Category: 2. World

Saudi Arabia told the US that Syrian security forces should be allowed to deploy to the country’s restive south despite Israeli objections, a US official told Middle East Eye.

The official, who requested anonymity due to sensitivities around the topic, said that Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud told US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday that the kingdom supported Syria’s military asserting control in the southern Syrian province of Sweida.

A readout of the call provided by the State Department said the two sides “discussed regional security matters, including efforts to end the violence in Syria”.

It did not provide further details.

The US official briefed on the call, and a second source familiar with the diplomacy, told MEE on Friday that the kingdom was “angry” about Israel attacking Syrian soldiers and dictating military deployments to Damascus. 

Sweida has been the site of sectarian violence between the majority Druze community and Sunni Bedouins. After bloody fighting broke out on Sunday, the Syrian government deployed troops to Sweida at the request of local authorities, prompting Israel to launch severe strikes against the Syrian army.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then ordered Syria’s government not to deploy troops south. When President Ahmed al-Sharaa did, Israel launched strikes on Syrian military convoys.

On Wednesday, Israel bombed the Syrian defence ministry and areas near the presidential palace.

Current and former US, Arab and Israeli officials told MEE that Netanyahu was seeking to carve out a zone of influence in southern Syria, a development that was unnerving the US’s Arab allies and Turkey.

In an about-turn on Friday, Israeli media reported, citing an unnamed Israeli official, that it had decided to “allow” the “limited entry” of internal Syrian security forces into Sweida for 48 hours.

‘Crystal clear’

A separate US official in the region who has been monitoring the Israeli strikes about the change in Israeli posture, told MEE that Israel’s push for a zone of influence in Syria’s south clashed with a unitary, central Syria that Trump’s envoy to the country, and ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, laid out just last week to reporters.

“I think Potus and others in the administration have been crystal clear about the path for Syria,” the official said, referring to President Trump.

A second regional source told MEE that the US was upset about the Israeli strikes. 

Israel’s intervention in Sweida has been especially inconvenient to the Trump administration because it comes as the US is pushing the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to submit to Damascus’s authority.

The US and SDF were allies fighting against the Islamic State militant group, but now Washington wants the Kurdish-led forces to integrate into the Syrian army, as opposed to maintaining an autonomous zone in the northeast.

Sharaa, a former leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and before that al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, led the removal of the country’s former president and strongman, Bashar al-Assad, in December 2024.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and other Arab states issued a statement on Thursday reaffirming their “unwavering support for Syria’s security, unity, stability and sovereignty”.

The statement said Israel’s strikes were a “flagrant assault on Syria’s sovereignty” and that they rejected “all forms of foreign intervention in its [Syrian] internal affairs”.

‘Vested in Sharaa’

Saudi Arabia’s decision to back Sharaa and assert military authority in Sweida is not surprising. The kingdom hosted a direct meeting between the Syrian president and Trump in Riyadh in May.

Trump said that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman were responsible for convincing him to terminate all sanctions on Syria, again in opposition to what diplomats say Israel preferred.

With Damascus strikes, Israel seeks to tear up Trump’s vision for Syria

Read More »

Farhan also spoke with his Turkish counterpart, Hakan Fidan, on Wednesday.

While Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have the funds to support Syria’s reconstruction, Sharaa enjoys close ties to Ankara. In April, Israel bombed several Syrian air bases that Turkey was planning to take over to train Sharaa’s security forces.

“Saudi Arabia is vested in Syrian stability and reconstruction. That includes in Sharaa,” the US official told MEE.

This all comes as Trump says he still wants to broker a normalisation agreement between the US’s two partners.

MEE was the first to report that Saudi Arabia lobbied Trump to stop attacks on Yemen’s Houthis in May. Trump’s decision to do so was widely seen as going against Israel.

The United States has rejected an agreement adopted by members of the World Health Organisation to improve preparedness for future pandemics following the disjointed global response to Covid-19, the American government said on Friday.

The State Department and Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement they had transmitted on Friday the official US rejection of the legally binding pact, which was adopted in Geneva in May after three years of negotiations.

