restrictions

Iran also expresses commitment to diplomacy as landmark 10-year nuclear deal with Western powers officially ends.

Iran has said it is no longer bound by restrictions on its nuclear programme as a landmark 10-year deal between it and world powers expired, though Tehran reiterated its “commitment to diplomacy”.

From now on, “all of the provisions [of the 2015 deal], including the restrictions on the Iranian nuclear programme and the related mechanisms are considered terminated,” Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Saturday, the day of the pact’s expiration.

“Iran firmly expresses its commitment to diplomacy,” it added.

The deal’s “termination day” was set for exactly 10 years after the adoption of resolution 2231, enshrined by the United Nations Security Council.

Officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement between Iran and China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States saw the lifting of international sanctions against Iran in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear programme.

But Washington unilaterally left the deal in 2018 during President Donald Trump’s first term in office and reinstated sanctions. Tehran then began stepping up its nuclear programme.

Talks to revive the agreement have failed so far, and in August, the UK, Germany and France triggered the so-called “snapback” process, leading to the re-imposition of the UN sanctions.

“Termination day is relatively meaningless due to snapback,” Arms Control Association expert Kelsey Davenport told the AFP news agency.

Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group’s Iran project director, told AFP that while the nuclear deal had been “lifeless” for years, the snapback had “officially buried” the agreement, with “its sorry fate continuing to cast a shadow over the future”.

Western powers and Israel have long accused Iran of seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, a claim Tehran denies.

Neither US intelligence nor the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said they found any evidence this year that Iran was pursuing atomic weapons.

Nuclear talks between Iran and world powers are currently deadlocked.

“Iran remains sceptical of the utility of engaging with the US given its history with President Trump, while Washington still seeks a maximalist deal,” Vaez told AFP.

On Monday, Trump said he wanted a peace deal with Iran, but stressed the ball was in Tehran’s court.

Tehran has repeatedly said it remains open to diplomacy with the US, provided Washington offers guarantees against military action during any potential talks.

The US joined Israel in striking Iran during a 12-day war in June, which hit nuclear sites, but also killed more than 1,000 Iranians, including hundreds of civilians, and caused billions of dollars in damage.

Angered that the IAEA did not condemn the attacks and accusing the agency of “double standards”, President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a law in early July suspending all cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog and prompting inspectors to leave the country.

For its part, the IAEA has described its inability to verify Iran’s nuclear stockpile since the start of the war “a matter of serious concern”.

The three European powers last week announced they will seek to restart talks to find a “comprehensive, durable and verifiable agreement”.

Iranian top diplomat Abbas Araghchi said during an interview last week that Tehran does “not see any reason to negotiate” with the Europeans, given they triggered the snapback mechanism.

Israel has imposed new restrictions on aid entering the besieged Gaza Strip and will not open the Rafah crossing as planned, while Israeli forces killed several people in the Palesitinian territory as the Israel-Hamas ceasefire came under growing strain.

Israel notified the United Nations on Tuesday that it will only allow 300 aid trucks – half of the number it originally agreed to – daily into the Gaza Strip from Wednesday.

Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Gaza, confirmed the UN had received the note from the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the arm of the Israeli military that oversees aid flows into Gaza.

The COGAT note said no fuel or gas will be allowed into the war-torn enclave except for specific needs related to humanitarian infrastructure.

Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud noted that allowing 300 trucks of aid each day was “not nearly enough” for famine-stricken Gaza.

“Three hundred is not enough. It’s not going to change anything,” he said.

Israeli authorities also announced the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt will remain closed.

The restrictions came hours after Israeli forces killed at least nine Palestinians in attacks in northern and southern Gaza, medical sources told Al Jazeera.

At least six Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in Gaza City, and three others were killed in Khan Younis.

Sources from al-Ahli Arab Hospital told Al Jazeera Arabic on Tuesday that Israeli soldiers killed five Palestinians in the Shujayea neighbourhood of Gaza City.

