Human Rights Glance
One-year-old Mohammed Bassiouni died of exposure to the cold on Tuesday. It was his first birthday.
That night, as winter storms lashed Gaza with cold winds and torrential rain, his family was shivering in a battered tent in Deir al-Balah where they had been displaced after fleeing Beit Lahia in northern Gaza.
“It was a night of rain and wind. We were up all night, his mother and I,” Mohammed’s father, Maher Bassiouni, told Drop Site. “At 4 a.m., the wind and rain calmed a little and me and his mother slept a bit. I woke up at 6 a.m. and I found the boy dead.” He spoke holding his son’s lifeless body wrapped in a purple blanket. “We belong to God and to him we shall return. God is sufficient for us, and He is the best disposer of affairs. I have nothing more to tell you. He is one year old. Today is his birthday. January 13th is his birthday, the day he died.”
The family rushed Mohammed to Al-Aqsa Hospital, but it was too late. His tiny body, still in diapers, was kept in the hospital morgue before he was wrapped in a white shroud for burial. Mohammed is the seventh child to die from hypothermia since the onset of winter, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, including four since the beginning of the year—among them a baby just seven days old and a four-year-old girl. Another 25 Palestinians have been crushed to death as storms caused damaged buildings and walls to collapse on families seeking shelter inside or in tents nearby.
Israel’s continued strangulation of essential supplies during winter has left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians shivering in the wet and cold and nearly three dozen dead. The genocidal war has displaced nearly the entire population and reduced Gaza to a broken landscape of rubble and collapsed structures. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are now living in flimsy tents that provide little shelter from the elements. According to the UN, the heavy rains and flooding have rendered thousands of tents uninhabitable and placed nearly 800,000 people, almost 40 percent of the population, in flood-prone sites at heightened risk—leaving families exposed to the winter cold without blankets, mattresses, or heating. Hundreds of tents have simply blown away and makeshift shelters have been heavily damaged.
Winter Cold and Collapsing Buildings Kill Palestinians in Gaza as Israel Blocks Shelter Supplies
Death of man at ICE camp could be investigated as homicide after examiner’s report
The death of a man who was being held at a federal detention camp in Texas in early January may be investigated as a homicide after the local medical examiner reportedly found the preliminary cause was “asphyxia due to neck and chest compression”.
Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban migrant who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in July last year, was pronounced dead on 3 January. He had been in ICE custody at Camp East Montana, a sprawling tent camp at the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso.
In a press release about his death, the agency claimed he died after “experiencing medical distress” and said his cause of death was under investigation. The Department of Homeland Security had previously highlighted Lunas Campos’s arrest as one of the “worst of the worst” a category used by DHS to trumpet what they claim as victories of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. He has convictions of child sexual abuse, possession of a firearm, and aggravated assault.
Dropsite News: The Gaza Genocide, West Bank, and Israel
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.
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”.
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