A senior Qatari diplomat told the International Court of Justice that Israel is conducting a “genocidal war against the Palestinian people” and weaponising humanitarian aid. He joined a long list of representatives from governments across the world condemning Israeli actions in its war on Gaza.
Published On 1 May 20251 May 2025
Brussels, Belgium – The recent arrest of a Palestinian activist in Belgium has raised alarm as the organisation he works for describes the incident as “a form of state harassment”.
Mohammed Khatib, the 35-year-old European coordinator for Samidoun, a global Palestinian prisoner solidarity network, was arrested on April 21 after attending a daily protest demanding an end to Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Every evening, dozens of people, some sporting keffiyehs, gather on the steps of the former stock exchange in Brussels to drape a Palestine flag down the steps and chant slogans of solidarity in English, Arabic and French.
A police presence is usual, but Khatib felt uneasy when he noticed an officer photographing him
He left about 7:30pm (17:30 GMT) and was stopped nearby for what he called a “spontaneous” ID check by local police.
He was arrested and taken in a police van to a central station. About 30 supporters gathered outside, chanting, “Free our comrade!” before being dispersed by riot police about 10pm (20:00 GMT).
Khatib was then transferred to a nearby station. He was questioned without a lawyer and released about 5am (03:00 GMT).
Khatib said he spent hours waiting in a cell before being asked for a few minutes about an incident in April 2024 during which he was attacked with a knife. There was also a brief trip to the hospital for nonurgent medication.
“They were doing anything they could to keep me,” Khatib told Al Jazeera.
The Brussels Public Prosecutor’s Office told Al Jazeera: “Mohammed Khatib was arrested as part of an investigation into events that took place in April 2024. He was released after questioning.”
A Palestinian refugee born in the Ein El Hilweh camp in Lebanon in 1990, Khatib fled to Belgium alone at age 19, claimed asylum and co-founded Samidoun one year later in 2011. Campaigning for the rights of Palestinians incarcerated in Israel is his sole occupation.
Samidoun’s stance on Israel-Palestine has led to Khatib being designated as a “serious” security threat by the Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis (CUTA), an independent body that reports to Belgium’s justice and interior ministries.
Khatib said officers on April 21 justified the arrest initially with the CUTA designation.
It marked the second time he has been arrested. In October 2023, he was arrested at a demonstration after refusing to stop waving a Palestine flag.
The latest detention was “nothing in terms of what we are facing”, he said, referring to efforts in some Western nations to curtail the pro-Palestine movement.
Samidoun called the arrest “a form of state harassment targeting a prominent leader, not only of Samidoun, but of the growing movement against the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine”.
“It’s hard not to see it in that light,” refugee and immigration lawyer Benoit Dhondt told Al Jazeera. “A lot of people are living in a state of schizophrenia because of how invisible the genocide in Gaza is being made in Europe.”
Meanwhile, “disproportionate policing of the pro-Palestine movement makes it very difficult to understand what is actually happening,” he said.
The author and journalist David Cronin wrote in The Electronic Intifada: “If the Belgian authorities enjoy any success in muzzling Mohammed Khatib and Samidoun, then we have to ask: Who is next? All Palestine solidarity campaigners are at risk.”
In May last year, police used water cannon and tear gas to disperse a peaceful protest outside the Israeli embassy in Brussels under instructions from Mayor Boris Dillies, who said the demonstration was unauthorised. An open letter signed by Amnesty International described the measure as “contrary to international law”.
Earlier that month, police had arrested about 40 protesters when a demonstration at the US embassy went overtime.
In a report on the state of the right to protest published in July, Amnesty noted that administrative arrest “is increasingly used to prevent people from participating in protests” in Belgium.
Human rights and immigration lawyer Helene Crokart told Al Jazeera that arrests “are not isolated incidents” and “sometimes amount to outright intimidation”.
On October 15, then-State Secretary for Migration and Asylum Nicole De Moor, a Christian Democrat, announced a procedure to strip Khatib, who she called a “hate preacher”, of asylum.
“Even if someone has already been recognised as a refugee but that person turns out to be an extremist, recognition can be withdrawn,” she stated.
On the same day, the United States and Canada blacklisted Samidoun, deeming it a “sham charity” and accusing it of raising funds for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated “terrorist” organisation.
Samidoun denied the allegation.
Germany banned Samidoun in 2023, alleging it celebrated the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel. Khatib said, “Some Palestinians were distributing baklava in the street. And we were there with the Samidoun flag.”
Khatib has also been banned from entering Switzerland for 10 years, which occurs only when an individual poses what is considered a “concrete” threat to national security, according to a Swiss government spokesperson. He was not permitted to enter the Netherlands for a university talk in October.
