President Donald Trump has signed an executive order sanctioning the International Criminal Court, accusing it of “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel”.

The measure places financial and visa restrictions on individuals and their families who assist in ICC investigations of American citizens or allies.

Trump signed the measure as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was visiting Washington.

Last November, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in Gaza, which Israel denies. The ICC also issued a warrant for a Hamas commander.

A White House memo circulated on Thursday accused the Hague-based ICC of creating a “shameful moral equivalency” between Hamas and Israel by issuing the warrants at the same time.

Trump’s executive order said the ICC’s recent actions “set a dangerous precedent” that endangered Americans by exposing them to “harassment, abuse and possible arrest”.

“This malign conduct in turn threatens to infringe upon the sovereignty of the United States and undermines the critical national security and foreign policy work of the United States government and our allies, including Israel,” the order said.

• International Criminal Court: What is the ICC and what does it do?

The US is not a member of the ICC and has repeatedly rejected any jurisdiction by the body over American officials or citizens.

The White House accused the ICC of placing constraints on Israel’s right to self-defence, while ignoring Iran and anti-Israel groups.

In his first term in office, Trump imposed sanctions on ICC officials who were investigating whether US forces had committed war crimes in Afghanistan. Those sanctions were lifted by President Joe Biden’s administration.

Last month, the US House of Representatives voted to sanction the ICC, but the bill foundered in the Senate.

The ICC was founded in 2002 – in the wake of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide – to investigate alleged atrocities.

Over 120 countries have ratified the Rome Statute – which established the ICC – while another 34 have signed and may ratify in the future.

Neither the US nor Israel is party to the Rome Statute.

The ICC is a court of last resort and is meant to intervene only when national authorities cannot or will not prosecute.

Trump’s executive order said that “both nations [the US and Israel] are thriving democracies with militaries that strictly adhere to the laws of war”.

During his last weeks in office, President Biden also criticised the ICC’s warrant for Netanyahu, calling the move “outrageous” and saying there was no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.

Trump’s signing of his latest executive order follows his announcement during a joint press conference with the Israeli prime minister on Tuesday about a plan for the US to “take over” Gaza, resettle its Palestinian population and turn the territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

After Arab leaders and the UN condemned the idea, the US president restated it on his Truth Social social media platform on Thursday.

“The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” Trump wrote, referring to the war between Israel and Hamas that is currently under a ceasefire.

He repeated that the plan would involve resettling Palestinians, and that no American soldiers would be deployed.

His post did not make clear whether the two million residents of the Palestinian territory would be invited to return, leaving officials scrambling to explain.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday any displacement would be temporary.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Gazans would leave for an “interim” period while reconstruction took place.

Netanyahu has praised Trump’s “remarkable” plan to re-make Gaza. On Thursday, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz ordered the military to prepare for the “voluntary departure” of Gaza’s residents.

He said the plan would include departures via land, sea and air.

Trump signed the order as Netanyahu continued his visit to Washington, meeting lawmakers from both the Republican and Democratic parties on Capitol Hill.

The Israeli prime minister also presented a golden pager to Trump.

The gift was a reference to Israel’s deadly operation against Hezbollah in September last year, using booby-trapped communications devices.

Dozens of people were killed and thousands injured in the attacks. Lebanese officials said civilians were hit in the explosions.

The tall, shiny buildings which rise out of the cornfields on the Myanmar side of the Moei river are a sight so jarring you find yourself blinking to be sure you haven’t imagined it.

Eight years ago there was nothing over there in Karen State. Just trees, a few roughly-built cement buildings, and a long-running civil war which has left this area of Myanmar one of the poorest places on earth. But today, on this spot along the border with Thailand, a small city has emerged like a mirage. It is called Shwe Kokko, or Golden Raintree.

It is accused of being a city built on scams, home to a lucrative yet deadly nexus of fraud, money-laundering and human trafficking. The man behind it, She Zhijiang, is languishing in a Bangkok jail, awaiting extradition to China.

But Yatai, She Zhijiang’s company which built the city, paints a very different vision of Shwe Kokko in its promotional videos – as a resort city, a safe holiday destination for Chinese tourists and haven for the super-rich.

The story of Shwe Kokko is also one of the unbridled ambition which has rippled out of China in the last two decades.

She Zhijiang dreamed of building this glittering city as his ticket out of the shadowy world of scams and gambling which he inhabited.

But by aiming so high he has drawn the attention of Beijing, which is now keen to stamp out the fraud operations along the Thai-Myanmar border which are increasingly targeting Chinese people.

Publicity about the scams is also hurting Thai tourism – Thailand is shutting down power to compounds over the border, toughening its banking rules and promising to block visas for those suspected of using Thailand as a transit route.

Shwe Kokko has been left marooned in post-coup, war-wracked Myanmar, unable to bring in the flow of investment and visitors it needs to keep going.

Yatai is trying to fix the city’s sinister image by allowing journalists to see it, holding out hope that more favourable reporting might even get She Zhijiang out of jail.

So they invited the BBC to Shwe Kokko.

Getting there is tricky.

Ever since construction began in 2017, Shwe Kokko has been a forbidden place, off-limits to casual visitors.

As the civil war in Myanmar escalated after the 2021 military coup, access became even more difficult. It takes three days from the country’s commercial hub Yangon – through multiple checkpoints, blocked roads and a real risk of getting caught in armed skirmishes. Crossing from Thailand takes just a few minutes, but requires careful planning to avoid Thai police and army patrols.

She Zhijiang’s colleagues took us on a tour, highlighting the newly-paved streets, the luxury villas, the trees – “Mr She believes in making a green city,” they told us. Our guide was Wang Fugui, who said he was a former police officer from Guangxi in southern China. He ended up in prison in Thailand, on what he insists were trumped-up fraud charges. There he got to know She Zhijiang and became one of his most trusted lieutenants.

At first glance, Shwe Kokko has the appearance of a provincial Chinese city. The signs on the buildings are written in Chinese characters, and there is a constant procession of Chinese-made construction vehicles going to and from building sites.

Yatai is vague about the tenants of all its buildings, as it is about many things. “Rich people, from many countries, they rent the villas,” they told us. And what about the businesses? “Many businesses. Hotels, casinos.”

However, most of the people we saw were local Karen, one of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities, who come into Shwe Kokko every day to work. We saw very few of the overseas visitors who are supposed to be the customers of the hotels and casinos.

Yatai says there are no more scams in Shwe Kokko. It has put up huge billboards all over town proclaiming, in Chinese, Burmese and English, that forced labour was not allowed, and that “online businesses” should leave. But we were quietly told by local people that the scam business was still running.

Starting a decade ago in the unchecked frenzy of Chinese investment on the Cambodian coast, then moving to the lawless badlands of Myanmar’s border with China, the scam operators have now settled along the Thai-Myanmar border. Around them, the Myanmar military and a hotch-potch of rebel armies and warlords are fighting for control of Karen State.

The scams have grown into a multi-billion dollar business. They involve thousands of workers from China, South East Asia, Africa and the Indian subcontinent kept in walled-off compounds where they defraud people all over the world of their savings.

Some work there willingly, but others are abducted and forced to work. Those who have escaped have told harrowing stories of torture and beatings. Some have come from Shwe Kokko.

We were able to speak to a young woman who had been working in one of the scam centres a couple of weeks before our visit. She had not enjoyed it and been allowed to leave.

Her job, she said, was as part of the modelling team, made up mostly of attractive young women, who contact potential victims and try to build an intimate online relationship with them.

“The target is the elderly,” she said. “You start a conversation like ‘oh you look just like one of my friends’. Once you make friends you encourage them by sending pictures of yourself, sometimes wearing your night clothes.”

Then, she explains, the conversation moves to get-rich-quick schemes, such as crypto investments, with the women claiming that’s how they made a lot of money.

“When they feel close to you, you pass them on to the chatting section,” she says. “The chatting people will continue messaging with the client, persuading them to buy shares in the crypto company.”

During our brief time in Shwe Kokko we were only allowed to see what Yatai wanted us to see. Even so, it was evident that the scams have not stopped, and are probably still the main business in the city.

Our request to see inside any of the newly-built office buildings were turned down. Those are private, they kept telling us. We were escorted at all times by security guards seconded from the militia group which controls this part of the border.

We were allowed to film the construction work, and the outsides of the buildings, but not to enter them. Many of the windows had bars on the insides.

“Everybody in Shwe Kokko knows what goes on there,” said the young woman who used to work in a scam centre.

She dismissed Yatai’s claim that it no longer permitted scam centres in Shwe Kokko.

“That is a lie. There is no way they don’t know about this. The whole city is doing it in those high-rise buildings. No-one goes there for fun. There is no way Yatai doesn’t know.”

“I can promise that Yatai would never accept telecom fraud and scams,” said She Zhijiang on a call from Bangkok’s Remand Prison, where he is being held.

Yatai wanted us to hear from the man himself, and hooked up a ropey video link. Only Mr Wang could be seen talking to him; we had to stay out of view of the prison guards, and had to rely on Mr Wang to put our questions to him.

Not much is known about She Zhijiang, a small-town Chinese entrepreneur who Beijing alleges is a criminal mastermind.

Born in a poor village in Hunan province in China in 1982, he left school at 14 and learned computer coding. He appears to have moved to the Philippines in his early 20s and into online gambling, which is illegal in China.

This is where he started to make his money. In 2014 he was convicted by a Chinese court of running an illegal lottery, but he stayed overseas.

He invested in gambling businesses in Cambodia, and managed to get Cambodian citizenship. He has used at least four different names.

In 2016, he struck a deal with a Karen warlord, Saw Chit Thu, to build a new city together. She Zhijiang would provide the funds, the Chinese construction machinery and materials, while Saw Chit Thu and his 8,000 armed fighters would keep it safe.

Glitzy videos by Yatai promised a $15bn (£12.1bn) investment and depicted a high-rise wonderland of hotels, casinos and cyberparks. Shwe Kokko was described as part of Xi Jinping’s Belt-and-Road Initiative or BRI, bringing Chinese funds and infrastructure to the world.

China publicly dissociated itself from She Zhijiang in 2020, and the Myanmar government launched an investigation into Yatai, which was building far beyond the 59 villas authorised by its investment permit and was operating casinos before these had been legalised in Myanmar.

In August 2022, acting on a Chinese request to Interpol, She Zhijiang was arrested and imprisoned in Bangkok. He and his business partner Saw Chit Thu have also been sanctioned by the British government for their links to human trafficking.

She Zhijiang claims to be a victim of double dealing by the Chinese state. He says he founded his company Yatai on the instruction of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, and insists that Shwe Kokko was then a part of the BRI.

He accuses China’s communist leadership of turning on him because he refused to give them control of his project. They wanted a colony on the Thai-Myanmar border, he says. China has denied any business relationship with She Zhijiang.

While he denied any wrongdoing on Yatai’s part, She Zhijiang, however, admitted to “a high probability” that scammers were coming to Shwe Kokko to spend their money.

“Because our Yatai City is completely open to anyone who can go in and out freely. Refusing customers, for a businessman like me, is really difficult. This is my weakness.”

It is, however, stretching credulity to believe that Yatai, which runs everything in Shwe Kokko, was unable to stop scammers coming in and out of the city.

It is also hard to think of any business other than scams which would choose to operate here.

With Thailand cutting off power and telecommunications, electricity comes from diesel generators, which are expensive to run. And communications go through Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system, which is also very costly.

Yatai’s strategy is “to whitewash the project to create a narrative that Shwe Kokko is a safe city”, says Jason Tower, from the United States Institute for Peace, which has spent years researching the scam operation in Shwe Kokko.

He says they may even “begin moving some of the more notorious components of the scam industry, like torture, into other zones”.

But he doesn’t think the plan will work: “What kinds of legitimate businesses will go into Shwe Kokko? It’s simply not attractive. The economy will continue to be a scam economy.”

When we were eventually allowed to see inside one casino in Shwe Kokko, run by a genial Australian, he told us they were going to close it down.

Inside the only customers were local Karen, gambling on a popular arcade-like game where they had to shoot digital fish. We were forbidden from doing any interviews. The back rooms, with the card and roulette tables, were empty.

The Australian manager said the casino – built six years ago – had been popular and profitable when there were just one or two of them, before the civil war. But these days, with at least nine in operation, there were not enough customers to go around.

The real money was in online gambling, which he said was the main business in Shwe Kokko.

It is impossible to know how much money is made through online gambling, and how much through outright criminal activities like money laundering and scams. They are usually run from the same compounds and by the same teams. When we asked Yatai how much money they made they would not tell us – not even a ballpark figure. That is private, they said.

The company is registered in Hong Kong, Myanmar and Thailand, but these are little more than shell companies, with very little income or revenue passing through them.

We turned down Yatai’s offer to see the go-kart track, water park and model farm that they have built. We did glimpse one other casino, while being taken to eat breakfast in Yatai’s own luxury hotel, though we could not go inside it. It seemed empty.

The only other facility we were allowed to see was a karaoke club, with spectacular private rooms, cavernous domes entirely covered in digital screens on which huge tropical fish and sharks swam.

They also ran video loops extolling the vision and virtues of She Zhijiang. This club too seemed deserted, except for some young Chinese women who worked there.

They wore opera masks to avoid being identified, and danced unenthusiastically to music for a few minutes before giving up and sitting down.

Interviews were not permitted. We were allowed to talk to a local Karen member of staff, but she was so intimidated by this we got little more than her name.

In his absence, She Zhijiang has left the running of Shwe Kokko to a young protégé, 31-year-old He Yingxiong. He lives with Wang Fugui in a sprawling villa they have built on the banks of the Moei River, overlooking Thailand, and guarded by massive Chinese bodyguards. There they play mahjong, eat the finest food and drink, and keep an eye on business.

Mr He has a slightly different explanation from his boss for the scams still operating under their noses. “We are just property developers,” he said. “I can guarantee that this kind of thing does not happen here.

“But even if it does, the local people have their own legal system, so it is their job to deal with it. Our job is just to provide good infrastructure, good buildings and supporting industries.”

But there is no legal system in this part of Myanmar, nor any government. It is ruled by the various armed groups which control different bits of territory along the Thai border.

Their commanders decide who can build or run a business, taking their cut to help fund their wars against the Myanmar military, or against each other. Many of them are known to be hosting scam compounds.

Mr He admitted that it was the war which had allowed Yatai to obtain the land so cheaply. Karen human rights groups have accused Saw Chit Thu of driving the original inhabitants off their land, with minimal compensation, though it is clear Yatai is also providing badly needed jobs for the locals.

It is the lawlessness of Karen State which makes it so appealing to illegal businesses – and that doesn’t help the image of Shwe Kokko.

Neither do recent headlines.

Last month a 22-year-old Chinese actor, Wang Xing, was rescued from a scam centre on the border after being lured to Thailand with an offer of work on a movie shoot. His disappearance spurred a barrage of questions on Chinese social media, forcing the Thai and Chinese authorities to mount a joint operation to free him.

Chinese tourists have been cancelling their holidays in Thailand, fearing for their safety. Other rescues have followed.

The BBC has been sent emails by some scam victims pleading for help; rescue organisations believe there are still thousands trapped. Nearly all are in smaller compounds along the border south of Shwe Kokko.

Yatai stressed to us that they are not the same as these rougher operations, some little more than a collection of sheds built in forest clearings. That is where all the bad things happen now, they said.

They talked about KK Park, a notorious compound south of the border town of Myawaddy, and Dongmei, a cluster of low-rise buildings run by a prominent Chinese crime lord called Wan Kuok Koi, better known as Broken Tooth.

That distinction hasn’t helped She Zhijiang, who once had the ear of politicians, police bosses and even minor royalty in Thailand. Today he appears to have lost even the influence he once had in prison, to buy himself special privileges. He has complained of being roughed up by the guards.

His lawyers are appealing against the Interpol red notice used to justify his arrest, but China’s voice will probably be loudest in determining his fate.

From our interview with him, Shi Zhijiang seemed genuinely outraged over his sudden reversal of fortune.

“Before, I had no understanding of human rights, but now I really understand how horrible it is to have human rights infringed upon,” he said.

“It is hard to imagine how the human rights of ordinary people in China are trampled upon when a respected businessman like me, who used to be able to go to the same state banquets as Xi Jinping, does not have his human rights and dignity protected in any way.”

It seems he really did believe he could build something which would one day transcend Shwe Kokko’s sordid origins as a scam city.

What happens to it now is hard to guess, but if the Thai and Chinese governments keep acting to shut down the scams, the money will start to dry up.

Israel’s defence minister has told its military to prepare a plan to “allow any resident of Gaza who wishes to leave to do so”, in line with President Donald Trump’s proposal for the US to take over the territory and resettle its 2.1 million Palestinians elsewhere.

Israel Katz said Gazans should have “freedom of movement and migration” and countries critical of Israel’s war with Hamas were “obligated” to take them in.

Trump meanwhile said Gaza would be “turned over” to the US by Israel “at the conclusion of fighting”.

But the Palestinian presidency reiterated its rejection of the plan, which it has said would violate international law, and insisted that “Palestine… is not for sale”.

The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

More than 47,550 people have been killed and 111,600 injured in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Most of Gaza’s population has also been displaced multiple times and almost 70% of its buildings are estimated to be destroyed or damaged.

Healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene systems have collapsed and there are shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter.

• Bowen: Trump’s Gaza plan won’t happen, but will have consequences
• ‘We won’t go out of Gaza’: Palestinians express shock and defiance
• Why does Trump want to take over Gaza and could he do it?
• How 15 months of war have drastically changed life in the territory
• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained

The Israeli defence minister wrote on X on Thursday that he welcomed the US president’s “bold initiative”, saying it could “support long-term reconstruction efforts in a demilitarized, threat-free Gaza after Hamas”.

Katz announced that he had instructed the Israeli military to “prepare a plan that will allow any resident of Gaza who wishes to leave to do so, to any country willing to receive them”.

“The plan will include exit options via land crossings, as well as special arrangements for departure by sea and air,” he said.

“Countries such as Spain, Ireland, Norway, and others, which have falsely accused Israel over its actions in Gaza, are legally obligated to allow Gazans to enter their territory. Their hypocrisy will be exposed if they refuse.”

He alleged that Hamas was preventing people leaving Gaza and said that they should have “the right to freedom of movement and migration”.

Hamas official Basem Naim accused Katz of trying to cover up for “a state that has failed to achieve any of its objectives in the war on Gaza” and said Palestinians would refuse to leave.

Meanwhile, the spokesman for the Palestinian presidency asserted that “Palestine, with its land, history and holy sites, is not for sale”.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh also said the Palestinians would “will not give up an inch of their land”, whether in Gaza or the occupied West Bank.

“The Palestinian people and their leadership will not allow the repetition of the catastrophes of 1948 and 1967, and will thwart any plan aimed at liquidating their just cause through investment projects whose place is neither in Palestine nor on its land.”

The 1948 “Nakba”, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee or driven from their homes before and during the war that followed the creation of the State of Israel.

Many of those refugees ended up in Gaza, where they and their descendants make up three quarters of the population. Another 900,000 registered refugees live in the West Bank, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war along with Gaza, while 3.4 million others live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, according to the UN.

Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, though it retained control of its shared border, airspace and shoreline, giving it effective control of the movement of people and goods. The UN still regards Gaza as Israeli-occupied territory because of the level of control Israel has.

On Wednesday, Jordan’s king expressed its “rejection of any attempts to annex land or displace Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank”, while Egypt’s foreign minister stressed the importance of reconstruction “without the Palestinians leaving the Gaza Strip”.

Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the UK and other countries – said Trump’s plan was “absurd” and would “only put oil on the fire” in the region.

The UN human rights office warned that any forcible transfer in, or deportation of, people from occupied territory was strictly prohibited under international law.

The UN’s secretary general also said it was “essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing” and stressed that Gaza would be an integral part of a future Palestinian state.

Antonio Guterres told a meeting in New York that the world had “seen a chilling, systematic dehumanisation and demonization of an entire people”.

