Relatives of Venezuelan migrants deported from the U.S. to a maximum security prison in El Salvador attend a vigil in front of El Salvador embassy in Caracas, Venezuela on April 2, 2025. (Photo: Juan Barreto / AFP via Getty Images)
“The cruelty of the U.S. and Salvadoran governments has put these people outside the protection of the law and caused immense pain to their families,” said one human rights advocate.
Human Rights Watch on Friday accused the governments of the United States and El Salvador of “a grave violation of international human rights law” over the deportation more than 230 Venezuelan nationals by the Trump administration to a megaprison in El Salvador last month.
The actions taken against the deportees constitute both enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention, according to a statement from the group released Friday.
The governments of the United States and El Salvador have subjected more than 200 Venezuelan nationals to enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention.
“The cruelty of the U.S. and Salvadoran governments has put these people outside the protection of the law and caused immense pain to their families,” said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch.
The group said that since their removal, the Venezuelans “have been held incommunicado” and that the United States and Salvadoran officials have not released a list of the people who were removed, though CBS News last month published a list of names the outlet obtained.
The administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used law that gives the president broad authority to detain or deport non-citizens during times of war, to justify dozens of the deportations—triggering a fierce legal battle.
The Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act in response to an alleged “invasion” by “Tren de Aragua,” a Venezuelan gang, but the government has produced scant evidence that the people removed had ties to Tren de Aragua. One hundred and one of the deportees were removed under regular immigration procedures.
According to Human Rights Watch, the Salvadoran government has failed to offer a legal basis for detaining the Venezuelan deportees and has not indicated when or whether they will be released.
“It appears that their detention is wholly arbitrary and potentially indefinite; a grave violation of El Salvador’s human rights obligations,” the group said.
Enforced disappearance, according to Human Rights Watch, is when officials deprive someone of their liberty and then conceal the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person. The violation is “especially serious” because it means they are outside the protection of the law.
The group is calling on U.S. authorities to publicly identify the Venezuelans who were removed to El Salvador and is urging the Salvadoran government to “confirm their current whereabouts, disclose whether there is any legal basis for their detention, and allow them contact with the outside world.”
The statement from Human Rights Watch also detailed the struggle that family members of the deported individuals have faced getting information about them.
The group has interviewed 40 relatives of people “apparently” removed to El Salvador, and all of them told Human Rights Watch that U.S. immigration authorities initially informed their relatives, who were in U.S. immigration detention, that they would be sent to Venezuela. They were not told they would be sent to El Salvador.
“Nobody should be forced to piece together bits of information from the media or to read into the authorities’ silence to find out where their relatives are being held,” Goebertus said. “Salvadoran authorities should urgently disclose the names and locations of all detainees transferred from the US, and allow them to contact their families.”
In addition to the Venezuelans who were deported in March, the Trump administration also deported a smaller number of Salvadoran nationals. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has admitted that one of the men sent to El Salvador was deported in “error.” On Thursday, the Supreme Court instructed the Trump administration to take steps to retrieve the man it had wrongly deported.
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Protesters demonstrate demanding justice for drug war victims, after the arrest of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, in Quezon City on March 11, 2025. (Photo: Earvin Perias / AFP)
“Duterte’s arrest on an ICC warrant… shows that suspected perpetrators of the worst crimes, including government leaders, can and will face justice,” said one human rights advocate.
On Tuesday, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by local authorities at Manila’s international airport after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant accusing him of crimes against humanity. News of his arrest prompted some observers to urge the arrest of another public figure who faces ICC charges: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Duterte case will pose a test for the court, according to The New York Times. In the past six months, the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Min Aung Hlaing, the head of the military junta in Myanmar.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote “Perhaps Netanyahu and Gallant will be next…” in response to the news. Danny Shaw, a professor at City University of New York, posted a video of Duterte’s arrest and wrote: “Why don’t they arrest Netanyahu?”
Wim Zwijnenburg, a project leader at the Dutch peace organization PAX, wrote, “now do Netanyahu.”
On Tuesday night, Duterte was placed on a plane that was bound for The Hague, where the court is headquartered, per the Times, citing two people with knowledge of the matter.
The ICC has accused Duterte of crimes against humanity during his time as president and when he was the mayor of the city of Davao. During his tenure as president, from 2016 to 2022, Duterte’s security forces carried out thousands of killings that his government cast as drug-related cases. In a 2017 report, Human Rights Watch described his “war on drugs” as effectively “a campaign of extrajudicial execution in impoverished areas of Manila and other urban areas.” Philippine National Police officers and unidentified “vigilantes” killed over 7,000 people between the start of his term and the release of that Human Rights Watch report, according to the group.