During the October 2023 attacks, 1,139 people were killed and more than 200 were taken captive into Gaza. Since then, Israel’s latest war on Gaza has killed more than 52,000 people, including more than 17,000 children, in the besieged enclave. Israel has justified the onslaught as an attempt to crush Hamas.
According to a CUTA spokesperson, Samidoun is classified as an “extremist” organisation, which “is not a criminal offence”.
“We are more interested in keeping an eye on the leadership, the members, what they do and say, how they disrupt public order and what group they are potentially targeting,” the spokesperson said.
Belgium’s right-wing government, appointed in February, is markedly more sympathetic to Israel than its predecessor.
Prime Minister Bart De Wever of the New Flemish Alliance party said Belgium would not arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for his arrest on charges of crimes against humanity. Four months earlier, then-Liberal Premier Alexander De Croo stated the opposite.
The coalition headed by De Wever intends to “ban dangerous radical organisations such as Samidoun due to their ties to terrorism or for spreading antisemitism”, according to official documents.
But a ban would likely take a long time to implement because Belgian positions depend on European Union and United Nations Security Council decisions.
De Moor’s successor, Anneleen Van Bossuyt, supports the initiative to revoke Khatib’s refugee status. Such a decision is made independently by the commissioner general for refugees and stateless persons and must rely on proof of a serious crime.
A decision to strip someone’s status may be appealed, but once finalised, the immigration office could issue an order for a person to leave the country.
The case depends on material that authorities said they are not sharing, even with Khatib.
Dhondt warned of a “chilling effect” on freedom of expression.
The government is using Khatib’s case as a “propaganda tool” to demonstrate strong policies on “extremism”, he said, even though it “can’t really say why [Khatib poses any threat]”.
Khatib denies all allegations of hate speech.
“If they had something they could use against me, I would not be sitting here. I would be in prison.
“The goal of this intimidation is to silence the movement, to make an example of us and say, ‘If you do the same, this is your future’. We will fight this.”
Khatib has previously called for Israel to be “dismantled” and said, “We do not call Hamas’s attack in Israel a terror attack. We call it justified resistance.”
Seen as hardline positions by some, mainstream activists have distanced themselves from Samidoun but urged Brussels to uphold freedom of expression.
The Human Rights League, a nonprofit organisation that has criticised Belgian authorities for allowing the transit of arms to Israel, does not wholly endorse Khatib’s views but “reiterates the need to protect freedom of expression, including for statements that ‘offend, shock or disturb’, according to the European Court of Human Rights”.
“While the positions defended by Mohammed Khatib and Samidoun can undeniably be described as radical, … to our knowledge they have never been prosecuted for any criminal offence (including for anti-Semitic statements) nor have they caused any public disorder,” the rights group said in a 2024 report.
The group linked Khatib’s case to other measures, such as local bans on keffiyehs and other pro-Palestine symbols and the temporary suspension of decisions on Palestinian asylum applications. The report concluded that the lack of a decision on revoking Khatib’s refugee status suggests insufficient evidence against him.
The Union of Progressive Jews in Belgium last year denounced a “smear campaign” against Khatib.
“Whatever political differences we may have, this threat is intolerable and shakes the very foundations of our democracy.”
Two months of Israel’s aid blockade on Gaza have taken a devastating toll on Palestinians especially children.
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The Red Sea is a vital waterway for global trade, connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Gulf of Aden through the Suez Canal. Approximately 12 percent of global shipping traffic normally passes through the Red Sea, including key oil shipments and commercial goods.
The Red Sea attacks began on November 19, 2023, when Houthi forces seized Galaxy Leader, a British-owned, Japanese-operated vehicle carrier, off the coast of Hodeidah. The 25-person crew was detained, and the ship was held for more than a year.
The Houthis justified the seizure as an act of solidarity with Palestinians, stating they would continue their actions until Israel’s war on Gaza came to an end.
Since November 2023, the Houthis have carried out more than 100 attacks, including missile, drone and boat raids, targeting Israel-linked commercial vessels as well as US and UK military ships in the Red Sea. The attacks have resulted in two ships being sunk and one seized.
The map below shows some of the locations of these attacks.
The war in Yemen has left the country in severe poverty.
The country has been divided between the Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, who control the west, including Sanaa, and the internationally recognised Yemeni government, which controls the south and east, with Aden as its capital.
Since 2015, the civil war in Yemen, with the intervention of a Saudi-led coalition on the government’s side, has devastated the country.
More than 4.5 million people have been displaced and 18.2 million need humanitarian aid. The risk of nationwide famine is at its highest, with nearly five million people facing acute food insecurity, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.
