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Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a food delivery driver in North Austin, Texas, was shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents while he was making a delivery on Sunday, September 20. Garces Perez, who survived the shooting but is now partially paralyzed, says his car was rammed by a large black unmarked truck. 

ICE claimed they attempted a traffic stop and that Garces Perez fled, but the DoorDash driver and his lawyers’ account contradict this report, saying after he tried to U-turn and pullover, ICE agents rammed his vehicle again, and then an agent got out and aimed his weapon through the passenger side of the car and shot Garces Perez in the back of his neck. 

CBP revealed on Tuesday, September 22, that the officer that fired the shot was not wearing a body camera, despite the agency’s body-camera requirements.

After a few hours in the hospital, Garces Perez was transferred to ICE custody with the bullet still lodged in his back. 

“I am not doing well due to the gunshot wound and I have not received the medical attention that I require,” he said through a translator at a press conference in Austin. After receiving no pain medication at the hospital, Garces Perez said that in ICE custody, he was forced to sleep on the floor and repeatedly asked for medical care while in severe pain.

His attorney also said he developed paralysis on his left side.

Local community demands ICE out of Austin

Within hours of the shooting, protests erupted in Austin. Hundreds of residents flooded the streets demanding ICE out of their neighborhoods. 

Organizers have connected the shooting to a growing number of fatal and nonfatal encounters involving immigration agents, including the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Ruben Ray Martinez in South Padre Island.

“We cannot be silent as ICE is shooting and killing our neighbors!” a statement by the Austin branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation said. 

Protests have continued across Austin on Monday and Tuesday. Student walkouts were also seen on Tuesday, September 22, by students across Pflugerville, Texas, north of downtown Austin, as well as Navarro Early College High School.

DHS defends the shooting and promises to investigate

After the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security quickly claimed that Garces Perez was an “illegal alien from Venezuela, who illegally entered” the United States.

Garces Perez’s lawyers have refuted these claims, saying he entered the country through CBP One, the US border processing system. “He had a work permit. He was seeking asylum.” They said that a notice of hearing was sent to an old address, despite Garces Perez updating his address with the immigration court. “He didn’t know he had a hearing. So he didn’t go and got a deportation order in absentia, which is a very common thing.”

According to reports, DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are leading an investigation into the ICE shooting of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez.

Austin police and the Travis County district attorney’s office have also said they intend to investigate the shooting. But their investigations come amid strong criticism of federal officials’ handling of previous ICE shootings in Texas. In Houston,  Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has said federal officials did not provide his office with information about the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. He is taking his own investigation to a grand jury to force the release of more details.

ICE violence continues in the US

The Austin shooting follows a series of fatal encounters involving federal immigration agents this year, including the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine.

As federal agents continue to face scrutiny over deadly encounters in Texas and other states, Austin residents and organizers say they will continue protesting and organizing until ICE is out of their communities.

Fear and anger are growing in South Africa after the bodies of nine women were discovered across the Ekurhuleni municipality, east of Johannesburg, over the past two months, with police investigating whether the deaths are connected, a 10th body was confirmed this week. Three suspects have been arrested, and police have acknowledged a possible connection between some of the killings. What is not in dispute is the scale of the crisis the discovery has exposed, and the outrage it has provoked, protests against femicide have been held in the country in the weeks since.

Four of the nine women have so far been publicly identified, Elizabeth “Tsontso” Moselakgomo, 38, a mother who vanished during her regular afternoon run and was found days later behind a hotel in Rhodesfield; Itumeleng Kekana, 32, missing since July and found in August with multiple stab wounds; Dineo Evelyn Motapane, 38, found in KwaThema; and Gracious Nkomo, 28, a lodge worker in Kempton Park missing for more than two weeks before she was found. 

Anger over the response

The deaths have triggered protests and renewed criticism of the country’s response to gender-based violence. Residents and women’s rights campaigners have questioned why women are repeatedly advised to change their behavior, avoid isolated areas, walking alone or running alone, rather than placing greater emphasis on preventing perpetrators from committing violence.

