Group items tagged

"The credibility and foundations of international human rights and humanitarian law as well as of the UN as a whole is at stake," he said.

Israel's impunity

But Gabriela Shalev, Israel's ambassador to the Security Council, did not refer at all to the Goldstone report during the meeting on Wednesday, but dismissed its findings before the debate even began.

The UN human rights council has endorsed the Goldstone report on Israel's war on Gaza, which accuses the military of using disproportionate force as well as laying charges of war crimes on Israeli occupation forces and Hamas.

25 votes to six with 11 countries abstaining and five declining to vote.

Hamas 'thankful'

Palestinian farmers in the West Bank, or "water pirates" as Israeli occupation forces prefer to call them, are siphoning off drinking water pipes in an effort to secure water to irrigate their farmland.

A World Bank report has accused Israel of using four times more water than Palestinians

Israel's daily water consumption per capita is four times higher than the 70 litre per person consumed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, according to the report entitled: Troubled waters - Palestinians denied fair access to water.

The militants have also begun to adopt other mundane state postures. The main road between Arish and Rafah is usually closed to civilians, forcing them to take side roads studded with checkpoints —  some manned by the military, others by the militants. Some of the militants’ checkpoints are stationed just a few kilometers away from the army’s, and are reportedly equipped with computers and internet connections to investigate any passersby.

Sayed, who works with journalists in North Sinai, was stopped and beaten at a militant-operated checkpoint between Arish and Rafah several weeks ago. Sayed was on the road with four Egyptian journalists, and two military tanks were driving ahead of them. The tanks turned shortly before Sayed found himself faced with the militants’ checkpoint. “I told them, ‘Be careful, there are military tanks nearby.’ They said, ‘We’re not here for them, we’re here for you’,” he recounts. Sayed and the journalists were shot at and physically assaulted, then released. He hid his companions’ press IDs, and said they worked for the sympathetic Al Jazeera satellite network based in Qatar. “If they knew the journalists were from an Egyptian newspaper, none of us would have made it out alive,” he claims.

Fouad is a coffee shop owner who recently relocated to Arish after the army evacuated the residents of Rafah to dig a buffer zone to deter terrorists. He explains that one time the militants collected everyone’s IDs at a checkpoint, but remained respectful because they didn’t suspect anyone. “The militants never hurt us or raise an arm in our face. They don’t scare us,” says an old woman from the village of Muqataa, a militant stronghold near Sheikh Zuwayed. “They have no interest in alienating the other residents, because they live among them and don’t want them to turn into collaborators with security,” Fathy explains.

Overall, an estimated 2,000 civilians were killed during bitter fighting for control of Raqqa, according to local casualty monitors—in an assault dominated by U.S. firepower

international media coverage of Raqqa dwindles away. Once the center of countless stories about the so-called Islamic caliphate, ISIS’s self-declared capital is now 80 per cent uninhabitable due to destruction from recent fighting, according to the United Nations.

according to an Airwars analysis, at least 95 per cent of strikes in Raqqa and all artillery strikes were American. At least 21,000 munitions—and possibly thousands more—struck the city

Before tuning in via Skype to oversee the murder and dismemberment of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saud al-Qahtani, a high-level adviser to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), was best known for running social media operations for the royal court and serving as MBS’s chief propagandist and enforcer. His portfolio also included hacking and monitoring critics of the Kingdom and MBS.

Al-Qahtani registered at least 22 domains since 2009, some of which have been used as command and control servers for malware

al-Qahtani’s posts on Hack Forums detail the hacking tools and services he purchased and used and the social media platforms and mobile apps he targeted. By June 2011, less than two years after joining the forum, he estimated that he had 90% of paid and free RATs on the market. Al-Qahtani also paid Hack Forum members to have social media accounts deleted and sought to manufacture engagement activity on major social media platforms, including YouTube and Facebook.

Since the outbreak of war in Syria, weapons from Central and Eastern Europe have flooded the conflict zone through two distinct pipelines – one sponsored by Saudi Arabia and coordinated by the CIA, and the other funded and directed by the Pentagon. A series of investigations by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) have brought to light these multi-billion-dollar weapons deliveries -- exposing the misleading and potentially illegal documents on which they rely, the shady dealers at its heart of the trade, and the governments that have profited from the war.