A United States judge has ordered the release of Columbia University student and pro-Palestine protester Mohsen Mahdawi as a case challenging his deportation proceeds.
In Burlington, Vermont, on Wednesday, US District Judge Geoffrey Crawford ruled Mahdawi could leave the Northwest State Correctional Facility, where he had been held since immigration officials arrested him earlier this month.
Mahdawi walked out of the court with both hands in the air, flashing peace signs as supporters greeted him with cheers.
As he spoke, he shared a message for President Donald Trump, whose administration has led a crackdown on student protesters who have denounced Israel’s war in Gaza.
“I am not afraid of you,” Mahdawi said to Trump. He also addressed the people of Palestine and sought to dispel perceptions that the student protest movement was anything but peaceful.
“We are pro-peace and antiwar,” Mahdawi explained. “To my people in Palestine: I feel your pain, I see your suffering, and I see freedom, and it is very soon.”
Mahdawi, a legal US resident who had been a leader in the protests at Columbia University, was detained on April 14 while attending a citizenship interview. Video of him being led away in handcuffs spread widely across social media.
His arrest came as part of a wider push by the Trump administration to target visa holders and permanent residents for their pro-Palestine advocacy. Trump has also pressured top universities to crack down on pro-Palestine protests, in the name of combating anti-Semitism.
Critics, however, say that rationale is an excuse to exert greater control over academia and stifle opposing views.
Mohsen Mahdawi was just released on bail by a federal judge in Vermont. pic.twitter.com/sgtNyfeYmU
— Katherine Franke (@ProfKFranke) April 30, 2025
While the immigration case against Mahdawi will proceed, Judge Crawford ruled the student activist posed no flight risk and could be released to attend his graduation next month in New York City.
It is possible the US government may appeal Mahdawi’s release, but the judge’s ruling allows him to leave the state of Vermont and fight his deportation from outside a detention facility.
The Trump administration, however, had opposed his release. Its lawyers argued that Mahdawi’s detention was “constitutionally valid aspect of the deportation process”.
Mahdawi’s lawyers have countered that his detainment treads on his constitutional rights to free speech.
“Mohsen has committed no crime, and the government’s only supposed justification for holding him in prison is the content of his speech,” Lia Ernst, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who is representing Mahdawi, said in a statement following his release.
The Trump administration has taken the broad position that constitutional speech protections only apply to US citizens, a question that could eventually be decided by the US Supreme Court.
In court filings, government lawyers have cited the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 as the legal basis for seeking Mahdawi’s deportation.
A rarely used part of the law allows the US to deport foreign nationals “whose presence or activities in the United States” gives the secretary of state “reasonable ground to believe [they] would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences”.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has used that provision as the basis for seeking to deport Mahdawi and other pro-Palestinian student protesters. Israel is a critical ally of the US in the Middle East.
Mahdawi was arrested weeks after fellow Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, also a US permanent resident.
In early March, Khalil was likewise detained by immigration officials. The pair co-founded the Palestinian Student Union at the prestigious Ivy League university.
Khalil has remained in immigration custody in Louisiana since his arrest outside his apartment. Earlier this month, an immigration judge ruled Khalil was indeed deportable, siding with government lawyers.
In a two-page letter submitted to the court, Secretary of State Rubio had written that the 30-year-old should be removed from the US for his role in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities, which fosters a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States”.
The Trump administration has broadly portrayed nearly all forms of pro-Palestine advocacy as “anti-Semitic”, in what critics have called an effort to silence freedom of speech.
Rubio provided no further evidence backing his claims against Khalil, and the student leader has been charged with no crime. Rubio’s letter nevertheless said that his department can revoke a permanent resident’s legal status even where their beliefs, associations or statements are “otherwise lawful”.
On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that Khalil can move forward with a legal challenge to his arrest and detainment on the grounds that he was targeted for his political views.
Both Mahdawi and Khalil have parallel court cases, one seeking reprieve from deportation and the other challenging the basis for their arrests.
While in detention, Mahdawi had been visited by US Senator Peter Welch, a Democrat who has denounced the student’s arrest as “unjust” and antidemocratic.
“I’m staying positive by reassuring myself in the ability of justice and the deep belief of democracy,” Mahdawi said at the time, according to a video posted on Welch’s X account.
“This is the reason I wanted to become a citizen of this country, because I believe in the principles of this country.”
“President Trump… I am not afraid of you.” Columbia University student activist Mohsen Mahdawi was freed on bail Wednesday from custody in Vermont. Mahdawi was arrested in April by US immigration officials over his role in pro-Palestinian protests on campus.
