Jared Kushner Reveals “Master Plan” for Gaza, Says There’s No Plan B

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, revealed the U.S. “master plan” for Gaza at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday.

“People ask us what our Plan B is—we do not have a plan B. We have a plan, we signed an agreement, we are all committed to making that agreement work,” Kushner said. “There’s a master plan. We’ll be doing it in phasing. In the Middle East, they build cities like this ... you know, two, three million people. They build this in three years. And so stuff like this is very doable if we make it happen.”

Kushner’s plan for a “New Gaza” includes a focus on tourism, with luxury hotels as well as a new seaport and airport. That seems to clash with existing realities, such as Israel having blocked such developments for the last two decades. Gaza didn’t have an airport even before the genocide, as Israel bombed the only airport in 2006. And despite a ceasefire having passed last year, Israel has killed at least 400 Palestinians in Gaza since then, and bombing campaigns continue.

While Israeli Prime Minister and accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to join Trump’s “Board of Peace” with reservations, he didn’t go to Davos. Switzerland is a signatory to the International Criminal Court, and would be obligated to arrest Netanyahu for war crimes committed in Gaza. Israeli President Isaac Herzog attended the conference, but didn’t bother to show up to the presentation.

The ambitious plan has many obstacles and hurdles in its place, especially considering the “Board of Peace” doesn’t have any buy-in from European powers yet. Only 20 of the 60 countries the U.S. invited to join the Board of Peace sent representatives to the presentation, including Argentina, Hungary, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. And the board doesn’t have any Palestinians on it, essentially making it a body that decides their fate without them having any visible presence.

“Just calm down for 30 days,” Kushner said in his presentation. “The war is over. Let’s work together.” So far, that goal seems like a pipe dream.

President Trump announced his “Board of Peace” on Thursday, but his invitations were snubbed by the U.S.’s traditional European allies, with right-wing, autocratic leaders like Argentina’s Javier Milei, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Saudi Arabia’s Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud joining instead.

France and Germany outright declined the invitation, while the United Kingdom cited the presumed involvement of Russian President Vladimir Putin as their dealbreaker.

“We do also have concerns about Putin being part of something which is talking about peace, when we have still not seen any signs from Putin that there will be a commitment to peace in Ukraine,” British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said to the BBC on Thursday.

Sweden, Slovenia, Norway, and Belgium have also all denied Trump’s invitation to the board.

“Belgium has NOT signed the Charter of the Board of Peace,” Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Prévot wrote Thursday on X, after the White House announced that they had joined. “We wish for a common and coordinated European response. As many European countries, we have reservations to the proposal.”

Countries that have agreed to join the board instead include Argentina, Belarus, Egypt, Jordan, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

The “Board of Peace” idea emerged from the Gaza “ceasefire”—an agreement that has been broken countless times, as at least 11 Palestinians, including two children and three journalists, were killed in Israeli attacks the day before Trump’s announcement.

Trump sees this board as a potential rival to the United Nations, a “peacekeeping” group of countries that are all loyal to him. He is selling permanent membership on the board for $1 billion. If an individual or a country doesn’t buy permanent membership, they only have a three-year window to stay on the board.

Executive members include Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, Apollo Global Management CEO Mark Rowan, World Bank president Ajay Banga, and Deputy National Security Advisor Robert Gabriel Jr.

This entire “Board of Peace” concept feels haphazard and strange, especially given the presence of autocrats like Orban and Milei—and our current antagonistic relationship with Greenland and NATO.

Donald Trump isn’t en route to an amenable acquisition of Greenland—but he doesn’t seem to be aware of that.

Mere hours after the president declared to the world Wednesday that he had discussed a “framework” for obtaining Greenland with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, the man on the other end of the line revealed that no such deal had been discussed.

The cold water did not wake Trump up from his dream of northern expansion, however. In an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo early Thursday morning, Trump insisted that the “details” of the monumental land grab were still being “negotiated.”

“What are we talking about? An acquisition of Greenland? Are you going to pay for it?” asked Bartiromo.

“We’re talking about it—it’s really being negotiated now, the details of it, but essentially it’s total access,” Trump said. “There’s no end, no time limit.”

