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The IDF will permanently seize parts of the Gaza Strip if Hamas doesn't release the hostages held in captivity, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Friday.

"I have instructed the IDF to seize additional areas in Gaza, evacuate the population, and expand security zones around Gaza to protect Israeli communities and IDF soldiers. The more Hamas persists in its refusal to release the hostages, the more territory it will lose, which will be annexed to Israel," Katz said.

"If the hostages are not released, Israel will continue to take more and more territory in the Strip for permanent control," he concluded.

On Thursday, Katz approved the continuation of military operations in Gaza.

Katz highlighted the importance of continuing the military pressure on Gaza until the hostages are released.

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When Donald Trump met President Zelensky in New York last September, the then US presidential candidate exuded confidence he could bring the war in Ukraine to an early end. "If we win, I think we're going to get it resolved very quickly," he said.

How quickly he meant varied over time. In a TV debate a few days earlier, Mr Trump had promised he would "get it settled before I even become president". This was an escalation on his previous commitment in May 2023 to stop the fighting in the first 24 hours of his presidency.

Mr Trump has now been in office for more than two months and the penny may be beginning to drop in the White House that trying to end a conflict as bitter and complex as this may take time.

The Department of Homeland Security said on Friday that it would revoke the temporary legal status of more than 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans welcomed into the US under a Biden-era sponsorship process, according to a notice posted to the Federal Register and signed by the homeland security chief Kristi Noem.

The order cuts short a two-year “parole” program – known as CHNV – under Joe Biden that allowed 532,000 people who had arrived in the US since October 2022 with financial sponsors to obtain two-year work permits to live and work in the US. Noem’s notice said they will lose their legal status on 24 April.

A Venezuelan soccer player who was in the U.S. awaiting a ruling on his asylum claim was deported to El Salvador under suspicion of being a member of a dangerous gang in what his attorney said was a misinterpretation of a tattoo.

Agents who detained Jerce Reyes Barrios, 36, last September said his tattoo was "proof of gang membership," his attorney Linette Tobin wrote in a sworn statement this week. But the tattoo – a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word "Dios," which means God in Spanish – was designed to look like the logo for Reyes Barrios' favorite soccer team, Real Madrid, Tobin said.

Reyes Barrios was apparently one of the over 200 Venezuelan migrants swept up in the Trump administration's deportations under the Alien Enemies Act in a deal with El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele to hold the detainees at a notorious prison there. The deportations have kicked off a legal back-and-forth between the administration and a federal judge, while the government has refused to make public any evidence that the Venezuelans are affiliated with Tren de Aragua.

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Local health officials said Israeli strikes killed at least 85 Palestinians across he Gaza Strip overnight and into Thursday, bringing the total to nearly 600 killed since Israel shattered a truce that had facilitated the release of more than two dozen hostages and brought relative calm since late January.

Hours later, Hamas fired three rockets at Israel without causing casualties, in the first such attack since Israel broke the ceasefire on Tuesday.

Zaher al-Waheidi, the head of the records department at the Gaza Health Ministry, said Israeli bombardments have killed at least 592 people in the past three days.

The Israeli military said it was again enforcing a blockade on northern Gaza, including Gaza City. Palestinians were not being ordered to leave northern Gaza but can no longer enter, the military said, and are only allowed to move south on foot using the coastal road. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had returned to what remains of their homes in the north during the ceasefire.re

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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s key peace demand that Western allies stop providing military aid and intelligence to Ukraine is quietly being ignored by the European Union.

As U.S.-led talks with Russia and Ukraine progress, without the Europeans at the table, the 27-nation bloc is pressing ahead with a steel “porcupine strategy” aimed at building the Ukrainian armed forces, and the country’s defense industry, into an even more formidable opponent.

At an EU summit on Thursday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that it’s “central” that Ukraine should remain an independent democratic nation that can continue its journey toward EU membership and “that it also has a strong army of its own after a peace agreement.”

“For us, it will be important to continue to support Ukraine significantly — as the European Union as a whole, as allies and friends and as individual countries,” Scholz told reporters in Brussels.

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