conflict

Kurmin Wali, Nigeria – Like most Sundays in Kurmin Wali, the morning of January 18 began with early preparations for church and, later on, shopping at the weekly market.

But by 9:30am, it became clear to residents of the village in the Kajuru local government area of Nigeria’s Kaduna State that this Sunday would not be a normal one.

Gunmen known locally as bandits arrived in the village in numbers, armed with AK47 rifles.

They broke down doors and ordered people out of their homes and the village’s three churches.

They blocked the village exits before taking people and marching dozens into the forest at gunpoint.

Some captives were taken from church, while others were forcibly kidnapped as gunmen moved from house to house.

In one house, more than 30 members of an extended family were abducted.

Jummai Idris, a relative of the family that was taken, remains inconsolable.

She was home the day of the attack and did not go out.

“When I heard shouting, I took two children and we hid behind a house. That was how they [the bandits] missed us,” she told Al Jazeera.

“But I heard every shout, every cry and footstep as they picked up people from our house and surrounding houses,” she added, between sobs.

With tears streaming down her face, Idris recounts how she kept calling out the names of her missing family members – men, women and children.

Her house sits on the edge of the village, close to a bandits’ crossing point.

“I don’t know what they are doing to them now. I don’t know if they’ve eaten or not,” she said.

A total of 177 people were abducted that day. Eleven escaped their captors, but about a quarter of Kurmin Wali’s population remains captive.

Initially, state officials denied the attack had taken place.

In the immediate aftermath, Kaduna’s police commissioner called reports a “falsehood peddled by conflict entrepreneurs”.

Finally, two days later, Nigeria’s national police spokesman, Benjamin Hundeyin, admitted an “abduction” had indeed occurred on Sunday. He said police had launched security operations with the aim of “locating and safely rescuing the victims and restoring calm to the area”.

Uba Sani, Kaduna state’s governor, added that more than just rescuing the abductees, the government was committed to ensuring “that we establish permanent protection for them”.

There has been a police presence in Kurmin Wali since then. But it is not enough to reassure villagers.

Locals say the police are not there to protect the village, but merely to compile the names of victims they for days denied existed.

At the premises of Haske Cherubim and Seraphim Movement Church, the largest church in the village, days after the attack, a rust-coloured door lay on the floor, pulled off its hinges. Inside the mud-brick building, the site was chaotic.

Plastic chairs overturned in panic were strewn around the room – just as the kidnappers had left them.

‘Only the recklessly bold can stay’

The church building was where the captors brought everyone before marching them into the forest surrounding the village.

Residents said the gunmen divided themselves into different groups, targeting homes and churches in the village.

Maigirma Shekarau was among those taken before he managed to escape.

“They tied us, beat us up, before arriving us into the bush. We trekked a long distance before taking a break,” he said of his journey with his captors.

Shekarau, a father of five, was holding his three-year-old daughter when he and others were taken.

“When we reached an abandoned village, I ducked inside a room with my little daughter when the attackers weren’t looking. I closed the door and waited. After what seemed like eternity, and sure they were gone, I opened the door and walked back home, avoiding the bush path,” he said, now back in the village.

But on returning home, his heart sank. He and his three-year-old were the only ones who made it home. The rest of the family is still held by the kidnappers.

Standing in a parched field of long dried grass, Shekarau says the village no longer feels like home.

The village chief was also taken, but managed to escape. He now presides over a community hopeful for the return of the missing – but too scared to stay.

“Everyone is on edge. People are confused and don’t know what to do. Some haven’t eaten. There are entire families that are missing,” said Ishaku Danazumi, the village chief.

Danazumi says the kidnappers regularly visit and loot the village grain stores and the villagers’ possessions, including mobile phones.

Two days after the attack, residents said the bandits rode through their village again.

On that day, the community also received a ransom demand.

“They accused us of taking 10 motorcycles they hid in the bush to evade soldiers who operated here the week before,” Danazumi said. “But we didn’t see those bikes.”

The chief said the captors told him the return of the 10 bikes was a precondition for the return of his people.

But deep inside, he knows, more demands will follow.

In the village, residents wait in their thatch and mud-brick houses, hoping for their loved ones to return.

But because of fear and the tense situation, many are leaving the farming community.

“Anyone thinking about remaining in this village needs to reconsider,” said Panchan Madami, a resident who also survived the attack.

“Only the recklessly bold can stay with the current state of security here.”

Villagers said that before the January 18 attack, 21 people kidnapped by the bandits were returned to them after a ransom was paid. But just two days later, a quarter of the village was taken.

“It will be stupid to stay here, hoping things will be OK,” added Madami.

The government says it will establish a military post to protect the community from further attacks. But that is not comforting enough for Idris, who has also made up her mind to leave.

“I’m not coming back here,” she said, gathering her belongings to leave the village where she grew up and married. “I just hope the rest of my family gets back.”

President Donald Trump says he is speaking to Iran’s leadership amid a significant US military build-up in the Middle East, as regional leaders push for diplomacy to avoid a new conflict.

White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan said federal immigration agents will conduct “targeted” rather than sweeping operations in Minnesota going forward. Homan is replacing controversial “commander at large” Gregory Bovino as head of operations in the state.

Emmy-winning Owda points to changes in TikTok’s US ownership, remarks from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to explain ban.

Award-winning Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda has said she has been permanently banned from TikTok, days after the social media platform was acquired by new investors in the United States.

Owda, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and contributor to Al Jazeera’s AJ+ from Gaza, shared a video on her Instagram and X accounts on Wednesday, telling her followers that her TikTok account had been banned.

“TikTok deleted my account. I had 1.4 million followers there, and I have been building that platform for four years,” Owda said in the video filmed from Gaza.

“I expected that it will be restricted, like every time, not banned forever,” she added.

Al Jazeera sent a query to TikTok inquiring about Owda’s account and is waiting for a reply.

Hours after Owda shared her video, an account that appeared to have the same username was still visible on TikTok with a message that said: “Posts that some may find uncomfortable are unavailable.”

The last post visible on that account was from September 20, 2025, nearly three weeks before a ceasefire was reached in Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.

In her video on Wednesday, Owda pointed to recent remarks from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Adam Presser, the new CEO of TikTok’s US arm, as a possible explanation for the ban.

Netanyahu met with pro-Israel influencers in New York in September last year, telling them that he hoped the “purchase” of TikTok “goes through”.

“We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield in which we engage, and the most important ones are social media,” Netanyahu, who is a war crimes suspect, said at the time.

“The most important purchase that is going on right now is … TikTok,” Netanyahu added. “TikTok, number one, number one, and I hope it goes through, because it can be consequential,” he said.

TikTok announced last week that a deal to establish a separate version of the platform in the US had been completed, with the new entity controlled by investment firms, many of which are American companies, including several linked to US President Donald Trump.

Owda also shared an undated video of Adam Presser, the new CEO of TikTok’s US arm.

In the video, Presser speaks about changes made at TikTok, where he previously worked as head of operations in the US, saying that “the use of the term Zionist as a proxy for a protected attribute” had been designated “as hate speech”.

“There’s no finish line to moderating hate speech, identifying hateful trends, trying to keep the platform safe,” Presser said.

Zionism is a nationalist ideology that emerged in the late 1800s in Europe, calling for the creation of a Jewish state.

Owda’s social media presence grew from posting daily videos in which she greeted her audience, saying, “It’s Bisan From Gaza – and I’m still alive.”

She made a documentary of the same name with Al Jazeera’s AJ+, which was awarded an Emmy in the Outstanding Hard News Feature Story category in 2024.

Her video on Wednesday came as Israel’s top court again postponed making a decision on whether foreign journalists should be allowed to enter and report on Gaza independently of the Israeli military.

Despite the ongoing ceasefire, an Israeli attack last week killed three Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 207 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, with the “vast majority” killed by Israeli forces.

A Los Angeles County judge ruled Wednesday that a corruption case against L.A. City Councilman Curren Price can move forward to trial, ensuring the misconduct scandal will hang over the veteran politician’s final year in office.

L.A. County Superior Court Judge Shelly Torrealba determined that prosecutors had provided enough evidence to move forward on four counts of voting on matters in which Price had a conflict of interest, four counts of embezzlement and four counts of perjury.

Price, who is set to leave the City Council after reaching his term limit at the end of the year, declined to comment after the hearing.

The councilman, who has represented South L.A. for more than a decade, was charged in June 2023. Prosecutors allege Price repeatedly voted to approve sales of land to developers or funding for agencies who had done business with his wife, Del Richardson, and her consulting company. Some of the votes involved funding and grants for the L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city housing authority.

Price, 75, is also accused of perjury for failing to include Richardson’s income on disclosure forms and embezzlement for including her on his city health insurance plan before they were legally married. He is due back in court in March, Torrealba said.

