To Shield Netanyahu, Israel Leaking False Claim Qatar Sabotaged Talks

 

L: Qatar's Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani in Doha on April 27, 2025. (Karim JAAFAR / AFP); R: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on April 23, 2025. (Menahem KAHANA / AFP)

An Arab official on Sunday denied Hebrew media reports that Qatar had urged Hamas to reject a recent Egyptian proposal for a hostage-ceasefire deal amid the terror group’s ongoing war with Israel in the Gaza Strip.

The source — who is familiar with the negotiations and is not from Qatar — told The Times of Israel that the reports are being “manufactured” by Israeli officials, who are seeking to further harm the negotiations and deflect blame for the failure of the talks away from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose demands have made an agreement all but impossible.

The Israeli premier has refused, in any agreement, to end the war or leave Hamas in power as the enclave’s governing body. Israel also refused, during a three-phase hostage-ceasefire deal earlier this year, to begin negotiations toward a permanent end to the war, instead allowing the agreement to collapse after its first phase.

 

Over the weekend, several Hebrew media outlets published reports that either cited only Israeli officials or no sources at all, claiming that Qatar had encouraged Hamas to reject a recent Egyptian proposal for a hostage deal by arguing that Doha could secure a better agreement in the form of a long-term truce.

Qatar has been a key mediator in hostage-ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, following the outbreak of war on October 7, 2023, when the Iran-backed organization — the de facto government of the Gaza Strip — invaded the Jewish state, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 people hostage.

 

Qatar hosts much of Hamas’s political leadership. It also funds the Hamas-friendly Al Jazeera network and, with Israeli consent, sent billions of dollars to the Hamas-run enclave over the decade prior to the October 7 attack.

Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani (R) and Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, hold a joint press conference at the Amiri Diwan Annex in Doha on April 27, 2025. (Karim JAAFAR / AFP)

Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said Sunday that he had noticed some progress in talks on Thursday.

Mossad director David Barnea — who has largely been sidelined in hostage talks since Netanyahu tapped Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer two months ago to lead the Israeli negotiating team — traveled to Doha on Thursday to meet the Qatari prime minister amid efforts to reach a deal, an Israeli official told The Times of Israel.

 

“We have seen on Thursday a bit of progress compared to other meetings, yet we need to find an answer for the ultimate question: how to end this war. That’s the key point of the entire negotiations,” said Al-Thani, at a press conference alongside Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan.

“When you don’t have a common objective, a common goal between the parties, I believe the opportunities [to end the war] become very thin,” the Qatari leader said.

Protesters call for the release of hostages held captive in Gaza, holding a sign marking 568 days of their captivity, at Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, April 26, 2025. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

Fidan said that talks in recent days had shown Hamas would be more open to an agreement that goes beyond a ceasefire in Gaza and aims for a lasting solution to the crisis with Israel.

On April 19, Fidan and Turkey’s intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalin, held talks with Hamas officials in Ankara to discuss the latest efforts for a ceasefire and the situation in Gaza.

Fidan said those talks showed Hamas would be more willing to sign a deal that also addresses the Palestinian territories and other issues, adding that the crisis could be turned into an opportunity to implement a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Qatari PM: ‘Qatargate’ is ‘journalistic propaganda’

Al-Thani on Sunday also blasted coverage of the so-called “Qatargate” scandal in Israel, in which two of Netanyahu’s aides are suspected of multiple offenses tied to their alleged work for a pro-Qatar lobbying firm.

“What is being called ‘Qatargate’ is journalistic propaganda for political purposes that has no basis in truth. Fringe politicians in Israel are leveling accusations against Doha while forgetting its role in the release of the hostages,” said the Qatari leader.

“There is a public relations campaign being waged against the State of Qatar in Israel,” he asserted, claiming that “Qatar’s contracts with an American communications firm were intended to counter a public relations campaign against us in Israel.”

According to the Qatargate case’s judge, two Netanyahu aides — Jonatan Urich and Eli Feldstein — are suspected of taking money to spread pro-Qatari messaging to reporters, in order to boost the Gulf state’s image as a mediator in hostage talks between Israel and Hamas, while in the prime minister’s employ.

American lobbyist Jay Footlik is believed to have been instrumental in facilitating the payments to Netanyahu’s aides. Hebrew media reported late last week that police investigators were expected to travel to the US in the coming days to question Footlik.

