Sullivan expresses worry over escalating Israel-Lebanon tension, calls Hezbollah strike as justice served

NEW YORK/PARIS: OpenAI’s board has not yet received a formal bid from an Elon Musk-led consortium, although a lawyer for the billionaire said the offer had been sent to OpenAI’s outside counsel. A day after Musk publicized a bid to offer $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the two sides were still at odds over what exactly happened to the formal bid.
OpenAI’s board of directors has not yet received a formal bid from Musk’s group, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday, adding to the confusion over the unsolicited attempt to take control of the world’s most prominent AI company.
Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, told Reuters that he sent the offer by email on Monday to OpenAI’s outside counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The law firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The bid — attached to an email — was in the form of a “detailed four-page Letter of Intent” to purchase OpenAI’s assets, signed by Musk and other investors and addressed to the board, Toberoff said.
“Whether Sam Altman chose to provide or withhold this from OpenAI’s other Board members is outside of our control,” he said, referring to OpenAI’s CEO.
The nonprofit that controls OpenAI is not for sale, Altman told Reuters on Tuesday when asked about Musk’s offer to buy it. The offer by the Musk-led consortium came amid the billionaire’s fight to block the artificial intelligence startup from transitioning to a for-profit firm.
“I have nothing to say. I mean, it’s ridiculous,” Altman said on the sidelines of an AI summit in Paris when asked about the offer.
“The company is not for sale. It’s another one of his tactics to try to mess with us,” Altman said, referring to Musk.
In an internal message to OpenAI employees on Monday, Altman said the board, though it had not officially reviewed the offer, planned to reject it based on the interest of OpenAI’s mission.
Musk cofounded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 as a nonprofit, but left before the company took off due to a disagreement over the company’s direction and funding sources with Altman and other co-founders. In 2023, he launched the competing AI startup, xAI. Musk, the CEO of Tesla and owner of technology company X, is a close ally of US President Donald Trump. He leads the Department of Government Efficiency, a new arm of the White House tasked with radically shrinking the federal bureaucracy.
OpenAI, in the process of raising $40 billion, is also seeking to transition into a for-profit from a nonprofit entity, which it says is required to secure the capital needed for developing the best AI models. The complicated transition involves putting a price tag on OpenAI’s nonprofit control of the for-profit arm.
Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings has said she is reviewing OpenAI’s proposed changes to ensure the company is “adhering to its specific charitable purposes for the benefit of the public beneficiaries, as opposed to the commercial or private interests of OpenAI’s directors or partners.”
Legal experts said Musk’s bid complicates the fair value held by OpenAI, particularly regarding charitable assets in its complicated corporate conversion, meaning the price it needs to pay in exchange for the nonprofit to give up control.
“It does help set a price point for the thinking about the valuation of the nonprofit assets,” Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, the consumer rights watchdog, told Reuters. “If it were to occur as proposed, the regulators have a duty to ensure that if there’s a selloff of assets to a for-profit entity, that fair market value is obtained.”

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has infuriated the Arab world by saying that Palestinians would not have the right of return to the Gaza Strip under his proposal to redevelop the enclave, which has been devastated by an Israeli offensive. From the earliest days of the Gaza war, Arab governments, particularly Egypt and Jordan, have said Palestinians must not be driven from land where they want to make a future state, which would include the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Trump first suggested on January 25 that Egypt and Jordan should take in Palestinians from Gaza, a proposal they strongly oppose. In a shock announcement on February 4, after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, Trump proposed resettling Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians and the US taking control and ownership of the demolished seaside enclave, redeveloping it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
On February 10, he said Palestinians would not have the right of return to Gaza under his plan, contradicting his own officials who had suggested Gazans would only be relocated temporarily. Trump’s plan touches on one of the most sensitive issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the right of Palestinians to return. Trump, known as a tough dealmaker in his earlier career as a property developer in New York, said that he believed he could persuade Jordan and Egypt to take in displaced Palestinians. He also said Palestinians could be resettled in “much better housing.”
Many of Gaza’s buildings have turned into rubble since the war between Hamas and Israel erupted on October 7, 2023.
Trump’s plans are likely to heighten fears among Palestinians in Gaza of being driven out of the coastal strip, and stoke concern in Arab states that have long worried about the destabilising impact of any such exodus.

WHAT IS BEHIND THE CONCERNS?
Palestinians have long been haunted by what they call the “Nakba,” or catastrophe, when 700,000 of them were dispossessed from their homes during the war that surrounded the creation of Israel in 1948.
Many were driven out or fled to neighboring Arab states, including to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where many of them and their descendants still live in refugee camps. Some went to Gaza. Israel disputes the account that they were forced out.
Today about 5.6 million Palestinian refugees — mainly the descendants of those who fled — currently live in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza. About half of registered refugees remain stateless, according to the Palestinian foreign ministry, many living in crowded camps.
Trump’s talk of resettling some two million Gazans is a nightmare for Jordan, which has long feared the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, and echoes a vision long propagated by right-wing Israelis of Jordan as an alternative Palestinian home.
The anxiety dates back to what is known as Black September. In 1970 the Jordanian army launched a huge offensive by that name to retake control of territory occupied by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Jordan.
King Hussein, fearing the growing influence of Palestinian factions, cracked down on Palestinian nationalists. His generals ordered tanks into the capital Amman. Over 3,000 Palestinians were estimated killed and some 20,000 fled Jordan.
The latest conflict, currently paused amid a fragile ceasefire agreement, has seen an unprecedented Israeli bombardment and land offensive in Gaza, devastating urban areas.
Most Gazans have been displaced several times in Israel’s offensive, launched after the 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas that killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.
More than 48,000 people have been killed in Gaza since then, according to Palestinian health officials.

HOW HAVE PALESTINIANS MOVED DURING THIS CONFLICT?
Before Israel launched its offensive in 2023, it told Palestinians in north Gaza to move to what it said were safe areas in the south. As the offensive expanded, Israel told them to head further south toward Rafah, on the border with Egypt.
Later in the war, before launching a campaign in Rafah, it instructed them to move to a new designated humanitarian zone in Al-Mawasi, an area that stretches 12 km (7 miles) along the coast, starting from the western areas of Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza to Khan Younis and Rafah in the south.
According to UN estimates, up to 85 percent of the population of Gaza — one of the world’s most densely populated areas — have already been displaced from their homes.

COULD A MAJOR DISPLACEMENT FROM GAZA HAPPEN?
Many Palestinians in Gaza have said they would not leave the enclave even if they could because they fear it might lead to another permanent displacement in a repeat of 1948.
Egyptian authorities have publicly rejected the idea of displacement of Palestinians on human rights grounds.
The most populous Arab country would also be wary of hosting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians potentially including members of Hamas, after years of crackdowns on domestic Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which had close ties to Hamas.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has shown no tolerance for Islamists. He views them as an existential threat to his country and thousands of Islamist militants have been imprisoned.

WHAT HAVE ISRAEL’S GOVERNMENT AND ITS POLITICIANS SAID?
Israel’s then-Foreign Minister Israel Katz, now serving as defense minister, said on February 16, 2024, that Israel had no plans to deport Palestinians from Gaza. Israel would coordinate with Egypt on Palestinian refugees and find a way to not harm Egypt’s interests, Katz added.
However, comments by some in the Israeli government have stoked Palestinian and Arab fears of a new Nakba. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has repeatedly called for a policy of “encouraging the migration” of Palestinians from Gaza and for Israel to impose military rule in the territory.