Richardson was named as a “suspect” in the district attorney’s office’s initial investigation in 2022, according to documents made public last year, but she was never charged with a crime. She has been among a group of Price’s supporters who have been in court for the past week. The two wore matching burgundy suits during Wednesday’s hearing.

Much of the weeklong proceeding centered around whether Price knew of potential conflicts of interest before casting votes, or intended to hide his financial stakes in them from the public. Delphi Smith, a former staffer for the councilman, and Price’s deputy chief of staff Maritza Alcaraz took the stand to explain the process they used to flag problematic council votes for Price and insisted they made their best efforts to highlight agenda items linked to vendors or agencies who had worked with Richardson.

“If the Councilman voted on something that was a potential conflict, he did so without knowing,” Alcaraz testified Wednesday.

L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. Casey Higgins, however, said Price is ultimately responsible for disclosing conflicts of interest and argued blaming his subordinates was not a defense to corruption charges.

“It’s not only hiding. It’s trying to create a wall around himself, to create this plausible deniability,” Higgins said. “It’s this ostrich with his head in the sand approach.”

Higgins said Alcaraz and Smith were “trying to jump in front of the bus” and that it was impossible to believe that Price had no knowledge of the conflicts. The dealings allegedly took place between 2019 and 2021 — after a 2019 Times investigation revealed he voted on decisions involving at least 10 companies in the same years they were listed as providing at least $10,000 in income to Richardson’s firm.

Price’s defense attorney, Michael Schafler, has argued there is no evidence that Price knew of the conflicts, and claimed payments to Richardson had no influence on Price’s voting decisions. All of the votes referenced in the criminal complaint passed with overwhelming support, and Price’s vote made no difference in the final result.

“There’s been no evidence presented that Mr. Price acted with any wrongful intent. No testimony from any witness … who said Mr. Price acted with willful intent,” Schafler said Wednesday. “I’ve never seen a public corruption case like that in my life.”

There were enormous sums of money on the line in each vote referenced in the criminal complaint. Richardson took in more than a half-million from October 2019 to June 2020 from the city housing authority before Price voted in favor of millions in grant funding for the agency, according to an amended complaint filed against Price last year.

Prosecutors also alleged Price wrote a motion to give $30 million to the L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority during a time frame when Richardson was paid upward of $200,000 by the agency.

After Torrealba’s ruling, Schafler said he was “disappointed” but thought the evidence presented over the past week revealed that “the prosecution’s case has a lot of gaps, a lot of holes, it’s based largely on speculation.”

Some of Price’s City Council colleagues have said Price’s alleged crimes were tantamount to paperwork errors, and should have been handled by the city’s Ethics Commission.

While questioning former employees of Price and Richardson, Higgins sought to paint a more nefarious picture. He repeatedly scrutinized the way that Price’s staff and a former employee of Del Richardson & Associates compiled a list of the firm’s projects that could represent conflicts and communicated about them.

Much of the conflict information was placed on a flash drive and given to Smith in person by Martisa Garcia, an employee of Richardson, Higgins said. Updates to the file were then made over the phone, and not discussed via e-mail, according to Higgins. When Smith and Alcaraz discussed votes in which Price might have to recuse himself, they did so on personal phones rather than city-issued devices, according to evidence Higgins put forth.

Higgins suggested Price’s staff was trying to hide the conflicts of interest.

“Was the thumb drive used to avoid public records requests?” Higgins asked Alcaraz, who curtly replied “No.”

Generally speaking, California Public Records Act requests for an elected official’s communications will only capture what is contained on government devices, not personal phones or e-mails. A spokeswoman for Price, Angelina Valenica, said there was no “intent to avoid PRA requirements” on the part of Price’s staff.

“The Councilmember was not involved in the handling, transport or storage of this information,” she said. “He relied on and trusted his staff to handle the matter appropriately and to seek guidance as necessary.”

While it’s unlikely Price will stand trial before his term runs out, the case could loom large over the race to replace him. A field of seven candidates is running for his council seat, including Price’s deputy chief of staff, Jose Ugarte, who has faced allegations that he failed to disclose consulting income that are similar to the basis of the perjury charges against his boss.

Chris Martin, a candidate and civil rights attorney with Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, said Wednesday that if the allegations are true, Price and his staff need to step down.

“It’s a serious breach of public trust. It’s important that we have leaders in the 9th District who will walk with integrity,” Martin said. “It also seems like he’s got a major issue with his staff enabling him. They should all resign.”

These are the key developments from day 1,435 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Here is where things stand on Thursday, January 29:

Fighting

• The death toll from a Russian attack on a passenger train in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region on Tuesday rose to six, after the remains of several bodies were recovered from the wreckage, the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office said on the Telegram messaging app.
• At least six people were injured in a Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region, the head of the regional military administration, Ivan Fedorov, said on Telegram.
• Russian forces attacked several locations across Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, killing a 46-year-old man and injuring at least two other people, the head of the regional military administration, Oleksandr Hanzha, said on Facebook.
• One person was killed in a Ukrainian attack on the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka in Russia’s Belgorod region, the regional emergencies task force reported, according to the country’s TASS state news agency.
• A Ukrainian drone attack killed one person in the city of Enerhodar, in a Russian-occupied area of Ukraine’s Zaporizhia region, Russia’s locally appointed official Yevhen Balitsky said, according to TASS.
• Fedorov has ruled out installing anti-drone netting as a mode of defence, saying that “there are more effective ways to combat Russian attacks”, Ukraine’s Ukrinform news agency reported.

Military aid

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that France will deliver more “French aircraft, missiles for air defence systems, and aerial bombs” to Ukraine this year, following a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Regional security

• Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said at an event in Paris that a 2035 target for rearming Europe “would be too late”.
• “I think rearming ourselves now is the most important thing,” Frederiksen said. “Because when you look at intelligence, nuclear weapons, and so on, we depend on the US,” she added.

• Switzerland plans to inject an additional 31 billion Swiss francs ($40.4bn) into military spending starting from 2028 by increasing sales taxes for a decade.
• “The world has become more volatile and insecure, and the international order based on international law is under strain,” the Swiss government said, noting that other European countries have also been increasing their defence spending.

Politics and diplomacy

• Vladislav Maslennikov, a top European Affairs official at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told TASS that restoring relations with the European Union will only be possible if European countries “cease their sanctions policy”, stop “pump[ing] weapons into the Kyiv regime, and sabotag[ing] the peace process around Ukraine.”

• President Macron said at an event in Paris that European countries must focus on asserting their “sovereignty, on our contribution to Arctic security, on the fight against foreign interference and disinformation, and on the fight against global warming”.
• “France will continue to defend these principles in accordance with the United Nations Charter,” said Macron, who has turned down an invitation for France to join Trump’s Board of Peace, which some critics say is an attempt to replace the United Nations.

Peace talks

• United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that negotiations over Ukraine’s Donetsk region, which is part of the Donbas region that is now 90 percent occupied by Russian forces, are “still a bridge we have to cross” in talks between Russia and Ukraine.
• “It’s still a gap, but at least we’ve been able to narrow down the issue set to one central one, and it will probably be a very difficult one,” Rubio said.

Energy

• Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko said that 639 apartment buildings in Kyiv remain without heat, with temperatures forecast to drop to -23 degrees Celsius (-9.4 degrees Fahrenheit) overnight this week.

Tehran, Iran – The Iranian government is putting into place contingency plans for basic governance as the threat of another war with the United States and Israel looms large.

President Masoud Pezeshkian gathered governors of Iran’s border provinces as well as his economy minister in Tehran on Tuesday to delegate some responsibilities to the governors if a war breaks out, state media reported. A working group was also formed, tasked with ensuring the increased flow of essential goods, particularly food.

The governors have been given authority to import goods without using foreign currency, engage in bartering and allow sailors to bring in products under simplified customs rules, according to the government-run IRNA news agency.

“In addition to importing essential goods, governors now have the authority to bring in all goods that are directly linked with the livelihoods of the people and the needs of the market in order to balance the market and prevent hoarding,” Pezeshkian was quoted as saying at the meeting.

“Through enforcing this policy, a considerable part of the pressures resulting from the cruel sanctions are neutralised,” he said in reference to harsh restrictions imposed by the US as well as United Nations sanctions reimposed in September, which the Iranian government blames for the economic crisis the country is going through.

But while the government resorts to focusing on the basics, nearly all of Iran’s 90 million people and all sectors of the country’s beleaguered economy continue to suffer from an unprecedented internet shutdown.

The digital blackout was imposed by the theocratic state on January 8 as nationwide protests reached a boiling point, followed by the killings of thousands of Iranians.

The intranet set up to offer some basic services during the state-imposed shutdown is slow and has failed to shore up online businesses. Traditional shops are also struggling to bring in customers.

Economic trouble persists

Amid a large deployment of armed security personnel, most shops are now open in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar – where the protests against the poor economic conditions started on December 28 – and other downtown business districts.