In 2017, Duterte earned praise from U.S. President Donald Trump, who told him in a phone call that he was doing “an unbelievable job on the drug problem,” according to reporting at the time.
“Duterte’s arrest on an ICC warrant is a hopeful sign for victims in the Philippines and beyond. It shows that suspected perpetrators of the worst crimes, including government leaders, can and will face justice, wherever they are in the world,” said Agnes Callamard, secretary general of the human rights group Amnesty International, in a statement Tuesday. “At a time when too many governments renege on their ICC obligations while others attack or sanction international courts, Duterte’s arrest is a huge moment for the power of international law.”
Duterte’s former chief legal counsel and presidential spokesperson, Salvador Panelo, said that the “ICC has no jurisdiction in the Philippines,” in part because “the country withdrew as an ICC member state in 2018,” according to a post on social media.
According to the Times, the court says the case only considers alleged crimes from the time when the country was still part of the court.
According to a copy of he warrant, which was obtained by the Times, three judges of the ICC said they believed Duterte “was responsible for the drug war killings that took place when he was president and mayor of Davao, and that there were reasonable grounds to believe that these attacks were ‘both widespread and systematic.’”
The government itself, in 2022, said that over 6,200 “drug suspects” were killed during Duterte’s war on drugs starting in 2016. Rights groups put the total number of people who died much higher, in the tens of thousands, according to PBS.
Trucks carrying aid wait in front of the Rafah border crossing on March 2, 2025 in Rafah, Egypt. The flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza has been blocked, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Hamas had not accepted a US-proposed temporary extension to the ceasefire deal, following the expiration of the first phase on Saturday. Photo by Ali Moustafa/Getty Images
“There will be famine and chaos”
Israel has reneged on the existing ceasefire agreement they had agreed to with Hamas. The first phase of the ceasefire expired Saturday and Israel announced on Sunday it is halting all humanitarian aid and fuel deliveries to Gaza and closing the border between Israel and Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that he made the decision “in full coordination with President Trump and his people.”
In a statement Hamas called the suspension of aid a “war crime” and a violation of the ceasefire agreement. It said Netanyahu’s “decision to suspend humanitarian aid is cheap blackmail, a war crime and a blatant coup against the [ceasefire] agreement”.
Stephen Zunes, the director of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco, says the US’s apparent proposal favoring Israel follows a well-established pattern seen since the beginning of the war.
“This is typical,” he told Al Jazeera. “Hamas and Israel will agree to something. Then Israel will try to revise it in its favor. Then the US will put forward a new proposal that is in Israel’s favor and then the US will blame Hamas for not accepting that proposal.”
Israel’s decision to block all aid going into the Gaza Strip is a war crime under international law, a human rights expert says.
Kenneth Roth – former head of Human Rights Watch who is now a visiting professor at Princeton University – said Israel as an occupying power has an “absolute duty” to facilitate humanitarian aid under the Geneva Conventions.
“Israel’s latest threat to cut off all aid is a resumption of the war-crime starvation strategy” that led to the arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by the International Criminal Court, he said.
Doctors Without Borders said Israel’s decision is “outrageous and will have devastating consequences”, said the group’s emergency coordinator Caroline Seguin.
“Humanitarian aid should never be used as a tool of war,” added the charity, known by its French acronym MSF, in a statement. “Regardless of negotiations between warring parties, people in Gaza still need an immediate and massive scale-up of humanitarian supplies.”
Jeremy Corbyn, who once led the UK Labour Party, said that Israel’s blocking of humanitarian aid was a “resumption of genocide”, before adding that the current British government – led by Labour – was “complicit.”
Fayza Nassar, a woman living in the heavily destroyed urban Jabaliya refugee camp, said the closure would exacerbate already dire living conditions.
“There will be famine and chaos,” she said. “Closing the crossings is a heinous crime.”
Israel’s offensive has killed at least 48,388 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It says more than half of those killed were women and children.
Israel’s decision to halt aid into Gaza is alarming.
International humanitarian law is clear: We must be allowed access to deliver vital lifesaving aid.
We can’t roll back the progress of the past 42 days. We need to get aid in and the hostages out.
Israel's new cutoff of humanitarian aid to Gaza as a tactic to pressure Hamas is a resumption of the war-crime starvation strategy that led the International Criminal Court to file charges against Netanyahu and Gallant. https://t.co/GcoYeB80GC
BREAKING: MSF strongly denounces Israel’s announcement to block aid into Gaza.
