Middle East

Barely 72 hours after United States President Donald Trump’s air strikes against Iran, a controversy erupted over the extent of the damage they had done to the country’s uranium enrichment facilities in Fordow and Natanz.

The New York Times and CNN leaked a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that the damage may have been “from moderate to severe”, noting it had “low confidence” in the findings because they were an early assessment.

Trump had claimed the sites were “obliterated”.

The difference in opinion mattered because it goes to the heart of whether the US and Israel had eliminated Iran’s ability to enrich uranium to levels that would allow it to make nuclear weapons, at least for years.

Israel has long claimed – without evidence – that Iran plans to build nuclear bombs. Iran has consistently insisted that its nuclear programme is purely of a civilian nature. And the US has been divided on the question – its intelligence community concluding as recently as March that Tehran was not building a nuclear bomb, but Trump claiming earlier in June that Iran was close to building such a weapon.

Yet amid the conflicting claims and assessments on the damage from the US strikes to Iranian nuclear facilities and whether the country wants atomic weapons, one thing is clear: Tehran says it has no intentions of giving up on its nuclear programme.

So what is the future of that programme? How much damage has it suffered? Will the US and Israel allow Iran to revive its nuclear programme? And can a 2015 diplomatic deal with Iran – that was working well until Trump walked out of it – be brought back to life?

What Iran wants

In his first public comments since the US bombing, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the attack “did nothing significant” to Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Reporting from Tehran, Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar said Khamenei spoke of how “most of the [nuclear] sites are still in place and that Iran is going to continue its nuclear programme”.

Mohammad Eslami, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, on Tuesday said that “preparations for recovery had already been anticipated, and our plan is to prevent any interruption in production or services”.

To be sure, even if they haven’t been destroyed, Natanz and Fordow – Iran’s only known enrichment sites – have suffered significant damage, according to satellite images. Israel has also assassinated several of Iran’s top nuclear scientists in its wave of strikes that began on June 13.

However, the DIA said in the initial assessment that the Trump administration has tried to dismiss, that the attacks had only set Iran’s nuclear programme back by months. It also said that Iran had moved uranium enriched at these facilities away from these sites prior to the strikes. Iranian officials have also made the same claim.

The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), had accused Iran of enriching up to 400kg of uranium to 60 percent – not far below the 90 percent enrichment that is needed to make weapons.

Asked on Wednesday whether he thought the enriched uranium had been smuggled out from the nuclear facilities before the strikes, Trump said, “We think everything nuclear is down there, they didn’t take it out.” Asked again later, he said, “We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn’t get to move.”

What was the extent of damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities?

Without on-site inspections, nobody can be sure.

Central Intelligence Agency director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday posted a statement saying, “several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years”. That’s a very different timeline from what the DIA suggested in its early assessment.

But it’s important to remember that the DIA and CIA also disagreed on whether Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 2003.

The DIA sided with the UN’s view that inspections had proven Hussein didn’t have such weapons. The CIA, on the other hand, provided intelligence that backed the position of then-president George W Bush in favour of an invasion – intelligence that was later debunked. In that instance, the CIA proved politically more malleable than the DIA.

Amid the current debate over whether Iranian nuclear sites were destroyed, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has also weighed in favour of the president’s view.

“Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed. If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do,” she posted on Twitter/X.

But Gabbard has already demonstrably changed her public statements to suit Trump.

In March, she testified before a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme that he suspended in 2003”.

On June 20, Trump was asked for his reaction to that assessment. “She’s wrong,” he said.

Gabbard later that day posted that her testimony had been misquoted by “the dishonest media” and that “America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalise the assembly”.

Gabbard’s clarification did not contradict her earlier view, that Iran was not actively trying to build a weapon.

Asked in an interview with a French radio network whether Iran’s nuclear programme had been destroyed, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi replied, “I think ‘destroyed’ is too much. But it suffered enormous damage.”

On Wednesday, Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission concurred with the CIA, saying Iran’s nuclear facilities had been rendered “totally inoperable” and had “set back Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons for many years to come”.

Also on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the destruction of Iran’s surface facilities at Isfahan was proof enough of Iran’s inability to make a bomb.

“The conversion facility, which you can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility, we can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on the map,” he told reporters.

Can a 2015 diplomatic deal be resuscitated?

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated with Iran by France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the US, China, Russia and the European Union in 2015, was the only agreement ever reached governing Iran’s nuclear programme.

The JCPOA allowed Iran to enrich its own uranium, but limited it to the 3.7 percent enrichment levels required for a nuclear reactor to generate electricity. At Israel’s behest, Trump abandoned the agreement in 2018 and Iran walked away from it a year later – but before that, it was working.

Even though Trump has said he will never return to the JCPOA, which was negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, he could return to an agreement of his own making that strongly resembles it. The crucial question is, whether Israel will this time back it, and whether Iran will be allowed to have even a peaceful nuclear programme, which it is legally entitled to.

On Wednesday, Trump didn’t sound as though he was moving in this direction. “We may sign an agreement. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s that necessary,” he told reporters at The Hague.

Any JCPOA-like agreement would also require Iran to allow IAEA inspectors to get back to ensuring that Tehran meets its nuclear safeguard commitments.

“IAEA inspectors have remained in Iran throughout the conflict and are ready to start working as soon as possible, going back to the country’s nuclear sites and verifying the inventories of nuclear material,” the IAEA said on Tuesday.

But Iran’s powerful Guardian Council on Thursday approved a parliamentary bill to suspend cooperation with the IAEA, suggesting that Tehran is at the moment not in the mood to entertain any UN oversight of its nuclear facilities.

What happens if Iran returns to enriching uranium?

“If Iran wants a civil nuclear programme, they can have one, just like many other countries in the world have one, and [the way for] that is, they import enriched material,” Rubio told journalist Bari Weiss on the Podcast, Honestly, in April.

“But if they insist on enriching [themselves], then they will be the only country in the world that doesn’t have a weapons programme, quote unquote, but is enriching. And so I think that’s problematic,” he said.

Ali Ansari, an Iran historian at St. Andrews University in the UK, told Al Jazeera that “there have already been calls to cease uranium enrichment from activists within the country”.

But the defiant statements from Iranian officials since the US strikes – including from Khamenei on Thursday – suggest that Tehran is not ready to give up on enrichment.

Trump has, in recent days, suggested that he wants Iran to give up its nuclear programme altogether.

On Tuesday, Trump posted on TruthSocial, “IRAN WILL NEVER REBUILD THEIR NUCLEAR FACILITIES!”

He doubled down on that view on Wednesday.

“Iran has a huge advantage. They have great oil, and they can do things. I don’t see them getting back involved in the nuclear business any more, I think they’ve had it,” he told reporters at the end of the NATO summit in The Hague.

And then he suggested the US would again strike Iran’s facilities, even if it weren’t building a bomb. “If [Iran] does [get involved], we’re always there, we’ll have to do something about it.” If he didn’t, “someone else” would hit Iran’s nuclear facilities, he suggested.

That “someone” would be Israel – which has long tried to kill any diplomatic effort over Iran’s nuclear programme.

At the NATO summit, Trump was asked whether Israel and Iran might start a war again soon.

“I guess some day it can. It could maybe start soon,” he said.

GoFundMe has been accused of blocking “millions of dollars” of life-saving aid from reaching Gaza.

Charity leaders, activists and desperate Palestinians in Gaza have condemned the crowdfunding website for shutting down or blocking withdrawals for Palestine-related fundraising pages – and have accused bosses of having “blood on their hands”.

Despite questions from Al Jazeera, the company has not revealed the amount of money raised on its platform for Gaza that has been frozen in its system or has been refunded to donors.

But it has told Al Jazeera that more than $300m has been raised on the platform for both Palestinians and Israelis since Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel in 2023 and the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Hala Sabbah, the founder of mutual aid group The Sameer Project, said that in September, more than $250,000 of donations to her organisation was refunded.

The London-based NGO-sector worker described the closure of her GoFundMe page as a “disaster” for her group’s efforts to provide emergency aid in the enclave.

The Sameer Project runs a camp for displaced people in Deir el-Balah, providing healthcare and essentials to its residents – paid for by money that, until now, had been raised through GoFundMe, totalling more than $1m. It also funds food, water, shelter and clothing for people across Gaza.

Sabbah said she was “treated like scum” by GoFundMe, despite her group’s pages raising about $44,000 for it in transaction fees.

“Our GoFundMe page had daily updates with complete cost breakdowns of every single initiative we did – everything was well-documented, with receipts,” she said.

“This information – including all transfers – was forwarded to GoFundMe, yet they still chose to shut us down.”

GoFundMe notifies page organisers that there will be a “review” process after they launch fundraisers related to Palestine – or “the conflict in the Middle East”, as it is phrased by the company’s compliance team in emails seen by Al Jazeera. The company claims this is part of its “standard verification process”, but critics say it appears to inordinately restrict Gaza-related pages rather than those for other causes, such as Israel or Ukraine.