But a shopkeeper at the Grand Bazaar told Al Jazeera that business activity is a fraction of what it was several weeks ago.

“There’s not much life and energy in the markets these days,” he said on the condition of anonymity. “The worst thing is that everything is still so unpredictable. You can see that in the currency rate too.”

Iran’s rial has been in freefall after markets partially reopened this week, degrading trust in the national currency.

The rial hit a new all-time low of about 1.6 million per US dollar on Wednesday. Each greenback had changed hands for about 700,000 rials a year ago and about 900,000 in mid-2025.

However, Central Bank of Iran chief Abdolnasser Hemmati said at the meeting with the governors in Tehran that the currency market was “following its natural course”.

He said $2.25bn worth of foreign currency deals have in recent weeks been registered in a state-run market set up to manage imports and exports, which he described as an “acceptable and considerable figure”.

The comments from Hemmati – who was also the Central Bank chief from 2018 to 2021 and was impeached as economy minister in March – immediately drew fire from the ultraconservative Keyhan newspaper, whose editor-in-chief is directly appointed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The newspaper said his comments run counter to the reality in the tumultuous currency market as well as Hemmati’s promises of price stability for essential goods when he re-emerged as the Central Bank governor last month.

While dealing with foreign pressure, Pezeshkian’s government has also been hounded by hardliners at home who have demanded immediate changes to his relatively moderate cabinet.

The infighting became so serious that the supreme leader publicly intervened, telling lawmakers in parliament and other officials during a speech last week that they are “forbidden” from “insulting” the president at a time when the country must focus on providing essential goods to the people.

Subsidy scheme

For his part, Pezeshkian has kept his rhetoric focused solely on “combating corruption” through an initiative that has eliminated a subsidised currency rate used for imports of certain goods, including food.

Pezeshkian’s government argued the subsidised allocated currency was being misused by state-linked organisations. The scheme was supposed to deliver cheaper imported food, but that has not been the case.

The money freed up by the initiative has been distributed as electronic coupons among Iranians to buy food from select stores at prices set by the government.

But each citizen will get only 10 million rials per month for four months. That figure amounted to just over $7 when it was announced during the protests early this month, but it is now worth closer to $6 as the fall of the national currency further erodes purchasing power.

To add insult to injury, the announcement of the subsidy scheme contributed to an abrupt tripling or quadrupling of prices for some essential goods, including cooking oil and eggs. Iran’s annual inflation rate remains untamed at nearly 50 percent and has been on a rising trajectory in recent months.

The top two state-run carmakers, which hold a large monopoly in Iran’s auto industry, have also been positioning themselves for yet another price hike as the end of the Iranian calendar year approaches in March.

One of the firms, Iran Khodro, said on Tuesday that it would increase prices by up to 60 percent while local media reported that the other, Saipa, was expected to follow suit. The government has reportedly intervened to delay or slow the price hikes.

TEDPIX, the main index of the Tehran Stock Exchange, continued its recent decline on Wednesday, losing 30,000 points to stand at 3,980,000. The index was at an all-time high of 4,500,000 last week, having made gains in early January.

Fears of a US attack on Iran are again heightened after Donald Trump demanded Tehran submit to his demands or face an attack “like with Venezuela.”

While diplomatic circles welcome the recovery of the last Israeli captive’s remains in Gaza and the imminent partial reopening of the enclave’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt, a quieter, darker reality is taking shape on the ground.

According to comments by retired Israeli General Amir Avivi, who still advises the military, Israel has cleared land in Rafah, an area in the southern Gaza Strip that it had already flattened in more than two years of its genocidal war, to construct an enormous facility to entrench its military control and presence in Gaza for the long term.

Speaking to the Reuters news agency on Tuesday, Avivi described the project as a “big, organised camp” capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people, stating it would be equipped with “ID checks, including facial recognition”, to track every Palestinian entering or leaving.

Corroborating Avivi’s claims, exclusive analysis by Al Jazeera’s Digital Investigations Team confirms that ground preparations for this project are already well under way.

Satellite imagery captured from December 2 through Monday reveals extensive clearing operations in western Rafah. The analysis identifies an area of about 1.3sq km (half a square mile) that has undergone systematic levelling.

According to the investigation, the operations went beyond mere debris removal and involved the flattening of land previously devastated by Israeli air strikes.

The cleared zone is located adjacent to two Israeli military posts, suggesting the new camp will be under direct and immediate military supervision. The satellite evidence aligns with reports that the facility is to act as a controlled “holding pen” rather than a humanitarian shelter.

The trap of return

To analysts in Gaza, no humanitarian intent is behind this projected high-tech infrastructure, which they say is in fact a trap for Palestinians.

“What they are building is, in reality, a human-sorting mechanism reminiscent of Nazi-era selection points,” Wissam Afifa, a Gaza-based political analyst, told Al Jazeera. “It is a tool for racial filtering and a continuation of the genocide by other means.”

The reopening of the Rafah crossing, tentatively scheduled for Thursday, according to The Jerusalem Post, comes with strict Israeli conditions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted on full “security control”.

For Palestinians hoping to return to Gaza, this means submitting to what Afifa describes as “human sorting stations”.

“This mechanism is designed to deter return,” Afifa said. “Palestinians will face interrogation, humiliation and the risk of arrest at these Israeli-run checkpoints just to go home.”

By leveraging facial recognition technology confirmed by Avivi, Israel is creating a high-risk ordeal for returnees, he said. Afifa argued it will force many Palestinians to choose exile over the risk of the “sorting station”, serving Israel’s longstanding goal of depopulating the Strip.

Permanent occupation within the ‘yellow line’

The Rafah camp is just one piece of a larger puzzle. Israel in effect occupies all of Gaza with a physical military presence in 58 percent of the Gaza Strip. Its forces directly occupy an area within the “yellow line”, a self-proclaimed Israeli military buffer zone established by an October ceasefire.

“We are witnessing the re-engineering of Gaza’s geography and demography,” Afifa said. “About 70 percent of the Strip is now under direct Israeli military management.”

This assessment of a permanent foothold is reinforced by Netanyahu’s own remarks to the Knesset on Monday. By declaring that “the next phase is demilitarisation”, or disarming Hamas, rather than reconstruction, Netanyahu signalled that the military occupation has no end date.

“The talk of ‘reconstruction’ starting in Rafah under Israeli security specifications suggests they are building a permanent security infrastructure, not a sovereign Palestinian state,” Afifa added.

A ‘show’ of peace

For the more than two million Palestinians in Gaza, the hope that the return of the last Israeli captive would bring relief has turned into frustration.

“There is a deep sense of betrayal,” Afifa said. “The world celebrated the release of one Israeli body as a triumph while two million Palestinians remain hostages in their own land.”

Afifa warned that the international silence regarding these “sorting stations” risks normalising them. If the Rafah model succeeds, it would transform Gaza from a besieged territory into a high-tech prison where the simple act of travel becomes a tool of subjugation, he said.

“Israel is behaving as if it is staying forever,” Afifa concluded. “And the world is watching the show of peace while the prison walls are being reinforced.”

Most European countries have either turned down their invitations to join United States President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” for overseeing the reconstruction of Gaza – or politely suggested they are “considering” it, citing concerns.

From within the European Union, only Hungary and Bulgaria have accepted. That is a better track record of unity than the one displayed in 2003, when then-US President George W Bush called on member states to join his invasion of Iraq.

Spain, Britain, Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia said “yes”.

France turned the invitation down on the grounds that Trump’s board “goes beyond the framework of Gaza and raises serious questions, in particular with respect to the principles and structure of the United Nations, which cannot be called into question”.

Trump pointedly did not invite Denmark, a close US ally, following a diplomatic fracas in which he had threatened to seize Greenland, a Danish territory, by force.

The US leader signed the charter for his Board of Peace on January 22 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, calling it “one of the most consequential bodies ever created”.

It has come across to many of the countries invited to join it as perhaps too consequential – an attempt to supplant the United Nations, whose mandate the board is meant to be fulfilling.

Although Trump said he believed the UN should continue to exist, his recent threats suggest that he would not respect the UN Charter, which forbids the violation of borders.

That impression was strengthened by the fact that he invited Russia to the board, amid its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

‘Trump needs a big win ahead of midterms’

“Trump is thinking about the interior of the US. Things aren’t going well. He needs a big win ahead of the November midterms,” said Angelos Syrigos, a professor of international law at Panteion University in Athens.

The US president has spent his first year in office looking for foreign policy triumphs he can sell at home, said Syrigos, citing the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the bombing of Iran and his efforts to end the Ukraine war.

Trump has invited board members to contribute $1bn each for a lifetime membership, but has not spelled out how the money will be spent.

His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a member of the executive board.

“How will this thing function? Will Trump and his son-in-law administer it?” asked Syrigos.

