Janet Jalil

Tämä on Global News Podcast BBC World Servicein podcasti. Olen Janet Jalil ja viimeisenä päivänä, 14.5., nämä ovat meidän tärkeimmät tarinamme. Donald Trump saa rauhallisen kiinnostuksen Chinesen presidentin Xi Jinpingin kanssa, kun he puhuvat kärsivästi ja järjestävät Beijingin yliopistossa. Israelin pääministeri sanoo, että hän on tehty yksityiskohtaisen reilun Yhdysvaltojen alueella Iranin aikana, mutta UAE väittää tätä.

The man tasked with implementing President Trump's peace plan for Gaza says Hamas can survive as a political movement, but only if it gives up its weapons. Also in this podcast, three years after a murder trial that inspired this miniseries...

A US lawyer convicted of killing his wife and son has had the verdict overturned because of concerns that the jury was improperly influenced. We begin in China, where President Trump was greeted with pomp and pageantry ahead of his highly anticipated meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

The two leaders took part in a rival ceremony at the Great Hall of the People before holding bilateral talks. In his opening remarks, President Xi said the two countries should be partners, not rivals. His warm words were echoed by Mr. Trump. So I really look very much forward to our discussion. It's a big discussion. There are those that say this is maybe the biggest summit ever.

The summit is being dominated by the issues of trade, Iran, Taiwan and tech. After Mr. Trump's failed attempt to impose swinging tariffs on China, his seeming inability to end Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and amid global concerns about the economic impact of the war he started in the Middle East. Our Beijing correspondent Stephen McDonnell is following their talks.

What do you make of that glowing praise? Because it's so different from the hard line he was taking when he's campaigning to be president. Is it a sign that his position is weaker than it was when he visited China last time, nearly a decade ago?

Stephen MacDonald. Next to a claim and a counterclaim. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he made a secret trip to the United Arab Emirates at the height of the US-Israel war on Iran to meet its president.

His office said the visit had led to a historic breakthrough in relations between Israel and the UAE. But the Emirati state has denied this happened, calling the claims baseless. This comes after recent reports that the UAE had secretly carried out its own attacks on Iran in retaliation for the Iranian attacks on its oil facilities. The UAE is one of a number of Arab states that have normalized relations with Israel in what are known as the Abraham Accords.

And on Tuesday, the US disclosed that Israel had shared part of its Iron Dome defence system with the UAE. Our Middle East analyst is Sebastian Usher. Well, what we have from Mr Netanyahu's office is essentially that he paid a visit during the war, and it was secret, and he had a meeting with the Emirati president, and it talks about a historic...

Kiitos puheenjohtaja.

Now it says it denies any reports about this meeting saying they're baseless. Now whether that was drafted while it was still being reported in the Israeli media before an actual statement by the prime minister's office is interesting, because it's quite different to say that Israeli media reports are baseless, but to say that the actual prime minister of Israel is lying, which is what that would be, is intriguing to say the least.

And Sebastian, if this was a secret visit, why did Mr. Netanyahu's office release this statement? I think this is about propaganda as much as anything else. I'm pretty sure that if this meeting did take place, and I think you'd have to say that the likelihood is that it did. Otherwise, why would Mr. Netanyahu's office be putting out its neck like this?

Mutta kuten sanoit, se on yksityinen keskustelu, mutta luulen, että EU haluaisi, että se pysyy yksityisessä keskustelussa, eikä halua, että se on tehty yksityisessä keskustelussa, mikä mielestäni on saanut tämän hyvin nopean vastauksen. Joten israelilaisen näkökulmasta se on toinen tapa, johon Mr. Netanyahu on kiinnostunut, sekä hänen omistajansa, jolloin valit ovat valmiita tulemaan pian,

and the world audience of just how central Israel now is to the security of the Middle East, and how Arab countries are looking to Israel for their protection. I mean, this latest report comes after we heard from a US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, just a day or so ago,

Ja se on erittäin tärkeää UAElle, koska on ollut raportteja siitä, että se käsittelee itsenäisiä hakemuksia Iranin kanssa.

There's that, absolutely. I mean, I think the position pre-war, where the UAE didn't want to stir up Iran, I think that's gone. I mean, obviously the two sides now are at each other's throats. I think the UAE, though, has two real concerns here. One is, it doesn't want to be even more in the target of Iran, which this would likely lead to. Also...

I mean, although the UAE signed up to the Abraham Accords back in 2020 about its diplomatic relations with Israel, although cordial relations with Israel go back years and years, business-wise they're very, very close to each other. Of the countries in the Arab world and Israel, I'd say they're probably the closest.

But it's still a big embarrassment for an Arab country of this kind to host the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There were a couple of times when Mr. Netanyahu was due to go to the UAE over the past few years since the Abraham Accords. Those didn't happen because of anger within the UAE over things that had happened in Israel. So this shows still it's very sensitive as far as Arab governments are concerned, even ones, as I say, that have signed up to a peace deal with Israel.

Sebastian Usher, despite a ceasefire supposedly being in place in Lebanon, its health ministry says 22 people, 8 of them children, were killed in Israeli airstrikes across the south of the country in the latest day of violence. Nearly 3,000 people have been killed since the Iranian-backed armed group Hezbollah started firing at Israel in response to its war on Iran, 400 of them since the ceasefire came into effect less than a month ago.

Israel has seized large swathes of South Lebanon, ordering residents to leave. Israeli and Lebanese officials are due to hold another round of talks in Washington on Thursday to try to end the fighting. Here's this report from our Middle East correspondent, Hugo Bishaker. Let's just go.