Humanitarian aid should never be used as a tool of war. Regardless of negotiations between warring parties, people in Gaza still need an immediate and massive scale-up of humanitarian supplies.… pic.twitter.com/NhOWoRDbrU
News outlets often preferred euphemisms like “displacing” or “resettling” to the more accurate “ethnic cleansing, as in this CBC headline (2/4/25).
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump said that the US will “take over the Gaza Strip” and “own” it for the “long-term” (AP, 2/5/25), and that its Palestinian inhabitants will be “permanently” exiled (AP, 2/4/25). Subsequently, when reporters asked Trump whether Palestinians would have the right to return to Gaza under his plan, he said “no” (BBC, 2/10/25).
After Trump’s remarks, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (Reuters, 2/5/25) said “it is essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing.”
Navi Pillay (Politico, 2/9/25), chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, said that
Trump is woefully ignorant of international law and the law of occupation. Forcible displacement of an occupied group is an international crime, and amounts to ethnic cleansing.
Human Rights Watch (2/5/25) said that, if Trump’s plan were implemented, it would “amount to an alarming escalation of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.”
Clarity in the minority
Amnesty International (2/5/25) called Trump’s proposal to forcibly transfer the population of Gaza a flagrant violation of international law”—but the phrase “international law” was usually missing from news reports on the plan.
I used the news media aggregator Factiva to survey coverage of Trump’s remarks from the day that he first made them, February 4 through February 12. In that period, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post combined to run 145 pieces with the words “Gaza” and “Trump.” Of these, 19 contained the term “ethnic cleansing” or a variation on the phrase. In other words, 87% of the articles these outlets published on Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza chose not to call it ethnic cleansing.
A handful of other pieces used language that captures the wanton criminality of Trump’s scheme reasonably well. Three articles used “forced displacement,” or slight deviations from the word, while five others used “expel” and another nine used “expulsion.” Two of the articles said “forced transfer,” or a minor variation of that. In total, therefore, 38 of the 145 articles (26 percent) employ “ethnic cleansing” or the above-mentioned terms to communicate to readers that Trump wants to make Palestinians leave their homes so that the US can take Gaza from them.
Furthermore, the term “international law” appears in only 27 of the 145 articles, which means that 81% failed to point out to readers that what Trump is proposing is a “flagrant violation of international law” (Amnesty International, 2/5/25).
A ‘plan to free Palestinians’
A Wall Street Journal op-ed (2/5/25) hailed “Trump’s Plan to Free Palestinians From Gaza”—in the same sense that the Trail of Tears “freed” the Cherokee from Georgia.
Several commentators in the corporate media endorsed Trump’s racist fever dream, in some cases through circumlocutions and others quite bluntly. Elliot Kaufman (Wall Street Journal, 2/5/25) called Trump’s imperial hallucination a “plan to free Palestinians from Gaza.”
While the Journal’s editorial board (2/5/25) called what Trump wants to do “preposterous,” the authors nonetheless put “ethnic cleansing” in scare quotes, as if that’s not an apt description. The paper asked, “Is his idea so much worse than the status quo that the rest of the world is offering?”
Sadanand Dhume (Wall StreetJournal, 2/12/25) wondered why “If Indians and Pakistanis Can Relocate, Why Can’t Gazans?” To bolster his case, Dhume noted that 2 million people died as a result of the India-Pakistan partition, and cited other shining moments in 20th century history, such as Uganda’s expulsion of Indians in the 1970s. That these authors implicitly or explicitly advocate Trump’s plan for mass, racist violence demonstrates that they see Palestinians as subhuman impediments to US/Israeli designs on Palestine and the region.
Bret Stephens (New York Times, 2/11/25) wrote that
Trump also warned Jordan and Egypt that he would cut off American aid if they refused to accept Gazan refugees, adding that those refugees may not have the right to return to Gaza. The president’s threats are long overdue.
Ethnically cleansing the West Bank
Al Jazeera (2/26/24): “Settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory.”
A similar pattern exists in coverage of the West Bank, where evidence of ethnic cleansing is hard to miss, but corporate media appears to be finding ways to do just that.
Legal scholars Alice Panepinto and Triestino Mariniello wrote an article for Al Jazeera (2/26/24) headlined “Settler Violence: Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Plan for the West Bank”:
Supported by the Israeli security forces and aided and abetted by the government, settler violence is a central part of the Israeli state’s policy and plan to ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territory in order to establish full sovereignty over it and enable settlement expansion.
The authors noted that, at the time they wrote their article, 16 Palesti nian communities in the West Bank had been forcibly transferred since October 7, 2023.
