Human Rights Glance
The EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has privately compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid-era South Africa, exposing a sharp contrast between her closed-door remarks and her public support for Israel.
Euractiv reported that the EU foreign policy chief made the comparison during confidential talks with Mexican officials in Mexico City, where she travelled from May 20 to 22 as part of a senior EU delegation.
Officials and diplomats, including people present at the meeting, told Euractiv that Kallas spoke about a visit last year to South Africa and its apartheid museum in Johannesburg.
She reportedly linked Israel’s rule over Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank to South Africa’s system of racial segregation, which lasted from 1948 until the early 1990s.
EU foreign policy chief compares Israel to apartheid South Africa: Report
Nearly 100 UK MPs and peers urge cancellation of Israeli settlement event
Nearly 100 British MPs and peers have signed a letter calling for an upcoming London event advertising the sale of land in illegal Israeli settlements to be cancelled, warning that it could implicate the UK in international war crimes.
The Great Israeli Real Estate Event is scheduled to be held in London this Sunday, but its location is being kept secret.
Andy McDonald, an MP for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East, published the statement on X on Friday, urging the UK government to prevent the Great Israeli Real Estate Event from taking place.
"The govt has an opportunity to uphold obligations under international law and take action against Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine," McDonald wrote.
The letter, sent to Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, described the event as "firmly embedded in Israel's project of colonial expansion" as it facilitates the sale of land seized from displaced Palestinians.
Palestinian American woman held without charge by Israeli military
A 20-year-old Palestinian American woman has been held in Israeli military detention for nearly two weeks after Israeli soldiers stormed her family home in a pre-dawn raid on 2 June.
Sama Safi, a psychology student at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank, has not been charged with any crimes. A spokesperson for the Israeli military said she and three other women detained around the same time were arrested “after promoting hostile terrorist activity and additional terrorist-related activities”.
Several US legislators have called for Safi’s release and her family has warned that she has a chronic medical condition that requires regular treatment.
One of the other detained Birzeit University students is a member of the Palestinian women’s national soccer team; another player from the team was also detained before being released earlier this week. The four students are being held at an Israeli detention and interrogation center in Jerusalem notorious for its record of abuse.
Palestinian football chief denied entry to US in latest case of World Cup travel restrictions
The head of the Palestinian Football Association, Jibril Rajoub, has been denied a visa to enter the US, in the latest case of a senior official being barred from attending the 2026 Fifa World Cup.
While the Palestinian national team did not qualify to play in the tournament, Rajoub, who possesses official Fifa accreditation, had planned to travel alongside global football delegates to attend the matches.
He was able to watch the opening match between Mexico and South Africa on Thursday in Mexico City, where he remains now.
He said the visa denial was an unfair and a politically motivated restriction on global football representatives, noting a stark contrast to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, which he attended without facing diplomatic obstacles.
"I don't believe that it's fair to use or to abuse and deny the right of all footballers all over the world to attend," he said.
Trump officials cut federal funds to LA homeless services agency
The Trump administration has suspended federal funding to Los Angeles’s beleaguered homelessness agency.
The announcement is the administration’s latest move rescinding funding to California, where Donald Trump has feuded with the state’s Democratic leaders.
In a letter to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the largest continuum of care (CoC) homeless services agency in the nation, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud) immediately suspended funds to the agency, pending an investigation citing allegations of fraud.
“Hud will fund results, not corrupt failure or the homeless industrial complex,” secretary Scott Turner said in a statement. “Taxpayers will no longer bankroll an organization that puts its own self-interests ahead of the Americans it was created to serve.”
Gaza is not an aberration - Israel planned this genocide decades ago
The truth slowly comes to light: Israel's genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.
Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza.
Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”
Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”
Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”
Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges... Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”
No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline "We were ordered to kill”.
‘It’s torture’: prisoners’ letters expose subterranean Oklahoma ‘dungeon’ known as the tombs
Down here in the tombs, there aren’t any windows,” writes Tremane Wood from inside his cell, in a modern-day American “dungeon” that few people have ever heard of.
“It’s really like living in cave,” he writes in another letter. “It’s dark and damp. Sometimes this place drives people mad. The hardest part is the isolation.”
Or in another: “You end up loosing [sic] track of days and nights and what day it is … It’s a real form of psychological torture that some people never come back from.”
Wood, 46, spent 17 years incarcerated in H Unit – the underground cells at the state prison in the rural town of McAlester, Oklahoma, where no natural light ever reaches.
According to prisoner letters seen by the Guardian and published here for the first time, H Unit – also known by the prisoners as the “tombs” – features a series of windowless cells that are built banked into the earth. The letters also tell of infestations of vermin, unsanitary conditions, and frequent instances of physical and sexual violence.
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