Chancellor says Berlin and Kyiv will jointly develop long-range weapons to strike Russia and Other International News.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin on Wednesday. PHOTO: SOEDER/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK/SHUTTERSTOCK

Key Points

Germany will increase financial and military aid to Ukraine, signaling Europe’s move to replace the U.S. as Kyiv’s key military supporter.

Germany and Ukraine will start a joint program to produce long-range weapons for use against Russian targets, a new form of military cooperation.

European leaders seek additional sanctions on Russia for refusing a cease-fire and worry Trump might abandon mediation efforts

Trump Clemency, Immigration, Tariff News & Israel

Trump has granted clemency in recent days to 26 people, including a former gang leader. Trump’s pardons or commutations included former lawmakers (ex-GOP Rep. Michael Grimm), reality-television stars (Todd and Julie Chrisley) and Larry Hoover, a onetime gang leader convicted of murder. And Trump said he was thinking about pardoning the men behind bars for conspiring to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer over her Covid-19 policies.

Trump also commuted the six federal life sentences of Chicago gang leader Larry Hoover, 74, who was convicted of murder, extortion, money laundering, and drug related offenses, and from prison ran a notorious drug gang that had about 30,000 members across 31 states and brought in an estimated $100 million a year. Hoover still faces what’s left of a 200-year sentence in Illinois for murder.

ImmigrationFederal agents are showing up unannounced at schools, homes and migrant shelters to interview unaccompanied migrant children. Critics say the visits are a pretext to deport the children.

Tariffs

A panel of federal judges blocked some of Trump’s tariffs, ruling that he did not have the “unbounded authority” to tax imports from nearly every country in the world.
The ruling gave the administration up to 10 days to complete the process of halting the tariffs. The government immediately filed plans to appeal the decision.
Global markets jumped after the court’s decision, Reuters reports.

Israel

The U.N. denounced a new Israeli-backed operation to distribute aid in Gaza, a day after a chaotic start. The operation, which bypasses the U.N., is run by private U.S. contractors and secured by Israeli soldiers.

China
The Chinese government has sent thousands of Uyghurs to work in factories that supply brands like Tesla, McDonald’s and Samsung. Click the video below to see David Pierson, a Times reporter, explain the findings of an investigation.

Hunger, Sickness and Crime Stalk Gaza Under Israel’s Blockade

Food is scarce and morale is fading after glimpse of normalcy during this year’s cease-fire was shattered by return to fighting


By Feliz Solomon

May 9, 2025 9:30 am ET


Key Points

Gaza faces a breakdown of law and order due to hunger, collapsed governance and conflict since a ceasefire ended in March.


Israel’s blockade, the war’s longest, is defended as a means to pressure Hamas to release hostages and prevent aid diversion.


Gazans are protesting Hamas and are desperate as restaurants close, food is scarce, and fights over resources increase.

What most. en Israel blockaded the Gaza Strip in early March, banning entry of all aid and other goods, Fady Abed, a dentist who works for a medical nonprofit there, thought it would last a few weeks

Months later, he can’t believe how much things have fallen apart.

In Gaza City, where he lives, community kitchens are closing because they have nothing left to cook. Each day, clinics run by his organization, MedGlobal, are visited by more malnourished children he described as “skin and bones.”

At night, a mix of hungry men and opportunistic gangsters roam the streets looking for places to loot. In the absence of authorities, armed vigilantes chase down and beat up suspected thieves. He worries about break-ins, because he has a bag of flour in his home.

“Things can’t continue like this,” Abed said. “We just won’t survive.”

Since Israel imposed the blockade—now the longest of the war set off by Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on southern Israel—the territory is descending into a state of chaos. Residents and aid workers say they have seen a breakdown of law and order amid the perfect storm of hunger, collapsed governance and intensifying conflict since March, when a two-month cease-fire fell apart.

“I’ve been doing this kind of work for two decades and I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Claire Manera, an emergency coordinator for the nonprofit Doctors Without Borders, speaking from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. At night, she hears the sounds of gunshots and men shouting outside her compound.
Tents of displaced Palestinians in the Jabalia refugee camp, northern Gaza. PHOTO: MAHMOUD ISSA/REUTERS
Children wait for food to be distributed in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. PHOTO: DOAA EL-BAZ/ZUMA PRESS

Israel has defended the blockade, saying Hamas reroutes aid to support its operations and that the pressure is needed to convince the militant group to release the roughly two dozen hostages it still holds. It says supplies built up in Gaza during the cease-fire and it is working on a plan to distribute aid with the help of American contractors that it says would circumvent Hamas.

