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Israel has sought to enlist Elon Musk’s help in reviving hostage negotiations with Hamas, according to reports in US media.

A source close to the Israeli hostage families, who spoke with Herzog and is familiar with the conversation, told CNN: “There was a chat between [Herzog] and a few hostage families, where one of the subjects discussed was influence on Trump, and Elon Musk’s name came up as someone of influence on Trump. Therefore, keeping an open channel with him is important.”

Musk attended Netanyahu’s controversial speech before a joint session of Congress earlier this year. He previously met with Netanyahu during a visit to Israel last year, as the tech leader sought to quell accusations of antisemitism after personally endorsing a post on his social network X, formerly Twitter, that claimed Jews hate white people.

Protests are planned in the Netherlands in response to a motion accepted by the Dutch parliament to “keep records on cultural and religious norms and values of Dutch people with a migration background”.

A public petition is calling for the motion to be withdrawn and anti-racism campaigners are planning to demonstrate next Saturday against the move by the government, in which the largest party is run by the anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders.

The Netherlands is in the midst of a heated discussion on integration and segregation after violence, some of it antisemitic, around a football match between Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax of Amsterdam.

Rightwing politicians accused Dutch Muslim ethnic minorities of failure to integrate, and the fragile four-party coalition narrowly avoided falling in November, with one junior minister and two MPs resigning over discrimination and the “tone” of debate

A U.S. State Department spokesperson told reporters on Thursday that the United States disagrees with Amnesty International’s new report accusing Israel of carrying out genocide in the Gaza Strip.

“We disagree with the conclusions of such a report,” spokesperson Vedant Patel said a day after the human rights group released the document. “We have said previously and continue to find that the allegations of genocide are unfounded.”

In the 296-page report released Wednesday—titled, “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza—Amnesty International found through its research and legal analysis “sufficient basis to conclude that Israel committed, during the nine-month period under review, prohibited acts under Articles II (a), (b), and © of the Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.”

One of the commanders of rebel forces in Aleppo, known as Abu Abdo, gave a special interview with i24NEWS' Matthias Inbar on Wednesday, revealing that, despite differences, "we are fighting against a common enemy."

"We look at Israel and the US, with the arrival of President Donald Trump, and we have a lot of respect and sympathy for them, for their actions against Iran – the country that leads terrorism in the region and all over the world."

He said that his faction "looks forward to cooperate and eliminate this enemy and restoring stability."

The man who received the harshest federal sentence in connection with 2020 protests against police brutality has been in solitary confinement for more than 250 days. Last Friday, Malik Muhammad ended a nine-day hunger strike undertaken in protest of his solitary confinement at Oregon State Penitentiary.

At the height of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Muhammad, a disabled Army combat veteran diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, had traveled from Indiana to protests in Kentucky and Oregon.

According to court documents, Muhammad participated in firearms training in Kentucky and later threw a Molotov cocktail at police in Oregon. In 2022, at 25 years old, he pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and received a 10-year prison sentence.

“We are talking about a conditions-of-confinement issue,” said Muhammad’s attorney, Lauren Regan, director of litigation and advocacy at the Civil Liberties Defense Center. The group advocates for civil liberties for political prisoners and took on Muhammad’s case last month. “Malik is designated 100 percent disabled as a combat veteran because of extreme PTSD. And the Department of Corrections knows that.”

Despite his conditions, Muhammad has been in solitary confinement for more than 250 days. His solitary confinement followed an incident where Regan said Muhammad asked to speak to a supervisor, and instead guards tased and beat him, then threw him in the hole.

Shell casings found at the scene where the UnitedHealthcare CEO was shot dead by a masked gunman in front of a busy New York City hotel had the words

“deny,” “defend” , “depose”

written on them, a senior New York City law enforcement official briefed on the investigation confirmed to NBC News on Thursday.

In a shocking turn of events, South Koreans went to bed Monday night to the news that their unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, had declared martial law over the country, only to awake on Tuesday to discover that the National Assembly—backed by crowds of citizens gathering in protest—had overruled Yoon and restored their hard-won democratic system.

By Wednesday, an uneasy calm had settled over Seoul. Yoon, who has been praised as a diplomatic wonder and staunch ally by President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, appeared to be on his way out. All of Yoon's senior aides, including his chief of staff, have resigned their posts even though the president had accepted the parliamentary demands and lifted his martial law order. Opposition parties in South Korea led by the left-liberal Democratic Party (DP) are now seeking to impeach Yoon over his actions, with the first votes scheduled for Thursday.

Yet even as the coup unravelled in full public view, the close ties between the Pentagon and Yoon's military could present a dilemma for Biden and the next Trump administration. The United States stations 28,500 troops in South Korea and a U.S. general holds operational control over the Korean Army and the U.S.-South Korean Combined Forces Command during times of war. That has led to serious strains in the bilateral alliance over the years.

At least 20 Palestinians were killed when Israeli airstrikes hit the Al-Mawasi ‘safe zone’ area west of Khan Yunis city in south Gaza on 4 December.

The Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS) reported that Israeli aircraft targeted the tents of displaced Palestinians and food storage facilities. “The occupation knows very well that there are only civilians in the Mawasi area,” Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal told Al Jazeera.