 

 

 

 

আল-আকসা ভেঙে থার্ড টেম্পল নির্মাণের প্রচারণায় ইসরায়েল

 

 

 

 ফিলিস্তিনের মুসলিমদের পবিত্রতম স্থানগুলোর একটি আল-আকসা মসজিদকে কেন্দ্র করে ইসরায়েলি বসতি স্থাপনকারীদের সাম্প্রতিক কর্মকাণ্ড গভীর উদ্বেগ ও উত্তেজনার সৃষ্টি করেছে। মসজিদটি ধ্বংস করে সেখানে ‘থার্ড টেম্পল’ নির্মাণের আহ্বান এবং পরিকল্পনার অভিযোগে কড়া প্রতিক্রিয়া জানিয়েছে ফিলিস্তিনি সরকার।

কাতারভিত্তিক সংবাদমাধ্যম আল-জাজিরার বরাতে জানা গেছে, সম্প্রতি হিব্রু ভাষায় সামাজিক যোগাযোগমাধ্যমে এমন কিছু পোস্ট ছড়িয়ে পড়েছে যেখানে আল-আকসা মসজিদে হামলার উসকানি এবং সেই জায়গায় নতুন ইহুদি উপাসনালয় নির্মাণের আহ্বান জানানো হয়েছে। বিষয়টিকে ফিলিস্তিনি কর্তৃপক্ষ অত্যন্ত উদ্বেগজনক বলে উল্লেখ করেছে এবং আন্তর্জাতিক সম্প্রদায়ের দৃষ্টি আকর্ষণ করেছে।

শনিবার (১৯ এপ্রিল) ফিলিস্তিনের পররাষ্ট্র ও প্রবাসী মন্ত্রণালয় জানায়, এই ধরনের আহ্বান শুধু ধর্মীয় অবমাননা নয়, বরং এটি সরাসরি মুসলিম বিশ্বের অনুভূতিতে আঘাত এবং পবিত্র স্থানের স্থিতিশীলতা নষ্টের চেষ্টা। তারা সতর্ক করে দিয়ে বলেন, এই প্রচেষ্টা জেরুজালেমে ইসরায়েলি আগ্রাসনের অংশ এবং ধর্মীয় সহিংসতা উসকে দেওয়ার কৌশল।

সম্প্রতি কৃত্রিম বুদ্ধিমত্তার (এআই) মাধ্যমে তৈরি একটি ভিডিও আরও উদ্বেগ বাড়িয়েছে। ভিডিওটিতে দেখানো হয়েছে, আল-আকসা মসজিদ ধ্বংস করে সেখানে তৃতীয় ইহুদি মন্দির গড়ে তোলার দৃশ্য। আগামী বছর জেরুজালেমে শিরোনামের এই ভিডিও সামাজিকমাধ্যমে ছড়িয়ে পড়ে এবং মুসলিম বিশ্বে তীব্র প্রতিক্রিয়ার জন্ম দেয়।

ফিলিস্তিনিদের মতে, আল-আকসা শুধু একটি ধর্মীয় স্থান নয়, এটি তাদের জাতীয় পরিচয়ের প্রতীক। ইসলাম ধর্মাবলম্বীদের জন্য এটি তৃতীয় সর্বোচ্চ মর্যাদাসম্পন্ন পবিত্র স্থান। যদিও প্রাঙ্গণের প্রশাসনিক দায়িত্ব জর্ডানের হাতে, ইসরায়েলি বাহিনী নিয়ন্ত্রণ করছে প্রবেশ ও নিরাপত্তাব্যবস্থা।

অন্যদিকে, ইহুদি ধর্মাবলম্বীদের একটি অংশ বিশ্বাস করে, এই স্থানেই প্রাচীনকালে প্রথম ও দ্বিতীয় টেম্পল স্থাপিত ছিল, যা রোমান সাম্রাজ্য খ্রিস্টপূর্ব ৭০ সালে ধ্বংস করে। সেই ঐতিহাসিক পটভূমিকে সামনে রেখেই তারা এখানে তৃতীয় মন্দির নির্মাণের দাবিতে আন্দোলন চালিয়ে যাচ্ছে।