GoFundMe has refused to disclose figures that show how many Israel or Ukraine fundraisers have been closed compared with those for Gaza.

Intrusive reviews

Social media has been flooded with Palestinian advocates speaking out about their pages being shut down. Fundraisers for Israel and Ukraine appear to face little of the same scrutiny. And when they do, media campaigns can quickly force GoFundMe to act. One Ukraine fundraiser that was shut down in March 2022 was reinstated the next month after media coverage of the case.

The company’s long and intrusive review process often results in Gaza fundraisers being shut down and money refunded to donors or pages being “paused”, preventing funds from being accessed by account holders until the review is concluded.

One United States-based fundraiser for the Sulala animal shelter in Gaza says it had about $50,000 dollars refunded to donors when its first page was closed. The team behind the fundraiser then created another page without specifically mentioning Gaza or Palestine, which was not flagged by GoFundMe, placed under review or paused, and ran for months uninterrupted.

In the case of The Sameer Project, GoFundMe’s compliance team said it was concerned about how funds were being distributed, and said that the documentation Sabbah had provided was not “accurate, complete or clear”. An email to Sabbah added that there were “material discrepancies” between the information shared and how funds were distributed to beneficiaries.

Before shutting the page down, the compliance team asked for personal information about who was receiving funds, evidence of bank transfer statements and details about partner organisations, which Sabbah says The Sameer Project provided.

“We spent weeks fighting back, and they completely ignored us – even denying us access to our donor lists,” Sabbah told Al Jazeera.

“People can raise funds to help the Israeli military…  and their pages don’t get closed. But we try to raise money for diapers and lifesaving medication, and we get scrutinised and shut down.”

“We have children in our camp on the verge of death. The company has blood on its hands.”

The mutual aid group – named after Sabbah’s Gaza-based uncle who died in January – says it has provided more than 800,000 litres (211,330 gallons) of water, $100,000 in cash aid, 850 tents and medical treatment for 749 children across the enclave.

It transfers money to intermediaries via makeshift exchange sites and by sending money directly to doctors or pharmacies.

Crowdfunding websites have for months been one of the only feasible ways to help those trapped in Gaza.

Famine is creeping further into the enclave, humanitarian aid is being blocked for long periods, civilian infrastructure lies in ruin and banks and ATMs have either been destroyed or have halted operations.

Sabbah slammed GoFundMe for not justifying shutting her page down despite the huge amount of money the company made from the group’s pages in”payment processing fees”. It charges 30 cents per donation and a 2.9 percent cut of the total raised.

There are no banking services left in Gaza, but there are exchange offices – often people using POS (point of service) cash machines charging exorbitant interest rates – and the option to swap cryptocurrency for physical currency, amid critical shortages of the latter.

Without regular aid flowing into the enclave, most charities rely on sending money via these limited routes to intermediaries who will distribute essentials and medical supplies.

Some tinned food, tents and health products are on sale in Gaza markets. But cash is scarce, stocks are extremely limited, and most people cannot afford to pay. Since breaking the ceasefire agreement with Hamas brokered in January, Israel resumed bombing and re-established a blockade on humanitarian aid lasting months.

Now, aid is only reaching the enclave through the heavily criticised US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Hundreds of desperate Palestinians have been shot and killed by Israeli forces at GHF aid collection sites.

‘Treated like animals’

Both still trapped in Gaza, Mostafa Abuthaher and his brother Yahya Fraij, aged 30, have twice created GoFundMe pages, and on both occasions, the company closed them down.

Yahya lost his home and three of his cousins to Israel’s onslaught, and now his family survives with only a makeshift tent near the beach in al-Mawasi in southern Gaza.

His wife gave birth to their six-month-old daughter during the war. Yahya told Al Jazeera that she has experienced nothing but suffering during her short life – and he has had to protect her from extreme cold and the trauma of Israeli bombardment.

“My daughter and I face death almost every day,” he said. “And now we have nothing – not even a tent. The war has taken everything from us.

“We’ve been treated like animals and insulted by the world for the last 20 months.”

The brothers had raised more than $12,000 to support their families until their first page was suddenly shut down. The company blocked them from withdrawing nearly $5,000.

In an email exchange with GoFundMe, a compliance officer said Mostafa’s page breached the company’s terms of service for “prohibited conduct”, which covers fundraisers that are “fraudulent, misleading, inaccurate, dishonest or impossible”.

He was asked to send a photo ID, provide his location and explain why his page description had changed so often and how the funds would be used. Then his page was closed, after which he expressed astonishment and accused the platform of bias.

The brothers say that many people in Gaza have set up GoFundMe pages because of the platform’s size and reputation, and then found themselves “trapped” once their pages began the often ill-fated verification process. Critics of GoFundMe say campaigns fundraising for Israel appear to be able to avoid similar interventions from its compliance team.

Other fundraisers on the website state they aim to raise funding for “equipment” that supports the Israeli military, or “training” and travel for new recruits.

A page raising money for gun sights and other equipment to “safeguard”  the Kishorit kibbutz in the north of Israel appeared to breach the website’s terms of service, but was active for nearly a year before no longer becoming accessible.

The terms of service prohibit fundraising for “weapons meant for use in conflict or by an armed group”.

Sabbah added that there is no guarantee that money from similar pages to fundraise for “equipment” or “security” won’t be used to buy weapons, at a time when the Israeli government is actively arming its citizens.

Double standards?

Al Jazeera sent several questions to GoFundMe, asking how many Gaza-related fundraisers there are, how much they had raised, the number listed as “transfers paused and the total removed or taken down. We also asked the company to provide like-for-like figures for Israel and Ukraine.

At the time of writing, GoFundMe refused to provide the specific information and data we requested. A spokesperson said: “GoFundMe has helped raise and deliver over $300m from donors in more than 215 countries and jurisdictions to support individuals and organisations helping those in both Gaza and Israel.

“Any suggestion of double standards is wholly without merit, baseless, and contrary to the values that guide our platform.

“Any decision to remove a fundraiser from the platform is never taken lightly and is informed explicitly by our Terms of Service. Taking action like this is difficult, but it protects our ability to support people who are fundraising to help others.”

Amr Shabaik, the legal director at the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), told Al Jazeera that the fundamental issue with platforms like GoFundMe was the “imbalanced application of rules” – behaviour consistent with other forms of digital censorship since October 7.

“Algorithmic discrimination and targeting, looking for certain descriptors and categories – like Gaza or Palestine specifically in the last 18 months – means some pages are subjected to an unfair and high level of scrutiny that other fundraisers are not,” he said.

“All platforms have their rules and regulations, but they’re applying them disproportionately and unfairly towards Palestinians.”

“There is a clear indication of a double standard. If you are actively preventing lifesaving aid – intentionally or unintentionally -– from reaching Gaza, it’s tough to say you’re not supporting a genocide.”

Shabaik points to studies undertaken by Human Rights Watch (HRW), The Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media and Palestine Legal that detail platforms’ inordinate targeting of pro-Palestine pages or accounts.

HRW says that between October and November 2023, 1,049 pro-Palestinian posts on Facebook and Instagram were taken down by the platform’s owner, Meta. Palestine Legal says that between October 7 and December 31, 2023, the organisation received 1,037 requests for legal support from people “targeted for their Palestine advocacy”. The Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media documented more than 1,639 “censorship violations” in its 2023 annual report, including content removal and suspensions.

Last December, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Freelance Journalists’ Union said that GoFundMe prevented $6,000 of funding from reaching the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate after its fundraiser was shut down. This is despite the organisation being based in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, not in Gaza.

One union delegate, using the name “Arv” as he wanted to remain anonymous, told Al Jazeera the money would have provided protective helmets, press vests and other safety apparatus for journalists reporting in the territory. He added that GoFundMe said the fundraiser was shut down due to a lack of compliance with unspecified “laws and regulations”.

In December, a union spokesperson said on its Twitter page: “Over the course of the fundraiser, we received a dozen requests for further information from GoFundMe, all of which were answered as thoroughly and in as timely a manner as possible, given the ongoing war.”

Arv added that the union had been pushed to explore the use of other fundraising platforms because of the difficulty of working with GoFundMe.

“Current GoFundMe users should do the same before they too are caught in such Kafkaesque circumstances,” he said.

The GoFundMe compliance team asked for business information, such as bank accounts, and even after informing the union the information had been accepted, the page was still closed down.

GoFundMe boasts that it is the world’s number one crowdfunding platform, but it only allows fundraisers to be created in 20 nations (not including Israel, Ukraine or Palestine) – meaning people in Gaza are reliant on intermediaries thousands of miles away if they want to receive donations.

