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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

Report from Beirut: Israel is ‘targeting everyone’ in bombing campaign, killing 700+ in just days

Report from Beirut: Israel is ‘targeting everyone’ in bombing campaign, killing 700+ in just days

  We get an update from Lebanon, where the death toll from Israeli airstrikes has risen to over 700 since Monday, following a series of explosions involving pagers and walkie-talkies in Beirut and southern Lebanon last week. The Israeli military reiterated its troops were preparing for a ground invasion of Lebanon if tensions continue to escalate. Multiple Israeli tanks and armored vehicles have appeared across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. As the Biden administration claims it’s working toward a ceasefire…

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U.S. gov’t agencies found Israel was blocking Gaza aid. Blinken ignored them to keep weapons flowing

U.S. gov’t agencies found Israel was blocking Gaza aid. Blinken ignored them to keep weapons flowing

  We speak with Brett Murphy, the ProPublica reporter behind a blockbuster exposé that revealed the Biden administration ignored warnings from its own experts about Israel blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza in order to keep supplying the country with weapons. USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the State Department’s refugees bureau both concluded earlier this year that Israeli authorities routinely impeded delivery of food and medicine into the devastated Palestinian territory, where hunger, disease and displacement have wreaked…

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Sen. Bernie Sanders and colleagues move to block arms sales to Israel

Sen. Bernie Sanders and colleagues move to block arms sales to Israel

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.): Today, with colleagues, I introduced Joint Resolutions of Disapproval seeking to block certain arms sales to Israel. The Senate will vote on these resolutions when it reconvenes in November. Let me explain why these arms sales must not proceed. Israel clearly had the right to respond to Hamas’ horrific terrorist attack on October 7th, which killed 1,200 innocent Israelis and took hundreds of hostages. But Prime Minister Netanyahu’s extremist government has not simply waged war against…

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In Israel’s prisons, skin diseases are a method of punishment

In Israel’s prisons, skin diseases are a method of punishment

+972 Magazine reports: Pale and frail, with an unkempt beard and a prosthetic eye, his emaciated body testifies to the neglect and torture he experienced inside Israeli prison. “Stay away,” he shouts at the eager crowd surrounding him upon his release. “I don’t know what disease I’m carrying — I have a rash and can’t risk shaking hands.” But his parents, overcome with emotion, move forward to embrace him. He shrinks away, fearfully insisting that he should remain untouched. Mo’ath…

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Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, two government bodies concluded. Blinken rejected their findings

Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, two government bodies concluded. Blinken rejected their findings

By Brett Murphy This story was originally published by ProPublica The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments…

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Hundreds of pregnant women prosecuted the year after Roe v. Wade fell

Hundreds of pregnant women prosecuted the year after Roe v. Wade fell

Rolling Stone reports: At least 210 women faced criminal charges related to pregnancy, abortion, pregnancy loss, or birth in the year after the Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, according to a new report from the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice. In most of the cases — 121 of the 210 — the information later used against the women was obtained or disclosed in a medical setting, researchers found. The period examined — from June 2022, when the court’s…

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Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented

Gaza’s suffering is unprecedented

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib writes: My brother, Mohammed, has survived nearly a year of war in Gaza while working to aid its people. He has scrambled out of the rubble of an air strike that destroyed our family home, and he has seen far too many of our relatives wounded or killed. Through it all, he has somehow remained unscathed. However, he recently fell severely ill battling a hepatitis infection. Mohammed is a deputy director of programs for one of the…

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Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel’

Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel’

Ryu Spaeth writes: It was mid-August, roughly a month and a half before his new book, The Message, was set to be published, and Ta-Nehisi Coates was in my face, on my level, his eyes wide and aflame and his hands swallowing his scalp as he clutched it in disbelief and wonder and rage. At the Gramercy Park restaurant where we’d met for breakfast, Coates, now 48, looked noticeably older than the fruit-cheeked polemicist whose visage had been everywhere nearly…

