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Hamas Halts Hostage Release, Citing Deadly Israeli Cease-Fire Violations
One group says that Israeli forces have killed at least 110 Palestinians since the cease-fire took effect last month. Among the victims are multiple children, including a 5-year-old girl.
Feb 10, 2025
Hamas on Monday announced the suspension of its next planned release of hostages kidnapped during the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, accusing that country of violating the fragile cease-fire agreement it signed last month.
Abu Obeida, the spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades—Hamas' armed wing— said in a statement that hostages will "remain in place until the occupying entity complies with past obligations and compensates retroactively."
"Over the past three weeks, the resistance leadership monitored the enemy's violations and their noncompliance with the terms of the agreement," Obeida explained. "These violations include delaying the return of displaced persons to northern Gaza, targeting them with shelling and gunfire in various areas of the Gaza Strip, and failing to allow the entry of relief materials in all forms as agreed upon. Meanwhile, the resistance has fulfilled all its obligations."
Since the cease-fire took effect on January 19, Israeli forces have bombed and shot civilians in Gaza, killing at least 110 Palestinians, according to the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Palestinian civilians killed over the past few weeks reportedly include multiple children—one of them a 5-year-old girl—and an elderly woman.
"Israel continues to commit genocide in the Gaza Strip by denying Palestinians the basic necessities for survival and imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction," the group alleged on Friday.
Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor continued:
Since the cease-fire, only a handful of injured and ill Palestinians from Gaza have been permitted to travel abroad for treatment, leaving thousands at risk of death due to Israel's ongoing denial of their right to receive treatment. In addition to ensuring a severe shortage of specialized medical personnel, generators, fuel, and oxygen stations, Israel has obstructed the rehabilitation of destroyed hospitals and blocked the entry of medical supplies, medications, and equipment.
Further, in addition to blocking equipment needed for maintenance and restoration, the ongoing and illegal restrictions by Israel are preventing the entry of temporary shelters, tents, and basic supplies for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose homes it has destroyed...
Israel is deliberately obstructing the restoration of essential infrastructure, including water and sewage systems, endangering civilian lives and worsening environmental and health crises.
This, after over 15 months of Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza left more than 170,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing in Gaza and around 2 million others forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and international humanitarian agencies.
U.S. President Donald Trump—whose proposal for an American takeover and redevelopment of the Gaza Strip into the "Riviera of the Middle East" has sparked international condemnation—said Monday that the cease-fire should end, letting "all hell break loose," if all the remaining 40 or so Israeli and international hostages are not released by noon on Saturday.
The Qassam Brigades on Monday reaffirmed Hamas' "commitment to the terms of the agreement as long as the occupation adheres to them."
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'We Will Not Leave': Palestinians Respond With Defiance to Trump's Ethnic Cleansing Plan
"This is our homeland," said one Gaza City resident. "Neither I, my children, nor my grandchildren will ever leave it."
Feb 05, 2025
Palestinians reacted with derision and defiance to U.S. President Donald Trump's Tuesday call for the ethnic cleansing and American takeover of the Gaza Strip.
Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a fugitive from the International Criminal Court—at the White House in Washington, D.C., Trump said the U.S. will "take over" the strip.
"We'll own it," he said, adding that U.S. developers will "level it out" and build the "Riviera of the Middle East" after Palestinians—"all of them"—leave Palestine's coastal enclave. Asked if his plan involved sending U.S. troops to Gaza, Trump replied, "If it's necessary, we'll do that."
Forced removal of people by an occupying power is a war crime according to Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, under which Israel's apartheid settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are also illegal. Leaders of Egypt and Jordan, where Trump has proposed sending Gazans, vehemently oppose the plan.
While far-right figures in the United States and Israel—which would not exist in its current form without the ethnic cleansing of around 1 million Palestinians in 1947-48 and 1967—were thrilled by Trump's comments, Palestinians decried what one forcibly displaced Gaza City resident called the Republican's "delusional" plan.
"We will not allow the rights of our people, for which we have struggled for decades, to be infringed upon," Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said in a statement. "These calls represent a serious violation of international law, and peace and stability in the region will not be achieved without the establishment of the Palestinian state."
Abbas added that Gaza "is an integral part of the Palestinian land" and that "the legitimate Palestinian rights are non-negotiable."
Hamas—which governs Gaza despite the 15-month Israeli bombardment, invasion, and siege that obliterated the strip and killed tens of thousands of its people—blasted Trump's proposal as "a crime against humanity and a reinforcement of the law of the jungle at the international level."
Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri toldReuters that Trump's plan is "ridiculous and absurd," warning that "any ideas of this kind are capable of igniting the region."
Um Tamer Jamal, a 65-year-old mother of six from Gaza, toldReuters that "we will not leave our areas."
"We have brought our kids up teaching them that they can't leave their home and they can't allow a second Nakba," she added, referring to the 1947-48 expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians—sometimes via massacres, death march, and other acts of ethnic cleansing—to make way for Jewish settlement in the new state of Israel.
