US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said Washington is grateful to Pakistan for its openness to considering a role in the proposed International Stabilisation Force for Gaza.

This comes despite Islamabad not yet confirming any commitment to the deployment of troops, The News reported on Saturday.

Speaking to reporters at a press conference in Washington on Friday,  Rubio responded to a question on whether the US had received Pakistan’s consent to send troops to Gaza for peacebuilding and peacemaking and said: “We are very grateful to Pakistan for their offer to be a part of [the peacekeeping force] or at least their offer to consider being a part of it.”

Rubio added, “I think we owe them a few more answers before we can ask anybody to firmly commit. But I feel very confident that we have a number of nation-states acceptable to all sides in this who are willing to step forward and be a part of that stabilisation force and…Pakistan is key if they agree.”

“We owe them a few more answers before we get there.”

Rubio said that “the next step” was announcing “the border of peace…the Palestinian technocratic group,” which he said would allow stakeholders to “firm up the stabilisation force, including how it’s going to be paid for, what their rules of engagement are, what their role will be in demilitarisation.”

However, Pakistan’s Foreign Office said on Thursday that no decision had yet been taken on participation in the International Stabilisation Force (ISF) for Gaza.

“We have not taken a decision to participate in the ISF as yet,” Foreign Office spokesperson Tahir Hussain Andrabi said at the FO’s weekly media briefing.

Responding to a query, the spokesperson said discussions on the ISF were ongoing in “certain capitals,” but Pakistan had neither committed to participating nor received any formal or specific request.

The clarification followed reports by some media outlets over the past few days suggesting that Pakistan was under growing pressure to join the ISF.

Last month, Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar had said Pakistan was ready to commit troops to a Gaza peace force but had clearly distanced the country from any role in disarming Hamas.

Trump’s Gaza plan, revealed in September this year, had envisaged the deployment of troops from Muslim-majority countries during a transitional ‘stabilisation’ phase.

In November, the UN Security Council adopted a US-drafted resolution endorsing Trump’s plan, including the deployment of the ISF.

Originally published in The News

US forces struck more than 70 Islamic State group targets in Syria on Friday in what President Donald Trump described as “very serious retaliation” for an attack that killed three Americans last weekend.

Washington said a lone gunman from the militant group carried out the December 13 attack in Palmyra — home to UNESCO-listed ancient ruins and once controlled by jihadist fighters — that left two US soldiers and a US civilian dead.

In response, the United States “struck more than 70 targets at multiple locations across central Syria with fighter jets, attack helicopters, and artillery,” US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement.

“The operation employed more than 100 precision munitions targeting known ISIS infrastructure and weapons sites,” CENTCOM said, using an acronym for the Islamic State group.

Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network that the United States is “inflicting very serious retaliation, just as I promised, on the murderous terrorists responsible,” and that those who attack Americans “WILL BE HIT HARDER THAN YOU HAVE EVER BEEN HIT BEFORE.”

CENTCOM said that US and allied forces have “conducted 10 operations in Syria and Iraq resulting in the deaths or detention of 23 terrorist operatives” following the Palmyra attack, without specifying which groups the militants belonged to.

No safe havens

Syria’s foreign ministry, while not directly commenting on the Friday strikes, said in a post on X that the country is committed to fighting the Islamic State (IS) group and “ensuring that it has no safe havens on Syrian territory, and will continue to intensify military operations against it wherever it poses a threat.”

The Americans killed in the Palmyra attack last weekend were Iowa National Guard sergeants William Howard and Edgar Torres Tovar, and Ayad Mansoor Sakat, a civilian from Michigan who worked as an interpreter.

Trump, Hegseth and top military officer General Dan Caine were among the US officials who attended a somber ceremony marking the return of the dead to the United States on Wednesday.

The attack was the first such incident since the overthrow of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in December last year, and Syrian interior ministry spokesman Noureddine al-Baba said the perpetrator was a security forces member who was due to be fired for his “extremist Islamist ideas.”

The US personnel who were targeted were supporting Operation Inherent Resolve, the international effort to combat IS, which seized swaths of Syrian and Iraqi territory in 2014.

The jihadists were ultimately defeated by local ground forces backed by international air strikes and other support, but IS still has a presence in Syria, especially in the country’s vast desert.

