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Israel, Azerbaijan Sign Military and Security Deal

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz meeting with Azeri delegation (Israeli Defense Ministry)
Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz meeting with Azeri delegation (Israeli Defense Ministry)
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Israel, Azerbaijan Sign Military and Security Deal

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz meeting with Azeri delegation (Israeli Defense Ministry)
Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz meeting with Azeri delegation (Israeli Defense Ministry)

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz revealed he completed an unannounced visit to Azerbaijan, during which he met senior Azeri officials and signed several cooperation agreements in the military and security fields.

Gantz's spokesman said the visit occurred on Monday, and a high-ranking delegation accompanied him.

According to a defense source who was part of the delegation, Gantz was asked about the Palestinian situation and rejected all proposals to invade the West Bank in response to Palestinian operations.

He also rejected the idea attributed to Chief of Staff Aviv Kohavi to send drones to assassinate armed Palestinian youths in Jenin.

Gantz sought calm with the Palestinians and was open about having direct relations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, pointing out that they meet and try together to find realistic solutions to break the stalemate in the political situation.

He added that at the same time, the minister stated that he fights the Palestinians when they send “shooters and terrorists” to kill Israeli soldiers and settlers.

Gantz went on to underline the importance of maintaining strategic relations between the State of Israel and the Republic of Azerbaijan and reflecting on the changes that have taken place in the Middle East region after the signing of the Abraham Accords.

The spokesman also noted that senior officials discussed the development of Israel's ties with Turkey and other countries in the region and the world.

Gantz took advantage of his presence in a country neighboring Iran and told Israel Hayom's military correspondent, Yoav Limor, that Tel Aviv could respond to any development in Iran.

He added that the nuclear deal is not advancing but not terminated yet, asserting Israel's opposition to the agreement.

A senior source who accompanied Gantz said that Israel has good relations with Azerbaijan, as it is an essential Islamic country neighboring Iran and, like Israel, faces many hostile schemes from the leaders of the Tehran regime.

The source noted that Israel and Azerbaijan must coordinate to confront these schemes together, noting that the meetings revealed the two sides share the same vision towards many regional issues.

During the visit, Gantz also met with the Chief of the State Border Service, Colonel General Elchin Guliyev, and visited a State Border Service headquarters.

Last April, Israel's Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman visited Azerbaijan and was received by President Ilham Aliyev.

Lieberman also met Ministers of Finance and Economy and concluded agreements to expand economic relations, especially in oil import.

Azerbaijan pledged to supply Israel with oil if the global energy crisis was exacerbated due to the sanctions imposed by the West on Russia following the war in Ukraine.

In turn, Israel vowed to provide Azerbaijan with the experts and knowledge it needs to develop wheat cultivation, which is also witnessing a global shortage because of the war.

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World

Iran Accused of ‘Digital Apartheid’

03 December 2025, Iran, Teheran: View of the smog-ridden metropolis of Tehran. Photo: Aref Taherkenareh/dpa
03 December 2025, Iran, Teheran: View of the smog-ridden metropolis of Tehran. Photo: Aref Taherkenareh/dpa
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Iran Accused of ‘Digital Apartheid’

03 December 2025, Iran, Teheran: View of the smog-ridden metropolis of Tehran. Photo: Aref Taherkenareh/dpa
03 December 2025, Iran, Teheran: View of the smog-ridden metropolis of Tehran. Photo: Aref Taherkenareh/dpa

Ordinary Iranians face up to 10 years in prison or even execution if they use X to write anything the government deems critical.

But little did they know that government officials and regime supporters have been using the social media site, which is banned inside Iran, Britain’s The Telegraph reported.

This practice has been revealed after Elon Musk’s X rolled out an update that displays each user’s location.

It has exposed government ministers, state media figures, political officials and pro-regime accounts as having accessed the banned platform from within Iran using special white SIM cards.