In October 2024, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese found that throughout the Gaza genocide, “Israeli forces and violent settlers” have “escalated patterns of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.” In the first 12 months after October 7, Albanese reported, “at least 18 communities were depopulated under the threat of lethal force, effectively enabling the colonization of large tracts” of the West Bank.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (2/10/25) said that Israel’s “latest ethnic cleansing efforts” entail “forcibly uproot[ing] thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank,” accompanied by
the bombing and burning of residential buildings and infrastructure, the cutting off of water, electricity and communications supplies, and a killing policy that has resulted in the deaths of 30 Palestinians…over the course of 19 days.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (2/10/25), Israeli military operations in Jenin camp, which expanded to Tulkarm, Nur Shams and El Far’a, displaced 40,000 Palestinian refugees between January 21 and February 10.
Unnoteworthy violations
I used Factiva to search New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post coverage and found that, since Panepinto and Mariniello’s analysis was published just under a year ago, the three newspapers have combined to run 693 articles that mention the West Bank. Thirteen of these include some form of the term “ethnic cleansing,” a mere 2%. Nine more articles use “forced displacement,” or a variation on the phrase, 31 use “expel,” 11 use “expulsion” and five use some variety of “forced transfer.”
Thus, 69 of the 693 Times, Journal and Post articles that mention the West Bank use these terms to clearly describe people being violently driven from their homes—just 10%. Many of the articles that address the West Bank are also about Gaza, so the 69 articles using this language don’t necessarily apply it to the West Bank.
Of the 693 Times, Journal and Post pieces that refer to the West Bank, 106 include the term “international law.” Evidently, the authors and editors who worked on 85% of the papers’ articles that discuss the West Bank did not consider it noteworthy that Israel is engaged in egregious violations of international law in the territory.
‘Battling local militants’
The Washington Post (2/2/25) captioned this image of IDF bombing with Israel’s claim that it was “destroying buildings used by Palestinian militants.”
Rather than equip readers to understand the larger picture in which events in the West Bank unfold, much of the coverage treats incidents in the territory discretely. For instance, the Wall Street Journal (1/22/25) published a report on Israel’s late January attacks on the West Bank. In the piece’s 18th paragraph, it cited the Palestinian Authority saying the Israeli operations “displaced families and destroyed civilian properties.” In the 24th paragraph, the article also quoted UNRWA director Roland Friedrich, saying that Jenin had become “nearly uninhabitable,” and that “some 2,000 families have been displaced from the area since mid-December.” Palestinians being driven from their homes are an afterthought for the article’s authors, who do nothing to put this forced displacement in the longer-term context of Israel’s US-backed ethnic cleansing.
A Washington Post report (2/2/25) on Jenin says in its first paragraph that the fighting is occurring “where [Israeli] troops have been battling local militants.” The article then describes Palestinian “homes turned to ash and rubble, cars destroyed and small fires still burning amid the debris.” It cited the Palestinian Health Ministry noting that “at least five people were killed in Israeli strikes in the Jenin area, including a 16-year-old.”
Establishing a “troops vs. militants” frame at the outset of the article suggested that that is the lens through which the death and destruction in Jenin should be understood, rather than one in which a racist colonial enterprise is seeking to ethnically cleanse the Indigenous population resisting the initiative.
The rights of ‘neighbors’
This New York Times piece (2/4/25) acknowledges that Israeli settlements have “steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians”—but doesn’t call this process ethnic cleansing.
The New York Times (2/4/25) published an article on Republican bills that would require US government documents to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the name that expansionist Zionists prefer. The report discusses how Trump’s return to office “has emboldened supporters of Israeli annexation of the occupied territory.”
The piece notes that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have “settled” the West Bank since Israel occupied it in 1967, and that Palestinians living there have fewer rights than their Israeli “neighbors.” The author points out that “the growing number and size of the settlements have steadily eroded the land accessible to Palestinians.”
Yet the article somehow fails to mention a crucial part of this dynamic, namely Israel violently displacing Palestinians from their West Bank homes. Leaving out that vital information fails means that readers are not a comprehensive account of the ethnic cleansing backdrop against which the Republican bills are playing out.
Recent coverage of Gaza and the West Bank illustrates that, while corporate media occasionally outright call for expelling Palestinians from their land, more often the way these outlets support ethnic cleansing is by declining to call it ethnic cleansing.
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Pro-Palestine protesters hold a banner calling for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a July 24, 2024 demonstration in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Joe Piette/flickr/cc)
“Benjamin Netanyahu should not be welcomed to the United States! He should be arrested for war crimes,” said CodePink.