Published On 30 Apr 202530 Apr 2025
Video from the Youth Front for Palestine shows student activists interrupting a meeting of University of Manchester leaders to demand the school sever ties with Israel’s Tel Aviv University. The school’s leadership defended its decision to maintain ties, saying that doing so is not in support of genocide or Israel.
Published On 30 Apr 202530 Apr 2025
Video shows the moment Israel’s military bombed more tents in Gaza, targeting shelters for displaced Palestinian
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A Palestinian paramedic who survived a deadly Israeli attack on a group of first responders in southern Gaza last month has been released from Israeli detention, the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) says.
Assaad al-Nassasra, an ambulance driver, was among at least 10 Palestinian detainees who were released into the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, the PRCS said.
The agency shared footage on social media that showed a visibly emotional al-Nassasra, dressed in a bright red PRCS jacket, embracing his colleagues after 37 days in Israeli detention.
His exact whereabouts had been unknown after the Israeli military opened fire on Palestinian first responders in the Rafah area of southern Gaza on March 23, killing 15 health workers in an attack that drew widespread outrage and calls for an independent investigation.
“He had been arrested while performing his humanitarian duty during the massacre of medical teams in the Tel Al-Sultan area of Rafah Governorate,” the PRCS said.
The first moments of colleague Asaad Al-Nsasrah’s arrival and reunion with his teammates following his release today, after 37 days in detention by the occupation forces. He had been arrested while performing his humanitarian duty during the massacre of medical teams in the Tel… pic.twitter.com/TzGHbZHeJl
— PRCS (@PalestineRCS) April 29, 2025
The PRCS reported last month that Israeli forces opened fire on the medics, who were driving in ambulances to assist wounded Palestinians at the site of an earlier Israeli attack.
The agency said it lost contact with its team and Israeli forces blocked access to the site of the incident.
When United Nations and Palestinian officials were able to reach the area a week later, they found a mass grave where bulldozed ambulances and bodies were buried.
Eight PRCS workers were killed along with six Palestinian Civil Defence team members and one UN employee, the PRCS said.
“This massacre of our team is a tragedy not only for us at the Palestine Red Crescent Society, but also for humanitarian work and humanity,” the agency said in a statement on March 30.
A video recovered from the mobile phone of one of the slain medics showed their final moments. They were wearing highly reflective uniforms and were inside clearly identifiable rescue vehicles before they were shot by Israeli forces.
Amid the international outcry, the Israeli military announced it would investigate what happened.
It said last week that its probe had identified a series of “professional failures”. The army said its code of ethics was not violated and one soldier was dismissed.
The PRCS slammed the Israeli military’s findings and called for an independent and impartial investigation by a UN body.
Al-Nassasra, 47, is one of two people who survived the attack.
The other survivor, Munther Abed, said at the time that he had seen al-Nassasra being captured, bound and taken away.
The father of six last spoke to his family on the night of the Israeli attack when he disappeared, telling them he was on his way to the PRCS headquarters to break his Ramadan fast with his colleagues, according to his son Mohamed.
When the family tried to call him about dawn the next day, he didn’t respond, and they found out from the PRCS that nobody could reach him or the other emergency workers.
Al-Nassasra had always warned his family that whenever he headed out on a mission, he may not make it back, his son said. But the family tried not to think about that as al-Nassasra continued his work throughout Israel’s 18-month war on Gaza.
His colleague Ibrahim Abu al-Kass also told Al Jazeera that al-Nassasra always carried sweets to offer children to encourage them to play somewhere safe, not in the middle of the road.
Israel has carried out an intensified campaign of arrests during the war. According to the Palestinian prisoner support network Addameer, at least 9,900 Palestinians are currently being held in Israeli detention facilities, including 400 children.
More than 3,400 are held without charge or trial under what’s known as “administrative detention”, which can be renewed for six-month periods indefinitely.
Al-Nassasra was released into Gaza through the Kissufim checkpoint along with the 10 other detainees before they were sent to a hospital in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah for medical checkups.
Reporting from the city, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said the released detainees reported being tortured in “horrific ways” and were in a bad physical and psychological state.
Israeli forces have routinely targeted first responders, humanitarian workers and journalists during the Gaza bombardment.
More than 52,300 Palestinians have been killed since the war began on October 7, 2023, while at least 117,905 have been wounded, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
Washington, DC – Donald Trump’s world view can be difficult to pin down.
During the first 100 days of his second term, the United States president started a global trade war, targeting allies and foes alike. He also issued decrees to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate and the World Health Organization, amongst other international forums.
Trump continued to double down on a series of unconventional foreign policy proposals: taking over the Panama Canal, annexing Greenland, making Canada the 51st US state and “owning” Gaza.
And despite promising to be a “peace” president, Trump has said he intends to take the US annual Pentagon budget to a record $1 trillion.
