Author: Brett Wilkins

In addition to killing, maiming, and forcibly displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has wrought tremendous psychological damage upon kids in the embattled strip, as detailed by a Save the Children report published Tuesday.

The charity’s report – entitled Trapped and Scarred: The Compounding Mental Harm Inflicted on Palestinian Children in Gaza – examines how “five months of violence, displacement, starvation, and disease on top of nearly 17 years of a blockade have caused relentless mental harm to children in Gaza.”

Continue reading “Israeli Genocide Causing ‘Complete Psychological Destruction’ of Gaza Children”

Bullet wounds caused by the same type of large-caliber ammunition used in several Israel Defense Forces rifles and machine guns undercut Israeli officials’ dubious claim that most victims of last week’s “Flour Massacre” near Gaza City died in a stampede, one human rights monitor said Wednesday.

Gaza officials said at least 118 Palestinians were killed and 760 others injured when Israeli troops shot and shelled a large crowd of starving people waiting for food distribution in the al-Nabulsi Roundabout area south of Gaza City on February 29. Israeli officials said many or most of the victims were trampled as the large crowd of people starving due to Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza desperately rushed aid trucks.

Continue reading “Bullets Found at Gaza Flour Massacre Site Belie Israel’s ‘Stampede’ Claim”

Seven national and over 200 local labor unions in the United States on Friday announced the establishment of a coalition to promote a cease-fire in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

The American Postal Workers Union (APWU), the Association of Flight Attendants, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, the National Education Association, National Nurses United (NNU), the United Auto Workers (UAW), and the United Electrical Workers (UE), and 200 local unions and labor organizations launched the National Labor Network for Cease-fire (NLNC) to “end the death and devastation” in Gaza.

The coalition says it represents more than 9 million union workers – “more than half the labor movement in the United States.”

Continue reading “200+ Unions Launch Network To Push for Gaza Ceasefire”

A young Palestinian human rights lawyer has been jailed by Israel for nearly a month without charge or trial after starting a group that trains female attorneys on how to visit the unprecedented number of Palestinians held in an Israeli prison in the illegally occupied West Bank.

Diala Ayesh, 28, was arrested on January 17 by Israeli occupation forces at a checkpoint near Bethlehem, according to the rights group Front Line Defenders. Another group, the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, said that on January 25 Israeli authorities “issued an arbitrary administrative detention order” for Ayesh through May 16.

Continue reading “Israel Jails Palestinian Human Rights Lawyer Diala Ayesh Without Charge”

Israel Defense Forces officers brought Israeli civilians into detention centers and allowed them to watch and film Palestinian prisoners being tortured, according to survivor testimonies published this week by the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.

Prisoners held at detention centers in Zikim on the northern border of the Gaza Strip and at a site in southern Israel affiliated with Naqab Prison “told Euro-Med Monitor that the Israeli soldiers had purposefully presented them before Israeli civilians, falsely claiming that they were fighters affiliated with Palestinian armed factions and that they had taken part in the October 7 attack on Israeli towns,” the group said.

Continue reading “IDF Let Israeli Civilians Film Torture of Palestinian Detainees: Report”

Amnesty International on Tuesday renewed its call for the U.S. government to drop charges against jailed WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, whose final hearing before the United Kingdom’s High Court regarding his extradition to the United States is fast approaching.

Assange’s February 20-21 hearing before the High Court will determine whether the Australian journalist – who has been imprisoned in London’s Belmarsh Prison since April 2019 – has exhausted all of his U.K. appeals and will be extradited to the United States, where he has been charged with violating the 1917 Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for publishing classified U.S. military documents and files on WikiLeaks over a decade ago.

Continue reading “‘Drop the Charges,’ Says Amnesty Ahead of Key Julian Assange Hearing”