistan would now be obliged to provide Saudi Arabia with a nuclear umbrella, a senior Saudi official told Reuters: "This is a comprehensive defensive agreement that encompasses all military means."
Pakistan is the only nuclear-armed, Muslim-majority nation, and also fields the Islamic world's largest army, which it has regularly said is focused on facing down neighbouring foe India.
The agreement was the culmination of years of discussions, the Saudi official said when asked about the timing of the deal. "This is not a response to specific countries or specific events but an institutionalisation of long-standing and deep cooperation between our two countries," the official added.
Israel's attempt on September 9 to kill the political leaders of Hamas with airstrikes on Doha, while they were discussing a proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza that Qatar is helping to mediate, infuriated Arab countries.
Before the Gaza war, Gulf monarchies - U.S. allies - had sought to stabilise ties with both Iran and Israel to resolve longstanding security concerns. Over the past year, Qatar has been subjected to direct hits twice, once by Iran and once by Israel.
Israel is widely understood to possess a sizeable nuclear arsenal but maintains a policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying possessing such weapons.
Pakistan had said its nuclear weapons are only aimed, as a deterrent, against India, and its missiles are designed with a range to hit anywhere to its east in India.
NUCLEAR UMBRELLA
Pakistani state television showed Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom's de facto ruler, embracing after signing the agreement. Also there was Pakistan's army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, regarded as the country's most powerful person.
"The agreement states that any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both," a statement from the Pakistani prime minister's office said.
Pakistan's decades-old alliance with Saudi Arabia - the site of Islam's holiest sites - is rooted in shared faith, strategic interests and economic interdependence.
Pakistan has long had soldiers deployed in Saudi Arabia, currently estimated at between 1,500 and 2,000 troops, providing operational, technical and training help to the Saudi military. That includes assistance to the Saudi air and land forces.
Saudi Arabia has loaned Pakistan $3 billion, a deal extended in December, to shore up its foreign exchange reserves.
The Saudi deal comes months after Pakistan fought a brief military conflict with India in May.
India's ministry of external affairs spokesperson, Randhir Jaiswal said in a post on X on Thursday that India was aware of the development, and that it would study its implications for New Delhi's security and for regional stability.
The senior Saudi official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged the need to balance relations with Pakistan and India, also a nuclear power.
"Our relationship with India is more robust than it has ever been. We will continue to grow this relationship and seek to contribute to regional peace whichever way we can."
Pakistan and India fought three major wars since the two countries were carved out of British colonial India in 1947.
After they both acquired nuclear weapons in the late 1990s, their conflicts have been more limited in scale because of the danger of nuclear assets coming into play.
(Reporting by Saeed Shah in Islamabad and Maha El Dahan in Dubai; additional reporting by Sudipto Ganguly in Mumbai; Writing by Yousef Saba and Ariba Shahid; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Christian Schmollinger and Andrew Heavens)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ar ... 59064.html
Re: THE MIDDLE EAST
For Arab Nations With Ties to Israel, Attacks on Qatar and Gaza City Raise Anxiety
The Middle Eastern states closest to Israel see the attack on Hamas officials in Qatar and the invasion of Gaza City as warning signs of potential threats to their own security.
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, on a screen at an Arab-Islamic summit in Doha, the country’s capital, convened after an Israeli strike in the city on Sept. 9.Credit...Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
By Erika Solomon
Reporting from Cairo
Sept. 22, 2025
For nearly two years, the Arab states that maintain uneasy relations with Israel have managed the war in Gaza as a political crisis, keeping up contacts despite their simmering frustrations.
The Israeli attacks on Qatar and Gaza City, within one week, now have some of those states wondering whether their own security may also be at risk.
Across the Middle East and beyond, Israel drew harsh condemnation for its Sept. 9 strike on Hamas leaders in the Qatari capital, Doha. The Gulf nation of Qatar is a firm U.S. ally that has played a leading role in trying to mediate a peace agreement to end the Gaza war.