The pact aims to ensure that drugs, therapeutics and vaccines are globally accessible when the next pandemic hits. It requires participating manufacturers to allocate a target of 20 per cent of their vaccines, medicines and tests to the WHO during a pandemic to ensure poorer countries have access.

US negotiators left discussions about the accord after President Donald Trump began a 12-month process of withdrawing the US, by far the WHO’s largest financial backer, from the agency when he took office in January. Its exit means the US would not be bound by the pact.

“Developed without adequate public input, these amendments expand the role of the WHO in public health emergencies, create additional authorities for the WHO for shaping pandemic declarations, and promote the WHO’s ability to facilitate ‘equitable access’ of health commodities,” the US statement said.

“Terminology throughout the 2024 amendments is vague and broad, risking WHO-coordinated international responses that focus on political issues like solidarity, rather than rapid and effective actions,” said the statement, jointly issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy, who has a long history of sowing doubt about vaccine safety, had slammed WHO in a video address to the Assembly during its vote, saying it had failed to learn from the lessons of the pandemic with the new agreement.

Kennedy and Rubio said on Friday that the rejection protects US sovereignty. The pact leaves health policy to national governments and contains nothing that overrides national sovereignty, however.

Germany deported dozens of Afghan men to their homeland on Friday, the second time it has done so since the Taliban returned to power and the first since a new government pledging a tougher line on migration took office in Berlin.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

CAIRO (Reuters) – Hamas’ armed wing spokesperson said on Friday that while the group favours reaching an interim truce in the Gaza war, if such an agreement is not reached in current negotiations it could revert to insisting on a full package deal to end the conflict.

Hamas has repeatedly offered to release all the hostages held in Gaza and conclude a permanent ceasefire agreement, and Israel has refused, Abu Ubaida added in a televised speech.

Arab mediators Qatar and Egypt, backed by the United States, have hosted more than 10 days of talks on a U.S.-backed proposal for a 60-day truce in the war that has laid waste to the Palestinian enclave.

As part of the potential deal, 10 hostages held in Gaza would be returned along with the bodies of 18 others, spread out over 60 days. In exchange, Israel would release a number of detained Palestinians.

“If the enemy remains obstinate and evades this round as it has done every time before, we cannot guarantee a return to partial deals or the proposal of the 10 captives,” said Abu Ubaida.

Disputes remain over maps of Israeli army withdrawals, aid delivery mechanisms into Gaza, and guarantees that any eventual truce would lead to ending the war, said two Hamas officials who spoke to Reuters on Friday.

The officials said the talks have not reached a breakthrough on the issues under discussion.

Hamas says any agreement must lead to ending the war, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the war will only end once Hamas is disarmed and its leaders expelled from Gaza. 

The European Union’s latest round of Russian sanctions have added yet more pressure on an already tight diesel market in the region that is a large importer of the fuel.

The EU confirmed on Friday that it would press ahead with a ban on the import of diesel that is made from Russian crude. Prior to the decision, some traders had been skeptical that the the bloc would go through with such a step.

Two UK charities have transferred millions of pounds to an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank with the endorsement of the charities regulator, the Guardian can reveal.

Documents show that the Kasner Charitable Trust (KCT), via a conduit charity, UK Toremet, has donated approximately £5.7m to the Bnei Akiva Yeshiva high school in Susya, in the Israeli-occupied territory.

As the budget of the school increased significantly as a result of the donations, the number of pupils, employees at the school and Susya residents have all increased.

Dror Etkes, an expert on Israeli settlement, said: “The school is likely the largest single source of employment in the settlement, and constitutes one of the main elements of the entire settlement’s existence.”

Susya was established in or around 1983, south of Hebron, adjacent to and impinging on the pre-existing Palestinian village of Khirbet Susiya (commonly known as just Susiya). In 1986, the Israeli authorities declared the main residential area of Susiya an archaeological site and evicted all of its residents, according to Amnesty International.

