Trump to meet Netanyahu in push for Gaza deal
Trump has said he believes there is a "good chance" of an agreement this week for a ceasefire in the devastated Palestinian territory, hot on the heels of a truce in the war between Israel and Iran.
The US president, who has expressed increasing concern over the situation in Gaza in recent weeks, will have dinner behind closed doors with Netanyahu, their third meeting since Trump returned to power.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said it was Trump's "utmost priority ... to end the war in Gaza and to return all of the hostages."
Leavitt said Trump wanted Hamas to agree to a US-brokered proposal "right now" after Israel backed the plan for a ceasefire and the release of hostages held in Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
The latest round of negotiations on the war in Gaza began on Sunday in Doha, with representatives seated in different rooms in the same building.
A second session was held on Monday and ended with "no breakthrough," a Palestinian official familiar with the negotiations told AFP.
The Hamas and Israeli delegations were due to resume talks later on Monday, the official said.
GOOD CHANCE
Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, was due to join the talks in Doha later this week in an effort to get a ceasefire over the line as the Gaza conflict nears its 22nd month.
In Washington, key US ally Netanyahu was to hold separate meetings with Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio before his dinner with Trump at 6.30 pm local time.
Netanyahu, speaking before heading to Washington, said his meeting with Trump could "definitely help advance" a deal with Hamas.
Trump said on Sunday that there was a "good chance we have a deal with Hamas ... during the coming week".
He added that during his talks with Netanyahu he wanted to discuss a "permanent deal" with Iran, following a truce with Israel that was precipitated by US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.
But the talks in both Washington and Doha promise to be tense.
Netanyahu previously said Hamas's initial response to the draft ceasefire proposal contained "unacceptable" demands.
The proposal included a 60-day truce, during which Hamas would release 10 living hostages and several bodies in exchange for Palestinians detained by Israel, two Palestinian sources close to the discussions had earlier told AFP.
But the group was also demanding certain conditions for Israel's withdrawal, guarantees against a resumption of fighting during negotiations, and the return of the UN-led aid distribution system, they said.
"END THE WAR"
In Israel's coastal hub of Tel Aviv, hours before the meeting, dozens of people, including relatives of hostages, demonstrated to demand the release of the remaining captives.
"President Trump - make history. Bring them all home. End the war," read a sign held by protesters outside the US diplomatic mission in the city.
Of the 251 hostages taken by Palestinian militants during the Hamas attack that triggered the war, 49 are still being held in Gaza, including 27 the Israeli military says, are dead.
Two previous ceasefires have broken down, and efforts to broker a new truce have repeatedly failed, with the primary point of contention being Israel's rejection of Hamas's demand for a lasting ceasefire.
In Gaza, the civil defence agency said Israeli forces killed at least 12 people on Monday, including six in a clinic housing people displaced by the war.
The war has created dire humanitarian conditions for the more than two million people in the Gaza Strip.
The rollout of food distribution by a US- and Israel-backed group in late May has been chaotic, with more than 500 aid seekers killed near its facilities, according to the UN Human Rights Office.
Hamas's October 2023 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed at least 57,523 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry. The UN considers the figures reliable.
It has also reduced much of the enclave to rubble, destroying schools, hospitals and residential areas, and severely restricted the entry of aid.