All those interviewed for this story and other campaigners have endorsed a boycott of the platform. Sabbah says she has since begun using the Australian crowdfunding website Chuffed, which reviewed her documentation and swiftly permitted her to withdraw, allowing her to continue her group’s work in Gaza.

The platform says it advocates on behalf of campaigners to sort out verification issues with its payment providers to prevent pages from being frozen or refunded.

Chuffed general manager Jennie Smith said: “We’ve been helping campaigners migrate from GoFundMe to Chuffed by the thousands over the last year and have seen firsthand the devastation the shutting down of their GoFundMe campaigns causes.”

Yahya described life for his family in his makeshift tent. He walks miles every day to get water and wraps up his baby daughter for the cold winter nights, fearing they may not wake up in the morning.

He says his family may have escaped the enclave if GoFundMe had allowed him to withdraw the money he raised.

“I try not to think about losing our money,” Yahya said. “If I kept thinking about how terrible everything is, I wouldn’t be alive now!

“But it makes you feel like everyone is conspiring against us. They are leaving us to die slowly.”

Constitutional panel ratifies bill to cease cooperation with IAEA after US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.

Iran’s Guardian Council has ratified a parliament-approved legislation to suspend Tehran’s cooperation with the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, after the war with Israel and the United States.

Iranian news outlets reported on Thursday that the appointed council, which has veto power over bills approved by lawmakers, found the parliament’s measure to “not to be in contradiction to the Islamic principles and the Constitution”.

Guardian Council spokesperson Hadi Tahan Nazif told the official state news agency, IRNA, that the government is now required to suspend cooperation with the IAEA for the “full respect for the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

Nazif added that the decision was prompted by the “attacks … by the Zionist regime and the United States against peaceful nuclear facilities”.

The bill will be submitted to President Masoud Pezeshkian for final approval and would allow Iran “to benefit from all the entitlements specified under … the Non-Proliferation Treaty, especially with regard to uranium enrichment”, Nazif said.

Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf suggested that the legislation is now binding after the Guardian Council’s approval.

“Continued cooperation with the agency, which plays a role as a protector of anti-human interests and an agent of the illegitimate Zionist regime through the pretext of war and aggression, is not possible until the security of our nuclear facilities is ensured,” Ghalibaf said in a social media post.

However, the IAEA said on Thursday that it had not received an official communication from Iran regarding the suspension.

Iranian officials have been decrying the IAEA’s failure to condemn Israeli attacks on the country’s nuclear facilities.

Before the war started, Tehran claimed to have obtained Israeli documents that show that the IAEA was passing off information to Israel about Iran’s nuclear programme – allegations that were denied by the agency.

Israel is widely believed to have its own nuclear arsenal, but its nuclear programme has not been monitored by the UN watchdog.

For years, Iranian nuclear sites have been under strict IAEA inspection, including by constant video feed. But it appears that Iran moved its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium from the facilities before they were bombed by Israel and the US during the recent war, putting them out of the view of UN observers for the first time.

US and Israeli officials have argued that the military strikes have set back Iran’s nuclear programme for years. But suspending cooperation with the IAEA could escalate the programme, although Tehran insists that it is not seeking a nuclear weapon.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Thursday that Moscow was “interested in Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA continuing”.

“We are interested in everyone respecting the supreme leader of Iran, who has repeatedly stated that Iran does not and will not have plans to create nuclear weapons,”  Lavrov said.

German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul also told journalists that Berlin “urges the Iranian government not to go down this path” and cease cooperation with the board.

On June 13, Israel launched a surprise bombing campaign against Iran, striking residential buildings and nuclear sites and military facilities, killing top commanders and scientists as well as hundreds of civilians.

Iran responded with barrages of missiles that left widespread destruction in Israel and killed at least 29 people.

On Sunday, the US joined Israel and launched unprecedented strikes on Iran’s Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz nuclear sites.

Following Iran’s retaliatory attack on a US military base in Qatar, a ceasefire was reached between the countries.

Both Israel and Iran declared victory after the war.

Ronaldo and his Saudi club side Al Nassr made the new deal official via social media, putting an end to rumours he could sign elsewhere.

Cristiano Ronaldo inked a two-year extension with Saudi Arabia’s Al Nassr, the club announced, following weeks of speculation over which team he would sign for next season.

“Cristiano Ronaldo is staying at @AlNassrFC until 2027,” the club wrote in a post on X on Thursday.

Minutes before the official confirmation, the team posted a teaser video, with the 40-year-old Ronaldo walking along a beachfront and saying: “Al Nassr forever.”

The Portuguese superstar arrived in 2023 in the kingdom to play with the club, heralding a rush of players in the latter stages of their careers to the oil-rich country.

Last month, Ronaldo posted “This chapter is over” hours after the Saudi Pro League wrapped up with Al Nassr finishing third and trophy-less once again.

“Ronaldo’s presence is a key factor in developing the Saudi league in the last two years and a half. He opens the door for elite and young players to come to Saudi Arabia,” a source from the Public Investment Fund (PIF), a major investor in Saudi football, told AFP last month.

The oil-funded PIF, the sovereign wealth fund behind a number of big-ticket Saudi investments, controls a group of Pro League clubs including Al Nassr, Al Hilal and Al Ahli.

Time for a title

Ronaldo’s announcement in May came just months after Brazilian star Neymar ended his injury-plagued 18-month stay in January, after playing just seven times for Al Hilal – on a reported salary of about $104m a year.

Although Ronaldo was the Pro League’s top scorer with 25 goals, he has been unable to win a Saudi or continental trophy with Al Nassr, who lost in the Asian Champions League semifinals last month.

Last year, the five-time Ballon d’Or winner said he could end his career with Al Nassr, the Riyadh team favoured by a number of Saudi royals.

Saudi Arabia has shaken up football by spending heavily on stars from Europe, starting with Ronaldo’s move in late 2022, and the desert nation will host the World Cup in 2034.

For the past two years, Saudi football fans could watch the likes of Ronaldo and Karim Benzema, with six Ballons d’Or between them, on any given weekend during the football season in the kingdom.

However, the oil-fuelled Saudi football project has drawn comparisons with the Chinese Super League, which imported players on exorbitant salaries until team owners went bust as the Chinese economy fizzled.

But with Saudi Arabia set to host the 2034 World Cup, and desperate to re-model itself as a tourism and business magnet before global oil demand falls for good, there is probably more to come from the Pro League.

Ronaldo appeared to trade an end-of-career payday for football obscurity when he first moved to Riyadh’s Al Nassr two years ago in a deal said to be worth $250m at the time.

The Story continues.. 🐐 💛
pic.twitter.com/XV8WoOREeB

— AlNassr FC (@AlNassrFC_EN) June 26, 2025

Last Thursday, just days after he had ordered strikes upon Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood outside Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital and spoke of his outrage that the building had been hit in an Iranian counterstrike.

“They’re targeting civilians because they’re a criminal regime. They’re the arch-terrorists of the world,” he said of the Iranian government.

Similar accusations were levelled by other Israeli leaders, including the president, Isaac Herzog, and opposition leader Yair Lapid, during the conflict with Iran, which ended with a ceasefire brokered by United States President Donald Trump on Monday.

However, what was missing from these leaders was an acknowledgement that Israel itself has attacked almost every hospital in Gaza, where more than 56,000 people have been killed, or that the Strip’s healthcare system has been pushed to near total collapse.

It was an omission noticeable in much of the Israeli press reporting on the Beersheba hospital attack, with few mentions of the parallels between it and Israel’s own attacks on hospitals in Gaza. Instead, much of the Israeli media has supported these attacks, either seeking to downplay them, or justifying them by regularly claiming that Hamas command centres lie under the hospitals, an accusation Israel has never been able to prove.

Weaponising suffering

According to analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera, a media ecosystem exists in Israel that, with a few exceptions, both amplifies its leaders’ calls for war while simultaneously reinforcing their claims of victimhood, all while shielding the Israeli public from seeing the suffering Israeli forces are inflicting on Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

One Israeli journalist, Haaretz’s media correspondent Ido David Cohen, wrote this month that “reporters and editors at Israel’s major news outlets have admitted more than once, especially in private conversations, that their employers haven’t allowed them to present the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the suffering of the population there”.

“The Israeli media … sees its job as not to educate, it’s to shape and mould a public that is ready to support war and aggression,” journalist Orly Noy told Al Jazeera from West Jerusalem. “It genuinely sees itself as having a special role in this.”

“I’ve seen [interviews with] people who lived near areas where Iranian missiles had hit,” Noy added. “They were given a lot of space to talk and explain the impact, but as soon as they started to criticise the war, they were shut down, quite rudely.”

Last September, a complaint brought by three Israeli civil society organisations against Channel 14, one of Israel’s most watched television networks, cited 265 quotes from hosts they claimed encouraged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide. Among them, concerning Gaza, were the phrases “it really needs to be total annihilation” and “there are no innocents.”