Catherine Fieschi, a political scientist and fellow at the European University Institute, believed there was a more ambitious geopolitical goal as well.

“It’s as though Trump were gathering very deliberately middle powers … to defang the potential that these powers have of working independently and making deals,” she said.

Much like Bush’s 2003 “coalition of the willing” against Iraq, Trump’s initiative has cobbled together an ensemble of countries whose common traits are difficult to discern, ranging from Vietnam and Mongolia to Turkiye and Belarus.

Fieschi believed Trump was trying to corral middle powers in order to forestall other forms of multilateralism, a pathway to power that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney outlined in his speech at Davos, which so offended Trump.

“In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: [to] compete with each other for favour, or to combine to create a third path with impact,” Carney had said, encouraging countries to build “different coalitions for different issues” and to draw on “the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules”.

He decried the “rupture in the world order … and the beginning of a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints”.

After the speech, Trump soon rescinded Canada’s invitation.

Countering agglomerations of power and legitimacy was Trump’s goal, Fieschi believed.

“Here you bind them into an organisation that in some ways offers a framework with Trump in it and the US in it, and implies constraints,” said Fieschi. “It’s not so much benign multilateralism as stopping the middle powers getting on with their hedging and with their capacity to have any kind of autonomy, strategic and otherwise.”

At the same time, she said, Trump was suggesting that the Board of Peace “might give them more power than they have right now in the UN”.

“Trump thinks this is like a golf club and therefore he’s going to charge a membership fee,” Fieschi said.

“If it was a reconstruction fee [for Gaza], I don’t think people would necessarily baulk at that,” she noted, adding that the fee smacked of “crass oligarchic motivation”.

The Board of Peace is called into existence by last November’s UN Security Council Resolution 2803 to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza.

It is defined as “a transitional administration” meant to exist only “until such time as the Palestinian Authority (PA) has satisfactorily completed its reform program … and [can] effectively take back control of Gaza.”

Trump’s charter for the board makes no mention of Gaza, nor of the board’s limited lifespan. Instead, it broadens the board’s mandate to “areas affected or threatened by conflict”, and says it “shall dissolve at such time as the Chairman considers necessary or appropriate”.

China, which has presented itself as a harbinger of multipolarity and a challenger of the US-led world order, rejected the invitation.

“No matter how the international landscape may evolve, China will stay firmly committed to safeguarding the international system with the UN at its core,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun last week.

The UN itself appears to be offended by Trump’s scheme.

“The UN Security Council stands alone in its Charter-mandated authority to act on behalf of all Member States on matters of peace and security,” wrote UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on social media on Monday, January 26.

“No other body or ad-hoc coalition can legally require all Member States to comply with decisions on peace and security,” he wrote.

Guterres was calling for a reform that would strengthen the legitimacy of the UN Security Council by better reflecting the balance of power in the world as it is, 81 years after the body was formed. But his statement can also be read as a veiled criticism of Trump’s version of the Board of Peace.

Transparency and governance are problematic, too.

Trump is appointing himself chairman of the board, with power to overrule all members. He gets to appoint the board’s executive, and makes financial transparency optional, saying the board “may authorise the establishment of accounts as necessary.”

The last Israeli captive’s body is found in Gaza – where many thousands of Palestinians lie buried under rubble.

Israel – as part of its long-standing policy – has not returned the remains of many hundreds of Palestinians.

Why – and what’s the impact?

Presenter:  James Bays

Guests: 

Amjad Sharwa – Director of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network in Gaza

Yara Hawari – Co-Director at Al-Shabaka: the Palestinian Policy Network

Issam Aruri – Commissioner-General of the Independent Commission for Human Rights in Palestine

Over the past year, United States President Donald Trump has pursued “peace-making” all across the world. A prominent feature of his efforts has been the belief that economic threats or rewards can resolve conflicts. Most recently, his administration has put forward economic development plans as part of peace mediation for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Syria.

While some may see Trump’s “business” approach to “peace-making” as unique, it is not. The flawed conviction that economic development can resolve conflicts has been a regular feature of Western neoliberal peace initiatives in the Global South for the past few decades.

Occupied Palestine is a good example.

In the early 1990s, when the “peace process” was initiated, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres started advocating for “economic peace” as part of it. He sold his vision of the “New Middle East” as a new regional order that would guarantee security and economic development for all.

The project aimed to place Israel at the economic centre of the Arab world through regional infrastructure — transport, energy and industrial zones. Peres’s solution for the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” was Palestinian economic integration. The Palestinians were promised jobs, investment, and improved living standards.

His argument was that economic development and cooperation would foster stability and mutual interest between Israelis and Palestinians. But that did not happen. Instead, as the occupation continued to entrench itself after the US-brokered Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), anger in the Palestinian streets grew and eventually led to the outbreak of the second Intifada.

This neoliberal approach was tested again by the Quartet – consisting of the United Nations, the European Union, the US and Russia – and its envoy Tony Blair in 2007. By then, the Palestinian economy had collapsed, losing 40 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in eight years and plunging 65 percent of the population into poverty.

Blair’s “solution” was to propose 10 “quick impact” economic projects and fundraise for them in the West. This went hand-in-hand with the policies of then-Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, in what came to be known as “Fayyadism”.

Fayyadism was sold to Palestinians as a pathway to statehood through institution-building and economic growth. Fayyad focused on generating short-term economic gains in the occupied West Bank while simultaneously rebuilding the Palestinian security apparatus to meet Israeli security demands.

This model of economic peace never addressed the root cause of Palestinian economic stagnation: the Israeli occupation. Even the World Bank warned that investment without a political settlement ending Israeli control would fail in the medium and long term. Yet the approach persisted.

There were Palestinians who benefitted from it, but they were not common Palestinians. They were a narrow elite: security officials who gained privileged access to financial institutions, contractors tied to Israeli markets, and a handful of large investors. For the wider population, living standards remained precarious.

Rather than preparing Palestinians for statehood, Fayyadism replaced liberation with management, sovereignty with security coordination, and collective rights with individual consumption.

This economic approach to conflict resolution merely gave Israel time to entrench its colonial enterprise by expanding its settlements on Palestinian land.

The latest economic plan for Gaza, presented by Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, is unlikely to bring economic prosperity to the Palestinians either. The project reflects two deeply contradictory dynamics: it foregrounds opportunities for investment and profit for global and regional oligarchies while systematically ignoring the fundamental national and human rights of the Palestinian people.

Security is framed exclusively around the needs of the occupying power, while Palestinians are compartmentalised, securitised, and surveilled — reduced to a depoliticised labour force stripped of social and national identity.

This approach views people as individuals rather than as nations or historically established communities. Under this logic, individuals are expected to acquiesce to oppression and dispossession once they obtain jobs and improve their living standards.

These strategies are failing to build peace not just in Palestine.

In the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the US has proposed expanding the demilitarised zone and converting it into a joint economic zone, featuring a ski resort. The US approach seems designed not only to pressure Syria to relinquish its sovereign rights over the territory, but also to recast it as a security project in ways that primarily benefit Israel. Under this framework, the US would act as the security guarantor. Its close alliance with Israel, however, puts its impartiality and true intentions in doubt.

In Ukraine, the US has proposed a free economic zone in parts of the Donbas region, from which the Ukrainian army would have to withdraw. This would allow Moscow to expand its influence without direct military confrontation, creating a buffer zone favourable to Russian security interests.

The Donbas has historically been one of Ukraine’s industrial bases, and transforming it into a free economic zone would deprive Ukraine of a critical economic resource. There are also no guarantees that the Russian army would not simply advance after the Ukrainian withdrawal and take the whole region.

These neoliberal “solutions” to the conflicts in Gaza, the Donbas and the Golan Heights are doomed to fail just like the economically-driven peace initiatives of the 1990s and 2000s in occupied Palestine.

The main problem is that the US cannot really provide credible guarantees that the areas would remain stable, so investors can secure returns on their investments. That is because no solid political settlement would be in place, given the fact that these proposals ignore the political, cultural and most importantly, national interests of the people living in these regions. As a result, no serious or independent investor would commit capital to such an arrangement.

Nations are not made up of consumers or labourers; they are made up of people with a common identity and national aspirations.

Economic incentives should follow, not precede, a political resolution that secures the self-determination of indigenous peoples. Any conflict-resolution framework that ignores collective rights and international law is therefore bound to fail. Political settlements must prioritise these rights, a requirement that stands in direct opposition to the logic of neoliberalism.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Deir el-Balah and Khan Younis, Gaza – For the past two years, Khitam Hameed has clung to the hope of a single sliver of news that could fundamentally change the fate of her entire family.

The reopening of the Rafah crossing, shut and controlled by Israel as part of its genocidal war on Gaza in spite of a ceasefire agreement, would allow her family to travel and reunite with her husband outside Gaza.