The women-led peace group CodePink is set to hold bicoastal demonstrations this week as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his backers in the U.S. government ignore an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for the right-wing leader, who stands accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Netanyahu arrived Monday in the United States, which has not ratified the Rome Statute governing the ICC, after crossing the airspace of European nations that are signatories to the treaty. The Israeli leader and Republican U.S. President Donald Trump are scheduled to hold a joint news conference Tuesday afternoon after meeting in the White House.
Later in the week, Netanyahu is set meet with Trump administration officials and congressional leaders, who recently spearheaded bipartisan passage of House legislation to sanction ICC officials for seeking to hold Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, accountable for waging a war whose conduct is also the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
“No matter who is in power, the imperialist leaders continue to fully support and fund the Zionist entity’s escalating genocide of the Palestinian people,” CodePink said in an online announcement of a Tuesday afternoon protest in Washington, D.C., and referring to Israel.
“While both Trump and Netanyahu continue to publicly advocate for total ethnic cleansing, we must ensure that they do not convene in our city without the people taking a stand,” the group added. “We reject war criminals being welcomed into our city. Join us on Tuesday to reject this meeting, which will inevitably advance their genocidal plans.”
Groups including CodePink, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Americans for Justice in Palestine Action, the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations, and American Muslims for Palestine are also planning a Tuesday afternoon press conference to demand Netanyahu’s arrest.
CodePink is also set to hold a demonstration outside Berkeley, California City Hall on Wednesday afternoon.
“War criminal Benjamin Netanyahu should not be welcomed to the United States! He should be arrested for war crimes,” the Bay Area chapter of CodePink asserted. “We are speaking out against the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu and taking a stand against the U.S. funding of the Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people.”
In addition to calling on the U.S. to “end all military aid to Israel,” CodePink Bay Area condemned the Trump administration’s plan to imprison tens of thousands of migrants in the notorious military prison at Guantánamo Bay. The White House confirmed Tuesday that U.S. officials have begun sending migrants from the United States to Guantánamo
Amnesty International said Tuesday on social media that “by welcoming Israeli PM Netanyahu, wanted by the ICC to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the United States is showing contempt for international justice.”
“The Biden administration flouted any efforts at international justice for Palestine. Now, by not arresting Netanyahu or subjecting him to U.S. investigations, President Trump is doubling down, welcoming him as the first foreign leader to visit the White House since the inauguration,” the group continued.
“The U.S. has a clear obligation under the Geneva Conventions to search for and try [to] extradite persons accused of having committed or ordered the commission of war crimes,” Amnesty added. “There must be no ‘safe haven’ for individuals alleged to have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are meeting on Tuesday.
Human Rights Watch chief advocacy officer Bruno Stagno said in a statement Tuesday that “if President Trump wants to break with the Biden administration’s complicity in the Israeli government’s atrocities in Gaza, he should immediately suspend arms transfers to Israel.”
“Trump said the hostilities in Gaza were ‘not our war’ but ‘their war,’ but unless the U.S. ends its military support, Gaza will also be Trump’s war,” Stagno added.
The National Iranian American Council (NIAC), meanwhile, expressed alarm at reporting that the Trump administration is preparing to ramp up his “maximum pressure” policy against Iran in an effort to stop the country from developing nuclear weapons and cripple its oil exports.
“Benjamin Netanyahu has played every single modern U.S. president to act against American interests and likes to boast, ‘I know America, America is a thing that can be moved easily,’” NIAC president Jamal Abdi said Tuesday. “Only time will tell whether Trump will succeed in his efforts to end and prevent wars and be a dealmaker in the Middle East, or if [Netanyahu] will move Trump into a war with Iran that will torpedo his presidency and ensure another generation of American military adventures.”
“Today, Trump has a rare and historic opportunity for peace—if he stands up to Bibi,” Abdi asserted, using Netanyahu’s nickname. “He has a chance to stabilize the Middle East and do what his predecessors tried and failed to accomplish: ending the forever wars that have bogged down the U.S. and American troops in the region for a generation.”
“Or, he could bow to Bibi and allow the U.S. to be dragged into a catastrophic regional war that would torpedo his presidency and America’s interests,” Abdi added. “Netanyahu and fellow hawks will surely welcome the ‘return’ of the so-called ‘maximum pressure’ approach on Iran—even though it never went away—and work to ensure that it is implemented as harshly as possible to drive Iran away from the negotiating table and push the U.S. and Iran toward a disastrous war.”