A few months earlier, in April, the channel was again criticised within the Israeli media, this time for a live counter labelled “the terrorists we eliminated”, which made no distinction between civilians and fighters killed, the media monitoring magazine 7th Eye pointed out.

Analysts and observers described how Israel’s media and politicians have weaponised the horrors of the past suffering of the Jewish people and have moulded it into a narrative of victimhood that can be aimed at any geopolitical opponent that circumstances allow – with Iran looming large among them.

“It isn’t just this war,” Noy, an editor with the Hebrew-language Local Call website, said. “The Israeli media is in the business of justifying every war, of telling people that this war is essential for their very existence. It’s an ecosystem. Whatever the authority is, it is absolutely right. There is no margin for doubt, with no room for criticism from the inside. To see it, you have to be on the outside.”

“The world has allowed Israel to act as some kind of crazy bully to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants,” Noy added. “They can send their troops into Syria and Lebanon, never mind Gaza, with impunity. Israel is fine. Israel is bulletproof. And why wouldn’t they think that? The world allows it, then people are shocked when Iran strikes back.”

The Israeli media largely serves as a tool to manufacture consent for Israel’s actions against the Palestinians and in neighbouring countries, while shielding the Israeli public from the suffering its victims endure.

Exceptions do exist. Israeli titles such as Noy’s Local Call and +972 Magazine often feature coverage highly critical of Israel’s war on Gaza, and have conducted in-depth investigations into Israel’s actions, uncovering scandals that are only reported on months later by the international media. Joint reporting from Local Call and +972 Magazine has revealed that the Israeli military was using an AI system to generate bombing target lists based on predicted civilian casualties. Another report found that the Israeli military had falsely declared entire Gaza neighbourhoods as evacuated, which then led to the bombing of civilian homes in areas that were still inhabited.

A more famous example is the liberal daily Haaretz, which regularly criticises Israel’s actions in Gaza. Haaretz has faced a government boycott over its coverage of the war.

“It’s not new,” Dina Matar, professor of political communication and Arab media at SOAS University of London, said. “Israeli media has long been pushing the idea that they [Israel] are the victims while calling for actions that will allow them to present greater victimhood [such as attacking Iran]. They often use emotive language to describe a strike on an Israeli hospital that they’ll never use to describe an Israeli strike on a hospital in Gaza.”

Take Israeli media coverage of the siege of northern Gaza’s last remaining functioning healthcare facility, the Kamal Adwan Hospital, in December.

While descriptions of the attacks on the hospital from United Nations special rapporteurs spoke of their “horror” at the strikes, those in the Israeli press, in outlets such as Ynet or The Times of Israel, instead focused almost exclusively upon the Israeli military’s claims of the numbers of “terrorists” seized.

Among those seized from the hospital were medical staff, including the director of Kamal Adwan, Dr Hussam Abu Safia, who has since been tortured in an Israeli military prison, his lawyer previously told Al Jazeera.

In contrast, Israeli coverage of the Soroka Hospital attack in Beersheba almost universally framed the hit as a “direct strike” and foregrounded the experience of the evacuated patients and healthcare workers.

In this environment, Matar said, Netanyahu’s representation of Israel as home to a “subjugated people” reinforced a view that Israelis have long been encouraged to hold of themselves, even amid the decades-long occupation of Palestinian land.

“No one questions what Netanyahu is saying because the implications of his speech make sense as part of this larger historical narrative; one that doesn’t allow for any other [narrative], such as the Nakba or the suffering in Gaza,” the academic said.

United States President Donald Trump has insisted that the military strikes he ordered on Iran’s nuclear facilities on Sunday morning “completely obliterated” Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities.

And after an initial classified US intelligence report contradicted that assertion, Trump and his administration have lashed out at those who leaked the document and the media that has covered it – throwing out its assessment.

The standoff between Trump and the evaluation of sections of his own intelligence community continued through Wednesday at The Hague, where the US president was attending the NATO summit and was asked several questions about the leaked document.

Yet it was only the latest instance of Trump publicly disagreeing with US intelligence conclusions during his past decade in politics – whether on Russia or North Korea, Venezuela or Iran.

Here’s what the latest spat is about, and Trump’s long history of disputing intelligence assessments:

What is Trump’s latest disagreement with US intelligence about?

On June 21, the US joined Israel in its strikes against Iran. US forces hit Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, three Iranian nuclear sites, with a range of missiles and bunker-buster bombs.

Trump applauded the success of the US attacks on Iran multiple times. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” he said in a televised address from the White House after the attack.

However, a confidential preliminary report by the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), suggested otherwise.

The DIA report said the US attacks had only set Iran’s nuclear programme back by less than six months.

The report added that in the DIA’s assessment, Iran had moved its stockpile of enriched uranium before the strikes, something Tehran has also claimed. As a result, little of the material that Iran could in theory enrich to weapons-grade uranium had been destroyed.

On Tuesday, the White House rejected the findings of the intelligence report. “This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, describing the person who leaked the document as a “low-level loser in the intelligence community”.

“The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration,” Leavitt added.

Trump also dismissed the report on Wednesday during the NATO summit in the Netherlands, continuing to claim that the US decimated Iran’s nuclear capabilities and denying claims that Tehran moved its enriched uranium. “I believe they didn’t have a chance to get anything out because we acted fast,” Trump said, adding “it would have taken two weeks, maybe, but it’s very hard to remove that kind of material… and very dangerous.

“Plus, they knew we were coming,” Trump added. “And if they know we’re coming, they’re not going to be down there [in the underground sections of the nuclear facilities].”

On Wednesday, the White House website published an article titled Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated – and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News.

Besides Trump, the article also quotes Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, which has said that “the devastating US strike on Fordow destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.” Of Iran’s three major nuclear sites, Fordow is the hardest to reach for Israel’s missiles, as it is buried deep under a mountain – which is why Israel successfully convinced the US to hit the facility with bunker-buster bombs.

Additionally, the White House article quotes the Trump-appointed US director of national intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, as saying: “The operation was a resounding success. Our missiles were delivered precisely and accurately, obliterating key Iranian capabilities needed to quickly assemble a nuclear weapon.”

John Ratcliffe, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), also diverged from the DIA report, saying the US had “severely damaged” Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In a statement published on the CIA website on Wednesday, Ratcliffe said: “CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes. This includes new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”

Yet Trump’s track record of disputing intelligence assessments and distrusting the intelligence community runs much deeper than Iran.

Did Trump disagree with US intelligence during his first term?

Yes, multiple times, including:

In 2016, on Russian election interference

The US intelligence community, in July 2016, accused Putin of meddling in the US presidential election with the aim of helping Trump defeat Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton.

In November of that year, Trump won the election. His transition team rebuked intelligence reports that concluded that Russian hackers had covertly interfered in the election.

In a statement, the Trump transition team said: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

In an interview in December 2016, Trump himself said: “I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it.”

He added that: “Nobody really knows. And hacking is very interesting. Once they hack, if you don’t catch them in the act, you’re not going to catch them. They have no idea if it’s Russia or China or somebody. It could be somebody sitting in a bed someplace. They have no idea.”

In 2018, again on Russian election interference

In July 2018, the US indicted 12 Russian military intelligence officers, accusing them of being involved in “active cyber operations to interfere in the 2016 presidential elections”, according to then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. This indictment was part of a probe into allegations of collusion between the Trump team and Russia before the 2016 election, being led by former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

That same month, Trump met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Helsinki for a joint summit. During a joint news conference after the two leaders had a one-on-one private discussion, Trump backed Putin on the Russian leader’s insistence that the Kremlin did not meddle in the 2016 election.

“I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” Trump said.

“He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

Trump also said the Mueller investigation was a “disaster for our country” and drove a wedge between Washington and Moscow, the “two largest nuclear powers in the world”.

Former CIA Director John Brennan called Trump’s statements during the news conference “nothing short of treasonous”. Trump later pulled Brennan’s security clearances. Those clearances give select former officials access to classified information and briefings.

In 2019, over Iran, North Korea and ISIL (ISIS)

In 2019, Trump again rebuked the intelligence community, disagreeing with them over multiple issues.

The US intelligence community, on January 29, 2019, told a Senate committee that the nuclear threat from North Korea remained and Iran was not taking steps towards making a nuclear bomb.

Intelligence agencies said they did not believe that Iran violating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a nuclear deal signed between Iran and a group of countries led by the US in 2015. This, even though Trump had pulled out of the deal in 2018.

“The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!” Trump wrote on X, then called Twitter.

“Be careful of Iran. Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!” Trump wrote in another X post.

On the other hand, US intelligence said North Korea was unlikely to give up its nuclear program.

