Israel and the new Syrian regime have recently held direct talks, according to an Israeli source familiar with the matter – an indication of shifting dynamics between the former enemies as Israel expands its military presence in the country.

The talks were held in Azerbaijan and were attended by the chief of the Israeli military’s Operations Directorate, Maj. Gen. Oded Basyuk, the source said, adding that Basyuk met with Syrian government representatives in the presence of Turkish officials.

Interim Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa said last week that his government was holding indirect talks with Israel to bring an end to its attacks on his country “so matters don’t reach a point where both sides lose control.”

There’s been no word from Damascus on any direct talks with Israel.

The source did not disclose the topics of the meeting, nor who was mediating. Channel 12 in Israel was the first to report the meeting.

This week, US President Donald Trump met Sharaa – a former jihadist who was designated a terrorist by the US in 2013 – in Saudi Arabia. Trump pledged to remove crippling sanctions imposed against the regime of Bashar al Assad. Assad was overthrown in an uprising led by Sharaa and fled Syria in December.

The White House said that Trump urged Sharaa take a series of measures, including normalization with Israel, expelling foreign and Palestinian “terrorists,” and helping the US to prevent the resurgence of ISIS.

Since the Assad regime fell, Israel has taken more territory in Syria and staged multiple attacks that it says are aimed at preventing the reconstitution of military capabilities and rooting out militancy that could threaten its security. Israel’s move into Syrian territory was initially described as temporary but officials have since said that the military will remain indefinitely.

Israel has also declared a buffer zone in the south of Syria with the stated aim of protecting Syria’s Druze minority. It also occupies the Golan Heights, which it captured from Syria in the 1967 war and later annexed.

Prospect of sanctions returning every six months

The US Treasury said Thursday it was working to Trump’s direction on Syria sanctions and aims to implement “the necessary authorizations that would be critical to bringing new investment into Syria.”

It added in a post on X that the “Treasury’s actions can help rebuild Syria’s economy, financial sector, and infrastructure and could put the country on a path to a bright, prosperous, and stable future.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio clarified that the US will issue waivers to Syria sanctions and is not fully repealing them for the time being.

“As we make progress, hopefully we’ll be in a position soon, or one day, to go to Congress and ask them to permanently remove the sanctions,” Rubio said in Antalya, Turkey, adding that the Trump administration hoped to eventually repeal the waivers because the prospect of sanctions returning every six months is a deterrent to investment.

Jake Wood, the foundation’s executive director, said he did not yet know when or how many aid trucks Israel would allow into Gaza, but he called conditions there “clearly urgent” and said he expects “positive updates on that in the coming days.”

The Israeli government, which has blocked aid to Gaza for nearly 11 weeks, has not responded to multiple requests for comment about the matter.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation will run a new, tightly controlled mechanism for Gaza aid deliveries that has been approved by Israel and the United States, which both countries say is designed to prevent Hamas from stealing aid.

The United Nations’ major aid organizations say there is no evidence of any significant diversion of aid in Gaza and are refusing to participate in the new aid mechanism, saying it will displace Palestinians and increase the dangers they face.

In his first interview since launching the foundation, Wood addressed criticisms by the UN and other aid groups and urged them to reconsider.

“This plan is not perfect, but this plan will be feeding people by the end of the month, in a scenario where no one has allowed aid in over the course of the last 10 weeks,” Wood said.

“Ultimately, the community is going to face a choice. This is going to be the mechanism by which aid can be distributed in Gaza. Are you willing to participate? The answer is going to be, you know, pretty critical to whether or not this ramps up to sufficiently feed 2.2 million people in a very desperate situation.”

Without the participation of the major UN agencies, Wood said it is “hard to say” whether his foundation will be able to distribute enough aid to feed Gaza’s population of 2.1 million. He said the foundation currently plans to provide 300 million meals in its first 90 days, which he acknowledged is “not sufficient.”

Wood said he believes much of the humanitarian community’s opposition to the new mechanism is based on misinformation, including what he says are false claims about the Israeli military providing direct security for aid distribution sites and biometric data being shared with the Israeli government.

“I cannot blame the humanitarian community for crying foul amid that misinformation. I would not have participated in a plan that did those same things. However, that is not the plan,” Wood said.

He added that he “unequivocally … will not be a part of anything that forcibly dislocates or displaces the Palestinian population.”

