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      For many Palestinian Americans, Trump’s Gaza plan evokes legacy of displacement

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      For Palestinian Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, like Zaynah Jadallah and her family, displacement and loss have become central elements of her family heritage.Her family members were teachers in Al-Bireh in what is now the occupied West Bank during the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes and land by Zionist paramilitaries, and then the Israeli army, in the war surrounding Israel’s creation.“They fled the attacks in two cars for Jordan. One of the cars made it, the other was bombed and they were burned alive,” she says.“None of them survived.”So when Donald Trump, standing alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, suggested last week that Palestinians in the devastated Gaza Strip leave their homes and that it be turned into a “riviera” for “the people of the world”, comments he has since doubled down on, Jadallah was livid.“The president of the United States calling for ethnic cleansing and the continued genocide of Palestinians,” she says.“It’s outrageous.”For many Palestinian American residents of Dearborn such as Jadallah, the responses to the US president’s proposals follow a similar line: defiance, anger, but not much in the way of surprise.“He has a history of being loyal to the Zionist movement of genocide and colonizing [of the] the Palestinian people,” she says.“It wasn’t surprising, but it was outrageous.”A photo on the front cover of the Dearborn-published Arab American News’s 1 February edition portrays thousands of Palestinians walking along a sea front to their destroyed homes in northern Gaza. The caption reads: “The Great March of Return”.“Gaza’s history is one of both pain and pride,” reads the newspaper’s lead article on the topic.It continues: “It stretches back to ancient civilizations and includes great resistance against invasion, such as the three-month siege by Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army in 332 BCE.”Trump’s announcement upended decades of international consensus and threatened fragile talks to extend a delicate ceasefire in Gaza. It was met with glee by much of the Israeli prime minister’s ruling coalition and other far-right elements in Israel.More than half of Dearborn’s 110,000 residents are of Arab heritage, making it home to one of the largest Arab communities outside the Middle East. Many Palestinian American residents have lost family members during Israel’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip, which killed more than 46,000 people.“Nobody is really shocked. Everybody is disgusted,” says Amer Zahr, a Palestinian American comedian and activist whose family was displaced from Nazareth, Jaffa and Akka (Acre) during the Nakba.“I’m really angry at the notion that we’re talking about the thing that Trump said on Tuesday like it’s new or novel or unique. It is not,” he says.“It is the policy of Israel to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, and that policy has been fully supported and funded by the United States.”He also finds that it’s only when Trump makes such comments that liberals and the Democratic party “finally reject the notion of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”.“I guess it has a different ring to it when Trump says it.”Trump won more votes in November’s presidential election in Dearborn than the Democratic party’s Kamala Harris or Green party candidate Jill Stein, the first time a Republican party candidate won the city in 24 years.While Harris declined to campaign in Dearborn, Trump had lunch at the Great Commoner, a café owned by an Arab American businessperson, just days before the election.“A lot of people [in Dearborn] voted for him secretly,” Zahr says. “They are the ones who have gone silent now.” Zahr voted for Stein.But some are doubling down on their support, not inclined to take Trump’s words at face value. Bishara Bahbah, a Palestinian American born and raised in Jerusalem, campaigned extensively in Michigan and other swing states through the group formerly called Arab Americans for Trump. (The group changed its name last week to Arab Americans for Peace.) He says Trump’s comments were just a “testing of the waters”.“I think the president threw out this idea as a trial balloon. There can never be a displacement of Palestinians from their homeland. It’s counterproductive,” he says.While members of his family were forced to flee Jerusalem during the Nakba in 1948, and he himself has since been banned from living in the city of his birth, Bahbah continues to believe peace in the Middle East is Trump’s main goal.“I know the president wants a legacy of peace and wants to be known as a peacemaker. For him to do that, the only path is a two-state solution which he told me he would support.”He says he has faced a backlash for supporting Trump that has included “messages on X that could be interpreted as death threats”, but that he’s been told by Trump’s advisers that Trump did not mean to suggest that Palestinians in Gaza be forcibly removed from their homes and land.“I believe that the president will come to the conclusion that what he said publicly is just not workable,” he says. He says the rebrand of his group to Arab Americans for Peace, announced hours after Trump’s comments, had been in the works for months.For Jadallah, Trump’s alleged plans for Israel to turn over the Gaza Strip to the US are an obvious contradiction to what he campaigned for president on.“It really shows his intention to serve a foreign government before the American people, right?” she says.“Because if he wants an America first agenda, he would talk about how we can spend our hard-earned tax dollars to improve our healthcare systems and our schools.”She says the resilience Palestinians in Gaza have shown following 15 months of bombardments and continued displacement lead her to believe that it’s highly unlikely that Trump’s plan to remove people from Gaza would succeed.“They’ve endured genocide, hunger, been displaced multiple times from the north to the south,” she says.“There’s still 2 million people residing in Gaza and they’ve told us that they don’t want to leave because they are the rightful owners of the land.” More

