By WAFAA SHURAFA, DAVID RISING and KAREEM CHEHAYEB, Associated Press

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — At least 17 people were killed Thursday in Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip, according to local health officials, as international pressure for a ceasefire continued to grow.

On the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, French President Emmanuel Macron told France 24 his country had recognized a Palestinian state on the conviction it “is the only way to isolate Hamas,” which has proved itself able to regenerate even after many of its leaders have been killed.

“Total war in Gaza is causing civilian casualties but can’t bring about the end of Hamas,” he said in the interview Wednesday. “Factually, it’s a failure.”

He said he had been lobbying U.S. President Donald Trump to press Israel again for a ceasefire, telling him “you have an important role to play — you who supports peace, who wants to bring peace to the world.”

“You cannot stop the war if there is no path to peace,” the French president added.

Deadly strikes hit central and southern Gaza

Meanwhile in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, 12 people were killed in an Israeli attack on the central town of Zawaida that hit a tent and a house, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the nearby city of Deir al-Balah. Eight children were among the victims, according to the hospital, and family members said another girl was still under the rubble.

Israeli army flares drift over buildings destroyed during Israeli ground and air operations in the northern Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

The hospital said another girl was killed in an airstrike that hit a tent in Deir al-Balah, and that it was caring for seven others injured in that attack.

In the southern city of Khan Younis, another Israeli attack hit an apartment building, killing four people, according to the Nasser Hospital where the bodies were taken.

Netanyahu denounces leaders who have recognized a Palestinian state

On Monday ahead of the opening of the U.N. General Assembly meetings, France, Andorra, Belgium, Luxembourg, Malta, and Monaco announced or confirmed their recognition of a Palestinian state in the hopes of galvanizing support for a two-state solution to the Mideast conflict.

Their announcements came a day after the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Portugal did the same, in defiance of Israel and the United States.

Related Articles

Today in History: September 25, Military escorts Little Rock Nine into Central High

Some leaders at UN condemn ‘sick expression of joy,’ ‘macabre response’ to Charlie Kirk’s killing

Tourism is helping Uganda’s endangered mountain gorillas make a comeback

China, world’s largest carbon polluting nation, announces new climate goal to cut emissions

For the first time in nearly six decades, a Syrian president steps up to speak at the UN

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the idea early Thursday before heading to New York himself where he was to address the assembly on Friday.

“At the U.N, General Assembly I will speak our truth,” he told reporters. “I will denounce those leaders who, instead of denouncing the murderers, the rapists, the child burners, want to give them a state in the heart of the land of Israel. It will not happen.”

At separate events in New York on Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s lead negotiator Steve Witkoff both offered optimistic views about what Witkoff called a “Trump 21-point plan for peace” that was presented to Arab leaders on Tuesday.

The U.S. has not released details of the plan or said whether Israel or Hamas accepts it, but Netanyahu suggested Israel’s position had not changed.

The Israeli leader said when he travels from New York on to Washington to meet with Trump, he would “discuss with him the great opportunities our victories have brought and also our need to complete the goals of the war: to return all our hostages, to defeat Hamas and to expand the circle of peace that is open to us.”

The U.S., along with Egypt and Qatar, have spent months trying to broker a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release. Those efforts suffered a major setback earlier this month when Israel carried out an airstrike targeting Hamas leaders in Qatar.

The war in Gaza began when Hamas stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage. Forty-eight captives are still inside Gaza, around 20 of them believed by Israel to be alive, after most of the rest were freed in ceasefires or other deals.

Israel’s ongoing retaliatory offensive has killed more than 65,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. It doesn’t say how many were civilians or combatants, but says women and children make up around half the fatalities. The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government. U.N. agencies and many independent experts consider its figures to be the most reliable estimate of wartime casualties.

Israel launched another major ground operation earlier this month in Gaza City, which experts say is experiencing famine. More than 300,000 people have fled, but up to 700,000 are still there, many because they can’t afford to relocate.

Rising reported from Bangkok and Chehayeb from Beirut. John Leicester and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this story.

By SYLVIE CORBET, Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — A Paris court sentenced former French President Nicolas Sarkozy to 5 years in prison and — in a major surprise — said he’ll be incarcerated even if he appeals, after finding him guilty Thursday in his trial for alleged illegal campaign financing by Libya.