“For Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, it would be foolish not to be concerned that there could be attacks on their country,” said H.A. Hellyer, a Middle East security expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London and at the Center for American Progress in Washington.
The attack in Qatar was followed by a ground invasion last week of densely populated Gaza City, which sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing to southern Gaza.
Israel has said it attacked Qatar as part of its policy of allowing no safe haven to Hamas, after its militants led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that set off the Gaza war. It said it was pursuing the Gaza City offensive to root out Hamas in one of its last strongholds.
Image
A child runs up a sandy dune near a cluster of tents sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza.
Displaced Palestinians in the al-Mawasi area of Gaza on Sunday.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Some of the angriest responses to these actions have come from Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Like Qatar, Egypt has also acted as a mediator in Gaza cease-fire negotiations.
The attack on Doha raised questions of whether Egypt, too, could be vulnerable to Israeli strikes — and whether any country in the region is truly off limits, analysts said.
At an emergency regional summit in Doha last week, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt called Israel an “enemy.” Diaa Rashwan, the leader of Egypt’s state media agency, said that was the first time he could recall an Egyptian president using that word since the peace process with Israel began in the late 1970s.
The choice, he said, was intentional.
“Our national security is under threat, and only an enemy can threaten national security,” Mr. Rashwan told the Egyptian television program Studio Extra.
Last week, as Israeli troops advanced on Gaza City with hundreds of Palestinians still sheltering there, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry warned of “catastrophic dangers.” It called the operation a “new phase of chaos as a result of Israeli recklessness and excessive arrogance.”
Like much of the Arab world, Egyptians were already seething over the war, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Egypt shares a border with southern Gaza in the Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian officials fear that the latest escalation of the war, which leaves people almost nowhere to flee to, could create pressure on their border by Palestinians desperate to escape.
Such a mass flight of people has long been feared by Egyptian officials, for a number of reasons. For one, they do not want to be accused of helping Israel to displace Palestinians.
Image
Palestinian children and adults in Gaza hold metal saucepans and plastic containers near big pots of food.
Palestinians waited for food aid in Khan Younis on Sunday.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Domestic security concerns are just as critical. If Hamas militants managed to cross the border with refugees, it could provoke an Israeli attack on Egyptian soil. (Egypt has accepted at least 100,000 medical evacuees and others who fled Gaza during the war. But it is already struggling economically and fears the added burden of taking in large numbers of additional refugees.)
And Israeli news media reported that Israel raised concerns to Washington about an Egyptian buildup of military forces in the Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian government has neither confirmed nor denied such a buildup, and The New York Times could not independently verify it.
But Yehia el-Kadwani, a lawmaker on the Egyptian Parliament’s defense and national security committee, told The Times that such measures, if taken, would be a warning.
Displacing Palestinians “is a red line,” he said. “Egypt will take a stance if this occurs.”
Jordan, another neighboring Arab country that has had a longstanding peace treaty with Israel, is also watching Israel’s actions nervously. It shares a border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where roughly three million Palestinians live.
As more countries recognize a Palestinian state in response to the Gaza war, Israel has intensified its threats to annex large parts of the West Bank.
Jordan is concerned that Israel could then try to push Palestinians across its border with the West Bank, according to Mr. Hellyer, the Middle East security expert.
Gulf nations, too, are weighing their options in light of the latest Israeli attacks.
For decades, they saw their principal rival in the Middle East as Iran and had, in recent years, found common cause with Israel in that shared enemy. In 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, two Gulf nations, were among several Arab countries that normalized relations with Israel.
But the mood is rapidly changing, said Mr. Hellyer.
“Now, they see Israel as a bigger threat to Gulf and regional security,” he said.
Image
A building that has been heavily damaged in one portion.