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Straits Times
20 minutes ago
- Straits Times
For Trump, domestic adversaries are not just wrong, they are ‘evil'
US President Donald Trump has referred to people viewed as critical of him or insufficiently deferential as wicked. ASPEN, Colorado – When the Pentagon decided not to send anyone to this week's Aspen Security Forum, an annual bipartisan gathering of national security professionals in the Colorado mountains, US President Donald Trump's appointees explained that they would not participate in discussions with people who subscribe to the 'evil of globalism'. After all the evils that the US military has fought, this may be the first time in its history that it has put globalisation on its enemies list. But it is simply following the example of Mr Trump. Last week, he denounced a reporter as a 'very evil person' for asking a question he did not like. This week, he declared that Democrats are 'an evil group of people'. 'Evil' is a word getting a lot of airtime in the second Trump term. It is not enough anymore to dislike a journalistic inquiry or disagree with an opposing philosophy. Anyone viewed as critical of the president or insufficiently deferential is wicked. The Trump administration's efforts to achieve its policy goals are not just an exercise in governance but a holy mission against forces of darkness. The characterisation seeds the ground to try to justify all sorts of actions that would normally be considered extreme or out of bounds. If Mr Trump's adversaries are not just rivals but villains, then he can rationalise going further than any president has in modern times. In June, he told a Cabinet secretary to consider throwing her Biden administration predecessor in prison because of his immigration policy. Last weekend, Mr Trump said he might strip Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship for the crime of criticising him. Top stories Swipe. Select. Stay informed. 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His rallies during that campaign rang with 'lock her up' chants aimed at his opponent, Mrs Hillary Clinton. But in returning to power, Mr Trump has been more focused on rooting out the 'enemy from within,' as he put it during his 2024 campaign. He has devoted enormous energy in his second term to prosecuting perceived enemies, purging career officials deemed disloyal and destroying what he calls 'the deep state' that he believes thwarted his policies last time and then persecuted him through criminal prosecutions after he left office. During the first six months of his first term in 2017, according to a search of the Factbase compendium of his speeches, Mr Trump regularly used the word 'evil' to describe terrorists, Nazis and bigots, much as other presidents might have, as well as immigrants. He used it in a domestic political context only once, when complaining about news coverage. In the nearly six months of his second term, he has used it 11 times to describe Democrats or journalists. Mr Trump has said that former president Joe Biden was 'an evil guy who wasn't very smart' and ran a 'very evil regime' surrounded by advisers and prosecutors who were also 'so bad and so evil, so corrupt.' 'I knew that running was very dangerous, because I knew how evil these people were,' Mr Trump said of Democrats on May 12, during an interview on Air Force One with Sean Hannity of Fox News. 'I knew how they cheat, they steal, they lie. They're a horrible group of people.' Speaking with visiting foreign ministers in the Oval Office on June 27, he said: 'We had a president that was incompetent. We had bad people circulating around this desk, this beautiful Resolute Desk. They had, I guess, evil intentions. They would – you couldn't be that stupid. I mean, they had evil intentions.' This is a level of presidential discourse unusual in modern times. President George H.W. 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Mr Trump's allies complain that he has been unfairly targeted by partisan prosecutors, vilified as a fascist, a Nazi and a dictator, and compared to some of history's most horrific villains like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Benito Mussolini. Yet lately, it is Mr Trump's own base that is seeing evil in the president's circle as some of his allies erupt over the administration's failure to release files that they assume would prove a broader conspiracy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. 'Evil forces are trying to take full control of the Trump administration and we must FIGHT to STOP them!!' Mr Alex Jones, a far-right conspiracy theorist, wrote on social media. But a president's words are different from anyone else's. They carry power and set the tone for national debate. More than any recent predecessor, Mr Trump has encouraged the notion that his presidency is a battle of good versus evil, embracing images of himself as a king, a pope and Superman. Those who question him, then, must be on the other side of that binary equation. When the president visited Texas last week to show concern over deadly floods there, a local CBS News reporter noted that families were upset that warnings had not gone out sooner, which might have saved loved ones who died. 'What do you say to those families?' she asked. 'I don't know who you are, but only a very evil person would ask a question like that,' Mr Trump replied. At a White House Faith Office luncheon on July 14, he again excoriated Mr Biden's team. 'We're against an evil group of people, and they're very smart, very smart,' he said. 'He's not, but they are. They took over the Oval Office. They actually took over the Oval Office.' Mr Trump has demonstrated willingness to use power against those he considers evil. 