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation will initially launch four distribution sites: three in southern Gaza and one in central Gaza, Wood said, even though much of the strip’s population is in the central and northern areas.

Wood said Israel has agreed to allow the foundation to establish two sites in northern Gaza, which he believes can be operational within the first 30 days of the foundation’s operations.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is only expected to be able to feed about 60% of Gaza’s population in its first weeks. Wood said it is not clear how long it will take to be able to cover the needs of the entire population.

Pressed on Israel’s claims that Hamas is stealing humanitarian aid – which Hamas and aid organizations deny – Wood said “it doesn’t really matter.”

“Israel controls access to Gaza, and if, if it is their belief that there is a large percentage of aid that is being interdicted by Hamas and other non-state actors … then we have no choice but to create a mechanism which operates in that construct and in that framing,” Wood said.

“I think, as with most situations, there’s three sides to every story. There’s one side, there’s the other side, and then there’s the truth somewhere in between. I’m not here to render judgment on either of those. I’m here to solve a problem and feed people.”

The foundation’s operations will be secured by a private American security contractor, UG Solutions, which also manned a vehicle checkpoint in Gaza during the ceasefire earlier this year.

Wood, a US Marine Corps veteran, said the contractors will be responsible for guarding aid trucks from the Gaza border to the distribution sites and will not be involved in distributing the aid to civilians.

Wood said they would be operating “under strict rules of engagement,” which he declined to share for operational security, but said they would abide by international laws and norms.

Since winning power back from the hands of his populist rivals a year and a half ago, Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk has faced one very stubborn roadblock to his plans: the country’s president.

That could change after a pivotal presidential election, which begins with a first round of voting Sunday.

Rafał Trzaskowski, the mayor of capital city Warsaw who is closely aligned with Tusk’s center-left ruling party, is leading opinion polling in the race to replace Andrzej Duda, who has served two terms and is ineligible to stand again.

His main challenger is Karol Nawrocki, an ally of US President Donald Trump, who like Duda before him is the chosen candidate of the right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party that has bitterly opposed Tusk’s agenda. Nawrocki has loudly supported Trump and visited the White House to meet with the president earlier this month.

The stakes for Tusk, and for Europe, are huge: the presidential palace has been the last political stronghold of PiS, which led an eight-year assault on the independence of the country’s judicial system, media and cultural bodies before Tusk ousted their government in late 2023. Tusk has re-aligned Warsaw with Brussels, where fellow leaders have cast him as a blueprint for scrubbing a country free of populism, at a time when most centrist leaders on the continent are succumbing to opposition from the right.

Freely wielding the presidential veto, Duda has blocked several attempts by Tusk to unpick the legacy of PiS’s transformation of the Polish state, including judicial reforms that have been a centerpiece of Tusk’s agenda. He has also stalled progress on bills relating to hate crime and contraception access, either by vetoing bills or sending them into legal gridlock.

Poland’s president is the country’s head of state, though it is traditionally a more ceremonial position than the prime minister, who runs the country’s government. But the power of the veto allows a president to act as a foil to their government, and Duda has waded readily into political proceedings, publicly clashing with Tusk over several aspects of his platform.

If Nawrocki were to triumph in the poll – which will proceed to a second round in two weeks, should no candidate reach 50% of the vote – that roadblock would be expected to remain firmly in place until the next parliamentary election in 2027, when Tusk will be expected to show voters the fruits of his government’s agenda.

“A Nawrocki victory would substantially diminish the prime minister’s domestic political capital,” Marta Prochwicz Jazowska of the European Council on Foreign Relations wrote. “Not only would it weaken Tusk’s room for manoeuvre, but it would also strain his already fragile ruling coalition as its members would likely disagree on how to respond to an opposition president.”

But a Trzaskowski presidency would immediately free Tusk from those constraints. The center-left mayor of Warsaw is a pro-European and socially liberal voice in Polish politics, who lost the previous presidential election to Duda by a razor-thin margin.

Though Polish presidential candidates technically stand as individuals, rather than representatives of a party, there is little hiding their affiliations and each major party historically endorses and campaigns for a candidate.

Not all of Tusk’s pledges would immediately come to pass, however. The prime minister would still need to win the consent of his broad governing coalition for some efforts that are particularly controversial in the heavily Catholic state.

