TV News LIES

A documentary featuring mothers surviving Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A video investigation uncovering Israel’s role in the killing of a Palestinian American journalist. Another video revealing Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.

YouTube surreptitiously deleted all these videos in early October by wiping the accounts that posted them from its website, along with their channels’ archives. The accounts belonged to three prominent Palestinian human rights groups: Al-Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

The move came in response to a U.S. government campaign to stifle accountability for alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Palestinian groups’ YouTube channels hosted hours of footage documenting and highlighting alleged Israeli government violations of international law in both Gaza and the West Bank, including the killing of Palestinian civilians.

“I’m pretty shocked that YouTube is showing such a little backbone,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. “It’s really hard to imagine any serious argument that sharing information from these Palestinian human rights organizations would somehow violate sanctions. Succumbing to this arbitrary designation of these Palestinian organizations, to now censor them, is disappointing and pretty surprising.”

After the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants and charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Secretary Yoav Gallant with war crimes in Gaza, the Trump administration escalated its defense of Israel’s actions by sanctioning ICC officials and targeting people and organizations that work with the court.

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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."

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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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