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Category: Human rights/civil liberties

Gazans face extreme hunger as ‘real famine’ spreads from north to south

Gazans face extreme hunger as ‘real famine’ spreads from north to south

Ruwaida Kamal Amer reports: Mustafa Al-Darsh, a 35-year-old father of three from Gaza City, spends hours every day searching for food for his family. Some days, he manages to secure a few canned goods; other days, his family has to settle for plain rice. “In the north, we yearn to eat bread with some thyme,” he told +972. He hasn’t been able to find flour for months. Since the start of October, when the Israeli army encircled northern Gaza and began subjecting…

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Joe Biden starts reading Rashid Khalidi ‘four years too late’

Joe Biden starts reading Rashid Khalidi ‘four years too late’

After Joe Biden stepped out of Nantucket Bookworks on Friday, he and his son Hunter looked like they’d just been caught shoplifting: Maybe it was because Biden was clutching a copy of Rashid Khalidi’s book The Hundred Years War on Palestine. During his Thanksgiving visit to Nantucket, Biden said: I’m thankful for a peaceful transition of the presidency. And I’m thankful for the fact that, I think, with the grace of God and the goodwill of the neighbors and a…

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Emboldened ‘manosphere’ accelerates threats and demeaning language toward women after election

Emboldened ‘manosphere’ accelerates threats and demeaning language toward women after election

The Associated Press reports: In the days after the presidential election, Sadie Perez began carrying pepper spray with her around campus. Her mom also ordered her and her sister a self-defense kit that included keychain spikes, a hidden knife key and a personal alarm. It’s a response to an emboldened fringe of right-wing “manosphere” influencers who have seized on Republican Donald Trump’s presidential win to justify and amplify misogynistic derision and threats online. Many have appropriated a 1960s abortion rights…

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Israeli military to remain in Gaza for years, food minister says

Israeli military to remain in Gaza for years, food minister says

The Guardian reports: The Israeli military will remain in Gaza for many years, fighting against fresh Hamas recruits in the territory and could be responsible for delivery of humanitarian aid there, a senior Israeli minister has said. The comments by Avi Dichter, Israel’s minister for food security and a member of the Israeli security cabinet, confirm an emerging picture of a long-term deployment of Israeli troops inside Gaza, with no immediate Israeli plan for any other administration to govern the…

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Gisele Pelicot: Finding sisterhood at France’s mass rape trial

Gisele Pelicot: Finding sisterhood at France’s mass rape trial

Diane de Vignemont writes: On my train back to Paris that evening, I sit next to a group of undergraduate students who, like me, traveled to Avignon to watch the trial. They take a break from their homework to talk to me. They tell me they’ve been following the case through reporters’ “live tweets” from the start. On social media, her supporters petition for Gisele to be made Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, or be given the Nobel Peace…

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The entire history of Zionism’s injustices, in one Bedouin village

The entire history of Zionism’s injustices, in one Bedouin village

Orly Noy writes: Last week, the State of Israel hung the scalp of another Palestinian community on its belt after completing the demolition of Umm Al-Hiran. On the morning of Nov. 14, hundreds of police stormed the Bedouin village — which is located in the Negev/Naqab desert, in southern Israel — accompanied by special forces officers and helicopters. The residents, Israeli citizens who had long feared that this day would come, had already self-demolished most of the structures in the…

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‘Total oppression’: West Bank children being killed at unprecedented rate

‘Total oppression’: West Bank children being killed at unprecedented rate

The Guardian reports: Mohammad was 12, a football-mad teenager who spent his days dreaming of a career on the pitch and his last minutes practising ball skills. Ghassan was 14, a quiet, generous teenager who ran errands for elderly relatives, with an adoring six-year-old brother who stuck to him like a shadow. Both boys were shot dead this summer by Israeli soldiers, victims of an unprecedented surge in attacks on children in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. In…

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‘That is genocide’: Israeli-American Holocaust historian on Gaza

‘That is genocide’: Israeli-American Holocaust historian on Gaza

  Israeli-American historian and esteemed professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, Omer Bartov, sat down with Mehdi Hasan to discuss Gaza, genocide, and the far right in Israel during a live event hosted by Busboys & Poets in Washington, D.C. During the discussion, Bartov explained the extremist direction of the Israeli military, the current far-right Israeli government, the weaponization of antisemitism to shield Benjamin Netanyahu from criticism, and how the United States could have prevented Israel from…