A damaged building in Qatar after the Israeli attack on Hamas in the capital.Credit...Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
Qatar never established diplomatic relations with Israel but maintained cordial ties, which included visits by Israeli officials during the Gaza cease-fire negotiations. Those ties were shattered with the attack on Doha.
Some Gulf countries are making moves that go beyond condemnations.
On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia announced a new “strategic defense pact” with Pakistan — a nuclear-armed country — declaring that an attack on one country was an attack on both.
Analysts said the agreement reflected, in part, a growing sense of frustration with the United States for not doing more to protect the Gulf.
In an article published on his website last week, Andreas Krieg, a Middle East expert at King’s College London, said the whole region was now at risk of plunging into the type of wider conflict not seen since the era of Arab-Israeli wars from 1948 to 1973.
In the decades since, Israel’s normalization of ties with a number of Arab countries has narrowed the conflict into an Israeli-Palestinian fight. With every Israeli escalation now, he said, the risk of drawing Arab countries into a wider conflict grows.
“Arab publics, already inflamed by Gaza, now see Israel as a concrete threat to Arabs collectively,” he wrote.
Rania Khaled contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/worl ... nians.html
The Middle Eastern states closest to Israel see the attack on Hamas officials in Qatar and the invasion of Gaza City as warning signs of potential threats to their own security.
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, on a screen at an Arab-Islamic summit in Doha, the country’s capital, convened after an Israeli strike in the city on Sept. 9.Credit...Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
By Erika Solomon
Reporting from Cairo
Sept. 22, 2025
For nearly two years, the Arab states that maintain uneasy relations with Israel have managed the war in Gaza as a political crisis, keeping up contacts despite their simmering frustrations.
The Israeli attacks on Qatar and Gaza City, within one week, now have some of those states wondering whether their own security may also be at risk.
Across the Middle East and beyond, Israel drew harsh condemnation for its Sept. 9 strike on Hamas leaders in the Qatari capital, Doha. The Gulf nation of Qatar is a firm U.S. ally that has played a leading role in trying to mediate a peace agreement to end the Gaza war.
“For Egypt, Jordan and Turkey, it would be foolish not to be concerned that there could be attacks on their country,” said H.A. Hellyer, a Middle East security expert at the Royal United Services Institute in London and at the Center for American Progress in Washington.
The attack in Qatar was followed by a ground invasion last week of densely populated Gaza City, which sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing to southern Gaza.
Israel has said it attacked Qatar as part of its policy of allowing no safe haven to Hamas, after its militants led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that set off the Gaza war. It said it was pursuing the Gaza City offensive to root out Hamas in one of its last strongholds.
Image
A child runs up a sandy dune near a cluster of tents sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza.
Displaced Palestinians in the al-Mawasi area of Gaza on Sunday.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Some of the angriest responses to these actions have come from Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Like Qatar, Egypt has also acted as a mediator in Gaza cease-fire negotiations.
The attack on Doha raised questions of whether Egypt, too, could be vulnerable to Israeli strikes — and whether any country in the region is truly off limits, analysts said.
At an emergency regional summit in Doha last week, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt called Israel an “enemy.” Diaa Rashwan, the leader of Egypt’s state media agency, said that was the first time he could recall an Egyptian president using that word since the peace process with Israel began in the late 1970s.
The choice, he said, was intentional.
“Our national security is under threat, and only an enemy can threaten national security,” Mr. Rashwan told the Egyptian television program Studio Extra.
Last week, as Israeli troops advanced on Gaza City with hundreds of Palestinians still sheltering there, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry warned of “catastrophic dangers.” It called the operation a “new phase of chaos as a result of Israeli recklessness and excessive arrogance.”
Like much of the Arab world, Egyptians were already seething over the war, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Egypt shares a border with southern Gaza in the Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian officials fear that the latest escalation of the war, which leaves people almost nowhere to flee to, could create pressure on their border by Palestinians desperate to escape.
Such a mass flight of people has long been feared by Egyptian officials, for a number of reasons. For one, they do not want to be accused of helping Israel to displace Palestinians.
