World roundup: February 6 2025

Stories from Israel-Palestine, North Korea, Sudan, and elsewhere

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TODAY IN HISTORY

February 6, 1840: British and Māori representatives sign the Treaty of Waitangi, officially making New Zealand a British colony. The Māori were looking for British protection from France and for recognition of their own property and individual rights. Under the terms of the treaty those rights were supposed to be protected, though it only took British colonial authorities a couple of decades to thoroughly breach that part of the arrangement.

February 6, 1981: Uganda’s National Resistance Army rebels against the government of Milton Obote following a disputed election in December. This marked the start of the most important phase of the Ugandan civil war, or Ugandan Bush War, though the conflict had begun in October 1980 with an uprising in the West Nile region. The NRA captured Kampala in January 1986, overthrowing the military government that had ousted Obote in a coup the year before. The rebels then set up a new government under their leader, Yoweri Museveni, who has been president of Uganda ever since.

INTERNATIONAL

In something of a surprise, but not of the good variety, last month set yet another global record as the hottest January ever recorded, as global average temperatures hit a whopping 1.75 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial norms. Followers of the climate apocalypse may recall that humanity set temperature records for 13 straight months starting in June 2023, a string that was barely broken in July 2024. Last August was the hottest August on record but for the rest of the year global temperatures slid slightly below their 2023 levels.

What makes January’s resurgence a surprise is that we’re officially in a La Niña period, and while this La Niña is relatively weak it should still be nudging temperatures down a bit. It probably is, which means something else is pushing temperatures up and that suggests humanity may have broken something about the planet’s climate regulation system. The leading candidate seems to be water temperature, which remains high and reduces the oceans’ effectiveness as a heat and carbon sink.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

According to Barak Ravid and Stephen Neukam at Axios, during their meeting earlier this week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Donald Trump that he could see his way clear to end the Israeli military’s (IDF) campaign in Gaza if Hamas agrees to give up power and send its leaders into exile. He further suggested extending the ongoing “first phase” of the Gaza ceasefire agreement to secure the release of additional October 7 hostages, in return for which he would be willing to discuss the release of “‘senior’ Palestinian prisoners” whose release Israeli officials have been resisting to date. There is of course no way to know if Netanyahu is actually serious or is just trying to set up Hamas to be responsible when the negotiations on a “second phase” of the ceasefire collapse. Hamas has already reportedly agreed to cede political authority over Gaza to some sort of committee, but it’s unclear whether it would be willing to give up military control.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Thursday that he’s ordered the IDF to prepare for the “voluntary” (trust us!) evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza. He is, of course, reacting to Trump’s plan (?) to ethnically cleanse the territory and turn it into a glorious US luxury colony with gold toilets as far as the eye can see. This continues to be the challenge posed by a US president who likes to think out loud while drawing from a brain that’s been checked out, to put it charitably, for at least a couple of decades now. Even when what that president says is stupid/unfeasible/abominable, somebody somewhere will feel compelled and/or emboldened to act on it because it came from the mouth of the US president.

Trump’s “proposal” was all of the above, though to be fair it’s been hard to get a precise bead on it because everybody in his administration keeps trying to walk parts of it back, in some cases only to be contradicted by their boss:

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio has characterized Trump’s “generous” and not “hostile” suggestion as an “offer to rebuild and to be in charge of the rebuilding” of Gaza, even though Trump explicitly said that other countries would pay for the rebuilding effort. I guess they’re going to hire the US to do it, for some reason. He also said that the US would have an “ownership position” in Gaza, which doesn’t align with simply managing its reconstruction.

• Rubio and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt have both described the relocation of Gaza’s population as “temporary”; Trump said he intends to “do something where [the Palestinians] wouldn’t want to go back” and on Thursday insisted that “Palestinians…would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities” outside Gaza.

• Leavitt and Trump himself now insist that his plan would not require a US military occupation of Gaza because the territory would “be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting”; previously Trump said he would deploy troops to the territory “if it’s necessary.”

It’s difficult for anyone outside the administration to critique a plan when the people within the administration still haven’t agreed on what that plan actually is. For Palestinians the specifics may be irrelevant. The fact that Trump even conceived of this idea shows that he’s as depravedly pro-Israel as ever and will likely find many more ways to immiserate them—like giving Netanyahu a green light to annex the West Bank (the IDF already seems to be depopulating the northern part of that territory, so it wouldn’t be that big a stretch). Certainly any hope that he would press Netanyahu to extend the current Gaza truce has to be diminishing now. The only thing preventing a worst-case scenario for the Palestinians may be the resistance of Arab governments whose support for the Palestinian cause has historically been fickle at best.

Elsewhere, the Israeli government announced its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Thursday, following the US out the proverbial door. This is because of the HRC’s ostensibly anti-Israel (or antisemitic, if you want to get really fanciful) bias, though I prefer to think of it as Netanyahu, having long ago withdrawn from the concept of human rights, simply dropping the pretense.

