TV News LIES

Israel and Hamas completed the sixth exchange of hostages and Palestinian prisoners on Saturday with just over two weeks remaining in their fragile Gaza ceasefire’s initial phase, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio landed in Israel to begin a Mideast tour.

Israelis expressed relief as the three hostages — Argentinian-Israeli Iair Horn, 46; American-Israeli Sagui Dekel Chen, 36; and Russian-Israeli Alexander Troufanov, 29 — seemed in better condition than the emaciated ones freed a week ago.

Troufanov was informed of his father’s death in the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the 16-month war. Chen was meeting his youngest daughter for the first time. Horn’s brother, Eitan, remains in captivity.

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Mykola Vashchuk may be thousands of miles from Kyiv, his home town, but life has never been busier.

He runs pierogi food businesses here in Cleveland and back in Ukraine, works part-time for a local charity, while studying for a law degree at Cleveland State University. His wife works at a daycare and the couple is raising two sons. He and his family have built a new life on the shores of Lake Erie, having fled Ukraine after a Russian bomb blew out two windows of their Kyiv apartment in December 2022.

“There was no electricity, no water, so we decided to come to the US,” he says.

You could give Donald Trump that Nobel peace prize right now. For a few days, he succeeded in uniting Palestinians and Israelis, though not quite in the way favoured by the judging panel in Norway. Instead, he had both sides holding their breath, hoping he was not about to destroy the closest thing to hope they have known in 16 months.

I am referring to the deal done nearly four weeks ago which has allowed for a ceasefire in Gaza, along with the phased release of hostages held by Hamas and prisoners held by Israel. It was always perilously fragile, but this week it looked to be on the brink of collapse. First cahttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/14/israel-benjamin-netanyahu-7-octoberme a Hamas threat to postpone the next release of three hostages, due tomorrow, in response to alleged Israeli violations of the ceasefire. Then Trump weighed in, saying that he no longer liked the deal brokered by the Biden administration anyway, that he’d had enough of hostages freed “in dribs and drabs” and wanted all of them out in one go, by noon Saturday. Otherwise, he said, “all hell is going to break out”.

An intense Israeli military raid had already sent Qusay Farahat fleeing his home in the occupied West Bank, but the offensive has since expanded, threatening a relative's house where he sought shelter.

The raid, which according to Israel aims to dismantle "terrorist infrastructure", has targeted Palestinian refugee camps in the northern West Bank including Jenin where 22-year-old Farhat is from.

But since it began on January 21, the deadly Israeli offensive has gradually encroached upon more cities and towns.

More than 350 rabbis, alongside additional signatories including Jewish creatives and activists, have signed an ad in the New York Times in which they condemn Donald Trump’s proposal for the effective ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.

The ad, which was signed by rabbis including Sharon Brous, Roly Matalon and Alissa Wise, as well as Jewish creatives and activists including Tony Kushner, Ilana Glazer, Naomi Klein and Joaquin Phoenix, says: “Trump has called for the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza. Jewish people say no to ethnic cleansing!”

The ad follows Trump’s proposal to “take over Gaza” and leave 2 million Palestinians who have survived Israel’s deadly onslaught against the narrow strip with “no alternative” but to leave their homes.

In Donald Trump’s world, everything has its price.

There is no place for sentiment in his politics. Common values cannot secure loans for military aid. And the US president does not care who controls the blood-soaked soils of east Ukraine, so long as he can access the rare earth minerals that lie beneath.

The peace Trump will negotiate is not about justice. There is no deeper moral or morality here except for who “got it done”, and Trump has signaled that he is ready to pressure Ukraine and Europe to provide concessions to entice Russia to sign on the dotted line.

All that’s left for him is to hash out a price.