On January 30, Trump contradicted this in an X post: “North Korea relationship is best it has ever been with US No testing, getting remains, hostages returned. Decent chance of Denuclearization.”

During his first term, Trump engaged directly with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and in June 2019, met him at the fortified Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas – the first US president to travel there.

Meanwhile, US spy chiefs warned that the ISIL (ISIS) armed group would continue to launch attacks from Syria and Iraq against regional and Western adversaries, including the US.

That assessment was at variance with Trump’s views. In December 2018, he withdraw 2,000 US troops from Syria on grounds that ISIL (ISIS) did not pose a threat any more. “We have won against ISIS,” he said in a video.

What did Trump and US intelligence clash over recently?

During his second term, too, Trump has differed with the intelligence community’s conclusions on multiple occasions, including:

In April, over Venezuela

Trump’s current term has been marked by an aggressive immigration crackdown. In March, he signed a proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Trump’s proclamation claimed that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion” against US territory.

The proclamation says all Venezuelan citizens aged 14 or older “who are members of” the gang and are not naturalised or lawful permanent US citizens are liable to be restrained and removed as “Alien Enemies”.

In his proclamation, Trump said the Tren de Aragua “is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus”.

However, in April, a classified assessment from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an arm of the DNI, found there was no coordination between Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan government. The assessment found that the gang was not supported by Venezuela’s government officials, including Maduro.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was the only one, among the 18 organisations that make up the US intelligence community, to disagree with the assessment.

In June, over Iran’s nuclear weapons

On March 25, Trump’s DNI Gabbard unambiguously told US Congress members that Iran was not moving towards building nuclear weapons.

“The IC [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khamenei has not authorised the nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003,” Gabbard said.

On June 17, however, Trump told reporters he believed Iran was “very close” to building nuclear weapons, after he made an early exit from the Group of Seven summit in Canada.

Trump’s distrust for his own intelligence community is widely viewed as stemming from what he has described as a “witch-hunt” against him – the allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him win.

During the 2018 news conference in Helsinki, Trump said: “It was a clean campaign. I beat Hillary Clinton easily.”

This doctor in Gaza has tried to save children torn to shreds by Israeli bombs and bullets at GHF aid sites. Speaking to Al Jazeera, she asked how the world can stand by and let the killing of starving people continue?

Through the 12 days of the recent Israel-Iran conflict, China moved quickly to position itself as a potential mediator and voice of reason amid a spiralling regional crisis.

The day after Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran on June 13, Beijing reached out to both sides to express its desire for a mediated solution even as the country’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, condemned Israel’s actions as a violation of international law.

Chinese President Xi Jinping soon followed with calls for de-escalation, while at the United Nations Security Council, China joined Russia and Pakistan in calling for an “immediate and unconditional ceasefire”.

When Iran threatened to blockade the strategically important Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes, Beijing was also quick to speak out.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs instead called for the “international community to step up efforts to de-escalate conflicts and prevent regional turmoil from having a greater impact on global economic development”.

Beijing’s stance throughout the conflict remained true to its longstanding noninterference approach to foreign hostilities. But experts say it did little to help shore up its ambition of becoming an influential player in the Middle East, and instead exposed the limitations of its clout in the region.

Why China was worried

Unlike some countries, and the United States in particular, China traditionally approaches foreign policy “through a lens of strategic pragmatism rather than ideological solidarity”, said Evangeline Cheng, a research associate at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.

This approach means China will always focus on protecting its economic interests, of which it has many in the Middle East, Cheng told Al Jazeera.

China has investments in Israel’s burgeoning tech sector and its Belt and Road infrastructure project spans Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Iraq, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

Critically, China relies on the Middle East for more than half of its crude oil imports, and it’s the top consumer of Iranian oil. A protracted war would have disrupted its oil supplies, as would an Iranian blockade of the strategically important Strait of Hormuz – something threatened by Tehran’s parliament during the conflict.

“War and security instability not only undermines Chinese investment and trade and business… but also the oil price and gas energy security in general,” said Alam Saleh, a senior Lecturer in Iranian Studies at the Australian National University.

“Therefore, China seeks stability, and it disagrees and opposes any kind of military solution for any type of conflict and confrontations, no matter with whom,” he said.

John Gong, a professor of economics at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, told Al Jazeera that China’s top concern through the conflict was to avoid “skyrocketing oil prices” that would threaten its energy security.

Flexing diplomatic muscle, protecting economic might

Aware of China’s friendly relations with Iran and Beijing’s economic fears, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on Beijing to keep Tehran from closing the Strait of Hormuz as ceasefire negotiations stumbled forward this week.

It was a brief moment of acknowledgement of Beijing’s influence, but experts say China’s overall diplomatic influence remains limited.

“China’s offer to mediate highlights its desire to be seen as a responsible global player, but its actual leverage remains limited,” Cheng said. “Without military capabilities or deep political influence in the region, and with Israel wary of Beijing’s ties to Iran, China’s role is necessarily constrained.”

To be sure, Beijing has demonstrated its ability to broker major diplomatic deals in the region. In 2023, it mediated the normalisation of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. While seen as a huge diplomatic win for China, experts say Beijing owed much of its success to fellow mediators, Oman and Iraq. China also mediated an agreement between Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Fatah, in July 2024, under which they committed to working together on Gaza’s governance after the end of Israel’s ongoing war on the enclave.

But William Yang, a senior analyst for Northeast Asia at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said the odds were stacked against China from the beginning of the latest conflict due to Israel’s wariness towards its relationship with Iran.

In 2021, China and Iran signed a 25-year “strategic partnership”, and Iran is an active participant in the Belt and Road project. Iran has also joined the Beijing-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and this year took part in China’s “Maritime Security Belt” naval exercises.

Iran’s “resolute opposition to American hegemony” also aligns well with China’s diplomatic interests more broadly, compared with Israel’s close ties to the US, Yang said.

China’s dilemma

It’s a scenario that could be repeated in the future, he said.

“This case also reinforces the dilemma that China faces: while it wants to be viewed as a great power that is capable of mediating in major global conflicts, its close relationship with specific parties in some of the ongoing conflicts diminishes Beijing’s ability to play such a role,” Yang said.

For now, Beijing will continue to rely on the US as a security guarantor in the region, he added.

“It’s clear that China will continue to focus on deepening economic engagement with countries in the Middle East while taking advantage of the US presence in the region, which remains the primary security guarantor for regional countries,” Yang said.

“On the other hand, the US involvement in the conflict, including changing the course of the war by bombing Iranian nuclear sites, creates the condition for China to take the moral high ground in the diplomatic sphere and present itself as the more restrained, calm and responsible major power,” he said.

In this episode of Centre Stage, our guest is Dr Gabor Mate, a retired physician, author and Holocaust survivor who has written extensively on trauma and child development, as well as Israel and Palestine.

Mate talks about the colonial foundations of Zionism, how living under it has traumatised Palestinians and the ways mainstream media distorts the realities on the ground in Gaza.

Phil Lavelle is a TV news correspondent at Al Jazeera.

EU leaders gather in Brussels to address sanctions on Russia, US tariffs, and Middle East conflicts.

The heads of the European Union’s 27 member nations will meet in Brussels to discuss tougher sanctions on Russia, ways to prevent painful new United States tariffs, and how to make their voices heard in the Middle East conflicts.

Most of the leaders will arrive at the event taking place on Thursday from a brief but intense NATO summit, where they pledged a big boost in defence spending and papered over some of their differences with US President Donald Trump.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will join the EU summit by videoconference, after having met Trump on Wednesday.

US-led NATO downgraded Ukraine from a top priority to a side player this week, but Russia’s war in Ukraine remains of paramount concern for the EU.

Members will be discussing a potential 18th round of sanctions against Russia and whether to maintain a price cap on Russian oil, measures that some nations oppose because it could raise energy prices.

Meanwhile, Trump’s threatened tariffs are weighing on the EU, which negotiates trade deals on behalf of all 27 member countries. He lashed out at Spain on Wednesday for not spending more on defence and suggested yet more tariffs. France’s president criticised Trump for starting a trade war with longtime allies.

European leaders are also concerned about fallout from the wars in the Middle East, and the EU is pushing to revive diplomatic negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

EU members have internal disagreements to overcome. They are divided over what to do about European policy towards Israel because of its conduct in its war on Gaza. And left-leaning parties are attacking European Commissioner Ursula von Der Leyen’s pivot away from the EU’s climate leadership in favour of military investment.

Defence and security are likely to top the agenda. The summit will end with a statement of conclusions that will set the agenda for the bloc for the next four months, and can be seen as a bellwether for political sentiment in Europe on key regional and global issues.

From hiding in Auschwitz to vlogging in war zones, some Gen Z travellers are going to extreme lengths to secure content for social media as part of a growing dark tourism trend

Dark tourism is one of the most popular niches for young travellers. As stories emerge of tourists eating sandwiches on Holocaust tours and fraternising with global terror organisations, it provokes the question: is it ethical?

