Human Rights Glance
Total casualty counts since ceasefire: Since October 11, the first full day of the ceasefire, Israel has killed at least 449 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 1,246, while 710 bodies have been recovered from under the rubble, according to the Ministry of Health.
Gaza officials report 32 deaths from cold and collapsing shelters: One Palestinian was killed and one injured as a result of a building collapse, bringing the total number of deaths from building collapses since the onset of winter to 25, according to the Ministry of Health. At least seven children have also died from exposure to the cold this winter. Health officials and doctors say hospitals are overwhelmed as they face shortages of medicines and medical supplies, rising malnutrition among mothers and children, and a surge in respiratory illnesses, while Israeli restrictions continue to limit the entry of essential health items.
UNICEF says more than 100 children have been killed in Gaza since the October ceasefire: More than 100 children, including 60 boys and 40 girls, have been killed in Gaza since the October ceasefire, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund. Speaking from Gaza, UNICEF representative James Elder said children are still being killed by airstrikes, drones, tank shelling, and live fire, while others are dying in tent shelters from exposure to winter storms.
Dropsite News: The Gaza Genocide, West Bank, and Israel
Claudette Colvin, US civil rights pioneer arrested for not giving up bus seat, dies aged 86
US civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin, arrested at age 15 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama, nine months before Rosa Parks’s similar but more famous act of defiance, died on Tuesday at age 86.
Although she remained a largely unsung figure in the civil rights movement for decades, Colvin’s 1955 act of rebellion inspired Parks and others and helped form the basis for the federal lawsuit that outlawed racial segregation in US public transportation.
Her death, under hospice care in Texas, was confirmed by Ashley Roseboro, a spokesperson for her family and the Claudette Colvin Foundation.
In one of the first publicized acts of civil disobedience against Montgomery’s Jim Crow rules governing city bus seating by race, Colvin refused to relinquish her seat for a white woman, as ordered by the driver, and stayed put until she was dragged off the bus by police.
According to accounts of her testimony in court, Colvin recalled she had been studying anti-slavery abolitionist heroes in school, and felt that she had Harriet Tubman on one shoulder, Sojourner Truth on the other, and “history had me glued to the seat.”
West Bank Invasions and Abductions Amid Escalating Violations
Israeli occupation forces carried out multiple invasions, home break‑ins, abductions, and movement restrictions across the occupied West Bank on Saturday, targeting communities in the northern Jordan Valley, Bethlehem, Hebron in the southern West Bank, Salfit in the central West Bank, Jenin in the northern West Bank, Qalqilia in the northwestern West Bank, Ramallah in the central West Bank, and occupied Jerusalem.
In the northern Jordan Valley, three young men were abducted while working on their agricultural land in Khirbet al‑Hadidiya.
Human rights activist Aref Daraghma identified them as Ahmad and his brother Mohammad Abdullah Bani Odah, along with Aref Omar Bisharat.
Israeli forces also invaded several areas east of Bethlehem, including al‑Ubeidiya, al‑Shawawra, Dar Salah, and Za’atara, with no reported abductions.
In Hebron in the southern West Bank, soldiers abducted two men after invading the Jabal Johar area, stopping and searching civilian vehicles. The abducted men were identified as Wasim Monther Gheith and Omar Nadi Abu Hamdiya.
Soldiers also invaded Dura and ar‑Rihiya, breaking into homes belonging to the Sharha and al‑Tubassi families and ransacking their contents.
Later in the evening, Israeli soldiers shot and injured fifty‑year‑old Shaker Falah al‑Ja’bari in his car, in the Khallet Hadour area east of Hebron, then prevented ambulances and residents from reaching him before taking him into custody.
Inside a Gaza medical clinic at risk of shutting down after an Israeli ban
Mohammed Ibrahim wants to run and play soccer again, but the 14-year-old has had three surgeries since an accident this summer when he was run over as he tried to grab food off an aid truck for his starving family.
A nurse at this Gaza City clinic changes the gauze on his right leg. He winces in pain.
"Focus with us and calm your mind," she tells him. "You will be just fine."