Image
Palestinian children and adults in Gaza hold metal saucepans and plastic containers near big pots of food.
Palestinians waited for food aid in Khan Younis on Sunday.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Domestic security concerns are just as critical. If Hamas militants managed to cross the border with refugees, it could provoke an Israeli attack on Egyptian soil. (Egypt has accepted at least 100,000 medical evacuees and others who fled Gaza during the war. But it is already struggling economically and fears the added burden of taking in large numbers of additional refugees.)
And Israeli news media reported that Israel raised concerns to Washington about an Egyptian buildup of military forces in the Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian government has neither confirmed nor denied such a buildup, and The New York Times could not independently verify it.
But Yehia el-Kadwani, a lawmaker on the Egyptian Parliament’s defense and national security committee, told The Times that such measures, if taken, would be a warning.
Displacing Palestinians “is a red line,” he said. “Egypt will take a stance if this occurs.”
Jordan, another neighboring Arab country that has had a longstanding peace treaty with Israel, is also watching Israel’s actions nervously. It shares a border with the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where roughly three million Palestinians live.
As more countries recognize a Palestinian state in response to the Gaza war, Israel has intensified its threats to annex large parts of the West Bank.
Jordan is concerned that Israel could then try to push Palestinians across its border with the West Bank, according to Mr. Hellyer, the Middle East security expert.
Gulf nations, too, are weighing their options in light of the latest Israeli attacks.
For decades, they saw their principal rival in the Middle East as Iran and had, in recent years, found common cause with Israel in that shared enemy. In 2020, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, two Gulf nations, were among several Arab countries that normalized relations with Israel.
But the mood is rapidly changing, said Mr. Hellyer.
“Now, they see Israel as a bigger threat to Gulf and regional security,” he said.
Image
A building that has been heavily damaged in one portion.
A damaged building in Qatar after the Israeli attack on Hamas in the capital.Credit...Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
Qatar never established diplomatic relations with Israel but maintained cordial ties, which included visits by Israeli officials during the Gaza cease-fire negotiations. Those ties were shattered with the attack on Doha.
Some Gulf countries are making moves that go beyond condemnations.
On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia announced a new “strategic defense pact” with Pakistan — a nuclear-armed country — declaring that an attack on one country was an attack on both.
Analysts said the agreement reflected, in part, a growing sense of frustration with the United States for not doing more to protect the Gulf.
In an article published on his website last week, Andreas Krieg, a Middle East expert at King’s College London, said the whole region was now at risk of plunging into the type of wider conflict not seen since the era of Arab-Israeli wars from 1948 to 1973.
In the decades since, Israel’s normalization of ties with a number of Arab countries has narrowed the conflict into an Israeli-Palestinian fight. With every Israeli escalation now, he said, the risk of drawing Arab countries into a wider conflict grows.
“Arab publics, already inflamed by Gaza, now see Israel as a concrete threat to Arabs collectively,” he wrote.
Rania Khaled contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/worl ... nians.html
Re: THE MIDDLE EAST
Can the Trump Peace Plan Overcome Unprecedented Cruelty?
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza is a smart plan for turning a bomb crater into a launchpad for peace — for taking a terrible, terrible war in Gaza and leveraging it to not only create a new foundation for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and maybe even Iraq as well. If it succeeds, it could even set in motion a much-needed transformation in Iran.
Hats off to its key architects: Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and Tony Blair. Without their efforts, this initiative would not have been born.
But while it may be unprecedented in its creativity, it meets a moment unprecedented in its cruelty, which makes it a long shot at best.
If only this plan were meant to solve a border dispute between Swedes and Norwegians. Alas, it is meant to halt the most vicious and deadly two years of fighting between Jews and Palestinians in the history of this conflict.