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      Israeli Troops Withdraw From Netzarim Corridor in Gaza

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      Israel’s military withdrew from the Netzarim Corridor under the cease-fire with Hamas. During the war, troops patrolled the zone that splits the territory, preventing evacuated Palestinians from returning north.Israel’s military withdrew Sunday from a key corridor dividing the Gaza Strip, leaving nearly all of the territory’s north as required by a tenuous cease-fire with Hamas ahead of any negotiations for a longer-lasting agreement.The military’s departure from the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza came as the Israeli government sent a delegation to Qatar over the weekend to discuss the next group of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners to be freed during the cease-fire agreement’s initial phase, which came into effect last month and is ongoing. The gaunt appearances of three Israeli hostages who were released on Saturday, stoking public comparisons to Holocaust victims, heaped new pressure on the negotiations.In a statement on Sunday, the Israeli military said troops were “implementing the agreement” to leave the corridor and allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to continue returning home to northern Gaza.Two Israeli military officials and a soldier in Gaza who were not authorized to discuss the situation publicly or by name said the troops had already left the Netzarim Corridor by Sunday morning.Hamas also said that Israeli troops had departed from the Netzarim Corridor, saying in a statement that it was “a victory for the will of our people.”A drone view after Israeli forces withdrew from the Netzarim Corridor on Sunday.ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s sanctions against the ICC are disgraceful | Kenneth Roth