Trump unveiled his plan for the US to take “long-term ownership” of Gaza and oversee its reconstruction during a visit to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.

The president said most of the Palestinians living in Gaza would have to be relocated to achieve his vision of creating “the Riviera of the Middle East”, and that they would be housed in Jordan, Egypt and other countries.

“I hope we can do something where they wouldn’t want to go back,” he said, echoing earlier remarks in the Oval Office where he talked about resettling people “permanently”.

At the White House briefing on Wednesday, spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt was asked to confirm whether all Palestinians who wanted to stay in Gaza would be allowed to do so.

“I can confirm that the president is committed to rebuilding Gaza and to temporarily relocating those who are there because… it is a demolition site,” she replied, appearing to contradict the president.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said the idea was for Gazans to leave the territory for an “interim” period while debris was cleared and reconstruction took place.

On Thursday, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that Gaza would “be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting”.

A ceasefire in effect between Israel and Hamas has halted the war and aims to lead to a permanent end to the fighting.

“The Palestinians… would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region. They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free,” he added.

The president also said no US soldiers would be needed to maintain stability.

In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Israel’s prime minister called Trump’s proposal “remarkable” and something that should be “examined, pursued and done”.

Netanyahu also suggested that Gazans would be able to return, saying: “They can leave, they can then come back, they can relocate and come back, but you have to rebuild Gaza.”

On 26 January, thousands of displaced Lebanese, who had been living across the country, tried to return to their homes in southern Lebanon.

They travelled in convoys, played revolutionary songs and waved, proudly, the yellow Hezbollah flag. Many found out that, aer more than a year of war, there were no homes to return to. They mourned what had been lost and, in the rubble of destroyed buildings, put up posters remembering the group’s late leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

The date marked the end of a deadline for the withdrawal of Israeli troops, part of a ceasefire brokered by the US and France, that required Hezbollah to remove its weapons and fighters from the south. The deal would also see the deployment of thousands of Lebanese soldiers in the area. But Israel said Lebanon had not fully implemented the deal and, as a result, not all invading forces pulled out. Lebanon also accused Israel of procrastination.

Unsurprisingly, there was violence. In some areas, Israeli soldiers opened fire and 24 people, including a Lebanese soldier, were killed. Still, for Hezbollah, which has been the dominant force in southern Lebanon for decades, the violence was an opportunity to project strength, after being battered in the conflict with Israel. But can the group survive a wave of changes in Lebanon, and the re-shaping of power in the Middle East?

Over the years, Hezbollah, the Shia Muslim militia, political and social movement, cemented its position as Lebanon’s most powerful group. Backed by Iran, it built a military force more formidable than the Lebanese army. The use of violence was always an option. A strong parliamentary bloc meant that no major decision was possible without its consent while Lebanon’s fractured political system gave it representation in the government. In short, Hezbollah had the ability to paralyse the state – and many times did so.

The latest conflict started in October 2023, when Hezbollah opened a second front against Israel as Israel launched a war in Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks. The hostilities escalated dramatically last September, as Israel had penetrated the group in ways then unimaginable. First, pagers carried by its members exploded. Then their walkie-talkies. An unrelenting air campaign and subsequent invasion of the south killed more than 4,000 people including many civilians, left areas with a significant presence of Shia Muslims – which form the bulk of Hezbollah’s support – in ruins, and severely damaged the group’s arsenal.

Many of its leaders were assassinated, most notably Nasrallah, who had been Hezbollah’s face for more than three decades. His successor, former number two Naim Qassem, who is not as charismatic or influential, has admitted they suffered painful losses. The ceasefire deal that came into force in November was essentially a surrender by the group, which is considered a terrorist organisation by the US, the UK and others.

In this new reality, last month, Lebanon’s parliament finally elected a new president – former army chief Joseph Aoun, who was favoured by the Americans – after more than two years of impasse that critics attributed to Hezbollah. Weakened, the group could not block the process as it had done in the past.

In another sign of its diminished position, Aoun then named as prime minister Nawaf Salam, who was serving as president of the International Court of Justice, and someone not aligned with the group.

Hezbollah, for now, seems to be focused on another priority: its base. The group has told its followers that the loss in the war is a victory, but many know the truth is different. Their communities are destroyed, and the damage to buildings is estimated to be over $3bn (£2.4bn), according to the World Bank.

In a country with a collapsed economy, no one knows who will help – if anyone, as international assistance has been conditioned on the government taking measures that would curb Hezbollah’s power. The group has paid compensation to some families, as it did after the 2006 war, but there are already indications of discontent.

“If people are still living in tents in six months’ time, or on the rubble of their homes, they may start to blame Hezbollah rather than the government or Israel. This is why they’re investing so much effort now to try to pre-empt that,” says Nicholas Blanford, a Beirut-based non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programmes and the author of Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel. “In the current context, you can push back a little bit against Hezbollah.”

But any action against Hezbollah comes with risks.

On 26 January, hours after people tried to return to the south, young men on motorbikes drove through non-Shia areas of Beirut and other places at night, honking and carrying Hezbollah flags. Residents in some areas confronted them. In a country where sectarian divisions run deep and many still remember the days of the 1975-1990 civil war, the convoys were seen as an intimidation tactic.

Mr Blanford said Hezbollah had “the implicit threat of violence” because of its military arm. “If you push them too hard,” he said, “they will slap you back very hard”. A Western diplomatic official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss private talks, told me: “We’ve been telling players here [the opposition] and in other countries: if you corner Hezbollah, it will probably backfire, and the risk of violence is a real possibility.”

Still, a new chapter has been opened in Lebanon, a country exhausted by pervasive corruption, government mismanagement and seemingly endless violence. It is a combination that has resulted in a dysfunctional state.

Addressing the Lebanese parliament in his inaugural speech, Aoun promised ambitious and long-delayed reforms with the knowledge that, without profound changes, Lebanon cannot be rescued. He vowed to rebuild public institutions, revive the economy, and, crucially, make the Lebanese army the sole carrier of weapons in the country. Aoun did not mention Hezbollah by name, but this is what he meant. The chamber enthusiastically applauded him; Hezbollah parliamentarians observed in silence.

But the decision about Hezbollah’s existence as a military power will probably be made far from Lebanon – in Iran. For decades, Tehran invested with weapons and money in a regional alliance it calls the Axis of Resistance, which constituted a ring of fire around Israel. Hezbollah was its main player. With thousands of well-trained, battle-hardened fighters and a vast arsenal that included long-range precision-guided missiles on Israel’s doorstep, the group acted as a deterrent against an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

This deterrence, for now, is gone – and rebuilding it, if that is Iran’s wish, will not be easy.

The fall of the Assad regime in Syria in December – in part because of Hezbollah’s setbacks – has interrupted the land corridor Tehran used to arm and fund the group. Israel, which has gathered extensive intelligence about Hezbollah, says it will continue to carry out attacks on the group to prevent its attempts to rearm.

Mr Blanford told me that “only Iran can really answer fundamental questions” about Hezbollah. “There is a possibility where either Iran or they [Hezbollah] decide to try to think differently, to disarm or become only a political party and social movement,” he said. “[But] this [ultimately] is Iran’s decision, out of the hands of Hezbollah.”

I asked a source familiar with Hezbollah’s internal affairs whether it was realistic to talk about the group’s disarmament. The issue, the source said, could be part of a “bigger, regional negotiation”, in what appeared to be a reference to indications by Iran that it is willing to reach an agreement with the West over its nuclear programme. “And there’s a difference between giving up weapons entirely or working under a framework with the state about their use, which is another possibility,” the source added.

Lebanon’s new leaders are under pressure to act quickly. Foreign allies see the reshaped balance of power in the Middle East as a chance to weaken Iran’s reach even further while the Lebanese are anxious for some stability and to have a sense that the rules apply to everyone. People here dislike when they are described as “resilient”, given their ability to carry on amid the chaos. “All we want is to live in a ‘normal country’,” I heard from a frustrated resident in a mainly Christian area of Beirut last year. It is also the case that after so much suffering, even Hezbollah’s supporters may be questioning what role the group should play.

Hezbollah is unlikely to return to what it was before the war. Disarming may not be as unthinkable as it once was.

A US judge has temporarily halted President Donald Trump’s plan offering incentives to federal workers to voluntarily resign before a Thursday midnight deadline.

Federal Judge George O’Toole Jr said the plan would be paused until a hearing on Monday when he could determine the merits of a lawsuit filed by federal employee unions, reported CBS, the BBC’s US partner.

The offer is part of an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to slash the size of the federal government.

The White House says more than 40,000 employees have accepted the offer to resign in exchange for pay until 30 September. Some workers have voiced confusion about the terms of the deal.

The order came hours before Thursday’s 23:59 EST (04:59 GMT Friday) deadline for federal workers to accept the offer.

A lawyer for the justice department said federal employees would be notified that the deadline had been paused, CBS reported.

The White House appeared to see the temporary halt as a way to increase the number of resignations.

“We are grateful to the Judge for extending the deadline so more federal workers who refuse to show up to the office can take the Administration up on this very generous, once-in-a-lifetime offer,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

An Office of Personnel Management (OPM) statement said the agency would continue processing resignations until an extended deadline of 23:59 local time on Monday.

“The program is NOT being blocked or canceled,” it said. “The government will honor the deferred resignation offer.”

The Trump administration, which previously said it hoped for as many as 200,000 employees to accept its offer, told US media they expected a spike in participation just ahead of the deadline.

“It’s going to save the American people tens of millions of dollars,” Leavitt told reporters outside the White House’s West Wing before the judge paused the programme.

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The American Federation of Government Employees, a union, filed the lawsuit against the OPM, arguing it had violated the law, that it could not fund the deal, and that it had given conflicting guidance about its terms.

The union said in an email to members that the offer was part of an “effort to dismantle the civil service and replace the skilled, professional workforce with unqualified political appointees and for-profit contractors”.

The union noted that Congress has not passed a budget for funding beyond mid-March, arguing that it was unclear whether agencies could pay workers until September.

On Thursday, the union said it was “pleased” by the judge’s actions.

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Some federal employees have described their shock at the buy-out proposal, which was delivered in the form of a late-night email with the subject line “Fork in the Road”. Some thought the email was spam.

“The tone of the initial email was like ‘you may be cut anyway,'” Monet Hepp, a medical support specialist at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, previously told BBC. “People were blindsided by it.”

Democrats have questioned the legality of the resignation package and warned it would lead to a “brain drain” that would be “felt by every American”.

“Without the expertise and institutional knowledge that so many federal employees bring to their work, our government will be incapable of responding effectively to national emergencies, serving the American public, or even carrying out routine operations,” Democrats on the House Oversight Committee wrote in a letter to President Trump.

On Tuesday, the Central Intelligence Agency became the first national security department to extend the offer to its staff. Former US intelligence officials and several lawmakers have raised concerns that this offer could undermine US national security.

There are also reports of impending cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the weather-forecasting agency, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Ippei Mizuhara, the former interpreter of Los Angeles Dodgers baseball star Shohei Ohtani, has been sentenced to nearly five years in prison for a fraud and gambling scheme.

He was ordered to pay back nearly $17m (£13.6m) that he’d stolen from the star athlete and another $1m to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in taxes.

Mizuhara, who had been Ohtani’s English interpreter since his US Major League Baseball (MLB) debut in 2018, was fired amid media reports last year about his gambling activities, which prompted investigations into Ohtani’s finances.

A probe revealed Mizuhara stole nearly $17m from the athlete to pay off debts owed to a southern California bookmaker.

He then lied on tax records to hide his actions. He pleaded guilty to bank and tax fraud charges.

“Mr Mizuhara had a unique position of trust that gave him power, brought him fame, and paid him well,” said Acting United States Attorney Joseph McNally. “Unfortunately, he exploited this dream job to steal millions of dollars from his friend and confidant.”

“This is a sad tale of an American success story gone wrong – so wrong that Mr Mizuhara will be spending years inside a prison cell.”

Sitting in a courtroom in Santa Ana, California, Mizuhara was wearing a light black suit with his hands folded in his lap, staring straight ahead at the judge as he delivered his ruling.

When the verdict was announced, he was motionless.

Before being sentenced, he apologised for his actions.

“I am truly sorry to Mr Ohtani for what I have done. I know an apology will not fix the crime I committed,” he said. “This mistake will impact me for the rest of my life and I’m prepared to accept the consequences.”

The scheme threatened to derail Ohtani’s career – currently one of baseball’s biggest global stars – as questions swirled about whether he was involved in the gambling scheme.

His translator, at first, claimed the star was aware of his gambling addiction and loaned him funds – a claim that Ohtani initially confirmed. He later clarified that his comments to reporters were not accurate and part of Mizuhara’s scheme, saying “all of this has been a complete lie”.

The MLB has strict rules against sports betting and it is illegal in California, though it is allowed in 38 other US states.

Ohtani has largely remained silent on the matter but released a statement on the scandal back in March saying: “I am very saddened and shocked that someone who I trusted has done this.”

In court, Judge John Holcomb said that after Mizuhara is released from prison, he will be on three years of probation, which will include drug and alcohol testing and continuing treatment for his gambling addiction.

Mizuhara has been granted a 45-day surrender date and will turn himself in on 24 March to serve his 57-month sentence.

Mizuhara, who was born in Japan, could also face deportation following the completion of his sentence.

Asked outside of the courthouse by the BBC about whether he will appeal, Mizuhara’s attorney said “no comment.”

Beyond the stolen funds, Mizuhara also purchased several autographed baseball cards using Ohtani’s money.

These cards, valued at approximately $325,000, were intended for resale, but Ohtani has since petitioned a federal judge to gain ownership of the cards as part of the recovery process.

Mizuhara admitted to falsifying his 2022 tax return and underreporting $4.1m in income derived from the scheme. He owes about $1.15m in unpaid taxes, plus penalties and interest.

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His sentencing was delayed several times before Thursday.

It was originally scheduled for 25 October last year, which would have coincided with the first game of the World Series in which Ohtani was playing, but prosecutors agreed to move it to 20 December. The Dodgers ended up winning the series.

The December date was then delayed to allow a forensic psychiatrist to evaluate Mizuhara’s gambling addiction. Mizuhara’s legal team used that report to argue for leniency, citing his co-operation and efforts to address his addiction.

During a previous court appearance, Mizuhara admitted to the charges against him and acknowledged his struggles with betting.

“I deeply regret my actions and the harm I have caused to Mr Ohtani and his family,” Mizuhara said. “I let my personal issues spiral out of control, and I betrayed the trust of someone who gave me everything.”

Although the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí never visited India, his artworks are set to be displayed in the country for the first time.

Starting Friday, an exhibition in the capital Delhi will showcase an expansive collection of more than 200 of his original sketches, etchings and watercolour paintings.

The collection has been curated by Christine Argillet, daughter of Pierre Argillet, a French collector who was also Dalí’s friend and publisher.

“Dalí was fascinated by India, especially, the West’s fascination with Indian mysticism in the 1960s and 1970s,” Ms Argillet told the BBC.

Some of the sketches in the collection are based on photographs her father had taken during a trip to India in the 1970s, when the hippie movement was at its peak and young guitar-toting Americans visited India on spiritual quests.

Dalí’s India features elephants and temples but, as with all his artwork, they’re not always easy to spot, having been rendered in the artist’s trademark surrealist style.

In his works, human bodies sprout flowers from their heads; eyeballs dance in a matrix of squiggles and strokes and dismembered body parts interact animatedly with the world around them. Stare for longer than a minute and these disconnected shapes begin to form new connections and meanings in the mind’s eye.

“Appreciating Dalí’s art is like peeling back the layers of an onion; you can keep finding something new to marvel at,” Ms Argillet says.

Bringing Dalí’s work to India was a long and arduous endeavour, says Akshitta Aggarwal of Bruno Art Group, the international art gallery presenting the exhibition.

“The project took five years; every sketch and artwork had to be checked for its authenticity,” Ms Aggarwal says.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t the first time Dalí’s creations have come to India. In 1967, Dalí famously designed a set of whimsical ashtrays for Air India – the country’s national airline back then – which were handed out to first class passengers.

In return, Dalí demanded not money but a baby elephant. Uttara Parikh, the then deputy commercial director of Air India, recounted to Times of India newspaper how she initially went shopping for one in a zoo in Mumbai city but returned empty-handed.

She finally procured the baby elephant from a zoo in Bangalore city (now Bengaluru) and Air India flew the animal to Spain, where it was kept in a zoo until its death in 2018. (Dalí had exciting plans for the elephant, such as undertaking a journey across the Alps, but his wife dissuaded him from attempting to carry them out).

Dalí’s demand might seem outrageous, but those familiar with the artist and his legacy know that it was very much in keeping with his personality.

Born in Spain in 1904, Dalí grew up in a world that was embracing the avant-garde and responding to the fallout of two world wars. Creatives of his time, like Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and André Breton, were finding new ways to express themselves and their ideas and their artistic styles heavily influenced a young Dalí.

The surrealist movement, widely acknowledged to be founded by André Breton, resonated with him the most. Surrealist art advocated for a form of expression that was “dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason”, according to Breton.

Dalí was also heavily inspired by Sigmund Freud and his theories around psychoanalysis – a method of treating mental illnesses by focussing on conflicts originating in a person’s psyche. Dreams take on a special importance as they are believed to express a person’s repressed thoughts and urges.

Consequently, Dalí’s art reflects many of these ideas – they have an almost dream-like quality and through free association, the visuals take on meanings that are unique to the onlooker. There is also visceral, almost shocking imagery, much like forbidden desires lying hidden in the subconscious mind.

“Dalí was a free-thinker and he embraced all facets of the human condition, particularly the taboo and unsettling ones,” Ms Argillet says.

The artist’s outward persona reflected his colourful take on life. He dressed in flamboyant suits and sported a moustache that pointed upward so severely it seemed in danger of piercing his eyes. In a 1955 interview with the BBC, Dalí revealed the origins of his famous upturned moustache.

“Dates, you know the fruit? In the last moment of dinner, I [did] not clean my finger and I put a little in my moustache and it remains for all afternoon very efficiently,” he said but later revealed that he used a strong wax to shape his moustache.

In the same interview, he described his moustache as being “very gay, very pointed, very aggressive”.

Ms Argillet, who knew Dalí intimately through her childhood and teenage years and often spent her summers in Spain with her father, recollects Dalí being a humorous person who loved playing pranks and “shocking the bourgeois”.

He once encouraged her to take some sweets from his bedroom and throw them at fishermen at a nearby beach. Only the sweets turned out to be cherry bombs, annoying the fishermen and forcing a young Ms Argillet to run for cover.

“At one of his parties, he had a tortoise carry around an ashtray on its shell,” Ms Argillet says.

But she adds that he was also a shy, intuitive, observant person who had a knack for reading people’s minds. He painted in his studio in short pants and slippers and, according to Ms Argillet, it was Dalí’s shyness that made him over-perform in public.

“He was misunderstood by many. There were many layers to Dalí, just like his paintings,” Ms Argillet says.

“The closer you look at his paintings, the more you understand Dalí.”

Panama President José Raúl Mulino has accused the US of spreading “lies and falsehoods” after the US State Department claimed American government vessels were no longer required to pay a fee to transit through the Panama Canal.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has since rowed back on his department’s claim, but called the fee for American vessels “absurd” due to a treaty binding the US to protect the canal if it comes under attack.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced his desire to regain control of the waterway since taking office and has refused to rule out retaking it by force. He is due to speak with Mulino on Friday.

The Panama Canal is a 51-mile (82km) passage that links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across the Central American country.

All vessels are required to pay a fee, based on size and type, for crossing the waterway but US ships have priority of passage.

In a post on X on Wednesday, the State Department wrote: “U.S. government vessels can now transit the Panama Canal without charge fees, saving the U.S. government millions of dollars a year.”

Mulino reacted to the statement by saying he rejects “this method of managing bilateral relations on the basis of lies and falsehoods.”