But for this family, the reopening is not just about freedom of movement. It represents both a chance for reunion after a long separation, and an opportunity to secure treatment for their son, whose life, schooling, and normal childhood have all been destroyed by the two-year Israel-Palestine war.

With the United States pushing a deeply intransigent Israel to progress to phase two of the ceasefire that began on October 10, the reopening of the Rafah crossing was directly tied by the far-right government to the recovery of the remains of the final Israeli captive, and only partially for pedestrian use under strict military supervision.

On Monday, the retrieval of the last Israeli captive’s body appeared to open that locked door, with thousands in urgent need of treatment or family reunification in a state of anxious anticipation.

From her family’s displacement site in the Nuseirat refugee camp near Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, Khitam, 50, a mother of six, sits trying to organise her thoughts as news circulates about Rafah.

Next to her is her 14-year-old son, Yousef, unable to walk, suffering from a rare genetic disorder called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a painful condition primarily affecting his bone development, with potential cardiac complications.

“Yousef has been undergoing treatment for this syndrome since he was very young … he has had around 16 surgeries,” Khitam tells Al Jazeera.

“We got used to hospitals, but before the war, there was some monitoring and a little hope.”

Since long before October 2023, the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt has been a lifeline for Palestinians, not only as a natural exit and entry point, but also as a symbol of connection with the outside world.

Before the war, the crossing was heavily used by patients seeking medical treatment, families visiting relatives abroad, and the movement of goods and supplies that helped ease Gaza’s economic pressure under Israeli blockade.

Its closure, beginning in May 2024 after Israeli forces took control, marked a dramatic turning point in the humanitarian crisis.

The shutdown affected not just the movement of people, but also significantly reduced the flow of medical aid and essential supplies, impacting thousands of patients waiting for treatment outside Gaza, including children and the wounded, amid a severe shortage of health services and medical equipment.

‘Opening the crossing shouldn’t be a miracle’

Before the war, Khitam and her family monitored Yousef’s condition regularly, and he could walk and move.

But the war halted everything. Hospitals were routinely bombed by Israel, and most ceased functioning. Medics were killed by the hundreds, medications ran out, and medical checkups became nearly impossible.

“Since the war, Yousef’s condition has deteriorated. His legs are weaker, walking is harder, he uses crutches,” Khitam pauses before continuing: “He falls often… and my heart is in my throat every time.”

The mother no longer knows the full extent of her son’s health. “I don’t know if he has heart complications, or if his spine has worsened … we are living with him with no answers.”

The war also separated the family. Weeks before the conflict erupted, Khitam’s 52-year-old husband, Hatim, had left Gaza for Egypt, as an initial step to secure a chance for the family to migrate and access advanced medical care for Yousef.

“Since then, I’ve been alone. Six children, one with a special medical condition, war, displacement, hunger,” Khitam says, her voice exhausted.

“Being displaced alone is so difficult. You don’t know where to go, how to protect your children, how to provide food or safety. The constant anxiety and fear have affected everyone, but Yousef suffers the most.”

“No school, no play, no outings, no treatment … even psychologically, he is exhausted. A child his age should be living his life, not caught between war and illness.”

But, she adds, “just the idea of travelling eases us a bit psychologically. It feels like a door might open” for treatment outside of the besieged enclave.

She still fears how the crossing will operate, even as hope keeps her going.

“Even if the crossing opens, not everyone can leave, and not every case will be approved,” she adds. “Opening the crossing shouldn’t be a miracle… it’s a right.”

Yousef’s story intersects with those of hundreds of families of sick children in Gaza, for whom Rafah is not just a crossing, but a lifeline.

‘The family started a new battle against time’

Local estimates indicate that more than 22,000 patients and injured people, including about 5,200 children, are unable to travel for treatment due to the Israeli closure, with thousands more waiting for approved medical transfers that cannot be executed.

Among them is Hur Qeshta, a newborn girl only 15 days old, born with a large, unusual tumour in her neck, affecting breathing and swallowing.

She requires urgent surgery outside Gaza, according to doctors at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza.

Her mother, Doaa Qeshta, 32 and a mother of five, tells Al Jazeera, “From the first moment she was born, the family started a new battle against time to ensure she could urgently travel for treatment.”

Hur was delivered via Caesarean section and now lies in the Nasser Hospital neonatal ICU, on oxygen and fed via a tube from her abdomen.

“She can’t breastfeed, everything is through a tube, and the mass is growing rapidly … all within 15 days,” says her mother.

Doctors confirmed that surgery inside Gaza is currently impossible due to a lack of facilities.

Doaa links her daughter’s condition to the circumstances during her pregnancy, including displacement in a tent in al-Mawasi, exposure to nearby shelling, smoke, gunpowder, hunger, and lack of nutrition.

“I was pregnant during famine … no food, no vitamins, no safety,” she recalls. “Shelling was nearby, 300 metres (980 feet) away… the tent shook; we thought we were dead.”

“Opening the crossing means saving my daughter’s life,” she says. “I’ve registered the whole family as companions … the most important thing is Hur goes, gets treatment, and survives.”

Of the reopening of the Rafah crossing, Doaa says, “We hear news and live on hope, but we are really in a limbo… we don’t know what’s happening or when. We just pray this is true.”

‘Our lives and futures hang on a hope’

The effects of Rafah’s closure go beyond medical access, affecting an entire generation of youth whose education has been halted at a closed gate.

Among those affected is Rana Bana, a 20-year-old from the Daraj neighbourhood in Gaza City.

She graduated from high school in 2023 with a 98 percent average in the science track, with a focus on pharmacy. Within a single year, she received multiple opportunities abroad, but none materialised due to Rafah’s closure.

“In 2024, I was accepted for a scholarship in Egypt, ready to leave, but the crossing closed. A year later, I got a scholarship to Turkiye, did the online interviews, was accepted, and since then I’ve been stuck,” Rana tells Al Jazeera.

Her Turkish scholarship includes 220 students from Gaza, all from different disciplines, most with high academic grades.

Over the past two years, Rana tried not to stagnate, taking Turkish language courses and exploring alternatives like local universities. But she would hold back each time she heard news of Rafah possibly reopening.

“Every time there’s news the crossing might open, I tell myself, ‘Let me wait a bit’… but it turns out to be just talk, and my hopes are dashed,” she adds. “A lot of our time and life has been wasted waiting … our lives and futures hang on a hope.”

Rana is displaced with her family of eight. They returned briefly to northern Gaza during the first ceasefire, found their home intact, but fled again after fighting resumed, and are now settled in Deir el-Balah.

“My biggest fear is leaving and not being able to come back,” she says. “Before, they [her family] were 100 percent supportive. Now there’s fear because the travel process is unclear, and they don’t know how many will be allowed or registered to travel.”

Many Palestinians fear leaving Rafah would be a one-way ticket as part of an openly touted Israeli plan to permanently expel the population from Gaza.

“We students and youth are the most affected group during the war,” Rana says. “Our years have gone by silently, our studies destroyed by war, and no one talks about us. All we want is education — not travel for tourism or anything else.”

“The next phase is not reconstruction.” After the return of the last Israeli captive held in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu said the next phase of the ceasefire will be “disarming Hamas and demilitarising the Gaza Strip.”

In 2007, Gustavo Petro was visiting Washington, DC, when he made an unusual request: to accompany his host’s friend on a school pickup run.

At the time, Petro was a rising star in the Colombian Senate who was in the United States to receive the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award for exposing politicians’ ties to paramilitary groups. His host was Sanho Tree, director of drug policy at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

“That’s something I can’t do in Colombia,” Tree remembered Petro telling him. “If your assassins know you’re going to pick up your kid at a certain time, that’s extremely dangerous.”

Such dangers were not new to Petro.

He began his career being hunted by soldiers as an armed rebel with the M-19, an underground student movement that sought a fairer, more democratic Colombia. After laying down his rifle, he became a whistleblowing senator, holding hearings on the shadowy alliance between politicians and paramilitary groups that reached the highest echelons of power – and earned him a price on his head from a paramilitary leader.

Throughout, he has pursued the same issues in a country torn apart by decades of armed conflict and where land has long been concentrated in the hands of the wealthy few.

“One thing we can say about Petro is that he’s been consistent,” said Alejandro Gaviria, Petro’s former education minister, who has been both a critic and ally of the president.

“If you watch an interview of his 20 years ago, he has exactly the same ideas. Then he was talking about peace, land reform; he was even ahead of his time talking about environmental issues.”

In 2022, Petro was elected the first left-wing president of the South American country and entered the presidential palace with promises to lead Colombia in a more equitable, eco-friendly direction.

On the international stage, he has been a rare figure among Latin American leaders as an outspoken critic of US President Donald Trump. After the US attacked Venezuela in early January and abducted the country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, Trump threatened military action against Colombia. The former rebel responded by saying he would “take up arms” again to defend Colombia. A detente soon followed after a phone call between the leaders.

