The BBC, Reuters and Financial Times report that Saudi Arabia has concluded its sweeping anti-corruption campaign. The BBC reports that Saudi Arabia says it has ended the anti-corruption drive, launched in 2017, that saw hundreds of princes, tycoons and business chiefs rounded up. More than $100bn (£76bn) in assets – including property and cash – has been recouped by the state, officials in the Gulf Kingdom say. They say settlements were reached with 87 individuals who confessed to the charges against them. Eight others refused to do so and have been referred to the public prosecutor. Another 56 cases have not been settled because of criminal charges yet to be resolved. The crackdown was launched by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in November 2017. The Financial Times reports that in a royal court statement, King Salman said: “The kingdom will continue its efforts to preserve integrity, combat corruption and empower law enforcement and other relevant state bodies so that they are able to effectively practice their role in preserving public funds.”

The BBC and Financial Times report that US President Donald Trump called his country’s intelligence agencies “naïve” and dismissed their assessment of the threat posed by North Korea. The BBC reports Trump tweeted: “Be careful of Iran. Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!” The testy response came after a US intelligence report said Iran was not making nuclear weapons. National Intelligence Director Dan Coats and other intelligence chiefs presented the Worldwide Threat Assessment report to the Senate on Tuesday. In a series of tweets, Trump said US intelligence officials “seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!” Iran, he continued, was “making trouble all over the Middle East, and beyond” in 2016, but had been “much different” since the US pullout from the “terrible” Iran nuclear deal. However, Trump warned that Tehran remained “a source of potential danger and conflict”, referring to reported recent Iranian missile tests.

The Times reports that the last remaining Islamic State fighters surrounded by western-backed forces in eastern Syria have offered to surrender in return for safe passage, according to Kurdish spokesmen. Mustafa Bali, of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), said the offer had been made through smugglers and those who had escaped from the last few remaining square miles of ISIS-held territory. The ISIS fighters were hoping to be ferried either to Turkey or to Idlib, the rebel-held province in the northwest of Syria, with their wives and children as human shields. The offer was rejected. The “operation will go on until the last terrorist is dead”, Bali said.

The Guardian and Reuters report on Yemen’s fragile ceasefire. The Guardian reports that, according to the UN special envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, the country’s fragile ceasefire is holding and Saudi Arabia remains intent on reaching a negotiated end to the four-year-old civil war. Griffiths has been in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, and the Red Sea port of Hodeidah this week to discuss blockages to agreements reached in UN-led talks in Stockholm in December. Yemen has been gripped by civil war between Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi-backed – and UN-recognised – Yemen government of Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi since 2015. Griffiths said the vital next steps were gaining access to grain in Hodeidah’s mills, and a UN-sponsored meeting between the warring factions to start the process of redeploying Houthi troops. Speaking on BBC Radio 4, he said the UN world food programme needed access to the mills in which enough grain to feed nearly 4 million Yemenis for a month had remained since October. Houthis claimed on Wednesday they were fired on by government forces as they tried to de-mine the route to the mills. Griffiths also said he had plans for the UN-led redeployment co-ordination committee (RCC), bringing together the rival military leaderships, to restart its meetings within the next few days. Admitting the state of the ceasefire looked dire from the outside, he nevertheless said the key metric for the UN was the absence of offensive military operations to take territory and the end of Saudi airstrikes in the area. Reuters reports that according to a senior UAE official on Wednesday, the Saudi-led coalition is prepared to use “calibrated force” to push the Iranian-aligned Houthi movement to withdraw from Yemen’s Hodeidah port city under a UN-sponsored deal. Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash said the Western-backed Sunni Muslim Arab coalition struck 10 Houthi training camps outside Hodeidah governorate on Wednesday. “Coalition prepared to use more calibrated force to prod Houthi compliance with Stockholm Agreement,” he tweeted. “To preserve ceasefire & any hope for political process, UN and international community must press Houthis to stop violations, facilitate aid convoys, and move forward on withdrawal from Hodaida city & ports as agreed,” he added.

The Financial Times has published an article by David Gardner called: “Benjamin Netanyahu and the looking-glass world of Israeli politics”, in which Gardner argues: “The Israeli premier will look for ways to burnish his rightwing credentials ahead of elections”.