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      Donald Trump’s executive order reauthorizing sanctions against international criminal court (ICC) personnel reflects a disgraceful effort to ensure that no American, or citizen of an ally such as Israel, is ever investigated or prosecuted. Quite apart from this warped sense of justice – that it is only for other people – the president’s limited view of the court’s powers was rejected in the treaty establishing the court and repudiated by the Joe Biden administration and even the Republican party. But that didn’t stop Trump.The US government traditionally has had no problem with two of the three ways that the court can obtain jurisdiction because it could control them. Washington is fine with the court prosecuting citizens of states that are members of the court because it has no intention of joining them. And it accepts that the United Nations security council can confer jurisdiction because it can exercise its veto to block prosecutions it doesn’t like.But the court’s founding document, the Rome Statute, allows a third route to jurisdiction. The court can investigate or prosecute crimes that occur on the territory of a member state, even if the perpetrator is the citizen of a non-member state. That was why Trump in his first term objected to an ICC preliminary examination in Afghanistan (and imposed sanctions – freezing assets and limiting travel – on the chief prosecutor at the time, Fatou Bensouda, and one of her deputies) because the investigation might have implicated CIA torturers in that country under George W Bush. Trump in his new executive order alludes to the prosecutor’s actions in Afghanistan, but it is a non-issue because the current ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has made clear that those past crimes are not his priority.The real issue is Israel. That same territorial jurisdiction is how the ICC was able to charge Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for their starvation strategy targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Israel never joined the court, but Palestine did, conferring jurisdiction for crimes committed on Palestinian territory, including Gaza, regardless of the perpetrator’s citizenship.Referring to the United States and Israel, Trump’s executive order says: “Neither country has ever recognized the ICC’s jurisdiction, and both nations are thriving democracies with militaries that strictly adhere to the laws of war.” These claims are legally irrelevant.The US opposition to territorial jurisdiction was rejected by the drafters of the ICC treaty by an overwhelming vote of 120-7. The only governments to join the United States in opposing it were China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar and Yemen.Moreover, there is no ICC exception for “thriving democracies” or governments that purport to respect the laws of war. As any justice institution should, its jurisdiction applies to governments regardless of their character or stated policy. The sole exception is under what is known as the “principle of complementarity”, in which the court defers to good-faith national investigations and prosecutions.But Israel has no history of prosecuting its leaders for war crimes, and despite the ICC charges against Netanyahu and Gallant, it has announced no investigation of their starvation strategy in Gaza. To the contrary, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency threatened Bensouda – the former ICC prosecutor – and her husband. That hardly reflects good-faith pursuit of possible war crimes.For two decades, the US government objected to territorial jurisdiction, but when the ICC charged Vladimir Putin, it abandoned that position. Putin was charged for kidnapping Ukrainian children and taking them to Russia. Russia has never joined the court, so the sole basis for the court acting was territorial jurisdiction – Putin’s alleged crime took place in Ukraine, which had conferred jurisdiction.That was a game-changer. Biden called the charges “justified”. Even prominent Republicans such as Lindsey Graham, one of the foreign policy leaders in the Senate, shifted. Joined by a long bipartisan list of sponsors, he secured unanimous adoption in March 2022 of a resolution endorsing the ICC’s prosecution of war crimes in Ukraine. Graham said that Putin’s “war crimes spree” had “rehabilitate[d] the ICC in the eyes of the Republican party and the American people”. Other Republicans visited the ICC prosecutor to support the prosecution of Putin.Yet this shift turned out to be only tactical. It did not survive the Israel exception to human rights principles. Now that senior Israeli officials have been charged, Trump has resurrected the objection to the ICC’s territorial jurisdiction.There is nothing the least bit radical about asserting jurisdiction over people who commit a crime on foreign territory. If I, an American citizen, murdered someone in London, Washington could hardly object if British authorities prosecuted me. By the same token, Britain would have every right to delegate that power to the ICC if, because of a crisis such as an occupation, it were unable to pursue the matter itself.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump is inviting trouble with his unprincipled stand. Article 70 of the Rome Statute authorizes prosecution for what Americans call “obstruction of justice” if anyone tries to impede or intimidate an official of the court because of their official duties. Bensouda essentially turned the other cheek when Trump sanctioned her. I would be surprised if Khan, the current prosecutor, were so understanding. The court would have jurisdiction over Trump because he is interfering with a pending prosecution.Trump might try to shrug off ICC charges, figuring that no one would dare to arrest him, but he would face other consequences. Because all 125 ICC member states would have a legal duty to arrest him were he to show up, they would probably tell him quietly that he is not welcome. Trump should ask Putin, who had to skip the August 2023 Brics summit in Johannesburg for the same reason, what it feels like to be a global pariah.Israel has other options. It could open a genuine, independent investigation of the starvation strategy and let the chips fall where they may. Netanyahu and Gallant, if they have a defense, could show up in the Hague and contest the charges, the way former Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta did. But Trump obstructing justice is not the answer.

      Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs, will be published by Knopf on February 25 More

