“We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating,” Fox News’s correspondent quoted Trump as saying, adding that the US president used swear words to emphasise his point: “We are going to beat the ‘effing s’ out of them.”

He further claimed that Brazil’s government, led by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, provided the largest share of the alleged funding behind the campaign.

US and Saudi warplanes carried out strikes on Tuesday against Iran-backed militants in Iraq who launched more than two dozen drone attacks in recent days, the US military said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived at the White House on Tuesday for talks with his US counterpart Donald Trump, as Kyiv seeks fresh diplomatic and military support in its fight against Russia.

“This is a great privilege, but it is also a great responsibility,” Netanyahu said before departing Israel on Monday.