Human Rights Glance
It was a moment of triumph for a man who has faced continual heartache over the past two years.
On Thursday, Dr. Jamal Eltaeb of Sudan was named the winner of the $1 million Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, which recognizes individuals who risk their lives to save others. The prize committee praised his "extraordinary courage and steadfast dedication to providing care for those trapped in conflict."
His country's civil war broke out in 2023, with a paramilitary group battling government forces. "Everywhere you look, there is pain that words cannot capture," Eltaeb told NPR in a Zoom interview.
That sentiment is echoed by the United Nations, which has described the country's civil war as the most devastating humanitarian crisis in the world. Over 150,000 have been killed and more than 12 million people displaced. Yet Eltaeb has been steadfast in serving the Sudanese people. An orthopedic surgeon, he is the director of Al Nao Hospital in Omdurman, one of the hospitals still functioning in areas surrounding the capital of Khartoum.
"It was my duty to my country and to my people," he says. "People need somebody to stay there for them."
Israel is holding dozens of Palestinians from Gaza isolated in an underground jail where they never see daylight, are deprived of adequate food and barred from receiving news of their families or the outside world.
The UN humanitarian relief chief, Tom Fletcher, has sounded the alarm over rising violence in the occupied West Bank, where attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians and their property continue to escalate.
Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said that the Higher Planning Council will approve the construction of 1,973 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank during its next session.
Brooklyn-based writer and reporter Jasper Nathaniel was going through the Turmus Ayya olive fields in the West Bank when he captured the spine-chilling footage showing masked Israeli settlers beating Palestinian settlers senseless, armed with crude melee weapons.
The most popular and potentially unifying Palestinian leader — Marwan Barghouti — is not among the prisoners Israel intends to free in exchange for hostages held by Hamas under the new Gaza ceasefire deal.
