Potential US military escalation in Iran is a 'coercive lever'
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Al Jazeera
3 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Hamas says open to ICRC delivering food to Israeli captives in Gaza
Hamas has said it is open to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delivering aid to Israeli captives in Gaza after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he requested the Geneva-based international organisation to step in. The statements from Hamas and Netanyahu came after Palestinian groups last week released videos showing two emaciated Israeli captives held in Gaza, where some 2 million Palestinians are struggling to survive the Israeli-induced starvation crisis. Netanyahu said on Sunday he had spoken to Julian Larson, the head of the ICRC delegation to Israel, requesting the group's 'immediate involvement' in providing food and medical treatment to captives still held in Gaza. In a post on X, Netanyahu wrote in Hebrew that he told Larson that Hamas was propagating a 'lie of starvation' in the enclave, but the reality was that 'systematic starvation is being carried out against our hostages'. Later on Sunday, the spokesman for the Qassam Brigades, Hamas's armed wing, said in a statement that Israeli captives held in Gaza 'eat what our fighters and all our people eat'. 'They will not receive any special privilege amid the crime of starvation and siege,' the spokesman, known as Abu Obeida, said. But, he added, the group is 'ready to act positively and respond to any request from the Red Cross to deliver food and medicine to enemy prisoners'. In order for requests to aid captives to be accepted, 'humanitarian corridors must be opened in a normal and permanent manner for the passage of food and medicine to all our people in all areas of the Gaza Strip', Abu Obeida said. Israeli attacks 'of all forms must cease during the receipt of packages for the prisoners', he added. The ICRC said in a statement on Sunday that it was 'appalled by the harrowing videos' of the captives held in Gaza and reiterated its call to be 'granted access to the hostages.' 'These videos are stark evidence of the life-threatening conditions in which the hostages are being held,' the ICRC said in the statement shared on X. 'We know families watching these videos are horrified and heartbroken by the conditions they see their loved ones held in,' the ICRC added. On its website, the ICRC says that 'securing access requires the cooperation of all parties involved'. The ICRC also says on its website that it 'has not been able to visit any Palestinian detainees held in Israeli places of detention since 7 October 2023.' In a separate statement on Sunday, the ICRC said it was also 'appalled' that a Palestine Red Crescent Society staff member had been killed in a 'clearly marked Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) building' in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. The PRCS had earlier said the attack was perpetrated by Israeli forces, but the ICRC statement did not refer to who was responsible. One million women and girls starving Meanwhile, the families of Israeli captives held in Gaza said on Sunday that Netanyahu's continued insistence that a 'military resolution' was the only solution was 'a direct danger to the lives of our sons, who live in the hell of tunnels and are threatened by starvation and immediate death'. 'For 22 months, the public has been sold the illusion that military pressure will bring back the hostages, and today, even before reaching a comprehensive draft agreement, it is said that an agreement is futile,' the families said in a statement. There are about 50 captives still in Gaza. Fewer than half are believed to be still alive. The latest developments come as the Government Media Office in Gaza said that Israeli authorities allowed just 36 aid trucks to enter the Gaza Strip on Saturday, while 22,000 aid trucks continue to sit outside the Strip waiting to bring much-needed food to Palestinians there. The United Nations office in Geneva on Sunday also warned that 1 million women and girls in Gaza are now starving. In a post on X, the UN said: 'One million. That's how many women and girls are starving in Gaza. This horrific situation is unacceptable and must end. We continue to demand the delivery of lifesaving aid for all women and girls, an immediate ceasefire, and the release of all hostages.' At least 175 people, including 93 children, have now been confirmed dead from forced starvation, according to the territory's Ministry of Health, including 17-year-old Atef Abu Khater, whose weight had dropped to just 25kg (55lbs) before he died on Saturday.
Al Jazeera
3 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
White House advisers defend Trump's firing of official behind jobs data
The White House has defended United States President Donald Trump's firing of the top official responsible for compiling employment statistics after her dismissal raised concerns about the future credibility of crucial economic data. Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), on Friday, claiming without evidence that the latest jobs report had been 'rigged' to make him look bad. On Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, denied that Trump was 'shooting the messenger' and questioned the accuracy of the figures showing much weaker hiring than previously reported. 'The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they're more transparent and more reliable,' Hassett told NBC News's Meet the Press, calling the downward revision of jobs growth for May and June 'unprecedented' and a 'historically important outlier'. 'And if there are big changes and big revisions – we expect more big revisions for the jobs data in September, for example – then we want to know why. We want people to explain it to us.' Speaking on Fox News later on Sunday, Hassett again poured doubt on the official figures, suggesting without evidence that employment statistics can sometimes contain 'partisan patterns'. 'I think what we need is a fresh set of eyes at the BLS, somebody who can clean this thing up,' he told Fox News Sunday. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer also defended Trump's dismissal of McEntarfer, saying the president had 'real concerns' about the jobs data. 'You want to be able to have somewhat reliable numbers,' Greer told CBS News' Face the Nation. 'There are always revisions, but sometimes you see these revisions go in really extreme ways. And it's, you know, the president is the president. He can choose who works in the executive branch.' The latest employment figures released on Friday showed that 258,000 fewer jobs were created in May and June than previously estimated, and that a fewer-than-expected 73,000 jobs were added in July, undermining Trump's insistence that the economy has not been negatively affected by his sweeping tariffs. Trump said on Sunday that he would announce a new BLS director, as well as a candidate to fill the position left open by the resignation of Federal Reserve governor Adriana Kugler, within the next few days. Trump's dismissal of McEntarfer, a career bureaucrat who was appointed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2024, has prompted condemnation from economists and both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. In a statement on Friday, The Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a group co-led by former BLS directors William Beach and Erica L Groshen, accused Trump of politicising the statistics agency and undermining confidence in official government data. 'US official statistics are the gold standard globally,' the group said. 'When leaders of other nations have politicised economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science.'