The indiscriminate murder on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas of Israelis in front of their children and children in front of their parents, on top of the kidnapping of babies and elderly people, which was met by the often indiscriminate retaliation by an Israeli army that was daily prepared to kill and maim dozens of Palestinian civilians and children to get one Hamas fighter — while grinding Gaza into rubble — may have done something no previous Israeli-Arab war ever did: It made the necessary — achieving peace — impossible.
In a lifetime of covering this conflict, I have never seen it broken into so many little pieces, each soaked in more distrust and hatred of the other than ever before. Aggregating these pieces together to implement this complex plan for a cease-fire, phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, hostage release, Palestinian prisoner release and then rebuilding of the Strip under international supervision will be a herculean task. It will require solving a diplomatic Rubik’s cube every day — while all the enemies of the deal try to scramble it every day.
I doubt Trump appreciates just how herculean an effort it will be, how much time and political capital it will require from him personally and how much he will have to squeeze both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Hamas and America’s Arab allies to do things that they not only won’t want to do, but that could be dangerous for them to do both politically and physically.
While Netanyahu said he agreed to this plan, I will believe it when I hear him saying it in Hebrew to his own people and cabinet. Friedman’s first rule of Middle East reporting: What people tell you in private is irrelevant. All that matters is what they say in public to their own people in their own language. In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth in private. In the Middle East, officials lie in private and tell the truth in public.
And Hamas, whose surviving leadership is mostly hiding in a bunker in Doha, still has to sign on. “There are so many ways that Netanyahu or Hamas can sabotage this,” Nahum Barnea, the Yedioth Ahronoth columnist, told me — but, like me, he thinks it’s worth a try and commends those who drew up the plan.
Because it is so necessary in so many ways. For starters, anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of warfare and where it is going can see that Israelis and Arabs and Iranians cannot afford for there to be another war. Smarter and cheaper drones and even missiles are being distributed ever farther, super-empowering more actors faster.
I don’t need to remind Israelis that on June 1 more than 100 Ukrainian drones that had been smuggled into Russia struck air bases deep inside Russia, damaging or destroying at least a dozen warplanes, including long-range strategic bombers. I am guessing that this daring surprise attack cost Ukraine something closer to a big shopping spree at Best Buy than anything approaching the roughly $80 million price of a single Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet in Israel’s fleet.
Second, Netanyahu can say all that he wants, as he did on Monday, that if Hamas does not accept this plan, “Israel will finish the job by itself” in Gaza, which Trump said he’d support. Easier said than done. If that happens, Israel will have a permanent military occupation of Gaza facing a permanent insurgency — which its own military leadership opposes. Some “finish.” That is why now that Trump has put this deal on the table, it will not be easy for Bibi or Hamas to definitively reject it.
That leads to the final reason this deal is necessary even if it seems impossible. The proliferation of social media, particularly TikTok, means that video of every single civilian casualty — every dismembered civilian — can now be broadcast to the smartphone of everyone on the planet. So, as Israel is discovering, the only way it can defeat an enemy like Hamas, embedded among civilians, is at the price of making itself a pariah among nations and having its sports teams, academics and entertainers shunned around the world.
Netanyahu can declare, with some real justification, that Israel is defending Western democratic values by defeating the Islamo-fascist Hamas in Gaza. Hamas is a terrible organization — most of all for Palestinians. But today any teenager on TikTok can also see how, at the same time, Bibi and Israel’s Jewish supremacists are perpetuating Western-style settler colonialism in the West Bank. No one is fooled — and I mean no one.
A “Pew poll, carried out in March 2025, found a significant shift in younger Republicans’ views of Israel since 2022, with views of Republicans under 50 years old becoming far more negative of Israel (50 percent) compared to 35 percent in 2022 — a 15-point shift,” according to the University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, who analyzed this and other survey data.
This peace plan is also necessary because we must not give up on a two-state solution — no matter how unlikely, because it remains the only just and rational outcome for this conflict. But we have to recognize that we cannot get there from here.
