Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has pushed the plight of the Palestinian people to the forefront of global attention. For more than two years, the world has witnessed the mass killing, disease and starvation imposed upon the enclave by Israel.

Faced with a sense of helplessness, calls have grown for boycotts of Israeli goods, for companies profiting from Israel or its settlements in the occupied West Bank to divest, and for politicians to expand sanctions that some have already imposed on Israeli ministers.

However, with other world events, such as the war in Ukraine and the United States’s face-off with Iran now dominating much of the world’s headlines, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement faces a challenge to keep attention on Gaza and Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.

Gains made

The war on Gaza has led to Israel facing unprecedented condemnation from around the world.

Israel has moved closer to pariah status for its attacks not just in Gaza – killing more than 70,000 Palestinians – but in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.

The country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant now find themselves facing International Criminal Court arrest warrants for war crimes.

At home, at least two of Israel’s far-right government ministers, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, have also been sanctioned by governments worldwide.

And on top of that hangs the judgement of the International Court of Justice in January 2024, that the state of Israel may plausibly be engaged in genocide, in an ongoing case brought by South Africa.

Criticism of Israel has also entered the mainstream culturally in Western countries, particularly among young people horrified by the death rained upon Gaza.

And importantly, there have been economic consequences for Israel and some of those doing business in it – echoing the boycott movement against apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

Companies such as the French supermarket chain Carrefour were forced to close a number of outlets in the Middle East amid public anger over its links to Israeli firms operating in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Other companies associated with Israel’s actions, including Airbnb – which allows Israelis in illegal settlements to rent their properties – and Microsoft, whose Azure cloud services have supported the Israeli military, have all faced internal dissent and reputational damage because of their ties to the Israeli government.

As a consequence of public pressure, pension funds from around the world, including Spain, Norway, Denmark, France and Ireland, have divested from Israeli assets linked to settlements, or withdrawn investments from companies tied to Israel.

“BDS and boycotts have changed Israel’s global trade landscape,” Avi Balashnikov, chairman of the Israel Export Institute, conceded in September 2024.

“We fight every day, hour by hour, for Israeli industry abroad,” he added. “Economic boycotts and BDS organisations present major challenges, and in some countries, we are forced to operate under the radar.”

Moving spotlight

Despite a US-brokered “ceasefire“, Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed more than 500 people since the agreement was reached in October, including at least 31 on Saturday. The fact that Israel has continued to kill Palestinians, while much of the world looks away, highlights the difficulty now facing the BDS movement and whether it can maintain the energy it has gained.

“It is not uncommon for the observance of a boycott to rise and fall according to the prominence of an issue and success of specific campaigns to raise awareness or promote adherence to the boycott,” Nick Cull, a historian and authority on cultural boycotts at the University of Southern California, told Al Jazeera.

“I think that the power of a boycott is cumulative,” Cull continued. “Just as advertising associates a brand with good feelings and positive experiences – think how over many decades Coca-Cola link their drink to ideas of friendship – as part of the ‘buy-me’ message, so a boycott’s ‘don’t buy’ message becomes a negative branding associating a product and its place of origin with negative feelings: training a revulsion impulse rather than a logical inner debate over the merits of a particular case.”

“Since the ceasefire, a less-visible form of genocide has been unfolding,” Saleh Hijazi, Policy Coordinator with the BDS movement, told Al Jazeera, pointing to the mounting death toll in Gaza from Israeli attacks and the restrictions that Israel was imposing on access to food and medicine.

“Israel and the US, a full partner in this genocide, have used the so-called ceasefire as an attempt to rescue apartheid Israel from a downward spiral, to launder its global image and muffle international outrage. It’s meant to push Palestinians out of the headlines, weaken calls for boycotts and sanctions, and make our struggle seem less urgent,” Hijazi said.

Lasting damage

However, while the media spotlight may have broadened from its formerly sharp focus on Gaza, the reputational damage inflicted on companies trading with Israel as a result of its genocide, as well as new initiatives to culturally isolate it, are gaining ground.

“I still feel odd about brands demonised during [South Africa’s] apartheid and artists who violated the boycott,” Cull added, emphasising the lasting reputational damage of boycotts. “This training of people into a negative reflex is what makes boycotts so powerful.”

More initiatives are now taking hold, attempting to build on the sense of cultural isolation many in Israel feel.

One, Game Over Israel, led by political strategist Ashish Prashar, aims to remove Israel from European football.

“We launched our campaign to kick Israel out of football with a huge billboard in Times Square on September 16, the same day the UN’s [Commission of Inquiry] report on genocide came out,” Prashar said.

“The idea is to appeal to what they call the ‘integrity of the game,’” he said, explaining that the campaign would continue despite the “ceasefire”. “We’re running a campaign the same way we would an election strategy. Our next target is to go after [European football’s governing body] UEFA in Switzerland.”