He has distanced himself from neo-conservative foreign policy and does not position himself as a promoter of human rights or democracy abroad. His “America First” stance and scepticism of NATO align with realist principles, but his impulsiveness and highly personalised diplomacy diverge from traditional realism.
At the same time, he has not called for a full military or diplomatic retreat from global affairs, setting him apart from isolationists.
So what exactly drives Trump’s foreign policy?
Experts say it is primarily fuelled by a dissatisfaction with the current global system, which he sees as unfairly disadvantaging the US with its rules and restrictions. Instead, Trump appears to want Washington to leverage its enormous military and economic power to set the rules to assert global dominance while reducing US contributions and commitments to others.
“The Trump doctrine is ‘smash and grab’, take what you want from others and let your allies do the same,” said Josh Ruebner, a lecturer at Georgetown University’s Program on Justice and Peace.
Mathew Burrows, programme lead of the Strategic Foresight Hub at the Stimson Center think tank, said Trump wants US primacy without paying the costs that come with that.
“He’s withdrawing the US from the rest of the world, particularly economically,” Burrows, a veteran of the US Department of State and CIA, told Al Jazeera.
“But at the same time, he somehow believes that the US … will be able to tell other countries to stop fighting, to do whatever the US wants,” he said. “Hegemony just doesn’t work that way.”
Trump appears to believe that threatening and imposing tariffs – and occasionally violence – is a way of employing US leverage to get world leaders to acquiesce to his demands.
But critics say the US president discounts the power of nationalism in other countries, which prompts them to eventually fight back. Such was the case for Canada.
After Trump imposed tariffs and called for Canada to become the 51st state, this led to a wave of nationalist pride in the northern neighbour and an abrupt shift from the Conservative Party to the Liberal Party.
From Canada to China, foreign governments have accused Trump of “bullying” and blackmail.
Some of Trump’s Democratic rivals have rushed to accuse him of abandoning the US global role, but at the same time, the US president has been projecting American strength to pressure other countries.
While not entirely isolationist, his approach marks a significant turn from that of his predecessor.
The late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said in 1998: “We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”
That purported power and wisdom, as Albright envisioned, put the US in a position to implement Pax Americana – the concept of a peaceful global order led by Washington.
Trump does see the US as proverbially taller than other nations, but perhaps not in the way Albright meant.
“America does not need other countries as much as other countries need us,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters earlier this month.
Her statement, however, was to stress that other nations must negotiate with the US to avoid Trump’s tariffs.
In this context, Trump is seeking revenues and jobs – not an international system governed by liberal values in the way that Washington defines them.
However, Burrows said the chief aim of Trump’s foreign policy is to dismantle the existing global order.
“A big part of his world view is really his negative feelings towards the current order, where others appear to be rising,” Burrows said. “And so, a lot of this is just tearing down.”
Much of the system that manages relations between different countries was put in place after World War II, with the US leading the way.
The United Nations and its agencies, the articles of international law, various treaties on the environment, nuclear proliferation and trade, and formal alliances have governed global affairs for decades.
Critics of Washington point out that the US violated and opted out of the system where it saw fit.
For example, the US never joined the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court in 1998. It invaded Iraq in 2003 without United Nations Security Council authorisation in an apparent breach of the UN Charter. And it has been providing unconditional support to Israel despite the US ally’s well-documented abuses against Palestinians.
“The United States has done a lot to stand up sort of multilateral institutions – the UN and others – that are based around these ideas,” said Matthew Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy.
“But the United States has always found ways to violate that violate these norms and laws when it when it serves our purposes,” he added, pointing to former US President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza and President George W Bush’s policies after the 9/11 attacks, which included extraordinary rendition, torture, invasion and prolonged occupation.
But for Trump and his administration, there are indications that the global order is not just to be worked around; it needs to go.
“The post-war global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us,” Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators during his confirmation hearing in January.
Trump recently told Time Magazine that the US has been “ripped off” by “almost every country in the world”.
His rhetoric on foreign policy appears to echo his statements about promising to look after “America’s forgotten men and women” who have been mistreated by the “elites” domestically.
While the modern world order has empowered US companies and left the country with immense wealth and military and diplomatic might, Americans do have major issues to complain about.
Globalisation saw the outsourcing of US jobs to countries with less expensive labour. Past interventionist policies – particularly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – are largely seen as strategic blunders that produced a generation of veterans with physical and mental injuries.
Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center, a centre-right think tank in Washington, DC, noted that wages have stagnated for many Americans for decades.
“The fact is that the benefits of globalisation were very maldistributed, and some people up at the top made enormous plutocratic sums of money, and very little of that flowed down to the mass of the working class,” Kabaservice told Al Jazeera.