The court said the date of his incarceration will be decided later, sparing the 70-year-old the humiliation of being marched out of the courtroom by police officers and going straight to jail.

The court found Sarkozy guilty of criminal association in a plot from 2005 to 2007 to finance his campaign with funds from Libya in exchange for diplomatic favors. But it cleared him of three other charges — including passive corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of the embezzlement of public funds.

FILE – French President Nicolas Sarkozy, left, greets Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi upon his arrival on Dec. 10 2007 at the Elysee Palace, in Paris. (AP Photo/Francois Mori, File)

The court also found two of Sarkozy’s closest associates when he was president — former ministers Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux — guilty of criminal association but likewise acquitted them of some other charges.

Overall, the ruling suggested that the court believed that the men conspired to seek Libyan funding for Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign but that judges weren’t convinced that the conservative leader himself was directly involved in the funding effort or that any Libyan money ended up being used in his winning campaign.

The chief judge, in an hours-long reading of the lengthy verdict, said Sarkozy allowed his close associates to reach out to Libyan authorities “to obtain or try to obtain financial support in Libya for the purpose of securing campaign financing.” He stood as she read out the verdict.

But the court also said it couldn’t determine with certainty that Libyan money ended up financing Sarkozy’s campaign. Still, under French law, a corrupt scheme can still be a crime even if money wasn’t paid or cannot be proven, the court explained.

Sarkozy, accompanied by his wife, the singer and model Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, was present in the courtroom, which was also filled with reporters and members of the public. Sarkozy sat in the front row of the defendant’s seats. His three adult sons were also in the room.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni Sarkozy arrive to the courtroom for his verdict for alleged illegal financing of his 2007 presidential campaign by the government of then-Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025 in Paris. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

Sarkozy, who was elected in 2007 but lost his bid for reelection in 2012, denied all wrongdoing during a three-month trial earlier this year that also involved 11 co-defendants, including three former ministers.

Despite multiple legal scandals that have clouded his presidential legacy, Sarkozy remains an influential figure in right-wing politics in France and in entertainment circles, by virtue of his marriage to Bruni-Sarkozy.

Alleged Libya financing

The accusations trace their roots to 2011, when a Libyan news agency and Gadhafi himself said the Libyan state had secretly funneled millions of euros into Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign.

Related Articles

Today in History: September 25, Military escorts Little Rock Nine into Central High

Some leaders at UN condemn ‘sick expression of joy,’ ‘macabre response’ to Charlie Kirk’s killing

Tourism is helping Uganda’s endangered mountain gorillas make a comeback

China, world’s largest carbon polluting nation, announces new climate goal to cut emissions

For the first time in nearly six decades, a Syrian president steps up to speak at the UN

In 2012, the French investigative outlet Mediapart published what it said was a Libyan intelligence memo referencing a 50 million-euro funding agreement. Sarkozy denounced the document as a forgery and sued for defamation. The court ruled Thursday that it “now appears most likely that this document is a forgery.”

Investigators also looked into a series of trips to Libya made by people close to Sarkozy when he served as interior minister from 2005 and 2007, including his chief of staff.

In 2016, Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told Mediapart that he had delivered suitcases filled with cash from Tripoli to the French Interior Ministry under Sarkozy. He later retracted his statement.

That reversal is now the focus of a separate investigation into possible witness tampering. Both Sarkozy and his wife were handed preliminary charges for involvement in alleged efforts to pressure Takieddine. That case has not gone to trial yet.

Takieddine, who was one of the co-defendants, died on Tuesday in Beirut. He was 75. He had fled to Lebanon in 2020 and did not attend the trial.

Prosecutors alleged that Sarkozy had knowingly benefited from what they described as a “corruption pact” with Gadhafi’s government.

Libya’s longtime dictator was toppled and killed in an uprising in 2011, ending his four-decade rule of the North African country.

Sarkozy denounced a ‘plot’

The trial shed light on France’s back-channel talks with Libya in the 2000s, when Gadhafi was seeking to restore diplomatic ties with the West. Before that, Libya was considered a pariah state.

Sarkozy has dismissed the allegations as politically motivated and reliant on forged evidence. During the trial, he denounced a “plot” he said was staged by “liars and crooks” including the “Gadhafi clan.”

He suggested that the allegations of illegal campaign financing were retaliation for his call — as France’s president — for Gadhafi’s removal.