He said he asked his ambassador in Washington to take “firm steps” to reject the claim, calling it “simply and plainly intolerable.”

Mulino added that US government vessels, including navy vessels, paid “$6-7m [£4.8-5.6m] a year” for the right of passage.

“It’s not as if the canal toll is breaking the economy of the United States,” he added.

The Panama Canal Authority (ACP) also made a statement saying it had “not made any adjustment” to tolls, adding that it was open to establishing a dialogue.

After Rubio and Mulino’s meeting, Panama announced it would not renew its membership of China’s infrastructure-building programme, known as the Belt and Road Initiative.

Rubio welcomed this move, calling it “a great step forward”, though Panama denied that the decision had been made at the request of the US.

Trump has expressed fears that China could close the canal to the US in the event of a crisis – something Panama and China have strongly denied.

On Wednesday, China’s Foreign Affairs spokesman, Lin Jian, said its partnership with Panama was yielding “fruitful results” and urged the country to “resist external interferences.”

Rubio met the canal’s administrator, Ricaurte Vásquez Morales alongside Mulino on Wednesday during his tour of Central America, where he demanded that Panama make “immediate changes” to the “influence and control” of China over the waterway.

This echoed Trump’s inaugural address, where he stated that the canal was being operated by China and he wanted to “take it back.”

Mulino has denied these allegations and rejected the plan, saying that the trade route “is and will remain” in Panama’s hands.

The US built the canal in the early 20th Century but, after years of protest, President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty with Panama in 1977 to gradually hand back control of the waterway. Trump has called this “a big mistake” since returning to office.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been on a tour of Central America to discuss migration and drug trafficking in the region.

Rubio’s statement responding to Mulino’s accusation of US “lies” was given at his last stop, the Dominican Republic.

Several more earthquakes have struck waters around the Greek island of Santorini just hours after authorities there declared a state of emergency.

The tourist hotspot has been rocked by seismic activity this week with thousands of earthquakes recorded since Sunday.

On Thursday evening, a 4.6 magnitude quake was recorded at 20:16 local time (18:00 GMT) in the sea between Santorini and another island, Amorgos, followed by a 4.2 magnitude quake roughly two hours later.

Santorini residents have begun night patrols amid fears of looting on the island, which has largely been left deserted as most residents have left.

More than 11,000 people have departed as authorities report earthquakes are being recorded on a minute-by-minute interval.

Experts have warned it is unclear when this period of “seismic crisis” on the popular tourist island might end.

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Thursday’s quakes have so far not been as severe as the 5.2 magnitude shock which occurred on Wednesday in waters between the two Greek islands.

So far no injuries have been reported, and there has also been no major damage on the island.

But authorities are preparing in case a larger quake hits. On Wednesday, they warned of landslide risks to parts of the island.

Magnitude refers to the size of an earthquake, with increases marked as decimal points.

A magnitude 6.0 and above is considered severe, whereas a magnitude 5.2, the strongest experienced so far in the region, is considered moderate.

On Thursday, Greek officials said the state of emergency for the island would be in place for nearly an entire month, until 3 March.

Greece is one of Europe’s most earthquake-prone countries. Seismologists have told the BBC it is difficult to predict how long the recent wave of seismic activity will last, with authorities warning it could go on for weeks.

“It is really unprecedented, we have never seen something like this before in [modern times] in Greece,” said Dr Athanassios Ganas, research director of the National Observatory of Athens.

He told the BBC: “We are in the middle of a seismic crisis.”

The “clusters” of quakes, which began on Friday, have puzzled scientists who say such a pattern is unusual because they have not been linked to a major shock.

Dr Ganas says they are seeing many earthquakes within a relatively small area, which don’t fit the pattern of a main shock and after shock sequence.

Those remaining on the island have raised fears of a potential tsunami. They have built makeshift defences from sacks placed along the island’s Monolithos beach, where buildings stand very close to the water.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who is expected to visit Santorini on Friday, struck an optimistic tone at a meeting of civil protection experts earlier on Wednesday.

“All plans have been implemented. Forces have been moved to Santorini and the other islands, so that we are ready for any eventuality,” he said.

He asked residents to “stay calm and cooperate with the authorities”.

Santorini is on what is known as the Hellenic Volcanic Arc – a chain of islands created by volcanoes – but the last major eruption was in the 1950s.

Greek authorities have said the recent tremors were related to tectonic plate movements, not volcanic activity.

Scientists cannot predict the exact timing, size or location of earthquakes.

King Charles and Queen Camilla are to host actor Stanley Tucci at a formal dinner on Friday evening to mark the confirmation of a state visit to Italy later this year.

The royal couple will travel to Italy in April and meet Pope Francis and Italian leaders, as well as carry out engagements in Rome and the ancient city of Ravenna, Buckingham Palace has confirmed.

It is expected to coincide with the King and Queen’s 20th wedding anniversary on 9 April.

Tucci – who presented Searching For Italy, a BBC programme celebrating Italian food and culture – will make a speech at an event at the royals’ Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire.

The Palace’s confirmation of the state visit to Italy suggests the King is well enough for an overseas journey, as he continues with his cancer treatment.

Tucci – an American of Italian descent starred in the Oscar-nominated Vatican thriller Conclave and has spoken about his experiences of throat cancer, which he said adversely affected his sense of taste.

The Italian-inspired evening at Highgrove will also be attended by the Italian ambassador to the UK, Inigo Lambertini.

Chef Francesco Mazzei will use local ingredients to cook an Italian menu, with the dishes reflecting the “slow food” style of cooking, which advocates fresh, regional dishes cooked in traditional ways.

Mixologist Alessandro Palazzi will be on hand to make drinks using Italian flavours and herbs grown at Highgrove.

The King – an enthusiast for art, culture and religion – has been a regular visitor to Italy, with this upcoming trip to be his 18th official visit.

State visits are carried out on behalf of the Foreign Office and there are likely to be meetings with senior Italian government figures – an effort to build relations with an important European partner – though full details of the itinerary are still to be revealed.

While there, the King and Queen may celebrate 20 years since their wedding in April 2005.

The date of the ceremony had to be changed because of the death of Pope John Paul II, with the then Prince Charles travelling to Rome to attend the funeral.

The visit to meet Pope Francis also coincides with 2025 being a special “jubilee” year for the Catholic church, held every 25 years.

The King and Queen will join the Pope for the celebrations as “Pilgrims of Hope”, according to the Palace.

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visited the Pope on the last such jubilee year in 2000.

The King has met Pope Francis on previous occasions, including at the Vatican in 2019 when the English-born Cardinal John Henry Newman was canonised as a saint.

This will be the first time they have met since Charles became monarch and supreme governor of the Church of England.

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India’s Foreign Minister S Jaishankar has told parliament the government is working with the US to ensure Indian citizens are not mistreated while being deported.

His statement came a day after a US military flight brought back 104 Indians accused of entering the US illegally.

One of the deportees told the BBC they had been handcuffed throughout the 40-hour flight, sparking criticism.

But Jaishankar said he had been told by the US that women and children were not restrained. Deportation flights to India had been taking place for several years and US procedures allowed for the use of restraints, he added.

Deportation in the US is organised and executed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“We have been informed by ICE that women and children are not restrained,” Jaishankar said.

He added that according to ICE, the needs of deportees during transit, including for food and medical attention, were attended to and deportees could be unrestrained during bathroom breaks.

“There has been no change from past procedure,” he added.

However Jaspal Singh, one of the deportees on the flight that landed in Amritsar city in the state of Punjab on Wednesday, told BBC Punjabi that he was shackled throughout the flight.

“We were tortured in many ways. My hands and feet were tied after we were put on the plane. The plane stopped at several places,” he said, adding that he was unshackled only after the plane landed in Amritsar.

The US has not given further details of how deportees were treated on the flight. Officials have said that enforcing immigration laws is “critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States” and it was US policy to “faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens”.

The US border patrol chief posted video showing deportees in shackles, saying the deportation flight to India was the “farthest deportation flight yet using military transport”.

President Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of undocumented foreign nationals a key policy. The US is said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered illegally.

Trump has said India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had assured him that the country would “do what’s right” in accepting US deportations.

In his statement on Thursday, Jaishankar said all countries had an obligation to take back their nationals who had entered other countries illegally. They often faced dangerous journeys and inhumane working conditions once they had reached their destinations, he said.

Fraudulent Indian travel agencies are known to take huge sums of money from people desperate to travel abroad for work, and then make them undertake dangerous journeys to avoid being caught by immigration officials.

Jaspal said he had taken a loan of 4m rupees ($46,000; £37,000] to travel to the US, a dangerous journey that took months and during which he saw bodies in the jungle of other migrants who had died on the route.

Opposition leaders have condemned the manner in which migrants were brought back to the country and have asked the government what action it plans to take over the treatment meted out to its citizens.

Congress MP Manickam Tagore called it “shocking and shameful”.

“The way the US is deporting Indians – chained like criminals – is inhumane and unacceptable,” he posted on X.

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said the US had the right to deport people who had entered the country illegally but criticised the manner in which they were deported.

“To send them like this abruptly in a military aircraft and in handcuffs is an insult to India, it’s an insult to the dignity of Indians,” he said.

This isn’t the first time that the US has faced the ire of politicians for allegedly mistreating migrants from their countries.

Last month, Brazil’s government expressed outrage after about 88 of its nationals arrived in their homeland handcuffed. The government said that it would demand an explanation from Washington over the “degrading treatment of passengers on the flight”.

Meanwhile, Colombia sent its own planes to collect deportees after Colombian President Gustavo Petro barred US military aircraft from landing, arguing that those on board were being treated like criminals.

Rights groups have urged countries to ensure deportees are treated humanely.

Hate symbols and terror offences will be punishable with mandatory jail terms ranging from one to six years in Australia, after parliament passed a series of amendments to hate crime laws on Thursday.

The new laws were passed following a wave of high-profile antisemitic attacks which have become a major topic of debate in the country.

The amendments have been described by the government as the “toughest laws Australia has ever had against hate crimes”.

But critics say that the governing Labor Party is caving to opposition demands and going against its own policy of opposing mandatory jail sentences.

Under the amendments, displaying hate symbols or performing a Nazi salute is now punishable with at least one year in prison.

Other penalties include a minimum of three years for financing terrorism and six years for committing or planning terrorist acts.

There have been several attacks on Jewish targets in Australia in recent months.

Last week authorities in Sydney found a caravan containing explosives and an antisemitic note.

The discovery came just a week after a childcare centre near a Jewish school and synagogue in Sydney was set on fire and antisemitic graffiti was seen on one of its walls.

In December, a synagogue in Melbourne was set alight with worshippers inside. No-one was seriously hurt in the incident, which sent shockwaves through the country.

Former Labor senator Kim Carr criticised the party for what he said was a “clear breach of the Labor party national platform”.

Labor opposes mandatory sentences on the grounds that such penalties do not reduce crime, undermine the courts’ independence and are often discriminatory in practice.

But opposition parties did not rush to welcome the new amendments either, accusing Labor of dragging its feet.

“The parliament is not acting today because of the decisiveness of the Labor Party,” Liberal senator James Paterson told reporters in Canberra.

“The prime minister has been dragged kicking and screaming to finally introduce tough legislation that will ensure there are real penalties for this behaviour.”

Performing the Nazi salute and displaying Nazi symbols such as the swastika, have been banned since January 2024 and carry up to one year in jail. The amendments on Thursday make the jail term mandatory.

“This is not about politics,” Home Affairs minister Tony Burke said on Wednesday night as the amendments were introduced to parliament.

“This is about whether the Australian Parliament believes it’s acceptable to advocate, threaten or commit violence against another person because of who they are, who they pray to or who they love.”

• Listen to Jeremy read this article on BBC Sounds

Donald Trump’s plan for the US to “take over” and “own” Gaza, resettling its population in the process, is not going to happen. It requires the co-operation of Arab states that have rejected it.

They include Jordan and Egypt – countries that Trump wants to take in Gaza’s Palestinians – and Saudi Arabia, which might be expected to foot the bill.

Western allies of the US and Israel are also against the idea.

Some – perhaps many – Palestinians in Gaza might be tempted to get out if they had the chance.

But even if a million left, as many as 1.2m others would still be there.

Presumably the United States – the new owners of Trump’s “Riviera of the Middle East” – would have to use force to remove them.

After America’s catastrophic intervention in Iraq in 2003, that would be deeply unpopular in the US.

It would be the final end of any lingering hope that a two-state solution was possible. That is the aspiration that a conflict more than a century old could be ended with the establishment of an independent Palestine alongside Israel.

The Netanyahu government is adamantly against the idea, and over years of failed peace talks, “two states for two peoples” became an empty slogan.

But it has been a central plank of US foreign policy since the early 1990s.

The Trump plan would also violate international law.

America’s already threadbare assertions that it believes in a rules-based international order would dissolve. Russia’s territorial ambitions in Ukraine and China’s in Taiwan would be turbocharged.

Why worry about all that if it is not about to happen – at least not in the way Trump announced in Washington, watched by a grinning and clearly delighted Benjamin Netanyahu?

The answer is that Trump’s remarks, however outlandish, will have consequences.

He is the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world – no longer a reality TV host and political hopeful trying to grab headlines.

Short-term, the disruption caused by his stunning announcement could weaken the fragile ceasefire in Gaza. One senior Arab source told me it could be its “death knell”.

The absence of a plan for Gaza’s future governance is already a fault line in the agreement.

Now Trump has provided one, and even if it does not come to pass, it presses very big buttons in the minds of Palestinians and Israelis.

It will nourish the plans and dreams of ultra-nationalist Jewish extremists who believe all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, and perhaps beyond, is a God-given Jewish possession.

Their leaders are part of Netanyahu’s government and keep him in power – and they’re delighted. They want the Gaza war to resume with the longer-term objective of removing the Palestinians and replacing them with Jews.

The finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said Trump had provided the answer to Gaza’s future after the 7 October attacks.

His statement said that “whoever committed the most terrible massacre on our land will find himself losing his land forever. Now we will act to finally bury, with God’s help, the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state.”

Centrist opposition leaders in Israel have been less effusive, perhaps fearing trouble ahead, but have offered a polite welcome to the plan.

Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups may feel the need to answer Trump with some kind of show of force against Israel.

For Palestinians, the conflict with Israel is driven by dispossession and the memory of what they call al-Nakba, “the catastrophe”. That was the exodus of Palestinians as Israel won its war for independence in 1948.

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• BBC Verify: Can Trump really take ownership of Gaza?

More than 700,000 Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes by Israeli forces. All but a handful were never allowed back and Israel passed laws it still uses to confiscate their property.

Now the fear will be that it is happening again.

Many Palestinians already believed Israel was using the war against Hamas to destroy Gaza and expel the population.

It is part of their accusation that Israel is committing genocide – and now they might believe Donald Trump is adding his weight to Israel’s plans.

• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained
• What is Hamas and why is it fighting with Israel in Gaza?
• What we know about the Gaza ceasefire deal

Just because Trump says something, that does not make it true or certain.

His statements are often more like opening gambits in a real estate negotiation than expressions of the settled policy of the United States.

Perhaps Trump is spreading some confusion while he works on another plan. He is said to crave the Nobel peace prize.

Middle East peacemakers, even when they do not ultimately succeed, have a strong track record of winning it.

As the world was digesting his Gaza announcement, he posted on his Truth Social platform his desire for a “verified nuclear peace agreement” with Iran.

The Iranian regime denies it wants nuclear weapons but there has been an open debate in Tehran about whether they are now so threatened that they need the ultimate deterrent.

For many years Netanyahu has wanted the US, with Israeli help, to destroy Iran’s nuclear sites. Doing a deal with Iran was never part of his plan.

During Trump’s first term, Netanyahu waged a long and successful campaign to persuade him to pull the US out of the nuclear deal Barack Obama’s administration signed with Iran.

If Trump wanted to throw the Israeli hard-right something to keep them happy as he makes overtures to the Iranians, he has succeeded.

But he has also created uncertainty and injected more instability into the world’s most turbulent region.

For most Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip there is already a painful history of forced displacement that is at the heart of their response to US President Donald Trump’s plan to take over the war-torn territory.

Speaking to the BBC, residents of a tent camp in the central town of Deir al-Balah expressed shock and defiance at the idea of being permanently resettled outside.

“Even if it costs us our souls, we will not leave Gaza,” said Mahmoud Bahjat, who is from the north. “We are against Trump’s decision. He ended the war but displacing us would end our lives.”

On the other hand, many Israelis have been expressing satisfaction at the radical ideas from the White House, particularly those on the far-right who seek to resettle Gaza.

Since a ceasefire took hold in Gaza – on the eve of Trump’s inauguration last month – there have been dramatic scenes of Palestinians returning to what is left of their homes.

Families have piled up possessions into cars and donkey carts or walked long distances along the coastal road, often just to reach piles of rubble.

According to the UN, at least 1.9m people, or about 90% of the population, across Gaza became displaced during 15 months of war.

The scenes of Palestinians on the move have echoed black-and-white footage from 1948 and the mass evacuations that took place during fighting before and after the creation of the state of Israel.

More than 700,000 people were then forced from their homes. The majority of Gazans are descendants of those original refugees.

Standing between rows of plastic sheeting in the Deir al-Balah camp, Jamalat Wadi says that her family has now sacrificed enough and that they are determined to build a new home.

“We endured a year and half of war. When [the Israeli military] finally withdraw from here, we want to remove the rubble and live on the land.”

“After the US made Israel destroy our houses in Gaza, he is telling us that Gaza is destroyed and we have to leave?” Ms Wadi goes on. “If there is only one drop of blood left in our children, we won’t go out of Gaza. We won’t give up on it!”

Many Palestinians we spoke to called on Jordan and Egypt – which Trump is pressing to take displaced Gazans – and for Saudi Arabia – which he wants to normalise relations with Israel – to hold out against US pressure.

• Why does Trump want to take over Gaza and could he do it?
• Trump’s Gaza plan will be seen as flying in face of international law

Since its establishment, Israel has rejected the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their historic homeland, as this would have left the Jewish people as a minority within its borders. Today, there are about 5.9m Palestinians registered by the UN, with most living in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Israel has long argued that those who were dispossessed should be absorbed by Arab countries, pointing out that thousands of Jews left these to come to Israel during the regional turmoil after it became a state.

Israeli officials suggest that by proposing to take over war-torn Gaza, creating a “Riviera of the Middle East” after resettling Palestinians elsewhere, the Trump administration is offering fresh thinking on a long-running conflict.

While Trump notably did not back the re-establishment of settlements in Gaza, settler leaders have reacted enthusiastically to the idea of displacement, calling on the Israeli government to act immediately.

Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war and began constructing settlements in both that are widely seen as illegal under international law. In 2005, Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza, although the UN still regards it as Israeli-occupied territory.

“Assuming Trump’s declarations about transferring Gazans to other countries throughout the world actualise, we need to move quickly and build settlements throughout the Gaza Strip,” stated the Nachala settlement organisation, which claims it has hundreds of activists ready to move there.

“No part of Israel should be left unsettled by Jews. If we leave any area desolate it is liable to be overtaken by our enemies,” Nachala added.

In contrast, the Israeli anti-occupation NGO, Peace Now, dismissed the Trump plan. It backs the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel as part of the long-standing international formula for peace in the region, known as the two-state solution.

Peace Now said there was “no feasible way to transfer two million Gazans” outside.

“It’s time to stop fantasising about ethnic cleansing and forced displacement in Gaza and face reality – there is only one solution that can guarantee security and stability in the Middle East: two states for two peoples and an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” it commented.

• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained
• What is Hamas and why is it fighting with Israel in Gaza?
• What we know about the Gaza ceasefire deal

Many Israelis and Palestinians are concerned about what the latest announcements could mean for the current talks on extending the Gaza ceasefire.

The next stage of the deal is meant to see the return of some 60 remaining Israeli hostages – not all of whom are alive – and a more permanent end to the fighting.

However, the brother of one Israeli hostage held by Hamas told us: “I don’t take what Trump says too seriously. It’s not realistic. He’s shooting for the stars.”

