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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

Israeli authorities are trying to silence humanitarian aid workers in Gaza

Israeli authorities are trying to silence humanitarian aid workers in Gaza

Jonathan Whittall writes: Gaza has been held under water for 22 months, allowed to gasp for air only when Israeli authorities have succumbed to political pressure from those with more leverage than international law itself. After months of relentless bombardment, forced displacement and deprivation, the impact of Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza’s people has never been more devastating. I have been part of coordinating humanitarian efforts in Gaza since October 2023. Whatever lifesaving aid has entered since then has been…

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DOJ contradicts White House’s goal to arrest 3,000 immigrants per day

DOJ contradicts White House’s goal to arrest 3,000 immigrants per day

Politico reports: Stephen Miller was unequivocal: Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would seek to arrest 3,000 or more immigrants per day, a staggering target that he said was necessary to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day,” the senior White…

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The United States is complicit in genocide. Let’s stop pretending otherwise

The United States is complicit in genocide. Let’s stop pretending otherwise

Mehdi Hasan writes: Can we finally stop pretending that what we have been witnessing in Gaza over the past 22 months is a “war,” a “conflict,” or even a “humanitarian crisis”? Many of the world’s leading human rights and humanitarian groups – including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders – agreed months ago that what is being livestreamed to our phones on a daily basis is indeed a genocide. This week, Israel’s own leading human rights group…

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‘We’re trying to do the best we can before we die’

‘We’re trying to do the best we can before we die’

Claire Porter Robbins writes: George Anton is hungry, but he’s become used to the sensation—the urgent, aching feeling in his stomach, the heaviness of his limbs. He hardly has time to acknowledge the discomfort, given all the work he has to do. He is the operations manager for an aid-distribution program operating through the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City, the sole remaining Catholic church in Gaza. Anton lives at the church in a single room that he shares…

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How the Israel inquiry led by ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, was derailed

How the Israel inquiry led by ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, was derailed

  A major Middle East Eye investigation has uncovered extraordinary details of an intensifying intimidation campaign targeting the British chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court over his investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes. The campaign has involved threats and warnings directed at Karim Khan by prominent figures, close colleagues and family friends briefing against him, fears for the prosecutor’s safety prompted by a Mossad team in The Hague, and media leaks about sexual assault allegations.

Netanyahu is choosing to let starvation consume the children in Gaza

Netanyahu is choosing to let starvation consume the children in Gaza

Alex de Waal writes: Mass starvation is unfolding in and around the Sudanese city of El Fasher, where the Sudanese Army and its allies are defending a siege and onslaught by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Both sides are fighting a war of starvation, stealing food from civilians and blocking aid. If the warring parties were to agree to a cease-fire this instant, given the perilous roads and the underfunded aid operation, it would be weeks or months before sufficient…

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As Witkoff and Huckabee staged a humanitarian photo op, dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israelis

As Witkoff and Huckabee staged a humanitarian photo op, dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israelis

Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous report: President Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee toured an “aid distribution” site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Rafah in southern Gaza on Friday. During the U.S. envoy’s highly stage-managed visit, at least 82 Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks across the enclave, including 49 people seeking food aid with more than 270 injured. The visit came as the leading international authority on food crises—the…

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The starvation of Gaza is shameful. Crippling sanctions on Israel are needed, say Israeli public figures

The starvation of Gaza is shameful. Crippling sanctions on Israel are needed, say Israeli public figures

The Guardian reports: A group of high-profile Israeli public figures, including academics, artists and public intellectuals, has called for “crippling sanctions” to be imposed by the international community on Israel, amid mounting horror over its starvation of Gaza. The 31 signatories of a letter to the Guardian include an Academy award recipient, Yuval Abraham; a former Israeli attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair; Avraham Burg, a former speaker of Israel’s parliament and former head of the Jewish Agency; and a number of…

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France and Britain’s recognition of a Palestinian state won’t end Israel’s onslaught

