Netanyahu condemns Israeli soldier seen vandalising Jesus statue with a sledgehammer in Lebanon

Israel confirms its soldier destroyed Jesus statue in Lebanon • FRANCE 24 English

 

IDF soldier’s destruction of Jesus statue triggers Poland-Israel spat

 

IDF soldier’s destruction of Jesus statue triggers Poland-Israel spat

 

Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski wrote on X that even Israeli “soldiers themselves admit to war crimes.”

 

April 20, 2026 5:56 pm CET

By Ferdinand Knapp

https://www.politico.eu/article/idf-soldier-destruction-jesus-statue-triggers-poland-israel-spat/

 

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has accused his Polish counterpart Radosław Sikorski of making “irresponsible statements” in a dispute over the destruction of a Christian symbol in Lebanon by a member of the Israel Defense Forces.

 

Sa’ar apologized “to every Christian” on Monday after a photo circulating on social media over the weekend appeared to show an Israeli soldier hitting a statue of Jesus in the head with a sledgehammer. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was “stunned and saddened” by the incident.

 

But despite the apologies, Sikorski wrote on X that the soldier in question should be “punished” and “lessons should be drawn” about the army’s training.

 

“IDF soldiers themselves admit to war crimes. They killed not only civilian Palestinians but even their own hostages,” the center-right politician continued.

 

Sikorski’s criticism seemed to add fresh fuel to the dispute. “What you wrote reflects ignorance and a deep lack of understanding,” Sa’ar responded on X on Monday. The IDF is a “professional and ethical army,” the minister added, and “there is no Western military that fights terrorism more precisely, or on the basis of better intelligence, than the IDF.”

 

The Israeli foreign ministry confirmed it had completed an initial investigation into the act and that “appropriate measures” would be taken against “those involved,” adding that the statue would be restored to its original location.

 

Patriarch of Jerusalem Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa also condemned the images as “a grave affront to the Christian faith,” calling for “disciplinary actions” against the perpetrator.

 

The spat comes as tensions between Israel and the EU continue to escalate, with even traditional European allies of Israel voicing criticism of its treatment of Palestinians.

 

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he was “deeply concerned about developments in the Palestinian territories” following reports by human rights organizations of a surge in violence against the group by settlers in the West Bank. Meanwhile, Italy suspended a defense and technology agreement with Israel last week “in consideration of the current situation” in the Middle East.

Hungary must arrest Netanyahu if he visits, Magyar says

 

Hungary must arrest Netanyahu if he visits, Magyar says

 

Israeli PM Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court, is due to visit Hungary later this year.

 

April 20, 2026 8:08 pm CET

By Ferdinand Knapp

https://www.politico.eu/article/peter-magyar-hungary-would-arrest-benjamin-netanyahu-israel/

 

Hungary’s Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar said Monday that his country must take Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into custody if he enters Hungarian territory while wanted by the International Criminal Court.

 

The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu in November 2024 over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. ICC member countries are in principle obliged to detain individuals subject to such warrants.

 

Hungary had previously refused to arrest the Israeli leader when he visited Budapest in April 2025, with staunch Netanyahu ally Viktor Orbán serving as prime minister. Prior to the meeting Orbán announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the ICC, a process that takes one year to take effect under the court’s statute, and guaranteed Netanyahu immunity.

 

Magyar, however, has announced he will halt the ICC withdrawal by June 2, which would be a year after Hungary filed a formal withdrawal notification to the U.N. secretary-general.

 

Asked by reporters what this would mean for Netanyahu’s planned visit this fall — he has already accepted Hungary’s invite — Magyar said: “I made this clear to the Israeli prime minister as well … it is the Tisza government’s firm intention to stop this and ensure that Hungary remains a member of the ICC.”

 

He added: “If a country is a member of the ICC and a person who is wanted by the ICC enters our territory, then that person must be taken into custody.”

 

Some countries, however, have argued they can remain ICC members without enforcing such warrants.

 

France argued that arresting Netanyahu would contravene other agreements it has with Israel. Article 98 of the ICC statute backs France’s reasoning, saying that a country cannot “act inconsistently with its obligations under international law with respect to the … diplomatic immunity of a person.”

 

Germany’s then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in April 2025 that he couldn’t imagine his country arresting Netanyahu. Italy also granted immunity to the Israeli leader.

 

Júlia Vadler contributed to this report.

Orbán's EU fixer faces becoming Hungary's 'fall guy'

 

Orbán's EU fixer faces becoming Hungary's 'fall guy'

 

Ambassador Bálint Ódor's knowledge of the EU's inner workings helped the outgoing government forcefully make its points for years. But his time in Brussels looks like it's coming to an end.

