TV News LIES

A bitter dispute between Europe and the US over the future of Gaza has broken out into the open, with the EU’s head of foreign policy, Kaja Kallas, warning that Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” was a personal vehicle for the US president that removed any accountability to Palestinians or the United Nations.

Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, also accused Trump of trying to bypass the original UN mandate for the board, and said Europe, one of the chief funders of the Palestinian Authority, had been excluded from the process.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Friday, Kallas said the original purpose of the UN resolution and mandate had been to help Gaza through a Board of Peace, but this had been subverted since the board’s charter now made no reference to Gaza or to the UN.

She said it was true that the UN security council resolution “provided for a Board of Peace for Gaza, but it also provided for it to be limited in time until 2027, it provided for the Palestinians to have a say, and it referred to Gaza, whereas the statute of the Board of Peace makes no reference to any of these things”.

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Protecting archaeological sites. Preventing water theft. The streamlining of land purchases. If anyone doubted the real purpose of the motley collection of new administrative and enforcement measures for the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel’s defence minister spelt it out: “We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” Israel Katz said in a joint statement with the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.

While the world’s attention was fixed upon the annihilation in Gaza, settlers in the West Bank intensified their campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2023; a fifth of them were children. Many more have been driven from their homes by relentless harassment and the destruction of infrastructure, with entire Palestinian communities erased across vast swathes of land.

The Israeli state is not merely complicit in these acts. In addition to the economic suffocation and increased military raids in the West Bank, the Guardian reported last month that settler-only units of the army are acting as “vigilante militias”. Haaretz newspaper reports that the military has ordered soldiers to prevent Palestinians from ploughing their land at the behest of settlers – not only threatening them with destitution, but paving the way for land seizure.

With Israel heading to elections in months, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners are in a hurry. While they and their allies have changed the facts on the ground dramatically, and have steadily expanded Israel’s control, the bureaucratic measures adopted by the security cabinet last Sunday are “tectonic”, as one scholar notes. They ease land theft, stripping away the very limited constraints on purchase, and destroy the nominal authority of Palestinians in areas A and B.

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Hanadi Abu Zant hasn’t been able to pay rent on her apartment in the occupied West Bank for nearly a year after losing her permit to work inside Israel. When her landlord calls the police on her, she hides in a mosque.

“My biggest fear is being kicked out of my home. Where will we sleep, on the street?” she said, wiping tears from her cheeks.

She is among some 100,000 Palestinians whose work permits were revoked after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack ignited the war in the Gaza Strip. Confined to the occupied territory, where jobs are scarce and wages far lower, they face dwindling and dangerous options as the economic crisis deepens.

Some have sold their belongings or gone into debt as they try to pay for food, electricity and school expenses for their children. Others have paid steep fees for black-market permits or tried to sneak into Israel, risking arrest or worse if they are mistaken for militants.

Israel, which has controlled the West Bank for nearly six decades, says it is under no obligation to allow Palestinians to enter for work and makes such decisions based on security considerations. Thousands of Palestinians are still allowed to work in scores of Jewish settlements across the West Bank, built on land they want for a future state.

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Why are the monks walking?

The monks embarked on the journey to remind Americans that peace is not a destination, according to the pilgrimage's announcement.

"As the nation faces challenges of division, mental health crises, and conflict both at home and abroad, this pilgrimage offers a simple yet profound message: Peace begins within the heart of each person and extends outward to families, communities, and the nation as a whole," a "Walk for Peace" news release stated.

Buddhist monks often undertake long walking pilgrimages that last months. During their walk, the monks observed a strict ascetic code inspired by ancient traditions. Those traditions include eating just one meal per day and sleeping beneath trees, which is considered a practice of humility, endurance and spiritual focus.

The monks announced they had arrived in Washington, DC, around 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 10.

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An 18-month-old girl detained for weeks by immigration authorities was returned to custody and denied medication after she was hospitalized with a life-threatening respiratory illness, according to a lawsuit filed in Texas federal court.

The child, identified in the lawsuit as "Amalia," was released by immigration authorities under President Donald Trump's administration after her parents sued on Friday, Feb. 6. The parents, who also had been detained, were released as well. The suit had sought the release of all three of them.

The family was detained during a check-in with immigration authorities on Dec. 11 and held at a facility in Dilley, Texas, according to the lawsuit. Amalia was hospitalized from Jan. 18 to 28, and returned to the Dilley facility in the midst of a measles outbreak, the lawsuit said.

"Baby Amalia should never have been detained. She nearly died at Dilley," said Elora Mukherjee, an attorney for the family.

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Alberto Castañeda Mondragón says his memory was so jumbled after a beating by immigration officers that he initially could not remember he had a daughter and still struggles to recall treasured moments like the night he taught her to dance.

But the violence he endured last month in Minnesota while being detained is seared into his battered brain.

He remembers Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulling him from a friend's car on Jan. 8 outside a St. Paul shopping center and throwing him to the ground, handcuffing him, then punching him and striking his head with a steel baton. He remembers being dragged into an SUV and taken to a detention facility, where he said he was beaten again.

He also remembers the emergency room and the intense pain from eight skull fractures and five life-threatening brain hemorrhages.

"They started beating me right away when they arrested me," the Mexican immigrant recounted this week to The Associated Press, which recently reported on how his case contributed to mounting friction between federal immigration agents and a Minneapolis hospital.

Castañeda Mondragón, 31, is one of an unknown number of immigration detainees who, despite avoiding deportation during the Trump administration's enforcement crackdown, have been left with lasting injuries following violent encounters with ICE officers. His case is one of the excessive-force claims the federal government has thus far declined to investigate.

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