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) has been among the sharpest voices responding to the killings. In a statement condemning the deaths, the union insisted the killings should not be treated as a “crime wave” or a mystery, describing them instead as femicide and, more precisely, a war being waged against women. NUMSA’s argument is that this is not an aberration but the visible edge of something structural. The union points to police figures showing at least 569 women murdered nationally between April and June 2026 alone, by the verified count, with an unverified estimate closer to 892, roughly six women killed every day. Against this, nine deaths in one metro over two months is, in the union’s words, closer to the ordinary condition of the country, made visible only because the fear of a serial killer has made it a story the wider public can imagine touching them.

The statement also pushes back on the instinct to treat this primarily as a street-level danger. Of thousands of rape cases registered by police in the same quarter, the majority occurred in a residence, not a public place. The killings that draw headlines, a body beside a highway, represent a fraction of a type of violence whose center of gravity is the home.

The economics underneath the violence

NUMSA also refuses to treat gender-based violence as an individual pathology alone. It traces a line from the colonial and apartheid-era migrant labor system, which depended on women’s unpaid domestic and reproductive labor to keep wages artificially low through to the present, where South African women remain disproportionately unemployed (an official rate near 37.5%, against 44.9% for men) and disproportionately head of household. Over four in ten nationally, and closer to half in rural areas. Close to two million employed women work informally, without pensions, medical aid, or written contracts. When a woman who is also a breadwinner is killed, the union argues, it is not only a life lost but a household’s income and caregiving capacity lost with her.

Gender-based violence and femicide were declared a national disaster in South Africa in November 2025. Nearly a year on, the killings in Ekurhuleni are evidence, in the union’s reading, that the declaration has not translated into protection.

What’s being demanded

NUMSA has rejected the idea of policing alone and the state’s response so far has leaned on a security “lockdown” of Kempton Park to answer a crisis this size. Its demands include full funding of the national plan on gender-based violence and femicide, functioning forensic and mortuary capacity so victims can be identified quickly, safe transport for workers on early and late shifts, and the implementation of the ILO Convention 190 on violence and harassment in the workplace, which South Africa has ratified but not fully enforced. Alongside state accountability, the union is calling for community-based structures, street and area committees, explicitly modeled on the civic organizing of the anti-apartheid period to accompany women, support survivors, and track cases through the courts.

Investigations continue, but the fear, concern and anger surrounding the killings remain. The deaths of the women in Ekurhuleni have already forced a public reckoning with the scale of violence against women in South Africa and the urgent need for stronger action to protect women and hold perpetrators accountable.

From Denmark to Litochoro in western Macedonia, northern Greece, by bike: 52 days, 10 countries and 3,500 kilometers for the crazy dream of Marilena Karantini. The great journey of 34-year-old Marilena Karantinini who managed fearless this special challenge. Her thought was simple… “This year I will go from Denmark to Litochoro by bike” she said […]

The post From Denmark to Greece on a bike: A woman’s “crazy dream” appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Tragedy in Rhodes: A firefighter who participated in an operation to rescue tourists, died on Tuesday, after he fell from a relative high height. The 52-year-old man fell from a height and was fatally injured during an operation to provide assistance to two tourists, hikers, in an area near Sianna on the island of Rhodes. […]

The post Firefighter killed during tourists’ rescue operation on Rhodes appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Α 50-year-old high school principal suffered a cardiac arrest outside the school in Ilioupoli suburb of eastern Athens during the heavy rain- and thunderstorm hitting the area on Tuesday. Initial reports suggest the cardiac arrest was caused by lightning. Passersby who saw the woman collapsing on the street outside the school immediately called for help […]

The post Woman suffers cardiac arrest during Athens thunderstorm; caused by lighting? appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Fifteen antiquities that had been illegally removed from Greece will be returned to the country from the United States. They were handed over to Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni at a special ceremony held at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. According to a statement by the Ministry of Culture, with this latest repatriation, the number […]

The post Fifteen antiquities repatriated to Greece from U.S. appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

On September 8, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon, a few months into a job at Anthropic (a leading US AI company) after three years at OpenAI, announced his resignation on X. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Within a day, the post had been read more than 100 million times. Four days later, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” declaring that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” or risk “losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption.” Within hours, Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed, Elon Musk posted “Dario is right,” and Google and Microsoft fell into line.

