Category: 2. World

PARIS (Reuters) – French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday slammed Israel’s plans to step up its military operation in Gaza as a disaster waiting to happen and proposed an international coalition under a United Nations mandate to stabilise Gaza.

Last week, Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan to take control of Gaza City, in a move that expanded its military operations in the shattered Palestinian territory and drew strong criticism at home and abroad.

“The Israeli cabinet’s announcement of an expansion of its operations in Gaza City and the Mawasi camps and for a re-occupation heralds a disaster of unprecedented gravity waiting to happen and of a drift towards a never-ending war,” said Macron, in remarks sent by his office to reporters.

“The Israeli hostages and the people of Gaza will continue to be the primary victims of this strategy,” added Macron.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office did not immediately return a request for comment. Responding to international criticism in a press conference on Sunday, he said Israel is “applying force judiciously”.

By proposing a U.N.-mandated mission in Gaza, Macron is seeking to build on the momentum created by his recognition of a Palestinian state last month, which set off a domino of recognitions, with Britain and Canada following suit. 

Donald Trump has confirmed that he and Vladimir Putin will discuss “land swapping” when they meet on Friday in Alaska for a high-stakes summit on the Ukraine war. But the US president expressed frustration with Volodymyr Zelenskyy for putting conditions on such a potential agreement.

During a news conference at the White House on Monday, Trump said he was frustrated with Zelenskyy’s insistence that Ukraine would need to hold a national referendum on any peace deal that stipulated recognising Russian control over territory that it has occupied during the war.

“I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelenskyy was saying I have to get constitutional approval,” Trump said. “He has approval to go to war and kill everybody but he needs approval to do a land swap. Because there will be some land swapping going on. I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody.”

European diplomats have been taken aback by the lack of clarity on the US side about the territories Putin is demanding from Ukraine and the terms of a ceasefire. The discrepancies within the US reporting back on what Russia is seeking has alarmed European diplomats and only added to a fear that Trump, inflating his personal relationship with Putin, could make damaging concessions.

Describing his vision for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, Trump said an agreement would include “good stuff, not bad stuff, also some bad stuff for both”. “We’re going to change the lines, the battle lines,” he added.

Trump, increasingly impatient with Putin in recent months, has long said he does not see a ceasefire occurring until he meets the Russian leader in person.

The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, on Monday invited Trump to join emergency virtual talks with EU leaders and Zelenskyy on Wednesday, as European demands grow for the US president to agree red lines before Friday’s summit with Putin.

Neither Zelenskyy nor European leaders have been invited to Trump’s meeting with the Russian president.

Trump said on Monday that he would seek to arrange direct talks between Putin and Zelenskyy, a proposal that the Russian president has rejected so far.

“The next meeting will be with Zelenskyy and Putin, or Zelenskyy and Putin and me. I’ll be there if they need, but I want to have a meeting set up between the two leaders,” Trump said.

He said a deal may not be possible and that he saw the upcoming summit as a “feel-out meeting”, and that he would update Zelenskyy and European leaders if Putin proposed a “fair deal”. “I’ll call him after and I may say lots of luck, keep fighting, or I may say we can make a deal,” he said.

Merz’s office said in a statement that the virtual talks would focus on “further options for action to put pressure on Russia” and “preparations for possible peace negotiations and related issues of territorial claims and security”.

It is not clear whether or not Trump has accepted the invitation to the call.

EU foreign ministers were meeting in an emergency session to underscore the demand. The UK has also been pressing for wider consultations after Trump unilaterally announced last week that he was going ahead with his first meeting with Putin since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

European leaders say Russia represents an existential threat to the continent and that they should not be excluded from the process. Issues such as the terms of a ceasefire, further sanction pressure on Russia, any proposed territorial swaps and security guarantees for Ukraine would be discussed with the US president in the virtual meeting.

There is concern that an unpredictable Trump will be lured into making fatal concessions to Putin, and the meeting would be a chance for him to map out his strategy.

The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said he was optimistic that the US president would formally consult European leaders before his meeting, and said the summit between Trump and Putin filled him with hope and fear.