Sarkozy was one of the first Western leaders to push for military intervention in Libya in 2011, when Arab Spring pro-democracy protests swept the Arab world.

“What credibility can be given to such statements marked by the seal of vengeance?” Sarkozy asked in comments during the trial.

Stripped of the Legion of Honor

In June, Sarkozy was stripped of his Legion of Honor medal — France’s highest award — after his conviction in a separate case.

Earlier, he was found guilty of corruption and influence peddling for trying to bribe a magistrate in 2014 in exchange for information about a legal case in which he was implicated.

Sarkozy was sentenced to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet for one year. He was granted a conditional release in May due to his age, which allowed him to remove the electronic tag after he wore it for just over three months.

In another case, Sarkozy was convicted last year of illegal campaign financing in his failed 2012 reelection bid. He was accused of having spent almost twice the maximum legal amount and was sentenced to a year in prison, of which six months were suspended.

Sarkozy has denied the allegations. He has appealed that verdict to the highest Court of Cassation, and that appeal is pending

Associated Press journalist John Leicester contributed.

Because there is a silver lining for most things in life, maybe there is also one for ABC’s craven (if brief) suspension, under thuggish government pressure, of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show. To wit: Now the left is once again all but unanimous in wanting to defend free speech.

That hasn’t always been the case in recent years.

It wasn’t the case when, a day before Kimmel’s suspension, Amy Klobuchar called on Congress to prevent violence like Charlie Kirk’s murder by cracking down on speech online. “I’m not for censorship, but I do think that more has to be done online,” said the Democratic senator from Minnesota. Sentences that begin “I’m not for censorship, but …” are usually calls for censorship.

It wasn’t the case this spring when Democrats in the Colorado legislature sought to criminalize some speech that “misgendered” or “deadnamed” transgender children, including custody threats to parents who refused to use their child’s preferred pronouns.

It wasn’t the case in 2023 when a RealClear Opinion Research poll found that three-fourths of Democrats believe government has a responsibility to limit “hateful” or inaccurate social media posts, as compared with roughly half of Republicans.

It wasn’t the case when, in the summer of 2021, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski asked, with clear relish, whether social media companies shouldn’t be “open to lawsuits” for publishing what she and the government deemed to be “misinformation” on the COVID vaccines.

It wasn’t the case when Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director then being interviewed by Brzezinski, answered, “We’re reviewing that, and certainly they should be held accountable.”

It wasn’t the case when, in February 2021, Facebook announced that it would treat claims that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured” — that is, the lab-leak hypothesis — as a form of misinformation, leading to the removal of all mention of it. Mark Zuckerberg later complained that the Biden administration pressured the company to take down posts about COVID-19, including humor, according to a report in Politico.

It wasn’t the case among the stars of the liberal literary establishment, including Sally Rooney and Arundhati Roy, who demanded boycotts of Israeli publications, publishers and institutions on account of their presumptive complicity in oppressing Palestinians.

It wasn’t the case, either, when another batch of liberal writers, including cartoonist Garry Trudeau and novelist Peter Carey, rebuked the PEN American Center for its decision to give an award to Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical newspaper that lost 12 of its staff members in a 2015 terrorist attack.

It wasn’t the case when the New York publishing industry began capitulating to social-media demands to cancel or torpedo books whose authors had run afoul of one left-wing orthodoxy or another: Jeanine Cummins and “American Dirt,” Richard North Patterson and “Trial,” Dr. Seuss and “If I Ran the Zoo” and several other titles.

It wasn’t the case when the editors of Slate indefinitely suspended podcast host Mike Pesca for arguing that it could be appropriate to mention a racial slur if not using it as an epithet. Or when The Atlantic fired conservative writer Kevin Williamson after a few days of employment because of a handful of remarks made years earlier. Or when NBC parted ways with Megyn Kelly because she said (and then apologized for saying) that, in her childhood, using blackface was “OK as long as you were dressing up like a character.”

It wasn’t the case in 2021 when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceled a prestigious science lecture by geophysicist Dorian Abbot because it didn’t like his views about diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Or when Harvard University pushed out evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven because of her insistence on the fundamental realities of sex differences. Or when Jason Kilborn, a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago (a public university), was suspended merely for referring to two slurs without specifically mentioning the actual slurs.