In March, settlers launched an attack on the Susiya home of Hamdan Ballal, one of the directors of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land.

In 2016 the Charity Commission wrote to UK Toremet saying: “A donation to a school in the occupied territories would be a donation for the advancement of education and therefore on the face of it a legitimate grant for UK Toremet to make.”

The former Conservative party chair Sayeeda Warsi said: “It’s appalling that any British national should be engaged in funding illegal settlements on occupied land – and it’s even more disturbing that this is being subsidised by all of us taxpayers.

“I’m sure the vast majority of my colleagues in Westminster will share my outrage that the Charity Commission is greenlighting these donations. Serious action must be taken so that settlements which are illegal under international law, and at the heart of a regime of discrimination and displacement, cannot benefit from charitable donations.”

Andy McDonald, a Labour MP and a solicitor, said: “The government must urgently take the steps necessary to ban the use of funds originating from the UK being used to support any aspect of the illegal occupation and ensure the Charity Commission is in no doubt about its duty in preventing such transfers and having the powers to do so.

“Donations to illegal settlements should invalidate charitable status and result in individual prosecutions. If legislation is needed, we must do it.”

Concerns have previously been raised about charitable donations from the UK to Israeli settlements but this is believed to be the first time there has been a definitive paper trail of a major transfer of funds to an illegal settlement.

In a written answer in parliament in 2015, the government said the Charity Commission, which covers England and Wales, had written to UK Toremet’s trustees “and will be meeting them to review … [its] governance, policies, procedures and operational activity”.

The following year the commission confirmed it had an “open case” and that UK Toremet had been issued with “an action plan” and its compliance was being monitored.

The £5.7m of donations were made subsequently, between 2017 and 2021. When the law firm Hickman & Rose contacted the commission about them in 2022 it replied that the issues raised were not within its regulatory role as they involved allegations of war crimes and advised the solicitors to report the matter to the police.

The lawyers accordingly approached the counter-terrorism command, SO15, about individuals within the two charities. SO15 responded in March this year that it would not be pursuing a criminal investigation, based on reasons that the lawyers plan to contest, but said it would be highlighting the UK position on illegal settlements to the commission “with our concerns”.

A Charity Commission spokesperson said: “We know this is a highly contentious issue about which there are strongly held opposing views. The commission can only operate within our legal framework, and the fact that a charity operates in the occupied Palestinian territories does not in itself constitute a criminal offence or breach of charity law.”

It said it referred all potential criminal matters to the relevant law enforcement body, adding: “Given the complex legal issues in relation to international law we are in the process of seeking renewed specialist advice from the attorney general.”

A UK Toremet spokesperson said it was “not driven by any political or ideological agenda: and grants were made within the scope of English charity law​”, highlighting the 2016 letter from the commission about educational donations.

A KCT spokesperson questioned whether the settlement was illegal. Before ending the call, he said the donation was for a “religious school, not for settlement purposes”, denied KCT was in any way encouraging the settlement and said the commission had “cleared” the donations.

Benedict Garman
BBC Verify senior journalist

Moving back to our story on the demolitions of buildings in Gaza by the Israeli military, we’re going to walk you through how our journalists carry out investigations like this.

We verified scores of videos showing scenes of destruction by the Israeli military. Israel restricts international journalists from entering Gaza, but at BBC Verify we monitor hundreds of social media feeds related to the war across TikTok, Telegram, X and Facebook.

Some accounts share videos filmed by soldiers and contractors working for Israel. As well as general scenes of destruction, many of these include the exact moment of demolition, either with controlled explosions, or with construction machinery like excavators and bulldozers.

By matching features in these videos to satellite imagery and pre-existing geolocated footage – for example, street level videos filmed by Palestinians – it was possible to establish their location. Then comparing satellite photos of the same places helped narrow down the time frame in which the demolitions happened, as the day a video is published is not necessarily the day it was filmed.

We only focused on videos depicting demolitions since Israel withdrew from the ceasefire in March.

There are many more verified videos which show construction vehicles moving around Gaza, under the guard of the Israeli military.