The number of U.S. airstrikes, drone strikes, and ground raids in Somalia have risen each year of the Trump administration: from 13 under Obama in 2016, the annual totals rose to 38 in 2017, 47 in 2018, and 55 so far in 2019, by New America’s count.

Officials with U.S. Africa Command, which carries out these strikes, asserts that these they have resulted in the targeted killing of hundreds of al-Shabaab militants, and no civilians have been killed in any U.S. airstrikes since April 2018. 

In 2017, American troops deployed to Somalia for the first since the “Black Hawk Down” incident a quarter-century ago.

The Committee to Protect Journalists today condemned the Turkish air strike on a civilian convoy that killed journalist Saad Ahmed and injured at least four other reporters.

According to a report by the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, five other civilians were killed in the strike.

Assad’s government has been responsible for the deaths of numerous journalists by torture, missile strikes, and targeted assassinations, according to CPJ reporting. Turkey is the world’s worst jailer of journalists, according to CPJ’s 2018 prison census.

At least 97 Yemeni healthcare workers have died from Covid-19 as the disease ravages the war-torn country, according to a report that gives an insight into the true scale of Yemen’s poorly documented outbreak.Yemen, already suffering from a five-year war that has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, has proved uniquely vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic, according to data published by the medical charity MedGlobal on Thursday.

Yemen’s official total number of cases is 1,610, with 446 deaths, so the high number of healthcare worker casualties outlined by the report suggests the true caseload and mortality figure is far higher. For comparison, in badly hit Italy, where 245,0362 people have caught the virus, 35,073 people have died, including about 100 doctors. Yemen currently has a 27% mortality rate from the disease – more than five times the global average.

In a country where half of all medical facilities are out of action, and aid funding shortfalls are exacerbating the existing malnutrition and cholera crises, the loss of just one medical professional has a devastating exponential effect. About 18% of the country’s 333 districts already have no doctors.

the Syria climate conflict narrative is deeply problematic.[2] Not only is the evidence behind this narrative weak. In addition, it masks what was really occurring in rural Syria (and in the country’s northeast region in particular) prior to 2011, which was the unfolding of a long-term economic, environmental and political crisis. And crucially, the narrative largely originated from Syrian regime interests in deflecting responsibility for a crisis of its own making. Syria is less an exemplar of what awaits us as the planet warms than of the complex and uncomfortable politics of blaming climate change.

much of Syria and the eastern Mediterranean region experienced an exceptionally severe drought in the years before the onset of Syria’s civil war: the single year 2007–2008 was northeastern Syria’s driest on record, as was the three-year period 2006–2009

it is reasonable to say, per the Columbia study, that climate change did make this particular drought more likely

The British government ran a secret “black propaganda” campaign for decades, targeting Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia with leaflets and reports from fake sources aimed at destabilising cold war enemies by encouraging racial tensions, sowing chaos, inciting violence and reinforcing anti-communist ideas, newly declassified documents have revealed.

The campaign also sought to mobilise Muslims against Moscow, promoting greater religious conservatism and radical ideas. To appear authentic, documents encouraged hatred of Israel.

The Information Research Department (IRD) was set up by the post-second world war Labour government to counter Soviet propaganda attacks on Britain. Its activities mirrored the CIA’s cold war propaganda operations and the extensive efforts of the USSR and its satellites.

Abramovich is perhaps the most visible of the “oligarchs” surrounding Putin, who are widely perceived as extensions of the Russian president and keepers of a vast fortune that is effectively under the Kremlin’s control. Much of this wealth was extracted from Russia’s enormous energy and mineral resources, and is now stashed in secret bank accounts in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, in empty mansions and condos from London to Manhattan to Miami, and in yachts and private jets on the French Riviera.

as much as 60% of Russia’s GDP is offshore

The reserved, gray-bearded Abramovich is notoriously litigious toward critics who seek to detail his close ties to Putin. Last year, he successfully sued the British journalist Catherine Belton, who claimed in her 2020 book Putin’s People that the Russian president dictated Abramovich’s major purchases, including his decision to buy Chelsea. He also extracted an apology from a British newspaper for calling him a “bag carrier” for the Russian president.