 

By GABRIEL GAVIN

April 21, 2026 4:00 am CET

By Gabriel Gavin

https://www.politico.eu/article/viktor-orban-eu-ambassador-fixer-hungary-fall-guy-balint-odor/

 

Under Viktor Orbán, Hungary needed someone in Brussels who could aggressively defend his government’s belligerent anti-EU stance while quietly working with other countries to get things done. In Bálint Ódor, it had its man.

 

Over the past six years, the 50-year-old — more mild-mannered than his bosses’ reputations in Europe might suggest — served as Hungary’s ambassador to the EU as relations with the bloc sank to historic lows. In that time, Budapest moved closer to Russia, trashed Ukraine and saw the bloc freeze billions of euros in funds over curbs on democratic freedoms.

 

But with Orbán’s defeat after 16 years as prime minister, Ódor could be out of a job. Opposition leader Péter Magyar, who ended the populist government’s rule in parliamentary elections on April 12, promised a historic reset, signaling he will sweep aside anyone too closely identified with the previous administration.

 

“By definition, everybody understands of each other that the loyalty is to your political bosses and to delivering results to their instructions,” said Ivan Rogers, about national ambassadors to the EU, a role he performed for the U.K. in Brussels until 2017. And, whatever Ódor thought about these instructions personally, he followed them to the letter.

 

While even those who worked closely with Ódor were uncertain about whether he was simply following orders or shared Orbán’s desire to bash Brussels, his reputation as the outgoing prime minister’s fixer may well be his downfall, according to five diplomats and officials from countries other than Hungary who worked with him closely, and who were granted anonymity to speak to POLITICO.

 

It would be easy to think that, given Orbán’s loud anti-EU stance, his man in Brussels would be a blunt instrument. Quite the opposite. Ódor is an expert on its treaties and has a PhD in international relations. Universities back home use his books to teach students how Europe works.

 

That’s why he was so effective, according to his fellow diplomats. Building any kind of trust within the Brussels bubble when he took over as ambassador in 2022 was a tough task. Ódor arrived in the wake of a spying scandal that saw the embassy itself accused of running intelligence agents under diplomatic cover and amid warnings Budapest was passing information to Moscow. The other leading Hungarian in town, Olivér Várhelyi, had also served as ambassador before being nominated by Orbán to be the country’s European commissioner, and is still being probed for his involvement in the alleged affair. He denies any wrongdoing.

 

‘You know he will deliver’

As Rogers implied, the group of ambassadors in Brussels are often a close-knit bunch. They’re expected to keep a close eye on diplomatic moves by their counterparts, feeding back notes on what other governments are saying or, perhaps more crucially, not saying. They also play an essential role in hammering out compromises and ensuring their countries’ interests are reflected in negotiations. This requires bridge-building skills and strong working relations with other envoys, MEPs and European Commission and Council officials.

 

For Ódor, the job wasn’t made easier by Orbán’s broadsides at Brussels and his accusations the EU was interfering in its domestic affairs. The ambassador had to build constructive ties with colleagues, while not drawing suspicions back home for being too friendly with them.

 

Ódor has at least been a consistent opponent on issues where Budapest was digging in its heels, clearly telegraphing to other nation’s ambassadors the Hungarian government’s position and being upfront about where there was room for negotiation, the four diplomats and officials who worked with him said. They were granted anonymity because the nature of their roles means their working relationships are sensitive.

 

“When you talk to Balint and he says ‘I agree with you’ you know he will deliver,” one of them said, adding that Ódor could be constructive even while having to follow the Budapest hard line.

 

Six-foot-two tall with glasses and graying hair, the Hungarian ambassador cuts a slightly awkward figure — and is spotted more frequently in the background of pictures while escorting his bosses in Brussels than during appearances in his own right. And when publicly challenged to defend the Hungarian government’s public priorities at a think tank event in late 2024, those present said he was evidently uncomfortable at the prospect of speaking out beyond his brief on EU affairs.

 

However, his role representing the EU’s most notorious blocker gave Ódor a powerful position during Coreper — the all-important meetings of ambassadors held in Brussels at least twice a week to hash out policy on everything from economic affairs to defense to relations with Washington. In practice, Budapest used its leverage to secure major carveouts from schemes it didn’t want to be part of — like funding Ukraine or quitting Russian oil — and staved off punishment for breaching its obligations for as long as possible.

 

For some who worked alongside him representing other European governments, this meant Ódor was a clear success.

 

“This is a country of 9.5 million people in a union of 450 million and yet around that table they have wielded this much power,” said a senior EU official. “Nobody thinks that isn’t impressive.”

