LIVE: Trump says ‘war done' between Israel and Iran; talks coming next week
Iran's parliament passes a bill to suspend cooperation with the UN's IAEA, which still needs approval from its national security council.
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Al Jazeera
24 minutes ago
- Al Jazeera
Is Israel using Gaza tribal militias to help ethnic cleansing?
In June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted to arming and supporting the Popular Forces militia in Gaza to oppose Hamas. 'What's wrong with this?' he said in a short video he tweeted. 'It only saves the lives of Israeli soldiers.' He did not clarify what the Popular Forces would do exactly, but experts believe Israel is backing the militia and its leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, to put a Palestinian face on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The 31-year-old Abu Shabab, a previously unknown member of Gaza's Tarabin Bedouin tribe, escaped prison around October 7, having been imprisoned since 2015 for drug-related charges. Drugs are reportedly smuggled into Gaza through Egypt's Sinai and, according to analysts, are run by ISIL-affiliated groups. This has led to a widespread belief that Abu Shabab has ISIL (ISIS) links. But Abu Shabab's alleged affiliation with ISIL has not been an issue for Israel; analysts say it is using him to advance its ethnic cleansing plans in Gaza. Abu Shabab emerges Abu Shabab, who leads the 100-man-strong Popular Forces militia, is an elementary school dropout, according to Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations. Despite this, he has a sophisticated and multilingual social media presence, and he recently penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal claiming that Palestinians in Gaza were done with Hamas. Analysts believe his refined media presence is likely honed outside Gaza. 'He's not been in touch with society for the last decade,' Shehada said. 'He's a nobody. He's basically a front guy.' His own tribe, the Tarabin, does not approve of his role in Gaza today, making a rare public statement disavowing him for allegedly collaborating with Israel. Abu Shabab began to rise to prominence in late May 2024 after Israel invaded Rafah, in southern Gaza. 'His gang emerges a month later and becomes the main gang that loots the overwhelming majority of food and aid that's going into Gaza systematically under [Israeli military] protection,' Shehada said. About nine out of 10 trucks entering Gaza have been looted, according to United Nations statistics. Israel initially blamed Hamas for the looting, but humanitarian groups refuted that claim, and even the Israeli military was unable to find any proof that that was the case. Instead, international aid workers say it was Abu Shabab who was systematically looting the aid. An internal UN memo obtained by the Washington Post specifically named Abu Shabab 'the main and most influential stakeholder behind systematic and massive looting' in Gaza. During the brief ceasefire that Israel unilaterally broke in March, Abu Shabab disappeared, only to reappear in mid-May when Israel, under immense international pressure, started to allow a trickle of aid back into Gaza. 'Literally on that day, he emerges again out of nowhere,' Shehada said. 'He's been the face of Israel's hunger campaign,' Shehada said, 'while giving Israel full deniability of it and outsourcing the thing.' A Palestinian face to ethnic cleansing Beyond the stealing of aid meant for starving Palestinians, analysts said Abu Shabab and his militia are contributing to a wider Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, which has been intensifying this year. 'Israel is in the process of trying to build up the militias associated with Abu Shabab in hopes that they can expand the concentration camp zones over which those militias can operate/control so that Israel can reduce the burden of occupation while facilitating the ethnic cleansing,' Tariq Kenney Shawa, the US policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian policy network, told Al Jazeera. In early July, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz announced a plan to push 600,000 Palestinians into tent cities in southern Gaza and called it 'voluntary migration'. When Katz revealed the plan, it was widely panned by the Israeli media and humanitarians. Abu Shabab's militia has been building what analysts are calling concentration camps in southern Gaza, in an effort to drive more than half a million Palestinians there before being displaced to third countries. 'The intention is to hold them there until an opportunity arises to send them elsewhere outside of Gaza, be that Egypt or any number of third countries,' Omar Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, said. Forcing Palestinians into an unbearably small area and then forcing them over the border into Egypt could spark serious international repercussions, as the Egyptians have rejected displacing Palestinians. 'Israel understands that if the [Israeli army] operates a concentration camp in Rafah, it wouldn't look very nice,' Shehada told Al Jazeera, adding that Israel would prefer 'a Palestinian face that's dressed in Palestinian uniforms with a Palestinian flag and speaking in Arabic' as the face of such an operation. In addition, he said, Abu Shabab has 'two very well-oiled Facebook propaganda machineries' that could convince desperate people to seek shelter in his camps, 'especially if Israel [begins] forcefully pushing people there.' 'Abu Shabab's militia is running smaller concentration camps within areas Israel controls and has advertised them as 'safe havens' for people to come get aid and set up tents and such,' Kenney Shawa said. Taking advantage of desperation This process has been bolstered by the US and Israel-backed GHF, which Israel is trying to impose as the sole distributor of aid in Gaza. But the GHF has been widely lambasted by aid groups and the UN for politicising aid, and Israeli soldiers shoot at hungry Palestinians every day as they try to secure aid for their families. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed at the GHF's distribution centres since May. Worsening the situation is that, instead of some 400 aid distribution points that the UNRWA used to operate in Gaza, the GHF has only four sites in the whole Gaza Strip. Tellingly, three of those are in the south, with only one in central Gaza, leading analysts to believe the sites were selected intentionally by Israeli authorities. 'Survival depends on food access,' Rahman said. 'The entire purpose of GHF is to force the population to relocate.'