For people who saw their factories closed and felt like they were living in “left-behind areas”, electing Trump was “retribution” against the system, Kabaservice said, adding that Trump’s “America First” approach has pitted the US against the rest of the world.
“America is turning its back on the world,” Kabaservice said. “Trump believes that America can be self-sufficient in all things, but already the falsity of this doctrine is proving true.”
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, a think tank that promotes diplomacy, said Trump’s foreign policy, including his approach to allies, comes from “the politics of grievance”.
“He does believe that the United States – because of its role as world policeman, which he’s not necessarily in love with – has been shouldering a lot of the security burden of the world without getting proper compensation,” Parsi told Al Jazeera.
The US president has been calling on NATO allies to increase their defence spending, while suggesting that Washington should be paid more for stationing troops in allied countries like Germany and South Korea.
So how does Trump view the world?
“He’s an aggressive unilateralist, and in many ways, he’s just an old-school imperialist,” Duss said of Trump. “He wants to expand American territory. He wants to extract wealth from other parts of the world … This is a kind of foreign policy approach from an earlier era.”
He noted that Trump’s foreign policy is to act aggressively and unilaterally to achieve what he sees as US interests.
Kabaservice said Trump wants the US to return to an age when it was a manufacturing powerhouse and not too involved in the affairs of the world.
“He likes the idea that maybe the United States is a great power, sort of in a 19th-century model, and it lets the other great powers have their own sphere of influence,” he said.
Kabaservice added that Trump wants the US to have “its own sphere of influence” and to be “expanding in the way that optimistic forward-moving powers are”.
This notion of an America with its own “sphere of influence” appeared to be supported by Rubio when he spoke earlier this year of the inevitability of “multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet”.
Parsi said that Trump is seeking hemispheric hegemony above all, despite his aversion for regime change – hence his emphasis on acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal.
“You’re shifting not from the politics of domination towards restraint; you’re shifting from the politics of global domination to a more limited form of domination,” Parsi told Al Jazeera.
“Focus only on your own hemisphere.”
The US may have already experienced what happens when these views of nostalgia and grievance see real-world implications. Trump’s erratic trade policy rocked the US stock market and sparked threats of counter-levies from Canada to the European Union to China.
Eventually, Trump postponed many of his tariffs, keeping a baseline of 10 percent levies and additional importing fees on Chinese goods. Asked why he suspended the measures, the US president acknowledged that it was due to how the tariffs were received. “People were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy,” he said.
Ultimately, Trump’s unilateralism and unpredictability have “broken the world’s trust in significant ways” that will outlast his presidency, Kabaservice told Al Jazeera.
“In the broad span of history, Trump will be seen as the person who committed terrible unforced errors that led to the end of the American century and the beginning of the Chinese century,” he said.
During his inauguration speech earlier this year, the US president said his legacy “will be that of a peacemaker and unifier”.
“His actual legacy will be that he has torn down the global system that the US created,” said Burrows, of the Stimson Center.
Parts of Europe were brought to a halt on Monday after a power cut lasted for almost one day.
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Palestinian ambulance driver Assaad al-Nassasra, who survived an Israeli attack in March that killed 15 medics, has been released from Israeli detention. He was among at least 10 Palestinian detainees released on Tuesday, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society.
Published On 29 Apr 202529 Apr 2025
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says a two-state solution is “at risk of dwindling to the point of disappearance."
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When we were children, my siblings and I regularly spent our pocket money on new books. Our mother had instilled in us a passionate love for books. Reading wasn’t just a hobby; it was a way of living.
I still remember the day our parents surprised us with a home library. It was a tall and wide piece of furniture with lots of shelves that they had placed in the living room. I was just five years old, but I recognised the sacredness of its corner from the very first moment.
My father was determined to fill the shelves with a variety of books—on philosophy, religion, politics, languages, science, literature, etc. He wanted to have a wealth of books that could compete with the local library.
My parents would often take us to the bookshop attached to the Samir Mansour Library, one of Gaza’s most iconic bookshops. We would be allowed to pick up to seven books each.
Our schools nurtured this love for reading as well, organising visits to book fairs, reading clubs, and discussion panels.
Our home library became our friend, our solace in both war and peace, and our lifeline on those dark, haunting nights lit only by bombs. Gathered around fire pits, we would discuss the works of Ghassan Kanafani and recite the poems of Mahmoud Darwish we had memorised from books in our library.
When the genocide started in October 2023, the blockade on Gaza was tightened to an unbearable level. Water, fuel, medicines, and nutritious food were cut off.
When gas ran out, people started burning whatever they could find: wood from the rubble of homes, tree branches, trash … and then books.
