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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Saturday that he had signed a declaration to expedite delivery of approximately $4 billion in military assistance to Israel, in what he cast as US President Donald Trump’s rejection of restrictions placed by predecessor Joe Biden.

The Trump administration, which took office on January 20, has approved nearly $12 billion in major foreign military sales to Israel, Rubio said in a statement, adding that it “will continue to use all available tools to fulfill America’s long-standing commitment to Israel’s security, including means to counter security threats.”

BRUSSELS, March 1 (Reuters) - NATO chief Mark Rutte said on Saturday he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that he needs to find a way to restore his relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump after their clash at a White House meeting on Friday.

The confrontation flared over differing visions of how to end Russia's three-year-old invasion, with Zelenskiy seeking strong security guarantees from a Trump administration that has embraced diplomacy with Vladimir Putin's Russia.

The meeting, which Rutte described as "unfortunate", plunged ties between Kyiv and its top military backer to a new low. "I said: I think you have to find a way, dear Volodymyr, to restore your relationship with Donald Trump and the American administration. That is important going forward," Rutte told the BBC, commenting on a call he had with Zelenskiy on Friday.

If Israel is forced to resume fighting against Hamas in Gaza, the U.S. is expected to provide full support, according to Col. (Ret.) Rich Outzen, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.

He told ILTV that even under the previous administration of President Joe Biden, the amount of military aid and ammunition that was withheld from Israel was “very, very minor.”

“With the Trump office, I suspect whatever his reservations and whatever his tempering language and maybe even criticism at some points, you'll still see full military support,” Outzen said.

Outlawed Kurdish militants have declared a ceasefire with Turkey after a landmark call by the jailed PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan, asking the group to disband.

It was the first reaction from the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) after Öcalan this week called for the dissolution of the group and asked it to lay down arms after fighting the Turkish state for more than four decades.

“In order to pave the way for the implementation of leader Apo’s call for peace and democratic society, we are declaring a ceasefire effective from today,” the PKK executive committee said, referring to Öcalan and quoted by the pro-PKK ANF news agency.

“We agree with the content of the call as it is and we say that we will follow and implement it,” the committee, which is based in northern Iraq, added. “None of our forces will take armed action unless attacked.”

The PKK, designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the US and the EU, has waged an insurgency since 1984 with the aim of carving out a homeland for Kurds, who account for about 20% of Turkey’s 85 million people.

The last time Nassar al-Hammouni talked to his son, Ayman, it was by telephone and the 12-year-old was overflowing with plans for the coming weekend, and for the rest of his life. He had joined a local football team and planned to register at a karate club that weekend. When he grew up, he told Nassar, he was going to become a doctor, or better still an engineer to help his father in the construction job that took him away from their home in Hebron every week.

None of that – the football, the karate or his imagined future career – will happen now. Last Friday, two days after the call to his father, Ayman was killed, shot by Israeli fire, video footage seen by the Guardian suggests.

The killing of children on the West Bank is no longer out of the ordinary, particularly since the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stepped up operations in the occupied territory after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and the beginning of the Gaza war. The intensity has increased since the January ceasefire in the strip.

The University of Cambridge has lost a High Court bid to secure “a draconian” five-year ban on pro-Palestine protests on some of its sites, rights groups have said.

The University of Cambridge attempted to argue that the injunction until 2030 was urgently required before graduation ceremonies this weekend, but the judge dismissed this application, saying he would grant only a “very narrow and limited court order” until tomorrow.

Saudi Arabia’s forces are accused of using indiscriminate force against migrants on their borders, with reports of deaths and injuries and multiple accounts of women being raped.

Ethiopian migrants attempting to cross from neighbouring Yemen between 2019 and 2024 have given accounts to the Guardian of coming under machine gun fire and of seeing bodies rotting in the border area.

“I personally saw three people die next to me,” said one Ethiopian, who attempted to cross at night into Saudi’s Najran province with dozens of others in 2022. “One of my legs was blown away by the Saudi fire. There were body parts of the injured and the dead all around me.”

Another migrant talked of sustaining shrapnel wounds to his leg and back. A third alleged witnessing the rape of three Ethiopian women by men in Saudi border guard uniforms. Others described beatings and sexual assault.

