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Israel says it will sue New York Times over article on sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Nethanyahu, and foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, have threatened to sue the New York Times for defamation over the publication of an essay by Nicholas Kristof detailing allegations that Palestinian women, men and children have been raped and sexually abused in Israeli military detention. “Following the publication by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times of one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar have instructed the initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times,” Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs wrote in a social media post on Thursday. “They defamed the soldiers of Israel and perpetuated a blood libel about rape, trying to create a false symmetry between the genocidal terrorists of Hamas and Israel’s valiant soldiers,” Netanyahu added in a statement to Reuters. “We will fight these lies in the court of public opinion and in the court of law. Truth will prevail.” “This threat, similar to one made last year, is part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a New York Times spokesperson, said in a Thursday statement. “Any such legal claim would be without merit. “Nick has covered sexual violence for decades, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s best on-the-ground journalists in documenting and bearing witness to sexual abuse experienced by women and men in war and conflict zones,” the statement continued. The paper has repeatedly defended Kristof’s reporting over the last few days. Kristof’s interviews with 14 men and women “were corroborated with other witnesses, whenever possible, and with people the victims confided in – that includes family members and lawyers”, said Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for the Times, in a statement posted on Wednesday. “Details were extensively fact-checked, with accounts further cross-referenced with news reporting, independent research from human-rights groups, surveys and in one case, with U.N. testimony. Independent experts were consulted on the assertions in the piece throughout reporting and fact-checking.” It is not clear in which jurisdiction Israeli officials would bring the lawsuit or whether defamation claims could even be filed by a government. “There is no chance a US court would countenance such a case,” said David A Logan, a professor emeritus at the Roger Williams School of Law and media law expert. There is a legal consensus, he added, that the first amendment bars lawsuits or prosecutions of critics of government brought by the government. Mark Stephens, an expert in international media law, called the idea of Israel suing the Times “ludicrous”. “Libel is about hurt feelings, being shunned and avoided and isolated as a human (sentient) being,” he said in an email. “This is as much about politics as it is about law – and courts are alert to the difference.” Kristof’s piece, which was published in the Times’ opinion section on Monday, details allegations of sexual abuse, including rape, at the hands of Israeli prison guards, soldiers, settlers and interrogators, and sometimes involving dogs. In the piece, Kristof wrote that he found the victims he interviewed by asking around among lawyers, human rights groups, aid workers and “ordinary Palestinians”. He noted that while he was able to corroborate many of their stories, in some cases “it was not possible, perhaps because shame left people reluctant to acknowledge abuse even to loved ones”. He notes that “there is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes” and extensively quotes Israeli officials’ rejection of the story’s allegations. The Guardian has also published accounts of sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli custody, and recently reported that Israeli soldiers and settlers were using sexual assault as a tool to force Palestinians out of their homes in the occupied West Bank. Allegations of sexual assault of detainees in Israeli detention have also been documented by Israeli and international human rights groups such as B’Tselem and Save the Children, among others. But Kristof’s story prompted furious backlash against the Times from Israel supporters. “Have they – the NY Times – no sense of decency and journalistic responsibility?” wrote Deborah Lipstadt, a former envoy to combat antisemitism under the Biden administration. Earlier this week, Israel’s foreign ministry accused the Times of purposely having published Kristof’s piece the night before the publication of an official Israeli report alleging systematic sexual violence by Hamas on and following 7 October 2023. The statement prompted the Times to issue a public response rejecting the allegations. The paper also publicly rejected allegations of internal discussions at the Times about “source credibility and lack of evidence”. “There is no truth to this at all,” Stadtlander said then. It is not the first time Israeli officials have threatened to sue the Times. Last year, Netanyahu said in an interview with Fox News that the Times “should be sued” over its coverage of starvation in Gaza. “I’m actually looking at whether a country can sue the New York Times,” Netanyahu said at the time. “And I’m looking into it right now, because I think it’s such a – it’s such clear defamation. I mean, you put a picture of a child that’s supposed to then represent all these supposedly starving children, yet they put in this picture of a child who has cerebral palsy.” Israel did not follow through on that threat. A spokesperson for the Times said at the time that “attempts to threaten independent media providing vital information and accountability to the public are unfortunately an increasingly common playbook, but journalists continue to report from Gaza for the Times, bravely, sensitively, and at personal risk, so that readers can see firsthand the consequences of the war.”

