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  • Trump withdraws U.S. from 66 international organizations and treaties, including major climate groups

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    President Trump on Wednesday withdrew the United States from 66 international organizations and treaties, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    In a presidential memorandum, Trump said it is “contrary to the interests of the United States to remain a member of, participate in, or otherwise provide support to” the organizations, which also include groups geared toward education, economic development, cybersecurity and human rights issues, among others. He directed all executive departments and agencies to take steps to “effectuate the withdrawal” of the U.S. from the organizations as soon as possible.

    While the president has already announced a withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement — an international treaty to limit global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius in order to prevent the worst effects of climate change — the latest move will further isolate the nation at a critical moment, experts said.

    The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change is a global treaty created in 1992 and signed by nearly 200 countries with the aim of addressing climate change through coordinated international action, including limiting planet-warming greenhouse gases. Trump already raised eyebrows last year by refusing to attend or send any high-level delegates to the annual U.N. Conferences of the Parties meeting in Brazil, where Gov. Gavin Newsom instead took on a starring role.

    Withdrawing from the U.N. Framework Convention is a “shortsighted, embarrassing, and foolish decision,” Gina McCarthy, a former director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said in a statement.

    “As the only country in the world not a part of the UNFCCC treaty, the Trump administration is throwing away decades of U.S. climate change leadership and global collaboration,” said McCarthy, who also served as the first White House national climate advisor and is now chair of the America is All In climate coalition.

    David Widawsky, director of the World Resources Institute, called the move a “strategic blunder that gives away American advantage for nothing in return.”

    “The 30-year-old agreement is the foundation of international climate cooperation. Walking away doesn’t just put America on the sidelines — it takes the U.S. out of the arena entirely,” Widawsky said.

    Trump on Wednesday also withdrew the U.S. from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading global scientific body studying global warming. Its major assessments published every six or seven years help inform climate policy around the world.

    Pulling the U.S. out of the IPCC won’t prevent individual U.S. scientists from contributing, but the nation as a whole will no longer be able to help guide the scientific assessments, said Delta Merner, associate accountability campaign director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has attended previous IPCC meetings.

    “Walking away doesn’t make the science disappear, it only leaves people across the United States, policymakers and businesses flying in the dark at the very moment when credible climate information is most urgently needed,” Merner said. “This is a clear attempt to weaken scientific guardrails that protect the public from disinformation, delay and reckless decision-making. Such a move will make it easier for fossil fuel interests to distort the facts while front-line communities pay the price.”

    Trump, who received substantial donations from oil and gas companies during his 2024 presidential campaign, has heavily promoted the development of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal. He has also taken several steps to limit scientific research and climate action in the U.S., including moving to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of the world’s leading climate and weather research institutions, in Boulder, Colo.

    Last year, the Trump administration also fired hundreds of scientists working to prepare the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment and removed the website that housed previous assessments.

    Other climate, environment and energy groups Trump withdrew from on Wednesday include the International Renewable Energy Agency, the International Solar Alliance, the the 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Compact and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, among many others.

    But the United States is the first nation to walk away from the U.N. Framework Convention, according to Manish Bapna, president and chief executive of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council.

    “President Trump pulls the United States out of the UNFCCC at the nation’s peril,” Bapna said. “It is not only self-defeating to let other countries write the global rules of the road for the inevitable transition to clean energy, but also to skip out on trillions of dollars in investment, jobs, lower energy costs and new markets for American clean technologies.”

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    Hayley Smith

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  • Israel faces global backlash as Gaza invasion deepens isolation

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    BEIRUT — Cascades of condemnation from friend and foe alike. An array of international organizations and rights groups leveling accusations of genocide and war crimes. Boycotts across a range of sectors and fields.

    As Israel begins its ground offensive to occupy Gaza City, defying international and domestic pressure to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas, it skirts ever closer to becoming a pariah state.

    “Israel is entering diplomatic isolation. We will have to deal with a closed economy,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a finance ministry conference on Monday, giving a rare admission of the war’s effect on Israel’s international standing.

    “We will have to be Athens and super-Sparta,” adapting to an “autarkic,” or self-sustaining, economy, he added. “We have no choice.”

    Netanyahu engaged in damage control on Tuesday, saying he was talking specifically about Israel’s defense industry and that the wider economy was “strong and innovative.” But by then his words had already spooked markets, spurring a sharp fall in the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and a raft of enraged statements from his political enemies.

    “We are not Sparta — this vision as presented will make it difficult for us to survive in an evolving global world,” the Israel Business Forum, which represents the heads of around 200 of the Israeli economy’s largest companies, said in a statement. “We are marching towards a political, economic, and social abyss that will endanger our existence in Israel.”

    Netanyahu has forged ahead with the ground operation despite repeated warnings from allies and adversaries that it would trigger a humanitarian catastrophe for hundreds of thousands of people remaining in what was the enclave’s largest urban center.

