Author: Brett Wilkins

Peace and human rights advocates on Sunday renewed calls for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and an increase in lifesaving humanitarian aid for its starving people as the embattled enclave marked six months since the start of Israel’s genocidal retaliation for the October 7 attacks.

In six months of bombardment by air, land, and sea following the Hamas-led attacks that killed more than 1,100 people in Israel – with over 240 people taken hostage – Israeli forces have killed or maimed more than 116,000 Palestinians, including people believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out homes and other buildings. Gazans – especially children – are starving to death as Israel severely restricts the amount of aid allowed to enter the strip. Women are “burying their newborns every day” as they have nothing to feed them.

Continue reading “World Marks Six Months of ‘Relentless Death and Destruction’ in Gaza”

A doctor at an Israeli field hospital inside a notorious detention center where hundreds of Palestinian prisoners are temporarily held is sounding the alarm about torture and horrific conditions at what some human rights defenders – including Israelis – are calling “Israel’s Guantánamo Bay” and even a “concentration camp.”

In a letter to Israel’s attorney general and defense and health ministers viewed by Haaretz – which reported the story Thursday – the anonymous physician describes likely war crimes being committed at the Israel Defense Forces’ Sde Teiman base near Beersheva. Palestinian militants captured by IDF troops, as well as many civilian hostages ranging in age from teenagers to septuagenarians, are held there in cages, 70-100 per cage, until they are transferred to regular Israeli prisons or released.

Continue reading “Doctor at Israeli Detention Camp for Gazans Blows Whistle on War Crimes”

More than 80 U.S. Muslim, Palestinian, and allied groups on Wednesday implored President Joe Biden to pursue a “concrete change in policy” that includes the suspension of arms transfers to Israel as it wages a genocidal war on Gaza.

“The National Security Memorandum on Safeguards and Accountability With Respect to Transferred Defense Articles and Defense Services prohibits our government from transferring arms to nations that violate international law or obstruct U.S. humanitarian aid,” the groups wrote in a letter to the U.S. president. “Furthermore, the Leahy Law forbids our government from providing military assistance to military units in foreign nations involved in human rights abuses.

Continue reading “80+ Groups Urge Biden to ‘Reverse Course Before Thousands More Die’ in Gaza”

The United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday published a draft report that found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a move that came on the same day as the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in the ongoing war.

The advance unedited version of the report – entitled Anatomy of a Genocide – concludes that Israel’s far-right government and military “have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.”

Continue reading “Draft UN Report Finds Israel Has Met Threshold for Genocide”

A Biden administration spokesperson on Monday attempted to avoid addressing allegations by employees of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees that they were tortured while in Israeli detention by claiming the U.S. State Department has not seen any media reporting on the accusations.

Ryan Grim, The Intercept‘s Washington, D.C. bureau chief, asked deputy State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel if he believes the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) staff members who say they were tortured by Israeli interrogators into making false confessions about involvement with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which led the October 7 attacks on Israel. Israeli officials claimed that at least 12 out of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff in Gaza had ties to Hamas and October 7.

Continue reading “US State Department Claims It Hasn’t Seen Reports of Israel Torturing UNRWA Staff”

More than 100 pro-Palestine demonstrators were arrested Thursday after staging a protest at The New York Times‘ Midtown Manhattan headquarters, where activists handed out copies of a satirical knockoff of the newspaper that skewered what organizers called its biased coverage of the Gaza genocide.

After surrounding the Times‘ printing plant in College Point, Queens, members of Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), Palestinian Youth Movement, and other groups shut down the paper’s Midtown West headquarters, where they chanted, “New York Times you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” “free, free Palestine,” and “from the river to the sea.”

Continue reading “Protests and Parody Paper Decry New York Times‘ Pro-Israel Bias in Gaza Coverage”