Tape shows Bolsonaro son asking jailed banker for $26.8m to fund film on father

Flávio Bolsonaro, Brazil’s leading rightwing presidential hopeful, has been caught on tape asking a banker accused of corruption for $26.8m (£20m) to fund a film about his father, the former president Jair Bolsonaro. The leaked voice memos and text messages were published on Wednesday by the Intercept Brasil, and later acknowledged by Flávio Bolsonaro, a far-right senator who is tied in polls with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ahead of October’s election. The incident was already being seen as the most serious blow since the senator announced his candidacy as his father’s representative, since the former president is under house arrest after being convicted over an attempted coup. In the recordings, Flávio Bolsonaro can be heard asking for R$134m ($26.8m) towards a “heroic” biopic in which Jair Bolsonaro is played by Jim Caviezel, who portrayed Jesus in Mel Gibson’s 2004 Passion of the Christ. The requests were made to the banker Daniel Vorcaro, who is currently in prison and at the centre of what many consider the country’s largest banking fraud and one of the biggest corruption scandals in recent history, with total losses estimated at R$60bn. In the messages, which were sent before his arrest – but when many of the accusations against him were already widely known – Flávio refers to the banker as “brother” and presses him for payment to ensure Caviezel and director Cyrus Nowrasteh were paid. “We’re at a very decisive moment for the film and, as there are a lot of outstanding payments, everyone is tense … Imagine us defaulting on someone like Jim Caviezel, or Cyrus … It would be very bad,” the younger Bolsonaro can be heard saying. The revelations triggered a significant backlash, even among the far right. Romeu Zema, the governor of Minas Gerais who is a presidential hopeful but has largely avoided criticising the Bolsonaros, called the recordings “a slap in the face to decent Brazilians”, while a conservative congressman suggested it might be better to replace Flávio on the ticket with Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle. “The blow to Flávio’s campaign is brutal – by far the worst news for his campaign so far,” said the sociologist Celso Rocha de Barros. “Flávio’s anti-establishment credentials, which helped him draw level with Lula, could quickly erode,” added Barros. Vorcaro was the majority shareholder in the small private Master Bank, and is accused of defrauding many of its 800,000 clients out of hundreds of millions of pounds by offering returns far above market rates. To cover losses and keep expanding, he allegedly paid millions in bribes to public officials and politicians. Vorcaro denies all the allegations and is awaiting trial in prison. The scandal has rattled Brazilian society from football, religion, politics and the judiciary – and first touched the Bolsonaro family last week, when police accused senator Ciro Nogueira, a former senior member of the ex-president’s cabinet, of having received monthly bribes of up to R$500,000 to act in the banker’s interests. Nogueira denies the allegations. When Flávio’s messages to Vorcaro were revealed on Wednesday, he initially denied the story, but later admitted it, saying it was “a son seeking private sponsorship for a private film about his father’s story”. In the messages, he invites Vorcaro to a private dinner with Caviezel and Nowrasteh in São Paulo, and the banker responds by suggesting it be held at his home. Caviezel and Nowrasteh are not accused of wrongdoing; neither man responded to a request for comment. Bolsonaro did not respond to requests for comment and, in his social media post, did not say whether he ultimately received the money. However, an advertising executive reportedly hired to broker the deal told the newspaper O Globo that at least ($12m) had been paid, and documents submitted to tax authorities and mentioned by the newspaper reportedly show that part of the funds was indeed transferred to an intermediary company. The sum is far above the budgets of two internationally successful Brazilian films: I’m Still Here, which won the Oscar for best international feature in 2025 with a budget of $8.9m, and The Secret Agent, nominated for best picture in 2026 with $5.6m. Some have drawn comparisons between the unusually high budget for Brazilian standards and the $40m plus $35m spent on marketing by Amazon for a documentary about the US first lady, Melania Trump. In Bolsonaro’s case, the film’s production company and its executive producer and screenwriter – a former Bolsonaro minister – denied that the project received any funds from Vorcaro or his bank. Barros said: “The budget is completely out of step with a national production, and the foreign participants are not top-tier. The way this money was raised still needs to be investigated … The producers say the money never reached them. So where did it go?”