We need a bridge that builds trust where every shred of trust has been destroyed. This plan proposes to do so by effectively creating a U.N.-approved mandate for putting Gaza under the supervision of an international governing body and military force with Arab approval and input from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The logic is that until and unless Palestinians in Gaza can build and demonstrate the capacity to govern there, it is impossible to talk about a two-state solution.
But to give Palestinians the best chance to demonstrate that, they need not only international support, but also for Israel to get out of the way in Gaza, and, I would add, halt all Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank, which has been designed to erase any possibility of Palestinian sovereignty there one day. Israel must be made to leave open the possibility of Palestinian statehood if the Palestinians achieve certain governance metrics. Only Trump — whose plan acknowledges statehood “as the aspiration of the Palestinian people” — can force that upon Bibi.
But here is the hidden incentive for Israel to seize on this Trump plan. Israel’s devastating destruction of both Iran and Hezbollah’s military capacity was a tactical military victory that has opened up enormous new possibilities for regional integration.
It led to the toppling of Iran’s puppet regime in Syria and paved the way for a fragile democratic coalition to take power there. It created the space for Lebanon’s best leadership duo since the civil war — President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam — to free Lebanon’s frail democracy from the death grip of Iran and Hezbollah. It has also opened more space for the democratically elected government of Iraq to gain better control of the pro-Iranian militias there.
At the same time, it has triggered a quiet debate inside Iran about the whole efficacy of spending billions of dollars, and making Tehran an international pariah, to support losers like Hamas and Hezbollah and permanently threaten Israel.
If, if, if this Trump peace plan can create a bridge back to a two-state solution, it will give enormous leeway for Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and even Iraq to consider joining the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel.
In other words, it would turn the tactical military defeat Israel and the Trump administration inflicted on Iran in the 12-day war into a strategic achievement.
Trump actually went out of his way in his White House news conference on Monday to signal to Iran that he is open to a new relationship, if Tehran is. “Who knows, maybe even Iran can get in there,” Trump said, speaking of the Abraham Accords, with Netanyahu standing close by.
Raghida Dergham, executive chairwoman of the Beirut Institute, observed the other day in a smart essay published in Annahar Al-Arabi, that for this to happen, Israel must overcome its “siege mentality and militarized bravado” and Iran must overcome its “bazaar mentality, swinging between bluster and concession, escalation and retreat.”
Iran’s leadership, she noted, keeps moving “one step toward compromise and two steps toward escalation, still clinging to the illusion that time favors them. But beneath their defiance lies quiet panic. In this cornered state, Tehran continues to make costly miscalculations, particularly around Israel and the dwindling myths of the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance,’ led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and to a lesser extent in Syria, where Iran’s networks have been severed.”
If this Trump deal goes ahead, it will so isolate Iran that maybe, finally, it will also trigger a real internal struggle and change of strategy there.
My bottom line: If you are a betting person, bet that the necessary will be impossible — you have a lot of history on your side that says the closer we get to peace, the more the haters will derail it.
If you are a hoping person, hope that this time will be different.
If you are praying person, pray that everything you know about this region, its current leaders and the poisonous legacy of the Gaza war will be overcome — because somehow the key players all realize that this really is the last train to somewhere decent and the next one, and all those ever after, will be nonstops to the gates of hell.
More from Thomas L. Friedman on the Mideast
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Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza is a smart plan for turning a bomb crater into a launchpad for peace — for taking a terrible, terrible war in Gaza and leveraging it to not only create a new foundation for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and maybe even Iraq as well. If it succeeds, it could even set in motion a much-needed transformation in Iran.
Hats off to its key architects: Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and Tony Blair. Without their efforts, this initiative would not have been born.
But while it may be unprecedented in its creativity, it meets a moment unprecedented in its cruelty, which makes it a long shot at best.
If only this plan were meant to solve a border dispute between Swedes and Norwegians. Alas, it is meant to halt the most vicious and deadly two years of fighting between Jews and Palestinians in the history of this conflict.