As Petro has struggled to put his ideas into practice throughout his term and faced tensions with Trump, what drives Colombia’s president?

Bookish rebel

Petro was born in 1960 to a middle-class family in the Caribbean coastal town of Cienaga de Oro, but spent much of his childhood in the rainy capital, Bogota, and his teenage years in the city of Zipaquira.​

From a young age, he questioned authority.

“He likes discussion, but not dogma,” his father, Gustavo Petro Sierra, once said in an interview where he recalled an incident when his son was three. He had tried to punish his son by slapping his hand, but missed and accidentally struck his face. Petro had looked his father in the eye and yelled, “Don’t hit me in the face, Dad!”

Petro’s father, a teacher, inspired his son’s love of reading, and Petro was particularly influenced by the celebrated novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His father gave him a copy as a birthday gift when he was a child, according to former Culture Minister Juan David Correa, who met Petro in 2021 as the editor of his memoir.

The magical realism epic immortalises Colombia’s civil wars and class struggles through the saga of the Buendia family through the 19th and early 20th centuries. After independence from Spain in 1810, Colombia experienced intermittent warfare between its two main political factions: the secular, reformist Liberals and the Conservatives, who wanted to maintain the Catholic, colonial status quo.

“That was a book that was definitive in our lives as Colombians,” explained Correa, noting Petro’s belief that Colombians must know their history.

“We have to know who these oligarchies or aristocracies are that ruled the country over the past 200 years of solitude [since independence], as [Petro] called it.”

In the colonial era, the Spanish oversaw a feudal-like system in which landless campesinos (rural workers) toiled for a pittance on behalf of wealthy landowners. In the Colombia that Petro grew up in, this system persisted. Even at the dawn of the new millennium, only 1 percent of landowners possessed half the arable land.

As a boy, Petro’s mother, Clara Nubia Urrego, would tell him stories about the turmoil in the country, including the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Gaitan, a presidential candidate for the Liberals, called for reforms, including land distribution, which landowners fiercely opposed. His murder in 1948 kicked off a decade of bloodshed, known as La Violencia, between Liberal armed rebels and the Conservative government.

A truce in 1958 led to a power-sharing arrangement between the Liberal and Conservative parties, known as the National Front. Things had seemingly calmed by the early 1960s, but in 1964, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, the remaining Liberal rebels roaming the countryside came together as the communist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN).

Meanwhile, the National Front blocked any legitimate alternatives, going so far as to rig the election on April 19, 1970 against the populist ANAPO (National Popular Alliance), which attracted people fed up with the two-party system, including Petro’s mother, who had joined the party. Seeing his mother’s sadness at the election results became Petro’s political awakening. He was 10.

At his Catholic school in Zipaquira, Petro and three other friends formed a study group and pledged to dedicate their lives to a better Colombia. They read Alternativa, a left-wing magazine founded by Garcia Marquez, which ran interviews with Chilean and Argentinian rebels and criticised the US sway over Latin America. They became involved with local unions, bringing together workers, salt miners and teachers.

In his memoir, Petro recalls his “communist” beliefs did not make him popular with priests or his classmates whose parents hung portraits of Spain’s fascist dictator General Francisco Franco on their walls. But he credits his high school as the place where he learned about liberation theology, a strand of Catholicism that advocates uplifting the oppressed.

“Since then, love for the poor has remained by my side,” he wrote.

“I didn’t learn that from Marxism, but from liberation theology.”

Occupying a hillside

In 1978, after enrolling at university in Bogota to study economics, Petro was handed a document by Pio Quinto Jaimes, a teacher involved in activist circles. It outlined the goals of an underground student movement known as the 19th of April Movement or M-19, named after the 1970 election. Jaimes was impressed by Petro’s work with the unions and considered him a worthwhile prospect for the group.

Although often described as “urban guerrillas”, M-19 was distinct from the uniformed rebels of the FARC or the ELN. Whereas the FARC recruited from rural workers and wanted a Cuban-style Marxist revolution, M-19 mainly consisted of politicised students who sought social democracy, denied by the two-party system.

Unlike the FARC’s camouflaged commandos, who would raid army outposts before disappearing into the jungle, M-19 operated in the cities and preferred symbolic stunts such as stealing the sword of Simon Bolivar, Colombia’s 19th-century liberation hero, from a Bogota museum.

“Bolivar has not died,” read a note they left behind. “His sword continues his fight. It now falls into our hands, where it is pointed at the hearts of those who exploit Colombia.”

The M-19 hijacked milk trucks to redivert the goods to poorer neighbourhoods, and orchestrated kidnappings targeting Colombia’s wealthy elite.

Petro read the document from cover to cover.

“The movement connected me with the reality of the country, with my mother’s stories about Gaitan, Bolivar, and the ANAPO,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It was as if it had struck a chord that intensely stirred some fibres within me.”

Petro, along with two of his high school study group friends, joined the M-19.

Although he learned to use a gun, he did not take part in armed operations. He was instead tasked with disseminating propaganda. He took on the nom de guerre Aureliano, after a rebel leader in Marquez’s novel.

After graduation, Petro returned to Zipaquira and was elected an ombudsman, a public advocate, in 1981, to hear residents’ complaints about the local government.

In the early 1980s, Petro edited a newsletter – Letter to the People – where he called on readers to occupy a hillside on the outskirts and turn it into a housing project for poor people. Some 400 impoverished families answered the call and found 22-year-old Petro and a group of young activists measuring out 6-by-12 metre (19.7×39.4 feet) plots. There were no wells or sewage, and residents had to collect rainwater.

The squatters were eventually granted permission to stay by the mayor, and the community evolved into a neighbourhood named Bolivar 83.

‘My youth was over’

By 1984, as peace negotiations between the government and M-19 gained momentum, Petro publicly acknowledged his involvement in the group.

“I did so at a demonstration that was one of the largest in the municipality’s history,” he said in an interview. “From then on, my life changed. My youth was over.”

After telling the crowd he belonged to M-19, Petro stepped back to applause.

But not everyone was pleased.

Petro’s father, who had no idea about his son’s secret life, was shocked by the risks he had been taking.

The talks with the government soon fell apart, meaning M-19 members were once again targets for arrest. Petro was forced to go underground.

He lay low in Bolivar 83, sleeping in different beds each night, and wore a disguise, a yellow dress and a wig, pretending to be a woman.

Around this time, Petro had a psychedelic revelation under the guidance of a shaman on a sacred mountain. Drinking ayahuasca, a powerful Amazonian brew, he experienced intense visions. The first showed an Indigenous princess descending from above as he was enveloped by roots.

“What does this mean?” he asked the shaman.

“Well, you are like a spirit taking care of nature,” the spiritual healer replied.

Petro, who recounted this experience in the book Children of the Amazon (2023), said this was the moment he realised his responsibility towards the environment. His second vision was more troubling: he saw his own death during an ambush.

In October 1985, soldiers poured into Bolivar 83, scouring the neighbourhood for M-19 rebels and intimidating residents. A terrified boy revealed the secret tunnels where Petro was hiding.

Petro was arrested, tortured for four days in a military barracks, and imprisoned. He served 16 months for possession of weapons, which he claimed were planted.

While imprisoned, he missed the birth of his first son, Nicolas. Katia Burgos, his wife, who he had known since childhood, was also with M-19.

Meanwhile, Colombia’s internal armed conflict escalated beyond the rebels and the government.

The rise of narcos

The emergence of drug cartels or narcotics traffickers, aka narcos, added another dimension to the conflict.

Cocaine, a white powder refined from coca leaves, gained popularity in the 1970s, fuelled partly by US disco culture. Initially, Colombia was mainly a transit point for cocaine smuggled from Peru or Bolivia, but it was not long before coca cultivation expanded within Colombia, soon becoming the most viable livelihood in rural areas.

Cocaine barons and other wealthy businessmen began bankrolling private armies and paramilitaries to protect their families and property from armed rebels.

Although both were engaged in criminal activities, the rebels sought to overthrow the ruling elite, but the narcos wanted to become part of it, pitting them on opposite sides of the conflict.

After his release from Bogota’s La Modelo prison in 1987 at age 26, the unease of Petro’s rebellion days stuck with him, and he even took to sleeping with an assault rifle under his bed.

The following year, he met Mary Luz Herran, an ardent M-19 member since she was 14. They would go on to marry and have two children, a daughter named Andrea and a son named Andres, before splitting.

Soon after they met, in 1990, the M-19 became the first significant rebel group to demobilise, transforming into the M-19 Democratic Alliance party.

But it was a dangerous time to be in Colombian politics.

In the 1980s and 90s, some 6,000 members of the left-wing Patriotic Union party were killed by narcos, paramilitaries and the security services.

M-19 were not spared, either. In 1990, their presidential candidate, Carlos Pizarro, was shot on board a passenger plane mid-flight.