Israeli nationalists chant ‘death to Arabs’ in violent Jerusalem Day march

Israeli nationalists chanted “death to the Arabs”, “may your villages burn” and “Gaza is a graveyard” in a state-sponsored march through Jerusalem to mark the anniversary of the city’s capture and annexation. The annual assertion of Jewish control over Palestinian East Jerusalem has grown more extreme in recent years, and Thursday’s event culminated with the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, unfurling an Israeli flag in front of the al-Aqsa mosque, the holiest Islamic site in the city. Most Palestinians in the Muslim quarter of the Old City had shuttered their shops and gone home before the march began, but members of far-right radical Jewish groups who had entered scuffled with Palestinian residents still there, with both sides throwing chairs at each other, until separated by police who entered the city that afternoon in force. “I’ve come to show all the world that this is our city. This is the Holy Land. God gave us this country and this city,” a 19-year-old marcher, Ariel Amichai, said. Asked what the intended message of the march was to Palestinians in Jerusalem, he replied: “That they must leave. This is our country. And they can’t just be here and try to stab us or kill us.” Amichai, who is from Modi’in, 43km from Jerusalem, said he believed that Jerusalem Day, marking the capture of the east side of the city in 1967, was the only day when Jews could enter the Muslim quarter through the Damascus Gate, though Israeli Jews and Palestinians use the gate on a daily basis. Marchers were bused in from around Israel and from settlements in the occupied West Bank in a vast operation funded by the Jerusalem municipality and government ministries. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, also took part in Thursday’s march. Once Palestinians had left the Old City, much of the tension was between government-backed marchers and members of a Jewish group, Standing Together, which had come to protect Palestinian residents from political violence. Suf Patishi, a Standing Together organiser, said a record 400 volunteers had turned up in hi-vis vests in the organisation’s trademark purple, on a day fraught with risks. “We wanted to really cover each and every corner of the city to make sure that we prevent attacks against Palestinians,” Patishi said. “Yes, it is dangerous to us, but nothing like the danger to the Palestinians that are living here.” There were a few religious Jews among the protective cordon of counter-protesters. An ultra-orthodox man with a long grey beard and gold coat said he had come from northern Israel and gave his name only as David. “I’ve become appalled by the violent behaviour of people in my community,” David said. “I’m a man of faith, religious, and they’re doing this in our name, and I felt I should do something to contrast that. This is a desecration of God’s name, so the only way to remedy that is to do the opposite, a Kiddush Hashem, a sanctification of God’s name.” On the al-Aqsa compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, Ben-Gvir danced with supporters singing “the Temple Mount is in our hands”, as he unfurled an Israeli flag. The national security minister has led a campaign to erode the 59-year status quo, dating back to the Israeli capture of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, under which non-Muslims are forbidden from praying in the sacred area. On Thursday evening, Ben-Gvir wrote on his Telegram social media account: “59 years after the liberation of Jerusalem, I raised the Israeli flag on the Temple Mount and we can proudly say: We have returned governance to the Temple Mount.”

Photo of US-China delegation criticized over absence of women: ‘masculine, militarized and exclusionary’