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      in Elections

      I Do Not Want Revenge for My Father’s Death

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      On a warm October night 12 years ago, my father, Yaya Ofer, was murdered by two Palestinian terrorists. They attacked him at home, at night, with axes, landing 41 blows on his body. His killing was planned. My father, who had retired as a colonel in the Israeli Army, had been the central figure in my childhood. As an adult, I loved hiking with him all over this country and meeting people from every background. In one evening all that was gone. The attackers were sentenced to life in prison. Now, as part of the cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, one of those men will walk free.I have come to peace with his freedom.Many of the 1,000 prisoners who are being released in exchange for the remaining Israeli hostages have the blood of people like my father on their hands, some of it barely dry. Behind every heartwarming video of a hostage embracing family members is a family like mine, being forced to relive our own grief.Knowing that the man who killed my father will walk out of prison stirs complex emotions, but I know it is the right decision to release these prisoners, if that is what it takes to save the hostages who have been held for almost 500 days. I believe nothing could be more sacred than bringing the hostages home — not my grief, which will not end, and not even my father, whose life I cannot restore. Not if we can bring back to life my fellow countrymen who are still held in the tunnels under Gaza.I hope this hostage-prisoner exchange will bring an end to this long and terrible war that has been thrust upon millions of people on both sides who did not choose it. And yet I am terribly worried that when the exchanges are finished, when the troops withdraw, we will discover that Israelis and Palestinians are now farther from peace than at any point in our history.I come from a family of peaceniks. My paternal grandfather, born in Haifa, helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp with the British Army. My maternal grandfather survived the Holocaust in Europe. He emigrated after the war to Israel and pioneered treatment of post-traumatic stress syndrome.After my father’s death I, too, wanted peace, not revenge. So I got involved in the peace-building community, including the Parents Circle-Family Forum — a group of bereaved families, Israelis and Palestinians, who have all lost loved ones, brutally, in this endless conflict. In the friendships I formed, I sought out not just Israelis, but also Palestinians, to understand their loss and mine. It was an antidote to spiraling into a state of depression, fear and hatred. Around the time of my father’s murder, I was helping to organize the annual Jerusalem Season of Culture project, which brings together Jews and Arabs for shared cultural projects including music, art and theater.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump’s Gaza plan suggests his pro-settler advisers are in the ascendant

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      When Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington this week, his first stop was to meet evangelical Christian leaders, who have cheered on Israel in the war in Gaza in an alliance with the country’s pro-settler rightwing government. For both constituencies, Israel’s right to annex the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank is a matter of faith and, they hope, a matter of time.Both constituencies cheered this week as Donald Trump announced his half-baked plan to “take over” Gaza, an idea he had only tinkered with before Tuesday evening, when it tumbled out to the obvious surprise of his closest aides.While most observers were shocked that the US president was in effect advocating for the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, the conservative alliance of Israel and the United States sees an opportunity to accelerate the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and its eventual annexation.“What has changed now is that Trump has said that it is US policy to support this as an end goal,” Matt Duss, the executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy, said of the Trump proposal. “And then of course it will just hop over to the West Bank, no question.”Israel’s pro-settler right wing immediately hailed Trump’s announcement. Bezalel Smotrich, the country’s ultranationalist finance minister, quoted a biblical passage about the return of Jewish pilgrims to Israel, writing: “Thank you President Trump. Together, we will make the world great again.”Itamar Ben-Gvir, who left Benjamin Netanyahu’s shaky coalition government because of the ceasefire with Hamas, said: “When I said this time and again during the war, that this was the solution to Gaza, they mocked me.”Under Joe Biden, saying that Gaza had been rendered unliveable would have been seen as a condemnation of Israel’s military campaign. But Trump, ignoring the Israeli assault that has been described as a “domicide” and led to the hollowing out of Gaza’s cities, simply went ahead and said it.The New York Times reported that the idea had been germinating among Trump and his close allies for weeks, and accelerated after his envoy Steve Witkoff travelled to the area and said: “There is almost nothing left of Gaza.” Yet Trump surprised his aides and even Netanyahu with the proposal, the paper reported, calling it “little beyond an idea inside the president’s head”.Trump’s plan may be a nonstarter and a distraction from more immediate questions of the second round of ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas. But it marks a serious shift towards some of the pro-settler advisers that he has elevated, including his nominee for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who said on Fox News in January: “There was a Palestinian state. It was called Gaza. Look how that turned out.”Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, has a record of hardline pro-Israel rhetoric and previously said Israel has a rightful claim to the West Bank, which he refers to by its Hebrew and biblical name of Judea and Samaria. Huckabee has refused to call the settlements by that name, insisting they be called “communities” or neighbourhoods. He has denied that the West Bank, seized by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 six-day war, is under military occupation.In a sign of growing ties between the US Christian right, the Israeli right and the pro-settler movement, Huckabee was in the audience when Netanyahu met leaders from America’s evangelical community during his trip to Washington this week.Also at the meeting with Netanyahu was John Hagee, the televangelist and founder of Christians United for Israel who has backed Israel’s expansion as a route toward Armageddon, after which “there will be 1,000 years of perfect peace, no presidential elections, no fake news, none of all of this nonsense”.In the US, Christian Zionists have tied their support for Israel’s claim to Palestinian lands to the book of Genesis, in which it says that God blesses those who bless Israel, and curses those who curse it.Hagee once claimed he had persuaded Trump to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by telling him at a White House dinner that Jesus was coming back to Jerusalem to “set up His throne on the Temple Mount where He will sit and rule for 1,000 years of perfect peace”.Trump has offered other tokens to pro-settler groups, including the repeal of Biden administration sanctions against individuals and groups accused of expansion and violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.The situation may indicate that in the circles of those who surround him, pro-settler figures are ascendant. They include Huckabee and Elise Stefanik, the US ambassador-designate to the UN, who during a confirmation hearing said she supported statements by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich that Israel had a “biblical right to the entire West Bank”.Others, including Witkoff, represent a wing of Trump’s supporters who are less hawkish on Israel and more focused on cutting transactional deals across the world.Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel organisation, said before the summit that Trump had two choices: the “dealmaker route” or the “screw-it path”. For Saudi Arabia to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, he said, Trump would have to at least seek to restrain Israel from expanding settlements in the West Bank.But, Ben-Ami said: “If he’s going down the screw-it path – ‘I don’t really care what anybody thinks, and I want Greenland and Panama and they can have the West Bank’ – then we’re in a different world.” More

