Over the coming hours, the Israeli military will reveal the results of its own inquiry into how it managed to kill seven aid workers in Gaza.
At the White House in Washington, they already know the content of the inquiry.
The details would have formed the heart of a tricky phone conversation between President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday.
The result of that phone call was a demand from the US president that Israel “announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers”.
The White House readout of the phone call said: “[Biden] made clear that US policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps.”
Image: Biden recently ratcheted up pressure on Netanyahu following the deaths of foreign aid workers in Gaza.
That point was developed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who said: “If we don’t see the changes that we need to see, there’ll be changes in our own policy.”
What forced the Israelis to conduct and publish an inquiry into the killings? And what forced President Biden to threaten Israel with a change in American policy on Gaza? The killing of foreign aid workers.
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A cynical conclusion? No: the blunt reality.
Image: Seven foreign WCK workers and a Palestinian driver were killed in the strike. Pic: AP
About 200 Palestinian aid workers have been killed in Gaza since the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel. They are among more than 30,000 people killed in six months across a closed strip of land just 25 miles long and 6 miles wide.
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Much of that strip has been flattened. Hospitals have been destroyed along with other infrastructure – mosques, courts, schools.
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There is an acute humanitarian crisis across the strip topped by a famine in the north.
But it was the death of foreigners working for the charity World Central Kitchen which prompted Israeli investigation and the American shift in language.
Image: The blood-stained passports of three of the aid workers killed by Israel. Pic: AP
One US official said this moment “is an inflection point in this war” – an inflection point only because the Israeli mistake this time was killing foreigners.
I say “mistake this time” because it’s likely the Israeli investigation will conclude it was a mistake. The obvious question then is how many other mistakes have there been where Palestinians died, and no investigation came?
One separate thought: the US says it’s policy on Gaza “might change” if Israel doesn’t change its tactics. But what would a change in America’s policy actually look like?
There is plenty of chatter about the prospect of the US pulling its military supply chain to Israel. What that sounds like and what it would looks like are two different things.
Do not expect America to cut Israel off. Biden wouldn’t do it. Congress wouldn’t allow it.
Image: “Do not expect America to cut Israel off. Biden wouldn’t do it. Congress wouldn’t allow it”. Pic: Reuters
If America was to limit its supply of weapons to Israel, it could leave the Jewish State in an existential position. Iran and its powerful proxies across the region could exploit the weakness.
And it’s not as if America can meaningfully dictate how Israel uses weapons it receives from America. It can hardly insist “don’t use these in Gaza”.
Look again at the language the Americans are using. Biden talked about US policy “with respect to Gaza”.
Later in the statement: “President Biden made clear that the United States strongly supports Israel in the face of [Iranian] threats.”
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That’s the nub of it. Biden wants to rein in Netanyahu with respect to Gaza – but the key lever he has is one he really can’t pull without exposing Israel to a greater existential threat.
That’s Biden’s challenge, and it’s Netanyahu’s advantage.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has apologised to Donald Trump over an anti-tariff advert featuring a clip of Ronald Reagan.
Speaking at the Asia-Pacific summit in South Korea, he also said he had reviewed the commercial and told Ontario Premier Doug Ford not to air it.
“I did apologise to the president,” Mr Carney said on Saturday, confirming earlier comments made by the US president on Friday.
“I told [Doug] Ford I did not want to go forward with the ad,” he added.
The private conversation with Mr Trump happened at a dinner hosted by South Korea’s president on Wednesday.
The commercial, commissioned by Mr Ford, included a quote from Republican former president Ronald Reagan saying that tariffs cause trade wars and economic disaster.
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In a post on Truth Social, he wrote: “Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act, I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.”
The ad by the Ontario government has a voiceover of Ronald Reagan criticising tariffs on foreign goods while saying they cause job losses and trade wars.
The video uses five complete sentences from a five-minute weekly address recorded in 1987, but edited together out of order.
The ad does not mention that the former US president was explaining that tariffs imposed on Japan by his administration should be seen as a sadly unavoidable exception to his basic belief in free trade as the key to prosperity.
