TV News LIES

Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff told a senior Kremlin official last month that achieving peace in Ukraine would require Russia gaining control of Donetsk and potentially a separate territorial exchange, according to a recording of their conversation obtained by Bloomberg.

In the 14 October phone call with Yuri Ushakov, the top foreign policy aide to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Witkoff said he believed the land concessions were necessary all while advising Ushakov to congratulate Trump and frame discussions more optimistically.

“Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere,” Witkoff told Ushakov during the five-minute conversation, according to Bloomberg’s transcript. “But I’m saying instead of talking like that, let’s talk more hopefully because I think we’re going to get to a deal here.”

The recording offers direct insight into Witkoff’s negotiating approach and appears to reveal the origins of the controversial 28-point peace proposal that emerged earlier in November.

TVNL Comment:  Guess who authored this deal way back when.

More...

In March 2006, the Harvard Kennedy School published a working paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by influential political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The paper, which ran in the London Review of Books and became the basis for a book published the following year, was an unflinching analysis of the impact of pro-Israel advocacy and lobbying groups on the U.S. political system, and the role of organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in shaping U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East.

Mearsheimer and Walt described a loose coalition of philanthropists, think tanks, advocacy groups, and Christian Zionist organizations that routinely pulled U.S. policy toward the Middle East away from America’s national interest, as the U.S. was being drawn into a military quagmire in Iraq. “Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored,” Walt and Mearsheimer wrote, “but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”

Even before the Kennedy School posted the paper online, the project had already spooked editors at The Atlantic, who originally commissioned the essay in the early 2000s. In an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year, Mearsheimer revealed that the editor of The Atlantic offered them a “$10,000 kill fee” if the publication didn’t print the article. Mearsheimer said, “That’s the fastest $10,000 we ever made.”

The paper was written by two highly esteemed scholars of international relations; Walt had been serving since 2002 as Academic Dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as prestigious an appointment as exists in the field, and Mearsheimer taught at the University of Chicago. But the backlash against it was swift, intense, and unusually public in the world of academia. A wave of news articles described the authors as antisemites, while the Anti-Defamation League weighed in to denounce what they called an “anti-Jewish screed.” The pressure became so intense that the Kennedy School removed its logo from the paper and added a disclaimer distancing the institution from its arguments.

More...

Charges will be filed against a teenager suspected of partaking in a large-scale arson attack this month on Palestinian factories and farmland in the West Bank, law enforcement announced Saturday night.

It marked the first charges filed against one of the suspected assailants in the raid on November 11, which saw dozens of settlers set fire to a factory and surrounding agricultural lands near the villages of Bayt Lid and Dayr Sharaf, in the northern West Bank.

The defendant, a minor who was nabbed at the scene by security forces, was one of four people who were arrested during the attack. A prosecutor’s statement was filed against him on Saturday, police said, and he was set to be charged Sunday by Central District prosecutors.

Four Palestinians were injured in the attack, and settlers later set their sights on the troops, attacking soldiers who were dispatched to the scene, the IDF said at the time.

According to the police’s statement, “more than 50 indictments have been filed against individuals involved in severe violent incidents in Judea and Samaria” since the start of the year.

However, enforcement against settler violence under National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has plummeted on the whole over the past three years, according to a recent Channel 12 report, with a 73% drop in the number of investigations opened into settler violence since 2023.

TVNL Comment:  Judea and Samaria are names given to this region which has been under illegal Israeli occupation since 1967.

Ramiz Alakbarov briefed on conditions in the battered enclave and the occupied West Bank, before touching on developments in Lebanon and Syria.

“Today we meet at a moment of renewed hope,” he said, speaking from Jerusalem. 

“While progress on the ground is fragile and deep uncertainty persists, we must seize the opportunity before us to chart a better future for Palestinians, Israelis and the wider region.”

Last month, Israel and Hamas reached agreement on the first phase of a ceasefire and hostage release following a plan put forward by United States President Donald Trump.  

However, recent Israeli airstrikes on populated areas have caused numerous casualties and destruction, while Palestinian militant attacks on Israeli soldiers have resulted in fatalities.

“This violence is jeopardizing the fragile ceasefire,” Mr. Alakbarov said, urging all parties “to exercise restraint and fulfill their commitments under the agreement.”

The Security Council “has also taken an important step in the consolidation of the ceasefire” with the adoption of resolution 2803 (2025), he added.

The text endorses the US plan and the deployment of a temporary international force for Gaza.

“While still facing unbearable living conditions and seemingly insurmountable destruction, the people in Gaza have experienced at least the first glimmers of respite from the near constant bombardment of the last two years,” he said.

More...

The United States-proposed Russia-Ukraine peace plan now has fewer points following negotiations in Switzerland to try to make the draft proposal more acceptable to Ukraine, according to a Ukrainian official close to the matter.

The initial 28-point peace plan now has 19 points, according to the official. It is unclear what points were removed.

The updated proposed peace agreement does not include a strict limit on the size of the Ukrainian army, a source briefed on the matter told ABC News. Under the initial proposal, the army would have been limited to 600,000 personnel.

The issue of amnesty for acts committed during the Russia-Ukraine war will not be included in the new version of the draft peace proposal, the source added. The initial plan had stated that all parties involved in the conflict "will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war."

U.S., European and Ukrainian officials met in Geneva to discuss the contentious proposal put to Kyiv last week, with terms critics say would constitute a Ukrainian capitulation.

More...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials reiterated their intention to block future Palestinian statehood ahead of the United Nations Security Council vote to authorize the U.S. plan for post-war Gaza on Monday.

There are three remaining deceased hostages in Gaza. Israeli authorities have been releasing the bodies of Palestinians in exchange for the return of hostage remains.

The ceasefire is broadly holding in Gaza, with Israeli forces inside the strip having pulled back to the so-called "yellow line." Still, renewed Israeli strikes have killed dozens of Palestinians in the past week.

Elsewhere, Israel is continuing strikes on what it says are Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon and on Sunday launched an airstrike in the capital Beirut. The Israel Defense Forces is also continuing raids in parts of the occupied West Bank.

More...