Defined by darktourism.com as tourism that involves travelling to sites that include death and disaster, it’s been widely expanded to include locations linked with unscrupulous figures and unpleasant events like incarceration. According to a 2022 Travel News survey found, a staggering 91% of Gen Z (13-28 year olds) have engaged in the activity in some form.

And if we’re talking about popular dark tourist sites, few places get darker than Auschwitz. It’s the most impelling legacy of the Holocaust, the twentieth century’s most obliterating tragedy. In the five years that it was active over 1.1 million people lost their lives, of which one million were Jewish. It’s also become an increasingly popular tourist destination.

Over 1.8 million people visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in 2024, a 10 per cent rise compared to 2023. And while these numbers are lower than the pre-Pandemic high of 2 million, the museum puts this down to the current conflicts in Russia-Ukraine and the Middle East.

READ MORE: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done on holiday? Once I broke into someone else’s home

Beverley Boden is a PhD researcher in the field of dark tourism and associate dean at Teesside University International Business School, who happens to spend a lot of her time at Auschwitz. Part of what fascinates her is what motivates people to visit these destinations, as well as the toll it takes on the tour guides.

Recently she’s also noticed a definite increase in interest in dark tourism from a crowd with two specific characteristics. Firstly, they tend to be predominantly young: 16 – 24. Secondly, there’s a lot of people who haven’t fully done their research.

Beverley explains: “When you’re at a place like Auschwitz, you see how disrespectful some tourists can be. They take calls when the guides ask them not to, eat food when the guides ask them not to. They take inappropriate pictures. They go into places that they shouldn’t.”

In one instance she recalls observing two young tourists hide behind the camp’s ovens, in gas chamber number one, and a tour guide had to plead with them to stop.

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Another time, a man pulled out a sandwich and began eating it outside of block number 10, while the guide recounted the intentional genital mutilation of women to end the Jewish race.

It’s not just Auschwitz either. Beverley says she’s also noticed an interest in Chernobyl, another quintessential dark tourist destination. While the Russia-Ukraine war has made visitor numbers hard to discern, the location of one of the world’s most terrifying nuclear tragedies has long drawn a mass appeal.

As for why she believes that these destinations have taken off with a wider audience, including those who haven’t done as much research, Beverley points to several theories. One is the wild popularity of recent shows, like Netflix’s Dark Tourist, which aired in 2018 and which sees the host travel to a plethora of unlikely destinations, from haunted forests to Jeffrey Dahmer’s hometown.

From her own experience, she admits there is also a level of “morbid curiosity” in seeing places associated with destruction and death. For the upcoming generation, too, who haven’t known a world without Internet, there is a desire to “push the boundaries”.

However, another, potentially more worrying facet of dark tourism, Beverley explains, includes visiting active or recent conflict zones.

Pursuit of the perfect selfie

Travel vloggers like Miles Routledge, Mike Okay and @josievlogsthings have gone viral – and caused controversy – over recent years for their visits to locations like Mauritania, Iraq and Afghanistan. These countries all have UK FCDO travel advisories and some are currently caught in active wars or are being run by governments with questionable human rights records.

Whether borne out of a genuine interest, or something ulterior, the audience’s intrigue is undeniable: many of these videos gain millions of views. After all, is your travel content really that engaging if you haven’t taken a selfie with the Taliban? As travel YouTuber Miles Routledge claimed to have done, after being held in custody by the Taliban in 2023.

While there’s no explicit link, the rise of these social media vlogs has correlated with an increase in real-world visitor stats. In 2023, over 5,200 tourists visited Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government documented a record 500-plus US and European tourists visiting the country in 2024.

One such visitor was Xiaochen Su, a Chinese-American digital nomad currently based in Malta. He was backpacking through the Middle East when he spotted a connecting flight to Baghdad and thought, “why not one more country?” When he landed he didn’t know what to expect.

“I heard about Baghdad so much on the news back when the war was still happening. I just wanted to see what the current situation was like,” he says.

Iraq is on the FCDO Do Not Travel list, which advises against all travel to many parts of the country due to a high threat of terrorism. It has suffered through decades of conflict that has resulted in over 200,000 casualties between 2003-2022, according to the online database Iraq Body Count. Xiaochen remembers being taken aback by the dilapidated buildings, including main shopping streets left shuttered and in ruins.

But what also struck him was how warmly he was treated. “People would come up to me and say ‘hey’. We had difficulty communicating, but people were nice,” he says. Ultimately, cities like Baghdad, stages for recent and devastating wars, are places where hundreds of thousands of people still live and work.

This is true for many of these dark tourist adventures. Often these places that hold salacious intrigue for dark tourists are homes, memorials, or even ancestral graves for others. Visiting such locations can be educational, if done respectfully.

“A lot of people think that even traveling as a dark tourist is unethical,” Beverley says. “But I think one of the great things about dark tourism is that it does shine a light on historical events. It can educate the younger generation because lessons can be learned.”

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President Trump extolls Israeli leader as a ‘warrior’, says the US will be the one that ‘saves Bibi Netanyahu’ amid corruption trial.

United States President Donald Trump has called for Israel to cancel the corruption trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or grant him a pardon, describing the case against the Israeli leader as a “witch-hunt”.

Trump issued the call on Wednesday on behalf of his close Israeli ally, who was indicted in 2019 in Israel on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

Netanyahu’s trial began in 2020 and involves three criminal cases. He has denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty.

“Bibi Netanyahu’s trial should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero, who has done so much for the State (of Israel),” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform using the Israeli leader’s nickname, adding that he had learned that Netanyahu was due to appear in court on Monday.

“Such a WITCH HUNT, for a man who has given so much, is unthinkable to me,” Trump added.

Israeli media have reported that cross-examination of Netanyahu began on June 3 in a Tel Aviv court and was expected to take about a year to complete.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog has the power to pardon Netanyahu, but has been quoted by Israeli media as saying that a pardon is “not currently on the table”.

Herzog also said that “no such request had been made”, according to the reports.

Trump also said in his post: “It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu.”

It was unclear what Trump or the US government could do to stop Netanyahu’s corruption trial.

Trump’s words of support for Netanyahu contrasted with the rare public rebuke he issued against the Israeli leader on Tuesday over Israel’s post-ceasefire strikes on Iran.

“Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I’ve never seen before. The biggest load that we’ve seen. I’m not happy with Israel,” Trump told reporters at the time.

Iran and Israel, he added, had been fighting “so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*** they’re doing”.

At least four Palestinians, including a teenager, have been killed in the occupied West Bank, where soldiers have been carrying out deadly raids for months and settlers have been violently rampaging against civilians unchecked, backed by the military.

The teenager was shot by Israeli forces, while the other three Palestinians were killed in an Israeli settler attack on the town of Kafr Malek, northeast of Ramallah. Seven others were injured in the settler attack.

Dozens of Israeli settlers attacked the town, burning vehicles and homes as residents of neighbouring villages attempted to confront them, local sources said. Israeli troops provided protection for the settlers and fired live rounds.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said it treated at least five wounded Palestinians who suffered gunshot wounds, with some in serious condition.

Palestinian Vice President Hussein al-Sheikh said the settlers were acting “under the protection of the Israeli army”.

“We call on the international community to urgently intervene to protect our Palestinian people,” he added, in a message on X.

In the other deadly incident, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said that Israeli troops shot dead a 15-year-old Palestinian boy during a raid on al-Yamoun, a town west of Jenin.

The ministry identified the teenager as Rayan Tamer Houshieh and said he succumbed to his wounds after being shot in the neck.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said that its teams had handled “a very critical case” in al-Yamoun, involving a teenager, before pronouncing him dead.

The al-Yamoun incident marked the second time a teenager has been reported killed in the occupied territory in two days.

On Monday, the Health Ministry said that Israeli fire killed a 13-year-old, identified as Ammar Hamayel, in Kafr Malek.

The occupied West Bank is home to more than 3 million Palestinians who live under harsh Israeli military rule, with the Palestinian Authority governing in limited areas cut off from each other by a myriad of Israeli checkpoints.

Israel has so far built more than 100 settlements across the West Bank, which are home to about 500,000 settlers – Israeli citizens living illegally on private Palestinian land in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

Daily Israeli raids

Although Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has garnered more attention, Palestinian suffering in the occupied West Bank has been acute, with hundreds of deaths, thousands of people displaced, house demolitions and significant destruction since October 7, 2023.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Palestine has expressed alarm at the “wave of renewed violence” by Israeli settlers and armed forces in the West Bank earlier this year.

“Israel must immediately and completely cease all settlement activities and evacuate all settlers, stop the forcible transfer of the Palestinian population, and prevent and punish attacks by its security forces and settlers,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said.