ডানপন্থি ইসরায়েলি রাজনীতিবিদরা এই দাবি আরও জোরদার করছেন। জাতীয় নিরাপত্তাবিষয়ক মন্ত্রী ইতামার বেন-গভির ২০২৪ সালের আগস্টে আল-আকসা প্রাঙ্গণে টেম্পল মাউন্ট স্থাপনের ঘোষণা দিয়ে বিতর্কে জড়ান। জানা গেছে, তিনি ২০২২ সালে দায়িত্ব নেওয়ার পর থেকে অন্তত ছয়বার আল-আকসা সফর করেছেন। প্রতিবারই এই সফর ঘিরে উত্তেজনা দেখা দিয়েছে।

ফিলিস্তিনি সরকার এই ঘটনাগুলোকে একটি পরিকল্পিত উসকানি হিসেবে দেখছে এবং আন্তর্জাতিক সম্প্রদায় ও জাতিসংঘের সংশ্লিষ্ট সংস্থাগুলোর প্রতি আহ্বান জানিয়েছে, যেন এ ধরনের উসকানিমূলক কর্মকাণ্ডকে আন্তর্জাতিক আইন অনুযায়ী গুরুত্বসহকারে বিবেচনা করে যথাযথ ব্যবস্থা নেওয়া হয়।

বর্তমানে আল-আকসা মসজিদ প্রাঙ্গণ কার্যত ডানপন্থি ইসরায়েলি রাজনীতিবিদ ও বসতি স্থাপনকারীদের টার্গেটে পরিণত হয়েছে। ইসরায়েলি নিরাপত্তা বাহিনীর সহায়তায় তারা প্রায় প্রতি সপ্তাহেই জোরপূর্বক মসজিদ চত্বরে প্রবেশ করছে এবং সেখানে ধর্মীয় আচার পালন করছে, যা বর্তমানে চুক্তিভিত্তিক নিষিদ্ধ।

আন্তর্জাতিক মহলের মধ্যে অনেকেই এই পরিস্থিতিকে হেবরনের ইব্রাহিমি মসজিদের ঘটনার সঙ্গে তুলনা করছেন, যেখানে মুসলিম ও ইহুদি অংশে জায়গা ভাগ করে দেওয়া হয়েছিল। অনেকে আশঙ্কা করছেন, আল-আকসার ক্ষেত্রেও হয়তো ইসরায়েল এমনই কিছু পরিকল্পনা করছে।

এই পরিস্থিতিতে আল-আকসা মসজিদের ভবিষ্যৎ নিয়ে উদ্বিগ্ন মুসলিম বিশ্ব ও ফিলিস্তিনি জনগণ আন্তর্জাতিক সংহতি ও প্রতিরোধের আহ্বান জানাচ্ছে। তারা বলছে, এই পবিত্র স্থানকে রক্ষা করা কেবল একটি ধর্মীয় দায়িত্ব নয়, বরং এটি একটি বৈশ্বিক ন্যায়বিচারের প্রশ্ন।

 

U.S. Agrees to Release Huawei Executive in Case That Strained Ties With China

Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive of Huawei Technologies, 

outside court in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Friday.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department reached an agreement on Friday clearing the way for a senior executive of Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecommunications giant, to return to China after admitting some wrongdoing in a sanctions violation case, removing one major irritant between the two superpowers.

Within hours, China reciprocated, releasing two Canadians whom it had held since shortly after the executive, Meng Wanzhou, was detained, and who had appeared to be jailed as hostages to Ms. Meng’s case.

The resolution of the criminal charges against Ms. Meng, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, came in the midst of a downward spiral in military, technological and trade competition between Washington and Beijing.

In China, Ms. Meng is considered a member of the new Chinese royalty — technology executives who have used their power to expand China’s influence across the globe. In Washington, she became a symbol of the Cold War-like atmosphere in relations between Beijing and Washington — and the near simultaneous releases also had echoes of that era.

 

F.D.A. Advisory Panel Recommends Pfizer Boosters for Older People and Others at High Risk

A dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine was prepared to be 

administered in Reading, Pa., this week.

A key advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration overwhelmingly rejected recommending Pfizer booster shots for most recipients of the company’s coronavirus vaccine, instead endorsing them only for people who are 65 or older or at high risk of severe Covid-19, and received their second dose at least six months ago.

The vote — the first on boosters in the United States — was a blow to the Biden administration’s strategy to make extra shots available to most fully vaccinated adults in the United States eight months after they received a second dose. The broader rollout was to start next week.