Reuters also interviewed Samir Abu Basel, a 40-year-old father of five in Gaza City, who said that "Trump can go to hell, with his ideas, with his money, and with his beliefs. We are going nowhere. We are not some of his assets."
Nizar Noman, a 64-year-old Gaza City resident still waiting to return to what's left of his home, toldMiddle East Eye that "President Trump is delusional to think that the people of Gaza can leave, even if it is a mess as he described."
"He now cares about the people in Gaza and thinks about our future?" he asked. "Where was he when we were being killed by Israeli missiles funded by American taxes?"
"As I belong to my homeland, my homeland belongs to me," Noman added. "I regret the day I left my house and went to the south. I now prefer to die under the rubble of my home than leave it again, even for another city in Palestine. This is our homeland. Neither I, my children, nor my grandchildren will ever leave it."
Zaid Ali, a 42-year-old northern Gaza resident, toldMiddle East Eye: "My family and I have been steadfast in northern Gaza. We never even thought about leaving."
Ali said he and his five brothers could not convince their 85-year-old father to flee Gaza, even after Israeli airstrikes killed three of his grandchildren.
"He witnessed the Nakba and left his home once as a child when they were forcibly displaced from Haifa," Ali explained. "He would never repeat his father's mistake... For him, Trump's words are a joke."
Diaspora Palestinians also condemned Trump's proposal.
The Westland, Michigan-based American Federation of Ramallah Palestine—one of the oldest Palestinian American advocacy groups—said in a statement that "President Trump's suggestion to ethnically cleanse Gaza is not only unacceptable and criminal, but also morally bankrupt, contemptible, and repugnant."
"We should aspire for peace, equality, and humanity, rather than this mere suggestion of displacing an already traumatized community" the group added. "It reveals the moral depravity of our country's leadership."
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Trump Call for 'Obviously Illegal' Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza Sparks Global Fury
"The expulsion of the Palestinian civilian population from Gaza would not only be unacceptable and contrary to international law," said Germany's foreign minister. "It would also lead to new suffering and new hatred."
Feb 05, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's call on Tuesday for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with American military force drew near-universal condemnation from the international community, with political leaders, United Nations officials, and human rights groups denouncing the outrageous proposal as inhumane and blatantly unlawful.
"Any forcible transfer in or deportation of people from occupied territory is strictly prohibited," Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement following Trump's remarks alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant after presiding over a 15-month-long, U.S.-backed decimation of the Gaza Strip.
U.S. allies and adversaries, including in the Middle East, swiftly rejected Trump's call for American ownership of Gaza and the total removal of the Palestinian population. Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Palestine's envoy to the U.N., Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and ordinary Palestinians in Gaza were among those who dismissed the U.S. president's proposal as unconscionable.
"These calls represent a serious violation of international law," said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "Peace and stability will not be achieved in the region without establishing a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital on the borders of 1967, based on the two-state solution."
European nations also sharply criticized Trump's proposal, with France's foreign ministry expressing "opposition to any forced displacement of Gaza's Palestinian population, which would constitute a serious violation of international law, an attack on the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians, and also a major obstacle to the two-state solution and a factor of major destabilization for our close partners, Egypt and Jordan, and the whole region."
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that "the expulsion of the Palestinian civilian population from Gaza would not only be unacceptable and contrary to international law."
"It would also lead to new suffering and new hatred," she warned.
"Once again, the man who claimed to be the peace candidate is showing himself to be nothing more than the War Profiteer President."
Trump's call for a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip came days after the president said he wants to "just clean out" the Palestinian enclave by forcibly displacing the territory's population, which is living under a fragile cease-fire agreement and in the process of returning to homes left in utter ruins by Israeli and American bombs.
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, said at a press conference on Tuesday that Trump's proposal is "completely irresponsible." Even the act of floating ethnic cleansing in Gaza amounts to "incitement to commit forced displacement, which is an international crime," said Albanese.
"The international community is made up of 193 states," she added, "and this is the time to give the U.S. what it has been looking for: isolation."
U.S. human rights and anti-war organizations joined the chorus slamming Trump's proposal, with Amnesty International USA executive director Paul O'Brien writing on social media that "removing all Palestinians from Gaza is tantamount to destroying them as a people."
Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of Win Without War, said in a statement late Tuesday that "forcibly removing Palestinians from Gaza is ethnic cleansing."
"It is obviously illegal, deeply morally wrong, and incredibly dangerous," said Haghdoosti. "People in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, and beyond need a real end to the war, not permanent forced displacement. Instead, tonight President Trump proposed to send U.S. armed forces to Gaza to kick Palestinians out and act as security guards for [Jared] Kushner and friends as they cash in on what Trump called 'the Riviera of the Middle East.'"
"Once again," Haghdoosti added, "the man who claimed to be the peace candidate is showing himself to be nothing more than the War Profiteer President."
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