Separately, earlier on Wednesday, a 66-year-old woman was shot in the head and killed by Israeli forces during a raid on the Shu’fat refugee camp, north of occupied East Jerusalem, according to several local media reports.

The Jerusalem governorate identified the woman as Zahriya Joudeh al-Obaid.

Her husband, Joudah Al-Obeidi, a 67-year-old resident of the camp, said his wife was standing on the roof of their home when Israeli forces stormed the area. He confirmed that police shot her in the head, and that she had posed no threat.

Like other refugee camps in Israeli-occupied areas, Shu’fat has seen repeated Israeli raids that often result in deaths, injuries and arrests.

In the northern West Bank, large-scale military incursions into Jenin and its refugee camp, as well as Tulkarem and the Nur Shams refugee camp, have resulted in widespread destruction and displacement of at least 40,000 people, according to UN figures.

Since Israeli forces launched its latest operation in Jenin 156 days ago, at least 40 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Wafa news agency.

When US President Donald Trump entered the war between Israel and Iran late on Saturday night, the region was braced for escalation.

The US dropped 17 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs and two dozen cruise missiles on Iran’s nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordow and Esfahan, assisting Israel, which had already been trading missile fire with Tehran since July 13.

Iran’s response soon came. On Monday evening, it launched 14 missiles aimed at the US Air Force’s Central Command in the Middle East, at Al Udeid in Qatar, a neutral country. Those missiles flew over the capital, Doha, spreading alarm.

Yet instead of leading to the “rathole of retaliations” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had warned against, the attack presaged a truce that Trump announced hours later, and that was facilitated by sophisticated diplomacy involving Qatar, the US and Iran.

So, how did a ceasefire emerge from the smoke of an attack?

What options did Iran have?

A military response against a US base was an obvious choice, because the US has exposure in Iran’s neighbourhood.

Apart from Al Udeid airbase, its Fifth Fleet is headquartered in Bahrain. Both are just more than 200km (125 miles) across the Persian Gulf from Iran. There is also an air base in Kuwait and four logistics air bases in Oman. Further afield, the US has three air bases in Saudi Arabia, three air bases in Iraq, and an air base in Jordan.

“The US has 40,000 troops in the region [on] 19 US bases, eight of which are permanent, and Iran has said previously they will become legitimate targets if the US strikes Iran,” said Al Jazeera’s Dorsa Jabbari.

In the past, Iran’s proxies in the region have been Tehran’s “primary Iranian means of retaliating against adversary attacks,” wrote The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, on Friday.

Houthi militias could resume attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, and Iran could itself attack shipping in the Strait of Hormuz – thus menacing two of the world’s most economically important shipping chokepoints simultaneously.

But the proxy attacks never came, demonstrating the limitations of Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance”, and “how exhausted it is after months of fighting the United States and Israel”, said the ISW in a comment on its website.

Still, even as the world prepared for Iran to respond to the US attacks, an Iran historian at St Andrews University in the UK, told Al Jazeera on Monday that he thought “an ‘off ramp’ with the United States” was likely.

“There will be a lot of public bluster, but privately, I think feelers will be put out,” he said, before the Iranian strike later that evening.

How did the strike unfold?

At around 7pm local time (16:00 GMT) on Monday, Iran struck Qatar.

Qatar condemned the attack as “an extremely dangerous escalation that represents a flagrant violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the State of Qatar”. It issued a demarche to the Iranian ambassador in Doha.

But the “feelers” Ansari had talked about appear to have been put out beforehand.

“I want to thank Iran for giving us early notice,” wrote Trump on social media, “which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured.”

The warning also allowed Qatar to prepare its air defences, shooting down 13 of the missiles and allowing one to fly “in a nonthreatening direction”, according to Trump.

Satellite images suggested the US had evacuated staff and aircraft from Al Udeid even before it struck Iran, so targeting it represented a low risk of casualties. Neither the US base at Al Udeid nor the Qatari Air Force suffered few material losses.

“I am pleased to report that NO Americans were harmed, and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their ‘system’,” wrote Trump three hours after the attack.

A mere two hours later, he announced the ceasefire.

“CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE! It has been fully agreed by and between Israel and Iran that there will be a Complete and Total CEASEFIRE (in approximately 6 hours from now, when Israel and Iran have wound down and completed their in progress, final missions!),” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform.

Trump later revealed that “Israel & Iran came to me, almost simultaneously, and said, ‘PEACE!’”

Iran’s government was eager to put the war behind it, issuing a statement early on Tuesday saying it had delivered a “humiliating and exemplary response to the enemy’s cruelty”, and framing the ceasefire as a “national decision to impose the cessation of war on the Zionist enemy and its vile supporters”.

How are Qatar’s relations with the US and Iran?

Qatar hosts the largest US airbase in the Middle East and has worked closely with Washington on a series of tricky diplomatic negotiations, involving the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hamas in Gaza, among others.

At the same time, it enjoys warm diplomatic and economic ties with Iran. “The South Pars and North Pars and North Field have been a joint [venture] for a long time – over 25 years,” Doha-based energy expert Roudi Baroudi told Al Jazeera, referring to gas fields that Qatar and Iran share.

The South Pars gas field alone holds almost as much gas as all the other known gas fields on the planet, said Baroudi.

Right after he announced the ceasefire, Trump thanked the emir of Qatar.

“I’d like to thank the Highly Respected Emir of Qatar for all that he has done in seeking Peace for the Region,” he wrote on Truth Social. Meanwhile, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian telephoned the Qatari emir on Tuesday to express “regret” over the attack the previous day.

Pezehkian clarified that Qatar and its people were not the target of Iran’s strikes. “[Pezeshkian] stressed that the State of Qatar will remain a neighbouring, Muslim, and sisterly state, and expressed his hope that relations between the two countries will always be based on the principles of respect for the sovereignty of states and good neighbourliness,” the emir’s office said in a statement.

Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani said on Wednesday that “Qatar undertook significant diplomatic efforts with regional and international partners to defuse tensions.”

And the impact of those efforts will be felt well beyond just Israel and Iran, Baroudi suggested.

“Washington and Doha defused an unseen economic and ecological bomb,” he said, because the Gulf is a powder keg of highly inflammable oil and gas wellheads, offloading terminals and tankers.

“The whole region has over 34 refineries along the coast. We have over 105 power plants and desalination plants, so a ceasefire will put away any danger to the water and electricity [supply] of the whole region,” he said, suggesting Qatar be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

A leaked intelligence report has cast doubt on Trump and Netanyahu’s claims that their attacks on Iran destroyed its nuclear programme. Analysts say some facilities weren’t even hit, while 400kg of uranium is unaccounted for. Soraya Lennie takes a look.

Iran’s parliament has passed a bill that would effectively suspend the country’s cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as Iran insists it will not give up its civilian nuclear programme in the wake of massive attacks on the country by Israel and the United States.

The move on Wednesday comes after a US and Qatar-brokered ceasefire between Iran and Israel ended 12 days of fierce hostilities – including an intensive US military intervention that struck three Iranian nuclear facilities on Sunday.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview on Wednesday that parliament voted to suspend – but not end – cooperation with the IAEA, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog.

He said the US had “torpedoed diplomacy” and could no longer be trusted, citing extensive damage to nuclear infrastructure. He reaffirmed Iran’s right to pursue peaceful nuclear energy under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Addressing the parliamentary bill, Baghaei said it sets conditions for Iran’s future engagement with the IAEA, including guarantees for the safety and security of Iranian scientists and nuclear facilities.

Ahead of Wednesday’s vote, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf criticised the IAEA for having “refused to even pretend to condemn the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities” that the US carried out.

“For this reason, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran will suspend cooperation with the IAEA until security of nuclear facilities is ensured, and Iran’s peaceful nuclear programme will move forward at a faster pace,” Ghalibaf told lawmakers.

Iran has long maintained that its nuclear programme was peaceful, and both US intelligence agencies and the IAEA had concluded that Tehran is not actively pursuing a bomb.

IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said he had already written to Iran to discuss resuming inspections of the country’s nuclear facilities.

Iran claims to have moved its highly enriched uranium ahead of the US strikes, and Grossi said his inspectors need to reassess the country’s stockpiles. “We need to return,” he said. “We need to engage.”

But given that Tehran has castigated Grossi for the IAEA’s censure of Iran the day before Israel attacked on June 13, and his subsequent comments during the conflict, that seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem, reporting from Tehran, said it is “clear that Iran’s nuclear programme will continue despite everything that has happened”.

Hashem said the bill will now go to the Guardian Council, which will study it “legally and religiously”.

“If there is consensus in the body, the bill will go to the Supreme National Security Council to be approved and finally to the government to become policy,” he added.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov described Iran’s decision as a direct consequence of the US and Israeli attacks on its nuclear sites.

