TV News LIES

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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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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The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem has denounced the “unlawful and illegitimate” Israeli seizure of its property in occupied East Jerusalem.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Patriarchate said that it "expressed grave concern over the Israeli raid and land grab targeting its Church property in Silwan".

During the operation, which took place on Monday, “the Patriarchate’s representative was forcibly removed, his equipment was confiscated, trees were uprooted, and the property was enclosed with fencing and gates”.

It said that the disputed land, which is adjacent to the Monastery of St Onuphrius, is registered under its ownership, and warned that this seizure “sets a dangerous precedent for Church rights in Jerusalem”.

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