Coxon was interviewed by Time, Axios, and NBC within two days, and Amodei’s essay was front-page news across the business press. Compare that with what happens to people who expose the harms AI is causing right now. Warnings about AI-generated fraud, model bias including racist bias, about chatbots and vulnerable users, about surveillance and AI’s use in military kill chains and the genocide in Gaza, get a news cycle at best. A warning about a hypothetical machine superintelligence got a global media event and a policy proposal from the industry’s leadership within four days.

AI systems do need regulating. The question is why the men who spent a decade racing towards what they now call an existential threat discovered their conscience on the same weekend, and what kind of regulation they are actually asking for.

What the Dario essay asks for

Stripped of its language of alignment and catastrophe, Dario Amodei’s essay is a list of demands. First, outside “evaluators” from bodies such as METR, a lab that tests AI models, would be given “company badges, desks, and laptops” inside the big labs. Second, the leading companies “within democratic countries” would jointly set safety standards and limits on how fast they build, for which Amodei asks the US government for “a narrow waiver” from antitrust law. Third, models crossing certain capability thresholds would have to carry “certifications” of good behavior, and limits on the computing power used to train them are put on the table. Fourth, the United States must “not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.” Amodei is candid about the goal: done well, these measures “would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly.”

The words “open source” do not appear in the essay. They do not need to. AI models come in two kinds. Closed models, like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, run only on the company’s own servers and users pay for access. Open-weight models, like China’s DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, and Qwen, are published as files that anyone can download, run on their own machines and modify. A certificate that must travel with a model cannot be attached to a file that anyone may copy. A ceiling on computing power freezes the ranking of the firms that already occupy the frontier. An antitrust waiver lets the five largest companies write rules for everyone else. The effect is a licensing regime only the incumbents can satisfy; the technology publication The Register called it regulatory capture with a nicer name.

The incident that supposedly proves it

The essay’s centerpiece is what Amodei calls the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident of July. In plain terms: OpenAI was testing its AI “agents,” programs that can act on their own, on a set of hacking puzzles. Roughly a third of the puzzles were impossible, driving the agents to look for ways to cheat the marking. The agents were supposed to be sealed off from each other without access to the internet. In practice, they weren’t, and through that loophole they found their way into a second test environment that was connected to the open internet. From there, one of them found login credentials that OpenAI staff had left exposed online, used them to break into Hugging Face, a website where AI models are shared, and rummaged through private files to work out how their answers were being marked. Amodei describes this as “a swarm of agents” acting as “a fanatically devoted collective” that, with more capability, “could have caused catastrophic damage.”

The people whose job is computer security reached a different conclusion. The investigation by METR, the very body Amodei wants embedded in every lab, found that sandboxes meant to isolate the AI agents were not, that the credentials should never have been exposed, and that OpenAI’s security team had noticed the agents misbehaving days earlier and done nothing. One practitioner quoted by IANS Research summed it up: “many failures and lack of controls that could have prevented this from happening in the first place.” Any bank that ran untested software with live internet access and exposed passwords would be found negligent. Routine containment, of the kind every serious IT department practices, would have stopped it.

Calling a security lapse a “fanatically devoted collective” is not analysis. It is anthropomorphizing, dressing an operational failure in the language of science fiction. And it is useful. A company whose product is being marketed as near-superintelligence that must be restrained for humanity’s sake has a far better story for investors than a company that left its passwords on the internet. The doom narrative and the hype narrative are part of the same cycle. Both say: this technology is so powerful that you cannot afford to be without it, and only we can be trusted with it.

Why now

The timing becomes clear once one looks at the money. The five big American technology companies are budgeted to spend close to $690 billion this year on data centers and chips, and borrowing now funds 32% of that spending, up from 9% two years ago. On the very day Amodei’s essay appeared, Altman announced that OpenAI’s stock market listing, which bankers had been preparing at valuations of up to $1 trillion, would not happen in 2026 because it was “an ill-advised moment,” citing safety. The next day, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic’s much-advertised profit margin of “above 80%” is calculated before two of its largest costs: the cost of creating its models and the revenue it shares with Amazon, its main distributor.