The Israeli military said it opened fire to remove a threat posed by people who approached its forces in northern Gaza.

The attacks come four days after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect, preparing the way for an exchange of captives and partial Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

The ceasefire is the first phase of US President Donald Trump’s proposal for ending Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed at least 67,913 people and wounded 170,134 since October 2023, according to Palestinian health authorities. The remains of thousands of other people are estimated to be under the rubble in Gaza.

At least 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, and more than 200 others were taken captive.

Under the terms of the ceasefire, Hamas and Israel carried out an exchange on Monday that saw the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails and 20 Israeli captives held in the Gaza Strip. Some 154 prisoners were exiled to Egypt.

Hamas was also due to return the remains of 24 dead captives on Monday, but the group only handed over four coffins.

Trump’s ceasefire plan provided a mechanism if that handover didn’t happen, saying Hamas should share information about deceased captives and “exert maximum effort” to carry out the handover as soon as possible.

Hamas said that it would transfer the remains of four more deceased Israeli captives on Tuesday, and the Israeli military said that the Red Cross had received the bodies.

The Israeli military accused Hamas of violating the ceasefire “regarding the release of the bodies of the hostages”.

Trump noted the delay in handing over the remains of the deceased captives in a post on his Truth Social platform.

“THE DEAD HAVE NOT BEEN RETURNED, AS PROMISED! Phase Two begins right NOW!!!” he wrote.

Hamas has previously said recovering the bodies of some captives could take more time because not all sites where they were held are known, and because of the vast Israeli destruction of the enclave.

“The headline here is, Israel is already starting to put threats of restricting aid going into Gaza for what they say is the slow work by Hamas to get the bodies of the deceased captives back to Israel,” Al Jazeera’s Gabriel Elizondo said, reporting from the UN.

@ajplus

Israel unilaterally broke the last ceasefire in Gaza. AJ+ spoke to journalist and analyst Omar Rahman about what might make this deal different. #Gaza #Ceasefire #Israel #PeaceDeal #Palestine

♬ news, documentary, serious, depressing : L(1488971) – 8.864

UN urges more aid deliveries

The UN and the International Red Cross called for all crossings into Gaza to be opened to allow desperately needed aid into the enclave. The UN had 190,000 metric tonnes of aid waiting and ready to go into Gaza, OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke said on Tuesday.

UNICEF spokesman Ricardo Pires, meanwhile, said the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) had 1,370 trucks ready to enter Gaza.

“The level of destruction, again, is so huge that it will take at least 600 trucks a day, which is the aim that we have,” he said. “We’re far from that.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) also stressed the need to send more aid into Gaza.

“We need to scale up the delivery of medical supplies because the pressure on hospitals is not going to ease overnight,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told reporters.

“We need really to bring as many supplies as we can right now to make sure that those health workers who are still providing healthcare have what they need.”

Reporters must promise not to publish unauthorised material to obtain press credentials.

Major media organisations, including conservative outlets, say the Pentagon is placing unlawful restrictions on journalists and their ability to cover the US military under a new set of reporting guidelines.

The guidelines were first announced in a September memo from the Department of Defense, and said that reporters must sign an affidavit pledging they would not publish unauthorised material – including unclassified documents – to keep their Pentagon press credentials.

Following pushback from the media, the wording was modified last week to say that reporters must simply “acknowledge” the new rules, but many organisations remain critical of the latest version of the rules.

Media companies, including public broadcaster NPR, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, and the Reuters and Associated Press news agencies, have all said they will not sign the rules in recent statements.

They also say the rules violate the US Constitution, which offers broad protections for freedom of speech and freedom of the press under the First Amendment. These rights were reaffirmed in a landmark 1971 Supreme Court case, New York Times Co v United States, that allowed US media to publish classified military documents during the Vietnam War.

“The proposed restrictions undercut First Amendment protections by placing unnecessary constraints on gathering and publishing information. We will continue to vigorously and fairly report on the policies and positions of the Pentagon and officials across the government,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of The Washington Post, in a statement on X.