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      in Elections

      USAID Turmoil Threatens Key Aid Supplies to Gaza, Officials Say

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      The Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the United States Agency for International Development have endangered the funding for food, tents and medical treatment for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, according to U.S. officials and workers for humanitarian groups funded by the agency.Officials said that the threats to the aid supply chain risked destabilizing the fragile cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which is contingent on the weekly entry of 4,200 aid and commercial trucks to the territory.With almost all U.S.A.I.D. staff set to be placed on administrative leave by Friday night, there will be only a handful of officials left to sign off on and audit hundreds of millions of dollars in outstanding payments to the agency’s partners on the ground in Gaza, raising alarm about how those groups will fund their operations.Of more than 200 officials in the agency’s Mideast team, just 21 will remain in post to manage its entire regional portfolio, according to an internal agency email reviewed by The New York Times. The team that organizes emergency aid supplies in dozens of crisis zones around the world each year, of which Gaza was just one, is down to just 70 staff members from more than 1,000.This is expected to slow or prevent the delivery of food packages to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, as well as tents, mattresses, blankets, hygiene kits and medical treatment, according to three officials and an aid worker. All four people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.While the aid agency does not operate inside Gaza, it has provided roughly $1 billion in aid to international aid groups on the ground since the war began in October 2023 — about a third of the total aid response, according to the United Nations. Hundreds of millions of dollars have yet to be disbursed and now may never be transferred to United Nations agencies and other major aid organizations, three officials said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump signs executive order to sanction ICC, accusing court of targeting US and its ‘close ally’ Israel – live

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      Donald Trump has signed an executive order sanctioning the international criminal court (ICC), the White House has confirmed.The order accuses the ICC of having “engaged in illegitimate and baseless actions” targeting the US and its “close ally” Israel, and said the court has “abused its power” by issuing “baseless” arrest warrants targeting Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. The order states:
      The ICC has no jurisdiction over the United States or Israel, as neither country is party to the Rome Statute or a member of the ICC.
      It’s 1am in Gaza and Tel Aviv, and 6pm in Washington. Here’s a recap of the latest developments:

      Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing sanctions on the international criminal court (ICC). The order accuses the ICC of having “engaged in illegitimate and baseless actions” targeting the US and its “close ally” Israel, and said the court “abused its power” by issuing “baseless” arrest warrants targeting Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

      Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, ordered the military to prepare plans to allow Palestinians “who wish to leave” Gaza to exit. Asked who should take the residents of Gaza, Katz said it should be countries who have opposed Israel’s military operations since the 7 October attacks. He also claimed that Spain, Ireland, and Norway, who all last year recognised a Palestinian state, are “legally obligated to allow any Gaza resident to enter their territories”.