He added that this was “like with Canada” – referring to the US leader’s suggestions that it should become his country’s “51st state”.

Some Gazans did acknowledge that they felt one aspect of President Trump’s declaration was based on reality – his comments that the small coastal strip has become “unliveable”.

Last month, a UN damage assessment showed that clearing over 50m tonnes of rubble left in Gaza as a result of the heavy Israeli bombardment could take 21 years and cost up to $1.2bn.

Bilal al-Rantisi, a former customs worker, is in shock after arriving back in Gaza City with his wife and four children having spent more than a year displaced in the south.

“We have returned to a catastrophe, the worst in history,” he said despondently. “I found neither my home nor my siblings’ homes were standing. Trump doesn’t speak in vain. He knows that Gaza is no longer a place fit for human habitation.”

He said he was hoping to sell his car and his wife’s gold jewellery to raise funds.

“I will leave Gaza at the earliest possible opportunity. Yes, all Gazans oppose displacement but putting emotions aside, if people were given the chance, many would choose to leave.”

Donald Trump has shocked the world by suggesting the US could “take over” and “own” Gaza, resettling its population in the process.

The US president later repeated elements of the proposal on social media, saying Gaza would be “turned over” to the US by Israel under his plan.

The White House moved to clarify that the displacement of Palestinians would be temporary, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio described it as an “interim” arrangement.

But the proposal has continued to draw condemnation, including from across the Middle East, close US allies and the United Nations – and some analysts have raised fears Trump’s comments could destabilise the ongoing ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, said the idea was “worth paying attention to”.

It comes amid ongoing questions about the post-conflict future of Gaza, where the UN estimates around two thirds of buildings have been destroyed or damaged after 15 months of fighting.

Trump’s vague proposal could signal the largest shift in US policy on the Middle East in decades, upending widespread international consensus on the need for a Palestinian state – comprising Gaza and the occupied West Bank – to exist alongside Israel.

If Donald Trump is right about one thing, it is that decades of US diplomacy on Israel and the Palestinians have failed to resolve the conflict.

Peace proposals and presidents have come and gone but the problems have festered. Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the war in Gaza it triggered were the hideous results.

Trump made his millions as a property developer and, with that hat on, made a perfectly valid observation: if Gaza is to be rebuilt, from scratch in some places, it makes little sense for hundreds of thousands of civilians to be sheltering in the rubble.

The task of rebuilding Gaza will be monumental. Unexploded munitions and mountains of debris have to be removed. Water and power lines have to be repaired. Schools, hospitals and shops need to be rebuilt.

Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff has said that could take years – and while that goes on, the Palestinians will need to go somewhere.

However, rather than exploring ways of keeping them close to home, almost certainly in camps in the central and southern parts of the Gaza Strip, Trump says they should be encouraged to leave – permanently.

Trump believes that in their absence, an idyllic, American-owned “Riviera of the Middle East” will rise from the ashes, providing thousands of jobs, opportunities for investment and, ultimately, a place for “the world’s people to live”.

• BBC Verify: Can Trump really take ownership of Gaza?
• Analysis: Trump’s real-estate instincts clash with America First view

Where to begin?

Even for a president who spent much of his first term upending US Middle East policy – including moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognising Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights – this was an astonishing proposal.

In their wildest imaginations, no US president ever thought that solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict would involve taking over a chunk of Palestinian territory and evicting its population.

To be clear, to do this by force would be a grave violation of international law.

Some Palestinians would likely choose to leave Gaza and rebuild their lives elsewhere. Since October 2023, as many as 150,000 already have.

But others cannot or will not, either because they lack the financial means to do so or because their attachment to Gaza – part of the land they call Palestine – is simply too strong.

Many Gazans are descendants of people who fled or were driven from their homes in 1948 during the creation of the state of Israel – a period Palestinians call the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe.

The thought of another will be too painful for many and they will cling to their reduced lives in what remains of Gaza with a fierce determination.

For Palestinians who dream of a state of their own, alongside Israel, the loss of part of it will feel like an amputation.

Gaza has been physically separated from the West Bank since 1948. Previous rounds of negotiations, as well as Trump’s 2020 “Vision for Peace”, included plans for tunnels or railways that might link the two.

Now Trump is basically telling the Palestinians to give up on Gaza once and for all.

While he does not appear to be advocating the forced deportation of civilians – which is against international law – Trump is clearly encouraging Palestinians to leave.

Palestinian officials have already accused Israel of blocking the supply of tens of thousands of caravans which could help Gazans to stay put in less damaged parts of the territory while reconstruction takes place elsewhere.

The Arab countries who Trump says should accept as many as 1.8 million Gazan refugees, mainly Egypt and Jordan, have expressed outrage.

Both have enough problems of their own without this added burden.

• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained
• What is Hamas and why is it fighting with Israel in Gaza?
• What we know about the Gaza ceasefire deal

Gaza was occupied by Egypt for 19 years before it was seized by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.

It is still considered occupied by Israel under international law, which Israel disputes. It says the occupation ended in 2005, when it unilaterally dismantled Jewish settlements and pulled out its military.

Around three quarters of UN members recognise Gaza as part of a sovereign state of Palestine, though the US does not.

Cut off from the outside world by fences and an Israeli maritime blockade, it has never felt like a truly independent place.

Nothing and no one moves in or out without Israel’s permission, and an international airport – opened amid much fanfare in 1998 – was destroyed by Israel in 2001 during the second Palestinian uprising.

Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza, citing security reasons, after Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006 and ejected its rivals from the territory after intense fighting the following year.

Long before the latest war, Palestinians had come to regard Gaza as an open prison.

• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained

It goes without saying that the US has no legal claim to the territory and it is not at all clear how Trump intends to impose American rule.

As with his bullish claims about US control over Greenland or the Panama Canal, it is not yet clear whether Trump really means it or if the comments represent an opening, outlandish bargaining position ahead of a bruising set of negotiations on Gaza’s future.

Various plans have been discussed for the post-war governance of Gaza.

In December, the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, agreed to form a joint committee to oversee its administration – an agreement which has so far come to nothing.

At other times, discussions have focused on the creation of an international peacekeeping force, possibly made up of troops from Arab countries.

Last month, Reuters reported that the UAE, US and Israel had discussed the formation of a temporary administration in Gaza until a reformed Palestinian Authority (PA), which already has control in parts of the West Bank, was ready to take over.

However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously publicly insisted that the PA will have no role to play in running post-war Gaza.

In a limited sense, American boots are already on the ground. A US security firm has employed around 100 former US special forces to man a vital checkpoint south of Gaza City and screen the vehicles of Palestinians returning to the north for weapons.

Egyptian security personnel have also been seen at the same checkpoint.

These could be the first, tentative signs of an expanded international – and possibly US-led – presence in Gaza.

But that is hardly a US takeover, something that would require a large-scale military intervention in the Middle East – the sort of thing Trump has long told voters he wants to avoid.

Negotiations on phase two of the two-week-old ceasefire between Israel and Hamas have barely begun but it is hard to see how Trump’s bombshell remarks will help to advance them.

If Hamas feels the end product of this whole process is a depopulated Gaza – devoid not just of Hamas, but of all Palestinians – it may conclude there is nothing to talk about and hold on to the remaining hostages it took on 7 October 2023.

Netanyahu’s critics have accused him of looking for excuses to blow up the negotiations and resume the war. They are bound to conclude that, with these comments, Trump is a willing accomplice.

On the other hand, the Israeli prime minister’s right-wing backers have expressed satisfaction with the US takeover plan, potentially reducing the risk of cabinet resignations and making Netanyahu’s immediate political future appear more assured.

In that sense, Trump has given Netanyahu a powerful incentive to keep the ceasefire going.

Asked whether he agreed the US should recognise Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank, Trump said he had yet to take a position but that he would have an announcement to make in four weeks’ time.

That remark has caused alarm among Palestinians, for whom such an announcement would inevitably be seen as another nail in the coffin for a two-state solution.

Recognising the legitimacy of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank would be a hugely consequential move. Most of the rest of the world regards them as illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

During previous rounds of peace talks, negotiators recognised that Israel would get to hold onto large settlement blocs as part of a final agreement, probably in exchange for small chunks of Israeli territory.

In 2020, Trump brokered the Abraham Accords, which secured the historic normalisation of relations between Israel and two Arab nations, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain.

The UAE signed that agreement on the understanding Israel would not annex parts of the West Bank – an understanding which may now be in jeopardy.

When a real-estate developer becomes the US president, don’t be surprised if American foreign policy includes a heavy helping of real-estate development.

That’s probably the biggest conclusion to draw from Donald Trump’s stunning proposal for the US to take over Gaza and turn it into a resort for all the people of the world to enjoy – a “Riviera of the Middle East”, in his words.

It also presents the latest iteration of a question that has persisted as long as Trump has been involved at the highest level of American politics.

Should Trump’s Gaza development plan, which includes the resettlement of more than two million Palestinians and US “ownership” of the contested lands be taken literally or seriously? Both, or neither?

Trump’s proposal flies in the face of the deeply held wishes of the Palestinian people and has been summarily rejected by the Arab nations that would have to play an integral part in resettling those displaced from war-torn Gaza.

It has also triggered howls of protest from the international community, as well as the president’s domestic critics in the Democratic Party.

“Developing war-torn land like a Trump golf resort isn’t a peace plan, it’s an insult,” said Democratic Congressman Troy Carter of Louisiana. “Serious leaders pursue real solutions, not real estate deals.”

• Live Updates:Trump’s Gaza plan

• Why does Trump want to take over Gaza and could he do it?

Even some of Trump’s most steadfast Republican allies have seemed wary of the president’s suggestion that US forces could occupy Gaza, clearing rubble and removing unexploded Israeli ordinance.

“I think most South Carolinians would probably not be excited about sending Americans to take over Gaza,” Lindsey Graham, who represents South Carolina in the US Senate, said on Wednesday. “I think that might be problematic, but I’ll keep an open mind.”

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky was even more blunt.

“I thought we voted for America First,” he wrote on X. “We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill our soldiers’ blood.”

Paul highlights what has been an apparent contradiction in the early weeks of Trump’s presidency. While Trump has culled US foreign aid and pledged to focus on American domestic concerns, he has also leavened his remarks with talk of American expansionism.

His interest in acquiring Greenland is persistent and, according to administration officials, deadly serious. His talk of making Canada the “51st state” and retaking the Panama Canal is no longer being treated like a joke.

And now Trump, one of the most vocal right-wing critics of the US invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, is suggesting a new Middle East nation-building project.

As for the specific ideas behind Trump’s latest proposal, they may be shocking for some but they shouldn’t be too much of a shock.

The president spoke of “cleaning out” Gaza and resettling Palestinians in remarks to reporters on Air Force One just days after his inauguration.

During the presidential campaign, he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that Gaza could be “better than Monaco”, but that the Palestinians “never took advantage” of their “best location in the Middle East”.

This also isn’t the first time Trump has viewed a seemingly intractable foreign policy situation as an exciting business opportunity.

During meetings with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in 2018, President Trump marvelled at the hermit nation’s “great beaches”, which could someday have the “best hotels”.

Those ambitious dreams have been shelved – and Trump’s Gaza vision, which would require a significant commitment of American blood and fortune at a time when it’s paring back its foreign involvements, will almost certainly meet the same fate.

But Trump’s Gaza proposal does represent a marked shift in America’s commitment to a two-state solution to the Palestinian situation.

A generous interpretation of the American strategy is that it is designed to shake up the Middle East powers and force them to commit more of their own resources, and political will, to finding a long-term solution to the situation in Gaza.

But such a strategy would come with risks.

The multi-step Israeli-Hamas ceasefire hangs in the balance. The Palestinians could view Trump’s comments as a sign that the US is not interested in a lasting peace, while Israeli hard-liners who are a key part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition may celebrate it as Trump’s green light for further expanding Israeli settlements.

Arab nations – some of whom worked with the first Trump administration to produce normalised relations with Israel in the Abraham Accords – may doubt whether Trump in his second term can be a reliable negotiating partner.

There are now years of evidence that Trump’s focus can shift on a moment’s notice. In the end, he could abandon all attempts at brokering a durable Middle East peace, blaming the Palestinians and their Arab allies for what he might view as their decision to reject the prospect of a better life removed from past conflicts.

Then it’s back to trade wars with Canada, condominiums in North Korea, mining sites in Greenland or some other challenge that does not divide his own party or require solving centuries of animosity with seemingly intractable ancestral concerns.

“We’ve put all our mattresses in the living room,” says Georgia Nomikou.

The Santorini resident fears the impact of ongoing earthquakes on the Greek island, popular with tourists for its picture-postcard views.

But the idyll has been disrupted this past week by thousands of earthquakes.

Santorini, and other Greek islands in the region, are in the middle of an “unprecedented” seismic swarm or crisis – the name for an abrupt increase in earthquakes in a particular area.

About three-quarters of the island’s 15,000 population have evacuated while authorities declared a state of emergency after a 5.2 magnitude quake, the largest yet, rocked the island on Wednesday.

Further, albeit smaller quakes, were felt again on Thursday.

The “clusters” of quakes have puzzled scientists who say such a pattern is unusual because they have not been linked to a major shock. So what’s going on?

Experts agree the island is experiencing what Greece’s prime minister has called an “extremely and intricate geological phenomenon”.

“It is really unprecedented, we have never seen something like this before in [modern times] in Greece,” says Dr Athanassios Ganas, research director of the National Observatory of Athens.

Santorini lies on the Hellenic Volcanic Arc – a chain of islands created by volcanoes.

But it has not seen a major eruption in recent times, in fact not since the 1950s, so the reason for the current crisis is unclear.

Experts say they’re seeing many earthquakes within a relatively small area, which don’t fit the pattern of a mainshock-aftershock sequence, says Dr Ganas.

He said this began with the awakening of a volcano on Santorini last summer. Then in January there was a “surge” of seismic activity with smaller earthquakes being recorded.

That activity has escalated in the past week.

Thousands of earthquakes have been recorded since Sunday, with Wednesday’s the most significant yet.

“We are in the middle of a seismic crisis,” Dr Gasnas said.

Dr Margarita Segou from the British Geological Survey described the quakes as happening everyday “in pulses”.

She says this “swarm-like behaviour” means that when a more significant earthquake strikes, for example a magnitude four, the “seismicity is increased for one to two hours, and then the system relaxes again”.

In short, it is impossible to tell. There are hopes that Wednesday’s quake, which struck at night, will be the biggest one to hit the island.

But seismologists have told the BBC it is difficult to be sure. Authorities have warned the activity could go on for weeks.

Experts also do not know whether this chain of quakes are foreshocks leading up to a large earthquake or their own event.

Professor Joanna Faure Walker, an earthquake geology expert at UCL’s Institute of Disaster Risk Reduction, said some large earthquakes do experience foreshocks – elevated levels of small to moderate seismic events – before the main shock.

But what is happening now are not volcanic earthquakes, say Dr Ganas. Volcanic earthquakes have a characteristic signature of low frequency wave forms and these have not been exhibited here.

Dr Segou told the BBC she and colleagues had analysed previous earthquakes in the region with machine learning – a data analysis method able to make predictions – to learn how earthquakes in the region in 2002 and 2004 came to an end.

The magnitude of those earthquakes were not as intense as the ones felt now she said. But the “signatures” of how they started and ended could help build a picture of what patterns to look out for.

Meanwhile, additional police units and military forces have been deployed to the island to help it cope with any major earthquake.

Ms Nomikou, who is president of Santorini’s town council, said her family were staying put but had each packed a small bag, “ready to go if anything happens”.

But some islanders say they are not phased by the tremors.

“I’m not afraid at all,” says one Santorini resident, who decided to stay put on the volcanic island despite thousands of her neighbours fleeing amid the ongoing earthquakes.

Chantal Metakides insists that she would not be joining her compatriots. “For 500 years, this house has lived through earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and it’s still standing,” she told AFP news agency, adding, “there’s no reason why this should change”.

Finding and fighting the militants who have become the beating heart of the Islamic State (IS) group in Africa can be tough work as they hide deep in the mountains of north-eastern Somalia.

But in typical Donald Trump style, after the new US president ordered an airstrike on the area last weekend, he posted on social media: “WE WILL FIND YOU, AND WE WILL KILL YOU!”

Trump said the hit, less than two weeks into his term, had targeted a senior IS attack planner and other militants in Somalia’s semi-autonomous region of Puntland and had “destroyed the caves they live in, and killed many terrorists without, in any way, harming civilians”.

He boasted that he had succeeded where former US President Joe Biden had failed.

“Biden and his cronies wouldn’t act quickly enough to get the job done. I did!”

The fact that Somalia was the target of America’s first major military operation under the new administration surprised many in the country who feared the US was planning to abandon them.

In his first term, Trump withdrew about 700 American troops, a decision reversed by his successor.

The $600,000 (£492,000) a year deal the Somalia government recently signed with top Washington lobbying firm, the BGR Group, is an indication of how worried it is.

Under Biden, US troops in Somalia were carrying out special operations, training an elite Somali force and conducting regular airstrikes.

A day before the airstrike, the Washington Post published an interview with Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud in which he pleaded for the US “not to pull out the American advisers and consultants who are supporting the training of our special forces”.

A post on X from his office after the strike also had a touch of desperation about it, acknowledging “the unwavering support of the United States in the fight against international terrorism” and welcoming “the continued commitment under the decisive leadership of President Donald Trump”.

But airstrikes are different from troops on the ground and Trump did not stop aerial bombardments in his first term. In fact, he increased them to nearly 400.

“The strike does not mean that the US government is going to step up its military engagement in Somalia,” says Matt Bryden, the strategic adviser of Nairobi-based Sahan Research.

“Several American officials expected to assume leadership positions on African affairs no longer perceive Somalia’s federal government to be a credible partner and are deeply critical of the high levels of security assistance provided in recent years to very little appreciable effect.”

Puntland’s counter-terrorism approach is different from that of the national Somali government, with which it cut ties in March last year.

It is more self-reliant and not as heavily dependent on support from African Union troops – of which around 12,000 are on the ground – and global powers including the US and Turkey.

As Mohamed Mubarak, head of Puntland’s security co-ordination office, points out it is troops from the north-east that have been battling IS for years with little help or thanks from others.

“It is not fair to put the airstrike front and centre while we have been fighting and dying on the ground,” Mr Mubarak says.

“Regardless of what the rest of the world is doing, we are fighting IS, which is an international problem,” he says.

“We have not seen much support except from Kenya, Ethiopia and the UAE. We don’t know if the Americans will conduct more than one airstrike.”

Puntland says its forces have captured 48 caves and IS outposts – and destroyed dozens of drones and explosive devices – since launching its full-scale “hilaac” or “lightning” offensive last year.

Although IS has been active in Somalia for about a decade, it has posed less of a threat than the Islamist group al-Shabab, which controls large parts of the country and has been described as al-Qaeda’s most successful affiliate.

However, in recent times, IS has become more significant – locally, regionally and internationally.

The authorities in Puntland and unnamed US officials say IS-Somalia’s leader, the orange-bearded, bespectacled Abdulqadir Mumin, is now the global head of IS.

Initial reports suggested he had been killed in a US airstrike last May but have never been confirmed.

Whether or not Mumin is the head of IS or is alive or dead, IS-Somalia has become increasingly worrying for foreign states.

As Trump said: “These killers, who we found hiding in caves, threatened the United States and our allies.”

According to Tricia Bacon, director of the policy anti-terrorism hub at American University in Washington DC, “IS-Somalia has taken on more responsibilities within the Islamic State network, particularly in Africa but beyond the continent as well”.

With branches of IS operating across the continent, from Mozambique to Mali, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Nigeria, IS-Somalia serves as a crucial nerve centre.

Ms Bacon warns that IS-Somalia is looking beyond Africa too.

“It is positioned to facilitate and contribute to IS attacks in the West, including the United States. It also seeks to inspire attacks in the West,” she says.