Among our relatives, this first happened to my brother’s family. My nephews, heavy-hearted, sacrificed their academic future: they burned their freshly printed schoolbooks—whose ink hadn’t even dried — so their family could prepare a meal. The very books that once fed their minds now fed the flames, all for survival.
I was appalled at the book burning, but my 11-year-old nephew Ahmed confronted me with the reality. “Either we starve to death, or we fall into illiteracy. I choose to live. Education will be resumed later,” he said. His answer shook me to the core.
When we ran out of gas, I insisted that we buy wood, even though its price was skyrocketing. My father tried to convince me: “Once the war is over, I will buy you all the books you want. But let us use these for now.” I still refused.
Those books had borne witness to our ups and downs, our tears and our laughter, our successes and our setbacks. How could we possibly burn them? I started rereading some of our books — once, twice, three times — memorising their covers, their titles, even the exact number of pages, burying in them my fear that our library might be the next sacrifice.
In January, after a temporary truce was concluded, cooking gas was finally allowed into Gaza. I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that my books and I had survived this holocaust.
Then in early March, the genocide resumed. All humanitarian aid was blocked: no food, no medical supplies, and no fuel could enter. We ran out of gas in less than three weeks. The full blockade and the massive bombardment made it impossible to find any other source of fuel for cooking.
I had no choice but to concede. Standing before our library, I reached for the international human rights law volumes. I decided they had to go first. We were taught these legal norms at school, we were made to believe that our rights as Palestinians were guaranteed by them and that one day, they would lead to our liberation.
And yet, these international laws never protected us. We have been abandoned to genocide. Gaza has been teleported to another moral dimension — where there is no international law, no ethics, no value for human life.
I tore those pages into bits, recalling how countless families had been torn to pieces by bombs, just like that. I fed the torn pages to the flames, watching them turn to dust — an anguished offering in memory of those who had been burned alive: Shaban al-Louh, who burned alive when Al-Aqsa Hospital was attacked, journalist Ahmed Mansour, who burned alive when a press tent was attacked, and countless others whose names we will never know.
Next, we burned all the pharmacology books and summaries belonging to my brother, a pharmacology graduate. We cooked our canned food over the ashes of his years of hard work. Still, it was not enough. The siege grew more suffocating and the fires devoured shelf after shelf of books. My brother insisted on burning his favourite books before touching any of mine.
But there was no hiding from the inevitable. We were soon down to my books. I was forced to burn my treasured collections of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry; the novels of Gibran Khalil Gibran; the poems of Samih al-Qasim, the voice of resistance; the novels of Abdelrahman Munif that I held dear; and the Harry Potter novels that I had spent my teenage reading. Then came my medical books and summaries.
While I stood there watching the flames consume them, my heart burned as well. We tried to make the sacrifice feel worthy — cooking a more scrumptious meal: pasta with bechamel sauce.
I thought that was the peak of my sacrifice, but my father went further. He dismantled the library’s shelves to burn as wood.
I managed to save 15 books. These are history books about the Palestinian cause, the stories of our ancestors, and the books belonging to my grandmother, who was ruthlessly killed during this genocide.
Existence is resistance; these books are my proof that my family has always existed here, in Palestine, that we have always been the owners of this land.
Genocide has pushed us to do things we never imagined in our darkest nightmares. It forced us to mutilate our memories and break the unbreakable, all for survival.
But if we survive — if we survive — we will rebuild. We will have a new home library and fill it again with the books we love.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Palestinian fishermen in Gaza have resorted to eating turtle meat due to severe food shortages due to Israel's blockade.
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Video shows firing and explosions as Israeli forces raided the city of Dura in the occupied West Bank
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Amnesty also says US President Donald Trump is responsible for ‘multiplicity of assaults’ on human rights.
Israel is perpetrating a “live-streamed genocide” in Gaza, committing illegal acts with the “specific intent” of wiping out Palestinians, Amnesty International has said.
Israeli forces in Gaza have violated the United Nations Genocide Convention with acts that include “causing serious bodily or mental harm to civilians” and “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction”, the human rights organisation said in its annual report released on Monday.
Israel has repeatedly “denied, obstructed and failed to allow and facilitate” humanitarian access to Gaza, and invaded the southern city of Rafah, despite warnings by the international community and the International Court of Justice about the “devastating effect it would have on the civilian population”, Amnesty said.
Israeli air strikes have also frequently hit civilians who were following evacuation orders, while its forces continued to “arbitrarily detain and, in some cases, forcibly disappear Palestinians”, the rights group said.