      Trump doubled down on its Gaza proposal amid widespread opposition. In a Truth Social post, Trump said the Palestinian territory would be “turned over” to the US by Israel after it concludes its military offensive against Hamas. Netanyahu, who is in Washington, said it is “worth listening carefully” to Trump’s proposal.

      The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said Palestinians in Gaza are “going to have to live somewhere else in the interim”. Rubio described Gaza as “not habitable”, in comments that appeared to walk back on Trump’s proposal about transferring Palestinians permanently to neighbouring countries. Rubio is reportedly planning to visit the Middle East later this month.

      The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) warned that the agency faces an “existential threat” after Israel formally banned it from operating on its territory. Philippe Lazzarini also described Trump’s Gaza proposal as “totally unrealistic”, adding: “We are talking about forced displacement. Forced displacement is a crime, an international crime. It’s ethnic cleansing.”

      Countries around the world continued to come out in opposition to Trump’s plan to turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East” after the 2.3 million Palestinians living there were transferred to other countries. Trump’s proposal would “squash” the ceasefire and “incite a return of fighting”, Egypt’s foreign ministry said. Russia called Trump’s proposal “counterproductive” and accused him of fuelling “tension in the region”.

      Human Rights Watch warned that the Trump’s proposal could move the US “from being complicit in war crimes to direct perpetration of atrocities”. Forced or coerced displacement is a crime against humanity, illegal under the Geneva conventions, to which Israel and the US are signatories.