Conservative news outlets The Washington Times and Newsmax, a cable news channel and competitor to Fox News, also said they would not sign the rules.

Newsmax cited “unnecessary and onerous” rules in a statement to Axios.

The Pentagon Press Association, an industry group representing defence reporters, said in a statement on Monday that the Pentagon has the right to make its own reporting rules, but they cannot set “unconstitutional policies as a precondition” to report there.

The association previously said the rules were “designed to stifle a free press”, and could open reporters up to legal prosecution.

The Pentagon reporting rules have been championed by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News presenter who was sworn into his post in January under President Donald Trump.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the department had “good faith negotiations” with the Pentagon Press Association, but that “soliciting [military] service members and civilians to commit crimes is strictly prohibited” in a statement on X.

Oct. 10 (UPI) — President Donald Trump is imposing another 100% in tariffs on Chinese goods exported to the United States and will restrict software exports to China.

The new tariffs are in addition to an existing 30% tariff on Chinese goods and would take effect on Nov. 1, and possibly sooner, the president said in a social media post on Friday, according to CBS News.

The United States in November also will place restrictions on “critical software” destined for China.

Trump said he also might cancel a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping due to new Chinese restrictions on rare earth minerals exports.

Trump and Xi are scheduled to meet in South Korea during an international economic conference that starts on Nov. 2, but the U.S. president on Friday said he no longer has a reason to do so.

“Some very strange things are happening in China!” the president said Friday in a post on Truth Social.

“They are becoming very hostile and sending letters to countries throughout the world that they want to impose export controls on each and every element of production having to do with rare earths,” Trump said.

The export restrictions would “clog’ the markets and make life difficult for virtually every country in the world — especially for China,” he added.

The president said representatives of other nations have contacted his administration and are “extremely angry over this trade hostility, which came out of nowhere.”

“There is no way China should be allowed to hold the world ‘captive,'” Trump said.

“But that seems to have been their plan for quite some time, starting with the ‘magnets’ and other elements that they have quietly amassed into somewhat of a monopoly position.”

Pending Chinese rare earth minerals restrictions

China sent letters that are several pages long to other nations and detail every rare earth element that Chinese leaders want to withhold from other countries, Trump said.

China controls most of the world’s rare earth minerals market and announced the new restrictions on Thursday, according to CNBC.

The restrictions announced on Thursday would take effect on Dec. 1 and affect the manufacturing of semiconductors and other technologies that rely on rare earth minerals, such as batteries for electric vehicles.

The Chinese government intends to require companies located outside of China to obtain a license to export their goods that contain rare earth minerals, The New York Times reported.

It also seeks to regulate the refining of rare earth minerals and certain types of technologies used to manufacture batteries.

The Chinese trade restrictions were announced amid efforts to ease trade tensions between the United States and China, which Trump and Jinping were expected to discuss during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Seoul, South Korea, in January, Politico reported.

Mutually assured economic disruption

Beijing’s announcement on Thursday could trigger “mutually assured disruption” of the Chinese, U.S. and other global economies, said Craig Singleton, a China fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

He called China’s move a “miscalculation” and said Trump’s social media post shows China has crossed a line that is likely to cause a trade war.

“Both sides are reaching for their economic weapons at the same time,” Singleton told Politico, “and neither seems willing to back down.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average reflected the news of the likely trade war on Friday and was down more than 520 points at $45,837.60 as of 2:25 p.m. EDT.

While the Dow is down, China’s pending rare earth minerals trade restrictions have spurred a run on related stocks, CNBC reported.

Rare earth mining firm MP Materials’ share price rose by 15% and USA Rare Earth’s shares by 19 percent during morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

USA Rare Earth is a vertically integrated rare earth miner and producer of magnets used in a variety of technologies.

NioCorp Developments’ share price also rose by 14% and Energy Fuels’ by more than 10% during trading late Friday morning.