International
Preliminary positive confirmation from Hamas on ceasefire proposal with Israel, according to Qatar
Hamas has given a “preliminary positive confirmation” to a ceasefire and hostage release proposal already approved by Israel, said Qatar on Thursday, which is mediating to achieve a pause in the war that has been devastating the Gaza Strip for almost four months.
“The path ahead of us is still very difficult. But we are optimistic because both parties have accepted the premises that would lead to a pause [in the fighting]. We hope to be able to announce good news in this regard in the next two weeks,” said Majed al Ansari, spokesperson for the Qatari foreign ministry.
Representatives from the United States, Qatar, Egypt, and Israel formulated a ceasefire and hostage exchange proposal over the weekend in Paris, aiming to negotiate with the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas.
“This proposal was approved by the Israeli side, and now we have a preliminary positive confirmation from Hamas,” stated the Qatari spokesperson, Majed al Ansari.
However, a Hamas source told AFP that there is “no agreement yet on the implementation” of the proposal and that “Qatar’s statement was hasty and not true.”
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in exile in Qatar, was expected to arrive in Egypt on Thursday or Friday, where he is likely to address this proposal.
A Hamas source had previously indicated that the Islamist movement, in power in Gaza since 2007, was examining a three-phase agreement proposal.
The first phase would include a six-week ceasefire during which Israel would release between 200 and 300 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 35 to 40 hostages. Additionally, between 200 and 300 trucks of humanitarian aid could enter Gaza each day.
On October 7, Hamas fighters entered southern Israel and killed around 1,163 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped about 250, according to the latest AFP tally based on Israeli official data.
In response to the attack, Israel launched an aerial and ground offensive to “annihilate” Hamas, classified as a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union, resulting in more than 27,000 deaths, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas health ministry.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant claimed that “Hamas has 10,000 dead terrorists and 10,000 who were taken out of action.”
US Sanctions Israeli Settlers
The United States imposed sanctions on a group of Jewish settlers accused of violence against Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank.
The violence by Jewish settlers has reached “unacceptable levels,” wrote US President Joe Biden in his executive order.
The Israeli government rejected these sanctions, stating that there is “no room for exceptional measures” against West Bank settlers.
“The vast majority of settlers in Judea and Samaria [West Bank] are law-abiding citizens, and many are currently fighting for the defense of Israel. Israel acts against all those who violate the law everywhere,” said a statement from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israeli settlers killed at least 10 Palestinians and set fire to dozens of homes in the occupied West Bank in 2023, according to the human rights group Yesh Din.
“Uninhabitable” Territory
In Gaza, witnesses reported Israeli airstrikes near Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis on Thursday night, the major city in the southern part of the enclave where, according to Israel, some Hamas leaders operate.
Over 30,000 displaced people are taking refuge in this partially destroyed town, lacking food, water, and medicine due to Israel’s total siege, according to the Hamas health ministry.
The population is “dying of hunger,” warned Michael Ryan, director of the World Health Organization’s emergency health program, on Wednesday.
According to the UN, the war forced 1.7 million of Gaza’s 2.4 million inhabitants to flee their homes.
The situation risks worsening due to the suspension of donations from several countries to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) after Israel accused 12 of its employees of being involved in the Hamas attack on October 7.
The agency, which stated that it might be forced to cease its operations “at the end of February,” was nominated on Thursday by a Norwegian politician for the Nobel Peace Prize “for its work in providing vital support to Palestine and the region.”
International
Trump could testify next week in the final stretch of his criminal trial
The defense of the former president of the United States. Donald Trump (2017-2021) said on Thursday that the tycoon has not yet decided if he will go up to the stand to testify next week, the date that the judge of the case wants it to be the final stretch for this criminal trial that began a month ago with the jury selection.
On Friday there will be no session and next Monday it is expected that Michael Cohen, who was a lawyer and right-hand man of the former president and is the last witness of the Prosecutor’s Office, will continue with his testimony after having already spent three days on the stand.
Trump’s lawyers also left the door open to summon more witnesses and said that it would not take “long” to make the announcement of who they would be.
For his part, Judge Juan M. Merchan considered it appropriate to warn both parties that they were prepared for the final allegations on Tuesday. That could mean that the case will reach the jury to pronounce its verdict next week.
This week, Cohen testified that Trump ordered him to pay $130,000 to silence Stormy Daniels during the campaign, a porn star who claims to have had relations with Trump in 2006, and detailed how he later reimbursed him for his expenses.
During the examination of the star witness of the Prosecutor’s Office this Thursday, Trump’s chief lawyer, Todd Blanche, was more agitated than the witness, who, for his part, answered serenely and sometimes extremely slowly.
Trump’s defense focused on questioning Cohen’s honesty and morality before the jury and on reviewing in detail some of the evidence that has been shown so far in the trial.
Thus, he asked Cohen to tell the lies he told the Intelligence Committee of the 2017 House of Representatives, where he lied under oath, which cost him to be accused of perjury in 2018.
The defense also analyzed the relationship with Cohen’s press, who explained that journalists came to him to ask him to confirm or deny information about Trump during the almost ten years he worked for him, and acknowledged that with some of them he came to establish a friendly relationship.
The former lawyer said that he never made any statement without first consulting the Republican politician.
Blanche attacked Cohen’s professionalism by pointing out that he secretly recorded some of his conversations with the press, including about forty with The New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, who has written 38 articles about him and was in the Manhattan Criminal Court room today following the case.