The toll of the war in Gaza has been immense. Most of its two million people have been displaced at least once; swaths of the enclave have been reduced to rubble; there are persistent shortages of medicine and daily necessities; and more than 52,000 have been killed, according to Palestinian authorities, who don’t say how many were combatants.

The return to fighting has been especially hard to bear for a population that got a brief taste of relative normalcy during the cease-fire. With no clear progress in negotiations, the fighting is set to get worse.

A Leadership Crisis Compounds the Decline of the Palestinian Cause

 

Protests against Hamas erupted in the Gaza Strip last month. Photo: Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press

By 

Marcus Walker

 April 8, 2025 5:30 am ET

RAMALLAH, West Bank—The Palestinians’ national cause has reached its lowest ebb in nearly 80 years, and there is no one to turn it around.

The Gaza Strip is in ruins. Many residents might leave or be pushed out following the war sparked by the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. Palestinian territory in the West Bank is divided by ever-expanding Israeli settlements. Middle East countries have been building ties with Israel, and allies such as Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah were battered by Israeli attacks last year.

Palestinians, meanwhile, are fighting with each other, caught between violent groups such as Hamas and the secular nationalist party Fatah, which governs parts of the West Bank and is widely seen as corrupt and ineffective.

Destroyed buildings in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: hatem khaled/Reuters

No third force has been able to break that duopoly. No new generation is emerging in either party to offer a fresh vision or strategy.

Opinion polling has been difficult and intermittent during the war, but in a survey last fall by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, a think tank in Ramallah, 35% of Gazans said they supported Hamas. In the West Bank, Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, fared even worse, with support reaching just 18%.

One thing many Palestinians agree on is how much internal divisions have weakened them in the unequal struggle with Israel.

The dream of Palestinian statehood was already gathering dust in the years before the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks that killed 1,200, left 251 as hostages and sparked a year and a half of war. The failure of the peace process under the 1990s Oslo Accords left the Palestinian Authority as little more than a junior partner in Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank, rather than a steppingstone to independence.

Around 2010, the majority of both Palestinians and Israelis stopped believing in the two-state solution—dividing the land to end the century-old conflict. Meanwhile Israel was building friendly relations with several Arab countries, bypassing the Palestinians.

Hamas hoped the Oct. 7 attack would revive the Palestinian cause while putting itself at the head. For many months afterward, around 70% of Palestinians approved of the attack, mainly because it put the Palestinian issue back in the global spotlight, according to several surveys by the PCPSR.

But public opinion turned, especially in Gaza, as the war brought far more pain than gain. Just over half of respondents still approved of the Oct. 7 attack as of last fall, including 39% in Gaza.

The war in Gaza has killed more than 50,000 people, according to local health authorities, who don’t say how many were combatants. Much of the enclave lies in ruins, and the bulk of its population of more than two million people has been displaced multiple times.

While the exact death toll remains uncertain, there is little doubt more Palestinian civilians and fighters have been killed in Gaza than in any previous round of fighting in the century-old conflict, including the 1948 war that saw the foundation of Israel and the flight or expulsion of around 750,000 Palestinians from their homes.

With Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah faring badly in fighting with Israel last year, and Sunni Arab governments acting only as diplomatic mediators, it is the Palestinians rather than Israel who are growing more isolated in the Middle East.

“October 7 is a turning point in the history of the conflict—the last nail in the coffin of a two-state solution based on 1967 borders,” said Hussein Ibish, a scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “Palestinians can see the end of their national project coming, and Hamas just made it more plausible.”

Fatah supporters have also grown disillusioned with party leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is also president of the Palestinian Authority. The 89-year-old veteran of the Palestinian struggle was once seen as a more moderate successor to the longtime national figurehead Yasser Arafat. But he’s now widely seen as merely clinging to office after blocking elections for nearly 20 years. Between 80% and 90% of Palestinians want him to resign, the PCPSR’s surveys have found.

Among the limited political alternatives on offer, some surveys say the left-wing  leader who enjoys the most support, and could beat Abbas and other unloved leaders of Fatah and Hamas in a head-to-head presidential election is Marwan Barghouti, who has been in an Israeli jail since 2002 for his role in the violent Second Intifada. But Israel’s government is steadfastly opposed to releasing him.

A Weakened Hamas Struggles to Respond to Israel’s Attacks

Intelligence assessments say the militant group’s arsenal and ranks are depleted and its leadership divided

By 

Summer Said

 and 

Dov Lieber

Updated March 20, 2025 11:20 am ET

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The site of an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Thursday. PHOTO: HATEM KHALED/REUTERS

Hamas delivered its first response to three days of Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip, launching a volley of rockets at Tel Aviv on Thursday that set off alerts and sent residents running for shelters.