While serving a term in Congress, Petro began receiving death threats from a paramilitary group called Colsingue, or Colombia Without Guerrillas, and for his and his family’s safety, he agreed to a diplomatic posting in Belgium in 1994. While there, he studied environmentalism and economics at the University of Louvain, and he became deeply interested in the work of Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who warned that while the global economy relies on constant growth, the Earth cannot be exploited forever.

But Petro grew restless in Brussels. “I felt bored, nostalgic, and eager to return to the political arena,” he writes in his memoirs.

He returned to Colombia, where he was re-elected to Congress in 1998. Two years later, he met his third wife, then a 24-year-old law student named Veronica Alcocer. They soon married, and despite initial tension with Veronica’s father — whom Petro described as an “almost fascist” in an interview with a Colombian magazine — Petro and his father-in-law grew close through their shared love of reading and intellectualism. His funeral in 2012 was one of the few times Petro cried in public. They have two daughters, ​​Sofia and Antonella.

Meanwhile, in a bid to start peace talks in 1998, then-President Andres Pastrana conceded territory roughly the size of Switzerland to Colombia’s largest armed group, the FARC. It was meant to be neutral ground, but the rebels used it to recruit and train child soldiers, grow coca, hold captives and enforce their own brand of justice.

Enter Alvaro Uribe. A right-wing hardliner, Uribe won the 2002 presidential election by promising to quash the rebels with an iron fist.

With US support, Uribe’s beefed-up military inflicted devastating defeats on the FARC. Washington had an interest in stopping the flow of cocaine from the source to the US, and in the 2000s and 2010s, Colombia was the third-largest recipient of US military aid after Israel and Egypt.

Defying death squads

Overall, security improved, but the Uribe era revealed that the authorities had been colluding with paramilitaries for years. While presenting themselves as anti-communist vigilantes, the paramilitaries were responsible for the lion’s share of civilian deaths, terrorising vast swaths of the country.

In one particularly brutal episode in 1997, a band of armed men descended on the village of El Aro in Antioquia. Villagers were brutally tortured and raped, and up to 17 people were killed. The paramilitaries burned the village down as they left, and witnesses reported seeing a helicopter circling above — a yellow aircraft belonging to the Antioquia governor’s office, which at the time was occupied by Uribe.

The ghosts of El Aro were reawakened in the parapolitica (para-politics) scandal of 2006 after journalists and prosecutors revealed that several lawmakers were in league with far-right paramilitary groups, allowing them to murder and intimidate opponents while enriching themselves through bribes and illegal land grabs.

What happened next became one of the defining periods of Petro’s career. He held public hearings and accused the perpetrators of the El Aro massacre of operating with Uribe’s blessing while he was governor, such as by helping establish civilian “self-defence” groups as a front for the militias.

“Why the silence, Mr President?” Petro pressed him at a hearing. “Or does the government accept that violent narcoterrorists have a presence in its ranks?”

The then-president fired back, calling the senator a “terrorist in civilian clothes”. Uribe’s alleged paramilitary ties later landed him in a years-long court case from 2012, ending in his conviction for witness tampering last year, which was soon overturned on appeal.

Having lost comrades like Pizarro to the bloody purges of the 1980s and 90s, Petro knew all too well what he was up against. The scandal established him as a fearless crusader, but won him few friends.

“He was the one to [expose the paramilitaries] at a time when it was incredibly dangerous,” said Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli, a human rights advocate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

“The impunity was so rampant … he was speaking to a Congress where 30 percent of it was linked to these groups.”

Tree, who nominated Petro for the human rights award in DC, remembered how the senator was on edge during this period.

“When I would meet with him in the mid-2000s in Bogota, he couldn’t stand near a window, and every night he had to go home by a different route,” Tree recalled.

Petro’s paranoia about standing near windows was not unwarranted; Salvatore Mancuso, the strongman behind the El Aro massacre, later confirmed that Petro’s name had indeed been on his hit list.

Mayor of Bogota

In 2010, Petro launched his first presidential bid but found himself at odds with his own party, the Democratic Pole, which sidelined him in favour of another candidate. Petro ran anyway and came in third overall.

He founded a new party, Humane Colombia, and successfully ran for mayor of Bogota in 2011.

While the previous mayor and his brother profited from corruption, Petro implemented many progressive reforms. A ban on brandishing firearms in public saw murder rates plunge to a three-decade low. Petro’s administration addressed animal cruelty, stopping the practices of using horse-drawn carts for rubbish collection and bullfighting, and pioneered mobile clinics for homeless drug users, treating addiction as a matter of public health.

“We were the first organisation to propose these [drug] reform ideas,” said Julian Quintero, director of Social Technical Action (ATS), a Bogota-based NGO focused on harm reduction and drug policy reform.

“Petro participated with us, and he sort of embraced the proposals we made to him.”

But Quintero noted that Petro’s governing style was also uneven, characterised by a rapid turnover of staff – a preview of his presidential years.

“Petro did very well as a senator because he’s a very good analyst who trembles with accusations when he’s in the opposition,” Quintero said.

“But when he takes office, he doesn’t stand out for his bureaucratic and technical skills. He’s not a good administrator. He changes teams very quickly, not allowing for continuity in his projects.”

Moreover, he added, in Colombia, “the left isn’t used to governing”.

Quintero noted that deeply entrenched right-wing interests also made Petro’s job more difficult. A failed attempt to overhaul the capital’s waste management system in 2013 ignited a political battle that saw Petro ousted from office by the arch-conservative Attorney General Alejandro Ordonez. That decision drew mass protests, and Petro was reinstated a month later – a sign that his brand of politics was gaining momentum.

Path to victory

In 2010, Petro had lost his presidential bid to Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s defence minister, who oversaw his campaign against the FARC in the 2000s. But it was Santos who – to Uribe’s dismay – brokered peace with the rebels in 2016.

When Uribe’s protege Ivan Duque took office in 2018, however, the government largely abandoned that agreement, and violence surged.

“[The Uribe faction] wanted a candidate, basically a puppet, who was to rip up the peace agreement and not let it advance,” WOLA’s Sanchez-Garzoli explained.

Armed groups, including rogue FARC commanders, drug cartels and paramilitaries, rushed to fill the power vacuum, where they once held sway.

Then, in 2021, Duque’s attempt to raise taxes prompted mass protests that were met with police brutality and dozens of deaths. The unrest and growing public disillusionment with the status quo, now fully exposed by the collapsing peace process and the pandemic-ravaged economy, meant Colombia finally had an opening for its first progressive president; a break from the conservative elite such as Uribe and Duque, who came from, and represented the interests of, the wealthy landowning class.

A leftist coalition called the Historic Pact rallied behind Petro for the 2022 elections.

Eager to include Liberals as well, Petro reached out to economist and former government official Gaviria.

“It’s kind of funny because when you see him at a rally, he’s really energised, but in a one-on-one interaction, he is timid, he is quiet, he is difficult to engage in conversation,” Gaviria said, recalling Petro’s visit to his home as he tried to build a coalition.

“When he visited my apartment, I was trying to ask him questions, and he never said anything to me. He stayed silent for five minutes.”

The presidential hopeful eventually proposed that Gaviria, then the Liberals’ presidential candidate, ally with his progressive forces.

Ultimately, in the second round of the election, Gaviria threw his support behind Petro, who offered him a place in his new cabinet as education minister when he took office that August.

International stage

As president, Petro took his message to the world. At his first United Nations speech, he warned, “the jungle is burning” while global powers were fighting over drugs and resources. He highlighted what he saw as the hypocrisy of vilifying cocaine while protecting coal and oil.

“What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil?” he asked. With Colombia’s cocaine industry having fuelled decades of civil war, Petro has called for cocaine legalisation, calling the so-called war on drugs a failure.

“Cocaine is illegal because it is made in Latin America, not because it is worse than whisky,” he told a broadcast government meeting in February 2025.

In confronting the climate crisis, he has halted fracking and new gas projects to shift Colombia towards clean energy. In an economy reliant on fuel exports, however, this decision has been met with fierce scrutiny.

Petro has also sought to address the country’s armed conflict.

Influenced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who believed true forgiveness meant forgiving the unforgivable, Petro presented Congress with a plan to bring all remaining cartels, armed rebels and paramilitaries to the table, including by suspending arrest warrants and empowering local leaders as mediators.

The plan was called “Total Peace”.

‘A dream’

Petro’s peace initiative was put to the test in Buenaventura, a key Colombian port on the Pacific Coast. The port had long been a strategic hub for cocaine smugglers loading cargo onto ships bound worldwide.

Then, in 2019, a deadly turf war exploded. Residents were terrified to leave their homes. In desperation, local archbishop Ruben Dario Jaramillo performed a mass exorcism of the city by spraying the streets with holy water from a convoy of vehicles.

