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.

Russia and Ukraine’s first direct talks in three years began Friday with hopes as dim as the gray Istanbul skies.

And while the weather brightened as the talks went on, the prospects for peace did not.

In the end a large prisoner swap (one of many in this war) and two discussion topics for future talks – a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, and the contours of a ceasefire – were the only deliverables, as the press pack at Istanbul’s Dolmabahçe Palace thinned out and the sun sank over the Bosphorus.

The issue of a ceasefire is where the intractable differences are clearest.

Russia, by proposing these talks last weekend, had managed to sidestep an ultimatum from Ukraine and its allies to sign up to an unconditional 30-day ceasefire or face major new sanctions.

Ukraine, meanwhile, was “ready to have a ceasefire agreed today,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesman, Heorhii Tykhyi, told reporters in a hastily arranged briefing late Friday afternoon, suggesting this wasn’t achievable because Russia’s low-level delegation “probably has (a) limited mandate.”

Not a new demand, but one which is both unacceptable to Kyiv and led US Vice President JD Vance to state earlier this month that Russia was “asking for too much” in its requirements to end the war.

As the diplomatic cars slipped through Istanbul’s crowded streets, US frustration seemed to mount. After US officials met with both sides soon before their direct talks, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio left Istanbul with a scathing assessment of their prospects.

“We came because we were told that there might be a direct engagement between the Russians and the Ukrainians; that was originally the plan,” he told reporters.

“That was not to be the case, or, if it is, it’s not at the levels we had hoped it would be at.”

And so, the Ukrainian side moved quickly to control the narrative.

Barely had the delegations emerged in Istanbul before Zelensky, at a summit in Albania, convened a call with US President Donald Trump and key European allies.

“Ukraine is ready to take the fastest possible steps to bring real peace,” Zelensky wrote on social media after the call. But he also made it clear that it was not just Ukraine that must act, adding “if the Russians reject a full and unconditional ceasefire and an end to killings, tough sanctions must follow.”

Ukrainian officials in Istanbul took a similar tone.

“The tentative success of today’s negotiations is still to be consolidated,” First Deputy Foreign Minister Sergiy Kyslytsya told reporters later in the afternoon. “That means that the pressure on the Russian Federation must continue.”

There was also a clear effort to emphasize the positives. “If we managed to agree on 1,000 for 1,000 exchange we think this was already worth it” said Tykhyi, the foreign ministry spokesman, referring to an agreed prisoner swap. “This is a great achievement by the Ukrainian delegation.”

Yet in a week where Russia has again rejected a ceasefire, ignored calls to send top-level officials to talks, and come to the table with demands that the US has already deemed unacceptable, there is still no sign of increased pressure from the US.

Instead, Trump promised Friday to meet with Putin “as soon as we can set it up,” having previously claimed “nothing’s going to happen (on Ukraine) until Putin and I get together.”

And so, the official Russian assessment from its chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, kept it simple. “We are satisfied with the outcome and ready to continue our contacts.”