Brussels’ top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said: “President Trump is right to say that Russia must end its war against Ukraine. The United States has the power to force Russia to negotiate seriously.” But she added: “Any agreement between the United States and Russia must include Ukraine and the EU because it is a security issue for Ukraine and for the whole of Europe.”

Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, also asserted Europe’s relevance, saying: “Europe is paying for Ukraine to defend itself and we are sustaining the Ukrainian state. This is a matter of existential European security interests. We appreciate President Trump’s efforts but we will be taking our own decisions here in Europe. To get to a fair peace, Russia has to limit its war aims.”

The White House is insisting that the Alaska meeting is to gauge whether Putin is willing to make concessions for peace, including on accepting western security guarantees for Ukraine, an acceptance that would acknowledge the long-term legitimacy of the Kyiv government led by Zelenskyy.

Merz spoke with Trump on Sunday night to underline that he would prefer the US to impose further economic sanctions on Moscow before the talks. He also said he assumed Zelenskyy would be involved in any talks, but for Moscow it would be a concession for a Russian delegation to hold talks with the Ukrainian president since its invasion is predicated on not recognising the legitimacy of the government.

A joint statement on Saturday from the leaders from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Britain, Finland and the European Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, urged Trump to put more pressure on Russia and stressed: “The path in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine.”

Putin will go into Friday’s talks believing he is making progress on the battlefield, Trump is desperate for a settlement and the Ukrainian people are also increasingly willing to make concessions for peace. But the Russian president also knows that if he makes no substantive offer, Trump will be under real political pressure to go ahead with long-promised broader economic sanctions against Russia.

Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator behind a congressional plan to impose secondary sanctions on countries that trade with Russia, expressed confidence that Trump would protect Ukraine’s interests at the summit. He was involved in the weekend diplomacy and is trusted as an intermediary with Trump by Ukrainian officials.

He said if Putin did not offer concessions, he expected Trump to make countries importing Russian oil pay a heavy price, adding that this applied not just to India but also to China and Brazil. India is already due to face 50% tariffs later this month.

Speaking on NBC, Graham said: “Militarily, we need to keep Ukraine strong, keep flowing them strong and modern weapons, and security guarantees with European forces on the ground as tripwires to prevent a third [Russian] invasion. We want to end this with the sovereign, independent, self-governing Ukraine, and a situation where Putin cannot do this the third time without being crushed.”

He added: “I want to be honest with you, Ukraine is not going to evict every Russian, and Russia is not going to Kyiv, so there will be some land swaps at the end.”

Ukraine’s leadership has long said that de facto it will not recover all the territory it has lost in successive Russian invasions, but with European support it is fiercely resisting a Russian demand that it should hand over territory in the Donetsk region it has not yet ceded on the battlefield, especially if there are no security guarantees for Ukraine or compensating land swaps by Russia.

Europeans are insisting that no limitations can be imposed on Ukraine developing its own military capabilities or the support it receives from third countries, including some inside Nato.

CUBO DE BENAVENTE, Spain (Reuters) – Extreme heat and strong winds caused “fire whirls” as a blaze burned several houses and forced the evacuation of hundreds of people from near a UNESCO-listed national park in northern Spain, authorities said on Monday.

Thirteen fires broke out in the north of the Castile and Leon region, with about 700 people told to abandon their homes in half a dozen villages.

Four fires were still live, Juan Carlos Suarez-Quinones, chief of environment for the regional government, said on Monday morning. Firefighters had extinguished the other nine.

High temperatures on Sunday had caused the so-called fire whirls near Las Medallas park, forcing firemen to retreat and burning some houses in the nearby village, according to Suarez-Quinones.

“This occurs when temperatures reach around 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in a very confined valley and then suddenly (the fire) enters a more open and oxygenated area. This produces a fireball, a fire whirl,” he said.

“This explosive and surprising phenomenon was very dangerous. It disrupted all the work that had been done, forcing us to start practically from scratch,” he added.

Scientists say the Mediterranean region’s hotter, drier summers put it at high risk of wildfires. Once fires start, dry vegetation and strong winds can cause them to spread rapidly and burn out of control, sometimes provoking fire whirls.