Trump has long been skeptical of Washington’s presence in Syria, ordering the withdrawal of troops during his first term but ultimately leaving American forces in the country.

The Pentagon announced in April that the United States would halve the number of US personnel in Syria in the following months, while US envoy for Syria Tom Barrack said in June that Washington would eventually reduce its bases in the country to one.

US forces are currently deployed in Syria’s Kurdish-controlled northeast as well as at Al-Tanf near the border with Jordan.

The US Department of Justice on Friday released a new cache of documents from its investigations into the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The Epstein files have been a significant political problem for President Donald Trump, with many of his supporters and Republicans in Congress demanding their release. It remains to be seen if this partial release will satisfy Trump’s critics on the issue.

Here are some initial takeaways from the documents:

Not much Trump

The big question before the document release was: How prominently would Trump feature in them? He and Epstein were friends and socialised frequently in the 1990s and early 2000s. Trump says they had a falling out in the mid-2000s, before Epstein’s first conviction in 2008.

Friday’s document dump of government files containing hundreds of thousands of pages was therefore notable for the lack of mentions of Trump. The Justice Department said more documents will be released over the next two weeks.

An initial examination of the cache by Reuters found scant photos of Trump or any mentions of him in documents. There was a single photo of Epstein appearing to hold a check with Trump’s name on it, and a separate photo taken inside Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse where a copy of Trump’s 1997 book, ‘Trump: The Art of the Comeback’, was tucked inside a bookshelf.

Trump’s name appeared in flight manifests listing passengers on Epstein’s private plane that were included in a first batch of material the Justice Department released in February.

Trump and several of his family members were also listed in an Epstein contact book, which was made public during the 2021 trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former associate who was found guilty of child sex trafficking and other offences in connection with Epstein’s crimes.

Trump has often denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein or that he had any knowledge of his crimes when the two socialised in Florida.

Quite a lot of Bill Clinton

The documents contained a number of mentions and photos of former Democratic President Bill Clinton.

There were several photos of Clinton, including one of him in a swimming pool with Maxwell and an unidentified person. Others showed Clinton in a hot tub, and another with a young woman sitting on the armrest of his seat with her arm draped around his shoulders, her face redacted. A fourth was a photo of a painting of Clinton in a blue dress hanging in Epstein’s New York home.

The release of the Clinton photos could conflict with Justice Department policy not to release material related to ongoing investigations. Trump, a Republican, has ordered the Justice Department to investigate Clinton’s ties to Epstein, in what critics said was an effort to shift the focus away from his own relationship with Epstein.

Clinton has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes when the two socialised and traveled together and has said he wishes he had never met Epstein.

Angel Urena, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, responded on the social media platform X, calling the images of Clinton “grainy, 20-plus-year-old photos”, and said Clinton knew nothing about Epstein’s crimes when the two socialised. “This isn’t about Bill Clinton,” Urena said.

1,200 victims and relatives, and 254 masseuses

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress in a letter that the department had identified more than 1,200 victims of Epstein and their relatives during an “exhaustive review” of the documents.

One document was Epstein’s masseuse list, which contained 254 names. All the names were redacted.

Blanche said the documents released on Friday included FBI files from its 2018 and 2006 investigations of Epstein and its investigation of his 2019 death, among other materials.

Heavy redactions, democrats cry foul

Many of the documents released by the Justice Department were heavily redacted. One of the redacted files, a 119-page document that appeared to contain grand jury testimony, was entirely blacked out. Three more documents of 100 pages each were totally redacted.

Some Democrats decried the Justice Department’s failure to release all of the Epstein files by the deadline set by a law passed by Congress in November and signed by President Trump.

Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator, called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to appear before Congress and explain why all the files had not been released.

Chuck Schumer, the senior Senate Democrat, said in a statement, “this set of heavily redacted documents released by the Department of Justice today is just a fraction of the whole body of evidence.”

Thomas Massie, a House Republican who was a leading sponsor of the Epstein document release law, said on X that Friday’s partial release “fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law” that Trump signed.

Trump and his Justice Department likely will face more criticism in the coming days for the paucity of Friday’s release and the fact that Trump is barely mentioned, while Clinton is. Ultimately, it is likely that Trump has not yet put the Epstein controversy behind him.