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Last weekend, he lashed out at O'Donnell, the actor and longtime Trump critic who had moved to Ireland just before he resumed office. He did not call her 'evil,' but he did call her a 'Threat to Humanity' on social media and added, 'Because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.' Such inflammatory threats would have been considered shocking in another era but passed with little notice because they have become business as usual under Mr Trump. In the case of O'Donnell in particular, some strategists in Washington assumed it was an attempt to distract from the Epstein meltdown that is damaging Mr Trump with his base and refocus ire on external enemies. The Pentagon decision on July 14 to pull a dozen officials from the Aspen Security Forum demonstrated how far the vilification of political discourse has trickled down from the Oval Office. Once a year, the forum brings together current and former government officials from both parties for relentlessly earnest, wonky and civil on-the-record discussions of issues like supply chains, artificial intelligence, energy security, China and the Middle East. The leafy campus where the forum is held is usually teeming with secretaries of state and defense, national security advisers, CIA directors, senators, foreign leaders, ambassadors and journalists. Among the scheduled participants this year are Ms Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state under the second Bush, and Mr Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to Mr Biden. They do not all agree with one another, which is the point. In Mr Trump's first term, his advisers attended the forum at times to make the case for their administration's policies and to talk with others to hear their ideas, including Mr Mike Pompeo, then the CIA director, and Mr Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence. But the Pentagon pullout this week reflected an unwillingness in the second term to engage in dialogue with anyone other than Trump loyalists. 'The Department of Defense has no interest in legitimizing an organisation that has invited former officials who have been the architects of chaos abroad and failure at home,' Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told Just the News, a Trump-friendly site. 'They are antithetical to the 'America first' values of this administration,' she added. 'Senior representatives of the Department of Defense will no longer be participating in an event that promotes the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country and hatred for the president of the United States.' NYTIMES
Straits Times
20 minutes ago
- Straits Times
Trump's National Guard troops are questioning their mission in LA
LOS ANGELES - When the California National Guard rolled into Los Angeles to respond to devastating wildfires in January, Southern Californians largely hailed the troops as heroes. Celebrities thanked them for their service in Pacific Palisades. Suburban homeowners competed to chat them up at traffic checkpoints in Altadena. Seven months later, much of that goodwill is gone. Protesters jeer the troops as they guard federal office buildings. Commuters curse the behemoth convoys clogging freeways. Family members grill members with questions about whether they really have to obey federal orders. The level of public and private scorn appears to have taken a toll on the National Guard deployment to Los Angeles that President Donald Trump announced in June, citing protests over immigration raids. 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Several said they had raised objections themselves or knew someone who objected, either because they did not want to be involved in immigration crackdowns or felt the Trump administration had put them on the streets for what they described as a 'fake mission'. The New York Times reached out to a broad pool of soldiers seeking interviews about the deployment. While a small sample, the six soldiers' comments aligned with other signs of poor morale. At least 105 members of the deployment sought counseling from behavioural health officers, and at least one company commander and one battalion commander who objected to the mission were reassigned to work unrelated to the mobilisation, the Guard officers said. Some troops became so disgruntled that there were several reports of soldiers defecating in Humvees and showers at the Southern California base where the troops are stationed, prompting tightened bathroom security. The California National Guard had 72 soldiers whose enlistment was set to expire during the deployment. Of those 72, at least two have now left the Guard and 55 others have indicated that they will not extend their service, according to the office of Governor Gavin Newsom, who is fighting Mr Trump's deployment in court. That number, if troops act on it, would amount to a 21 per cent retention rate, far lower than the Guard's typical 60 per cent rate, officials said. 'The moral injuries of this operation, I think, will be enduring,' one of the two Guard officials said. 'This is not what the military of our country was designed to do, at all.' The six soldiers are a fraction of the thousands of troops who have been deployed to Los Angeles. Many members of the Guard have had no trouble taking part in the operation and have voiced no personal conflicts or concerns. It's not uncommon for soldiers in Guard deployments to complain about their assignments, question the reasons they were called up or seek counselling during deployments. Earlier in 2025, after National Guard soldiers were called in to keep order in the New York state prison system after corrections officers went on strike, some troops described feeling unprepared and took issue with not being provided pepper spray or other means of protecting themselves. Officials with the military's Northern Command, which is overseeing the president's military response in California, said the deployment was more organised than the interviewed soldiers suggested. The officials declined to comment on the morale of the troops, their behavioural health, the reassignments or the deployment's impact on re-enlistment. Mr Trump began deploying thousands of troops on June 7 to Southern California, making the case that