Tusk has promised to relax Poland’s abortion restrictions, which currently constitute a near-total ban on the procedure, and to allow civil partnerships between same-sex couples, but both pledges have attracted opposition from lawmakers propping up his government.

Sunday’s vote is expected to whittle the field of candidates down to Nawrocki and Trzaskowski, before a head-to-head run-off in two weeks. But much attention will also be paid to the performance of Sławomir Mentzen, the co-leader of the far-right Confederation party, which is staunchly anti-Brussels, anti-immigration and strongly critical of Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Israeli military says it has launched the first stages of a new major offensive in Gaza, in a development that comes on the same day that US President Donald Trump concluded his visit to the region without securing a ceasefire deal.

“Over the past day, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) launched extensive attacks and mobilized forces to seize strategic areas in the Gaza Strip, as part of the opening moves of Operation ‘Gideon’s Chariots’ and the expansion of the campaign in Gaza, to achieve all the goals of the war in Gaza, including the release of the hostages and the defeat of Hamas,” the military said in a statement shortly before midnight local time.

“IDF troops in the Southern Command will continue to operate to protect Israeli citizens and realize the goals of the war,” the military added.

The development comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier this month that the population of Gaza would be displaced to the south following his security cabinet’s approval of an expanded military operation that one minister described as a plan to “conquer” the territory.

On Thursday, the Israeli military intensified operations across Gaza, killing more than 100 people, and pledged to continue bombings – even as Trump suggested establishing a “freedom zone” in the enclave.

Many of the casualties were in Jabalya in northern Gaza and in Khan Younis in the south, according to Gaza Civil Defense.

Netanyahu has pledged to eradicate Hamas with a strategy that would see the military hold more territory in Gaza and push the entire civilian population into a smaller area in the south.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

For millions across India, a rigid caste system thousands of years old still dictates much of daily life – from social circles to dating pools to job opportunities and schooling.

The Indian government has long insisted that the social hierarchy has no place in the world’s most populous nation, which banned caste discrimination in 1950.

So, it came as a surprise when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration announced that caste would be counted in the upcoming national census for the first time since 1931 – when India was still a British colony.

Counting caste will “ensure that our social fabric does not come under political pressure,” the government said in its April press release. “This will ensure that society becomes stronger economically and socially, and the country’s progress continues without hindrance.”

The release didn’t include any detail on how the caste data would be collected, or even when the census will take place (it has been repeatedly delayed from its original 2021 date). But the announcement has revived a longstanding debate about whether counting caste will uplift disadvantaged groups – or further entrench divisions.

The proposal is so controversial because a caste census “forces the state to confront structural inequalities that are often politically and socially inconvenient,” said Poonam Muttreja, Executive Director of the Population Foundation of India.

The lack of caste data over the past century means “we are effectively flying blind, designing policies in the dark while claiming to pursue social justice,” she added. “So, the next census is going to be a historical census.”

What is caste?

India’s caste system has roots in Hindu scriptures, and historically sorted the population into a hierarchy that defined people’s occupations, where they can live and who they can marry based on the family they’re born into. Today, many non-Hindus in India, including Muslims, Christians, Jains and Buddhists, also identify with certain castes.

There are several main castes, and thousands of sub-castes – from the Brahmins at the top, who were traditionally priests or scholars, to the Dalits, formerly known as the “untouchables,” who were made to work as cleaners and waste pickers.

For centuries, castes on the bottom rung – Dalits and marginalized indigenous Indians – were considered “impure.” In some cases they were even barred from entering the homes or temples of the upper castes, and forced to eat and drink from separate utensils in shared spaces.

India tried to wipe the slate clean after it won independence from Britain in 1947, introducing a flurry of changes in its new constitution. It set up specific categories of castes, used to establish affirmative action quotas and other benefits – eventually setting aside 50% of jobs in government and places at educational institutions for marginalized castes. It also abolished the concept of “untouchability” and banned caste discrimination.

The decision to stop counting caste in the census was another part of this mission.

“After independence, the Indian state consciously moved away from enumerating caste … in the census,” said Muttreja. “They thought they should not highlight caste, and that in a democracy, it will automatically even out.”

But that hasn’t happened. Although the hard lines of caste division have softened over time, especially in urban areas, there are still major gaps in wealth, health and educational attainment between different castes, according to various studies. The most disadvantaged castes today have higher rates of illiteracy and malnutrition, and receive fewer social services such as maternal care and reproductive health, Muttreja added.