Meanwhile, Mr Carney said his talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday were a turning point in relations after years of tensions.
He also met Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the sidelines of the summit.
Donald Trump has said he is designating Nigeria a “country of particular concern” as “thousands of Christians” are being killed there.
Posting on Truth Social, he said radical Islamists are committing “mass slaughter” and Christianity is “facing an existential threat” in the West African nation.
The US president said he was asking officials to “immediately look into this matter, and report back to me”.
Mr Trump quoted figures suggesting 3,100 Christians had been killed in Nigeria, but did not state any source for the numbers or timeframe.
He stated: “We stand ready, willing, and able to save our Great Christian population around the World!”
Nigeria now joins North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and China on a list of countries “of particular concern” due to violations of religious freedom.
The move is one step before possible sanctions – which could mean a ban on all non-humanitarian aid.
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The Nigerian government has vehemently rejected the claims. Analysts have said that, while Christians are among those targeted, the majority of victims of armed groups are Muslims in the country’s Muslim-majority north, where the most attacks take place.
Mr Trump’s move follows efforts by Republican senator Ted Cruz to get fellow evangelical Christians to lobby Congress over claims of “Christian mass murder” in Nigeria.
Boko Haram – which kidnapped more than 270 schoolgirls in 2014 – is the main group cited in previous warnings by US and international governments.
The group has committed “egregious violations of religious freedom”, according to a 2021 report by the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
It said more than 37,000 people had been killed by Islamist groups in Nigeria since 2011.
Churches and Christian neighbourhoods have been targeted in the past, but experts say Muslims are the most common victims of Boko Haram attacks, which routinely target the police, military and government.
Other groups operating said to be operating in the country include Boko Haram offshoot Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP).
About half of Nigeria’s population is estimated to be Muslim, who mostly live in the north, with roughly the other half following Christianity.
US travellers are currently urged to “reconsider” travel to Nigeria due to a threat of terrorism, crime, kidnapping and armed gangs. The UK advises its citizens along similar lines.
The US is drastically cutting the number of refugees it will allow into the country to 7,500, and giving priority to white South Africans.
The new figure, announced on Thursday in a memo in the Federal Registry, the official journal of the US administration, is a dramatic reduction from last year’s 125,000, set by former president Joe Biden.
No reason was given for the decrease, but the note said the admission of the 7,500 refugees during the 2026 fiscal year was “justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest”.
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The notice posted to the register’s website said the 7,500 admissions would “primarily” be allocated to Afrikaner South Africans and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands”.
It is half the 15,000 total set for 2021 during Donald Trump’s first term in office at the height of the COVID pandemic, which reports said was the previous lowest refugee admissions cap.
Refugee rights groups were quick to condemn the proposal, with International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) president Sharif Aly, saying that by “privileging Afrikaners while continuing to ban thousands of refugees who have already been vetted and approved, the administration is once again politicising a humanitarian programme”.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, CEO of Global Refuge, said: “Concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the programme’s purpose as well as its credibility.”
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Human Rights First president, Uzra Zeya, called it a “new low point” in US foreign policy, which will “further destabilise front-line states that host over two-thirds of the world’s nearly 43 million refugees, undermining US national security in tandem”.
Image: US President Donald Trump showed South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa printed-out articles in the Oval Office. Pic: AP
In May, Mr Trump confronted South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House, claiming white farmers in his nation were being killed and “persecuted”.
A video purporting to show burial sites for murdered white farmers was played but was later shown to be scenes from a 2020 protest in which the crosses represented farmers killed over multiple years.
The South African government has vehemently denied that Afrikaners and other white South Africans are being persecuted.
In January, the US president suspended the US Refugee Admissions Programme (USRAP) to, in his words, allow US authorities to prioritise national security and public safety.
During the Oval Office meeting, Mr Ramaphosa said only that he hoped that Trump officials would listen to South Africans about the issue, and later said he believed there is “doubt and disbelief about all this in [Mr Trump’s] head”.