Tel Aviv — After more than a year of bombing and homelessness, Gazans are looking to a new administration in Washington for help. President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory has raised hopes and fears among the five million residents of the Palestinian territories — the warn-torn Gaza Strip and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Gaza resident Rakan Abdul Ahman told CBS News he wants the new U.S. president to make Israel end the war.

“We’ve witnessed enough killing of women and children,” he said. “I’m looking for Trump to end the suffering in the Gaza Strip.”

In the eyes of Ahmed Harb, a Gazan journalist, the incoming Trump administration faces a real test. In his victory speech, Trump said he’d end wars. Harb hopes that means the one in Gaza.

“I hope he was telling the truth,” he told CBS News, adding: “But he shouldn’t stop the war at the expense of the Palestinian people.”

That is the big worry for Palestinian politicians, too, including Mustafa Bargouti. Still a practicing physician, he leads the Palestinian National Initiative, a party that champions democratic government for all Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza.

The question, Bargouti said, is “how you stop the war? Do you stop it by annexing occupied territories? By ethnically cleansing Palestinians? Or do you stop the war by forcing Israel to end its illegal policy of settling Israelis on our land?”

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, sparked by the U.S. and Israeli-designated terrorist group’s massacre of some 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, has diverted international attention away from growing violence in the West Bank by Israeli settlers determined to encroach on what has been Palestinian land.

In 2023, there were a record number of so-called outposts — makeshift Jewish encampments set up by settlers in what has been Palestinian land. They can be as simple as a couple of shipping containers that function as a de-facto Jewish real estate claim. The settler groups then lobby Israel’s courts and government to retroactively make the outposts official Jewish settlements.

Right-wingers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet support Jewish expansion, including the outposts, in the West Bank. They openly advocate driving the Palestinians out, and annexing the whole area for Israel. Not only would that be illegal under international law, Bargouti warns that it would also lead to even more conflict.

“We will struggle for our rights,” he said. “It will take time. We will suffer. We know that. But what’s the alternative? To cease to exist? It’s ethnic cleansing. We cannot accept that.”

Palestinians everywhere are watching Trump’s choosing of pro-Israeli officials for key positions with dismay, especially Mike Huckabee, the president-elect’s pick to serve as the next U.S. Ambassador to Israel.

Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, is on the record as saying, “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.”

“When you hear a person like Huckabee saying there is no occupation, and there are no settlements, they are just Israeli communities…. he might as well say there is no international law,” said Bargouti.

During Trump’s first term, he opposed the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and, in 2020, proposed what he called “the deal of the century” — a template for a long-sought Palestinian state.

Under his proposal, the new state would have been a scattering of isolated Palestinian lands, each surrounded by Israel. The plan was rejected by both the Palestinians and by Jewish settlers and, since then, both sides have dug in.

Even if the new Trump administration revives some version of its proposal for a Palestinian state, it will face Palestinians and their Arab allies whose resolve has only been hardened by a devastating year of war in Gaza that has killed almost 44,000 people.

On the Israeli side, hardliners in Netanyahu’s government oppose any form of Palestinian sovereignty. Netanyahu himself has flatly rejected the prospect repeatedly.

Bargouti, however, sounded ready for the fight.

“I’m sure it will be a rough year for everybody,” he told CBS News. “But whatever happens, we, the Palestinian people, will never give up our right to struggle for our freedom.”

Elizabeth Palmer

Elizabeth Palmer is CBS News’ senior foreign correspondent. She is based in the CBS News London Bureau, and reports on major events across Europe and the Middle East. Palmer was previously based in Tokyo, and before that in Moscow, for CBS News.

Victoria Kjær Theilvig of Denmark has been crowned Miss Universe.

Kjaer, an animal protection advocate who works in the diamond selling business, beat out Miss Nigeria at the end of 73rd edition of the competition in Mexico City. Miss Mexico placed third.

It is the first time a Danish contestant has won Miss Universe.

The pageant was held in the Mexico City Arena, an indoor venue with a capacity for 20,000 people. Supporters inside shouted and waved flags from countries around the world.

The ceremony began with 131 mariachi musicians and singer Taboo of the Black Eyed Peas playing “Mexicana,” a song created by Emilio Estefan for the contest.

The gala was hosted by Mario López; Olivia Culpo, Miss Universe 2012; presenter Zuri Hall; and Catriona Gray, Miss Universe 2018.

Organizers said that there were more than 120 contestants.

“We can’t wait to see the incredible impact she’ll make as our new Miss Universe,” the competition wrote on social media, along with video of the winning moment. “Congratulations Victoria Kjaer Miss Universe 2024.”

This year some countries were represented for the first time, such as Belarus, Eritrea, Guinea, Macau, Maldives, Moldova and Uzbekistan.

This is the third time that Mexico has hosted Miss Universe.

Miss Nicaragua Sheynnis Palacios won the previous Miss Universe competition in El Salvador, the first to wear the crown from her country.

R’Bonney Gabriel from the United States was crowned the 71st Miss Universe.

Spain has arrested 14 people suspected of links to the powerful Mexican Sinaloa cartel as part of a kidnapping and murder probe, police said Sunday.

The ring busted by Spanish investigators was mainly made up of Mexican nationals. It was connected to the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is based in northwestern Mexico and has been shaken by weeks of gang infighting.

“The dismantled criminal network, which is based in Catalonia, is believed to be involved in the kidnapping and death of a man whose body was found in a wooded area” in the northeastern Spanish region in August, police said in a statement.

The victim, whose nationality was not specified, allegedly worked with the gang and “had come from Italy for a meeting with several chiefs.”

The victim’s family in Kosovo reported his disappearance to the police after he was abducted between late May and June.

The family received a 240,000-euro ransom request ($253,000) and a total of $32,000 was paid in cryptocurrency.

The 14 detained suspects were allegedly involved in drug trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping and murder, the statement also said. The detainees, 11 men and 3 women, are between 30 and 70 years old.

The Catalonia-based ring received shipments from Mexico containing clothes soaked with methamphetamine, which they then extracted in a Spanish lab, police added.

The 14 arrests came just days after Spain arrested one of its top police officers after 20 million euros were found hidden in the walls of his house, as part of a probe into the country’s largest-ever cocaine bust.

The Sinaloa cartel, which is named after the Mexican state where it originated, is one of the largest criminal organizations in the world. Two of its founders, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada are jailed in the United States.

Zambada, 76, was arrested on July 25 in the southern United States, where he landed with Joaquin Guzman Lopez, one of “El Chapo’s” sons, who led a faction of the cartel known as the “Chapitos.” The veteran drug trafficker has accused Lopez of kidnapping him and handing him over to U.S. law enforcement.

According to an indictment released by the U.S. Justice Department last year, the “Chapitos” and their cartel associates used corkscrews, electrocution and hot chiles to torture their rivals while some of their victims were “fed dead or alive to tigers.” El Chapo’s sons were among 28 Sinaloa cartel members charged in a massive fentanyl-trafficking investigation announced in April 2023.

“El Chapo” is serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison in Colorado after being convicted in 2019 on charges including drug trafficking, money laundering and weapons-related offenses.

Spiraling criminal violence, much of it linked to gang drug trafficking, has seen more than 450,000 people murdered in Mexico since 2006.