the state's Democratic leaders were failing to protect federal agents and property after immigration raids sparked protests. The president commandeered a total of 4,100 California National Guard members who ordinarily are controlled by the governor, and dispatched an additional 700 Marines. Since then, the military presence in California has been a flashpoint of debate, as armed soldiers have faced down protesters outside federal buildings and accompanied federal agents conducting raids in the Los Angeles region. Several operations have drawn intense backlash, including a show of force in MacArthur Park and an immigration raid on a cannabis farm in Ventura County where a fleeing farmworker fell from a greenhouse and later died. The deployment has started scaling back. On July 1, the president agreed to release about 150 Guard troops in a specialised wildfire fighting unit, and on July 15, the Pentagon announced that 1,990 members of the Guard's 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team begin demobilisation. It was unclear if the president would end the mission after 60 days, as his order initially suggested. The other half of the deployment – 1,892 members of the 49th Military Police Brigade – remains. Missions have come under intense scrutiny for potential constitutional violations. California authorities have challenged the legality of the deployment, citing a 19th-century law, the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally makes it illegal to use federal troops for law enforcement on domestic soil unless there is an insurrection. Trump administration officials and Justice Department lawyers have argued that troops are 'not engaged in law enforcement' but are merely protecting federal agents. Civil liberties groups have disputed that portrayal, pointing to the temporary detention of one man by Marines early in the deployment. A federal judge has set a trial for August to determine whether the use of the National Guard and Marines has violated federal law. Most troops have been stationed at the Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos, a federally owned facility operated by the California National Guard near Long Beach. The soldiers said breakfasts are hearty – eggs, hash browns, sausage, pancakes – and accommodations are comfortable. Despite efforts to keep them busy, however, they reported long stretches of downtime and frustration with missions that leaked or were cancelled by the time lumbering convoys reached their destinations. In Los Alamitos, a coastal suburb of about 12,000 people, the troops have crowded into a 2-square-mile facility that is shared with other government agencies, which have balked at the encroachment. In emails obtained through a public records request, workers in a joint programme to eradicate the Mediterranean fruit fly complained that troops shaving and brushing their teeth are crowding the bathrooms and that scientists are unsettled by nearby trucks full of explosives. Soldiers meander down new walkways between a huge tent city and new semi-permanent buildings. 'I've lived here 33 years and this is the first I've seen anything like this,' the mayor of Los Alamitos Shelley Hasselbrink said. 'We call it the circus – they look like big circus tents.' Two Democratic officials who were granted brief access to the base – Mr Josh Fryday, a Navy veteran who leads community engagement for the governor's office, and Representative Derek Tran, an Army veteran who represents Los Alamitos – said the massive military presence, which has been projected to cost US$134 million, seemed excessive and extreme. 'If they can do this here,' Mr Fryday said, 'they can do it in any community.' NYTIMES
CNA
20 minutes ago
- CNA
Trump says Coca-Cola to switch to cane sugar in US
WASHINGTON: Beverage giant Coca-Cola has agreed to use real cane sugar in its US production, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday (Jul 16) on social media. The company currently uses high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in its domestic beverages - a sweetener that has long drawn criticism from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make America Healthy Again movement. "I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. "I'd like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them - You'll see. It's just better!" The US president did not explain what motivated his push for the change, which would not impact his well-known favourite beverage, Diet Coke. Since his return to the White House, Trump has re-installed a special button in the Oval Office which summons a helping of the sugar-free carbonated drink. Coca-Cola did not immediately confirm the ingredient shift. "We appreciate President Trump's enthusiasm for our iconic Coca-Cola brand. More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca-Cola product range will be shared soon," the company said in a short statement. HFCS became popular in the 1970s, with its use skyrocketing thanks to government subsidies for corn growers and high import tariffs on cane sugar. Any shift away from corn is likely to draw backlash in the Corn Belt, a Midwestern region that has been a stronghold of support for Trump. Both HFCS and sucrose (cane sugar) are composed of fructose and glucose. However, they differ structurally: HFCS contains free (unbonded) fructose and glucose in varying ratios - 55/45 in soft drinks - while sucrose consists of the two sugars chemically bonded together. These structural differences, however, don't appear to significantly affect health outcomes. A 2022 review of clinical studies found no meaningful differences between HFCS and sucrose in terms of weight gain or heart health. The only notable distinction was an increase in a marker of inflammation in people consuming HFCS. Overall, both sweeteners appear similarly impactful when consumed at equal calorie levels. Despite this, Mexican Coke - which is made with cane sugar - is often sold at a premium in US stores and prized for its more "natural" flavour.