Committee members appeared dismissive of the argument that the general population needed booster shots, saying the data from Pfizer and elsewhere still seemed to show two shots protected against severe disease or hospitalization and did not prove a third shot would stem the spread of infection. Some also criticized a lack of data that an additional injection would be safe for younger people.

“It’s unclear that everyone needs to be boosted, other than a subset of the population that clearly would be at high risk for serious disease,” said Dr. Michael G. Kurilla, a committee member and official at the National Institutes of Health.

 

Fired Officer Is Indicted in Breonna Taylor Case; Protesters Wanted Stronger Charges

A former officer was charged with “wanton endangerment” for endangering Ms. Taylor’s neighbors with gunshots when she was killed by police officers in her Louisville apartment.

People in Louisville, Ky., sobbed and had to be consoled after Wednesday’s grand jury announcement in the Breonna Taylor case.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A grand jury weighing evidence in one of the country’s most contentious police shootings indicted a former Louisville police detective on charges of reckless endangerment on Wednesday for his role in the raid on the home of Breonna Taylor, but the two officers who shot Ms. Taylor six times faced no charges.

Protesters poured into the streets in Louisville after the announcement, and at least two police officers were shot shortly before a 9 p.m. curfew. There were also demonstrations in New York, Chicago, Milwaukee and smaller cities around the country.

The demonstrators called for all three officers, who are white, to be held to account for Ms. Taylor’s death in March. The officers had fired a total of 32 shots after they stormed her apartment with a warrant.

Prosecutors found that the two officers who shot Ms. Taylor, who was Black, were justified in their use of force because they had identified themselves as officers and had then come under fire from her boyfriend, who said he thought it was intruders forcing their way inside. The charges against former Detective Brett Hankison were for firing recklessly into a neighbor’s apartment.

Ms. Taylor’s death, which came months before George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police, became a rallying cry for racial justice protesters nationwide. On Wednesday afternoon, hundreds of demonstrators chanted Breonna Taylor’s name between sobs and scowls as they wound their way through the streets of Louisville. They carried signs that said “abolish police” and “Black lives matter.” Dozens of cars followed, honking their horns.

For more than two hours, the police followed in silver cruisers without intervening. But eventually a line of officers in riot gear confronted protesters, released chemical agents and arrested several people in the crowd.

At a news conference on Wednesday in Frankfort, Kentucky’s attorney general, Daniel Cameron, walked through the grand jury’s decision in detail in an effort to defuse the rage.

“The decision before my office is not to decide if the loss of Breonna Taylor’s life was a tragedy — the answer to that question is unequivocally yes,” he said.

Mr. Cameron, a Republican, acknowledged that not everyone would be satisfied with the charges and said that as a Black man, he understood the pain that was brought about by Ms. Taylor’s death.

“Justice is not often easy and does not fit the mold of public opinion. And it does not conform to shifting standards,” Mr. Cameron said.

The grand jury decision to indict Mr. Hankison came after more than 100 days of protests on the streets of Louisville and after a monthslong investigation into the death of Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician who was shot in the hallway of her apartment by officers executing a search warrant as part of a drug investigation.

Grand jurors indicted Mr. Hankison, a detective at the time, on three counts of “wanton endangerment,” saying he had imperiled the lives of three of Ms. Taylor’s neighbors by firing bullets that reached their apartment.

Mr. Hankison fired through a door and window of Ms. Taylor’s apartment building that were covered with blinds, violating a department policy that requires officers to have a line of sight. At least some of his rounds reached the apartment directly behind Ms. Taylor’s, where a pregnant woman, her husband and their 5-year-old child were asleep. The rounds shattered the family’s glass door but did not harm anyone.

Mr. Hankison is the only one of the three officers who fired their weapons who was dismissed from the force, with a termination letter stating that he showed “an extreme indifference to the value of human life.”

All summer across America, Ms. Taylor’s name has been chanted and her image held up on posters at rallies protesting police brutality, with celebrities writing open letters and erecting billboards that demanded the officers be criminally charged.

In anticipation of the grand jury’s decision, the Louisville Metro Police Department canceled vacations and Chief Robert J. Schroeder said officers would not be granted time off. A local judge signed an order shutting the federal courthouse downtown, where storefronts and office towers were boarded up because of demonstrations that sometimes turned violent.