The Times and Reuters report that former army chief Benny Gantz is emerging as the biggest poll threat to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of April’s elections. The Times reports that Gantz’s new party, the Israeli Resilience Party, is polling at 16 per cent compared with Likud’s 24 per cent. He has vowed to strengthen Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and promised that under his leadership Israel will never leave the Golan Heights, strategically important territory which it seized from Syria in 1967. Gantz’s party was founded only a month ago, although his team has been planning the campaign for at least a year. Its slogan is “no more left and right, just Israel before everything else”. To have a chance of closing the gap with Likud, it will need to convince voters of that message.

In the Guardian, Letta Taylor argues that: “It shouldn’t take Pink Floyd to rescue ISIS fighters’ abandoned children”. Taylor writes that: “Governments with nationals trapped in Syria should do what Roger Waters did when he saved Mahmud and Ayyub Ferreira”. On 21 January, Roger Waters, co-founder of the British rock band Pink Floyd, helped rescue two young brothers from a camp in Syria that was holding wives and children of foreign Islamic State members. Mahmud Ferreira, 11, and his brother Ayyub, 7, have been reunited with their mother and are poised to return to their native Trinidad. Taylor argues: “If only the dozens of governments whose nationals are trapped in Syria because they are children of ISIS members would show similar concern. About 1,250 children from 46 countries – including at least 12 from Britain – have been held for up to two years in camps in northeast Syria with no end in sight. Many are toddlers. The children have not been charged with any crime, and the local authorities have repeatedly called on their countries to take them. Yet most governments balk at bringing them back, claiming they may be security threats.”

The Times reports that three Iraqi refugees have been arrested on suspicion of planning a “grave” terrorist attack in Germany with explosives derived from fireworks. Two are accused of downloading a bombmaking manual from the internet and experimenting with gunpowder they had extracted from rockets that were ostensibly bought for New Year’s Eve celebrations. They acquired a detonator from Britain. While their target remains unclear, prosecutors said the suspects were Islamists “related” to Islamic State and that one of them had vowed to kill “as many infidels as possible, but no children”, according to Der Spiegel. Yesterday, special forces arrested the men, named as Shahin F and Hersh F, both 23, and Rauf S, 36, at a flat in Meldorf, a village on the North Sea coast of Schleswig-Holstein.

Reuters reports that The UN nuclear watchdog policing the Iran nuclear deal with major powers said on Wednesday that attempts to pressure it on inspections were “counter-productive and extremely harmful”, though it stopped short of naming those responsible. In a speech to staff on Wednesday, IAEA chief Yukiya Amano was blunt. “If our credibility is thrown into question and, in particular, if attempts are made to micro-manage or put pressure on the agency in nuclear verification, that is counter-productive and extremely harmful,” he said, according to a text of the speech posted online by the IAEA. He did not elaborate on the attempts or those behind them.

The Israeli media is dominated by the impact of Benny Gantz’s campaign launch and the surge in support for his Israel Resilience party. The closing gap between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and Gantz’s Hosen L’Yisrael (‘Resilience for Israel’) party, as indicated in several opinion polls published on Wednesday night, features prominently on the front pages of Yediot Ahronot, Maariv and Haaretz.

Meanwhile the pro-Netanyahu Israel Hayom leads with a report on comments attributed to figures in the rival centrist Yesh Atid party, that “If Gantz doesn’t join us, we’ll wipe him out politically”, although Mako online reports Lapid’s denial.

All the Israeli media report large protests held by Israelis of Ethiopian descent, and their supporters, which blocked main roads in Tel Aviv on Wednesday afternoon. The protesters demanded an end to racism, and expressed anger at police violence following the fatal shooting of 24-year-old Yehuda Biadga by police on 18 January. Biadga threatened officers with a knife, but suffered from mental health problems, and could have been stopped with non-lethal force, according to his family. Maariv reports that more than 10,000 participated in an evening rally in Tel Aviv’s Rabin square. Following the rally, a group of protesters clashed with police, leading to 11 arrests.

In other news Haaretz reports on its front page that police have launched an inquiry into funding irregularities during Education Minister Naftali Bennett’s campaign for leadership of the right wing Jewish Home party in 2012. Israel Hayom trails an interview with Likud MK and Netanyahu ally David Bitan, in which he says after the election Likud will form a right wing government, but invite the centrist parties of Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid to join.

Kan radio reports that recent ceasefire violations on the Gaza-Israel border have been caused by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, and in particular its military commander Abu al-Atta, also known as Abu Salim.

The Times of Israel reports that the BBC has rejected a call from various prominent pro-Palestinian campaigners in the arts, not to participate in the Eurovision song contest to be held in Tel Aviv in May. Times of Israel also includes a feature analysing the threat to British Jews from the radical left and far right extremists.