      At least 47,583 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks since October 2023, according to the Palestinian health ministry on Thursday. The ministry’s latest daily update also said a total of 111,633 have now been injured.
      As we reported earlier, the international criminal court (ICC) has been bracing itself for US sanctions since Donald Trump’s inauguration last month.Trump has been a vocal critic of the ICC since it issued arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant last November for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, along with several Hamas leaders simultaneously.At the time, the ICC said it had found reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant “bear criminal responsibility for … the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.In addition, the three-judge panel said there were reasonable grounds to believe they bear criminal responsibility “as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population”.The ICC relies on 125 member states of the Rome statute to execute arrest warrants. Neither Israel nor the US are members.Donald Trump’s executive order warns that the US will impose “tangible” and “significant” consequences on individuals who work on ICC investigations of US citizens or US allies, such as Israel.The sanctions include freezing any US assets of those designated and barring them, or their families from entering the US.Donald Trump has signed an executive order sanctioning the international criminal court (ICC), the White House has confirmed.The order accuses the ICC of having “engaged in illegitimate and baseless actions” targeting the US and its “close ally” Israel, and said the court has “abused its power” by issuing “baseless” arrest warrants targeting Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. The order states:
      The ICC has no jurisdiction over the United States or Israel, as neither country is party to the Rome Statute or a member of the ICC.
      Benjamin Netanyahu said it is “worth listening carefully” to Donald Trump’s proposal for the US to take control of the Gaza Strip.Netanyahu, in a video statement from Washington DC, described the US president’s plan as “the first original idea that has come up in years”.The Israeli prime minister also spoke about his recent meeting with US congressional and Senate leaders, during which he said: “Everyone expressed enormous appreciation for Israel’s great achievements.”“I said that we are changing the face of the Middle East, and they simply saluted that,” he added.US president Donald Trump has reportedly now signed an executive order sanctioning the international criminal court (ICC), accusing the body of “improperly targeting” the United States and its allies, such as Israel.The Reuters news agency has published the headline and cited an unnamed White House official. We’ll bring you more details as soon as possible.Donald Trump’s efforts to slash and reshape American foreign aid is crippling the intricate global system that aims to prevent and respond to famine.In a wider context than Israel’s war in Gaza, the international famine monitoring and relief system has suffered multiple blows from a sudden cessation of US foreign aid, Reuters reports.The spending freeze is supposed to last 90 days while his administration reviews all foreign-aid programs.The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said an exception allows emergency food assistance to continue.But much of that emergency aid is at least temporarily halted, compounded by Trump’s move this week to shut the US Agency for International Development (USaid).About 500,000 metric tons of food worth $340m is in limbo, said Marcia Wong, a former senior USaid official who has been briefed on the situation.US-provided cash assistance intended to help people buy food and other necessities in Sudan and Gaza also has been halted, aid workers told Reuters.The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has called on the international community to help feed millions of Palestinians in Gaza and rebuild the territory.The UN agency has provided more than 15,000 tonnes of food to feed more than 525,000 people since a fragile 19 January ceasefire between Israel and Hamas came into effect, WFP’s deputy executive director Carl Skau said, according to Agence-France-Presse.“We call on the international community and all donors to continue supporting WFP’s life-saving assistance at this pivotal moment,” Skau said in a statement after his visit to Gaza.
      The scale of the needs is enormous and progress must be maintained. The ceasefire must hold.
      “In critical sectors beyond food – water, sanitation, shelter, even getting children back into school – we need to work together,” he added.The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said it is a “realistic reality” to expect Palestinians in Gaza to “live somewhere else in the interim”.Rubio, taking questions during a press conference in the Dominican Republican, described Gaza as “not habitable”.“Gaza right now has unexploded munitions, lots of rockets and weapons,” he said, adding:
      I think that’s just a realistic reality, that in order to fix a place like that, people are going to have to live somewhere else in the interim.
      Donald Trump’s top officials, including Rubio and the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, have appeared to walk back on some of the US president’s proposals about transferring Palestinians permanently to neighbouring countries.Rubio encouraged other countries in the region to “step forward and provide a solution and an answer to that problem”.The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is planning to visit the Middle East in mid-February, Axios reports.Rubio is planning to travel to the region after the Munich security conference, which begins on 14 February, the outlet says, citing sources.Rubio reportedly plans to visit Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and possibly more countries.Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly gave Donald Trump a “golden pager” during their meeting in Washington DC this week, in an apparent reference to Israel’s deadly attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon last year.In photos circulating online, the golden pager can be seen mounted on a piece of wood, accompanied by a golden plaque that reads in black lettering: “To President Donald J. Trump, Our greatest friend and greatest ally. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”Israeli media reported that the Israeli prime minister, who is wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes, also gave the US president a regular pager.The gift was reportedly a nod to Israel’s deadly operation last September against Hezbollah, during which thousands of handheld pager beeper devices and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah detonated simultaneously across Lebanon.The explosions killed at least 37 people, including children as young as nine years old, and left thousands wounded.Benjamin Netanyahu, during his meetings in Washington, presented a plan for ending the war in Gaza in return for Hamas giving up power and its leaders leaving the Palestinian territory, Axios reports.Netanyahu told US officials that he wants to extend the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal in order to release more hostages, the outlet said, citing sources. In exchange for additional hostages, Israel would be ready to release more Palestinian prisoners, it said.The report said Netanyahu indicated that if the first phase is extended, he plans to present Hamas with a proposal that includes ending the war in Gaza and releasing “senior” Palestinian prisoners.In return, Netanyahu would demand that Hamas releases the remaining hostages, relinquish power in the Gaza Strip and that its senior leaders, including those who will be released from prison, would go into exile, the report said. A US source said:
      Bibi and Israeli leadership have articulated a plan that includes allowing senior Hamas leadership to go into exile in a third-party country.
      If Hamas relinquishes power and its leaders go into exile, it could open the door for a day-after plan, possibly including Donald Trump’s proposal for the US to “take over” Gaza, according to the report. More