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The operation is the sixth known attack on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean, and the first known to have left some people alive.
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Just days after the U.S.-backed ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas went into effect, President Trump has issued new threats against Hamas, saying Thursday the United States would back a military intervention against the group if it fails to uphold the ceasefire agreement.
"There is the fear all the time that the war will be renewed," says Amira Hass, Haaretz correspondent for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who joins us from Ramallah. Hass is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and is the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank.
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There are growing questions over the legality of U.S. strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean. "These are sitting ducks, and we are simply engaged in cold-blooded murder of individuals who may or may not be drug smugglers," says David Cole, professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Cole says that President Trump is "committing homicide" by killing people without trial. "These individuals who have now been sent to the bottom of the sea by this president, if they were tried, at most, would face a sentence of some period of years," says Cole. "There would be no death penalty authorized under the Constitution for these individuals, even assuming they're guilty."
This comes as Trump has authorized the CIA to carry out covert operations inside Venezuela aimed at regime change, raising fears of a military confrontation between the two countries.
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Palestinians who have been released from Israeli prisons as part of the hostage exchange with Hamas are describing physical and psychological torture, medical neglect, deprivation and more. Moureen Kaki, a Palestinian American aid worker with Glia International who has been interviewing the returnees, joins us from Khan Younis to share some of their stories. Most were captured and imprisoned without charge by the Israeli military in the past two years. "They were being illegally imprisoned as captives by the Israeli military and then the Israeli government," Kaki explains. "Some of them were held captive for as little as three months, and some of them for several years."
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"War is over," declared Donald Trump Sunday night, as the first phase of the U.S.-backed 20-point Gaza peace plan got underway. Hamas has returned the remaining 20 living hostages back to Israel, while Israel has released around 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. We get a reaction to the ceasefire from the Palestinian writer and human rights activist Ahmed Abu Artema. He recently evacuated Gaza, nearly two years after multiple family members, including his son, were killed in an Israeli military attack. "We cannot say we are happy, because we lost everything," he says.
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