The new X location feature was designed to spot fake accounts but instead has lifted the curtain on the divide in Iran, one of the world’s most censored countries, according to the newspaper.

Critics of the regime have termed the online divide a form of “digital apartheid”, with only certain groups able to access the internet freely.

Ordinary Iranians are forced to use VPNs, which conceal their true location, to get around the ban. If they are caught posting on X they are reprimanded by Iranian authorities, and if those posts are anti-Iran or pro-Israel, they face execution or prison sentences.

Meanwhile, state and pro-regime accounts use the white SIM cards in their phones to receive unrestricted access to the internet and bypass their own restrictions.

Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani, an Iranian politician who serves on the national security commission, criticized their use.

Ardestani said: “Many people want filtering to exist because they want to sell VPNs and do business.”

He added that the VPN market, used by ordinary Iranians, has high financial turnover and is controlled by “a mafia”.

If users access X through VPNs, the location shows the country where their server is located rather than their actual location.

Other banned platforms in Iran include Facebook, YouTube and Telegram.

“This is obvious discrimination in public rights and against the explicit text of the constitution,” one Iranian citizen told The Telegraph, referring to Iran’s constitutional guarantee of equality among citizens.

“When you yourself use white SIM cards, how can we expect you to understand the pain of filtering? How can we expect you to fight to remove it?” another Iranian said.

Among those whose locations were displayed were communications minister Sattar Hashemi, former foreign minister Javad Zarif, government spokesman Fatemeh Mohajerani and dozens of journalists working for state-aligned media outlets.

Also exposed were political figures, eulogists who praise the Iranian regime at official events, and accounts that had claimed online to be opposition voices, including some monarchist and separatist pages operating from inside Iran with apparent government approval.

Analysts say it is meant to keep parts of the opposition narrative under the control of the clerical establishment.

The exposure proved particularly embarrassing for officials who had publicly opposed privileged internet access.

Mohajerani had claimed she used VPN software like ordinary citizens, saying: “Class-based internet has neither legal basis nor will it ever be on the government’s agenda.”

Mahdi Tabatabaei, communications deputy, said: “Making society white and black is playing on the enemy’s field.”

He added that from President Masoud Pezeshkian’s view, “all 90 million Iranians are white”.

Journalist Yashar Soltani compared the situation to George Orwell’s Animal Farm. He said: “When freedom is rationed it’s no longer freedom – it’s structural discrimination.”

World

Aid Workers Stand Trial in Greece on Migrant Smuggling Charges

TOPSHOT - Migrants sit onboard an inflatable boat before attempting to illegally cross the English Channel to reach Britain, off the coast of Sangatte, northern France, on July 18, 2023. (Photo by BERNARD BARRON / AFP)
TOPSHOT - Migrants sit onboard an inflatable boat before attempting to illegally cross the English Channel to reach Britain, off the coast of Sangatte, northern France, on July 18, 2023. (Photo by BERNARD BARRON / AFP)
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Aid Workers Stand Trial in Greece on Migrant Smuggling Charges

TOPSHOT - Migrants sit onboard an inflatable boat before attempting to illegally cross the English Channel to reach Britain, off the coast of Sangatte, northern France, on July 18, 2023. (Photo by BERNARD BARRON / AFP)
TOPSHOT - Migrants sit onboard an inflatable boat before attempting to illegally cross the English Channel to reach Britain, off the coast of Sangatte, northern France, on July 18, 2023. (Photo by BERNARD BARRON / AFP)

Two dozen aid workers went on trial in Greece on Thursday on charges including migrant smuggling, in a case that rights groups have dismissed as a baseless attempt to outlaw aid for refugees heading to Europe.

The trial on the island of Lesbos comes as EU countries, including Greece - which saw more than one million people reaching its shores during Europe's refugee crisis in 2015-2016 - are tightening rules on migration as right-wing parties gain ground across the bloc, Reuters said.