By the time Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Thursday, the bilateral had featured all the expected pomp and pageantry: a meticulously choreographed display of Chinese soldiers, children waving American and Chinese flags, and rows of senior officials and the US’s top business executives. Conspicuously absent at the table, however, were women from either delegation – a stark visual that quickly drew criticism from observers who saw it as an unmistakable display of patriarchal power. In a tweet that has attracted over 22,000 likes overnight, Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard University, wrote: “A painting of the end of meritocracy: A meeting of the two largest economies and not one woman at the table.” Speaking to the Guardian, Gopinath elaborated on her comments, saying: “We have somehow gravitated back to this idea that what matters is your network and not your capabilities – and that matters [in terms of] whether or not you get a seat at the table.” She added: “It’s just inexplicable how you end up with a single-gender table, given the many talented women around the world. Halima Kazem, associate director for Stanford University’s program in feminist, gender and sexuality studies, echoed similar sentiments. Comparing Thursday’s images to bilateral meetings during Barack Obama’s presidency, Kazem said: “We’ve gone backward. Obama-era US-China summits included women at the table. Now neither superpower thinks women belong in the room where great power politics happens. This isn’t just American failure – it’s a bilateral signal that women’s voices don’t matter in shaping the global order.” Women seated at previous US-China bilateral meetings during Obama’s presidency included Liu Yandong, China’s then vice-premier, as well as Susan Rice, US national security adviser, and Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state. Kazem pointed to the type of power being ostensibly signaled by both sides, saying: “This wasn’t about lack of qualified women – both countries have plenty in their diplomatic and security establishments. This was a choice about what kind of authority to project: masculine, militarized, and exclusionary. “When both superpowers perform power this way, they’re jointly defining what ‘serious’ diplomacy looks like and who gets excluded from it,” she added. Despite the absence of women at Thursday’s bilateral meeting in the Great Hall of the People, a small handful of women did accompany Trump on his two-day visit to Beijing, including Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, as well as Jane Fraser, the Citigroup CEO, and Dina Powell McCormick, the Meta president.

For anxious Taiwan, Trump’s silence after Xi talks is best possible outcome

Before this week’s summit between the Chinese and US presidents, Taiwan had been cast as the anxious bystander. Observers suggested that Taipei feared the unpredictable and transactional Donald Trump might overturn Washington’s longstanding support for the island democracy, which Beijing claims as a breakaway province, during Thursday and Friday’s talks. But while the US president hailed his “great” meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, when the leaders emerged on Thursday afternoon, he took an uncustomarily muted approach as he sidestepped questions on Taiwan. A White House readout of the meeting published later also omitted mention of the country. Trump may have been reading the room. Shortly before the meeting, Xi took a firm tone, declaring that “Taiwan independence” and peace in the Taiwan strait were “incompatible”. Xi said: “If it is handled properly, the relationship between the two countries [China and the US] will remain generally stable. If it is not handled well, the two countries will collide or even conflict, pushing the entire Sino-US relationship into a very dangerous situation.” Wen-Ti Sung, a non-resident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, said Xi’s tone was “surprisingly firm for summit diplomacy”. That was intended to signal to Trump that the “Taiwan issue remains the reddest of red lines” for Beijing. Xi’s message was “get Taiwan right and we are friends; get Taiwan wrong and we might become foes before you know it”, Sung said. Taiwan’s ministry of foreign affairs issued a swift and firm retort to Xi, saying: “The Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to one another.” But beyond this customary sparring, Taipei will be quietly pleased at the meeting’s outcome, not least the silence from Washington, according to William Yang, a senior analyst focusing on China for the Crisis Group. While Trump and Xi are to meet again on Friday, Yang believes that will be focused on trade and investment deals, and Taipei may have already breathed a “sigh of relief”. Yang said: “[Taipei] would welcome Taiwan being mentioned as little as possible. They’d rather have Taiwan not mentioned than Taiwan mentioned in a way that marks a departure from longstanding US policy.” Before Trump’s arrival in Beijing on Wednesday evening, Xi had been expected to press him on arms sales to Taipei. Beijing regards Taiwan as a breakaway province, despite never having ruled it, and refuses to renounce the right to use of force to take it. Washington acknowledges China’s claim without endorsing it, and maintains a policy of strategic ambiguity in which it says it could – but may not – intervene to protect Taiwan should the island be invaded. The US also supplies Taiwan with the means to defend itself, through arms sales. Before the meeting, China’s Taiwan affairs office reiterated its “consistent and unequivocal” opposition to these arms sales, condemning Washington’s “military ties with China’s Taiwan region”. In December, the Trump administration angered Beijing by announcing an $11bn (£8bn) weapons package for Taiwan. Another package worth about $14bn has reportedly been awaiting Trump’s signoff for months, with a bipartisan group of US senators last week urging him to move forward with it. The president now faces added impetus to do so, after Taiwan’s parliament ended a 16-month impasse on Friday when opposition parties passed a much-reduced $25bn defence budget financing those purchases.” Before Trump’s meeting with Xi, commentators speculated the US president’s need for Beijing’s support to end his intractable war with Iran could set the stage for some kind of “grand bargain”, in which he made concessions on US support for Taiwan. But the tenor of Xi’s statement suggests the Chinese leader “may not want to place Taiwan within that framework”, said Alexander Huang, chair of the Taiwan-based thinktank the Council on Strategic and Wargaming Studies. Huang said: “Xi did not openly ask Trump to say or commit something on Taiwan. This is because Xi believes the Taiwan question should be handled strictly between [Taipei and Beijing]. Openly asking Trump for specific words or actions would give the impression that Taiwan is a bargaining chip up for trade.”