The indiscriminate murder on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas of Israelis in front of their children and children in front of their parents, on top of the kidnapping of babies and elderly people, which was met by the often indiscriminate retaliation by an Israeli army that was daily prepared to kill and maim dozens of Palestinian civilians and children to get one Hamas fighter — while grinding Gaza into rubble — may have done something no previous Israeli-Arab war ever did: It made the necessary — achieving peace — impossible.
In a lifetime of covering this conflict, I have never seen it broken into so many little pieces, each soaked in more distrust and hatred of the other than ever before. Aggregating these pieces together to implement this complex plan for a cease-fire, phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, hostage release, Palestinian prisoner release and then rebuilding of the Strip under international supervision will be a herculean task. It will require solving a diplomatic Rubik’s cube every day — while all the enemies of the deal try to scramble it every day.
I doubt Trump appreciates just how herculean an effort it will be, how much time and political capital it will require from him personally and how much he will have to squeeze both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Hamas and America’s Arab allies to do things that they not only won’t want to do, but that could be dangerous for them to do both politically and physically.
While Netanyahu said he agreed to this plan, I will believe it when I hear him saying it in Hebrew to his own people and cabinet. Friedman’s first rule of Middle East reporting: What people tell you in private is irrelevant. All that matters is what they say in public to their own people in their own language. In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth in private. In the Middle East, officials lie in private and tell the truth in public.
And Hamas, whose surviving leadership is mostly hiding in a bunker in Doha, still has to sign on. “There are so many ways that Netanyahu or Hamas can sabotage this,” Nahum Barnea, the Yedioth Ahronoth columnist, told me — but, like me, he thinks it’s worth a try and commends those who drew up the plan.
Because it is so necessary in so many ways. For starters, anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of warfare and where it is going can see that Israelis and Arabs and Iranians cannot afford for there to be another war. Smarter and cheaper drones and even missiles are being distributed ever farther, super-empowering more actors faster.
I don’t need to remind Israelis that on June 1 more than 100 Ukrainian drones that had been smuggled into Russia struck air bases deep inside Russia, damaging or destroying at least a dozen warplanes, including long-range strategic bombers. I am guessing that this daring surprise attack cost Ukraine something closer to a big shopping spree at Best Buy than anything approaching the roughly $80 million price of a single Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet in Israel’s fleet.
Second, Netanyahu can say all that he wants, as he did on Monday, that if Hamas does not accept this plan, “Israel will finish the job by itself” in Gaza, which Trump said he’d support. Easier said than done. If that happens, Israel will have a permanent military occupation of Gaza facing a permanent insurgency — which its own military leadership opposes. Some “finish.” That is why now that Trump has put this deal on the table, it will not be easy for Bibi or Hamas to definitively reject it.
That leads to the final reason this deal is necessary even if it seems impossible. The proliferation of social media, particularly TikTok, means that video of every single civilian casualty — every dismembered civilian — can now be broadcast to the smartphone of everyone on the planet. So, as Israel is discovering, the only way it can defeat an enemy like Hamas, embedded among civilians, is at the price of making itself a pariah among nations and having its sports teams, academics and entertainers shunned around the world.
Netanyahu can declare, with some real justification, that Israel is defending Western democratic values by defeating the Islamo-fascist Hamas in Gaza. Hamas is a terrible organization — most of all for Palestinians. But today any teenager on TikTok can also see how, at the same time, Bibi and Israel’s Jewish supremacists are perpetuating Western-style settler colonialism in the West Bank. No one is fooled — and I mean no one.
A “Pew poll, carried out in March 2025, found a significant shift in younger Republicans’ views of Israel since 2022, with views of Republicans under 50 years old becoming far more negative of Israel (50 percent) compared to 35 percent in 2022 — a 15-point shift,” according to the University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, who analyzed this and other survey data.