The 24 defendants, affiliated with the Emergency Response Center International (ERCI), a nonprofit search-and-rescue group that operated on Lesbos from 2016 to 2018, face multi-year prison sentences. The felony charges include involvement in a criminal group facilitating the illegal entry of migrants and money laundering linked to the group's funding.

Among them is Sarah Mardini, one of two Syrian sisters who saved refugees in 2015 by pulling their sinking dinghy to shore and whose story inspired the popular 2022 Netflix movie The Swimmers, and Sean Binder, a German national who began volunteering for ERCI in 2017. They were arrested in 2018 and spent over 100 days in pre-trial detention before being released pending trial.

"The trial's result will define if humanitarian aid will be judicially protected from absurd charges or whether it will be left to the maelstrom of arbitrary narratives by prosecuting authorities," defense lawyer Zacharias Kesses told Reuters.

Greece has toughened its stance on migrants. Since 2019, the center-right government has reinforced border controls with fences and sea patrols and in July it temporarily suspended processing asylum applications for migrants arriving from North Africa.

Anyone caught helping migrants to shore today may face charges including facilitating illegal entry into Greece or helping a criminal enterprise under a 2021 law passed as part of Europe’s efforts to counter mass migration from the Middle East and Asia. In 2023, a Greek court dropped espionage charges against the defendants.

Rights groups have criticized the case as baseless and lacking in evidence. "The case depends on deeply-flawed logic," Human Rights Watch said in a statement. "Saving lives at sea is mischaracterized as migrant smuggling, so the search-and-rescue group is a criminal organization, and therefore, the group’s legitimate fundraising is money laundering."

World

Putin Says Russia Will Take All of Ukraine's Donbas Region Militarily or Otherwise

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with journalists as he attends the VTB Investment Forum "Russia Calling!" in Moscow, Russia, December 2, 2025. Sputnik/Yevgeny Biyatov/Pool via REUTERS
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with journalists as he attends the VTB Investment Forum "Russia Calling!" in Moscow, Russia, December 2, 2025. Sputnik/Yevgeny Biyatov/Pool via REUTERS
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Putin Says Russia Will Take All of Ukraine's Donbas Region Militarily or Otherwise

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with journalists as he attends the VTB Investment Forum "Russia Calling!" in Moscow, Russia, December 2, 2025. Sputnik/Yevgeny Biyatov/Pool via REUTERS
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks with journalists as he attends the VTB Investment Forum "Russia Calling!" in Moscow, Russia, December 2, 2025. Sputnik/Yevgeny Biyatov/Pool via REUTERS

President Vladimir Putin said in an interview published on Thursday that Russia would take full control of Ukraine's Donbas region by force unless Ukrainian forces withdraw, something Kyiv has flatly rejected.

Putin sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops in the Donbas, which is made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, said Reuters.

"Either we liberate these territories by force of arms, or Ukrainian troops leave these territories," Putin told India Today ahead of a visit to New Delhi, according to a clip shown on Russian state television.

Ukraine says it does not want to gift Russia its own territory that Moscow has failed to win on the battlefield, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said Moscow should not be rewarded for a war it started.

Russia currently controls 19.2% of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, all of Luhansk, more than 80% of Donetsk, about 75% of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and slivers of the Kharkiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

About 5,000 square km (1,900 square miles) of Donetsk remains under Ukrainian control.

In discussions with the United States over the outline of a possible peace deal to end the war, Russia has repeatedly said that it wants control over the whole of Donbas - and that the United States should informally recognize Moscow's control.

Russia in 2022 declared that the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia were now part of Russia after referenda that the West and Kyiv dismissed as a sham. Most countries recognize the regions - and Crimea - as part of Ukraine.

Putin received US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in the Kremlin on Tuesday, and said that Russia had accepted some US proposals on Ukraine, and that talks should continue.

Russia's RIA state news agency cited Putin as saying that his meeting with Witkoff and Kushner had been "very useful" and that it had been based on proposals he and President Donald Trump had discussed in Alaska in August.