The concern about further unrest appeared prescient after two police officers were shot on Wednesday night. In a video livestreamed by the department, officers fired several projectiles while marching south along Brook Street. Moments later, several other bangs were heard, and the officers scattered. “Shots fired, shots fired,” said the woman recording the video as she ran for cover. Officers took cover behind a police truck and began shouting “officer down!”

Robert J. Schroeder, the Louisville police chief, said at a brief news conference that a suspect was in custody and that neither of the officers’ injuries were life-threatening.

Tensions boiled over at several protests nationwide. In Buffalo, a truck drove through a group of people who had gathered to protest, according to a local reporter at the scene. Demonstrators blocked highway traffic in Milwaukee, and protesters who marched from Brooklyn into the Lower East Side of Manhattan yelled at patrons in restaurants: “Wake up, this is your fight too!”

Protesters marched in Louisville after Wednesday’s announcement.

Credit...

After the announcement, protesters shrieked in disgust. Shouts of “That’s it?” rose from the crowd. One person called for the city to be burned down. Several people broke down in sobs.

Desaray Yarbrough, who walked out of her Louisville house as people in the crowd marched past it, said the announcement would do nothing to quell angry demonstrators.

“It’s unjustifiable,” Ms. Yarbrough said. “The lack of charges is getting ready to bring the city down.”

Ms. Taylor’s mother, who had sued the city of Louisville for wrongful death in April, received a $12 million settlement last week. But Ben Crump, a lawyer for the family, wrote on Twitter that the lack of additional charges was “outrageous and offensive.”

Many legal experts had predicted that indictments would be unlikely, given that a state statute in Kentucky allowed citizens to use lethal force in self-defense and that it was Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend who had fired first.

“As an African-American, as someone who has been victim of police misconduct myself, getting pulled over and profiled, I know how people feel,” said John W. Stewart, a former assistant attorney general in Kentucky. “I have been there, but I have also been a prosecutor, and emotions cannot play a part here.”

During the raid, two officers, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and Detective Myles Cosgrove, returned fire after Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired one shot that struck Sergeant Mattingly in the leg, Mr. Cameron said. Mr. Walker’s bullet pierced Sergeant Mattingly’s femoral artery, and officers scrambled to apply a tourniquet to his leg.

The officers who broke down Ms. Taylor’s door shortly after midnight on March 13 had come with a search warrant, signed by a local magistrate. They had court approval for a “no-knock” warrant, which Louisville has since banned, but the orders were changed before the raid, requiring them to knock first and announce themselves as the police.

Mr. Walker has said that he and Ms. Taylor did not know who was at her door. Only one neighbor, out of nearly a dozen interviewed by The New York Times, reported hearing the officers shout “police” before entering.

The warrant for Ms. Taylor’s apartment was one of five issued in a case involving her ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover, who is accused of running a drug trafficking syndicate. At the other addresses that were searched, officers found a table covered in drugs packaged for sale, including a plastic sachet containing cocaine and fentanyl, police logs and a laboratory report show.

The surveillance leading police officers to Ms. Taylor’s home included a GPS tracker showing repeated trips by Mr. Glover to her home; photographs of him emerging from her apartment with a package in his hands; footage showing her in a car with Mr. Glover arriving at one of the trap houses he operated; and his use of her address on bank records and other documents. The F.B.I. has opened an investigation into whether the inclusion of her name and address on the warrant violated her civil rights, as her family’s lawyers have claimed.

The announcement on Wednesday revealed several new details in the case. Investigators at an F.B.I. laboratory reviewed the ballistics evidence and concluded that the shot that killed Ms. Taylor was fired by Detective Cosgrove. A total of 32 shots were fired by the police: 16 by Detective Cosgrove, 10 by Mr. Hankison and six by Sergeant Mattingly. The attorney general said none of Mr. Hankison’s rounds struck Ms. Taylor.

Mr. Cameron, who ran on a law-and-order platform, said the investigation and the grand jury determined that the police had properly knocked and announced their presence before bursting into Ms. Taylor’s apartment — a point disputed by Mr. Walker and by a number of neighbors who have said in interviews with reporters that they heard no announcement.

A memorial to Ms. Taylor in Louisville.