Meanwhile, the competition has arrived, and it is nearly free. On OpenRouter, a widely used exchange through which software developers send requests to AI models, Chinese open-weight models now handle 58% of the traffic from American firms; a year ago American models held 70%. DeepSeek and Qwen charge 60 to 90% less than Anthropic and OpenAI. A firm that cannot win on price, cannot fund its next model from earnings and cannot yet sell shares to the public has one option left: change the rules.

Washington says no, for its own reasons

The Trump administration has so far refused. The president’s response was that “whoever wins AI, wins,” and his AI adviser David Sacks called the whole affair a “doomer psyop” aimed at open-source models. This is not a defense of the public interest. It is arithmetic. According to ING, spending on AI equipment, software and data centers accounted for roughly a third of all US economic growth in the second quarter of this year; on the broadest measure, half. The rest of the economy is being squeezed by the war on Iran: petrol prices have risen 53% since it began, consumer inflation reached 4.2% in May, and energy costs are up 23.5% on the year. Take the data-center boom out, and the United States is close to recession. Washington cannot allow the frontier to be paced because the frontier is the only thing still growing.

Two futures

China’s official response was brief. “Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest,” said foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun on September 14. A more revealing reply came from inside DeepSeek, where Shengyu Liu, a kernel software engineer, published a widely circulated essay arguing that the safest path is to keep frontier AI open and cheap rather than concentrated in any single company, American or Chinese. As AI develops, he wrote, society “may be pulled toward one of two extremes: communism or Cyberpunk 2077.” In the first, “productive capacity is liberated on an enormous scale, and people’s standard of living rises substantially.” In the second, “a handful of technology companies control most of society’s resources”; a tiny number of people have access to the most advanced AI, “while most people are left with only weak, second-rate AI.”

That is the real choice, and it is a choice about ownership, not about speed. Real regulation would hold companies liable for the harm done by the software they run, including inside their own labs, and would treat running powerful agents without containment as the negligence it is. It would cost the labs money, which is why it is not in Amodei’s essay. What is in the essay is a request to be made gatekeepers of a technology built on borrowed money that its owners now fear they cannot sell.

The frontier does not need pacing. It needs owners who can be held to account, and a public that is not frightened into paying monopoly prices for AI services by the very people who build it.

Bappa Sinha is a veteran technologist interested in the impact of technology on society and politics.

On October 4, nearly 160 million Brazilians will go to the polls to elect their next president, vice president, members of Congress, governors, and state legislators from the country’s various states. If no presidential candidate receives more than 50% of the valid votes, a runoff election will be held on October 25.

At this time, 13 presidential candidates are vying for the presidency in Brasília, although polls clearly point to two candidates vying for the presidency of Latin America’s most economically powerful country.

On one side is Brazil’s current president, the former union leader and progressive Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula served as president from 2003 to 2011 with very high approval ratings, although following corruption allegations, he was imprisoned and sentenced to nine years.

However, after over 500 days in detention, a judge ordered his release, ruling that the proceedings were flawed. The Supreme Court of Justice called the incident a “historic error.” Following that, Lula faced off against then-far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and defeated him in the 2022 election. Now Lula hopes to be re-elected once again.

At the forefront is none other than Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, who has leveraged his father’s reputation to boost his own. This is because Jair Bolsonaro was found guilty of several crimes that, according to the Brazilian justice system, were intended to prevent Lula’s inauguration and promote a coup d’état. Jair Bolsonaro is currently in house arrest for those crimes.

Consequently, a significant portion of Brazilian society, as well as international politicians such as Donald Trump, consider Bolsonaro’s imprisonment to be unjust. This explains how his son Flávio – a lawyer and businessman who currently serves as a senator – has managed to garner significant support in his bid to win the presidency on October 4.

Thus, two clearly distinct political and economic models are pitted against one another. Lula belongs to a political tradition that seeks to strengthen the state, reduce extreme poverty, invest in social programs, and diversify trade partners (such as China and India), all in line with a clearly pro-sovereignty discourse.