“International partners should provide more support to Puntland’s ongoing efforts against the group.”

Mr Bryden says collusion with Iranian-backed Houthi rebels across the Red Sea in Yemen is also an issue.

“Like al-Shabab, IS-Somalia has received arms and training from the Houthis in Yemen, which is a source of concern for the US government and its allies,” he says.

A growing number of foreign fighters are joining the group, enhancing its strength in terms of numbers and expertise.

A major source of IS-Somalia recruits are thought to be Ethiopian migrants, who gather in Puntland’s port city of Bosaso in the hope of a sea crossing to a better life abroad.

IS offers them better pay than they would earn in the Gulf states and experts say that some of the group’s senior commanders are Ethiopian.

“We assess that IS-Somalia is 80% or more foreign fighters, mostly from North Africa, Ethiopia, Tanzania and the Middle East, in that order,” says Mr Mubarak.

He estimates the group is about 1,000-strong; UN monitors put it at around 600 to 700.

Last October, the head of the US Africa Command, Michael Langley, said he thought IS had grown in northern Somalia by about “two-fold” in a year.

The group staged one of its most sophisticated ever attacks in December, hitting a military base in Puntland’s Bari region.

The group released a statement saying not a single Somali was involved. The 12 attackers came from seven countries – Tanzania, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen and Ethiopia.

The movement has also become more effective at raising money.

The US, UN and Somalia experts say a key part of IS’s financial infrastructure – the al-Karrar office – is based in Puntland, disbursing funds and expertise to other branches of the group in Africa and beyond.

The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said IS-Somalia had raised nearly $2m in the first half of 2022 by taxing local businesses, imports, nomads and farmers.

If Puntland’s forces are to succeed in driving out the militants, air support will prove invaluable.

Shortly after the US strike, Puntland police said the head of IS-Somalia’s assassination squad, Abdirahman Shirwa Aw-Said, had surrendered.

But experts say such strikes will need to be consistent to hunt down existing IS cells in Somalia and stop others mushrooming.

It is unclear whether the US and its unpredictable leader have the appetite to keep bombing Somalia’s north-eastern mountains.

• The would-be African nation in love with Donald Trump
• Somalia’s men in sarongs taking on al-Shabab militants
• Somali piracy 2.0 – the BBC meets the new robbers of the high seas
• A quick guide to Somalia

A video claiming that USAID, the US government’s main overseas aid agency, has paid Hollywood celebrities millions of dollars to visit Ukraine has gone viral on social media and has been amplified by high-profile accounts like Elon Musk.

However, the clip is not real and has hallmarks of a Russian disinformation operation that the BBC has previously investigated.

BBC Verify’s Olga Robinson explains why.

India’s biggest news organisations are seeking to join a lawsuit against OpenAI, the US startup behind ChatGPT, for alleged unauthorised use of their content.

The news organisations include some of India’s oldest publications like The Indian Express, The Hindu, The India Today group, billionaire Gautam Adani-owned NDTV, and over a dozen others.

OpenAI denies the allegations and told the BBC that it uses “publicly available data” that are in line with “widely accepted legal precedents”.

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in Delhi to discuss India’s plan for a low-cost AI ecosystem with IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.

He said India “should be one of the leaders of the AI revolution” and said earlier comments from 2023, when he said Indian firms would struggle to compete, had been taken out of context.

“India is an incredibly important market for AI in general and for OpenAI in particular,” local media quoted him as saying at the event.

The legal case filed against OpenAI in November by Asian News International (ANI), India’s largest news agency, is the first of its kind in India.

ANI accuses ChatGPT of using its copyrighted material illegally – which OpenAI denies – and is seeking damages of 20m rupees ($230,000; £185,000).

The case holds significance for ChatGPT given its plans to expand in the country. According to a survey, India already has the largest user base of ChatGPT.

Chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on massive datasets collected by crawling through the internet. The content produced by nearly 450 news channels and 17,000 newspapers in India holds huge potential for this.

There is, however, no clarity on what material ChatGPT can legally collect and use for this purpose.

OpenAI is facing at least a dozen lawsuits across the world filed by publishers, artists and news organisations, who have all accused ChatGPT of using their content without permission.

The most prominent of them was filed by The New York Times in December 2023, in which the newspaper demanded “billions of dollars” in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, its backer.

“A decision by any court would also hold some persuasive value for other similar cases around the world,” says Vibhav Mithal, a lawyer specialising in artificial intelligence at the Indian law firm Anand and Anand.

Mr Mithal said the verdict in the lawsuit filed by ANI could “define how these AI models will operate in the future” and “what copyrighted news content can be used to train AI generative models [like ChatGPT]”.

A court ruling in ANI’s favour could spark further legal cases as well as opening the possibility of AI companies entering into license sharing agreements with content creators, which some companies have already started doing.

“But a ruling in OpenAI’s favour will lead to more freedom to use copyrighted protected data to train AI models,” he said.

ANI provides news to its paying subscribers and owns exclusive copyright over a large archive of text, images and videos.

In its suit filed in the Delhi High Court, ANI says that OpenAI used its content to train ChatGPT without permission. ANI has argued that this led to the chatbot getting better and has profited OpenAI.

The news agency said that before filing the suit, it had told OpenAI its content was being used unlawfully and offered to grant the company a license to use its data.

ANI says OpenAI declined the offer and put the news agency on an internal blocklist so that its data is no longer collected. It also asked ANI to disable certain web crawlers to ensure that its content was not picked up by ChatGPT.

The news agency says that despite these measures, ChatGPT picks up its content from websites of its subscribers. This has enriched OpenAI “unjustly”, it says.

ANI also says in its suit that the chatbot produces its content verbatim for certain prompts. In some instances, ANI says, ChatGPT has falsely attributed statements to the news agency, hampering its credibility and misleading the public.

Apart from seeking compensation for damages, ANI has asked the court to direct OpenAI to stop storing and using its work.

In its response, OpenAI says it opposes the case being filed in India since the company and its servers are not located in the country and the chatbot has also not been trained there.

In December, the Federation of Indian Publishers, which claims to represent 80% of Indian publishers including the Indian offices of Penguin Random House and Oxford University Press, filed an application in court saying that they were “directly affected” by this case and should be allowed to present their arguments as well.

A month later, Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), which represents leading Indian news outlets, and three other media outlets filed a similar application. They argued that while OpenAI had entered into licensing agreements with international news publishers such as the Associated Press and Financial Times, a similar model had not been followed in India.

DNPA told the court the case would affect the livelihood of journalists and the country’s entire news industry. OpenAI has, however, argued that chatbots are not a “substitute” for news subscriptions and are not used for such purposes.

The court has not admitted these applications by the publishers yet and OpenAI has argued that the court should not hear them.

But the judge clarified that even if these associations are allowed to argue, the court will restrict itself to ANI’s claims since the other parties had not filed their own lawsuits.

Meanwhile, OpenAI told the BBC it is engaging in “constructive partnerships and conversations” with news organisations around the world, including India, to “work collaboratively”.

Analysts say the lawsuits filed against ChatGPT across the world could bring into focus aspects of chatbots that have escaped scrutiny so far.

Dr Sivaramakrishnan R Guruvayur, whose research focuses on responsible use of artificial intelligence, says that the data used to train chatbots is one such aspect.

The ANI-OpenAI case will lead the court “to evaluate the data sources” of chatbots, he said.

Governments across the world have been grappling with how to regulate AI. In 2023, Italy blocked ChatGPT saying that the chatbot’s mass collection and storage of personal data raised privacy concerns.

The European Union approved a law to regulate AI last year.

The Indian government too has indicated plans to regulate AI. Before the 2024 election, the government issued an advisory that AI tools that were “under-testing” or “unreliable” should get government permission before launching.

It also asked AI tools to not generate responses that are illegal in India or “threaten the integrity of the electoral process”.

A Palestinian and an Israeli sit in a West Bank village at night.

They wonder aloud whether Basel will ever be able to freely visit Yuval’s home in Israel, whether Basel’s village will get building permits, and whether they will one day have stability.

For years, the friends have been filming the destruction of houses, a well and a school by the Israeli army after a court order declared Basel’s community illegal. They tell each other they hope they will change that reality.

Now, that scene has reached some of the world’s biggest stages.

The film it is in, No Other Land, has been nominated for an Oscar and a Bafta for best documentary feature.

It follows the fight over Masafer Yatta, a community of around 20 villages, and the friendship between Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham.

In the film Basel is nearly detained after a protest, his father is arrested, and a soldier shoots a community member in the neck while confiscating a generator, leading to the man’s paralysis and death.

“It’s scary because yes, the film is succeeding and people are aware of it, but I don’t think there is sufficient action, especially amongst those who have power to change this,” Yuval told the BBC.

“I don’t have an illusion that films are going to change the world, but I know they can change individuals, and I know that they can be part of a bigger change, and we really need this now.”

Basel and Yuval created the film along with Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor over five years.

Asked about the man who was paralysed, the IDF said its investigation had found no crime. A spokesperson said that during an operation against “illegal construction”, two Palestinians had grabbed a soldier by his weapon and vest, leading to the shot.

Palestinian eyewitnesses told Israeli media they were not contacted as part of the initial investigation and believed the shot was fired intentionally.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967. Israeli settlements in the territory are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this. They have expanded over the past 55 years, becoming a focal point of violence and conflicting claims over land.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. That triggered an Israeli military campaign that has killed at least 47,500 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Since then, settler-related violence in the West Bank has increased, with 13 Palestinians killed by settlers, according to the UN.

More than 850 Palestinians, many of them militants, have been killed by Israeli troops in the West Bank in the same period, the Palestinian health ministry says. The UN says 30 Israelis were killed by Palestinians in the West Bank during that timeframe.

In 2024, the UN recorded about 1,420 incidents of Israeli settler violence – the highest number that reportedly led to casualties, property damage or both, since records began in 2006.

Additional attacks on Palestinians had occurred since US President Donald Trump’s return to power, Basel said, and the filmmakers feared it could worsen.

Trump has lifted sanctions the Biden administration had placed on some settlers. The president’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has said Israel has a “title deed” to the West Bank and “there’s no such thing” as occupation or settlements.

When asked on Tuesday whether he agreed the US should recognise Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank, Trump said he had yet to take a position but that he would make an announcement in four weeks’ time.

The debate over Masafer Yatta began in the 1980s when Israel declared the area a closed military firing zone, meaning no one was allowed to live there.

According to notes from a 1981 meeting, then-Israeli Agricultural Minister Ariel Sharon offered the military additional training areas to restrict the “expansion of the Arab villagers from the hills towards the desert”.

Israel argued residents previously did not live there permanently. The Palestinian population took their case to Israel’s Supreme Court, arguing communities had lived there for generations and pointing to a 1945 map showing some villages.

In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Israel and allowed the demolition of homes and expulsion of more than 1,000 villagers.

Scenes from the film show a bulldozer destroying a primary school, a truck pouring mud into a well, and machinery crushing a home as villagers confront the army.

A girl cries, and when her mother is asked if she has any other place to go she says: “We have no other land.”

The documentary also records intimate human moments, like when the mother, who moves into a cave, kisses her daughter and tells her: “You’re my love… Tomorrow will be a new day.”

The film explores Basel and Yuval’s friendship as well. Though they are around the same age and share similar values, their inequality is ever-present.

While Yuval can travel freely in Israel and the West Bank, Basel cannot travel into Israel without a permit, as part of what it says are security measures.

In the film, Basel laments that although he studied law, he could only find work in construction in Israel, and when he thinks about it too hard, “I feel this huge depression.”

The film does not shy away from the tension created by Yuval’s identity, with one Palestinian asking him: “How can we remain friends, when you come here, and it could be your brother or friend who destroyed my home?”

Yuval told the BBC he felt “responsibility for what is happening to Basel’s community” because “at the end of the day, the fuel in the bulldozers is my tax money”.

Last year, Yuval faced a backlash for his acceptance speech for the best documentary award at the Berlin Film Festival, alongside Basel, in which he criticised a “situation of apartheid” and called for a ceasefire in Gaza.

US filmmaker Ben Russell, who was there and wore a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf, said he stood against “genocide” in Gaza. Israel strongly denies the accusation of genocide.

German Culture Minister Claudia Roth said the statements were “shockingly one-sided and characterised by a deep hatred of Israel”, while Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner posted on social media that it was an “intolerable relativisation” and that “antisemitism has no place in Berlin”.

Israel’s public broadcaster called Yuval’s comments antisemitic.

Yuval, who said he received death threats, told the BBC he was “very angry” at the label, which was “emptying this term of meaning at a time when antisemitism is rising on the right wing and on the left wing”.

He said it was “absurd” to hear the criticism when most of his family was killed in the Holocaust, adding that learning from this history “should tell us to fight against dehumanisation… no matter who is the victim”.

Despite winning several international awards, No Other Land is self-distributing in the US because it has not found an official distributor there – rare for a documentary which has been nominated for an Oscar.

One of the film’s last scenes is from 13 October 2023, when Basel recorded a settler shooting his cousin, whose hands appear empty, in the stomach. In other footage, settlers throw rocks at homes while soldiers watch.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the shooting case was transferred to the state attorney’s office, which the BBC approached for comment.

Currently in Masafer Yatta, Basel said settlers have “unlimited power” and there is a “daily level of harassment”.

He said there were three major settler attacks in January, including on a 72-year-old taken to hospital after he was hit in the head with sticks, and around 15 people arrested in the two days before 30 January while grazing their sheep or chasing away settlers’ sheep. Israel Police did not reply to a BBC request for comment.

The UK has sanctioned three settler outposts and four organisations it says are supporting violence against West Bank communities. Yuval called on the UK to sanction all settlers, believing that would “truly be a deterrent”.

A foreign office spokesperson told the BBC the foreign secretary “has been clear with Israeli ministers that they must clamp down on settler violence and end settlement expansion”.

“We have regularly taken action against settler violence, including through targeted sanctions, and will continue to do all we can to ensure the rights of Palestinians are protected and that those responsible for violence are held to account,” the statement read.

Yuval said: “I really believe there is no other way forward, other than reaching a just, fair political solution where Palestinians can be free, truly free, and our people, both of them, will have security and self-determination.

“It really makes me angry, not only that my government is going in the other way, but that the world is allowing it to happen for so long.”

In the film, Basel recalls a seven-minute visit by Tony Blair to his village – after which Israel cancelled demolition orders there.

“This is a story about power,” he says.

Now, Basel gets “strength and power from the people around me”, making him want to not give up.

“One water drop doesn’t make change,” he says during a protest in the film, “but keep dropping the water and it will make change.”

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order sanctioning the International Criminal Court, accusing it of “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel”.

The measure places financial and visa restrictions on individuals and their families who assist in ICC investigations of American citizens or allies.

Trump signed the measure as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was visiting Washington.

Last November, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in Gaza, which Israel denies. The ICC also issued a warrant for a Hamas commander.

A White House memo circulated on Thursday accused the Hague-based ICC of creating a “shameful moral equivalency” between Hamas and Israel by issuing the warrants at the same time.

Trump’s executive order said the ICC’s recent actions “set a dangerous precedent” that endangered Americans by exposing them to “harassment, abuse and possible arrest”.

“This malign conduct in turn threatens to infringe upon the sovereignty of the United States and undermines the critical national security and foreign policy work of the United States government and our allies, including Israel,” the order said.

• International Criminal Court: What is the ICC and what does it do?

The US is not a member of the ICC and has repeatedly rejected any jurisdiction by the body over American officials or citizens.

The White House accused the ICC of placing constraints on Israel’s right to self-defence, while ignoring Iran and anti-Israel groups.

In his first term in office, Trump imposed sanctions on ICC officials who were investigating whether US forces had committed war crimes in Afghanistan. Those sanctions were lifted by President Joe Biden’s administration.

Last month, the US House of Representatives voted to sanction the ICC, but the bill foundered in the Senate.

More than 120 countries are members of the court, including many European nations, but the US nor Israel are not.

The ICC is a court of last resort and is meant to intervene only when national authorities cannot or will not prosecute.

Trump’s executive order said that “both nations [the US and Israel] are thriving democracies with militaries that strictly adhere to the laws of war”.

During his last weeks in office, President Biden also criticised the ICC’s warrant for Netanyahu, calling the move “outrageous” and saying there was no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.

Trump’s signing of his latest executive order follows his announcement during a joint press conference with the Israeli prime minister on Tuesday about a plan for the US to “take over” Gaza, resettle its Palestinian population and turn the territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

After Arab leaders and the UN condemned the idea, the US president restated it on his Truth Social social media platform on Thursday.

“The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” Trump wrote, referring to the war between Israel and Hamas that is currently under a ceasefire.

He repeated that the plan would involve resettling Palestinians, and that no American soldiers would be deployed.

His post did not make clear whether the two million residents of the Palestinian territory would be invited to return, leaving officials scrambling to explain.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday any displacement would be temporary.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Gazans would leave for an “interim” period while reconstruction took place.

Netanyahu has praised Trump’s “remarkable” plan to re-make Gaza. On Thursday, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz ordered the military to prepare for “voluntary departure” of Gaza’s residents.

He said the plan would include departures via land, sea and air.

Trump signed the order as Netanyahu continued his visit to Washington, meeting lawmakers from both the Republican and Democratic parties on Capitol Hill.

The Israeli prime minister also presented a golden pager to Trump.

The gift was a reference to Israel’s deadly operation against Hezbollah in September last year, using booby-trapped communications devices.

Dozens were killed and thousands injured in the attacks, including some civilians, according to Lebanese officials.

The tall, shiny buildings which rise out of the cornfields on the Myanmar side of the Moei river are a sight so jarring you find yourself blinking to be sure you haven’t imagined it.

Eight years ago there was nothing over there in Karen State. Just trees, a few roughly-built cement buildings, and a long-running civil war which has left this area of Myanmar one of the poorest places on earth. But today, on this spot along the border with Thailand, a small city has emerged like a mirage. It is called Shwe Kokko, or Golden Raintree.

It is accused of being a city built on scams, home to a lucrative yet deadly nexus of fraud, money-laundering and human trafficking. The man behind it, She Zhijiang, is languishing in a Bangkok jail, awaiting extradition to China.

But Yatai, She Zhijiang’s company which built the city, paints a very different vision of Shwe Kokko in its promotional videos – as a resort city, a safe holiday destination for Chinese tourists and haven for the super-rich.

The story of Shwe Kokko is also one of the unbridled ambition which has rippled out of China in the last two decades.

She Zhijiang dreamed of building this glittering city as his ticket out of the shadowy world of scams and gambling which he inhabited.

But by aiming so high he has drawn the attention of Beijing, which is now keen to stamp out the fraud operations along the Thai-Myanmar border which are increasingly targeting Chinese people.

Publicity about the scams is also hurting Thai tourism – Thailand is shutting down power to compounds over the border, toughening its banking rules and promising to block visas for those suspected of using Thailand as a transit route.

Shwe Kokko has been left marooned in post-coup, war-wracked Myanmar, unable to bring in the flow of investment and visitors it needs to keep going.

Yatai is trying to fix the city’s sinister image by allowing journalists to see it, holding out hope that more favourable reporting might even get She Zhijiang out of jail.

So they invited the BBC to Shwe Kokko.

Getting there is tricky.

Ever since construction began in 2017, Shwe Kokko has been a forbidden place, off-limits to casual visitors.

As the civil war in Myanmar escalated after the 2021 military coup, access became even more difficult. It takes three days from the country’s commercial hub Yangon – through multiple checkpoints, blocked roads and a real risk of getting caught in armed skirmishes. Crossing from Thailand takes just a few minutes, but requires careful planning to avoid Thai police and army patrols.

She Zhijiang’s colleagues took us on a tour, highlighting the newly-paved streets, the luxury villas, the trees – “Mr She believes in making a green city,” they told us. Our guide was Wang Fugui, who said he was a former police officer from Guangxi in southern China. He ended up in prison in Thailand, on what he insists were trumped-up fraud charges. There he got to know She Zhijiang and became one of his most trusted lieutenants.