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For months, Ms. Taylor’s death has been a rallying cry. Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, called out her name during the Democratic National Convention. Oprah Winfrey paid for billboards demanding the officers be charged, writing in her magazine, “We have to use whatever megaphone we can.”Rukmini Callimachi reported from Louisville and Frankfort, Ky., Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from New York, and John Eligon and Will Wright from Louisville. Julie Bosman contributed reporting from Kenosha, Wis. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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Russian Opposition Leader Leaves Berlin Hospital After Poisoning

Doctors treating Aleksei Navalny said he had been discharged after 32 days of treatment and could make a full recovery.

Aleksei A. Navalny, center, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, in Moscow last year. He was poisoned with a highly toxic nerve agent last month.

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LBERLIN — Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, has been released from a hospital in Germany and could make a full recovery from poisoning with a highly toxic nerve agent, doctors said on Wednesday, as European leaders wrestled over a response to Moscow.  

“Based on the patient’s progress and current condition, the treating physicians believe that complete recovery is possible,” the Charité hospital said in a statement released on Wednesday. “However, it remains too early to gauge the potential long-term effects of his severe poisoning.”

Neither the doctors nor Mr. Navalny, 44, who has returned to communicating with his supporters through his Instagram account in recent days, gave any indication of where he would go after his release. But a senior German security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the opposition leader’s movements, said he would remain under protection in Berlin for rehabilitation.Mr. Navalny has said that he intends to return to Russia once he has made a full recovery. He arrived at the hospital, one of Germany’s leading research clinics, on Aug. 22 after being evacuated by air ambulance from the Siberian city of Tomsk, where he had been receiving treatment after collapsing on Aug. 20 while aboard a domestic flight to Moscow.

Russia has maintained that it played no role in the poisoning of Mr. Navalny, although he would not be the first Kremlin enemy to be attacked with a class of Novichok, a Soviet-designed chemical weapon. A similar agent was used by Russian operatives in Britain in 2018 to attack Sergei V. Skripal, a former intelligence officer who had served prison time in Russia for spying for the British before being traded in a spy swap.

Given the substance used, the German authorities and others say there is no doubt that the Russian government was behind the poisoning. Such an act would be a breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention to which Moscow is a signatory.

The organization is expected in the coming days to release the results of its own analysis of biomedical samples collected from Mr. Navalny by its team of experts. Leaders in Berlin and Paris are awaiting the findings before moving to impose financial sanctions on Russia through the European Union.

According to the French newspaper Le Monde, during a Sept. 14 phone call between President Emmanuel Macron of France and President Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian leader stonewalled with denials and offered dubious explanations for Mr. Navalny’s poisoning, suggesting that the Russian opposition leader might have poisoned himself.

Although Mr. Macron’s office declined to comment on the report, which was published on Tuesday and based on unspecified sources, Mr. Navalny responded with a sarcastic comment on his social media account.

“It’s a good theory,” he said. “I think it is worth the closest study.”

“I boiled Novichok in the kitchen, quietly took a sip of it in the plane and fell into a coma,” he continued. “Before that, I agreed with my wife, friends and colleagues, that if the Health Ministry insisted on taking me to Germany that they would never permit that to happen. Dying in an Omsk hospital and ending up in an Omsk morgue where the cause of death would be listed as ‘lived long enough’ was the ultimate goal of my cunning plan.”

“But Putin,” he said, “outplayed me.”

Once Mr. Navalny arrived in Berlin, doctors at the Charité hospital placed him in a medically induced coma in the intensive care ward, where he spent 24 days, while also under constant police protection.

Suspecting that their patient was suffering from an agent more complex than what they could detect, they sent samples to their colleagues at the Military Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology in Munich, which found traces of a nerve agent from the Novichok family in Mr. Navalny’s blood and urine.

It was also found on a water bottle that the opposition leader’s team brought to Germany from his hotel room, leading them to believe that he was poisoned there, not at the airport as had originally been suspected.

Laboratories in France and Sweden have confirmed the German findings that Mr. Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent from the Novichok family.

Russia has been insisting that it is willing to open an investigation of the Navalny poisoning but that it has been stymied by the refusal of France and Germany to share the results of their analyses, an assertion that Mr. Putin repeated in his conversation with Mr. Macron, Le Monde said. Both countries have insisted that Moscow had all the information it needed from the two days Mr. Navalny spent in Russia before he was evacuated to Germany.

Russia’s ambassador to Germany, Sergei Nechayev, told a German newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung, that Mr. Navalny had not responded to attempts from the embassy to provide him with consular services.