Some readers might argue that the effort to cancel Kimmel is unique — and uniquely dangerous — because it was pushed by Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission. That is true, but then why the comparative liberal silence about the Biden administration’s efforts to police speech on social media? Others might argue that COVID misinformation or hate speech should be subject to different rules from mundane political speech. More than a century of First Amendment jurisprudence, from liberal and conservative justices alike, says otherwise.

And then there are those who point to the hypocrisy of conservatives, Carr not least, who rail against censorship and cancellation when it comes from the left and then enforce their own cancel (or consequence) culture the moment they are in power. A very fair point — and all the more reason for liberals to stick by liberal principles when it comes to their own side’s self-appointed censors.

It’s a cliché, but can’t be said enough, that speech is genuinely free only when it is speech we like the least from those we dislike the most. Rosa Luxemburg put it well: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”

Shana tova.

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.

Related Articles

Commentary: Why the government’s subversion of data is so dangerous

Noah Feldman: Blaming violence on free speech is a very old trick

Michael R Bloomberg: In dark times, Americans need leadership that unites

David M. Drucker: How Erika Kirk memorialized her late husband

David Brooks: The era of dark passions is unleashed

 

Once again, Congress seems to be barreling toward a government shutdown. Once again, the process is likely to be costly, counterproductive and completely unnecessary.

As so often in recent years, Congress has yet to pass all 12 appropriations bills needed to fund the government on time. Unless a deal materializes, the lights will go out on Oct. 1. Republicans were able to pass a mostly party-line bill in the House on Friday but will need bipartisan support to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.

With this bit of leverage, Democrats are thinking of forcing a shutdown to induce certain policy concessions. Although their goals are legitimate, closing the government won’t further any of them.

Last week, party leaders aired two main objectives. The first concerns health-care policy. Enhanced Covid-era tax credits for insurance bought on Affordable Care Act exchanges are set to expire at the end of the year, potentially raising out-of-pocket costs by as much as 75% and jeopardizing coverage for 4 million people. This would indeed be a bad outcome and extending the subsidies is a reasonable priority.

A second concern is that the White House keeps refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress. In July, it requested a “rescission” of about $9 billion in foreign-aid funding and media subsidies (which Congress partly accepted) and in August asserted the right to cut another $4.9 billion effectively without legislative consent. Again, Democrats have a point: This maneuver is anti-democratic, probably illegal and worth fighting over.

The problem is that a shutdown won’t address either concern. Across five decades of these fights, the party demanding concessions has almost always taken the blame in the court of public opinion and has almost never accomplished its goals. In this case, a minority in the Senate would be defying majorities in both chambers as well as the president in pursuit of unrelated policy changes. It’s hardly a winning hand.

Moreover, closing the government is costly in itself. A 16-day shutdown in 2013 led to perhaps $6 billion in lost output and $2 billion in added costs. That’s to say nothing of the harm to services: Air travel may be disrupted, Food and Drug Administration inspections halted, benefits delayed, data releases postponed, national parks shuttered and much else. Hundreds of thousands of workers would likely be furloughed without pay.

Rather than picking this unwinnable fight, Democrats should agree to a stopgap funding bill, then do the hard work of negotiating compromises and winning elections.

A bipartisan deal on the Obamacare subsidies — ideally one that includes a long-term extension in return for gradually moderating tax credits for the highest earners — should be achievable: Neither party wants to see big premium hikes in an election year. As for “pocket rescissions,” a court challenge is underway; the Government Accountability Office has deemed the practice illegal; and half a dozen prominent Republicans, including the Senate majority leader, have publicly broken with the president on the topic. Should the White House attempt further such gambits, a bipartisan rejection seems likely.

More important for Democrats is that they have a good chance of winning the House and making gains in the Senate next November, so long as they don’t blow it by engaging in stunts like this. Midterms historically favor the opposition party, and the president remains quite unpopular. If they wish to advance their policy goals and reassert authority over a wayward executive, the ballot box is the place to do it.

— The Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board

Related Articles

Bret Stephens: Now the left cares about free speech again

Commentary: Why the government’s subversion of data is so dangerous

Trump says he was victim of ‘triple sabotage’ at UN and Secret Service is looking into the matter

Federal judge refuses to reinstate eight former inspectors general fired by Trump administration

Judge rules feds can’t require states to cooperate on immigration to get disaster money