But the threat was quickly neutralized—one rocket was intercepted, while the other two landed harmlessly—highlighting how the militant group has yet to mount an effective military response to Israel’s renewed attacks.

Analysts believe that in part reflects a strategy of waiting for the right time while portraying Israel as the aggressor. But Arab intelligence officials and an Israeli security official say it also reflects the militant group’s badly degraded arsenal and fighting force after more than a year of war.

The Arab intelligence officials believe that Hamas now has just 10% to 15% of the 20,000 projectiles it had when it attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel said the attacks, which sparked the current war, left around 1,200 dead and an additional roughly 250 taken hostage. Israel has destroyed many of Hamas’s rocket-manufacturing sites, making it difficult to replenish the arsenal, the intelligence officials said. 

New recruits who have replaced fallen fighters are young and poorly trained, and their senior leadership is divided following the deaths last year of leader Yahya Sinwar and many of his top lieutenants, the intelligence officials said. 

People mourn a Palestinian killed in Israeli strikes, in Khan Younis. PHOTO: HATEM KHALED/REUTERS

The gaps mean Hamas has to keep its capabilities in reserve until it can determine whether Israel’s moves are aimed at coercing it to release more of the hostages it holds or are the prelude to a new ground invasion of the territory, the Arab officials and analysts said.

“They want to keep the rockets and missiles they have as a calculation for how this operation will develop,” said Michael Milstein, the former head of Palestinian affairs in Israeli military intelligence.

Israel shattered a two-month cease-fire early Tuesday morning, beginning a wave of airstrikes that Palestinian health authorities say have left more than 500 people dead, including senior Hamas political leaders.

It has kept up the strikes and moved troops back into the south and center of the Gaza Strip, partially reoccupying a corridor that bisects the territory and restricting Palestinian movement to a road running along the coast.

On Thursday, Israel’s military said its troops were operating on the ground in the area of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip. The ground incursion was preceded by airstrikes in the area, as well as dozens of others across the enclave, Israel’s military said. 

Israeli analysts caution that Hamas still has the capability to inflict casualties in guerrilla-style combat. The group has gathered unexploded Israeli shells to use in ambushes and is briefing newly appointed commanders on where to position fighters in the event of a new invasion, the Arab intelligence officials said. It is also repairing its system of tunnels that connect key areas of Gaza after it was severely damaged by Israel during the war.

A damaged building in Khan Younis. PHOTO: HATEM KHALED/REUTERS

The group’s leaders have passed out leaflets to new recruits showing them how to carry out ambushes and other guerrilla tactics. One reviewed by The Wall Street Journal shows how to attack Israel’s Merkava tanks, calling out “kill points” including the back door, ammunition storage areas and places where the gears are vulnerable.

Attacks by those recruits aren’t likely to be sophisticated but could still be deadly if Israeli troops enter Gaza in force.

The military said on Tuesday night that it attacked militants in northern Gaza that were preparing to shoot rockets at Israel. Additionally, the military said it attacked several vessels off Gaza’s coast that were planning attacks for Hamas and its smaller militant partner, Islamic Jihad. 

“They are weaker but not something we can rely on and create assumptions that they will soon collapse,” Milstein said. “It won’t happen.”

Hamas could also try to attack Israel from the West Bank as well as from Lebanon or Syria, he said.

Still, the U.S.-designated terrorist group is much diminished. Israel’s military believes it has killed as many as 20,000 fighters as well as much of its senior leadership. It has also beat back Hamas’s regional allies, limiting its opportunities to rearm.

The U.S.-designated terror group’s arsenal of projectiles has dwindled to the point where it needs to conserve rockets and long-range missiles capable of hitting the Tel Aviv area, Arab intelligence officials and security analysts said. Milstein estimated that it may have just dozens within that range.

 

Despite high vaccination rates, Israel is experiencing a Covid surge

• Two months ago, Israel seemed to have nearly stamped out the coronavirus, with case counts hovering at 200 per day. Now, with more than 50,000 active cases, the country is entering a new wave of infections. [The Times of Israel]
• The new rise in case counts — driven by the delta variant — suggests that the vaccine’s effectiveness is waning, particularly against the more contagious variant. [BBC News]
• The daily new case rate has doubled in two weeks, though vaccine shots — which 78 percent of eligible Israelis have received — are showing strong protection against severe cases, seemingly even more so for those with booster shots. 1.1 million Israelis having already received their third vaccine shot.  [The New York Times / Isabel Kershner]
• Experts say the situation in Israel is a warning to the rest of the world. Israel began its vaccine campaign in December 2020, meaning that early recipients have reached the eight-month mark in which some studies have shown  vaccine effectiveness begins to decrease. [Science / Meredith Wadman]
• Israel is now contending with the possibility of a new lockdown. The country also updated its travel list, banning travelers from hotspots and requiring a quarantine for most. [Haaretz]

America Needs to Start Telling the Truth About Israel’s Nukes

Credit...Illustration by Nicholas Konrad/The New York Times; photograph by Rost-9D


NY TIMES

By Peter Beinart


Mr. Beinart writes frequently about American foreign policy and politics.