For his part, Flávio Bolsonaro promises to continue on his father’s path: economic neoliberalism, reducing the size of the state, building closer ties with the private sector, and – perhaps most importantly – placing Brazil once again under the influence of the Trump administration, which supports the far-right candidate.

Read more: Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro all set to face off this October in Brazil’s presidential election

Clearly, a victory for the far right – which is close to Washington – would represent a sharp shift in the region’s current economic and political course. Brazil accounts for nearly 50% of the region’s total GDP, so a victory for a Trump ally would drastically alter not only the political landscape but also the economic one. On the other hand, a victory for Lula would signal a “halt” (probably the most significant of all possible outcomes) to the wave of victories by the Latin American right and far right – allies and supporters of US hemispheric and military policy – that have swept the electoral landscape in recent years.

What do the polls say?

Since the start of the presidential race, Lula has maintained a lead over his political opponent. However, that lead has been narrowing as the weeks have gone by, raising the possibility that the runoff election, scheduled for October 25, will be a very close race. This is because, it appears, neither candidate will manage to secure more than 50% of the vote to win in a single round.

According to a poll by the MDA Pesquisa Institute, Lula holds a solid lead over Bolsonaro: 40.06% to 30.4%. Augusto Cury comes in third with 6% of the vote, while the remaining candidates trail behind this mark. According to this poll, in the event of a runoff, Lula would win with 47.3% against Bolsonaro’s likely 40%.

However, other polls paint a different picture, in which Lula remains in the lead but by a very narrow margin. This is according to an AtlasIntel poll, which shows Lula with 46% of the vote, while Bolsonaro would receive 44% in the first round. In the runoff, the gap would disappear, and both candidates would receive nearly 47% of the vote (a technical tie).

A corruption scandal that is shaking up the political landscape

However, everything could change in the wake of a scandal that has rocked Brazilian politics. In late 2025, the former owner of Banco Máster SA, Daniel Vorcaro, allegedly committed a serious case of bank fraud. Since his arrest in March 2026, his conversations, friendships, and connections have all been under close investigation.

One of the people who has come under scrutiny is Flávio Bolsonaro, who confirmed that he had asked the banker for money to make a film about his father called “Dark Horse”. The Federal Police are investigating this case to determine whether Bolsonaro participated in any illegal activity.

Meanwhile, Lula’s inner circle has also been affected. The judge who ordered Jair Bolsonaro’s arrest, Alexandre de Moraes, is alleged to have exchanged messages with Vorcaro. Moraes has been portrayed as a judge close to Lula and thus Bolsonaro and his supporters have seized on the revelation of the messages to call for Moraes’s removal and indirectly accuse the government of suspicious activities.

The debate has led to a serious crisis within the Brazilian judiciary because a decision to investigate Moraes was postponed, prompting accusations of political bias among the judges.

An 8-year-old child was caught driving an All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV) widely known in Greece as “γουρούνα” (quad bike) at the port of the island of Paros on Saturday. The child was accompanied by a 33-year-old US national sitting on the back seat. According to some media, he was the child’s father. The vehicle had overturned, […]

The post 8-year-old child caught driving an ATV motorcycle on Paros appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Ilias Kasidiaris, a former MP of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, who was released from prison last week, announced on Monday, his support for a new far-right party called the Alliance of Greeks. As KTG reported last week HERE, Kassidiaris is eager to return to politics, however, legislation makes it impossible for convicts for crimimal […]

The post Ex neo-Nazi Golden Dawn official declares support for new far-right party appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

A 27-year-old man stabbed to death multiple times his former partner, a 25-year-old woman, and staged a robbery to cover up the murder. The victim was found in a pool of blood by a passerby at a gazebo at the end of a bicycle path in Igoumenitsa, western Greece, on Sunday night. He called the […]

The post Femicide in W. Greece: Young man stabs to death former partner appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Greece’s National Meteorological Service EMY issued a weather warning on Monday, September 21, 2026. Heavy rainfalls, storms and and lightning are forecast to affect several regions in the country as of Tuesday, September 22. The weather deterioration is forecast to be of short duration, starting from the early hours of Tuesday, September 22, through the early […]

The post Greece Weather Warning: Heavy rainfalls, thunderstorms and lightning appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

