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  China controls the rare earths the world buys - can Trump's new deals change that? US President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of deals on his Asia visit to secure the supply of rare earths, a critical sector that China has long dominated. The deals with Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia differ in size and substance and it's too early to assess their tangible impact. But they all include efforts to diversify access to the minerals that have become essential for advanced manufacturing, from electric vehicles to smartphones. The agreements, which aim to lock partners into trading with the US, are a clear bid to reduce dependence on China, ahead of a key meeting with its leader Xi Jinping. They could eventually challenge Beijing's stranglehold over rare earths, but experts say it will be a costly process that will take years. "Building new mines, refining facilities, and processing plants in regions such as Australia, the United States, and Europe comes ...
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Gaza health ministry denies manipulating death toll figures


At al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Alam Hirzallah resigns himself to a grim task: registering the deaths of the wife and two children of his grieving cousin.

His family brought the bodies here on an electric rickshaw or tuk-tuk. They found them in their house in eastern Gaza City after Israeli shelling hit the family home. Asma Hirzallah, Mayar, 5, and Abdullah, 3, were killed.

"The hospital asked for their full names and ID numbers," explains Alam, referring to the numbers all Palestinians are given in a population registry administered by Israel.

"They gave us a paper to confirm they were martyred and told us to come back for the death certificate. Now we don't know where to go to bury them as the cemeteries are in areas under Israeli control."

At least 51,266 people have been killed in the 18 months since the Gaza war began, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, with nearly a third of the dead aged under 18.

Israel has repeatedly challenged the accuracy of the Palestinian fatalities list - in terms of overall numbers, and in particular, the demographic breakdown - claiming it is used as Hamas propaganda. The figures are cited with attribution, by UN agencies and widely in the media.

The list does not distinguish between civilians and members of Palestinian armed groups who are killed in the war, and Israel has accused Hamas of inflating the percentages of women and children.

Recently, several media reports have raised questions about the reliability of the statistics by highlighting anomalies between the August and October 2024 and March 2025 lists of fatalities. The reports focus on how some 3,000 names of people originally identified as fatalities were removed from later revised lists.

A Gazan health official, Zaher al-Wahidi, denied to the BBC that victims had vanished or that there was a lack of transparency, insisting: "The health ministry works towards having accurate data with high credibility.

"In every list that gets shared, there is a greater verification and revision of the list. We cannot say that the health ministry removes names. It's not a removal process, rather it is a revision and verification process."

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