This peace plan is also necessary because we must not give up on a two-state solution — no matter how unlikely, because it remains the only just and rational outcome for this conflict. But we have to recognize that we cannot get there from here.
We need a bridge that builds trust where every shred of trust has been destroyed. This plan proposes to do so by effectively creating a U.N.-approved mandate for putting Gaza under the supervision of an international governing body and military force with Arab approval and input from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The logic is that until and unless Palestinians in Gaza can build and demonstrate the capacity to govern there, it is impossible to talk about a two-state solution.
But to give Palestinians the best chance to demonstrate that, they need not only international support, but also for Israel to get out of the way in Gaza, and, I would add, halt all Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank, which has been designed to erase any possibility of Palestinian sovereignty there one day. Israel must be made to leave open the possibility of Palestinian statehood if the Palestinians achieve certain governance metrics. Only Trump — whose plan acknowledges statehood “as the aspiration of the Palestinian people” — can force that upon Bibi.
But here is the hidden incentive for Israel to seize on this Trump plan. Israel’s devastating destruction of both Iran and Hezbollah’s military capacity was a tactical military victory that has opened up enormous new possibilities for regional integration.
It led to the toppling of Iran’s puppet regime in Syria and paved the way for a fragile democratic coalition to take power there. It created the space for Lebanon’s best leadership duo since the civil war — President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam — to free Lebanon’s frail democracy from the death grip of Iran and Hezbollah. It has also opened more space for the democratically elected government of Iraq to gain better control of the pro-Iranian militias there.
At the same time, it has triggered a quiet debate inside Iran about the whole efficacy of spending billions of dollars, and making Tehran an international pariah, to support losers like Hamas and Hezbollah and permanently threaten Israel.
If, if, if this Trump peace plan can create a bridge back to a two-state solution, it will give enormous leeway for Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and even Iraq to consider joining the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel.
In other words, it would turn the tactical military defeat Israel and the Trump administration inflicted on Iran in the 12-day war into a strategic achievement.
Trump actually went out of his way in his White House news conference on Monday to signal to Iran that he is open to a new relationship, if Tehran is. “Who knows, maybe even Iran can get in there,” Trump said, speaking of the Abraham Accords, with Netanyahu standing close by.
Raghida Dergham, executive chairwoman of the Beirut Institute, observed the other day in a smart essay published in Annahar Al-Arabi, that for this to happen, Israel must overcome its “siege mentality and militarized bravado” and Iran must overcome its “bazaar mentality, swinging between bluster and concession, escalation and retreat.”
Iran’s leadership, she noted, keeps moving “one step toward compromise and two steps toward escalation, still clinging to the illusion that time favors them. But beneath their defiance lies quiet panic. In this cornered state, Tehran continues to make costly miscalculations, particularly around Israel and the dwindling myths of the so-called ‘Axis of Resistance,’ led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and to a lesser extent in Syria, where Iran’s networks have been severed.”
If this Trump deal goes ahead, it will so isolate Iran that maybe, finally, it will also trigger a real internal struggle and change of strategy there.
My bottom line: If you are a betting person, bet that the necessary will be impossible — you have a lot of history on your side that says the closer we get to peace, the more the haters will derail it.
If you are a hoping person, hope that this time will be different.
If you are praying person, pray that everything you know about this region, its current leaders and the poisonous legacy of the Gaza war will be overcome — because somehow the key players all realize that this really is the last train to somewhere decent and the next one, and all those ever after, will be nonstops to the gates of hell.
More from Thomas L. Friedman on the Mideast
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
Israel’s Gaza Campaign Is Making It a Pariah State https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/opin ... hamas.html
Aug. 25, 2025
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
If This Mideast War Is Over, Get Ready for Some Interesting Politics https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/opin ... hange.html
June 24, 2025
Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
How to Think About What’s Happening With Iran and Israel https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/opin ... rikes.html
June 13, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/opin ... e9677ea768