WASHINGTON: US officials now believe that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza is unlikely before President Joe Biden leaves office in January, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The newspaper cited top-level officials in the White House, State Department and Pentagon without naming them. Those bodies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“I can tell you that we do not believe that deal is falling apart,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters on Thursday before the report was published.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said two weeks ago that 90 percent of a ceasefire deal had been agreed upon.
The United States and mediators Qatar and Egypt have for months attempted to secure a ceasefire but have failed to bring Israel and Hamas to a final agreement.
Two obstacles have been especially difficult: Israel’s demand to keep forces in the Philadelphi corridor between Gaza and Egypt and the specifics of an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
The United States has said a Gaza ceasefire deal could lower tensions across the Middle East amid fears the conflict could widen.
Biden laid out a three-phase ceasefire proposal on May 31 that he said at the time Israel agreed to. As the talks hit obstacles, officials have for weeks said a new proposal would soon be presented.
The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on Oct. 7 when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
Israel’s subsequent assault on the Hamas-governed enclave has killed over 41,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry, while displacing nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, causing a hunger crisis and leading to genocide allegations at the World Court that Israel denies.

DENMARK: Swedish authorities have charged a 52-year-old woman associated with the Daesh group with genocide, crimes against humanity, and serious war crimes against Yazidi women and children in Syria — in the first such case of a person to be tried in the Scandinavian country.

Lina Laina Ishaq, who’s a Swedish citizen, allegedly committed the crimes from August 2014 to December 2016 in Raqqa, the former de facto capital of the self-proclaimed Daesh caliphate and home to about 300,000 people.

The crimes “took place under Daesh rule in Raqqa, and this is the first time that Daesh attacks against the Yazidi minority have been tried in Sweden,” senior prosecutor Reena Devgun said in a statement.

“Women, children, and men were regarded as property and subjected to being traded as slaves, sexual slavery, forced labor, deprivation of liberty, and extrajudicial executions,” Devgun said.

When announcing the charges, Devgun said that they were able to identify the woman through information from UNITAD, the UN team investigating atrocities in Iraq.

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Daesh “tried to annihilate the Yazidi ethnic group on an industrial scale,” Devgun said.

In a separate statement, the Stockholm District Court said the prosecutor claims the woman detained a number of women and children belonging to the Yazidi ethnic group in her residence in Raqqa and “allegedly exposed them to, among other things, severe suffering, torture or other inhumane treatment as well as for persecution by depriving them of fundamental rights for cultural, religious and gender reasons contrary to general international law.”

According to the charge sheet, Ishaq is suspected of holding nine people, including children, in her Raqqa home for up to seven months and treating them as slaves. She also abused several of those she held captive.

The charge sheet said that Ishaq, who denies wrongdoing, is accused of having molested a baby, said to have been one month old at the time, by holding a hand over the child’s mouth when he screamed to make him shut up.

She is also suspected of having sold people to Daesh, knowing they risked being killed or subjected to serious sexual abuse.

In 2014, Daesh stormed Yazidi towns and villages in Iraq’s Sinjar region and abducted women and children. Women were forced into sexual slavery, and boys were taken to be indoctrinated in jihadi ideology.

The woman earlier had been convicted in Sweden and was sentenced to three years in prison for taking her 2-year-old son to Syria in 2014, an area that Daesh then controlled.

The woman claimed she had told the child’s father that she and the boy were only going on holiday to Turkiye. However, once in Turkiye, the two crossed into Syria and the Daesh-run territory.

In 2017, when Daesh’s reign began to collapse, she fled from Raqqa and was captured by Syrian Kurdish troops. She managed to escape to Turkiye, where she was arrested with her son and two other children she had given birth to in the meantime, with a Daesh foreign fighter from Tunisia.

She was extradited from Turkiye to Sweden.

Before her 2021 conviction, the woman lived in the southern town of Landskrona.

The court said the trial was planned to start Oct. 7 and last approximately two months.

Large parts of the trial are to be held behind closed doors.