Al Jazeera
an hour ago
- Al Jazeera
Trump's Washington, DC takeover begins as National Guard troops arrive
Some of the 800 National Guard members deployed by US President Donald Trump have started arriving in the nation's capital, ramping up after the White House ordered federal forces to take over the city's police department and reduce crime in what the president called – without substantiation – a lawless city. The influx on Tuesday came the morning after Trump announced he would be activating the guard members and taking over the department. He cited a crime emergency – but referred to the same crime that city officials stress is already falling noticeably. The president holds the legal right to make such moves – to a point. The law lets Trump control the police department for a month, but how aggressive the federal presence will be and how it could play out remained open questions as the city's mayor and police chief went to the Justice Department to meet with the attorney general. The meeting comes a day after Mayor Muriel Bowser said Trump's freshly announced plan to take over the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and call in the National Guard was not a productive step. She calmly laid out the city's case that crime has been dropping steadily and said Trump's perceived state of emergency simply doesn't match the numbers. She also flatly stated that the capital city's hands are tied and that her administration has little choice but to comply. 'We could contest that,' she said of Trump's definition of a crime emergency, 'but his authority is pretty broad.' Bowser made a reference to Trump's 'so-called emergency' and concluded: 'I'm going to work every day to make sure it's not a complete disaster.' Al Jazeera's Kimberly Halkett, reporting from Washington, DC, said Trump has accused Democrats of being 'weak on crime'. 'He singled out Democrat-run cities like Oakland – which is outside San Francisco – New York, Baltimore, even Chicago,' she said. 'Given the fact they're run by Democrats … this is causing a little bit of concern.' Democrats are calling the move 'a power grab'. 'Even though they're saying this is technically legal, it is a hostile takeover given that these powers have actually never been executed in modern history,' Halkett said. Trump's bumpy relationship with DC While Trump invokes his plan by saying that 'we're going to take our capital back', Bowser and the MPD maintain that violent crime overall in Washington has decreased to a 30-year low after a sharp rise in 2023. Carjackings, for example, dropped about 50 percent in 2024 and are down again this year. More than half of those arrested, however, are juveniles, and the extent of those punishments is a point of contention for the Trump administration. 'The White House says crime may be down, but that doesn't mean that it's not a problem and that violent crime exists at levels that are far too high,' Halkett said. Bowser, a Democrat, spent much of Trump's first term in office openly sparring with the Republican president. She fended off his initial plans for a military parade through the streets and stood in public opposition when he called in a multi-agency flood of federal law enforcement to confront anti-police brutality protesters in the summer of 2020. She later had the words 'Black Lives Matter' painted in giant yellow letters on the street about a block from the White House. In Trump's second term, backed by Republican control of both houses of Congress, Bowser has walked a public tightrope for months, emphasising common ground with the Trump administration on issues such as the successful effort to bring the National Football League's (NFL's) Washington Commanders back to the District of Columbia. She watched with open concern for the city streets as Trump finally got his military parade this summer. Her decision to dismantle Black Lives Matter Plaza earlier this year served as a neat metaphor for just how much the power dynamics between the two executives had evolved. Now that fraught relationship enters uncharted territory as Trump has followed through on months of what many DC officials had quietly hoped were empty threats. The new standoff has cast Bowser in a sympathetic light, even among her longtime critics. 'It's a power play and we're an easy target,' said Clinique Chapman, CEO of the DC Justice Lab. A frequent critic of Bowser, whom she accuses of 'over policing our youth' with the recent expansions of Washington's youth curfew, Chapman said Trump's latest move 'is not about creating a safer DC; it's just about power'.
Al Jazeera
an hour ago
- Al Jazeera
Top Russia-US diplomats hold phone call before Trump-Putin Alaska meet
The top diplomats from Russia and the United States have held a phone call ahead of a planned meeting this week between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In a post on Telegram on Tuesday, the ministry said Sergei Lavrov said the two sides had reaffirmed their intention to hold successful talks. The US Department of State did not immediately confirm the talks. But speaking shortly after the announcement, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt revealed that Trump would meet with Putin in the city of Anchorage. She said the pair would discuss ending Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 'On Friday morning, Trump will travel across the country to Anchorage, Alaska for a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin,' Leavitt told reporters. She added that Trump 'is determined to try and end this war and stop the killing'. On Monday, Trump told reporters he was 'going to see' what Putin 'has in mind' when it comes to a deal to end the fighting. Trump also said he and Putin would discuss 'land swapping', indicating he may support an agreement that sees Russia maintain control of at least some of the Ukrainian territory it occupies. Kyiv has repeatedly said that any deal that would see it cede occupied land – including Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia – to Russia would be a non-starter. Moscow has maintained that any deal must require Ukraine to relinquish some of the territories Russia has seized since 2014. He has also called for a pause to Western aid for Ukraine and an end to Kyiv's efforts to join the NATO military alliance.