At first glance, Shwe Kokko has the appearance of a provincial Chinese city. The signs on the buildings are written in Chinese characters, and there is a constant procession of Chinese-made construction vehicles going to and from building sites.

Yatai is vague about the tenants of all its buildings, as it is about many things. “Rich people, from many countries, they rent the villas,” they told us. And what about the businesses? “Many businesses. Hotels, casinos.”

However, most of the people we saw were local Karen, one of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities, who come into Shwe Kokko every day to work. We saw very few of the overseas visitors who are supposed to be the customers of the hotels and casinos.

Yatai says there are no more scams in Shwe Kokko. It has put up huge billboards all over town proclaiming, in Chinese, Burmese and English, that forced labour was not allowed, and that “online businesses” should leave. But we were quietly told by local people that the scam business was still running.

Starting a decade ago in the unchecked frenzy of Chinese investment on the Cambodian coast, then moving to the lawless badlands of Myanmar’s border with China, the scam operators have now settled along the Thai-Myanmar border. Around them, the Myanmar military and a hotch-potch of rebel armies and warlords are fighting for control of Karen State.

The scams have grown into a multi-billion dollar business. They involve thousands of workers from China, South East Asia, Africa and the Indian subcontinent kept in walled-off compounds where they defraud people all over the world of their savings.

Some work there willingly, but others are abducted and forced to work. Those who have escaped have told harrowing stories of torture and beatings. Some have come from Shwe Kokko.

We were able to speak to a young woman who had been working in one of the scam centres a couple of weeks before our visit. She had not enjoyed it and been allowed to leave.

Her job, she said, was as part of the modelling team, made up mostly of attractive young women, who contact potential victims and try to build an intimate online relationship with them.

“The target is the elderly,” she said. “You start a conversation like ‘oh you look just like one of my friends’. Once you make friends you encourage them by sending pictures of yourself, sometimes wearing your night clothes.”

Then, she explains, the conversation moves to get-rich-quick schemes, such as crypto investments, with the women claiming that’s how they made a lot of money.

“When they feel close to you, you pass them on to the chatting section,” she says. “The chatting people will continue messaging with the client, persuading them to buy shares in the crypto company.”

During our brief time in Shwe Kokko we were only allowed to see what Yatai wanted us to see. Even so, it was evident that the scams have not stopped, and are probably still the main business in the city.

Our request to see inside any of the newly-built office buildings were turned down. Those are private, they kept telling us. We were escorted at all times by security guards seconded from the militia group which controls this part of the border.

We were allowed to film the construction work, and the outsides of the buildings, but not to enter them. Many of the windows had bars on the insides.

“Everybody in Shwe Kokko knows what goes on there,” said the young woman who used to work in a scam centre.

She dismissed Yatai’s claim that it no longer permitted scam centres in Shwe Kokko.

“That is a lie. There is no way they don’t know about this. The whole city is doing it in those high-rise buildings. No-one goes there for fun. There is no way Yatai doesn’t know.”

“I can promise that Yatai would never accept telecom fraud and scams,” said She Zhijiang on a call from Bangkok’s Remand Prison, where he is being held.

Yatai wanted us to hear from the man himself, and hooked up a ropey video link. Only Mr Wang could be seen talking to him; we had to stay out of view of the prison guards, and had to rely on Mr Wang to put our questions to him.

Not much is known about She Zhijiang, a small-town Chinese entrepreneur who Beijing alleges is a criminal mastermind.

Born in a poor village in Hunan province in China in 1982, he left school at 14 and learned computer coding. He appears to have moved to the Philippines in his early 20s and into online gambling, which is illegal in China.

This is where he started to make his money. In 2014 he was convicted by a Chinese court of running an illegal lottery, but he stayed overseas.

He invested in gambling businesses in Cambodia, and managed to get Cambodian citizenship. He has used at least four different names.

In 2016, he struck a deal with a Karen warlord, Saw Chit Thu, to build a new city together. She Zhijiang would provide the funds, the Chinese construction machinery and materials, while Saw Chit Thu and his 8,000 armed fighters would keep it safe.

Glitzy videos by Yatai promised a $15bn (£12.1bn) investment and depicted a high-rise wonderland of hotels, casinos and cyberparks. Shwe Kokko was described as part of Xi Jinping’s Belt-and-Road Initiative or BRI, bringing Chinese funds and infrastructure to the world.

China publicly dissociated itself from She Zhijiang in 2020, and the Myanmar government launched an investigation into Yatai, which was building far beyond the 59 villas authorised by its investment permit and was operating casinos before these had been legalised in Myanmar.

In August 2022, acting on a Chinese request to Interpol, She Zhijiang was arrested and imprisoned in Bangkok. He and his business partner Saw Chit Thu have also been sanctioned by the British government for their links to human trafficking.

She Zhijiang claims to be a victim of double dealing by the Chinese state. He says he founded his company Yatai on the instruction of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, and insists that Shwe Kokko was then a part of the BRI.

He accuses China’s communist leadership of turning on him because he refused to give them control of his project. They wanted a colony on the Thai-Myanmar border, he says. China has denied any business relationship with She Zhijiang.

While he denied any wrongdoing on Yatai’s part, She Zhijiang, however, admitted to “a high probability” that scammers were coming to Shwe Kokko to spend their money.

“Because our Yatai City is completely open to anyone who can go in and out freely. Refusing customers, for a businessman like me, is really difficult. This is my weakness.”

It is, however, stretching credulity to believe that Yatai, which runs everything in Shwe Kokko, was unable to stop scammers coming in and out of the city.

It is also hard to think of any business other than scams which would choose to operate here.

With Thailand cutting off power and telecommunications, electricity comes from diesel generators, which are expensive to run. And communications go through Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system, which is also very costly.

Yatai’s strategy is “to whitewash the project to create a narrative that Shwe Kokko is a safe city”, says Jason Tower, from the United States Institute for Peace, which has spent years researching the scam operation in Shwe Kokko.

He says they may even “begin moving some of the more notorious components of the scam industry, like torture, into other zones”.

But he doesn’t think the plan will work: “What kinds of legitimate businesses will go into Shwe Kokko? It’s simply not attractive. The economy will continue to be a scam economy.”

When we were eventually allowed to see inside one casino in Shwe Kokko, run by a genial Australian, he told us they were going to close it down.

Inside the only customers were local Karen, gambling on a popular arcade-like game where they had to shoot digital fish. We were forbidden from doing any interviews. The back rooms, with the card and roulette tables, were empty.

The Australian manager said the casino – built six years ago – had been popular and profitable when there were just one or two of them, before the civil war. But these days, with at least nine in operation, there were not enough customers to go around.

The real money was in online gambling, which he said was the main business in Shwe Kokko.

It is impossible to know how much money is made through online gambling, and how much through outright criminal activities like money laundering and scams. They are usually run from the same compounds and by the same teams. When we asked Yatai how much money they made they would not tell us – not even a ballpark figure. That is private, they said.

The company is registered in Hong Kong, Myanmar and Thailand, but these are little more than shell companies, with very little income or revenue passing through them.

We turned down Yatai’s offer to see the go-kart track, water park and model farm that they have built. We did glimpse one other casino, while being taken to eat breakfast in Yatai’s own luxury hotel, though we could not go inside it. It seemed empty.

The only other facility we were allowed to see was a karaoke club, with spectacular private rooms, cavernous domes entirely covered in digital screens on which huge tropical fish and sharks swam.

They also ran video loops extolling the vision and virtues of She Zhijiang. This club too seemed deserted, except for some young Chinese women who worked there.

They wore opera masks to avoid being identified, and danced unenthusiastically to music for a few minutes before giving up and sitting down.

Interviews were not permitted. We were allowed to talk to a local Karen member of staff, but she was so intimidated by this we got little more than her name.

In his absence, She Zhijiang has left the running of Shwe Kokko to a young protégé, 31-year-old He Yingxiong. He lives with Wang Fugui in a sprawling villa they have built on the banks of the Moei River, overlooking Thailand, and guarded by massive Chinese bodyguards. There they play mahjong, eat the finest food and drink, and keep an eye on business.

Mr He has a slightly different explanation from his boss for the scams still operating under their noses. “We are just property developers,” he said. “I can guarantee that this kind of thing does not happen here.

“But even if it does, the local people have their own legal system, so it is their job to deal with it. Our job is just to provide good infrastructure, good buildings and supporting industries.”

But there is no legal system in this part of Myanmar, nor any government. It is ruled by the various armed groups which control different bits of territory along the Thai border.

Their commanders decide who can build or run a business, taking their cut to help fund their wars against the Myanmar military, or against each other. Many of them are known to be hosting scam compounds.

Mr He admitted that it was the war which had allowed Yatai to obtain the land so cheaply. Karen human rights groups have accused Saw Chit Thu of driving the original inhabitants off their land, with minimal compensation, though it is clear Yatai is also providing badly needed jobs for the locals.

It is the lawlessness of Karen State which makes it so appealing to illegal businesses – and that doesn’t help the image of Shwe Kokko.

Neither do recent headlines.

Last month a 22-year-old Chinese actor, Wang Xing, was rescued from a scam centre on the border after being lured to Thailand with an offer of work on a movie shoot. His disappearance spurred a barrage of questions on Chinese social media, forcing the Thai and Chinese authorities to mount a joint operation to free him.

Chinese tourists have been cancelling their holidays in Thailand, fearing for their safety. Other rescues have followed.

The BBC has been sent emails by some scam victims pleading for help; rescue organisations believe there are still thousands trapped. Nearly all are in smaller compounds along the border south of Shwe Kokko.

Yatai stressed to us that they are not the same as these rougher operations, some little more than a collection of sheds built in forest clearings. That is where all the bad things happen now, they said.

They talked about KK Park, a notorious compound south of the border town of Myawaddy, and Dongmei, a cluster of low-rise buildings run by a prominent Chinese crime lord called Wan Kuok Koi, better known as Broken Tooth.

That distinction hasn’t helped She Zhijiang, who once had the ear of politicians, police bosses and even minor royalty in Thailand. Today he appears to have lost even the influence he once had in prison, to buy himself special privileges. He has complained of being roughed up by the guards.

His lawyers are appealing against the Interpol red notice used to justify his arrest, but China’s voice will probably be loudest in determining his fate.

From our interview with him, Shi Zhijiang seemed genuinely outraged over his sudden reversal of fortune.

“Before, I had no understanding of human rights, but now I really understand how horrible it is to have human rights infringed upon,” he said.

“It is hard to imagine how the human rights of ordinary people in China are trampled upon when a respected businessman like me, who used to be able to go to the same state banquets as Xi Jinping, does not have his human rights and dignity protected in any way.”

It seems he really did believe he could build something which would one day transcend Shwe Kokko’s sordid origins as a scam city.

What happens to it now is hard to guess, but if the Thai and Chinese governments keep acting to shut down the scams, the money will start to dry up.

Israel’s defence minister has told its military to prepare a plan to “allow any resident of Gaza who wishes to leave to do so”, in line with President Donald Trump’s proposal for the US to take over the territory and resettle its 2.1 million Palestinians elsewhere.

Israel Katz said Gazans should have “freedom of movement and migration” and countries critical of Israel’s war with Hamas were “obligated” to take them in.

Trump meanwhile said Gaza would be “turned over” to the US by Israel “at the conclusion of fighting”.

But the Palestinian presidency reiterated its rejection of the plan, which it has said would violate international law, and insisted that “Palestine… is not for sale”.

The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

More than 47,550 people have been killed and 111,600 injured in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Most of Gaza’s population has also been displaced multiple times and almost 70% of its buildings are estimated to be destroyed or damaged.

Healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene systems have collapsed and there are shortages of food, fuel, medicine and shelter.

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The Israeli defence minister wrote on X on Thursday that he welcomed the US president’s “bold initiative”, saying it could “support long-term reconstruction efforts in a demilitarized, threat-free Gaza after Hamas”.

Katz announced that he had instructed the Israeli military to “prepare a plan that will allow any resident of Gaza who wishes to leave to do so, to any country willing to receive them”.

“The plan will include exit options via land crossings, as well as special arrangements for departure by sea and air,” he said.

“Countries such as Spain, Ireland, Norway, and others, which have falsely accused Israel over its actions in Gaza, are legally obligated to allow Gazans to enter their territory. Their hypocrisy will be exposed if they refuse.”

He alleged that Hamas was preventing people leaving Gaza and said that they should have “the right to freedom of movement and migration”.

Hamas official Basem Naim accused Katz of trying to cover up for “a state that has failed to achieve any of its objectives in the war on Gaza” and said Palestinians would refuse to leave.

Meanwhile, the spokesman for the Palestinian presidency asserted that “Palestine, with its land, history and holy sites, is not for sale”.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh also said the Palestinians would “will not give up an inch of their land”, whether in Gaza or the occupied West Bank.

“The Palestinian people and their leadership will not allow the repetition of the catastrophes of 1948 and 1967, and will thwart any plan aimed at liquidating their just cause through investment projects whose place is neither in Palestine nor on its land.”

The 1948 “Nakba”, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flee or driven from their homes before and during the war that followed the creation of the State of Israel.

Many of those refugees ended up in Gaza, where they and their descendants make up three quarters of the population. Another 900,000 registered refugees live in the West Bank, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war along with Gaza, while 3.4 million others live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, according to the UN.

Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, though it retained control of its shared border, airspace and shoreline, giving it effective control of the movement of people and goods. The UN still regards Gaza as Israeli-occupied territory because of the level of control Israel has.

On Wednesday, Jordan’s king expressed its “rejection of any attempts to annex land or displace Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank”, while Egypt’s foreign minister stressed the importance of reconstruction “without the Palestinians leaving the Gaza Strip”.

Hamas – which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US, the UK and other countries – said Trump’s plan was “absurd” and would “only put oil on the fire” in the region.

The UN human rights office warned that any forcible transfer in, or deportation of, people from occupied territory was strictly prohibited under international law.

The UN’s secretary general also said it was “essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing” and stressed that Gaza would be an integral part of a future Palestinian state.

Antonio Guterres told a meeting in New York that the world had “seen a chilling, systematic dehumanisation and demonization of an entire people”.

Trump unveiled his plan for the US to take “long-term ownership” of Gaza and oversee its reconstruction during a visit to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.

The president said most of the Palestinians living in Gaza would have to be relocated to achieve his vision of creating “the Riviera of the Middle East”, and that they would be housed in Jordan, Egypt and other countries.

“I hope we can do something where they wouldn’t want to go back,” he said, echoing earlier remarks in the Oval Office where he talked about resettling people “permanently”.

At the White House briefing on Wednesday, spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt was asked to confirm whether all Palestinians who wanted to stay in Gaza would be allowed to do so.

“I can confirm that the president is committed to rebuilding Gaza and to temporarily relocating those who are there because… it is a demolition site,” she replied, appearing to contradict the president.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said the idea was for Gazans to leave the territory for an “interim” period while debris was cleared and reconstruction took place.

On Thursday, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that Gaza would “be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting”.

A ceasefire in effect between Israel and Hamas has halted the war and aims to lead to a permanent end to the fighting.

“The Palestinians… would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region. They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free,” he added.

The president also said no US soldiers would be needed to maintain stability.

In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Israel’s prime minister called Trump’s proposal “remarkable” and something that should be “examined, pursued and done”.

Netanyahu also suggested that Gazans would be able to return, saying: “They can leave, they can then come back, they can relocate and come back, but you have to rebuild Gaza.”

Ippei Mizuhara, the former interpreter of Los Angeles Dodgers baseball star Shohei Ohtani, has been sentenced to nearly five years in prison for a fraud and gambling scheme.

He was ordered to pay back nearly $17m (£13.6m) that he’d stolen from the star athlete and another $1m to the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in taxes.

Mizuhara, who had been Ohtani’s English interpreter since his US Major League Baseball (MLB) debut in 2018, was fired amid media reports last year about his gambling activities, which prompted investigations into Ohtani’s finances.

A probe revealed Mizuhara stole nearly $17m from the athlete to pay off debts owed to a southern California bookmaker.

He then lied on tax records to hide his actions. He pleaded guilty to bank and tax fraud charges.

“Mr Mizuhara had a unique position of trust that gave him power, brought him fame, and paid him well,” said Acting United States Attorney Joseph McNally. “Unfortunately, he exploited this dream job to steal millions of dollars from his friend and confidant.”

“This is a sad tale of an American success story gone wrong – so wrong that Mr Mizuhara will be spending years inside a prison cell.”

Sitting in a courtroom in Santa Ana, California, Mizuhara was wearing a light black suit with his hands folded in his lap, staring straight ahead at the judge as he delivered his ruling.

When the verdict was announced, he was motionless.

Before being sentenced, he apologised for his actions.

“I am truly sorry to Mr Ohtani for what I have done. I know an apology will not fix the crime I committed,” he said. “This mistake will impact me for the rest of my life and I’m prepared to accept the consequences.”

The scheme threatened to derail Ohtani’s career – currently one of baseball’s biggest global stars – as questions swirled about whether he was involved in the gambling scheme.

His translator, at first, claimed the star was aware of his gambling addiction and loaned him funds – a claim that Ohtani initially confirmed. He later clarified that his comments to reporters were not accurate and part of Mizuhara’s scheme, saying “all of this has been a complete lie”.

The MLB has strict rules against sports betting and it is illegal in California, though it is allowed in 38 other US states.

Ohtani has largely remained silent on the matter but released a statement on the scandal back in March saying: “I am very saddened and shocked that someone who I trusted has done this.”

In court, Judge John Holcomb said that after Mizuhara is released from prison, he will be on three years of probation, which will include drug and alcohol testing and continuing treatment for his gambling addiction.

Mizuhara has been granted a 45-day surrender date and will turn himself in on 24 March to serve his 57-month sentence.

Mizuhara, who was born in Japan, could also face deportation following the completion of his sentence.

Asked outside of the courthouse by the BBC about whether he will appeal, Mizuhara’s attorney said “no comment.”

Beyond the stolen funds, Mizuhara also purchased several autographed baseball cards using Ohtani’s money.

These cards, valued at approximately $325,000, were intended for resale, but Ohtani has since petitioned a federal judge to gain ownership of the cards as part of the recovery process.

Mizuhara admitted to falsifying his 2022 tax return and underreporting $4.1m in income derived from the scheme. He owes about $1.15m in unpaid taxes, plus penalties and interest.

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His sentencing was delayed several times before Thursday.

It was originally scheduled for 25 October last year, which would have coincided with the first game of the World Series in which Ohtani was playing, but prosecutors agreed to move it to 20 December. The Dodgers ended up winning the series.

The December date was then delayed to allow a forensic psychiatrist to evaluate Mizuhara’s gambling addiction. Mizuhara’s legal team used that report to argue for leniency, citing his co-operation and efforts to address his addiction.

During a previous court appearance, Mizuhara admitted to the charges against him and acknowledged his struggles with betting.

“I deeply regret my actions and the harm I have caused to Mr Ohtani and his family,” Mizuhara said. “I let my personal issues spiral out of control, and I betrayed the trust of someone who gave me everything.”

A US judge has temporarily halted President Donald Trump’s plan offering incentives to federal workers to voluntarily resign before a Thursday midnight deadline.

Federal Judge George O’Toole Jr said the plan would be paused until a hearing on Monday when he could determine the merits of a lawsuit filed by federal employee unions, reported CBS, the BBC’s US partner.

The offer is part of an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to slash the size of the federal government.

The White House says more than 40,000 employees have accepted the offer to resign in exchange for pay until 30 September. Some workers have voiced confusion about the terms of the deal.

The order came hours before Thursday’s 23:59 EST (04:59 GMT Friday) deadline for federal workers to accept the offer.

A lawyer for the justice department said federal employees would be notified that the deadline had been paused, CBS reported.

The White House appeared to see the temporary halt as a way to increase the number of resignations.

