TV News LIES

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 detainees have included at least two civilians held for months without charge or trial: a nurse detained in his scrubs, and a young food seller, according to lawyers from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) who represent both men.

The two men were transferred to the subterranean Rakefet complex in January, and described regular beatings andMore... violence consistent with well-documented torture in other Israeli detention centres.

Rakefet prison was opened in the early 1980s to house a handful of the most dangerous organised crime figures in Israel but closed a few years later on the grounds that it was inhumane. The far-right security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, ordered it back into service after the 7 October attacks in 2023.

The US supreme court on Friday is considering taking up a case that could challenge the legality of same-sex marriage across the country.

Hours after ruling that Donald Trump’s administration can block transgender and non-binary people from selecting passport sex markers that align with their gender identity, the justices are holding their first conference on the Davis v Ermold case. While their deliberations are typically kept private, the court may announce whether it will take the case as early as Monday.

The case involves Kim Davis, a former Kentucky county clerk who, in 2015, became a cause celebre for religious opposition to same-sex marriage after the US supreme court legalized the practice in the Obergefell v Hodges case. Davis repeatedly refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and, at the height of her fame, was even briefly jailed for contempt of court.

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The Supreme Court on Nov. 6 put back in place the Trump administration’s requirement that passports identify someone by their biological sex at birth, another ruling for President Donald Trump’s policies that stem from his assertion that someone’s sex cannot be changed.

Over the objections of the cohurt's three liberals, a majority of the justices paused a lower court’s ruling blocking Trump’s passport policy for transgender and nonbinary people while it’s being challnged in court.

The high court previously allowed Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military to go into effect before courts have decided if it’s legal.

On Trump's first day back in office, he issued an executive order requiring the federal government to only “recognize two sexes, male and female,” declaring “these sexes are not changeable.” 

The president required the State Department to issue passports that “accurately reflect the holder’s sex” based on that definition.

The Biden administration had allowed people to choose a nonbinary “X” identification marker and eliminated a medical documentation requirement for requests to change a gender marker.

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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.

“Many of these attacks are linked to Palestinians’ attempts to harvest their olive crops,” he said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Palestinians have been killed and injured. Their homes and property damaged. Their livestock attacked.”

Mr. Fletcher said that more trees have been damaged, and more communities affected this year than in the previous six years combined.

“The failure to prevent or punish such attacks is inconsistent with international law,” he warned. “Palestinians must be protected. Impunity cannot prevail. Perpetrators must be held accountable.”

His remarks follow warnings from the UN Spokesperson’s Office last week that violence by Israeli settlers has surged across the West Bank, often under the watch of Israeli security forces.

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Until last week, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi was the Israeli army’s top lawyer. Now she is behind bars and at the center of a scandal rocking the country after a bizarre sequence of events that included her abrupt resignation, a brief disappearance and a frantic search that led authorities to find her on a Tel Aviv beach.

The soap opera-worthy saga was touched off last week by Tomer-Yerushalmi’s explosive admission that she approved the leak of a surveillance video at the center of a politically divisive investigation into allegations of severe abuse against a Palestinian at a notorious Israeli military prison.

The video shows part of an assault in which Israeli soldiers are accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee.

By leaking the video last year, Tomer-Yerushalmi aimed to expose the seriousness of the allegations her office was investigating. Instead, it triggered fierce criticism from Israel’s hard-line political leaders. After Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned under pressure last week, her critics continued to heave personal insults.

TVNL Comment:  This woman is being villified and hounded for validating the truth about the sexual torture of a Palestinian prisoner. Where is the rest of the legal community in Israel, or, Heaven forbid, the rest of the world?

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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.

He did not specify when the council will meet, Israeli Channel 12 reported.

The announcement came a day after Israel approved the building of 1,300 settler homes in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc south of occupied East Jerusalem.

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.

Smotrich said Israeli authorities have approved nearly 30,000 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank this year, describing it as an "unprecedented achievement" for his government.

The Palestinian group Hamas denounced the Israeli move as a "dangerous escalation in the policy of Judaisation and settlement expansion targeting Palestinian land deep inside the West Bank."

"These settlement plans constitute a blatant violation of international law and United Nations resolutions that criminalise settlement construction," it said in a statement.

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