HARTFORD — The Selectboard has canceled a special meeting scheduled for next week to consider adopting a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

In a 6-1 vote on Tuesday, the board backtracked on its plan to take up the proposed resolution on April 22.

“I do support a ceasefire and I’d like to see our community find ways to support our Palestinian residents as well as immigrant community members,” board member Miranda Dupre said in a recording of the meeting. “I just don’t know if this resolution at this time will do that.”

Last year’s board rejected, 4-3, a citizen-sponsored resolution with hundreds of signatures that called for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to U.S. support for Israel’s military offensive.

More than 1,200 Israelis were killed in Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Since then the Israel-Hamas war has claimed the lives of nearly 51,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Women and children make up more than half of the dead, the ministry claims.

Israel’s military has destroyed much of Gaza’s infrastructure and displaced around 90% of its 2 million Palestinian residents.

Brandon Smith, who worked on last year’s resolution, was the lone board member to support going ahead with the special meeting.

At its April 1 meeting, the board voted 6-0, with Michael Hoyt absent, in favor of scheduling the special meeting, which had been proposed by Smith.

His rationale for wanting to reintroduce the proposed resolution this month stemmed from Israel reinvading Gaza after a ceasefire that went into effect on Jan. 19 fell apart, Smith said.

“(T)he ceasefire didn’t hold, and we’re supplying weapons and political cover to Israel’s extermination campaign yet again,” he wrote in a Listserv post on April 13.

Smith also hoped that with three new Selectboard members elected last month, the resolution might have a better chance this time around.

Smith then spent the week before Tuesday’s meeting collaborating with community members who crafted last year’s resolution to revise it.

The revision includes an updated Palestinian death toll and calls upon Vermont’s congressional delegation to filibuster legislation prioritized by President Donald Trump and calls on Congress to refuse to confirm any of his nominees until an arms embargo against Israel is enacted.

The revised resolution defines “antisemitism,” for use by town staff, as “the discrimination, targeting, violence, and dehumanizing stereotypes directed at Jews because they are Jewish,” the definition Jewish Voice for Peace, a Jewish Palestinian solidarity organization, uses.

But in the two weeks between voting for a special meeting and Tuesday’s regularly scheduled meeting, board members changed their minds.

The board received about 15 emails from constituents opposing the special meeting and the resolution.

“Selectboard members: please pay attention to the town of Hartford business that you were elected to spend time on,” resident Mary Kay Brown wrote to the Hartford Listserv on April 14. “We’ve got those other elected state and national level officials working on Gaza and other issues and probably many of us have already contacted them with our views on such issues.”

During Tuesday’s meeting, board members Michael Hoyt and Erik Krauss agreed that a ceasefire resolution is not appropriate for the town to take up.

The remaining five members disagreed, especially since federal immigration agents took Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian activist with ties to the Upper Valley, into custody on Monday in Colchester, Vt.

Mohsen, a legal permanent U.S. resident, or green card holder, since 2014, is being held at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in Swanton, Vt.

“The resident abducted by ICE was expressly abducted because he publicly supported the topic of this resolution,” Smith said during Tuesday’s meeting. “I think when our townspeople start getting plucked from their daily business, without charge of a crime as this man was, I think whatever topic that drives that is town business. How close does it have to get to you before you start thinking it’s town business?”

The board released a statement Tuesday night calling for Mahdawi’s “timely release.”

“Mohsen is a member of our community, a neighbor, and a friend to many,” the statement says. “He has added value as an educator, mediator, and relationship builder, and has an outpouring of support from his home of Hartford.”

Instead of a ceasefire resolution, which has no legal power but merely expresses an opinion, Dupre suggested the board create a task force to “research the best way for Hartford to support Palestinians right now,” she said in a Thursday phone interview.

Dupre said the resolution process felt rushed and divisive: “It didn’t feel like it was a totally collaborative effort.”

“Some people want to see the resolution led by the community as opposed to the board member as if I’m not a community member,” Smith said in a phone interview. “My political philosophy is, the purpose of a system is what it does. ... The purpose of the Selectboard in that moment was to make sure a ceasefire resolution was not debated.”

While Smith likes Dupre’s ideas, he doesn’t know what more the board has the power to do.

“I struggle to think about what could have more teeth, because the teeth in the proposed resolution is all a local body can do,” Smith said.

The board has no formal commitment to take up issues relating to Gaza again, but Dupre is not worried about it getting brushed to the side.

“I’m not going to let this go,” she said.

Emma Roth-Wells can be reached at erothwells@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.

CORRECTION: The Hartford Selectboard received about 15 emails opposin  g a special meeting to consider adopting a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. A previous version of this story overstated the number of emails the board received due to inaccurate information from a board member.