American politicians often warn that if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, it will spark a nuclear stampede across the Middle East. Allowing Tehran to get the bomb, Senator Robert Menendez, the current chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, predicted in March 2020, could “set off a dangerous arms race in the region.” In an interview in December, President-elect Joe Biden cautioned that if Iran went nuclear, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt might too, “and the last goddamn thing we need in that part of the world is a buildup of nuclear capability.”

Such statements are so familiar that it’s easy to overlook their artifice. In warning that Iran could turn the Middle East nuclear, American politicians imply that the region is nuclear-free now. But it’s not. Israel already has nuclear weapons. You’d just never know it from America’s leaders, who have spent the last half-century feigning ignorance. This deceit undercuts America’s supposed commitment to nuclear nonproliferation, and it distorts the American debate over Iran. It’s time for the Biden administration to tell the truth.

American officials began hiding the truth about Israeli nuclear weapons after Israeli leaders hid the truth from them. In the early 1960s, writes Avner Cohen in his book “The Worst Kept Secret,” Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion repeatedly told President John F. Kennedy that the reactor Israel was building in the desert town of Dimona “was for peaceful purposes only.” When the United States sent inspectors to the site, the Israelis concocted an elaborate ruse, which included building fake walls to conceal the elevators that led to an underground reprocessing plant. By decade’s end, the die was cast. The C.I.A. concluded that Israel already possessed nuclear warheads.

So Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir hatched a deal. Neither Israel nor the United States would acknowledge that Israel had nuclear weapons, and Washington would not pressure Israel to submit them to international oversight. For 50 years now, American presidents have abided by the bargain. Scholars believe that when Israel tested a nuclear weapon in the Indian Ocean in 1979, the Carter administration covered it up. In 2009, when a journalist asked Barack Obama if he knew of “any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons,” Mr. Obama responded, “I don’t want to speculate.”

Feigning ignorance about Israeli nuclear weapons makes a mockery of America’s efforts at nonproliferation. Mr. Obama vowed to pursue a nuclear-free world. Yet to prevent public discussion of Israel’s arsenal, his administration helped squelch a United Nations conference on a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The Biden administration continues to impose punishing sanctions on Iran in an attempt to force its government to accept inspections more stringent than those required by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Meanwhile, Israel, which has never signed the N.P.T., permits no inspections at all.

This hypocrisy leads many around the world to smirk when American diplomats claim to be defending the “rules-based order.” It also empowers those Iranians who claim Tehran has the right to match its regional rival.

Finally, the American government’s deceptive silence prevents a more honest debate at home about the dangers an Iranian nuclear weapon would pose. American politicians sometimes say an Iranian bomb would pose an “existential” threat to Israel. That’s a dubious claim, given that Israel possesses a nuclear deterrent it can deploy on air, land and sea. But many Americans find the claim plausible because, according to recent polling conducted by Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland, barely 50 percent know Israel has nuclear weapons. A higher percentage thinks Tehran has the bomb.

Even if an Iranian bomb wouldn’t existentially threaten Israel, the United States should still work to forestall one diplomatically. With negotiations with Tehran at risk of collapse, the Biden administration should commit to lifting the sanctions that are crippling Iran’s economy in return for verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear capacity. But if those efforts fail — and the Biden administration faces pressure to wage war rather than allow Iran to gain the capacity to build a nuclear weapon — it’s crucial that Americans make an informed decision about the risk a nuclear Iran poses to America’s closest ally in the Middle East. That’s harder when the American government never publicly admits that Israel has the means to deter a nuclear attack.

The Biden administration is not going to force Israel to give up its nuclear weapons. But that doesn’t mean it must undermine America’s global credibility and deceive its people by denying reality. Perhaps a more honest American discussion of Israel’s nuclear arsenal will breathe new life into the distant dream of a nuclear-free Middle East. Even if that doesn’t happen, it will be bracing, after a half-century of lying by omission, simply to hear America’s leaders tell the truth.