"It hurts," the boy whimpers. Unable to fight back tears, he bursts out: "I can't! I can't!"
This clinic is run by Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French initials MSF, an international aid group that provides lifesaving care in war zones around the world. But this clinic and MSF's 19 other health care facilities and medical points across Gaza are facing massive pressure, and some may even have to shut down.
Israel banned MSF and dozens of international aid organizations, preventing them from bringing in aid or international staff to Gaza and the occupied West Bank under new security and transparency rules that came into effect on Jan. 1.
"It's a catastrophe. An absolute catastrophe," Ibrahim's mom, Neama Abu Ghanim, says of Israel's decision.
She tells NPR that before coming to this MSF clinic, her son spent months unable to sleep from pain, despite seeking treatment in some of Gaza's still partially functioning hospitals. Gaza's health system was shattered during two years of war.
"When I came here, they helped him with medicine to sleep for even just a few hours at night, which helped me so much," she says.
UK ‘pays substantial sum’ to tortured Guantánamo Bay detainee
The UK has settled out of court by paying a “substantial sum” to a Guantánamo Bay detainee who was suing the government for its alleged complicity in his rendition and torture, according to the inmate’s legal team.
Lawyers for Abu Zubaydah have accused the British intelligence services of providing questions to his CIA interrogators to put to him while they were torturing him at a string of CIA “black sites” around the world where he was held between 2002 and 2006.
They claim that the case has relevant lessons for the UK today, highlighting the legal and moral risks involved in cooperation with the US at a time it is violating international law.
Abu Zubaydah, whose full name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, is a stateless Palestinian who grew up in Saudi Arabia. He was one of the first detainees in the US “war on terror” to be tortured, and was subjected to a full range of what the Bush administration at the time termed “enhanced interrogation techniques”, in secret prisons in Thailand, Lithuania, Poland, Afghanistan, Morocco, and then the US base at Guantánamo Bay, on Cuba’s southern coast.
Now 54, he has been held in Guantánamo Bay without charge ever since, becoming one of its “forever prisoners”.
Maryland woman who says she is US citizen finally released from ICE custody
A Maryland woman has been released and reunited with her family after spending 25 days in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody – despite her attorneys saying documentation showed she was born in the US and therefore is a citizen.
Dulce Consuelo Díaz Morales and her legal team maintain she was born in the US and possess records supporting that claim. ICE, however, had disputed this, asserting she is a Mexican citizen who entered the US unlawfully.
According to Díaz Morales, ICE agents detained her near her home on 14 December while her family watched. She told the DC, Maryland and Virginia news outlet WRC-TV that she attempted to explain she was born in Maryland – but said authorities did not accept her explanation. She added that her faith and the hope of reuniting with her family helped her endure the detention.
Díaz Morales said she lived in Mexico starting at age seven and returned to the US more than a year and a half ago. She believes confusion arose because she used her mother’s last name while living in Mexico, whereas US records list both her father’s and mother’s last names.
Settlers assault 3 Palestinians, torch cars in latest West Bank attack; 3 arrested
Three Israelis were arrested after settlers wounded at least two people and set fire to cars at a Palestinian factory near Nablus in the West Bank earlier today, according to Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
The IDF and Israel Police say in a joint statement that two Palestinians were hospitalized in moderate condition as a result of the attack.
According to the Red Crescent, three people were wounded in the attack on the al-Junaida dairy factory in the village of Deir Sharaf, including a 65-year-old man whose hand was broken. A 50-year-old and a 48-year-old man were also hospitalized with bruises to their bodies.
The Israeli forces say that they arrested three suspects at the entrance to the settlement of Shavei Shomron in the northern West Bank after receiving a report that “extremists” in the area set fire to four cars and assaulted Palestinians, including one who was inside one of the cars.
The suspects were taken for questioning at the Ariel police station, the joint statement says, adding that the IDF, Border Police and the Shin Bet are continuing searches in the area and investigating the incident.
TVNL Comment: No settlers are EVER held responsible for their crimes. Not ever.
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