Israeli minister urges full force assault on Gaza
JERUSALEM: Israel's far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said Friday it was time to use 'full force' in Gaza, after Hamas said a new US-backed truce proposal failed to meet its demands.
'Mr Prime Minister, after Hamas rejected the deal proposal again -- there are no more excuses,' Ben Gvir said on his Telegram channel.
'The confusion, the shuffling and the weakness must end. We have already missed too many opportunities. It is time to go in with full force, without blinking, to destroy, and kill Hamas to the last one.'
The White House said on Thursday that President Donald Trump and US envoy Steve Witkoff had 'submitted a ceasefire proposal to Hamas that Israel backed'.
'Israel signed off on this proposal before it was sent to Hamas,' Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, adding discussions were 'continuing' with the militants.
Israel has not confirmed that it approved the new proposal.
Hamas sources said last week the group had accepted a US-backed deal, but on Thursday political bureau member Bassem Naim said the new version meant 'the continuation of killing and famine... and does not meet any of our people's demands, foremost among them halting the war'.
'Nonetheless, the movement's leadership is studying the response to the proposal with full national responsibility,' he added.
A source close to the group said the new version 'is considered a retreat' from the previous one, which 'included an American commitment regarding permanent ceasefire negotiations'.
According to two sources close to the negotiations, the new proposal involves a 60-day truce, potentially extendable to 70 days, and the release of 10 living hostages and nine bodies in exchange for Palestinian prisoners during the first week.
It also involves a second exchange of the same number of living and dead hostages during the second week, according to the sources.
The same sources said Hamas had agreed last week to two exchanges on the same terms, but one during the first week of the truce and the other during the final week.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Star
an hour ago
- The Star
Stop scaring future world leaders off US campuses
HERE'S yet another way in which US President Donald Trump is making America neither Great Again nor strong, but weaker, and for a long time to come: He's sabotaging the US-centred trans-national intellectual and personal networks that have amplified American power by breaking the pipeline of future leaders of foreign countries who were educated and shaped in the US. His administration is doing that by expelling, harassing, or intimi-dating foreigners at US univer-sities. It revoked the visas of more than 1,400 international students on American campuses. In some cases, the government alleged that students were pro-Palestinian protesters, in others that they committed 'crimes', even if those turned out to be unpaid parking tickets or were even non-existent. Many of the revocations had no clear rationale at all. As part of the specific showdown between the White House and Harvard University, the administration threatened to stop the institution from enrolling international students altogether; however, on Friday a federal judge temporarily halted the ban. Before that, the many lawsuits brought by international students over their visa statuses caused enough chaos that the government promised to restore due process to its review of student visas. Whether it does or not, though, the damage may already be done. No matter how many students this bureaucratic jihad ultimately forces to go home, it will dissuade myriad other young talents abroad from applying to study in America in the first place. Why should they subject themselves to legal risk or hostility (on top of America's outlandish tuition costs) when they could instead get their degrees in other countries? And among those bright young things forming new ideas, expertise, and friendships outside rather than inside of the US will be some of tomorrow's world leaders. To grasp what America in the coming years will miss out on, consider the subtle but influential webs of soft power that have long been among the boons of America's status as an educational superpower. When covering the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, or again the global one of the late 2000s, I often heard that negotiations among countries and institutions went better than expected – and better for the US, in particular – because a lot of the people in the meetings had spent time on the same campuses, studied under the same professors, or even sat in the same classrooms. They wore different garb and spoke English in different accents. But they shared the language and mentality of, say, Harvard's Kennedy School, or the economics departments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the University of Chicago. Mario Draghi, for example, has been an Italian and a European central banker (as well as a prime minister of Italy), just as Raghu-ram Rajan ran India's central bank and the research side of the International Monetary Fund, among other things. But both got their PhDs at MIT, and were influenced by Stanley Fischer, a titan of finance (and himself a former central banker of Israel). As a professor at MIT, Fischer in fact mentored future central bankers on most continents except Antarctica. Mark Carney, a former central bank governor in Britain and Canada (and Canada's current Prime Minister), is not among them – he went to Harvard instead. In some cases, these biographies make for stories of stunning success for the individuals as well as for the world and the host country, the US. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a Nigerian who studied at Harvard and MIT, then went on to reform Nigeria's economy in two stints as Finance minister, before working at the World Bank and running the World Trade Organisation. She's still Nigerian, but now a US citizen as well. The list of US-educated heads of state is also long. For ambitious Latin Americans and Africans, a stint or two on an American campus is practically a rite of passage. The founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, sent his younger son to Stanford and the elder to Harvard's Kennedy School; that one later became Singapore's third prime minister. Taiwan's current president got his master's degree from Harvard; his predecessor got hers from Cornell. The Jordanian king also studied in America (at Georgetown), as did much of his policy elite. Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, did not, but that makes him an outlier among Saudi royals. The Israelis love to take a swing through American campuses, including incumbent Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (MIT and Harvard). On it goes, from Moldova to South Korea and Indonesia, where the current president did not study in the US but his influential Finance Minister, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, did (University of Illinois); she has called her American years formative. Whether an American educa-tion always makes foreign leaders more pro-American or pro-Western, or even just more capable, is moot. At a minimum, though, it lets international students see the world and their own countries through American eyes, narratives, metaphors, and references. It gives them a literal and figurative vocabulary with which they will later run international organisations or negotiate with the White House. The scholar Joseph Nye defined soft power as the ability to get others to want what you want. To the extent that a US education gets others to think as Americans think, it is the ideal tool of soft power, if you choose to see it that way. There are of course many other reasons for the US to host international students – about a million a year as of last count. Foreigners who study in America go on to invent and pioneer new technologies and business models at disproportionate rates, and most do it in and for the US. If the Trump administration pushes them away, those talents will innovate in and for China instead, or other adversaries and competitors. But the ability to form intellectual and personal networks across the world is enough reason to keep American education cosmopolitan, as opposed to barricading the ivory tower and closing American minds. In that way, education is like trade: enriching when it's open, corrosive when it closes. The benefits I'm describing pay out slowly, admittedly, and Trump isn't known for his attention span or long-term planning. But some rewards can be immediate, even if hard to quantify. Bilal Erdogan (Indiana University and Harvard) has surely talked at least some sense about America into his father, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. And as relations between the US and China become ever tenser, it surely helps both countries that Xi Jinping can turn to his daughter Mingze for discreet pointers about the Yanks. She too reportedly went to Harvard, though under an alias. Little else is publicly known, not even whether she paid all her parking tickets. – Bloomberg Opinion/Tribune News Service
The Star
an hour ago
- The Star
Private city, public fight
TO many, Tatu City on the outskirts of Nairobi looks like a success. The first city entirely built by a private company to be operational in east Africa, with some 25,000 people living and working there, it accounts for around two-thirds of all foreign investment in Kenya. Its low-tax status has attracted more than 100 businesses including Heineken, coffee brand Dormans and the biggest call-centre and cold-chain transport firms in the region. But to some local politicians, Tatu City has looked more like a target for extortion. A parade of governors have, according to the city's owners, demanded land worth millions of dollars in exchange for building permits. A few years ago, a governor 'drove around with us, just pointing at different plots of land, saying 'I want that, I want that'', said Preston Mendenhall, Kenya country head for Rendeavour, the company building the city. The American responded with a tactic rarely attempted in Kenya: going public. More than once, Mendenhall has held press conferences detailing the alleged extortion attempts of local politicians. 'They thought that we, as foreign investors, would leave the country,' he said. '(But) we're looking at a 50-year time horizon. For us to challenge somebody, if need be in public, who is trying to extort us... we believe that's the right thing to do.' Last year, he publicly accused local governor Kimani Wamatangi of demanding 22ha of Tatu City, worth US$33mil, free of charge. Wamatangi – who did not respond to a request for comment – denied the accusation. It's a risky strategy. 'I'm subject to four defamation cases. It's their intimidation tactic and they're used to getting what they want,' said Mendenhall. 'But the first case goes back to 2015 and we haven't had a hearing yet, so I'm not too worried.' The waiting game appears to be paying off. The first governor who targeted them, Ferdinand Waititu, is now in prison from a separate corruption case. Wamatangi was arrested in April by anti-corruption officers who found some US$13,000 in cash in his home, also in an unrelated case. A worker inspecting the condition of goods preserved in sub-zero storage at cold chain solutions provider, Cold Solutions Kenya Sez Ltd, at their plant in Tatu City in Ruiru, Kiambu county. — AFP World-class facilities Meanwhile, Tatu City is slowly but steadily growing. The resident population is still small, but the 2,000ha site already includes a supermarket, health clinic and two schools with 5,000 pupils. There are 2,400 homes ranging from studios to lakeside mansions and 2,000 more on the way. Many are attracted by the fact that it has its own electricity and water supply to prevent cuts that are highly common across Africa. 'That is why we chose Tatu City,' said Hannington Opot, commercial director of Hewa Tele, which is currently building a factory to produce medical-grade oxygen for hospitals – a chemical process requiring uninterrupted power and water. Cold Solutions, which provides storage for food and pharmaceutical partners, also highlighted the infrastructure. 