“Since 7 October 2023 – when Hamas perpetrated horrific crimes against Israeli citizens and others and captured more than 250 hostages – the world has been made audience to a live-streamed genocide,” Amnesty’s secretary-general, Agnes Callamard, said in the introduction to the report.
“States watched on as if powerless, as Israel killed thousands upon thousands of Palestinians, wiping out entire multigenerational families, destroying homes, livelihoods, hospitals and schools.”
Israel and “its powerful allies, first among them the USA, claimed that or acted as if international law did not apply to them”, Callamard said.
Israel has strongly denied committing genocide, insisting that it is acting in self-defence against Hamas and that it takes extraordinary measures to protect civilians.
More than 51,300 people, including at least 17,400 children, have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 7, 2023, according to Palestinian health authorities.
About 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, according to Israeli authorities.
In its report, Amnesty also raised alarm about “unprecedented forces”, including the administration of United States President Donald Trump, that it said posed a threat to human rights globally.
“A multiplicity of assaults – against human rights accountability, against international law, and against the UN – have been but some of the hallmarks of the first 100 days of US President Donald Trump’s ‘reign’ in 2025,” Callamard said.
“But those reckless and punishing offensives, against efforts to end global poverty and undo long standing racial and gender-based discrimination and violence, did not start this year. Red lines don’t turn green overnight.”
Amnesty also expressed concern about alleged human rights violations committed by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine and attacks on gender equality in Afghanistan and Iran.
“The Taliban government criminalized the public existence of women and girls, passing so-called vice and virtue laws, denying their rights to work and education. Dozens of women protesters were forcibly disappeared or arbitrarily detained,” Callamard said.
“In Iran, new compulsory veiling laws intensified oppression of women and girls, imposing flogging, exorbitant fines and harsh prison sentences, while officials and vigilantes who violently attack women and girls for defying the law continued with impunity.”
At least 68 people were killed in a US air attack on a migrant detention centre in Yemen
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Palestinian envoy tells court aid used as a ‘weapon of war’ as Israeli foreign minister condemns ‘delegitimisation’ of his country.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has opened hearings to gauge Israel’s responsibility for the humanitarian crisis engulfing Gaza during its war against Hamas.
The hearings, which began on Monday in The Hague and will run throughout the week, follow a request last year from the United Nations General Assembly asking the court to assess Israel’s responsibility to ensure the provision of essential supplies to Gaza.
Since the start of the war 18 months ago, Israel has blocked aid, leaving Palestinians facing severe shortages of food, water, fuel and medicine.
Over the next five days, 38 countries – including the United States, China, France, Russia and Saudi Arabia – will address the 15-judge panel to consider how Israel’s actions comply with international law.
The League of Arab States, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and African Union will also present their arguments about Israel’s obligations to ensure aid reaches Gaza.
Top Palestinian official Ammar Hijazi told the judges that Israel was blocking aid to use as a “weapon of war”.
No food or medical supplies have reached the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip since March 2 when Israel imposed what has become its longest ever blockade of the territory. It was followed two weeks later by the collapse of a two-month ceasefire.
“These are the facts. Starvation is here. Humanitarian aid is being used as a weapon of war,” Hijazi said.
The ICJ has been tasked by the UN with providing an advisory opinion “on a priority basis and with the utmost urgency”.
While no immediate ruling is expected, the court’s advisory opinion will likely shape future international legal approaches.
However, it is nonbinding, meaning its impact depends on whether states choose to enforce or ignore it.
The ruling “will likely be ignored by Israel, as it has done with other judgements from the ICJ, the International Criminal Court and other international legal bodies,” Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands said, reporting from The Hague.
However, he added that “the tide of pressure is mounting” on Israel as a growing list of international courts have ruled against its actions.
What the UN is saying, Challands noted, is that “Israel basically has a twofold obligation here under international law. It has an obligation as an occupying power in the Palestinian territories … That includes children’s education and welfare systems, medical facilities, including UN-established hospitals, and humanitarian relief operations. If it doesn’t do those things, then it’s in contravention of its obligations under international law.”
“It also has an obligation as a signatory to the UN Charter, because under that, the UN has immunities and exemptions that set it apart from other institutions and other multilateral organisations”, Challands continued.
The ICJ will consider the positions of both state actors and international organisations in its deliberations.
However, it will not hear from Israeli representatives directly. Rather, Tel Aviv has submitted written advice and objections.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar responded to the opening of the hearings by branding them “part of a systematic persecution and delegitimisation of Israel” in comments to reporters in Jerusalem.
“It is not Israel that should be on trial. It is the UN and UNRWA,” he insisted, referring to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, which Israel is preventing from delivering aid to Gaza.
An Israeli drone strike has killed at least 12 Palestinians, including a number of children in Gaza City.
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