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U.S. to keep sending arms to Israel despite dire conditions in Gaza

U.S. to keep sending arms to Israel despite dire conditions in Gaza

The New York Times reports: The State Department said on Tuesday that it did not plan to decrease weapons aid to Israel, as a 30-day deadline set by the Biden administration passed without the country substantially improving the humanitarian situation in war-devastated Gaza. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had warned in a letter dated Oct. 13 that the United States would reassess its military aid to Israel if it failed to increase…

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Gaza doesn’t care about Trump or Harris — only survival matters

Gaza doesn’t care about Trump or Harris — only survival matters

Ahmed Najar writes: I spoke to my family in Gaza a day before the US election. Our conversation followed days of silence, of unbearable waiting, with every hour deepening my dread. When I finally heard my nephew’s voice, I felt relief, but it quickly gave way to heartbreak. At just 21, his voice now carries a sadness and exhaustion far beyond his years. “Does it even matter who wins?” he asked me, his tone hollow and resigned. “[Donald] Trump or…

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How Trump could ban abortion without Congress

How Trump could ban abortion without Congress

Mary Ziegler and Reva Siegel write: The Supreme Court rejected a challenge to abortion drugs just a few months ago, but anti-abortion forces are already back with a new lawsuit. The suit would have a devastating impact on abortion rights across the country. But even if it doesn’t succeed, it’s part of a strategy that former President Donald Trump could use to ban abortion nationwide if he wins the White House — even without action from Congress. Trump has said…

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‘There is no hate like Christian love’

‘There is no hate like Christian love’

CNN reports: Greg Jr. says he didn’t tell his parents about his sexuality earlier because he’d heard stories of evangelical parents who refused to pay for their gay kid’s college or kicked them out of the house. Once on the streets, these forsaken youths are more likely to experience sexual assault, HIV infection, hate crimes, depression and suicide, according to True Colors United, a nonprofit group formed to address youth homelessness in the US. The current share of homeless youth…

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The conservative strategy to ban abortion nationwide

The conservative strategy to ban abortion nationwide

  The Lincoln Project: Project 2025 and its evil architects envision an America where women will be monitored, prosecuted, and jailed for exercising their own bodily autonomy. We are not going back! Rachel Monroe writes: In mid-October, at a bank in downtown Amarillo, the local chapter of the League of Women Voters hosted an educational forum about proposed ordinances that would be on the ballot in November. Most were procedural—adding members to the city council, changing the process for a…

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‘Our job is to flatten Gaza. No one will stop us’

‘Our job is to flatten Gaza. No one will stop us’

Ryan Grim writes: Journalists Younis Tirawi and Sami Vanderlip have managed to find and archive all the Instagram stories and daily posts shared by the soldiers of one key unit, Israel’s 749 Combat Engineering Battalion. They’ve mapped out the structure of the unit and identified the individual soldiers and officers involved, along with their various roles in operations. They have tracked the activities of each company in the battalion, including what they were doing, when, and where, as the force…

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Exterminate, expel, resettle: Israel’s endgame in northern Gaza

Exterminate, expel, resettle: Israel’s endgame in northern Gaza

+972 Magazine reports: The “Generals’ Plan,” published in early September, has a very simple goal: to empty the northern Gaza Strip of its Palestinian population. The plan itself estimated that about 300,000 people were still living north of the Netzarim Corridor — the Israeli-occupied zone that bisects Gaza — although the UN put the number closer to 400,000. During the first phase of the plan, the Israeli army would inform all of those people that they have a week to evacuate to the south…

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Black people recognize what is happening to Palestinians

Black people recognize what is happening to Palestinians

Vann R. Newkirk II writes: In April 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois stepped onto the stage of the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in Midtown Manhattan. His beard was grizzled and he was still working out how to lecture through new dentures. In a word, he was old. During his long life, he’d witnessed the dawn of Jim Crow and the glow of the first atom bombs; the slaughter of the Comanche and the rivalry between the Soviet Union…

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