“We are grateful to the Judge for extending the deadline so more federal workers who refuse to show up to the office can take the Administration up on this very generous, once-in-a-lifetime offer,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

An Office of Personnel Management (OPM) statement said the agency would continue processing resignations until an extended deadline of 23:59 local time on Monday.

“The program is NOT being blocked or canceled,” it said. “The government will honor the deferred resignation offer.”

The Trump administration, which previously said it hoped for as many as 200,000 employees to accept its offer, told US media they expected a spike in participation just ahead of the deadline.

“It’s going to save the American people tens of millions of dollars,” Leavitt told reporters outside the White House’s West Wing before the judge paused the programme.

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The American Federation of Government Employees, a union, filed the lawsuit against the OPM, arguing it had violated the law, that it could not fund the deal, and that it had given conflicting guidance about its terms.

The union said in an email to members that the offer was part of an “effort to dismantle the civil service and replace the skilled, professional workforce with unqualified political appointees and for-profit contractors”.

The union noted that Congress has not passed a budget for funding beyond mid-March, arguing that it was unclear whether agencies could pay workers until September.

On Thursday, the union said it was “pleased” by the judge’s actions.

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Some federal employees have described their shock at the buy-out proposal, which was delivered in the form of a late-night email with the subject line “Fork in the Road”. Some thought the email was spam.

“The tone of the initial email was like ‘you may be cut anyway,'” Monet Hepp, a medical support specialist at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, previously told BBC. “People were blindsided by it.”

Democrats have questioned the legality of the resignation package and warned it would lead to a “brain drain” that would be “felt by every American”.

“Without the expertise and institutional knowledge that so many federal employees bring to their work, our government will be incapable of responding effectively to national emergencies, serving the American public, or even carrying out routine operations,” Democrats on the House Oversight Committee wrote in a letter to President Trump.

On Tuesday, the Central Intelligence Agency became the first national security department to extend the offer to its staff. Former US intelligence officials and several lawmakers have raised concerns that this offer could undermine US national security.

There are also reports of impending cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the weather-forecasting agency, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

Several more earthquakes have struck waters around the Greek island of Santorini just hours after authorities there declared a state of emergency.

The tourist hotspot has been rocked by seismic activity this week with thousands of earthquakes recorded since Sunday.

On Thursday evening, a 4.6 magnitude quake was recorded at 20:16 local time (18:00 GMT) in the sea between Santorini and another island, Amorgos, followed by a 4.2 magnitude quake roughly two hours later.

Santorini residents have begun night patrols amid fears of looting on the island, which has largely been left deserted as most residents have left.

More than 11,000 people have departed as authorities report earthquakes are being recorded on a minute-by-minute interval.

Experts have warned it is unclear when this period of “seismic crisis” on the popular tourist island might end.

• How long could the Santorini ‘seismic crisis’ last?

Thursday’s quakes have so far not been as severe as the 5.2 magnitude shock which occurred on Wednesday in waters between the two Greek islands.

So far no injuries have been reported, and there has also been no major damage on the island.

But authorities are preparing in case a larger quake hits. On Wednesday, they warned of landslide risks to parts of the island.

Magnitude refers to the size of an earthquake, with increases marked as decimal points.

A magnitude 6.0 and above is considered severe, whereas a magnitude 5.2, the strongest experienced so far in the region, is considered moderate.

On Thursday, Greek officials said the state of emergency for the island would be in place for nearly an entire month, until 3 March.

Greece is one of Europe’s most earthquake-prone countries. Seismologists have told the BBC it is difficult to predict how long the recent wave of seismic activity will last, with authorities warning it could go on for weeks.

“It is really unprecedented, we have never seen something like this before in [modern times] in Greece,” said Dr Athanassios Ganas, research director of the National Observatory of Athens.

He told the BBC: “We are in the middle of a seismic crisis.”

The “clusters” of quakes, which began on Friday, have puzzled scientists who say such a pattern is unusual because they have not been linked to a major shock.

Dr Ganas says they are seeing many earthquakes within a relatively small area, which don’t fit the pattern of a main shock and after shock sequence.

Those remaining on the island have raised fears of a potential tsunami. They have built makeshift defences from sacks placed along the island’s Monolithos beach, where buildings stand very close to the water.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who is expected to visit Santorini on Friday, struck an optimistic tone at a meeting of civil protection experts earlier on Wednesday.

“All plans have been implemented. Forces have been moved to Santorini and the other islands, so that we are ready for any eventuality,” he said.

He asked residents to “stay calm and cooperate with the authorities”.

Santorini is on what is known as the Hellenic Volcanic Arc – a chain of islands created by volcanoes – but the last major eruption was in the 1950s.

Greek authorities have said the recent tremors were related to tectonic plate movements, not volcanic activity.

Scientists cannot predict the exact timing, size or location of earthquakes.

Panama President José Raúl Mulino has accused the US of spreading “lies and falsehoods” after the US State Department claimed American government vessels were no longer required to pay a fee to transit through the Panama Canal.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has since rowed back on his department’s claim, but called the fee for American vessels “absurd” due to a treaty binding the US to protect the canal if it comes under attack.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced his desire to regain control of the waterway since taking office and has refused to rule out retaking it by force. He is due to speak with Mulino on Friday.

The Panama Canal is a 51-mile (82km) passage that links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across the Central American country.

All vessels are required to pay a fee, based on size and type, for crossing the waterway but US ships have priority of passage.

In a post on X on Wednesday, the State Department wrote: “U.S. government vessels can now transit the Panama Canal without charge fees, saving the U.S. government millions of dollars a year.”

Mulino reacted to the statement by saying he rejects “this method of managing bilateral relations on the basis of lies and falsehoods.”

He said he asked his ambassador in Washington to take “firm steps” to reject the claim, calling it “simply and plainly intolerable.”

Mulino added that US government vessels, including navy vessels, paid “$6-7m [£4.8-5.6m] a year” for the right of passage.

“It’s not as if the canal toll is breaking the economy of the United States,” he added.

The Panama Canal Authority (ACP) also made a statement saying it had “not made any adjustment” to tolls, adding that it was open to establishing a dialogue.

After Rubio and Mulino’s meeting, Panama announced it would not renew its membership of China’s infrastructure-building programme, known as the Belt and Road Initiative.

Rubio welcomed this move, calling it “a great step forward”, though Panama denied that the decision had been made at the request of the US.

Trump has expressed fears that China could close the canal to the US in the event of a crisis – something Panama and China have strongly denied.

On Wednesday, China’s Foreign Affairs spokesman, Lin Jian, said its partnership with Panama was yielding “fruitful results” and urged the country to “resist external interferences.”

Rubio met the canal’s administrator, Ricaurte Vásquez Morales alongside Mulino on Wednesday during his tour of Central America, where he demanded that Panama make “immediate changes” to the “influence and control” of China over the waterway.

This echoed Trump’s inaugural address, where he stated that the canal was being operated by China and he wanted to “take it back.”

Mulino has denied these allegations and rejected the plan, saying that the trade route “is and will remain” in Panama’s hands.

The US built the canal in the early 20th Century but, after years of protest, President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty with Panama in 1977 to gradually hand back control of the waterway. Trump has called this “a big mistake” since returning to office.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been on a tour of Central America to discuss migration and drug trafficking in the region.

Rubio’s statement responding to Mulino’s accusation of US “lies” was given at his last stop, the Dominican Republic.

Donald Trump has shocked the world by suggesting the US could “take over” and “own” Gaza, resettling its population in the process.

The US president later repeated elements of the proposal on social media, saying Gaza would be “turned over” to the US by Israel under his plan.

The White House moved to clarify that the displacement of Palestinians would be temporary, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio described it as an “interim” arrangement.

But the proposal has continued to draw condemnation, including from across the Middle East, close US allies and the United Nations – and some analysts have raised fears Trump’s comments could destabilise the ongoing ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, said the idea was “worth paying attention to”.

It comes amid ongoing questions about the post-conflict future of Gaza, where the UN estimates around two thirds of buildings have been destroyed or damaged after 15 months of fighting.

Trump’s vague proposal could signal the largest shift in US policy on the Middle East in decades, upending widespread international consensus on the need for a Palestinian state – comprising Gaza and the occupied West Bank – to exist alongside Israel.

If Donald Trump is right about one thing, it is that decades of US diplomacy on Israel and the Palestinians have failed to resolve the conflict.

Peace proposals and presidents have come and gone but the problems have festered. Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the war in Gaza it triggered were the hideous results.

Trump made his millions as a property developer and, with that hat on, made a perfectly valid observation: if Gaza is to be rebuilt, from scratch in some places, it makes little sense for hundreds of thousands of civilians to be sheltering in the rubble.

The task of rebuilding Gaza will be monumental. Unexploded munitions and mountains of debris have to be removed. Water and power lines have to be repaired. Schools, hospitals and shops need to be rebuilt.

Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff has said that could take years – and while that goes on, the Palestinians will need to go somewhere.

However, rather than exploring ways of keeping them close to home, almost certainly in camps in the central and southern parts of the Gaza Strip, Trump says they should be encouraged to leave – permanently.

Trump believes that in their absence, an idyllic, American-owned “Riviera of the Middle East” will rise from the ashes, providing thousands of jobs, opportunities for investment and, ultimately, a place for “the world’s people to live”.

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Where to begin?

Even for a president who spent much of his first term upending US Middle East policy – including moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognising Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights – this was an astonishing proposal.

In their wildest imaginations, no US president ever thought that solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict would involve taking over a chunk of Palestinian territory and evicting its population.

To be clear, to do this by force would be a grave violation of international law.

Some Palestinians would likely choose to leave Gaza and rebuild their lives elsewhere. Since October 2023, as many as 150,000 already have.

But others cannot or will not, either because they lack the financial means to do so or because their attachment to Gaza – part of the land they call Palestine – is simply too strong.

Many Gazans are descendants of people who fled or were driven from their homes in 1948 during the creation of the state of Israel – a period Palestinians call the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe.

The thought of another will be too painful for many and they will cling to their reduced lives in what remains of Gaza with a fierce determination.

For Palestinians who dream of a state of their own, alongside Israel, the loss of part of it will feel like an amputation.

Gaza has been physically separated from the West Bank since 1948. Previous rounds of negotiations, as well as Trump’s 2020 “Vision for Peace”, included plans for tunnels or railways that might link the two.

Now Trump is basically telling the Palestinians to give up on Gaza once and for all.

While he does not appear to be advocating the forced deportation of civilians – which is against international law – Trump is clearly encouraging Palestinians to leave.

Palestinian officials have already accused Israel of blocking the supply of tens of thousands of caravans which could help Gazans to stay put in less damaged parts of the territory while reconstruction takes place elsewhere.

The Arab countries who Trump says should accept as many as 1.8 million Gazan refugees, mainly Egypt and Jordan, have expressed outrage.

Both have enough problems of their own without this added burden.

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Gaza was occupied by Egypt for 19 years before it was seized by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.

It is still considered occupied by Israel under international law, which Israel disputes. It says the occupation ended in 2005, when it unilaterally dismantled Jewish settlements and pulled out its military.

Around three quarters of UN members recognise Gaza as part of a sovereign state of Palestine, though the US does not.

Cut off from the outside world by fences and an Israeli maritime blockade, it has never felt like a truly independent place.

Nothing and no one moves in or out without Israel’s permission, and an international airport – opened amid much fanfare in 1998 – was destroyed by Israel in 2001 during the second Palestinian uprising.

Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza, citing security reasons, after Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006 and ejected its rivals from the territory after intense fighting the following year.

Long before the latest war, Palestinians had come to regard Gaza as an open prison.

• Israel and the Palestinians: History of the conflict explained

It goes without saying that the US has no legal claim to the territory and it is not at all clear how Trump intends to impose American rule.

As with his bullish claims about US control over Greenland or the Panama Canal, it is not yet clear whether Trump really means it or if the comments represent an opening, outlandish bargaining position ahead of a bruising set of negotiations on Gaza’s future.

Various plans have been discussed for the post-war governance of Gaza.

In December, the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, agreed to form a joint committee to oversee its administration – an agreement which has so far come to nothing.

At other times, discussions have focused on the creation of an international peacekeeping force, possibly made up of troops from Arab countries.

Last month, Reuters reported that the UAE, US and Israel had discussed the formation of a temporary administration in Gaza until a reformed Palestinian Authority (PA), which already has control in parts of the West Bank, was ready to take over.

However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously publicly insisted that the PA will have no role to play in running post-war Gaza.

In a limited sense, American boots are already on the ground. A US security firm has employed around 100 former US special forces to man a vital checkpoint south of Gaza City and screen the vehicles of Palestinians returning to the north for weapons.

Egyptian security personnel have also been seen at the same checkpoint.

These could be the first, tentative signs of an expanded international – and possibly US-led – presence in Gaza.

But that is hardly a US takeover, something that would require a large-scale military intervention in the Middle East – the sort of thing Trump has long told voters he wants to avoid.

Negotiations on phase two of the two-week-old ceasefire between Israel and Hamas have barely begun but it is hard to see how Trump’s bombshell remarks will help to advance them.

If Hamas feels the end product of this whole process is a depopulated Gaza – devoid not just of Hamas, but of all Palestinians – it may conclude there is nothing to talk about and hold on to the remaining hostages it took on 7 October 2023.

Netanyahu’s critics have accused him of looking for excuses to blow up the negotiations and resume the war. They are bound to conclude that, with these comments, Trump is a willing accomplice.

On the other hand, the Israeli prime minister’s right-wing backers have expressed satisfaction with the US takeover plan, potentially reducing the risk of cabinet resignations and making Netanyahu’s immediate political future appear more assured.

In that sense, Trump has given Netanyahu a powerful incentive to keep the ceasefire going.

Asked whether he agreed the US should recognise Israeli sovereignty over the occupied West Bank, Trump said he had yet to take a position but that he would have an announcement to make in four weeks’ time.

That remark has caused alarm among Palestinians, for whom such an announcement would inevitably be seen as another nail in the coffin for a two-state solution.

Recognising the legitimacy of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank would be a hugely consequential move. Most of the rest of the world regards them as illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

During previous rounds of peace talks, negotiators recognised that Israel would get to hold onto large settlement blocs as part of a final agreement, probably in exchange for small chunks of Israeli territory.

In 2020, Trump brokered the Abraham Accords, which secured the historic normalisation of relations between Israel and two Arab nations, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain.

The UAE signed that agreement on the understanding Israel would not annex parts of the West Bank – an understanding which may now be in jeopardy.

On 26 January, thousands of displaced Lebanese, who had been living across the country, tried to return to their homes in southern Lebanon.

They travelled in convoys, played revolutionary songs and waved, proudly, the yellow Hezbollah flag. Many found out that, aer more than a year of war, there were no homes to return to. They mourned what had been lost and, in the rubble of destroyed buildings, put up posters remembering the group’s late leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

The date marked the end of a deadline for the withdrawal of Israeli troops, part of a ceasefire brokered by the US and France, that required Hezbollah to remove its weapons and fighters from the south. The deal would also see the deployment of thousands of Lebanese soldiers in the area. But Israel said Lebanon had not fully implemented the deal and, as a result, not all invading forces pulled out. Lebanon also accused Israel of procrastination.

Unsurprisingly, there was violence. In some areas, Israeli soldiers opened fire and 24 people, including a Lebanese soldier, were killed. Still, for Hezbollah, which has been the dominant force in southern Lebanon for decades, the violence was an opportunity to project strength, after being battered in the conflict with Israel. But can the group survive a wave of changes in Lebanon, and the re-shaping of power in the Middle East?

Over the years, Hezbollah, the Shia Muslim militia, political and social movement, cemented its position as Lebanon’s most powerful group. Backed by Iran, it built a military force more formidable than the Lebanese army. The use of violence was always an option. A strong parliamentary bloc meant that no major decision was possible without its consent while Lebanon’s fractured political system gave it representation in the government. In short, Hezbollah had the ability to paralyse the state – and many times did so.

The latest conflict started in October 2023, when Hezbollah opened a second front against Israel as Israel launched a war in Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks. The hostilities escalated dramatically last September, as Israel had penetrated the group in ways then unimaginable. First, pagers carried by its members exploded. Then their walkie-talkies. An unrelenting air campaign and subsequent invasion of the south killed more than 4,000 people including many civilians, left areas with a significant presence of Shia Muslims – which form the bulk of Hezbollah’s support – in ruins, and severely damaged the group’s arsenal.

Many of its leaders were assassinated, most notably Nasrallah, who had been Hezbollah’s face for more than three decades. His successor, former number two Naim Qassem, who is not as charismatic or influential, has admitted they suffered painful losses. The ceasefire deal that came into force in November was essentially a surrender by the group, which is considered a terrorist organisation by the US, the UK and others.

In this new reality, last month, Lebanon’s parliament finally elected a new president – former army chief Joseph Aoun, who was favoured by the Americans – after more than two years of impasse that critics attributed to Hezbollah. Weakened, the group could not block the process as it had done in the past.

In another sign of its diminished position, Aoun then named as prime minister Nawaf Salam, who was serving as president of the International Court of Justice, and someone not aligned with the group.

Hezbollah, for now, seems to be focused on another priority: its base. The group has told its followers that the loss in the war is a victory, but many know the truth is different. Their communities are destroyed, and the damage to buildings is estimated to be over $3bn (£2.4bn), according to the World Bank.

In a country with a collapsed economy, no one knows who will help – if anyone, as international assistance has been conditioned on the government taking measures that would curb Hezbollah’s power. The group has paid compensation to some families, as it did after the 2006 war, but there are already indications of discontent.

“If people are still living in tents in six months’ time, or on the rubble of their homes, they may start to blame Hezbollah rather than the government or Israel. This is why they’re investing so much effort now to try to pre-empt that,” says Nicholas Blanford, a Beirut-based non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programmes and the author of Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah’s Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel. “In the current context, you can push back a little bit against Hezbollah.”

But any action against Hezbollah comes with risks.

On 26 January, hours after people tried to return to the south, young men on motorbikes drove through non-Shia areas of Beirut and other places at night, honking and carrying Hezbollah flags. Residents in some areas confronted them. In a country where sectarian divisions run deep and many still remember the days of the 1975-1990 civil war, the convoys were seen as an intimidation tactic.

Mr Blanford said Hezbollah had “the implicit threat of violence” because of its military arm. “If you push them too hard,” he said, “they will slap you back very hard”. A Western diplomatic official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss private talks, told me: “We’ve been telling players here [the opposition] and in other countries: if you corner Hezbollah, it will probably backfire, and the risk of violence is a real possibility.”

Still, a new chapter has been opened in Lebanon, a country exhausted by pervasive corruption, government mismanagement and seemingly endless violence. It is a combination that has resulted in a dysfunctional state.

Addressing the Lebanese parliament in his inaugural speech, Aoun promised ambitious and long-delayed reforms with the knowledge that, without profound changes, Lebanon cannot be rescued. He vowed to rebuild public institutions, revive the economy, and, crucially, make the Lebanese army the sole carrier of weapons in the country. Aoun did not mention Hezbollah by name, but this is what he meant. The chamber enthusiastically applauded him; Hezbollah parliamentarians observed in silence.

But the decision about Hezbollah’s existence as a military power will probably be made far from Lebanon – in Iran. For decades, Tehran invested with weapons and money in a regional alliance it calls the Axis of Resistance, which constituted a ring of fire around Israel. Hezbollah was its main player. With thousands of well-trained, battle-hardened fighters and a vast arsenal that included long-range precision-guided missiles on Israel’s doorstep, the group acted as a deterrent against an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

This deterrence, for now, is gone – and rebuilding it, if that is Iran’s wish, will not be easy.

The fall of the Assad regime in Syria in December – in part because of Hezbollah’s setbacks – has interrupted the land corridor Tehran used to arm and fund the group. Israel, which has gathered extensive intelligence about Hezbollah, says it will continue to carry out attacks on the group to prevent its attempts to rearm.