“Ninety percent of Israel’s games are played through UEFA,” Prashar said. “Suspending them would probably help lots of the clubs, their towns and the fans. Just the cost of policing an Israeli game … costs a fortune. Most councils can’t afford that. Other stadiums are closed off, which means that fans can’t go and clubs lose the ticket money, or they’re moved, which means no one makes any money.”

“It’s not about football,” he said. “It’s about not accepting the normalisation of Israel. It’s the institutional resistance to this that’s frightening. This shouldn’t be on people or small groups of activists. This should be on governments.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Newly disclosed government files on Jeffrey Epstein are offering more details about his interactions with the rich and famous after he served time for sex crimes in Florida, and on how much investigators knew about his abuse of underage girls when they decided not to indict him on federal charges nearly two decades ago.

The documents released Friday include Epstein’s communications with former White House advisers, an NFL team co-owner and billionaires including Bill Gates and Elon Musk.

The fallout already includes the resignation of a top official in Slovakia, Miroslav Lajcak, who once had a yearlong term as president of the U.N. General Assembly.

Lajcak resigned after photos and emails were made public detailing meetings he had with Epstein in the years after Epstein was released from jail.

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice said it would be releasing more than 3 million pages of documents along with more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images under a law intended to reveal most of the material it collected during two decades of investigations involving the wealthy financier.

The files, posted to the department’s website, included documents involving Epstein’s friendship with Britain’s Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, and Epstein’s email correspondence with onetime Trump adviser Steve Bannon, New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch and other prominent contacts with people in political, business and philanthropic circles.

Other documents offered a window into various investigations, including ones that led to sex trafficking charges against Epstein in 2019 and his longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, and an earlier inquiry that found evidence of Epstein abusing underage girls but never led to federal charges.

Slovakian official resigns

Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister, said Saturday that he had accepted the resignation of Lajcak, his national security adviser.

Lajcak, a former Slovak foreign minister, hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing, but emails showed that Epstein had invited him to dinner and other meetings in 2018.

The records also include a March 2018 email from Epstein’s office to former Obama White House general counsel Kathy Ruemmler, inviting her to a get-together with Epstein, Lajcak and Bannon, the conservative activist who served as Trump’s White House strategist in 2017.

Lajcak said his contacts with Epstein were part of his diplomatic duties. Pressure mounted for his ouster from opposition parties and a nationalist partner in Fico’s governing coalition.

Draft indictment detailed Epstein’s abuse

The FBI started investigating Epstein in July 2006 and agents expected him to be indicted in May 2007, according to the newly records released. A prosecutor wrote up a proposed indictment after multiple underage girls told police and the FBI that they had been paid to give Epstein sexualized massages.

The draft indicated prosecutors were preparing to charge not just Epstein but also three people who worked for him as personal assistants.

According to interview notes released Friday, an employee at Epstein’s Florida estate told the FBI in 2007 that Epstein once had him buy flowers and deliver them to a student at Royal Palm Beach High School to commemorate her performance in a school play.

The employee, whose name was blacked out, said some of his duties were fanning $100 bills on a table near Epstein’s bed, placing a gun between the mattresses in his bedroom and cleaning up after Epstein’s frequent massages with young girls, including disposing of used condoms.

Ultimately, the U.S. attorney in Miami at the time, Alexander Acosta, signed off on a deal that let Epstein avoid federal prosecution. Epstein pleaded guilty instead to a state charge of soliciting prostitution from someone under age 18 and got an 18-month jail sentence. Acosta was Trump’s first labor secretary in his earlier term.

Epstein offers to set Andrew up on a date

The records have thousands of references to Trump, including emails in which Epstein and others shared news articles about him, commented on his policies or politics, or gossiped about him and his family.

Mountbatten-Windsor’s name appears at least several hundred times, including in Epstein’s private emails. In a 2010 exchange, Epstein appeared to try and set him up for a date.

“I have a friend who I think you might enjoy having dinner with,” Epstein wrote.

Mountbatten-Windsor replied that he “would be delighted to see her.” The email was signed “A.”

Epstein, whose emails often contain typographical errors, wrote later in the exchange: “She 26, russian, clevere beautiful, trustworthy and yes she has your email.”

Concerns over how Justice Department handled records

The Justice Department is facing criticism over how it handled the latest disclosure.

One group of Epstein accusers said in a statement that the new documents made it too easy to identify those he abused but not those who might have been involved in Epstein’s criminal activity.

“As survivors, we should never be the ones named, scrutinized, and retraumatized while Epstein’s enablers continue to benefit from secrecy,” it said.