A prolonged heatwave in Spain continued on Monday with temperatures set to reach 42 °C in some regions.

Domingo Aparicio, 77, was evacuated to a nearby town from his home in Cubo de Benavente on Sunday after a warehouse in front of his home burned down.

“How am I supposed to feel? It’s always shocking for people close to the catastrophe,” he said.

Two or three fires may have been started by lightning strikes, Suarez-Quinones said, but there were indications that the majority were the result of arson, which he described as “environmental terrorism”.

In the northern part of neighbouring Portugal, nearly 700 firefighters were battling a blaze that started on Saturday in Trancoso, some 350 km (200 miles) northeast of Lisbon.

So far this year about 52,000 hectares (200 square miles), or 0.6% of Portugal’s total area, have burned, exceeding the 2006-2024 average for the same period by about 10,000 hectares, according to the European Forest Fire Information System.

For Stefan Erasmus, it’s a step in the right direction in ensuring that he maximizes production while protecting the environment.

Firefighters were also battling blazes in Navarra in northeastern Spain and in Huelva in the southwest, authorities said.

 

LONDON: Half of the protesters arrested in London on Saturday in relation to the banned group Palestine Action are older than 60, police data shows.

Officers arrested 532 people at the mass demonstration against the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization last month, The Guardian reported.

All except 10 were arrested under Section 13 of the UK’s Terrorism Act for displaying placards or signs in support of a banned group.

London’s Metropolitan Police on Sunday released an age breakdown of the people arrested at the demonstration. Almost 100 were in their 70s and 15 were aged 80 or older.

The event was organized in Parliament Square by Defend Our Juries, which requested that protesters hold signs saying: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

Police arrested high-profile former government and military figures. Jonathon Porritt, 75, a former adviser to the government of Tony Blair, said he is deeply concerned by the erosion of civil liberties in Britain under successive governments.

Police arrested him under Section 13 and he was bailed until Oct. 23. He described the ban on Palestine Action as “a measure of the government’s desperation” that is “entirely inappropriate.”

Porritt said: “I thought this was overreach by the home secretary, trying to eliminate the voices of those who are deeply concerned about what is happening in Gaza.

“This was an absolutely clear case of a government using its powers to crush dissenting voices when it is the government itself that is most reprehensible for what continues to be an absolute horror story in the world.

“What we are seeing now in Gaza has just utterly shocked people and it’s completely abhorrent that we are living through a genocide on our TV screens.”

Some people who attended the protest complained that police detained older demonstrators for hours in the hot summer weather and denied them access to water.

Defend Our Juries on Sunday said everyone arrested had been released from police custody and no charges had been issued.

The Met Police said: “There was water available at the prisoner processing points and access to toilets. We had police medics on hand as part of the policing operation and we processed people as quickly as possible to ensure nobody was waiting an unreasonably long time.

“Notwithstanding that, a degree of personal responsibility is required on the part of those who chose to come and break the law.

“They knew they were very likely to be arrested which is a decision that will inevitably have consequences.”

Chris Romberg, a 75-year-old former British Army officer colonel and a military attache at the British embassies in Jordan and Egypt, was also arrested under Section 13 and bailed.

“This is a serious assault on our freedoms,” Romberg, the son of a Holocaust survivor told, The Guardian. “When I protested against the US war in Vietnam, we were able to chant ‘victory to the NLF’ without being criminalized.

“Now a statement of support for a nonviolent direct-action group is prosecuted under anti-terrorism legislation.”

Award-winning poet Alice Oswald, 58, told officers who had detained her to write to the home secretary about the position they were forced into as a result of the Palestine Action ban.

She said: “Clearly there were some police officers who were really struggling with what they had to do. You could see the slightly shifty look in their faces, too.

“When I was speaking to them in the police van I did say: ‘Write to Yvette Cooper and tell her that this is making your life impossible’.”

She told The Guardian that she was partly motivated to attend the demonstration after delivering online poetry classes to young people in Gaza.

Since the proscription of Palestine Action in July, 10 people have been charged for suspected offenses under the Terrorism Act.