    Visiting the U.S. in July, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, center, posed alongside Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), Sen. Jim Risch (R-Ida.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

    (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

    Even as tanks and armored vehicles streamed into Gaza City’s western neighborhoods, an independent U.N. commission released a report Tuesday concluding that “Israeli authorities and security forces have the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

    It was the most recent of a number of international organizations and rights groups accusing Netanyahu’s government of committing genocide. The Israeli government dismissed the commission’s report as “falsehoods.”

    The European Commission on Wednesday decided on a partial suspension of a trade agreement between the European Union and Israel. The move could involve imposing tariffs on Israeli goods entering the union.

    The measure, said EU top diplomat Kaja Kallas in a statement Tuesday on X, is aimed at pressuring Israel’s government to change course over the war in Gaza.

    Western governments — including some of Israel’s most loyal supporters — castigated the decision to invade, with Germany’s foreign minister slamming it as “the completely wrong path” and France saying the campaign had “no military logic.”

    Yvette Cooper, Britain’s foreign secretary, said it was “utterly reckless and appalling,” while Irish President Michael Higgins, a routinely vociferous critic of Israel, said the U.N. must look to exclude countries “practicing genocide and those who are supporting genocide with armaments.”

    Meanwhile, many nations — including traditional U.S. allies such as Australia, Britain, Canada and others — are expected to recognize Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly in defiance of intense diplomatic pressure from Washington.

    Pope Leo XIV weighed in Wednesday on the carnage in Gaza, expressing his “deep solidarity” with Palestinians “who continue to live in fear and survive in unacceptable conditions, being forcibly displaced once again from their lands.” He called for a ceasefire.

    A Palestinian woman sits next to wrapped bodies on stretchers.

    Relatives of Palestinians who died following Israeli attacks mourn as the bodies are taken from Al-Shifa Hospital for funerals in Gaza City on Wednesday.

    (Khames Alrefi / Anadolu / Getty Images)

    Israel’s military pressed on with the offensive Wednesday, leveling buildings in Gaza City’s ’s north, west and south, residents and local reporters said. Palestinian health authorities in the enclave said 50 people had been killed since dawn Wednesday, adding to a death toll that has exceeded 65,000 since Oct. 7, 2023. It will take months to fully occupy Gaza City, Israel military leaders say.

    It’s unclear if the U.S. supports the ground invasion. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Trump prefers a negotiated settlement, but seemed reluctant to exert any pressure to stop Israel’s incursion. Trump, after professing “I don’t know too much” about the offensive, threatened Hamas if it used hostages as human shields.

    Israel’s Arab neighbors perceive the ground operation as the latest in a series of moves over the last two years that demonstrate it has little interest in peace, pointing to Israel’s bombing this month of Arab countries — the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria, Qatar and Yemen — to say it has become as destabilizing a player in the region as Iran has long been.

    Prospects for Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between some Arab states and Israel forged during Trump’s first term, appear dimmer than ever. And the United Arab Emirates, a founding and enthusiastic member of the accords, has said they are under threat if Netanyahu goes ahead with plans to annex the occupied West Bank.

    The fallout has spread to the cultural arena.

    On Tuesday, Spain joined Ireland, the Netherlands and Slovenia in saying it would boycott the Eurovision contest if Israel were to join. Last week, Flanders Festival Ghent, a Belgian music festival, withdrew its invitation for the Munich Philharmonic to play there because the orchestra’s conductor is Lahav Shani, who is also music director of the Israeli Philharmonic. In August, Israeli actor Gal Gadot blamed “pressure” on Hollywood celebrities to “speak out against Israel” for the paltry box office returns of “Snow White.”

    Even Israel’s much-vaunted arms industry, which has used the war in Gaza as proof-of-concept for its wares and has proven to be relatively resistant to opprobrium, is being affected.

    Though the U.S. remains by far Israel’s largest supplier of weapons, a number of European governments have imposed complete or partial arms embargoes and prevented Israeli arms makers from participating in defense expos. This week, organizers for the Dubai Air Show, one of the world’s largest aerospace trade events, were reported to have barred Israeli defense firms from taking part — reversing a policy in recent years that saw them take pride of place in similar events.

    Similarly, beginning next year, Israelis will not be able to attend programs at the Royal College of Defence Studies, in London, a prestigious defense college that allows enrollment from the British armed services and roughly 50 U.K. partner nations.

    “U.K. military educational courses have long been open to personnel from a wide range of countries, with all U.K. military courses emphasizing compliance with international humanitarian law,” the Ministry of Defence in London said in a statement Monday. It said the Israeli government’s decision to escalate in Gaza “is wrong.”

    “There must be a diplomatic solution to end this war now,” the statement said, “with an immediate ceasefire, the return of the hostages and a surge in humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.”

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    Nabih Bulos

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