Human Rights Glance
A Palestinian citizen of Israel held by the internal security agency, Shin Bet, has died in hospital after being found unconscious in his cell, with his family and lawyers saying they found severe bruising on his body.
According to a Haaretz report, Saber Amitel, 21, was arrested earlier this month and taken to Shikma prison in Ashkelon, where he was denied access to a lawyer. He was suspected of arms smuggling
Police told his attorneys and family that he had attempted to take his own life.
His family and legal team were only permitted to visit him after Haaretz enquired about the case.
When his lawyers visited him at Barzilai Hospital on 8 June, they found severe bruising on his body, according to Haaretz.
Palestinian dies in Israeli custody with signs of torture
UN warns Palestinian children 'defenceless' amid Israeli crackdown on NGOs
Palestinian children are "increasingly unprotected", as Israel forces human rights organisations to cease or curtail work across the occupied Palestinian territories, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child warned on Monday.
The committee condemned Israel's designation of civil society groups as "terrorists". Labelling NGOs as terrorist entities gives Israel legal cover to obstruct humanitarian work, including military raids, travel bans, personal financial sanctions, threats of arrest, destruction of records and, in some cases, "threats of secondary sanctions against partners".
he committee is made up of a body of 18 independent experts that work within the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN OHCHR).
The warning doesn't name any of the organisations they are alluding to, but in 2021 Israel outlawed six major Palestinian NGOs, including Adameer, Al-Haq, Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children International - Palestine, Union of Agricultural Work Committees and the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees.
In January of this year, more than 50 international NGOs operating in occupied Palestine warned that recent registration measures imposed by Israel threatened to halt operations at a time of acute humanitarian need in Gaza.
Nearly 100 UK MPs and peers urge cancellation of Israeli settlement event
Nearly 100 British MPs and peers have signed a letter calling for an upcoming London event advertising the sale of land in illegal Israeli settlements to be cancelled, warning that it could implicate the UK in international war crimes.
The Great Israeli Real Estate Event is scheduled to be held in London this Sunday, but its location is being kept secret.
Andy McDonald, an MP for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East, published the statement on X on Friday, urging the UK government to prevent the Great Israeli Real Estate Event from taking place.
"The govt has an opportunity to uphold obligations under international law and take action against Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine," McDonald wrote.
The letter, sent to Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, described the event as "firmly embedded in Israel's project of colonial expansion" as it facilitates the sale of land seized from displaced Palestinians.
‘It’s torture’: prisoners’ letters expose subterranean Oklahoma ‘dungeon’ known as the tombs
Down here in the tombs, there aren’t any windows,” writes Tremane Wood from inside his cell, in a modern-day American “dungeon” that few people have ever heard of.
“It’s really like living in cave,” he writes in another letter. “It’s dark and damp. Sometimes this place drives people mad. The hardest part is the isolation.”
Or in another: “You end up loosing [sic] track of days and nights and what day it is … It’s a real form of psychological torture that some people never come back from.”
Wood, 46, spent 17 years incarcerated in H Unit – the underground cells at the state prison in the rural town of McAlester, Oklahoma, where no natural light ever reaches.
According to prisoner letters seen by the Guardian and published here for the first time, H Unit – also known by the prisoners as the “tombs” – features a series of windowless cells that are built banked into the earth. The letters also tell of infestations of vermin, unsanitary conditions, and frequent instances of physical and sexual violence.
Israel 'emptying' Al-Aqsa facilities to undermine Waqf, watchdog warns
Israel has emptied four facilities within the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex that served as offices for the Islamic Waqf, in what a monitoring group has described as an escalating campaign against the Jordanian-backed body.
The Al-Quds International Institution, a Palestinian organisation that monitors developments in Jerusalem, said on Tuesday that Israeli authorities have used "manufactured security pretexts" to target the facilities.
According to the group, Israeli forces raided the sites in recent months, broke their locks and prevented the installation of replacements.
The facilities were then left open, while anyone attempting to enter them was expelled because they had been used for "activities that threaten security".
The four sites are the Dome of Imam al-Ghazali, located above the Bab al-Rahma prayer hall along the eastern wall of the complex; Dar al-Hadith al-Sharif in the northeastern section of Al-Aqsa; Qubbat Sulayman, an open-air domed shrine opposite King Faisal Gate; and Qubbat Musa, located near Bab al-Silsila (Chain Gate).
Israeli Troops Kill 7-Month-Old Baby In West Bank, Palestinian Officials Say
Israeli troops shot at a car in the occupied West Bank, killing a 7-month-old Palestinian baby and wounding his parents, the Palestinian health ministry said, with the bullet striking the boy in the face.
The Israeli military said that soldiers shot at a vehicle perceived to be accelerating toward them near Hebron. It said an initial inquiry found that the three Palestinians wounded were uninvolved civilians.
Israeli military activity, and settler violence against Palestinians, have surged in the territory since the war in Gaza began in October 2023.
The baby’s father, Bethlehem University lecturer Fahd Abu Haikal, told The Associated Press that a bullet struck the windshield before piercing his right hand and striking his son and wife in the back seat Friday evening. Another bullet struck the hood, according to AP journalists who saw the car.
The bullet passed through Sam Fahd Abu Haikal’s face.
“He was the entire world,” Haikal said of the boy, who turned seven months on Friday.
The mother was in critical condition, with shrapnel close to her heart.
Leen Ezzeddine, the US-Lebanese graduate at Harvard Medical School who chose to speak out
When Leen Ezzeddine stood before her classmates at Harvard Medical School, the moment could have been framed as a familiar story of immigrant success: a Lebanese woman graduating as a doctor from one of the world’s most prestigious institutions.
But Ezzeddine chose to tell a different story.
In her graduation speech last week, she spoke of circumstance, borders, luck and the thin line separating her life from the lives of medical students in Lebanon and Palestine who share the same ambition but are made to study under drones, bombardment and displacement.
That line, for her, was not abstract. While she was pursuing her studies at Harvard, a US missile launched by Israel levelled her family home in Arab Salim, her mother’s village in southern Lebanon, in October 2024.
It was the village where she used to spend her summers, surrounded by cousins, relatives, and her grandparents, Hayat Chamseddine and Ali Zayour, who were later forced to leave and relocate to Beirut after their house was destroyed.
The contrast was stark: she was standing in Harvard as a new doctor, while the village that helped shape her childhood and family memories was being attacked.
That contradiction became the emotional and political centre of her intervention.
Her speech was not only about Gaza, or Lebanon, or the violence of war. It was about what it means to become a doctor inside an elite institution while entire communities are being denied the basic conditions of life.
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