IRAQ

Turkish drone strikes killed three members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), including a “commander,” in northern Iraq’s Sulaymaniyah province on Thursday. The Iraqi government, meanwhile, has a decision to make after the Trump administration ended a sanctions waiver that had allowed it to purchase Iranian electricity and natural gas. As Musings on Iraq’s Joel Wing points out, that affects upwards of 40 percent of Iraq’s energy supplies and there’s no clear alternative available. More punishment may be coming if the administration cuts Iraq’s central bank off from the US dollar. The Iraqi economy is heavily dollar dependent, and sanctioned actors in the region (including Iran) have taken advantage of that in the past to acquire dollars from the bank. Depriving the bank of dollars would deprive those actors but it would also probably crash the Iraqi economy.

IRAN

The Trump administration on Thursday imposed its first Iran sanctions under Maximum Pressure 2.0, targeting the oil sector. According to Al Jazeera, “the measures targeted firms, ships and individuals affiliated with companies already sanctioned by the US” so there doesn’t seem to be anything groundbreaking here. It is noteworthy that the administration started with oil. Under Maximum Pressure 1.0 the administration tried, unsuccessfully, to reduce Iranian oil revenue to zero.

ASIA

PAKISTAN

Unspecified militants attacked a police checkpoint in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province early Thursday morning, killing at least three police officers. Presumably these were Pakistani Taliban fighters. Separately, a military raid on a suspected militant hideout in another part of the province left at least 12 of the militants and one soldier dead. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry later said that one of the dead militants was “the son of an Afghan government official,” without further explanation. His body was repatriated to Afghanistan.

INDIA

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to visit Washington next week to spend some time with his “dear friend” Donald Trump. Sadly, their friendship is being tested a bit, according to The New York Times, thanks to the Trump administration’s deportation policy. The administration sent 100 undocumented Indian migrants back to India on Wednesday, which isn’t such a big deal, but the manner in which it did so has caused a fair amount of upset in India. Trump apparently isn’t satisfied just deporting people back to their home countries; he’s deporting them shackled on military, rather than commercial, flights even though it costs more. Reports of mistreatment on Wednesday’s flight have sparked outrage and that outrage is becoming a political headache for Modi ahead of his US trip.

NORTH KOREA

North Korea’s involvement in Russia’s war against Ukraine may not be going terribly well on the battlefield, where North Korean units have suffered so many casualties they’ve reportedly been pulled out of combat, but it is having at least one positive effect from Pyongyang’s perspective. According to Reuters, citing “two senior Ukrainian sources,” the North Korean ballistic missiles being used by Russian forces have gotten considerably more accurate over the past couple of months than they were previously. All of the real world experience they’re getting seems to be enabling improvements in those munitions that could pay dividends should North Korea ever find itself in another shooting war.

AFRICA

SUDAN

According to UN humanitarian coordinator Clementine Nkweta-Salami, recent fighting between the Sudanese military and Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North rebels has killed at least 80 people in the city of Kadugli, capital of Sudan’s South Kordofan state. That’s only part of the picture, as there have been reports of fighting in other parts of South Kordofan as well as Blue Nile state. Nkweta-Salami’s statement warned that the fighting is already causing greater levels of “food insecurity,” and people parts of both of those states were already estimated to be suffering in near-famine conditions. In Khartoum, meanwhile, AFP reported that the Sudanese military is advancing on the Republican Palace, which under normal circumstances serves as the official presidential residence but is at present controlled by the Rapid Support Forces militant group.

IVORY COAST

AFP reported on Thursday that the French military is aiming to complete its withdrawal from Ivory Coast on February 20. President Alassane Ouattara announced the French departure in December, which will see the removal of a sizable counterterrorism force though a small, 80 person training detachment will remain. Paris is in the midst of “reorganizing” its African military presence after being kicked out of several countries, particularly across West Africa.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

M23 militants held a rally in the recently-captured city of Goma on Thursday to encourage residents to feel good about their new overlords. The leader of the rebels’ political umbrella group, Corneille Nangaa, declared the city “liberated and sanitized” and urged the reopening of schools and state offices. It’s unclear how well the message was received. Meanwhile, the militants have continued their advance on the city of Bukavu and were reportedly just 50 kilometers away on Thursday. And Congolese officials have confirmed that President Félix Tshisekedi will attend a joint summit of the East African Community and Southern African Development Community in Tanzania starting on Friday. Rwandan President Paul Kagame, M23’s patron, will also be in attendance, which means if there’s still a chance for diplomacy here it will have to take place at that summit.

Nangaa speaking at Thursday’s rally (ALEXIS HUGUET/AFP via Getty Images)

EUROPE

RUSSIA

There are a few items to cover:

• The Russian military said on Thursday that its forces had “thwarted an attempted counterattack by the Ukrainian armed forces” in Russia’s Kursk oblast, dealing heavy losses to the Ukrainians. There are apparently some indications that the Ukrainians made a bit of territorial progress and those losses were not as severe as the Russians claimed, so “thwarted” might be too strong a word.

