The News
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would resume the war in Gaza after a temporary pause in hostilities comes to an end.
A six-week truce was agreed last month, but at a press conference with US President Donald Trump, Netanyahu reiterated his longstanding demand for total victory, saying “Hamas will continue the battle to destroy Israel.”
The peace process has been thrown into turmoil by Trump’s recent suggestion that the US could “take over” Gaza, two Middle East analysts wrote for Semafor. The comment was “widely understood on the Arab Street… as endorsing ethnic cleansing,” said Arab News Editor-in-Chief Faisal J. Abbas. But, Al Arabiya’s Hadley Gamble wrote, it threw down a gauntlet to Arab states: “Trump is telling the Middle East to take care of its own problems.”