Human Rights Glance
A Palestinian citizen of Israel held by the internal security agency, Shin Bet, has died in hospital after being found unconscious in his cell, with his family and lawyers saying they found severe bruising on his body.
According to a Haaretz report, Saber Amitel, 21, was arrested earlier this month and taken to Shikma prison in Ashkelon, where he was denied access to a lawyer. He was suspected of arms smuggling
Police told his attorneys and family that he had attempted to take his own life.
His family and legal team were only permitted to visit him after Haaretz enquired about the case.
When his lawyers visited him at Barzilai Hospital on 8 June, they found severe bruising on his body, according to Haaretz.
Palestinian dies in Israeli custody with signs of torture
UN warns Palestinian children 'defenceless' amid Israeli crackdown on NGOs
Palestinian children are "increasingly unprotected", as Israel forces human rights organisations to cease or curtail work across the occupied Palestinian territories, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child warned on Monday.
The committee condemned Israel's designation of civil society groups as "terrorists". Labelling NGOs as terrorist entities gives Israel legal cover to obstruct humanitarian work, including military raids, travel bans, personal financial sanctions, threats of arrest, destruction of records and, in some cases, "threats of secondary sanctions against partners".
he committee is made up of a body of 18 independent experts that work within the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN OHCHR).
The warning doesn't name any of the organisations they are alluding to, but in 2021 Israel outlawed six major Palestinian NGOs, including Adameer, Al-Haq, Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children International - Palestine, Union of Agricultural Work Committees and the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees.
In January of this year, more than 50 international NGOs operating in occupied Palestine warned that recent registration measures imposed by Israel threatened to halt operations at a time of acute humanitarian need in Gaza.
I am a doctor in the occupied West Bank. Our hospitals are dying
For the past four years, I have witnessed the slow deterioration of our healthcare system. In the last two years, the situation has escalated dramatically - into something catastrophic.
Our hospitals are not simply struggling. They are being pushed beyond their limits, and our pharmacy shelves are bare.
Day by day, medicine by medicine, surgery by surgery, the system that thousands of patients depend upon is collapsing before our eyes.
This is not a natural crisis. It is the direct result of the economic collapse in Palestine and the withholding of clearance revenues - Palestinian tax funds collected by Israel. These funds, which constitute over 60 percent of the Palestinian Authority's revenues, have been frozen for months.
Palestinians in Gaza say bank account closures cut off access to vital funds
Palestinians in war-ravaged Gaza have accused the Bank of Palestine of freezing or closing their accounts without adequate explanation, leaving them unable to access salaries, aid and personal savings.
Several account holders told Middle East Eye they were unable to access funds needed to pay rent, buy essentials and support their families after discovering their accounts had been restricted or shut down.
They said they received little or no explanation from the bank and were given no clear pathway to challenge the decisions.
Due to the chronic liquidity shortage in Gaza and widespread deterioration of banknotes, many Palestinians rely heavily on banking applications and digital wallets to access and transfer money.
Ahmed Sardah told MEE that he was trying to transfer money through the bank's mobile application when he discovered his account had been closed. He later learned that his PalPay and Jawwal Pay wallets had also been suspended.
DOJ memo stokes fear among disability advocates of a return to institutionalization
The Justice Department released a memo this week that quietly calls into question decades of civil rights protections for Americans with disabilities and stirred fear and anger among advocates and families.
The memo, an opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, argues that states do not have to provide in-home or community-based care to people with disabilities who need support. These services allow many disabled Americans to continue to live, learn and work at home or in their own communities, among family and friends.
"It is now the position of the United States government that people with disabilities don't have a right to be part of their communities," says Alison Barkoff, a health law and policy professor at George Washington University who led disability law and policy efforts during both the Obama and Biden administrations. "I can't overstate how significant this change in position is."
Israeli Strikes Kill 6, Including 2 Children And Al Jazeera Cameraman
Israeli strikes in Gaza on Saturday killed at least six people, including two children and a cameraman with broadcaster Al Jazeera, according to Palestinian health officials.
Despite an October ceasefire between Israel and the militant group Hamas, the enclave has seen near-daily Israeli attacks that have killed over 1,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
The first strike on Saturday hit an apartment in Gaza City around 2 a.m., according to the ministry. At the site, an Associated Press reporter saw rubble and chunks of concrete stained with blood.
Juneteenth: How news of the Emancipation Proclamation spread through the South
Weeks after the Civil War's guns fell silent and barely two months after President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas. They had come to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, an order freeing enslaved people in seceded Confederate states. And the date they arrived — June 19, 1865 — is now remembered as the first "Juneteenth."
The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued years earlier during the war, on Jan. 1, 1863. It's the version most commonly emphasized in history books: the executive order that Lincoln himself reportedly said was "the great event of the nineteenth century" and his lasting legacy.
But word of such an order had already been circulating throughout the South for months. A preliminary proclamation, which contained much the same wording as the historic order, was issued on Sept. 22, 1862, days after the Battle of Antietam — the single bloodiest day in American military history. The purpose of it was to "warn that if the Confederate states don't return to the Union by January 1st, [Lincoln] will in fact issue a final proclamation," according to Harold Holzer, a Lincoln historian.
Not all enslaved people immediately knew about Lincoln's orders, but many learned of it while the fighting was still raging. Rumors spread through informal networks, sometimes inadvertently from slaveholders themselves, says Holzer, who directs the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York.
Slaveholders would often discuss the proclamation right in front of the people they enslaved, he says. They wrongly assumed that since enslaved people were prohibited from reading and writing, they would be oblivious to discussion of events around them.
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