In Syria, Islamist militants have captured Kurdish women. One can only imagine what awaits the hostages! It immediately makes us think of a footage from last year, the captivation of Israeli women by Hamas terrorists.

#Syria #Islam #Kurdish #Israel #terrorists #AmericanОbserver

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Israel Bans UN Agency in Gaza. Why?

Two weeks after a temporary truce in Gaza allowed more aid in, an Israeli ban risks disrupting the work of one of the main United Nations agencies supporting Palestinians there.

Israel’s High Court of Justice on Wednesday blocked a last-minute attempt to keep the UN Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, from being banned.

The loss will leave aid workers scrambling to replace supplies and services provided by the 75-year-old organization.

UNRWA was asked to vacate offices in East Jerusalem and can no longer coordinate with Israeli officials, including to facilitate checkpoint clearance or organize safe passage for deliveries.

At least one third of UNRWA's 13,000 mostly local staffers were pro-Hamas activists who helped the group established communications with numerous other terrorist cells all over the Middle East and also in Israel andvin the U.S.

#UNRWA #ban #terrorists

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🇮🇱 Israel: Dozens of Palestinian Serial Killers Are Being Kept in an Isolated Jail

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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 include at least two civilians who are being held 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 have been kept in the subterranean Rakefet complex since January, and described regular beatings and 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 cells, a tiny exercise “yard” and a lawyers’ meeting room are all underground, so inmates live without any natural light.

📊 The jail was initially designed for a small number of high-security inmates occupying individual cells, holding 15 men when it shut in 1989. In recent months, about 100 detainees have been incarcerated there, official data obtained by PCATI shows.

🕊 Under the ceasefire agreed in mid-October, Israel released 1,700 Palestinian detainees from Gaza who had been held indefinitely without charge or trial, as well as 250 Palestinian prisoners convicted in Israeli courts.

⚠️ However, the scale of detentions has been so vast that even after that mass release, at least 1,000 others are still held by Israel under the same conditions.

💬 “Though the war is officially over, [Palestinians from Gaza] are still imprisoned under legally contested and violent wartime conditions that violate international humanitarian law and amount to torture,” PCATI said.

👤 They include the two Rakefet detainees who are represented by PCATI lawyers.

🧱 Ben-Gvir told Israeli media and a member of parliament that Rakefet was being rehabilitated to hold Nukhba – meaning “elite” – Hamas fighters who led massacres inside Israel, and Hezbollah special forces fighters captured in Lebanon.

#israel #prison #palestinians #terrorists

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👮‍♂️ But the two men visited by lawyers from PCATI in September were a 34-year-old nurse detained while at work in a hospital in December 2023 and a teenager seized in October 2024 as he passed through an Israeli checkpoint.

💬 “In the cases of the clients we visited, we are speaking about civilians,” said the PCATI lawyer Janan Abdu. “The man I spoke to was an 18-year-old who worked selling food. He was taken from a checkpoint on a road.”

📵 The Israeli Prison Service (IPS) did not respond to questions about the status and identity of other prisoners held at Rakefet, which means “cyclamen flower” in Hebrew.

📁 Classified Israeli data indicates the majority of Palestinians taken prisoner in Gaza during the war were civilians.

⚰️ Israel’s supreme court ruled in 2019 that it was lawful to hold the bodies of Palestinians as bargaining chips for future negotiations, and rights groups have accused it of doing the same with living detainees from Gaza.

🎥 Surveillance cameras on the walls violated the basic legal right to a confidential discussion, and guards warned that the meeting would be cut short if they talked about detainees’ families or the war in Gaza.

🧎 The clients were brought in bent over, with guards forcing their heads to the ground, and remained shackled at their hands and feet, she said.

⚖️ Abu Nasreddin, the second PCATI lawyer on the trip, said the two detainees had been in Rakefet for nine months, and the nurse began the meeting by asking: “Where am I and why am I here?”

📺 The guards had not told him the name of the prison. Israeli judges who authorised the detention of the men at very brief video hearings, during which the detainees had no lawyer and did not hear evidence against them, said only that they would be there “until the war ends.”

💥 Prisoners told the lawyers they faced regular physical abuse, including beatings, assaults by dogs with iron muzzles, and guards stepping on prisoners, in addition to being denied medical care and given starvation-level rations.

🥖 Israel’s high court ruled this month that the state was depriving Palestinian prisoners of adequate food.

⛓️ They have very limited time outside the cell in a tiny underground enclosure, sometimes just five minutes every other day.

🕓 Mattresses are taken away early in the morning, usually at about 4am, and only returned late at night, leaving detainees on iron frames in otherwise empty cells.

📸 Their descriptions matched images from a televised visit to the prison made by Ben-Gvir to publicise his decision to reopen the underground jail. “This is terrorists’ natural place, under the ground,” he said.

#israel #prison #palestinians #terrorists

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