Author: Daily Sabah With Reuters

Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri on Tuesday rejected Israeli and U.S. calls for the group to disarm, saying its right to resist was not negotiable. “The weapon of the resistance is a red line, and it is not negotiable,” he told Reuters. “We will not accept (any deal) to trade it for reconstruction or the entry of aid.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday that the United States and Iran should resolve their mutual issues through talks, and Russia was ready to do everything in its power to help bring this about, state news agency RIA reported.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said on Tuesday he was certain that U.S. President Donald Trump would be able to achieve peace on what he referred to as the Palestinian issue. Speaking during an extraordinary Arab League summit, he said Egypt would be hosting a conference for Gaza reconstruction next month.

Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Tuesday Israel was ready to proceed to the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal, as long as Hamas was ready to release more of the 59 hostages it is still holding. Fighting in Gaza has been halted since January 19 under a truce arranged with U.S. support and Qatari and Egyptian mediators, and Hamas has exchanged 33 Israeli hostages and five Thais for some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. But the initial 42-day truce has expired and Hamas and Israel, which has blocked the entry of aid trucks into Gaza, remain far apart…

France and Britain are proposing a partial one-month truce between Russia and Ukraine that would not cover ground fighting, French President Emmanuel Macron told the daily newspaper Le Figaro on Sunday. However, Macron said the truce would cover air, sea and energy infrastructure attacks. “In the event of a ceasefire, it would be very difficult to verify (fighting) along the front was being respected,” Macron told Le Figaro, adding that the front line was equivalent to the distance between Paris and Budapest. Macron spoke to Le Figaro as he flew to London for a meeting with European leaders, convened by…

Russia’s defence ministry on Sunday said its forces had conducted strikes in the last 24 hours on gas processing facilities used by Ukrainian defence forces, the Interfax news agency reported. Reuters could not immediately verify the battlefield reports.

Europe urgently needs to rearm and member states must be given the fiscal space to carry out a surge in defence spending, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Sunday after a meeting about support for Ukraine. Von der Leyen added that Europe also needed to show the United States that it was ready to defend democracy. “After a long time of underinvestment, it is now of utmost importance to step up the defence investment for a prolonged period of time,” she told reporters after the meeting in London. “Member states need more fiscal space to do a…

U.S. President Donald Trump announced the names of three cryptocurrencies to be included in a new U.S. crypto strategic reserve on Sunday, spiking the value of each in market trading. Trump said on social media that his January executive order on digital assets would create a stockpile of currencies including XRP (Ripple), SOL (Solana), and ADA (Cardano). The assets rose 10% to 35% in trading on Sunday. Other digital assets also gained. Trump said his order “directed the Presidential Working Group to move forward on a Crypto Strategic Reserve that includes XRP, SOL, and ADA. I will make sure the…

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said that some European leaders had privately set out new plans on defence spending during a meeting in London, but he declined to give details, saying it was for individual leaders to set them out. Rutte was speaking to reporters outside the meeting on Sunday.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Sunday said he did not accept that the United States under President Donald Trump was an unreliable ally. On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky clashed with Trump and cut his Washington visit short. Asked during a press conference whether the U.S. was now an unreliable ally, Starmer said: “Nobody wanted to see what happened last Friday, but I do not accept that the U.S. is an unreliable ally. “The U.S. has been a reliable ally to the UK for many, many decades, and continues to be. There are no two countries as closely aligned…