A 82-year-old man was reportedly beaten to death by a 76-year-old man during a argument over a sunbed in a popular organized beach in Vouliagmeni in Athens Riviera on Sunday. According to initial information, the 76-year-old who was accompanied with a 21-year-old woman argued with the victim over the sunbed. Quickly the situation went out […]

The post One dead after elderly men argue over a sunbed at Athens beach appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Margaret Chant-Papandreou, second wife of former Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, and women’s rights activist, has died at the age of 103, media reported on Friday. The American-born women’s rights advocate played a prominent role in efforts to strengthen the legal and social rights of women in Greece. Chant-Papandreou was the wife of former prime minister […]

The post Margarita Chant-Papandreou, women’s rights activist, dies at 103 appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

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The European Commission has approved the registration of Olio dei Colli de Bologna from Italy as a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI).

Olio del Colli di Bologna is an extra virgin olive oil from the Emilia-Romagna region, located in northern Italy. The area is part of the ‘Evaporitic Karst and Caves of Northern Apennines' natural site, which was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2023. The Olio del Colli di Bologna is characterised by very low free acidity levels. It is a balanced oil with medium fruitiness, bitterness and pungency intensity.

This new designation joins the more than 3,900 protected names already listed in the eAmbrosia database. More information is available on the Quality Policy pages.

The European Commission is empowered by the EU Treaties to borrow from the international capital markets on behalf of the European Union to finance selected EU policy programmes. The Commission has raised €11 billion of EU-Bonds in its 8th syndicated transaction for 2026.

The dual-tranche transaction concerned a €6 billion new 3-year EU-Bond maturing on 12 March 2030 and a €5 billion new 30-year EU-Bond maturing on 12 October 2056.

Building on the pricing of recent syndications against the EU Bond curve, both maturities were priced against reference points in the EU Bond curve. The approach reflects the growing liquidity of the EU-Bond curve, which can be used more frequently as a reliable reference point for pricing of syndicated issuances when deemed desirable.

The transaction is part of the Commission's €80 billion funding target for the second half of 2026.

More information is available in the press release online.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, while condemning the Israeli government’s plans to advance settlement construction in the E1 area of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), stopped short of proposing a ban on trade with the Israeli communities in the area, in contrast with an initiative pushed by some EU member states and EU’s foreign policy Kaja Kallas, writes European Jewish Press, Yossi Lempkowicz.  

She spoke on Wednesday (16 September) during her annual State of Union address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Von der Leyen received a round of applause for condemning the Israeli government’s plans to advance construction in the E1 area, a strategi area between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim. ”The Israeli government’s decision to advance the illegal E1 settlement projects is unacceptable,” she said, after deploring the ”deep suffering in Gaza and unchecked settler violence in the West Bank” which, she said, ”have deeply affected Europeans.”

”It is painful for many Europeans that member states have been unable to build the necessary majorities for a unified response,” she added, noting that ”some member states have been unable to build the necessary majorities for a unified response. Some member states have moved ahezd. Others are considering doing so.”

A group of over 100 MEPs, mainly from S&D, The Left, the Greens and Renew groups, had written a letter to the President of the European Commission to make an “urgent appeal for a Commission legislative proposal to ban EU trade with illegal Israeli settlements”.

Until now, EU member states are divided about the proposal to ban trade from Judea and Samaria.. Countries like Slovenia and Czechia, but also Germany and Italy, have blocked such sanctions.

Von der Leyen highlighted the Commission’s efforts to mobilise funding for the Palestinian Authority and for the reconstruction of Gaza.

‘’We have delivered more aid than anyone else. Through the Palestine Donor Group and the Team Gaza Initiative, we have brought together 65 delegations. Together we have sanctioned nearly 1 billion Euro to rebuild Gaza and support a modern Palestinian Authority,’’ she noted.

She concluded her statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by stressing that ‘’ Europe supports the right to self-defense for Israel.’’

”The Palestinian people have an equal right to live in safety and in dignity. It is Europe’s role to keep the blame of the two-state solution alive,’’ the EU Commission President added.

Yossi Lempkowicz is Editor-in-chief of European Jewish Press (EJP).