• The Trump administration on Thursday did away with “Task Force KleptoCapture,” a Biden Justice Department initiative to seize the assets of Russian oligarchs in response to the Ukraine invasion. It also disbanded the “Foreign Influence Task Force,” which dealt with foreign (including Russian) disinformation and election interference operations.

• The UK government stripped the accreditation from a Russian diplomat on Thursday in retaliation for a similar Russian move against a British diplomat back in November. Russian authorities had accused that diplomat of spying.

UKRAINE

The Ukrainian military received a couple of new consignments of aircraft on Thursday: a batch of Mirage 2000 fighters from France and F-16s from the Netherlands. The size of both shipments is unknown. Several European countries have promised to send fighters to Ukraine, which made the F-16 in particular a focal point in its arms requests until the US finally acquiesced in 2023, but those pledges have been for relatively small numbers of jets and what’s arrived to date doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in the conflict.

AMERICAS

ECUADOR

Ecuadorian voters will head to the polls on Sunday for a general election in which President Daniel Noboa will be seeking a full term, after finishing out the remainder of what had been Guillermo Lasso’s term before he stepped aside in 2023. There will be 16 candidates on the ballot but polling indicates the race will essentially be a rematch of the 2023 contest that saw Noboa defeat leftist Luisa González. Noboa should probably be considered the favorite, though not prohibitively. To win in the first round, one candidate must take more than 50 percent of the vote or 40 percent with at least a ten point lead over the runner up. If no candidate hits either of those marks the top two finishers will go to a runoff on April 13.

Noboa has oriented his presidency around an authoritarian crackdown on violent crime similar to what Nayib Bukele has done in El Salvador. His problem is that, while murder rates did drop last year compared with the year before, they haven’t dropped all that much, and some other types of crime (kidnappings, for example) have actually increased in frequency since he took office. That’s why he may be vulnerable.

PANAMA

The Panama Canal Authority is denying claims that it has given permission for US government vessels to pass through the waterway fee-free. Those claims came from none other than the US State Department, which announced on Wednesday that US ships would no longer be required to pay to transit the canal, “saving the US government millions of dollars a year.” Donald Trump has accused Panama of turning control of the canal over to China and has threatened to seize it, which served as the backdrop to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to the country on Sunday. Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino did make some concessions to Rubio, including Panama’s withdrawal from China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Either he also offered to waive those canal fees or somebody in the State Department is making it up.

UNITED STATES

In Thursday’s chaos roundup:

• According to Reuters, the Trump administration intends to maintain just 294 employees of the US Agency for International Development, down from more than 10,000 around the world today. Obviously this means the end of USAID in all but name, with the administration perhaps feeling that it can’t entirely eradicate the department without congressional approval. Rubio is reportedly telling State Department employees that the US is not eradicating foreign aid entirely, but it’s unclear what programs might actually survive or what form that aid might take moving forward. What does seem clear is that the waivers Rubio has been issuing for humanitarian projects aren’t working; former USAID contractors speaking with The Intercept’s Matt Sledge called them “performative” and “lip service.” By the way, if you’re still wondering why Trump and SuperPresident Elon Musk have destroyed USAID so zealously, apparently the agency was investigating the relationship between the Ukrainian government and Musk’s Starlink telecom firm. It’s not clear what the investigation was about, but coincidentally or not it’s probably kaput now.

• Trump signed an executive order on Thursday sanctioning the International Criminal Court and its personnel for having the temerity to investigate US war crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli war crimes in Gaza. The sanctions include asset freezes and travel bans for court officials and their families. Trump previously blacklisted then-ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in 2020 but the Biden administration subsequently lifted those sanctions.

• Reuters says that the Trump administration may issue a series of demands to the World Health Organization in exchange for abandoning its decision to withdraw from that body. The scope of those demands is unclear but one would likely be the appointment of an American director when current head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus leaves that post in 2027.

• Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has reportedly revised its artificial intelligence guidelines to remove a section that prohibited applications that are “likely to cause harm.” So it’s getting into the AI weapons business. I mean, really, what could go wrong?

Finally, Spencer Ackerman considers what is likely to go wrong should Trump insist on ethnically cleansing Gaza:

It does not need to be said that Palestinians will fight to the end to remain in Gaza. They will be relentlessly demonized as terrorists for doing so. They will also be incentivized to inflict as much horror as desperate people can inflict when faced with the prospect of losing everything. And, once unleashed, no one can ever know where and when it will end.

If U.S. forces are deployed to Gaza, we can expect them to come under attack. The agonies of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars may even be eclipsed, since those Iraqi and Afghan fighters confronted occupation but not the prospect of the Americans removing them from their land and heritage. (I recognize that in Iraq in 2005-7, for many Sunni insurgents, this distinction blurred when Iraq’s civil war inflicted sectarian violence on people already under occupation, but not even George W. Bush flirted with population transfer, let alone broadcast it live from the White House.)

Once under fire, the U.S. military will retaliate. There will then be no more distinction possible between the U.S. materially supporting Israel in a genocidal campaign – again; that is horrific and unacceptable enough – and being a co-belligerent in that campaign. And, yet again, once unleashed, no one can ever know where that violence will end.