France and Britain’s recognition of a Palestinian state won’t end Israel’s onslaught

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley write: Almost two years into a conflict that has cost tens of thousands of lives, amid an Israeli military campaign and humanitarian blockade that have reached apocalyptic proportions, and faced with their own powerlessness as they bear witness to what growing numbers of experts call a genocide, Emmanuel Macron has announced France’s dramatic next step: it will recognize a Palestinian state in September. Keir Starmer quickly followed suit, stating that the UK would do likewise…

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Venezuelan men sent to CECOT on what they endured and reuniting with their families

Venezuelan men sent to CECOT on what they endured and reuniting with their families

By Perla Trevizo, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, Melissa Sanchez and Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica, Ronna Rísquez, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Adrián González, Cazadores de Fake News, photography and additional reporting by Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune This story was originally published by ProPublica Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his…

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Peter Beinart: Why do some American Jews believe equality is good for us but not for Israelis and Palestinians?

Peter Beinart: Why do some American Jews believe equality is good for us but not for Israelis and Palestinians?

  Editor-at-large of “Jewish Currents,” who writes “The Beinart Notebook” on Substack, Peter Beinart sits down with Jon Stewart to discuss his book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,” and speaking out against Israel. They talk about learning from Jewish history to be the saviors rather than the oppressors, America and the U.N.’s failure to hold Benjamin Netanyahu accountable, the urgency of engaging in critical discourse with other Jews, and how listening to Palestinian stories can illuminate…

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Israel is committing genocide, says Israeli human rights group

Israel is committing genocide, says Israeli human rights group

B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, reports: Since October 2023, Israel has shifted its policy toward the Palestinians. Its military onslaught on Gaza, underway for more than 21 months, has included mass killing, both directly and through creating unlivable conditions, serious bodily or mental harm to an entire population, decimation of basic infrastructure throughout the Strip, and forcible displacement on a huge scale, with ethnic cleansing added to the list of official war objectives….

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Trump order pushes forced hospitalization of homeless people

Trump order pushes forced hospitalization of homeless people

The Washington Post reports: President Donald Trump has directed federal agencies to find ways to make it easier to forcibly hospitalize homeless people with mental illness and addiction for longer periods — an effort to fight what the administration calls “vagrancy” threatening the streets of U.S. cities. An executive order signed Thursday pushes federal agencies to overturn state and federal legal precedent that limits how local and state governments can involuntarily commit people who pose a risk to themselves or…

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Genocide has become a spectacle as Israeli soldiers and U.S. contractors murder starving Palestinians

Genocide has become a spectacle as Israeli soldiers and U.S. contractors murder starving Palestinians

  A former US veteran who was employed at a food distribution site in Gaza has accused members of the Israel Defence Forces and American colleagues of deliberately targeting and killing unarmed Palestinian civilians. Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Aguilar, a former special forces veteran, was recruited to work for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a joint Israeli-US scheme replacing the United Nations food distribution operation in Gaza. He has told the BBC he witnessed the IDF shooting at the crowds of Palestinians, firing…

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‘We are starving’

‘We are starving’

Ruwaida Amer writes: I am so hungry. I’ve never meant those words in the way I do now. They carry a kind of humiliation that I can’t fully describe. Every moment, I find myself wishing: If only this were just a nightmare. If only I could wake up and it would all be over. Since last May, after I was forced to flee my home and take shelter with relatives in Khan Younis refugee camp, I’ve heard those same words…

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Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison describe ‘hell on Earth’

Venezuelans deported to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison describe ‘hell on Earth’

NPR reports: Carlos Daniel Terán, 19, still remembers the words a prison warden told him when he entered El Salvador’s mega-prison, CECOT. “He told us we were never going to leave this place,” Terán recalled. It was March of this year. Terán had just been transferred from an immigration detention center in Texas to the notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo — known as CECOT — a maximum-security prison built to house accused Salvadoran gang members. El Salvador’s own justice…

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