Social segregation is also widespread; only 5% of marriages in India are inter-caste, according to the India Human Development Survey. Similar divides linger in friend groups, workplaces, and other social spaces.

These persistent gaps have fueled rising demand for a caste census, with many arguing that data could be used to secure greater federal government aid and reallocate resources to the needy.

In some states – such as Bihar, one of India’s poorest states – local authorities have conducted their own surveys, prompting calls for Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government to follow suit.

Now, it appears, they will.

Why now?

Modi has long pushed back on attempts to define the population along traditional caste lines, previously declaring that the four “biggest castes” were the poor, youth, women and farmers – and that uplifting them would aid the entire country’s development.

But rising discontent among underprivileged castes boosted opposition parties during the 2024 national election, which delivered a shock result: although Modi won a third term, the BJP failed to win a majority in parliament, diminishing their power.

Modi’s U-turn on the caste census, his rivals claim, is a political maneuver to shore up support in upcoming state elections, particularly in Bihar – a battleground state where the issue has been particularly sensitive.

“The timing is no coincidence,” wrote M. K. Stalin, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu state and a longtime Modi critic, in a post on X. “This sudden move reeks of political expediency.”

Bihar’s own caste survey in 2023 found there were far more people in marginalized castes than previously thought, sparking an ongoing legal battle to raise the affirmative action quotas.

Several other states took their own surveys, which the federal government said in its statement were “varied in transparency and intent, with some conducted purely from a political angle, creating doubts in society.”

The main opposition Congress party celebrated the government’s announcement, claiming Modi had bowed to their pressure. BJP leaders, meanwhile, say the opposition neglected to conduct any caste census during their years in power, and had now politicized the issue for their own gain.

The previous Congress-led government did conduct a national caste survey in 2011, but the full results were never made public, and critics alleged the partial findings showed data anomalies and methodology issues. It was also separate from the national census conducted that same year, meaning the two sets of data can’t be analyzed against each other.

Though authorities haven’t said when the new census will take place, they have enough time to refine the methodology and make sure key information is collected, said Sonalde Desai, demographer and Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Maryland College Park.

After the census is complete, the next battle will begin: how to use that data to shape policy.

A controversial proposal

Not all are in favor of the caste census.

Opponents argue that the nation should be trying to move away from these labels instead of formalizing them. Some believe that instead of focusing on caste, government policies like affirmative action should be based on other criteria like socioeconomic class, said Desai, also a professor of applied economic research at the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi.

She supports the caste census, but said opponents might view such a survey as regressive, instead of helping to create “a society in which (Indians) transcend that destiny” defined by caste.

There’s another factor, too: if the census reveals that marginalized castes are bigger than previously thought, as was the case in Bihar, the government could increase how much affirmative action they receive, angering some traditionally privileged castes who already dislike the quota system.

Over the years, anti-affirmative action protests have broken out, some turning deadly – with these groups accusing the government of reverse discrimination, echoing similar controversies in the United States about race-conscious college admissions and job hiring. These same groups are likely to decry the caste census, Muttreja said.

Already, some opposition leaders are calling to remove the 50% cap on affirmative action quotas, and to implement affirmative action in other institutions like private companies and the judiciary – controversial proposals that have prompted online firestorms.

It might also show how the balance of power and privilege has shifted over the past century, said Desai. Since the 1931 census, some previously disadvantaged castes may have been buoyed by affirmative action and other measures – while other castes that once sat higher on the ladder may no longer be considered as privileged.

This is why, she argues, India’s government should use the data to perform a “re-ranking” – reorganizing which castes belong in which of the specific categories used to allocate resources and benefits.

The census could clearly illustrate who needs what kind of help and how to best deliver it, instead of relying on outdated data, said Muttreja. It can reveal intersectional gaps; for instance, a woman in rural India may struggle far more than a man of the same caste, or a peer in an urban area. And it could show whether any castes have ballooned in size, demanding more funding than currently allocated.

“It can shape school funding, for instance, health outreach, employment schemes and more,” she said. It “helps ensure that quotas reflect real disadvantage, not just historical precedent.”

Once that data is out there, Muttreja believes, the government will be forced to act – it can’t afford not to. And for those who still deny that caste discrimination remains rampant, or who argue that affirmative action is no longer necessary: “This data will stare at people’s faces.”