 

Power games

Magyar’s sweep to power has career diplomats in Brussels worried. Most of the 135 staff behind the blacked-out windows of Hungary’s towering permanent representation in Brussels’ European quarter have never gone through a domestic handover of power because they weren’t working there in 2010. While lawyers, technical attaches and assistants are likely to be essential, more visible political appointees could be in line to be moved or dismissed, starting with the ambassador himself.

 

“It’s always been hard to know if he believes what he says — if he shares Orbán’s views, or if he’s just doing his job,” said a fellow ambassador, pointing out that Ódor fitted in comfortably with his colleagues, cracking jokes in the margins of meetings.

 

That’s a perennial issue for most EU diplomats from countries with impartial civil services, according to Rogers, who served as the U.K.’s ambassador to the bloc throughout much of the Brexit negotiations.

 

“You never really ask your colleagues, ‘are you a true believer?’ — nobody would have asked me whether I was a true believer in [David] Cameron or [Theresa] May,” two prime ministers he served, he said. Nonetheless, “Olivér [Várhelyi] was a true believer, I think … When he came in there was probably rather less collaboration behind the scenes. His predecessors and successors I suspect were more apparatchik-class diplomats who nevertheless had good connections.”

 

Despite this, Várhelyi is likely to stay on as European commissioner, because EU convention makes it far harder for an incoming government to fire them than the country’s ambassador.

 

‘True to their oath’

The insistence he was just doing his job looks unlikely to save Ódor from being removed from the role, particularly given one of Magyar’s most important first tasks is to unfreeze the €18 billion in EU funds. That would constitute a major thaw in relations with Brussels, and would require Budapest to show a serious departure from the Orbán days.

 

The posting is also personal for Magyar — who worked in the Hungarian permanent representation over a decade ago. His government will depend “on everyone who has done their job well and has remained true to their oath,” he said in his first press conference after the election victory.

 

The most likely candidate to take charge of the embassy is Márton Hajdu, two Hungarian officials told POLITICO. A former spokesperson for Hungary’s foreign ministry who later climbed the ranks of the Commission, Hajdu became an advisor to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and is understood to be an obvious choice for the incoming Tisza Party, which is scrambling to find people it can trust to do its bidding.

 

Hajdu joined Magyar for talks with the Commission in Budapest over the weekend on how to unlock the funds, photographed as part of the six-strong team expected to take high-profile jobs.

 

Ódor is unlikely to get much thanks for his service from the incoming government — or from his opposite numbers in Brussels.

 

“He’d be the one to be dressed down in Coreper whenever the government blocked a decision yet again, cozied up to Russia or just generally refused to cooperate with the EU,” said Júlia Pőcze, a Hungarian political expert and researcher at Brussels’ CEPS think tank.

 

He has always been “a convenient fall guy for Orbán in Brussels,” she said. He looks like being the fall guy for Magyar too.

Strategic autonomy: Can Europe break free from the US?

‘Immediate Results’ vs. ‘The Long Game’: The U.S. and Iran Face Off

 

‘Immediate Results’ vs. ‘The Long Game’: The U.S. and Iran Face Off

 

As the United States and Iran make a second attempt at a deal, their negotiating styles are on a collision course.

 

David E. Sanger

By David E. Sanger

David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents for The New York Times, and reported from Switzerland and Austria in 2014 and 2015 during the negotiations for the last nuclear accord struck with Iran.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/us/politics/us-iran-negotiation-style.html

April 20, 2026

 

President Trump views himself as the master of coercive diplomacy, forcing his opponents to capitulate quickly to American demands or face the threat of attack.

 

But in dealing with Iran over the past six weeks, Mr. Trump has discovered that he is up against a nation that prides itself on resilience and delay. And never has that been more obvious than in recent days, when Mr. Trump has tried jawboning the Iranians by contending that they already surrendered — they “agreed to everything” he insisted on Friday, including turning over their “nuclear dust” — only to discover that patter doesn’t work with Iranian officials, who took to social media to declare he had made it all up.

 

So over the next few days, assuming that Vice President JD Vance leaves for Islamabad on Tuesday for a second shot at agreeing to a “framework” for a deal, the two approaches are about to come into direct collision. If the stakes were not sky-high — the prospect of renewed combat in the Middle East, global energy shortages and the very real possibility that the surviving Iranian leaders emerge convinced they need a nuclear weapon more than ever — it would be a classic case study in negotiation styles.

 

“Trump is impulsive and temperamental; Iran’s leadership is stubborn and tenacious,” said Robert Malley, who negotiated with the Iranians in the lead-up to the 2015 nuclear deal and again in a failed effort by the Biden administration.

