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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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Israeli forces have detained two journalists, two foreign solidarity activists and a Palestinian anti-settlement activist in the southern occupied West Bank city of Hebron while they were documenting attacks carried out by illegal Israeli settlers, according to local sources.

Osama Makhamera, a Palestinian activist involved in resisting settlement expansion, told Anadolu on Friday that Israeli forces stormed the Rujum al-Aala area after illegal settlers attacked residents of the Masafer Yatta region, south of Hebron.

He said the forces detained two journalists working with a foreign media outlet, along with two foreign activists and Rateb al-Jbour, coordinator of the popular and national committees opposing illegal Israeli settlement activity in southern Hebron, as they were documenting the settler assault.

Makhamera added that the detainees were taken to a nearby Israeli settlement in the area. Al-Jbour was later released, while the fate of the journalists and foreign activists remains unknown.

He said the Rujum al-Aala community has faced repeated attacks by illegal settlers, with incidents escalating in recent days.

The assaults have left residents wounded, including women and children, caused extensive damage to homes and property, destroyed crops, and prevented residents from accessing their farmland and grazing areas.

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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) warned Tuesday that 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos’s detention could be far from an isolated case.

“Here’s the thing, we don’t know how many others are in the same situation that didn’t get a photo that went viral,” Walz said during a Tuesday press conference as he denounced the ways ICE had targeted schools and students.

In a letter he sent this week, Walz also pressed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to reveal the number of children who’ve been detained in Minnesota.

“Incredibly, his case is only one of many. Each day brings new reports of children detained by ICE,” Walz wrote.

Walz’s statements underscore how the detention of children has skyrocketed under the Trump administration, and also point to how limited the oversight is of the treatment of kids in federal detention.

According to an analysis by The Marshall Project, ICE held roughly 170 children on an average day during President Donald Trump’s second term, a major uptick compared to the last year of former President Joe Biden’s administration. In the last 16 months of the Biden administration, ICE held about 25 children per day.

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In February 2024, just over three months into Israel’s war on Gaza, U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked an internal cable intended for wider distribution among senior officials in the Biden administration that warned northern Gaza had turned into an “apocalyptic wasteland,” according to Reuters.

Lew and Hallett reportedly blocked the cable, which described the consequences of Israel’s assault in harrowing detail, because they believed it lacked balance.

The cable was drafted by U.S. Agency for International Development staffers and was based on a two-part humanitarian fact-finding mission by a small United Nations team that visited the area on January 31 and February 1, 2024.

I was part of that mission.

Northern Gaza had been under a total siege for over three months when we were eventually allowed to enter in January 2024. We moved through Gaza City, Beit Lahia, Jabaliya, and Beit Hanoun.

What we found was an endless horizon of destruction. People were living under plastic sheeting or in the rubble of buildings. Schools had been destroyed. In parts of Beit Hanoun, the entire area had been depopulated and decimated. There was a deadly shortage of clean drinking water, food and access to healthcare.

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U.S. District Judge Fred Biery on Jan. 31 ordered the release of Liam and his father, asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias, from the Dilley, Texas, immigration detention center. Biery previously ruled on Jan. 27 that the Minnesota preschooler or his father could not be deported.

The detention of Conejo and his son Liam garnered national attention, with many criticizing ICE after photos began circulating showing the blue bunny-hat-wearing 5-year-old being detained in the driveway of his home on Jan. 20.

The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children," Biery wrote in his order filed Jan. 31.

Biery's order continued: "Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned."

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