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Category: Middle East and north Africa

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  • Netanyahu nominates Trump for Nobel peace prize at White House meeting expected to focus on Gaza

    The prime minister made the announcement at a dinner with the president, with the US expected to push Israel to agree a Gaza ceasefire

    Benjamin Netanyahu told Donald Trump that he would nominate him for the Nobel peace prize on Monday, as the two leaders met for the first time since the US launched strikes on Iran’s nuclear program as part of a short-lived war between Israel and Iran.

    Trump was expected to press Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire in Israel’s 21-month-old war against Hamas in Gaza amid an outcry over the humanitarian cost of an offensive that has led to nearly 60,000 deaths, most of them Palestinian.

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  • The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world

    The rules of the institutions that define our lives bend like reeds when it comes to Israel – so much that the whole global order is on the verge of collapse

    Sereen Haddad is a bright young woman. At 20 years old, she just finished a four-year degree in psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in only three years, earning the highest honors along the way. Yet, despite her accomplishments, she still can’t graduate. Her diploma is being withheld by the university, “not because I didn’t complete the requirements”, she told me, “but because I stood up for Palestinian life.”

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  • Trump considers forcing journalists to reveal sources who leaked Iran report

    President dismisses leaked assessment suggesting strikes only temporarily disrupted Iran’s nuclear development

    Donald Trump said he is weighing forcing journalists who published leaked details from a US intelligence report assessing the impact of the recent American military strikes on Iran to reveal their sources – and the president also claimed his administration may prosecute those reporters and sources if they don’t comply.

    In an interview Sunday with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, Trump doubled down on his claim that the 21 June airstrikes aimed at certain Iranian facilities successfully crippled Iran’s nuclear program. He insisted the attacks destroyed key enriched uranium stockpiles, despite Iranian assertions that the material had been relocated before the strikes.

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  • ‘There’s a significant lack of knowledge’: Iranian American legislator on countries’ tangled history amid conflict

    Yassamin Ansari, an Arizona representative, explains how her background shapes her perspective on US foreign policy

    Arizona congresswoman Yassamin Ansari brings an unusually personal perspective to the US’s fraught relationship with Iran. The daughter of two Iranian parents who fled their homeland – her father as a student in the 1970s who couldn’t return after the 1979 revolution, her mother as a 17-year-old in 1981 escaping the new regime’s restrictions on women – Ansari grew up immersed in the complexities of US-Iran relations.

    This deep familiarity with both Iranian domestic politics and the tangled history between Washington and Tehran has given the Democratic freshman a distinctive edge in debates over military strikes, sanctions and diplomatic engagement.

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  • US Senate votes down resolution to restrict Trump from escalating Iran war

    Democratic effort fails in mostly partisan vote, hours after US president says he would consider more bombing

    Senate Democrats failed on Friday to get a war-powers resolution passed to limit Donald Trump’s ability to single-handedly escalate the war with Iran. The resolution, “to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran”, was voted down 53-47.

    The vote on the resolution, introduced by the Democratic senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, split along mainly partisan lines. One Republican, Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted for it; one Democrat, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted against it.

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  • Trump calls for Netanyahu corruption trial to be cancelled

    US president calls Israeli prime minister a ‘great hero’ and that the charges against him constitute a ‘witch hunt’

    Donald Trump has weighed in on ally Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-running corruption trial, saying in a social media post that the trial was a “witch hunt” and should be cancelled.

    “Bibi and I just went through HELL together, fighting a very tough and brilliant longtime enemy of Israel, Iran, and Bibi could not have been better, sharper, or stronger in his LOVE for the incredible Holy Land,” Trump said on Wednesday night, using a nickname for the Israeli leader.

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  • Fragile Israel-Iran truce appears to hold after Trump’s fury at initial violations

    US president at one point called Benjamin Netanyahu to order him to scale down an Israeli airstrike

    The shaky truce between Israel and Iran appeared to be holding on Tuesday evening after an extraordinary day in which a furious Donald Trump at one point personally intervened by calling Benjamin Netanyahu in order to get him to scale down an Israeli airstrike.

    Waking in Washington to find the ceasefire he had brokered the night before had been violated by both sides, Trump told the media: “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

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  • Trump is not interested in listening to US experts on Iran and the Middle East

    The US president is more willing to listen to Israel than his predecessors were and is also deeply suspicious of the CIA

    When Donald Trump ordered the US military to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend, the debate among intelligence officials, outside experts and policymakers over the status of Tehran’s nuclear program had largely been frozen in place for nearly 20 years.

    That prolonged debate has repeatedly placed the relatively dovish US intelligence community at odds with Israel and neoconservative Iran hawks ever since the height of the global war on terror.

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  • Trump news at a glance: Supreme court hands Trump immigration victory as president declares Iran-Israel ceasefire

    Court ruling will allow administration to continue deporting migrants to war-torn countries not their own. Key US politics stories from Monday 23 June at a glance

    The US supreme court on Monday paved the way for the Trump administration to resume deporting migrants to countries they are not from, including to conflict-ridden places such as South Sudan.

    In a brief, unsigned order, the court’s conservative supermajority paused the ruling by a Boston-based federal judge who said immigrants deserved a “meaningful opportunity” to bring claims that they would face the risk of torture, persecution or even death if removed to certain countries that have agreed to take people deported from the US.

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  • Trump’s war with Iran signals perilous shift from showman to strongman

    The emergence of Hawk Trump dismayed some of his Maga base but students of US adventurism were unsurprised

    So the military parade that brought tanks to the streets of Washington on Donald Trump’s birthday was more than just an authoritarian ego trip. It was a show of strength and statement of intent.

    Exactly a week later, sporting a “Make America great again” (Maga) cap in the situation room, the American president ordered the biggest US military intervention in decades as more than 125 aircraft and 75 weapons – including 14 bunker-busting bombs – struck three Iranian nuclear sites. Trump called it a “spectacular military success” – but it remains unclear how much damage had actually been inflicted.

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