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After just seven months in the role, the president of one of the foremost US literary organisations resigned last week over what he described as the unfair treatment of Palestinians compared to Israelis and Jewish Americans.

Dinaw Mengestu, a celebrated Ethiopian-American novelist, exited the top job at Pen America on Thursday after the group published a report about the emotional toll on Israeli and Jewish-American writers after the fallout from Israel's nearly three-year-long genocide in Gaza.

Many reported losing jobs or career opportunities.

Mengestu wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday that "it is not about different opinions" or "different experiences", but rather "PEN America's ongoing failure to defend free expression fairly and equitably", as it keeps producing work that "supports suppression through bigotry and indifference".

That suppression, he described, comes from undermining the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which he maintained is also a form of protected free speech under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

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AL-MAGHAZI REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip—At midnight, Waad al-Shafi was still awake, sitting on the floor beside her 22-month-old son, Jawad. The room was small and worn down by Israeli shelling. Long cracks run across the concrete and flakes of paint hung from the corners. The dim light cast shadows on the wall behind her.

She held a cloth dampened with cool water, which she dabbed lightly on Jawad’s feet as he slept. Every few moments, she placed her hand on his chest and felt his breathing. Jawad stirred before his eyes snapped open. He let out a low whimper before the words came out in broken pieces: “Bang. Blood. Tank.”

Waad didn’t ask him what he meant. She knew. She leaned toward him and smoothed his hair with one hand, keeping the other resting on him. When his voice fell quiet again, she stayed as she was, sitting beside him, awake, watching the rise and fall of his chest.

Jawad has been this way since March 19, when his father, Osama Al-Shafi, said he was going to take his son to the store to buy candy. He lifted Jawad onto his shoulders and headed out. The store was to the west, near their home in the eastern part of Al-Maghazi refugee camp, a few hundred meters from the “yellow line.” When he left the house, his direction suddenly changed and he began wandering eastward.

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Israel has issued orders to confiscate large tracts of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank in order to expand a road for Israeli settlers in the area.

One of the largest settler roads in the West Bank, Route 60 lies east of Ramallah and south of Nablus and its completion requires the appropriation of Palestinian land along its route.

The project will lead to the expropriation of privately owned paved agricultural land, in order to add new lanes and strengthen links between illegal Jewish settlements in the area.

Al-Mazra'a Al-Sharqiya, east of Ramallah, is among the Palestinian towns most threatened by the project, as the road runs alongside large areas of its agricultural land.

The Israeli expropriation notice announces the confiscation of hundreds of dunams, but the exact number is unknown because farmers found the confiscation orders discarded on their land rather than delivered to them directly.

Taysir Salem, a landowner in Al-Mazra'a Al-Sharqiya, told Middle East Eye his grandfather owned 180 dunams (18 hectares) of land, which his family inherited and planted with trees. 

The land is now set to be confiscated.

"Route 60 will be extended through our land, and at our expense, they will take it by force and bulldoze half of a hill that belongs to us," he said.

"All the neighbouring towns will also be subjected to land theft because of the road," he added.

The official Israeli confiscation of the land is accompanied by a settler campaign to intimidate local residents and prevent them from accessing it fully.

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Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said US envoy Steve Witkoff described Gaza’s entire population as “two million Nazis” during a private meeting last year.

Speaking at a conference in Israel on Thursday, the far-right minister recounted a conversation held after Witkoff’s visited Gaza last August at the height of the Israeli genocide.

Smotrich said: "When Witkoff was appointed, I sat with him and Ron Dermer [former Israeli ambassador to the US]." They showed Witkoff a propaganda video, after which the US envoy turned to Smotrich and reportedly said: "Bezalel, I will not let two million Nazis live next to your children on fences."

Witkoff, a former property lawyer with no previous foreign policy or humanitarian experience, publicly presented the Gaza visit as an effort to “help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza”.

At the time, Israel was deliberately starving residents by restricting food entering Gaza and driving much of its population towards famine.

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An Israeli soldier’s photo of a Palestinian man from Gaza stripped to his underwear, blindfolded and bound face-down to an iron rod corroborates extensive reporting on Israeli torture of Palestinians in detention and itself may constitute a war crime, rights groups have said.

The image was shared on a now-deleted personal social media account, with the Hebrew-languahttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/08/photo-palestinian-prisoner-corroborates-israeli-torture-claimsge caption “good morning”. It was brought to wider public attention by a Palestinian writer and activist who goes by Tamer.

“Both abusive treatment of detainees and the public sharing of humiliating or degrading images of them can constitute war crimes,” said Oneg Ben Dror from the prisoner and detainees department at Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI).

The photo “confirms what thousands of testimonies from Palestinian detainees have exposed, and what we and other organisations have been reporting for nearly three years now,” she added. “Israeli detention facilities are torture camps for Palestinians.”

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Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man killed by federal immigration agents during a traffic stop in Houston this week, was not the intended target of the “enforcement operation”, the Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were reportedly seeking two people from Guatemala when they attempted to stop Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the United States for 35 years, the New York Times reported.

Salgado Araujo, who was on his way to work early on Tuesday morning, was driving three other people in a white van. After the shooting, the three men were taken into custody. One of the three men has been identified by advocates as Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, the brother of the victim. The New York Times reported that he was still in an immigration detention center.

In a statement provided to the Guardian, an unnamed DHS official said officers had received a tip from law enforcement partners about their target’s address and had previously spotted two white vans at that property.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/09/houston-man-killed-ice-agents

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