Meanwhile, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, pressed the department to let lawmakers review unredacted versions of the files as soon as Sunday. He said in a statement that Congress must assess whether the redactions were lawful or improperly shielded people from scrutiny.

Department officials have acknowledged that many records in its files are duplicates, and it was clear from the documents that reviewers took different degrees of care or exercised different standards while blacking out names and other identifying information.

There were multiple documents where a name was left exposed in one copy, but redacted in another.

Epstein’s ties to powerful on display

The released records reinforced the Epstein was, at least before he ran into legal trouble, friendly with Trump and former President Bill Clinton. None of Epstein’s victims who have gone public has accused Trump, a Republican, or Clinton, a Democrat, of wrongdoing. Both men said they had no knowledge Epstein was abusing underage girls.

Epstein killed himself in a New York jail in August 2019, a month after being indicted.

In 2021, a federal jury in New York convicted Maxwell, a British socialite, of sex trafficking for helping recruit some of his underage victims. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

U.S. prosecutors never charged anyone else in connection with Epstein’s abuse. One victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, sued Mountbatten-Windsor, saying she had sexual encounters with him starting at age 17. The now-former prince denied having sex with Giuffre but settled her lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.

Giuffre died by suicide last year at age 41.

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The AP is reviewing the documents released by the Justice Department in collaboration with journalists from Versant, CBS and NBC. Journalists from each newsroom are working together to examine the files and share information about what is in them. Each outlet is responsible for its own independent news coverage of the documents.

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Tucker and Richer reported from Washington. Associated Press journalists from around the country contributed to this report.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of Jeffrey Epstein at https://apnews.com/hub/jeffrey-epstein.

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff said he had “productive and constructive meetings” with the Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

“We are encouraged by this meeting that Russia is working toward securing peace in Ukraine and is grateful for [the president’s] critical leadership in seeking a durable and lasting peace,” Witkoff wrote on X.

During a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, Witkoff said that progress had been made and that there had been “lots of good things happening between the counterparties discussing the land deal.”

“I think the people of Ukraine are now hopeful and expecting that we’re going to deliver a peace deal sometime soon,” Witkoff added.

TRUMP SAYS PUTIN AGREED TO HALT KYIV STRIKES FOR ONE WEEK AMID BRUTAL COLD

The meetings occurred on Saturday in Florida, according to Witkoff, and included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and White House senior advisor Josh Gruenbaum. Witkoff and Kushner have been two of the key players from the Trump administration not only in the Russia-Ukraine deal, but also others, including the Israel-Gaza peace plan.

Witkoff, Kushner and Gruenbaum also met with Putin earlier this month in Moscow shortly after the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Following the meeting in Moscow, Witkoff, Kushner, Gruenbaum and other U.S. representatives met with negotiators from Ukraine and Russia. The talks were said to be constructive, despite the fact that obstacles to peace remained.

“A lot was discussed, and it is important that the conversations were constructive,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X. “As a result of the meetings held over these days, all sides agreed to report back in their capitals on each aspect of the negotiations and to coordinate further steps with their leaders.”

ZELENSKYY TOUTS ‘CONSTRUCTIVE’ TRILATERAL TALKS BETWEEN THE US, RUSSIA AND UKRAINE IN ABU DHABI

Nearly four years after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, Ukrainians are facing a brutal winter and Russian strikes on Kyiv’s energy resources have made conditions worse. However, President Donald Trump said on Thursday at his Cabinet meeting that Putin had agreed to a temporary pause in targeting Kyiv and other places in the region experiencing the frigid weather.

“And because of the cold, extreme cold — they have the same that we do — I personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kyiv and the cities and towns for a week,” Trump said, adding that Putin had “agreed to do that.” The president classified the weather in the region as being “record-setting cold.”

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed on Friday that Trump had made the request for Putin to stop targeting Kyiv until Feb. 1 “in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations,” The Associated Press reported. The outlet noted that it was odd that the Kremlin spokesperson mentioned Feb. 1, as it would mean it was only a two-day pause. Additionally, the AP reported that the cold weather forecast is set to get worse after Sunday.

Witkoff, Kushner and Gruenbaum met with Putin earlier this month in Moscow shortly after the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Following the meeting in Moscow, Witkoff, Kushner, Gruenbaum and other U.S. representatives met with negotiators from Ukraine and Russia. The talks were said to be constructive, despite the fact that obstacles to peace remained.

“A lot was discussed, and it is important that the conversations were constructive,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X. “As a result of the meetings held over these days, all sides agreed to report back in their capitals on each aspect of the negotiations and to coordinate further steps with their leaders.”

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Russia and Ukraine are set to hold another round of peace negotiations in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, according to The Kyiv Independent. However, it is unclear whether the U.S. will participate in the talks.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.