“Putting pressure is just half of the equation; [US and European officials] have succeeded with that, undoubtedly the pain on Iran is immense,” says Mr. Parsi. “But to channel the pain is a very, very different task.”

measures have begun to bite, causing economic isolation and a precipitous fall in both oil revenues and the value of the Iranian currency. But Iran has still added thousands of centrifuges to enrich uranium, and deployed a more efficient, second-generation centrifuge model; stepped up uranium enrichment levels from 5 percent to 20 percent, which is technically not too far from weapons-grade; and moved its most sensitive work to a deeply buried site impregnable to air attack.

“it is highly unlikely that the regime will succumb to sanctions pressure … [when] no proportionate sanctions relief is put on the table by the P5+1, and capitulation is seen as a greater threat to the regime’s survival than even a military confrontation with the United States.”

It was August 14, and Shreateh had just reached halfway around the world to pull off a prank that would make him the most famous hacker in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He’d discovered a Facebook bug that would allow him to post to another user’s wall even if he wasn’t on the user’s friends list. Demonstrating the bug on Zuckerberg was a last resort: He first reported the vulnerability to Facebook’s bug bounty program, which usually pays $500 for discoveries like his. But Facebook dismissed his report out of hand, and to this day refuses to pay the bounty for the security hole, which it has now fixed. Where Facebook failed, though, techies from across the world stepped in to fix, crowdfunding a $13,000 reward for Shreateh. Now that money, and Shreateh’s notoriety, is about to launch the former construction worker into a new life. He’s using the funds to buy a new laptop and launch a cybersecurity service where websites will be able to request “ethical hacking” to identify their vulnerabilities. And he’s started a six-month contract with a nearby university to find bugs as part of their information security unit. He hacks and reports flaws on other universities’ sites in his free time.

The West Bank is no easy place to be a hacker, or to do anything in the technology sphere. The occupied region depends on Israel for electricity, water and telecommunications, including the sluggish Internet that crawls into the South Hebron Hills. Shreateh has a well and three water tanks on his roof because Yatta only receives several days of running water every few months. Blackouts are common, and the town often goes without electricity for whole days in the winter. Partly to blame is a complex system established by the Oslo accords that splits the West Bank into three zones under different combinations of Palestinian and Israeli control. “It’s like Swiss cheese,” says George Khadder, a tech entrepreneur who worked in Silicon Valley for 13 years. He sketches how Zones A, B and C weave in, out and around each other, with chunks of Israeli settlement territory in between. “The West Bank is like an archipelago, in terms of contiguity and services. This is absolutely a problem.” This access gap is clear on the drive from Jerusalem to Yatta, which requires passing through a military checkpoint that bars Shreateh from entering Israel. The road to Yatta passes several Israeli settlements, sprawling over hilltops with their separate telecom systems, brightly lit streets and green, well-watered lawns. “The dogs in Israel drink more water than Palestinians,” the taxi driver laughs.

Shreateh has his own website and 44,156 followers on Facebook, many of whom spam him with questions about hacking into their boyfriends’ profiles or raising their exam grades online. Shreateh ignores them. “I am an ethical hacker,” he says. “I don’t damage or destroy.” That makes him different from some other Palestinian hackers. The same month as Shreateh’s Facebook prank, hacktivists hijacked Google’s Palestine domain, redirecting it to a page with a Rihanna background song and written message: “uncle google we say hi from palestine to remember you that the country in google map not called israel. its called Palestine” This month, another group called KDMS hacked the websites of security companies AVG and Avira, among other companies, redirecting to a site displaying the Palestinian flag, a graphic of Palestinian land loss, and a similar message: “we want to tell you that there is a land called Palestine on the earth,” it read in part. “this land has been stolen by Zionist.’

They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel.

For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead

Every country manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth

The Basic Law of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia does not guarantee gender equality.

A vigorous progressive movement,

Due to an enforced