Ukraine hit by second day of large-scale Russian missile and drone strikes

Russian missiles and drones are pounding Ukraine for a second day, as almost continuous heavy attacks hit the country, with Kyiv bearing the brunt of an assault that has killed at least eight people, including a 13-year-old, and injured 44 in the capital. The overnight attacks followed heavy daylight raids with missiles and drones across the country on Wednesday, one of the longest single attacks of the war. “As of now, already five people have been reported killed in Kyiv as a result of last night’s Russian attack,” the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote in a statement on social media. “There must be a just response to all these strikes,” he added, saying he had ordered Ukraine’s armed forces to prepare options for retaliation. The assault began at 3am on Thursday with hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles fired by Moscow, with the sound of explosions echoing through Kyiv. Water and power supplies were disrupted in the east of the city. The scale of the Russian attacks and their intensity appeared to put paid to claims by the US president, Donald Trump, that a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine was close, following recent remarks by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, that the war may be approaching an end. Ukraine’s air force said the latest attack involved 56 missiles of various types and almost 700 drones. Separately, Ukraine reported that Russian drones on Thursday had struck a UN vehicle in the southern city of Kherson. Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said a large apartment block had collapsed in the city’s Darnytskyi district. “Eighteen apartments have been destroyed. A rescue and search operation is ongoing. According to preliminary information, 11 people have been rescued from the building,” he told local media. “Forty people have been injured in the capital as a result of the enemy large-scale attack. Among them are two children. Thirty-one of the injured have been taken to hospital, including one child.” Ukraine’s interior minister, Ihor Klymenko, said “more than 10 people were still believed to be missing” from the attack. Wednesday’s daytime raids killed at least 14 people and injured more than 80 others. They appear to have included “double-tap” strikes aimed at first responders sent to the sites of attacks, and also struck two dozen sites associated with Ukraine’s railway system and other critical infrastructure. After strikes in western Ukraine close to the Hungarian border, Hungary summoned Russia’s ambassador on Thursday, a stark example of the change brought about by the election of Péter Magyar as prime minister after years of cosy relations between Budapest and Moscow under his predecessor Viktor Orbán. The scale of the recent raids led to warnings that Russia was attempting to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defence systems by swarming them with drones and missiles. In a late afternoon post on Wednesday, Zelenskyy had described the raids as “one of the longest [and most] massive Russian attacks against Ukraine”, suggesting Moscow’s aim was to spoil the “political atmosphere” during Trump’s visit to China. He added that Ukraine’s intelligence had assessed Moscow was attempting to overwhelm Kyiv’s air defences through the scale and intensity of the attacks to cause “as much grief and pain as possible”. The attacks followed Trump’s latest claims of progress in negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow, which were offered on Wednesday with scant detail and followed similar unfounded claims. “The end of the war in Ukraine I really think is getting very close,” the US president told reporters as he left the White House for a summit in Beijing. “Believe it or not, it’s getting closer.” His comments followed remarks by Putin in a speech last weekend that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was possibly coming to an end. The attacks came as Ukraine’s battlefield prospects appeared to have been improving in recent months. It has gone from pleading for international help with its defence to offering other countries expertise on how to counter attacks thanks to its domestically developed drone technology.