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Putin regime will collapse without warning, says freed gulag dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza

Putin regime will collapse without warning, says freed gulag dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza

Carole Cadwalladr writes: The last time I met Evgenia Kara-Murza, it was a grim day in early March. The timing couldn’t have been worse. As we spoke, Alexei Navalny’s coffin was being lowered into the frozen ground in a Moscow cemetery. Meanwhile Evgenia’s husband, Vladimir Kara-Murza, was still incarcerated in a Siberian prison cell almost identical to the one in the Arctic Circle in which Navalny had been found dead, presumed murdered. The parallels were eerie. Because Vladimir, a journalist…

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A dramatic rise in pregnant women dying in Texas after abortion ban

A dramatic rise in pregnant women dying in Texas after abortion ban

NBC News reports: The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds. From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the…

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A plan to liquidate northern Gaza is gaining steam

A plan to liquidate northern Gaza is gaining steam

Meron Rapoport reports: The date is October, November, or December 2024, or maybe early 2025. The Israeli military has just launched a new operation throughout northern Gaza — “Operation Order and Clean-up,” we’ll call it. The army orders the temporary evacuation of all Palestinian residents north of the Netzarim Corridor “for their personal safety,” explaining that “the IDF is expected to take significant action in Gaza City in the coming days, and wants to avoid harming civilians.” The order is…

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With world’s attention shifting, some in Gaza fear they will be forgotten

With world’s attention shifting, some in Gaza fear they will be forgotten

The New York Times reports: After nearly a year of war, fear marks everyday life for Palestinians in Gaza. There is fear of the Israeli warplanes that tear through the skies and carry out deadly airstrikes. There is fear of famine with only a trickle of aid coming in. There is fear of being displaced, yet again, by Israeli evacuation orders. And now, there is increasing fear of being forgotten. International attention has been diverted, first by deadly Israeli military…

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Sheikh Omar Suleiman: ‘Republicans were vile. Democrats were absent. Palestinians were invisible’

Sheikh Omar Suleiman: ‘Republicans were vile. Democrats were absent. Palestinians were invisible’

  In the wake of a hate crimes hearing in the US Senate in which Palestinian voices were not platformed, Mehdi sat down with renowned Muslim-American scholar and pastor Sheikh Omar Suleiman. They talked about the killing of six-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi and the double standards in how that horrific murder was covered, but also of his mother’s resilience and the resilience of Palestinians in general despite Gaza. They also covered Republican Senator John Kennedy’s Islamophobic conduct: “In a hearing about…

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The Gazan infants who never saw their first birthday

The Gazan infants who never saw their first birthday

Ibrahim Mohammad writes: On Sept. 16, Gaza’s Health Ministry released a 649-page document containing the personal information of 34,344 Palestinians killed by Israel’s onslaught on the enclave over the past 11 months. The seemingly endless list is incomplete: more than 41,000 Palestinians have been martyred since October 7, according to Health Ministry figures, but many of them have not yet been fully identified. Over 11,300 of the identified victims are children, and 710 of them were killed before they turned…

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Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants are another test for America’s Christians

Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants are another test for America’s Christians

Russell Moore writes: The accusation that Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city are abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs relies not on one falsehood but on a web of them. The rhetoric evokes racist tropes about “savages” who do not conform to our civilized Western world. There’s also a religious angle: the idea that Haitian refugees are voodoo occultists who might be worshipping the devil. As an evangelical Christian who actually believes in the existence of Satan,…

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Missouri high court restores abortion measure to ballot

Missouri high court restores abortion measure to ballot

The New York Times reports: The Missouri Supreme Court rejected a bid on Tuesday to throw out a question on the ballot in November that will ask voters whether to establish a right to abortion in the state Constitution. The seven-member court handed down a one-page ruling less than three hours before the state’s deadline for printing ballots for absentee voters, capping a furious few days of legal maneuvers, as anti-abortion groups and state Republicans made a last-ditch effort to…

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