To which the former lawyer, who can no longer practice, justified – without receiving the question – that in the state of New York they consider it legal to record a phone call without letting the other person know.
However, Trump’s lawyer reproached him for also recording conversations with clients, something that is not allowed for lawyers in this state.
He also recorded conversations with Trump, one of them in 2016 that he used as evidence in this trial.
With regard to other conversations with the former president and his circle during the last stretch of the 2016 presidential elections, in which Cohen points out that the issue of payment was discussed to silence the extramarital relationship, Blanche questioned Cohen’s memory by pointing out that at that time he received an average of 50 calls a day.
Trump, who is in the middle of the electoral campaign but has to attend the trial four days a week, paid attention during the testimony of his former employee, thus breaking with his habit of “listening to the testimonies with his eyes closed”, especially after lunch.
Today the news was not only inside the room, but also outside, where dozens of large penis-shaped pink balloons flew over the vicinity of the court.
The balloons overprinted the faces of people like Merchan or that of the Manhattan prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, who has filed the accusation that Trump has in the dock.
International
The US begins to disembark aid for Gaza through the artificial dock it has installed on its coast
Gaza has begun to receive humanitarian aid on the ground through the artificial pier built and anchored off its coast by the United States.
As reported by the US Central Command on its website, “the trucks carrying humanitarian assistance began to arrive on land through a temporary dock in Gaza. No American military man landed in Gaza”
“This is an ongoing multinational effort to deliver additional aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza through a maritime corridor that is entirely humanitarian by nature and will include aid products donated by several countries and humanitarian organizations,” says the Command.
The United States announced yesterday, Thursday, the start of the operations of the floating pier as a maritime humanitarian corridor to Gaza, which according to the Pentagon will allow about 500 tons of aid to be delivered in two days and assist more than two million people at risk of famine.
The European Union (EU) has also begun sending aid from through the maritime corridor from Cyprus to this pier.
The first shipment consists of 88,000 cans of food sent by Romania through the EU Civil Protection Mechanism.
Precisely, the infrastructure includes a floating platform several kilometers from the coast for large ships from Cyprus to transfer the pallets to other smaller boats.
The project has been named Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS) and consists of two docks: one floating to which the ships loaded with help will be moored and another called Trident, which will be the “roadway” through which the trucks that will take the supplies to land will travel.
Meanwhile, Israeli evacuation orders continue in Rafah, the town at the southern end of the Gaza Strip where many displaced by the offensive against Hamas have been concentrated in half a year.
About 600,000 people have already left the city, according to this United Nations.
“In general, they have moved north and northwest, towards the coast, where they have been ordered to go. Their journey is complicated because there are no safe routes and there is certainly no danger-free destination in Gaza,” the spokesman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Jens Laerke, said at a press conference.
Before the attacks of October 7, 2023, Rafah was a small town of about 275,000 people, a figure that has skyrocketed to 1.4 million due to the progressive displacement from north to south that the Israeli military intervention has involved.
International
Kim Jong-un’s sister denies that North Korea is exporting weapons to Russia
The sister of the leader of North Korea, Kim Yo-jong, has denied in an opinion article published this Friday that the latest arms developments of the regime are aimed at boosting exports to Russia and insisted on describing the alleged shipment of weapons to Moscow as a “false rumor.”
In an editorial collected by the KCNA agency, Kim assures that the North Korean defense industry “continues to transform and reap rapid progress” in reference to the information published by state propaganda last week that shows his brother, Kim Jong-un, visiting mills of shuttles for missiles and multiple rocket launchers.
“I think it is necessary to point out the fact that hostile forces are deceiving public opinion with the false rumor that the weapons systems produced by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are ‘to export to Russia,’” Kim writes.
“As we have already said several times, the ‘rumor about the arms trade between the DPRK and Russia’, woven with wrong visions and fiction, is the most absurd paradox and does not deserve any evaluation or interpretation,” he adds.
US and South Korean intelligence have published satellite images showing thousands of containers exported from northeastern North Korea to the Russian region of Primorie, from where they transport them to areas near the front in Ukraine.
Several experts have also pointed to the evidence that shows that Moscow has used North Korean short-range artillery rounds or ballistic missiles to attack Ukrainian assets.
Kim, who is deputy director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of North Korea, assures that there is no “intention to export” “technical military capacities to another country or to make them public.”
The leader’s sister assures that the “recent activities” in the field of defense respond exclusively to the implementation of the ambitious five-year weapons modernization plan approved by the Workers’ Party in January 2021.
“The most pressing task for us is not the “publication” or the “export” of weapons, but to perfect the preparations for the war,” writes Kim, who assures that “tactical weapons, including multiple rocket launchers and missiles recently exhibited by us are manufactured with a single mission.”
“We do not hide the fact that these weapons have the function of preventing Seoul from carrying out crazy plans,” he concludes, alluding to the tensions with the South.
At the beginning of the year, Kim Jong-un himself declared South Korea as the main national enemy and eliminated the goal of reunification of the Constitution.
Since then, the regime has withdrawn a multitude of symbolic elements in the country that urged the need to seek peaceful reunification, emphasizing that it is a profound diplomatic turn that in turn is coupled with an intense rapprochement with Russia in the last year.
Trump could testify next week in the final stretch of his criminal trial
The US begins to disembark aid for Gaza through the artificial dock it has installed on its coast
Kim Jong-un’s sister denies that North Korea is exporting weapons to Russia
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