TV News LIES

The Israeli Prison Service has begun preparations to introduce the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners, Israeli media reported on Sunday.

According to Israel's Channel 13, preparations include the creation of a facility dubbed "Israel's Green Mile", where executions will take place. 

Training and procedural preparations have also started, while a delegation from the prison service is expected to visit an East Asian country to study the legal and regulatory framework for implementing capital punishment, the report added.

The move follows the Knesset’s approval of the death penalty bill in its first reading last year, with 39 MPs in favour and 16 against.

The bill must pass two further readings before becoming law.

The report added that executions will be carried out by hanging, with three guards pressing the trigger simultaneously.

Specialist teams, composed entirely of volunteers, will be assigned to the task.

An Israeli source told the channel that death sentences will be carried out within 90 days of the final verdict.

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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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Five-year-old Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos misses her cousins, classmates and kindergarten teachers in Austin, Texas. Despite being a US citizen, she was deported on 11 January alongside her mother, Karen Guadalupe Gutiérrez Castellanos, to Honduras, a country Génesis had never known.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were acting on an administrative deportation order against Gutiérrez, 26, issued in 2019, before Génesis was born.

“I kept telling them ‘the girl was born here’. They didn’t care, they picked up the child, just put a jumper on her and told me to get into the car with her,” Gutiérrez told the Guardian.

The two were held for almost a week in a hotel 80 miles from their home, without access to a lawyer or a hearing before a judge, before being deported to the Central American country.

Activists and analysts point to a string of procedural violations in the case and note similarities with other recent detentions of children, such as that of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in Minneapolis. They see it as a chilling indication of what may lie ahead as Donald Trump’s administration continues with mass deportations.

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