‘Disgraceful, despicable’

US intelligence officials have assessed the strikes as a targeted operation with limited effectiveness, saying the US bombings had only set Tehran’s nuclear programme back by a few months.

The findings are at odds with US President Donald Trump’s claims about the strikes. Trump has insisted that the nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan were “obliterated” by a combination of bunker-busting and conventional bombs.

Meanwhile, the fragile truce between Israel and Iran appeared to be holding on Wednesday following a rocky start.

Trump told reporters at a NATO summit that it was going “very well”, insisting that Iran was “not going to have a bomb and they’re not going to enrich”.

An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the ceasefire agreement with Iran amounted to “quiet for quiet”, with no further understandings about Iran’s nuclear programme going ahead.

In Iran, health officials said the number of Iranians killed in Israeli strikes has risen to 627, while the number of those wounded stood at 4,870.

Other signs of life returning to relative normality in Iran came as officials said they will ease internet restrictions that were put in place since the conflict began nearly two weeks ago.

“The communication network is gradually returning to its previous state,” said the cybersecurity command of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in a statement carried by state media.

A spokesperson for the Iranian Ministry of Roads and Urban Development said that Iran’s airspace will reopen at 2pm local time (10:30 GMT) on Thursday.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the NATO summit, Trump said US and Iranian officials are due to speak next week, continuing a dialogue that was interrupted by Israel’s attack and the subsequent conflict.

“I’ll tell you what, we’re going to talk with them next week, with Iran. We may sign an agreement, I don’t know,” Trump told reporters.

Separately, Iran slammed NATO chief Mark Rutte’s praise of Trump for the attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“It is disgraceful, despicable and irresponsible for [NATO’s secretary-general] to congratulate a ‘truly extraordinary’ criminal act of aggression against a sovereign state,” Baghaei wrote on the X platform.

Separately, Iranian state media reported on Wednesday that the head of the IRGC command centre, Ali Shadmani, died of wounds sustained during Israel’s military strikes on the country. The command centre vowed “harsh revenge” for his killing, state media added.

Israel had said on June 17 that it killed Shadmani, who it says it ascertained was Iran’s wartime chief of staff and most senior military commander.

As the Israel-Iran ceasefire staggered into effect on Tuesday, all of the combatants launched a plausible argument for victory.

In the United States, President Donald Trump claimed that both his diplomatic and military interventions had largely been responsible for halting the fighting, while the leaders of Iran and Israel each claimed to have secured a decisive win in a regional contest that dates back decades.

In Israel, however, the emerging narrative is that the end result of the conflict with Iran has solidified the position of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Just two weeks ago, Netanyahu was in real trouble. On the night before he ordered the unilateral strike on regional nemesis Iran, his governing coalition was only able to survive thanks to a last-minute deal with dissenting members. Public and political opinion had also appeared to have turned against his war on Gaza, and internationally, Israel’s allies were beginning to protest the blockade of the Palestinian enclave.

Now, he can argue that he has severely weakened Israel’s most dangerous regional enemy, Iran, and he claims that its nuclear programme has been destroyed and sent “down the drain”.

The Iran threat

Buoyed by rising poll numbers and the sense of having successfully confronted Iran, Netanyahu may, according to reports in Israel, seek to take advantage politically and call snap elections.

Having built up the threat of Iran over three decades, and repeatedly warned that his country’s principal bogeyman was about to build a nuclear weapon despite Tehran’s denials, Netanyahu can now take advantage of being seen as the man who ended that threat.

“Entire generations have grown up in Israel with this fear of Iran,” Israeli political scientist Ori Goldberg said. “There’s a foundational narrative that there’s this crazy state out there that, without any logic or reason, wants to destroy us.”

“My oldest daughter is 22 now, and has never known anything else,” Goldberg said. “Netanyahu is now getting the credit for having confronted that.”

In a video statement released earlier today, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich framed the conflict in characteristically apocalyptic terms, telling his social media followers, “The State of Israel has defeated in the last twelve days the empire of evil that threatened the entire world and sought the destruction of Israel.”

That argument is supported by much of the Israeli public – which has largely supported right-wing and far-right parties in recent years.

“Netanyahu is stronger than ever,” Mitchell Barak, an Israeli pollster and former political aide to several senior Israeli political figures, including Netanyahu, told Al Jazeera. “No one’s going to bring him down, no one’s going to challenge him, not his opponents, not his detractors, nobody.”

“He showed that Israel can go it alone. He held off, before American help, then continued alone. Bennett, Lapid can’t challenge that,” Barak continued, referring to two former Israeli prime ministers, the right-wing Naftali Bennett and the centrist Yair Lapid, who are both opponents of Netanyahu.

Not so rosy

However, how long the Israeli prime minister’s perceived victory will last is uncertain. The Iranian government and its Islamic Republic form of governance remain in place, even as Netanyahu has repeatedly called for its overthrow. Netanyahu insinuated that regime change was a possible result of the conflict between Israel and Iran, and Trump used the term in a social media post on Sunday, before clarifying on Monday that he was opposed to regime change because it could lead to “chaos”.

And despite Israeli claims, it is too early to have a definitive answer on the condition of Iran’s ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programmes. The former, despite Israel’s effective air defence systems, led to the deaths of at least 28 Israelis during the conflict, while Iran is likely to shroud its nuclear programme in secrecy going forward. Early intelligence assessments are reported to have determined that Iran’s nuclear timeline has been delayed, but not destroyed.

And analysts have previously suggested to Al Jazeera that Iran is likely to accelerate its nuclear programme, with hardliners within the Iranian regime now even more convinced of the need for a plausible deterrent against Israel.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions out there, such as how much uranium remains enriched, or even where it is, but, in the short term, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s been destroyed or not,” Yossi Mekelberg, a senior consulting fellow with Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme, told Al Jazeera. “Netanyahu and his allies in the White House will be able to spin it. What matters to them is that Iran has suffered a real physical and psychological blow.”

However, how long Netanyahu may be able to survive on spin alone remains far from certain, Mekelberg added. “Every Houdini eventually comes across a lock they can’t pick,” he said.

Netanyahu’s actions since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023 have arguably made his country’s position weaker in the long term. Israel’s international isolation has increased, with revulsion worldwide at the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza, where it has killed more than 56,000 Palestinians. Netanyahu himself is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, and South Africa has led a number of other countries in taking Israel to the International Court of Justice, accusing it of carrying out genocide in Gaza.

The images of those killed, including thousands of children, and the total destruction of Gaza, have spread on social media in particular, turning many in the West against Israel. This has become particularly noticeable in the US, where even on the right – traditionally a bastion of support for Israel – support for the country has become controversial.

And while Trump has shown himself to be a pro-Israeli president, the perception among many in his “America First” movement that Israel dragged the US into a war against Iran has led to anger and heavy criticism of Israel among many of Trump’s most prominent supporters.

Trump himself publicly reprimanded Israel after the latter planned to launch a large attack on Iran after the ceasefire began on Tuesday. Eventually, Israel conducted only a small and symbolic attack, following what it said was a ceasefire violation by Iran – one that Trump was clear did not warrant a response.

Some indication of the fury that has greeted Netanyahu’s decision to abuse the terms of Trump’s ceasefire was provided by Trump’s former chief strategist and ally Steve Bannon. Speaking on his War Room podcast on Tuesday, Bannon called Netanyahu a “bald-faced liar” and Israel a “protectorate”.

Appearing to address Netanyahu directly, Bannon continued, “You have the gall – particularly after what [Trump] did for you and the grief he’s taken over here – you have the gall … When he said, ‘This is what I’ve done, and I need you to be a partner, I need you to stand down first’, you lied to him. That’s why he’s furious”.

Gaza deal?

While Israel can put the conflict with Iran behind it – for now – the war on Gaza continues, with no sign of Israel finding an alternative force to Hamas to rule the enclave, and no deal to secure the release of the Israeli captives still held in the Palestinian territory.

That may put a wrench in any plans for Netanyahu to secure another term as prime minister in the short term.

“I’m not so sure about snap elections,” Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of parliament representing the Hadash-Ta’al Party, said.

“The polls are in Netanyahu’s favour, but it’s still not certain. I can’t see Netanyahu going to the polls with Gaza still going on,” she added, suggesting that the prime minister might wait for the summer parliamentary recess on July 26, when he would be freer to negotiate some kind of conclusion to the war on the enclave.

Based on Netanyahu’s attitude towards negotiations over the past 20 months, it is not clear that finding a deal to end the war on Gaza is something he wants. Instead, any deal is likely to require a significant push from Trump – if the US president wants to make one.

“I can’t see how Netanyahu can reach any kind of settlement in Gaza,” Goldberg said. “Everyone’s waiting for Trump to act again … Negotiations with Hamas may start again, but it’ll be Trump that imposes some kind of end to [the war].”