A network of Telegram channels with Russian links is encouraging UK residents to commit violent attacks on mosques and Muslims and offering cryptocurrency in return, campaigners have warned.

The channels have already been linked to real world events in the form of Islamophobic graffiti sprayed on mosques and schools in east and south London earlier this month, sometimes with the names of the groups mentioned. Those incidents are under investigation by the police.

The same groups have also been sharing PDFs containing bomb-making recipes and designs for 3D-printed weapons. Posters with QR codes for the groups and associated TikTok accounts have also appeared on British streets.

However, there has been alarm in recent weeks after a switch in the group’s language from encouraging graffiti to explicitly calling on people to carry out knife attacks.

All the talk now is of how we might defend ourselves without the US. But almost everyone with a voice in public life appears to be avoiding a much bigger and more troubling question: how we might defend ourselves against the US.

As Keir Starmer visits the orange emperor’s court in Washington, let’s first consider the possibilities. I can’t comment on their likelihood, and I fervently hope that people with more knowledge and power than me are gaming them. One is that Donald Trump will not only clear the path for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, but will actively assist him.

Now consider our vulnerabilities. Through the “Five Eyes” partnership, the UK automatically shares signals intelligence, human intelligence and defence intelligence with the US government. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed that the US, with the agreement of our government, conducts wholesale espionage on innocent UK citizens. The two governments, with other western nations, run a wide range of joint intelligence programmes, such as Prism, Echelon, Tempora and XKeyscore. The US National Security Agency (NSA) uses the UK agency GCHQ as a subcontractor.

Donald Trump may be pursuing a mineral rights deal with Vladimir Putin and Russia as well as with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine, a top Senate Democrat has warned, discussing the US president’s demand that Kyiv grant US firms access to 50% of its rare-earth reserves, as a price for helping end the war three years after Russia invaded.

“I think anything that helps position Ukraine for any peace negotiations is a positive move,” said Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Senate foreign relations and armed services committee, who recently visited Ukraine.

“Now, what we heard when we were in Ukraine is that 40-50% of those mineral deposits are actually in territory controlled by the Russians. Maybe part of the deal is President Trump is going to get a deal with Vladimir Putin on the mineral rights too. So … that could be a little tricky.”

Shaheen was speaking to the One Decision podcast, hosted by the former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, the former CIA director Leon Panetta and the reporter Christina Ruffini.

On 23 January, faculty and staff from the City University of New York’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC) union voted 73-70 in favour of a resolution to divest from Israeli companies and government bonds and recommended the teacher’s pension divest $100m from Israeli companies and bonds.

However, less than a month after the resolution passed, union leadership organised a re-vote on the divestment resolution - which led to a 113-63 vote against it on 20 February.

Now, members of a university labour union have expressed concern that months of hard work to pass a resolution to boycott and divest from Israel had been undemocratically overturned by leadership.

CUNY’s PSC union is said to have around 30,000 members and is one of the largest academic unions in the country.

Speaking to the Middle East Eye about the union leadership’s move to hold a re-vote and revoke the resolution, Evan Rothman, sponsor of the resolution in the delegate’s assembly to boycott and divest, said union leadership had cited two aberrations - which impacted a total of four votes - as the key reason for conducting a second vote.

However, Rothman believed that the union leadership’s intense scrutiny of the electoral process and the decision to “fix” procedures was unusual and unprecedented.

“To me, this is another instance of the Palestine exception where we saw colleges and universities across the country bring out all of these policies that were understood to be formalities but never enforced,” Rothman said.

The villa is stunning. The private swimming pool; the lush, landscaped terrace with firepit; the long dining table with its expansive balcony view; the pingpong table; the piano. But the jewel in the crown, according to the Airbnb listing, is the experience of watching the sun rise over the nearby mountains from the luxury of the generous master bedroom.

The villa with views of the Judean mountains is in a settlement located on land seized from Palestinians and considered illegal under international humanitarian law. Only a handful of Palestinians are allowed to enter this, and other, Israeli settlements in the West Bank, usually as labourers with special permits.

Exclusive analysis carried out by the Guardian found 760 rooms being advertised in hotels, apartments and other holiday rentals in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, on two of the world’s most popular tourism websites.