But in October 2022, the leaders of two rival gangs met and shook hands at a church service, thanks to a truce brokered by Jaramillo, building on the Total Peace initiative. The following six weeks saw only one killing, compared with the previous monthly death toll of 25.

The broader peace plan, however, has had flaws. Anticipating a deal, armed groups consolidated their positions to get the upper hand in negotiations while taking advantage of ceasefires to recruit and resupply.

As Quintero observed, the groups calling themselves “guerrillas” today are mostly criminal gangs using the label to legitimise their actions. “There are no guerrillas with the ideology to overthrow the state,” he said.

“[Instead], today there are gangs of very well-armed drug traffickers posing as guerrillas.”

The two most problematic ones are the Gulf Clan and the ELN. The Gulf Clan is a powerful narco-paramilitary crime syndicate demanding talks to negotiate their surrender while aggressively expanding its empire. The ELN continues to carry out attacks and kidnappings and is battling a renegade FARC faction in the dense jungles of Catatumbo, a fertile coca-growing region near Venezuela, displacing tens of thousands of people and prompting Petro to declare a temporary state of emergency last January.

Gaviria said that while reining in heavily armed drug dealers hiding in mountains and jungles would be challenging for any government, Petro has not really had a plan.

“He thought political will was enough to achieve Total Peace, which is completely wrong,” Gaviria said.

He compared Petro’s approach with Santos’s.

“Santos had a strategy, a group negotiating with the FARC. He met with that group every week, having conversations with his experts around the world … he was very disciplined in the way he was conducting this difficult topic.

“Petro was just completely different. No strategy at all,” Gaviria added. “Big announcements and political will. [Petro] thought that was enough, and now we know that no, it was not enough, especially if you’re dealing with such a complex problem.

“Total Peace was not a strategy. Total Peace was an idea, a dream.”

The chaotic nature of Petro’s cabinet has also complicated matters. The turnover rate is high, averaging a new minister every 19 days. Gaviria resigned in early 2023, along with three other ministers, during a fallout over health reforms. And 13 ministers lost or left their jobs in just three months between late 2024 and early 2025.

“I think this is a direct result of his style of policymaking,” said Gaviria, describing it as “undisciplined”.

Petro tends to replace ministers with loyalists and former members of the M-19, while publicly squabbling with former staff and accusing them of disloyalty. Some connect Petro’s perilous past to this governing style.

“Petro has a paranoid style of government that almost defines him,” said Gaviria.

“He is always thinking that there is a conspiracy against him. And probably this idea is related to being a former guerrilla member and living [in hiding].”

Correa agreed, noting that Petro does not trust many people.

The replacements he selects, too, are not necessarily the best-qualified.

For example, Sanchez-Garzoli believes the ELN peace process collapsed because Petro appointed “an ideologue and less of a real negotiator”.

“They basically blew apart a process that could have demobilised thousands,” she explained.

For Gaviria, Petro is these days more interested in ideological battles on social media than in leading the country. “I think he knows that he has not been an effective president,” he said. “Governing a country can be difficult, boring … [and to be successful] you have to engage in difficult conversations. You have to change your mind.”

Petro, he believes, has struggled to accept that “tragic destiny”.

Legacy

Petro’s advocacy on Palestine – and the severing of diplomatic ties with Israel over its genocidal war on Gaza – the climate crisis, drug reform and willingness to confront Trump have won him international praise. Trump, without any evidence, has accused Petro of running cocaine mills and called him a “sick man” on several occasions.

Back home, Petro points to having reduced poverty and infant mortality rates, increased agricultural production, and provided greater access to education, but his criticised peace strategy has failed to deliver broad demobilisation, and stark inequality persists. His approval rating has dropped from 56 percent when he took office to almost 36 percent.

Petro’s presidency has been overshadowed by scandals, including his eldest son Nicolas’s arrest for alleged money laundering linked to narco campaign funding. He calls such attacks targeting his inner circle “lawfare”, aimed at weakening him, something he experienced when he was briefly ousted as mayor of Bogota.

“The first thing they tried to destroy was my family,” he told Spanish daily El Pais last February. “They wanted to destroy the emotional ties because a man without emotional ties becomes hard, bad, and errs.”

He conceded that the presidency is a role that brings him “absolute unhappiness”.

As Petro faces the end of his presidency this year, his legacy may be that of a polarising figure, a revolutionary who tried to overthrow the system from within — yet was unable to solve Colombia’s toughest challenges.

Still, Petro’s supporters see his presidency as the start of a social transformation.

“Our country is a very conservative society; our values, our classism are very, very evident,” said Correa.

“I think that it will take two generations to reconstruct the society … And I think that this government represents only a beginning, a seed for the new generation.”

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders says it will provide Israeli authorities with the personal details of some of its Palestinian and international staff working in Gaza and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory.

But critics warn Israel, whose army has killed more than 1,700 health workers – including 15 employees of the charity, also known by its French initials MSF – during the genocide in Gaza, could use the information to target more humanitarian workers in the besieged Strip and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

MSF said it faced an “impossible choice” to either provide the information or be forced by Israel to suspend its operations.

On January 1, Israel withdrew the licences of 37 aid groups, including MSF, the Norwegian Refugee Council and International Rescue Committee and Oxfam, saying they failed to adhere to the new “security and transparency standards”.

The measure could exacerbate an already dire humanitarian situation for people in war-shattered Gaza, as they endure continued attacks.

Here’s what you need to know:

Why did Israel corner NGOs?

Last year, Israel said it would suspend aid groups that did not meet new requirements on sharing detailed information about their employees, funding and operations.

According to rules set out by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs, the information to be handed over includes passports, CVs and names of family members, including children.

It said it would reject organisations it suspected of inciting racism, denying the state of Israel’s existence or the holocaust. It would also ban those it deems as supporting “an armed struggle by an enemy state or a terrorist organisation against the State of Israel”.

The measures were roundly condemned, given that Israel has weaponised aid throughout the genocide and falsely accused the United Nations humanitarian agencies of working with Hamas fighters and sympathisers.

Israel has also accused MSF – without providing evidence – of employing people who fought with Palestinian groups.

MSF said it would “never knowingly” employ people engaging in military activity.

Why did MSF agree to Israel’s demands?

MSF runs medical services in Gaza as well as the occupied West Bank, providing critical and emergency medical care, including surgical, trauma, and maternal care. It also helped run field hospitals in Gaza during two years of Israeli genocide.

In a statement on Saturday, MSF said following “unreasonable demands to hand over personal information about our staff”, it has informed Israeli authorities that, as an exceptional measure, “we are prepared to share a defined list of Palestinian and international staff names, subject to clear parameters with staff safety at its core”.

It said MSF’s Palestinian employees agreed with the decision after extensive discussions.

“We would share this information with the expectation that it will not negatively affect MSF staff or our medical humanitarian operations,” MSF said. “Since 1 January 2026, all arrivals of our international staff into Gaza have been denied and all our supplies have been blocked.”

How have observers reacted?

MSF’s decision was condemned by some doctors, activists and campaigners, saying it could endanger Palestinians.

A former MSF employee, who requested to remain anonymous, told Al Jazeera, “It is extremely concerning, from a duty of care perspective, from a data protection perspective, and from the perspective of the most foundational commitment to humanity, that MSF would make a decision like this.”

“Staff are extremely concerned for their wellbeing and futures. Other NGOs have been in uproar, since it further exposes their decision not to concede to Israel’s demands,” they said. “MSF faces profoundly difficult decisions – concede to the demands of a genocidal regime, or refuse and face complete expulsion and an abrupt end to all health activities in the coming weeks. But what is humanitarianism under genocide? There must be alternatives – alternatives that demand a much bolder and more disruptive approach to humanitarianism amid such brutal political decline.”

Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British surgeon who has volunteered in Gaza several times, said, “The moral bankruptcy lies in the implication that during a genocide, Palestinians are capable of making free consent. Their employees have as much choice as the Palestinians who knowingly went to their death at the feeding stations to feed their families.”

He added that the decision was “in clear contravention” of European Union data protection laws.

Hanna Kienzler, a professor of global health at King’s College London, said on X, “MSF, you have withdrawn your teams from war-affected settings before when you felt a mission’s integrity and/or safety were compromised. What makes you think Palestinian staff can be treated like cannon fodder so you can continue your mission in Gaza?”

Have other groups heeded Israel’s demands?

Israel says 23 organisations have agreed to the new registration rules. The others are understood to be weighing their decisions.

Al Jazeera contacted Oxfam and is awaiting a response.

Is aid being delivered to Gaza?

Gaza has been pulled back from the brink of famine, but needs far more aid to support the population amid continued Israeli attacks – more than 400 people have been killed since a fragile ceasefire came into place in October, large-scale displacement and a healthcare crisis.

Food shortages persist.

Israel said it would commit to allowing 600 aid trucks per day to enter the Strip, but in reality, only 200 or so are being let in, locals say.