Mr Blanford told me that “only Iran can really answer fundamental questions” about Hezbollah. “There is a possibility where either Iran or they [Hezbollah] decide to try to think differently, to disarm or become only a political party and social movement,” he said. “[But] this [ultimately] is Iran’s decision, out of the hands of Hezbollah.”

I asked a source familiar with Hezbollah’s internal affairs whether it was realistic to talk about the group’s disarmament. The issue, the source said, could be part of a “bigger, regional negotiation”, in what appeared to be a reference to indications by Iran that it is willing to reach an agreement with the West over its nuclear programme. “And there’s a difference between giving up weapons entirely or working under a framework with the state about their use, which is another possibility,” the source added.

Lebanon’s new leaders are under pressure to act quickly. Foreign allies see the reshaped balance of power in the Middle East as a chance to weaken Iran’s reach even further while the Lebanese are anxious for some stability and to have a sense that the rules apply to everyone. People here dislike when they are described as “resilient”, given their ability to carry on amid the chaos. “All we want is to live in a ‘normal country’,” I heard from a frustrated resident in a mainly Christian area of Beirut last year. It is also the case that after so much suffering, even Hezbollah’s supporters may be questioning what role the group should play.

Hezbollah is unlikely to return to what it was before the war. Disarming may not be as unthinkable as it once was.

The US Senate has confirmed President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the White House budget office, Russell Vought, hours after Democrats staged an all-night hearing in the chamber in protest.

Vought’s nomination to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has been controversial due to his role as an author of Project 2025, a “wish list” of conservative priorities for Trump in his second term.

Democrats held the floor overnight into Thursday, delivering speeches criticising Vought’s role in Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal government.

But with Democrats the minority in the chamber, Republican votes for Vought were enough to confirm him to the new role by 53-47.

Project 2025 was created by the Heritage Foundation, one of Washington’s most prominent right-wing think tanks, and calls for the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies like the Department of Justice, to be placed under direct presidential control.

It also advocates for eliminating job protections for thousands of government employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees, and calls for a nationwide ban on abortion.

Vought wrote a key chapter in the document on the executive office of the president, and served as the Republican National Committee’s 2024 platform policy director.

He will now administer the $6.75tn (£5.44tn) federal budget. He served in the same role during Trump’s first administration.

Democrats are already outraged by Trump’s budget decisions since returning to the White House, including the move to cut funding for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), reportedly allowing Elon Musk access to sensitive Treasury payroll documents, and his attempts to shrink the federal workforce with a buyout programme.

Faced with the quick pace of Trump’s executive orders, Democrats rallied around funding and the federal budget in their overnight session, and sought to make an example of Vought in an attempt to tank his nomination.

Democrats painted Vought as Trump’s “most dangerous nominee” due to his control over funds that have been allocated by Congress.

Democratic minority Senate leader Chuck Schumer described Vought as “the most radical nominee, who has the most extreme agenda”.

“We want Americans every hour, whether it’s 8pm or 3am, to hear how bad Russell Vought is and the danger he poses to them in their daily lives,” he said on the Senate floor.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said Vought was already making radical changes to government, even before he was confirmed.

“Russ Vought was the puppet master behind the funding shut down that threw this country into chaos,” Warren said, referring to last week’s funding freeze on many federal projects.

Republicans hold a 53-47 majority over Democrats in the chamber, which made it impossible for the minority party to block Vought’s confirmation without objections from Republicans.

Vought received the backing of all Republicans, including Utah Senator Mike Lee, who took X to congratulate him.

“If you like what you’ve been seeing from President Trump and DOGE, get ready, because Russ Vought is going to be a lean, mean, budget-cutting machine leading OMB,” Lee wrote.

A canal in a suburb of Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires turned bright red on Thursday, alarming local residents.

Pictures and videos show the intensely coloured water flowing into an estuary, the Rio de la Plata, which borders an ecological reserve.

Local media reports suggest the colour may have been caused by the dumping of textile dye, or by chemical waste from a nearby depot.

The Environment Ministry said in a statement that water samples had been taken from the Sarandí canal to determine the cause of the colour change.

By late afternoon the colour of the water had lost some of its intensity, the AFP news agency reported.

Residents have claimed that many local companies dispose of toxic waste in the waterway, which runs through an area of leather processing and textile factories some 10km (6 miles) from the centre of the capital.

A resident, a woman called Silvia, told local news channel C5N that although it is has turned red now, “other times it was yellow, with an acidic smell that makes us sick even in the throat”.

“I live a block from the stream. Today, it has no smell. There are not many factories in the area, although there are warehouses.”

Another resident, Maria Ducomls, told AFP industries in the region dump waste in the water, and said she had seen it coloured differently in the past – “bluish, a little green, pink, a little lilac, with grease on top”.

Hate symbols and terror offences will be punishable with mandatory jail terms ranging from one to six years in Australia, after parliament passed a series of amendments to hate crime laws on Thursday.

The new laws were passed following a wave of high-profile antisemitic attacks which have become a major topic of debate in the country.

The amendments have been described by the government as the “toughest laws Australia has ever had against hate crimes”.

But critics say that the governing Labor Party is caving to opposition demands and going against its own policy of opposing mandatory jail sentences.

Under the amendments, displaying hate symbols or performing a Nazi salute is now punishable with at least one year in prison.

Other penalties include a minimum of three years for financing terrorism and six years for committing or planning terrorist acts.

There have been several attacks on Jewish targets in Australia in recent months.

Last week authorities in Sydney found a caravan containing explosives and an antisemitic note.

The discovery came just a week after a childcare centre near a Jewish school and synagogue in Sydney was set on fire and antisemitic graffiti was seen on one of its walls.

In December, a synagogue in Melbourne was set alight with worshippers inside. No-one was seriously hurt in the incident, which sent shockwaves through the country.

Former Labor senator Kim Carr criticised the party for what he said was a “clear breach of the Labor party national platform”.

Labor opposes mandatory sentences on the grounds that such penalties do not reduce crime, undermine the courts’ independence and are often discriminatory in practice.

But opposition parties did not rush to welcome the new amendments either, accusing Labor of dragging its feet.

“The parliament is not acting today because of the decisiveness of the Labor Party,” Liberal senator James Paterson told reporters in Canberra.

“The prime minister has been dragged kicking and screaming to finally introduce tough legislation that will ensure there are real penalties for this behaviour.”

Performing the Nazi salute and displaying Nazi symbols such as the swastika, have been banned since January 2024 and carry up to one year in jail. The amendments on Thursday make the jail term mandatory.

“This is not about politics,” Home Affairs minister Tony Burke said on Wednesday night as the amendments were introduced to parliament.

“This is about whether the Australian Parliament believes it’s acceptable to advocate, threaten or commit violence against another person because of who they are, who they pray to or who they love.”

A man who was fined €200 (£166) for making a call on loudspeaker at a train station in France has begun a fight against the penalty.

The man, named only as David, told French broadcaster BFM TV he was on a call with his sister at Nantes station on Sunday when an employee from SNCF, the French railway company, approached him.

David said he was told that he would be fined €150 if he did not turn off the loudspeaker – a fine which he claims was later increased to €200 because he did not pay it on the spot. He has since hired a lawyer to dispute the fine.

SNCF confirmed the man was fined by its security staff in a quiet area of the station.

The state-owned train company disputed some details of the passenger’s account, according to French outlet La Parisien.

David, reported to be 54 years old, said he initially hung up the phone when he was told about the fine, thinking it was a joke, BFM TV reported.

SNCF described an escalating interaction between the passenger and its staff member before the fine was issued.

It told BBC News its security staff operate on trains and at stations and are authorised to issue fines against passengers.

SNCF confirmed the fine increased from €150 “because the customer refused to pay”.

According to Ouest-France, the incident happened on Sunday.

While there is no national law in France prohibiting the use of mobile phones on loudspeaker in public places, there are noise control regulations.

According to the French Transport Code, those who use “sound devices or instruments” or “disturb the peace of others by noise” in areas used for public transport could face a fine.

Opinion surveys suggest speaking loudly in a public place is among the behaviours deemed most unacceptable when it comes to phone calls.

In a survey of 2,005 adults in Great Britain last year, pollster YouGov found 86% felt the use of speakerphone in a shared environment was unacceptable, while 88% felt the same for speaking loudly.

With such strong feelings, countries around the world have different approaches to policing the issue.

The UK’s railway by-laws state that the use of any equipment to produce sound that annoys another person is not allowed, unless there is written permission, and it risks a fine.

Some train operators in the UK offer “quiet coaches” or “quiet zones” – carriages where passengers are encouraged to keep the noise level down. For example, London North Eastern Railway asks passengers travelling in such coaches to make sure music they are listening to cannot be heard through their headphones and to move if they want to make or receive a call.

Italian train operator Trenitalia offers a similar service on the Frecciarossa train. Passengers “who wish to travel in complete relaxation and away from noise pollution from cell phones” can travel in a “silent area” in its business carriage.

In Japan, where there are strict cultural norms around public behaviour, talking on the phone while on a train is considered impolite and it is strongly discouraged.

Guidelines for train etiquette issued under the website for the West Japan Railway Company asks passengers to not speak loudly on the train and set their phones on silent mode, as well as refrain from making and accepting calls while on the train.

“Speaking loudly inside trains is an annoyance to nearby passengers,” it says.

Meanwhile, the Busan Transportation Corporation located in the city of Busan in South Korea, advises passengers to put their phone on vibration mode and “have conversations quietly” under a rail etiquette guide posted on its website.

A Russian diplomat has been expelled from the UK in the latest escalation of a tit-for-tat spat after Moscow threw out a British official last year.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy said action had been taken “following Russia’s recent expulsion of a British diplomat” in November.

Moscow accused the diplomat of giving false information and spying as grounds for asking him to leave.

The government said the UK “will not stand for intimidation of our staff in this way” and that “any further action taken by Russia will be considered an escalation and responded to accordingly”.

Russia’s ambassador to the UK Andrey Kelin, who has been in post since 2019, was summoned to the Foreign Office to be informed one of his diplomats was having their accreditation revoked.

An accreditation is a recognition by a government of a diplomat’s status, and gives them certain immunities depending on rank.

“We are unapologetic about protecting our national interests,” Lammy said.

“My message to Russia is clear – if you take action against us, we will respond.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry said it intended to retaliate to the expulsion, in a statement given to the state-owned Tass news agency.

Moscow revoked the British diplomat’s accreditation in November, accusing them of spying and ordering the individual to leave the country within two weeks.

Russian state-run news agencies reported that the country’s security service FSB had accused the diplomat of providing false information on his documents and carrying out espionage activities.

His photo and name was also shared on Russian TV bulletins.

At the time, the Foreign Office dismissed Russia’s accusations as “baseless” and said it was considering a response.

Russia previously said it planned to take further action should the UK respond to its own expulsion.

Diplomatic relations between the UK and Russia have worsened since the latter’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Since then, expulsions of diplomats have become increasingly common.

In September last year, Russia announced that the accreditation of six British diplomats in Moscow had been revoked, requiring them to leave the country.

And in May, British diplomat Capt Adrian Coghill was given a week to leave Russia, days after the Russian defence attaché was expelled from London for alleged espionage as an “undeclared military intelligence officer”.

A number of British politicians and members of the press have also been barred from entering Russia since the war began, including senior government officials and journalists from the BBC, Sky News and Channel 4.

Most recently, 30 more people, including Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and other Labour cabinet members, were added to Russia’s “stop list”.

Lammy and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer were added to the list in 2022, as was now-Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch.

Australian scientists have produced the world’s first kangaroo embryo through in vitro fertilisation (IVF), a breakthrough they say could help save other species from extinction.

Using specimens from eastern grey kangaroos, the researchers successfully injected a single sperm cell into an egg, but said achieving a live birth would require more work and “technical advancements”.

The feat provides important insights into marsupial breeding and could aid efforts to improve the genetic diversity of endangered species such as the koala, Tasmanian devil, northern hairy-nosed wombat and Leadbeater’s possum, lead researcher Andres Gambini said.

Australia houses the largest variety of marsupial mammals, but it also has the highest rate of mammal extinctions.

The University of Queensland experiment looked at the growth of kangaroo eggs and sperm in a laboratory setting before creating embryos using a method known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI).

The technique, which is already used on humans and some domestic animals, was tried on eastern grey kangaroos that had died. The species was selected because it is not endangered and has existing high populations.

Despite how iconic marsupial species are in Australia and the crucial role they play in its biodiversity, studies into their tissues have been limited, scientists say.

“We are now refining techniques to collect, culture and preserve marsupial eggs and sperm,” said Dr Gambini, adding that such methods would play a crucial role in safeguarding “the genetic material of these unique and precious animals”.

IVF is being used as a tool to try and preserve endangered species the world over.

Last year, scientists achieved the world’s first IVF rhino pregnancy, successfully transferring a lab-created rhino embryo into a surrogate mother in Kenya.

In 2018, IVF was also used to create the world’s first donkey embryo.

The Governor of the Bank of England has urged continued US support for two major global economic institutions.

Andrew Bailey told the BBC he was “following extremely closely” whether the Trump administration will change its support for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Sources in Washington said the two institutions were caught by a White House executive order for a review of United Nations (UN) and other international organisations.

Mr Bailey said it is “very important that we don’t have a fragmentation of the world economy”.

He said “a big part of that is that we have support and engagement in the multilateral institutions, institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, that support the operation of the world economy. That’s really important.”

There is growing concern in finance ministries and central banks around the world about US disengagement from the institutions, with radical changes to the global financial system now being floated in Washington DC.

The “Project 2025” suggested blueprint for Trump’s presidency, which was authored by figures who are now key White House staff, recommended withdrawal from both institutions and termination of financial contributions.

It said the institutions “espouse economic theories and policies that are inimical to American principles of free market and limited government principles.”

Following a White House executive order, all international intergovernmental organisations of which the US is a member will be reviewed to determine if they are “contrary to the interests of the US” and “can be reformed”.

The six month review may then provide recommendations for withdrawal to President Trump.

Sources in the G20, or Group of Twenty – a club of countries that meets to discuss global economic and political issues – said that during his first term, Trump’s team suggested abolishing the IMF at the 2018 Buenos Aires Summit.

The IMF and World Bank are specialised agencies of the UN.

The US is the largest shareholder in both the Fund and the Bank, institutions which were created by the post-war Bretton Woods Conference 80 years ago.

The IMF provides last resort lending for nations in financial trouble, and surveys economic problems.

The World Bank gives money and cheap loans to developing countries for poverty alleviation and development.

The Trump administration is yet to appoint staff to this area, but USAID’s development spending is currently the focus of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cuts.

Some members of the administration are believed to be particularly focused on the World Bank’s loans to China.

Asked about the possibility of the US leaving the Fund, the IMF said yesterday it had a “long history” of “working with successive US administrations”.

An Israeli military court has sentenced a soldier to seven months in prison after he admitted to the aggravated abuse of Palestinian detainees from Gaza at the Sde Teiman military detention centre.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the reservist, who it did not name, was convicted over “several incidents in which he punched the detainees with his fists and used his weapon while they were handcuffed and blindfolded”.

“These acts were committed in the presence of other soldiers, some of whom called on him to stop, and were even documented on the defendant’s mobile phone,” it added.

The Haaretz newspaper said he was the first soldier convicted of abusing Gazans held during the war with Hamas.

He had made the Palestinians say demeaning phrases and make animal noises, and beat them while they were bound and blindfolded, Haaretz reported.

It also cited the Beit Lid Military Court as saying the soldier admitted to three counts of aggravated abuse and one count of unbecoming conduct as part of a plea deal with prosecutors.

They related to four separate incidents between January and June 2024, when he was guarding lorries transporting detainees, it said.

According to Haaretz, the court found an unspecified number of masked soldiers, whose identities remain unknown, had also participated in the abuse.

In addition to the prison term, the convicted soldier was also given a suspended sentence and demoted to the rank of private, according to the IDF.

“Soldiers have a duty to use the force entrusted to them in accordance with IDF values and orders, at all times and in times of war in particular,” the IDF said.

The Sde Teiman detention facility was set up after the start of the Gaza war 15 months ago. Since then, it has been at the centre of reports of serious abuses.

In July, far-right protesters broke into Sde Teiman after Israeli military police went there to question nine reservists suspected of raping a detainee and causing a life-threatening injury to him. Several of the reservists were subsequently arrested.

In October, a report by a UN commission of inquiry alleged that thousands of child and adult detainees from Gaza had been “subjected to widespread and systematic abuse, physical and psychological violence, and sexual and gender-based violence amounting to the war crime and crime against humanity of torture and the war crime of rape and other forms of sexual violence”.

Israel’s government said it rejected the accusations of widespread ill-treatment and torture of detainees, and insisted that it was “fully committed to international legal standards”. It also said it had carried out thorough investigations into every complaint.

The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.

More than 47,550 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

According to the Israeli rights group HaMoked, 1,802 Palestinians from Gaza are currently being held as “unlawful combatants” in Israeli prisons. The figure does not include detainees being held by the military.

Teammates of Spanish footballer Jenni Hermoso have given testimony in support of her account of feeling overwhelmed after being allegedly forcibly kissed by Spain’s former football chief Luis Rubiales.

Her teammates Irene Paredes, Laia Codina, and Alexia Putellas appeared at the trial of Mr Rubiales in Madrid on Thursday, where he is accused of sexual assault and coercion.

Ms Putellas said Ms Hermoso had felt “overwhelmed” after the incident, while Ms Codina said she was “sad” and “not enjoying herself”.

Mr Rubiales kissed Ms Hermoso on the lips during the 2023 Fifa Women’s World Cup medal ceremony in Australia, triggering protests and calls for his resignation. He denies any wrongdoing.

Ms Hermoso had told the court on Monday she had never given permission to be kissed at the World Cup medal ceremony and felt “disrespected” as a woman.

Ms Putellas said she thought at the time the incident had been something “fortuitous” and a “misunderstanding” but Ms Hermoso then later showed her a video and said she did not know how it occurred to Mr Rubiales to kiss her, according to local Spanish media.

The court heard from Ms Paredes that while on the bus to the airport after the World Cup final, she told her teammates to stop making jokes about the incident, saying it was “serious”.

Ms Putellas said that Ms Hermoso was “overwhelmed” on the plane back to Spain.

“She started crying from exhaustion,” the Barcelona player added.

The 31-year-old said Ms Hermoso was asked to speak to Mr Rubiales on the plane who told her that she should “come out” and “deny that there was no consent” in the kiss.

“She was angry and she said that there was no need for him to explain the facts to her because she had experienced it, that she wasn’t going to do that,” Ms Putellas said.

Ms Codina told the trial that during the team’s celebratory trip to the Spanish island of Ibiza, Ms Hermoso was “sad, she was not enjoying herself, far from it” even though it “should have been the best moment” of her life.

Three colleagues of Mr Rubiales are also on trial, accused of colluding in the alleged coercion: Jorge Vilda, coach of the World Cup-winning side, Rubén Rivera, the federation’s former head of marketing, and former sporting director, Albert Luque. They all deny the charges.

On Wednesday, the court heard that Mr Vilda spoke to Rafael Hermoso – brother of Jenni Hermoso – on the flight back to Spain, telling him that Mr Rubiales feared for his position, according to local Spanish media.

Mr Vilda asked him to speak to his sister about her making a video with Ms Rubiales that would downplay the kiss.

The coach warned that his sister could face “professional and personal consequences” if she did not cooperate, Rafael Hermoso said.

Speaking in court on Monday, Ms Hermoso said she and the then-president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation hugged and celebrated at the football event, saying that he then grabbed her “by the ears and kiss[ed] me on the mouth”.

“I didn’t hear or understand anything,” she said, adding that “a kiss on the lips is only given when I decide so”.

The footballer said she felt “completely abandoned by the federation”.

Prosecutors are calling for Mr Rubiales to receive a one-year prison sentence for sexual assault for the kiss.

They are also calling for him to be given a sentence of a year-and-a-half for coercion, for allegedly trying to pressure Ms Hermoso into saying publicly that the kiss was consensual.

Mr Rubiales denies the charges. The trial continues.