The president then said that “it’s possible” the U.S. could acquire Greenland, and claimed that his wildly aggressive negotiating tactics had added to America’s military access to the icy island, despite myriad existing treaties that already give the U.S. unfettered access to Greenland as a military base.

Greenland is a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark and has repeatedly rejected Trump’s attempts to stake a claim to their land.

Rutte told Fox News Wednesday evening that he had not discussed the issue of whether or not Greenland will remain under the Danish flag during his meeting with Trump.

“What I don’t hear is Greenland—is it still under the Kingdom of Denmark in this framework deal?” asked host Bret Baier.

“That issue did not come up any more in my conversations tonight with the president,” Rutte said. “He’s very much focused on what do we need to do to make sure that that huge Arctic region—where change is taking place at the moment, where the Chinese and the Russians are more and more active—how we can protect it.”

The vast majority of the American public opposes Trump’s attempts to obtain Greenland. A YouGov survey published Tuesday found that 72 percent of polled voters do not support a military takeover of Greenland. Even Republicans were far less likely to support the measure, with 52 percent opposed compared to 22 percent in favor.

Federal immigration agents reportedly used a 5-year-old boy in Minnesota to lure his family members out of their home in order to detain and deport them. Then they sent him away.

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was returning home from school Tuesday with his father when masked immigration agents approached them in their driveway.

The Department of Homeland Security claimed Thursday that officers were only targeting Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, Liam’s father, who “fled on foot—abandoning his child.”

However: “Another adult living in the home was outside and begged the agents to let him take care of the small child, and was refused,” said Zena Stenvik, a Columbia Heights Public School superintendent who recounted the story to MPR News.

“Instead the agent took the child out of the still-running car, led him to the door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in in order to see if anyone else was home, essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.”

Stenvik said that the Ramos family had an “active asylum case” and no deportation order. “I have viewed the legal paperwork with my own eyes,” she said.

“Why detain a 5-year-old? You can’t tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal,” Stenvik said.

Family members said they didn’t know where the child was for nearly 24 hours.

Marc Prokosch, the family’s lawyer, said that based on his experience, he believed Liam and his father were sent out of state. “I’m exploring whether we file a habeas corpus petition to get him out; we’d have to actually file that down in Texas now,” he told MPR News.

Prokosch confirmed that the family had been following the legal asylum process. “Every step of their immigration process has been doing what they’ve been asked to do, and so this is just … cruelty,” he said.

According to Columbia Heights school district officials, three other students have been detained by federal agents in recent weeks, including a 10-year-old who was detained with her mother on her way to school, another student who was taken on the way to school, and a 17-year-old who was detained when ICE agents stormed into their home.

In December, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wouldn’t deny that the Trump administration was illegally deporting people with ongoing asylum cases. ICE attorneys at immigration hearings are increasingly asking immigration judges to dismiss asylum cases, and the Trump administration has instructed judges to grant quick dismissals. At the same time, the Trump administration has purged dozens of immigration judges and sought to recruit so-called “deportation judges” to help ramp up the government’s soft ethnic cleansing.

This story has been updated.

The Department of Homeland Security is crudely referring to its newest immigration crackdown in Maine as “Operation Catch of the Day,” as it prepares to hunt and catch immigrants like lobsters.

“These masked men with no regard for the rule of law are causing long-term damage to our state and to our country,” Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline said on Wednesday. “Lewiston stands for the dignity of all people who call Maine home.”

Maine’s two biggest cities, Portland and Lewiston, have large Somali populations, and were already on edge as the Trump administration continued its racist targeting of the group. The operation’s very name speaks to the inhumanity with which these agents treat people.

DHS announced the operation began with a series of arrests on Tuesday. It’s not clear how long ICE agents will be stationed in Maine, or if Border Patrol agents currently in Minneapolis will head to Maine next.

“ICE has been operating in Maine for a while. But now they’re threatening to step up their brutality, and bring what we saw in Minneapolis to our state,” Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner said on X last week, before offering strategies for community members to combat aggressive immigration agents. “We will not let masked agents come to Maine and terrorize our communities. We will not be intimidated. This is our home.”