'We wanted to put a stake in the ground and say that Africans can build world-class facilities. And it marries nicely with what Tatu is trying to do,' said managing director Fredd Kambo. Unity Homes has built over 1,500 apartments. Buyers are attracted by the 'playgrounds, parks, the fact they can drink the water from the tap... and knowing no one will build two centimetres in front of your balcony', said commercial director Mina Stiernblad. By far the hardest Tatu City is the most advanced of six cities Rendeavour is building across Africa – in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia. Kenyan corruption has made it 'by far the hardest', said Mendenhall. Anger over corruption was one of the key drivers of mass protests in Kenya last year. But Rendeavour's founders made their fortunes in the free-for-all of 1990s Russia and are unfazed. The owners have faced their own allegations, including claims of tax evasion. But investigations have been ongoing for years without resulting in any charges. Mendenhall says they are just more extortion attempts by 'bad actors'. He emphasised that many in the Kenyan government are 'incredibly supportive'. 'They understand the vision of this project, understand the number of jobs that it's created,' he said. And for all the corruption attempts, Mendenhall has great faith in Kenya. 'Kenya is really an economic hub of the region (and) we think Nairobi will become the capital of Africa,' he said. — AFP
New Straits Times
6 hours ago
- New Straits Times
Global universities luring US-bound students amid Trump crackdown
UNIVERSITIES around the world are seeking to offer refuge to students impacted by United States President Donald Trump's crackdown on academic institutions, targeting top talent and a slice of the billions of dollars in academic revenue in the US. Osaka University, one of the top ranked in Japan, is offering tuition fee waivers, research grants and help with travel arrangements to students and researchers at US institutions that want to transfer. Japan's Kyoto University and Tokyo University are also considering similar schemes, while Hong Kong has instructed its universities to attract top talent from the US. China's Xi'an Jiaotong University has appealed for students at Harvard, singled out in Trump's crackdown, promising "streamlined" admissions and "comprehensive" support. Trump's administration has enacted massive funding cuts for academic research, curbed visas for foreign students, especially those from China, and plans to hike taxes on elite schools. Trump alleges top US universities are cradles of anti-American movements. In a dramatic escalation, his administration last week revoked Harvard's ability to enrol foreign students, a move later blocked by a federal judge. Masaru Ishii, dean of the graduate school of medicine at Osaka University, described the impact on US universities as "a loss for all of humanity". Japan aims to ramp up its number of foreign students to 400,000 over the next decade, from around 337,000 now. Jessica Turner, CEO of Quac-quarelli Symonds, a London-based analytics firm that ranks universities globally, said other leading universities around the world were trying to attract students unsure of going to the US. Germany, France and Ireland are attractive alternatives in Europe, she said, while in the Asia-Pacific, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and mainland China are rising in profile. Chinese students have been particularly targeted in Trump's crackdown, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday pledging to "aggressively" crack down on their visas. More than 275,000 Chinese students are enrolled in hundreds of US colleges, providing a major source of revenue for the schools and a crucial pipeline of talent for US technology companies. International students — 54 per cent from India and China — contributed more than US$50 billion to the US economy in 2023. Trump's crackdown comes at a critical period in the international student application process, as many young people prepare to travel to the US in August to find accommodation and settle in before term starts. Dai, 24, a Chinese student based in Chengdu, had planned to head to the US to complete her master's degree but is seriously considering taking up an offer in Britain instead. "The policies (by the US government) were a slap in my face. I'm thinking about my mental health and I may change schools." Students from Britain and the European Union are also more hesitant to apply to US universities, said Tom Moon, deputy head of consultancy at Oxbridge Applications, which helps students in their university applications. There has been an uptick in applications to British universities from prospective students in the US, said Universities UK, an organisation that promotes British institutions. It said, however, that it was too early to say whether that translates into more students enrolling. Ella Rickets, an 18-year old first year student at Harvard from Canada, said she receives a generous aid package paid for by the school's donors. However, she is concerned that she won't be able to afford other options if forced to transfer. "Around the time I was applying to schools, the only university across the Atlantic I considered was Oxford. "However, I realised that I would not be able to afford the international tuition and there was no sufficient scholarship or financial aid available," she said. If Harvard's ability to enrol foreign students is revoked, she would most likely apply to the University of Toronto, she said. Analytics firm QS said overall visits to its 'Study in America' online guide have declined by 17.6 per cent in the last year — with interest from India alone down over 50 per cent. "If America turns these brilliant and talented students away, they will find other places to work and study," said Caleb Thompson, a 20-year-old US student at Harvard, who lives with eight international scholars. Additional reporting by John Geddie The writers are from Reuters