 

“Trump demands immediate results; Iran’s leadership plays the long game,” Mr. Malley continued. “Trump insists on a flashy, headline-grabbing outcome; Iran’s leadership sweats every detail. Trump believes brute force can compel obedience; Iran’s leadership is prepared to endure enormous pain rather than concede on core interests.”

 

There is a reason the last big negotiation, completed 11 years ago, took the better part of two years, moving from secret talks with a then-new Iranian president with a pragmatic bent to a full-scale negotiation involving scores of meetings.

 

The final agreement ran more than 160 pages long, including five technical annexes that defined the limits on Iran’s nuclear activities, the pacing of sanctions relief and, most importantly, Iran’s obligations to comply with inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Every page, and most provisions, triggered an argument; just when old issues were resolved, and some kind of agreement seemed in place, the Iranian negotiators would arrive with new demands.

 

The Iranians have their own complaints about the Americans. The accord that was ultimately reached — not signed, because it was not a formal treaty — in 2015 was overturned by Mr. Trump in 2018. Ever since, the Iranians have made the point that it is pointless to negotiate with one president if the next one is going to scrap the resulting agreement.

 

More recently, Iranian officials have noted that twice in a row, in June 2025 and again this February, Mr. Trump has ordered attacks on Iran in the midst of diplomatic negotiations. The Iranians cast this as perfidy, evidence that Mr. Trump is not a reliable interlocutor.

 

And the distrust turned into gunfire over the weekend, near the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian boats opened fire on two freighters that they said were breaking out of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s strict control of who can, and cannot, sail through the Strait. On Sunday, the U.S. Navy shot out the engine room of a huge Iranian-flagged container ship, which the Navy has now seized. Mr. Trump noted that the ship had been sanctioned by the Treasury in 2020, at the end of his first term, for a “prior history of illegal activity.”

 

“We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.

 

One way to interpret these moves is that they are efforts to shape the negotiating sessions, just as generals try to shape the battlefield. The Iranians are demonstrating that no matter what happens or what they give up, they will be able to control commerce across the strait and charge millions of dollars for passage. The Trump administration is demonstrating that it is willing to reopen hostilities if negotiations fail.

 

Mr. Trump reinforced that point on Sunday, writing that a good deal is on the table.

 

“I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY.”

 

It was the latest example of how Mr. Trump has veered from complimenting Iran’s new leaders, who replaced those killed in the strikes that began Feb. 28, as “more reasonable” than their predecessors, to warning them of more violence ahead if he doesn’t get his way.

 

But while that is a new element in the talks, the cultural divide in how to negotiate is not.

 

That divide was evident 11 years ago, in the gilded halls of the 160-year-old Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland, where Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterparts from five other countries struggled to close a preliminary agreement with Iran. It was, perhaps, the closest analogue to what is unfolding now in Islamabad.

 

Every day the American delegation would speak about how many centrifuges had to be disassembled and how much uranium needed to be shipped out of country. Yet when Iranian officials — including Abbas Araghchi, now the Iranian foreign minister — stepped out of the elegant, chandeliered rooms to brief reporters, most of the questions about those details were waved away. The Iranians talked about preserving respect for their rights and Iran’s sovereignty.

 

“I remember we finally got the parameters agreed upon at the hotel,” Wendy Sherman, the chief U.S. negotiator at the time, said on Monday. “And then a few days later the supreme leader came out and said, ‘Actually, some very different terms were required.’”

 

Ms. Sherman, who went on to become deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration, would go into these negotiations with a large posse. She often had the C.I.A.’s top Iran expert in the room, or nearby. So was the energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, an expert in nuclear weapons design. Proposals floated by the Iranians would be sent back to the U.S. national laboratories, where weapons are designed and tested, for expert analysis of whether the agreements being discussed would keep Iran at least a year away from a bomb.

 

But Mr. Trump’s negotiating team travels light, with no entourage of experts and few briefings. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the president’s son-in-law and the special envoy, learned their negotiating skills in New York real estate and say a deal is a deal. They say they have immersed themselves in the details of the Iran program, and know it well.

 

Moreover, even if the issues they are facing are very much the same ones that the Obama-era negotiators faced, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff see little value in spending hours poring over the diplomatic history, especially given what Mr. Trump had to say about the resulting agreement.

 

But Mr. Trump is clearly sensitive about the coming comparisons. “The DEAL that we are making with Iran will be FAR BETTER than the JCPOA,” he said, using the acronym for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the formal name for the 2015 accord. “It was a guaranteed Road to a Nuclear Weapon, which will not, and cannot, happen with the deal we’re working on.”

 

And with that, Mr. Trump set up the test that his own negotiation, if successful, may be measured by.

 

David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.