Qatar Tribune
6 hours ago
- Qatar Tribune
From Laos to Brazil, Trump's tariffs leave a lot of losers, but even the winners will pay a price
Agencies President Donald Trump's tariff onslaught this week left a lot of losers – from small, poor countries like Laos and Algeria to wealthy U.S. trading partners like Canada and Switzerland. They're now facing especially hefty taxes – tariffs – on the products they export to the United States starting Aug. 7. The closest thing to winners may be the countries that caved to Trump's demands — and avoided even more pain. But it's unclear whether anyone will be able to claim victory in the long run — even the United States, the intended beneficiary of Trump's protectionist policies.'In many respects, everybody's a loser here,'' said Barry Appleton, co-director of the Center for International Law at the New York Law School. Barely six months after he returned to the White House, Trump has demolished the old global economic order. Gone is one built on agreed-upon rules. In its place is a system in which Trump himself sets the rules, using America's enormous economic power to punish countries that won't agree to one-sided trade deals and extracting huge concessions from the ones that do. 'The biggest winner is Trump,' said Alan Wolff, a former U.S. trade official and deputy director-general at the World Trade Organization. 'He bet that he could get other countries to the table on the basis of threats, and he succeededdramatically.''Everything goes back to what Trump calls 'Liberation Day'' – April 2 – when the president announced 'reciprocal'' taxes of up to 50% on imports from countries with which the United States ran trade deficits and 10% 'baseline'' taxes on almost everyone else. He invoked a 1977 law to declare the trade deficit a national emergency that justified his sweeping import taxes. That allowed him to bypass Congress, which traditionally has had authority over taxes, including tariffs — all of which is now being challenged in retreated temporarily after his Liberation Day announcement triggered a rout in financial markets and suspended the reciprocal tariffs for 90 days to give countries a chance to negotiate. Eventually, some of them did, caving to Trump's demands to pay what four months ago would have seemed unthinkably high tariffs for the privilege of continuing to sell into the vast American market. The United Kingdom agreed to 10% tariffs on its exports to the United States — up from 1.3% before Trump amped up his trade war with the world. The U.S. demanded concessions even though it had run a trade surplus, not a deficit, with the UK for 19 straight years. The European Union and Japan accepted U.S. tariffs of 15%. Those are much higher than the low single-digit rates they paid last year — but lower than the tariffs he was threatening (30% on the EU and 25% on Japan). Also cutting deals with Trump and agreeing to hefty tariffs were Pakistan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Even countries that saw their tariffs lowered from April without reaching a deal are still paying much higher tariffs than before Trump took office. Angola's tariff, for instance, dropped to 15% from 32% in April, but in 2022 it was less than 1.5%. And while Trump administration cut Taiwan's tariff to 20% from 32% in April, the pain will still be felt. '20% from the beginning has not been our goal, we hope that in further negotiations we will get a more beneficial and more reasonable tax rate,' Taiwan's president Lai Ching-te told reporters in Taipei Friday. Trump also agreed to reduce the tariff on the tiny southern African kingdom of Lesotho to 15% from the 50% he'd announced in April, but the damage may already have been done that didn't knuckle under — and those that found other ways to incur Trump's wrath — got hit harder. Even some poorer countries were not spared. Laos' annual economic output comes to $2,100 per person and Algeria's $5,600 — versus America's $75,000. Nonetheless, Laos got rocked with a 40% tariff and Algeria with a 30% levy. Trump slammed Brazil with a 50% import tax largely because he didn't like the way it was treating former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is facing trial for trying to lose his electoral defeat in 2022. Never mind that the U.S. has exported more to Brazil than it's imported every year since 2007. Trump's decision to plaster a 35% tariff on longstanding U.S. ally Canada was partly designed to threaten Ottawa for saying it would recognize a Palestinian state. Trump is a staunch supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Switzerland was clobbered with a 39% import tax — even higher than the 31% Trump originally announced on April 2. 'The Swiss probably wish that they had camped in Washington'' to make a deal, said Wolff, now senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 'They're clearly not at all happy.'' Fortunes may change if Trump's tariffs are upended in court. Five American businesses and 12 states are suing the president, arguing that his Liberation Day tariffs exceeded his authority under the 1977 law. In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade, a specialized court in New York, agreed and blocked the tariffs, although the government was allowed to continue collecting them while its appeal wend its way through the legal system, and may likely end up at the U.S. Supreme Court. In a hearing Thursday, the judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sounded skeptical about Trump's justifications for the tariffs. 'If (the tariffs) get struck down, then maybe Brazil's a winner and not a loser,'' Appleton portrays his tariffs as a tax on foreign countries. But they are actually paid by import companies in the U.S. who try to pass along the cost to their customers via higher prices. True, tariffs can hurt other countries by forcing their exporters to cut prices and sacrifice profits — or risk losing market share in the United States. But economists at Goldman Sachs estimate that overseas exporters have absorbed just one-fifth of the rising costs from tariffs, while Americans and U.S. businesses have picked up the most of the tab. Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Ford, Best Buy, Adidas, Nike, Mattel and Stanley Black & Decker, have all hiked prices due to U.S. tariffs 'This is a consumption tax, so it disproportionately affects those who have lower incomes,'' Appleton said. 'Sneakers, knapsacks ... your appliances are going to go up. Your TV and electronics are going to go up. Your video game devices, consoles are going to up because none of those are made in America.'' Trump's trade war has pushed the average U.S. tariff from 2.5% at the start of 2025 to 18.3% now, the highest since 1934.
