Middle East crisis: Trump calls for Gaza hostages release ahead of Netanyahu meeting at the White House – as it happened | Israel

Here is a summary of today’s events so far:

Executions in Saudi Arabia surged last year to a record high, Amnesty International said Monday, as activists increasingly warn about the kingdom’s use of the death penalty in nonviolent drug cases.

Saudi Arabia executed 345 people last year, the highest number ever recorded by Amnesty in over three decades of reporting. In the first six months of this year alone, 180 people have been put to death, the group said, signaling that record likely will again be broken.

This year, about two-thirds of those executed were convicted on non-lethal drug charges, the activist group Reprieve said separately. Amnesty also has raised similar concerns about executions in drug cases.

Saudi Arabia has not offered any comment on why it increasingly employs the death penalty in the kingdom. Saudi officials did not respond to detailed questions from The Associated Press about the executions and why it is using the death penalty for nonviolent drug cases.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said Israeli forces killed at least 12 people on Monday, including six in a clinic housing Palestinians displaced after 21 months of war.

Israel has recently expanded its military operations in the Gaza Strip, where the war has created dire humanitarian conditions for the Palestinian territory’s population of more than two million.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that six people were killed and 15 injured in an Israeli air strike that hit the Al-Rimal clinic, “which houses hundreds of displaced people, in the Al-Rimal neighborhood west of Gaza City.”

AFP footage showed Palestinians, including groups of young children, combing through the bombed-out interior of the clinic, where mattresses lay alongside wood, metal and concrete broken apart in the blast.

US envoy ‘unbelievably satisfied’ by Lebanese response to disarming Hezbollah request

Israel and Hamas are set to hold indirect talks in Qatar for a second day on Monday, aimed at securing a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza, ahead of a meeting in Washington between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.

The US president has said a deal could be reached this week. Before departing for Washington on Sunday, Netanyahu said that Israeli negotiators had been given clear instructions to achieve a ceasefire under conditions that Israel has accepted.

An Israeli official told Reuters that the atmosphere so far at the Gaza talks, mediated by Qatar and Egypt, as positive. Palestinian officials said that initial meetings on Sunday had ended inconclusively.

A second Israeli official said the issue of humanitarian aid had been discussed in Qatar, without providing further details.

Hours after the Israeli strikes, two missiles were launched from Yemen towards Israel, the Israeli army said, with Yemen military spokesman Yehyaa Saree claiming responsibility for the attacks.

The Houthis acknowledged the Israel’s military airstrikes on ports and facilities they held, but offered no damage assessment from the attack.

Their military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, claimed its air defense forces “effectively confronted” the Israelis without offering evidence.

“We are fully prepared for a sustained and prolonged confrontation, to confront hostile warplanes and to counter attempts to break the naval blockade imposed by our armed forces on the enemy,” Saree said.

A French man has been missing in Iran since mid-June, France’s minister responsible for the country’s residents abroad said on Monday, adding that Paris had no details on what had happened to the man.

“It’s a worrying disappearance and we are in contact with the family,” Laurent Saint-Martin, who is also trade minister, told RTL radio.

“It is worrying because Iran has a deliberate policy of taking Western hostages,” he added.

But Saint-Martin did not say specifically that the Iranian authorities were holding the man, who also has German nationality.

French media reported that the man was an 18-year-old who had been on a cycling trip in the region but went missing a few days after Israeli planes struck targets in Iran.

Separately, a diplomatic source said Iran has charged two French nationals – Jacques Paris and Cecile Kohler – with spying for Israel’s Mossad intelligence service. The two have been held in Iran more than three years in what France has called state-sponsored hostage taking.

A US envoy met Lebanese officials in Beirut on Monday to discuss a proposed plan to disarm Hezbollah, hours after Israel launched new air strikes and a cross-border ground assault.

The Israeli escalation was seen by Lebanese officials and diplomats as an attempt to ratchet up pressure on Hezbollah, whose leader Naim Qassem said in a televised speech on Sunday that the group still needed arms to defend Lebanon from Israel.

US envoy Thomas Barrack’s proposal, delivered to Lebanese officials during his last visit on June 19, would see Hezbollah fully disarmed within four months in exchange for the withdrawal of Israeli troops occupying several posts in south Lebanon and a halt to Israeli air strikes.

Lebanon formed a committee to draft a response. Hezbollah was expected to provide its own feedback to its ally, Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri, to incorporate into a counter-proposal being prepared in time for Barrack’s Monday visit.

Israel announces capture of members of Iran-backed cell in southern Syria

Nearly 450,000 Afghans have returned from Iran since the start of June, the United Nations’ migration agency said on Monday, after Tehran ordered those without documentation to leave by July 6.

In late May, Iran said undocumented Afghans must leave the country by July 6, potentially impacting four million people out of the around six million Afghans Tehran says live in the country.

Numbers of people crossing the border have surged since mid-June, with some days seeing around 40,000 people crossing at Islam Qala in western Herat province, UN agencies have said.

From June 1 to July 5, 449,218 Afghans returned from Iran, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration told AFP on Monday, adding that the total for the year so far was 906,326.

Israel’s military launched airstrikes early Monday targeting ports and facilities held by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, with the rebels responding with missile fire targeting Israel.

The attacks came after an attack Sunday targeting a Liberian-flagged ship in the Red Sea that caught fire and took on water, later forcing its crew to abandon the vessel.

Suspicion for the attack on the Greek-owned bulk carrier Magic Seas immediately fell on the Houthis, particularly as a security firm said bomb-carrying drone boats appeared to hit the ship after it was targeted by small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. The rebels’ media reported on the attack but did not claim it. It can take them hours or even days before they acknowledge an assault.

A renewed Houthi campaign against shipping could again draw in US and Western forces to the area, particularly after President Donald Trump targeted the rebels in a major airstrike campaign.

The meeting between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu will take place in the evening US time. What have both leaders said about a possible ceasefire deal?

Before departing for Washington on Sunday, Netanyahu praised the cooperation with the US for bringing a “huge victory over our shared enemy.” He struck a positive note on a ceasefire for Gaza, saying he was working “to achieve the deal under discussion, on the terms we agreed to.”

Asked on Friday how confident he was a ceasefire deal would come together, Trump told reporters: “I’m very optimistic – but you know, look, it changes from day to day.”

On Sunday evening, he seemed to narrow his expectation, telling reporters that he thought an agreement related to the remaining hostages would be reached in the coming week. He also said one of the matters he expected to discuss with Netanyahu “is probably a permanent deal with Iran.”

A Russian foreign ministry statement said its minister Sergei Lavrov had issued a new denunciation of Israeli and US strikes on Iran last month, “including the bombing of nuclear energy infrastructure under safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency”.

It came during Lavrov’s talks in Rio de Janeiro with Abbas Araqchi, his Iranian counterpart, whom he met at the BRICS summit. Lavrov restated Moscow’s offer to help resolve disputes around Tehran’s nuclear programme, the Russian foreign ministry said.

In a joint statement from the opening of the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, the leaders of the BRICS group of developing nations called attacks against Iran’s “civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities” a “violation of international law”.

The group expressed “grave concern” for the Palestinian people over Israeli attacks on Gaza, and condemned what the joint statement called a “terrorist attack” in India-administered Kashmir.

The group voiced its support for Ethiopia and Iran to join the World Trade Organization, while calling to urgently restore its ability to resolve trade disputes.

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