We stand firmly against injustice in all its forms. Nothing can justify the current war crimes committed by Israel in occupied Palestine. Equally, nothing can excuse the continued support offered by other nations to this apartheid regime. If you believe in human rights, dignity, and justice, then we urge you to boycott this rogue state. Silence is complicity, do what’s right.
A group of civil servants from the United States and EU member nations releases an unsigned letter declaring their governments’ policies concerning the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza are “wrong.”
The letter, which The New York Times says has over 800 supporters, complains that concerns the officials privately expressed “were overruled by political and ideological considerations” and they therefore “are obliged to do everything in our power on behalf of our countries and ourselves to not be complicit in one of the worst human catastrophes of this century.”
The missive goes on to accuse Israel of showing “no boundaries in its military operations in Gaza” and ignoring “all important counterterrorism expertise gained since 9/11.”Science DoseKeep Watching.
The letter’s supporters call to hold Israel “accountable to international humanitarian and human rights standards applied elsewhere,” and to “use all leverage available — including a halt to military support — to secure a lasting ceasefire and full humanitarian access in Gaza and a safe release of all hostages.”
“Develop a strategy for lasting peace that includes a secure Palestinian state and guarantees for Israel’s security, so that an attack like 7 October and an offensive on Gaza never happen again,” they add.
According to the letter, the officials that endorsed it hail from 12 different countries and EU institutions.
NEW YORK (AP) — Student editors at the Columbia Law Review say they were pressured by the journal’s board of directors to halt publication of an academic article written by a Palestinian human rights lawyer that accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and upholding an apartheid regime.
When the editors refused the request and published the piece Monday morning, the board — made up of faculty and alumni from Columbia University’s law school — shut down the law review’s website entirely. It remained offline Tuesday evening, a static homepage informing visitors the domain “is under maintenance.”
The episode at one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious legal journals marks the latest flashpoint in an ongoing debate about academic speech that has deeply divided students, staff and college administrators since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Several editors at the Columbia Law Review described the board’s intervention as an unprecedented breach of editorial independence at the periodical, which is run by students at Columbia Law School. The board of directors oversees the nonprofit’s finances but has historically played no role in selecting pieces.
In a letter sent to student editors Tuesday and shared with The Associated Press, the board of directors said it was concerned that the article, titled “Nakba as a Legal Concept,” had not gone through the “usual processes of review or selection for articles at the Law Review, and in particular that a number of student editors had been unaware of its existence.”
“In order to preserve the status quo and provide student editors some window of opportunity to review the piece, as well as provide time for the Law Review to determine how to proceed, we temporarily suspended the website,” the letter continued.
Those involved in soliciting and editing the piece said they had followed a rigorous review process, even as they acknowledged taking steps to forestall expected blowback by limiting the number of students aware of the article.
In the piece, Rabea Eghbariah, a Harvard doctoral candidate, accuses Israel of a litany of “crimes against humanity,” arguing for a new legal framework to “encapsulate the ongoing structure of subjugation in Palestine and derive a legal formulation of the Palestinian condition.”
Eghbariah said in a text message that the suspension of the law journal’s website should be seen as “a microcosm of a broader authoritarian repression taking place across U.S. campuses.”
Editors said they voted overwhelmingly in December to commission a piece on Palestinian legal issues, then formed a smaller committee — open to all of the publication’s editorial leadership — that ultimately accepted Eghbariah’s article. He had submitted an earlier version of the article to the Harvard Law Review, which the publication later elected not to publish amid internal backlash, according to a report in The Intercept.
Anticipating similar controversy and worried about a leak of the draft, the committee of editors working on the article did not upload it to a server that is visible to the broader membership of the law journal and to some administrators. The piece was not shared until Sunday with the full staff of the Columbia Law Review — something that editorial staffers said was not uncommon.
“We’ve never circulated a particular article in advance,” said Sohum Pal, an articles editor at the publication. “So the idea that this is all over a process concern is a total lie. It’s very transparently content based.”
In their letter to students, the board of directors said student editors who didn’t work on the piece should have been given an opportunity to read it and raise concerns.
“Whatever your views of this piece, it will clearly be controversial and potentially have an impact on all associated with the Review,” they wrote.
Those involved in the publishing of the article said they heard from a small group of students over the weekend who expressed concerns about threats to their careers and safety if it were to be published.
Some alluded to trucks that circled Columbia and other campuses following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, labeling students as antisemites for their past or current affiliation with groups seen as hostile to Israel.
The letter from the board also suggested that a statement be appended to the piece stating the article had not been subject to a standard review process or made available for all student editors to read ahead of time.
Erika Lopez, an editor who worked on the piece, said many students were adamantly opposed to the idea, calling it “completely false to imply that we didn’t follow the standard process.”
She said student editors had spoken regularly since they began receiving pushback from the board on Sunday and remained firmly in support of the piece.
When they learned the website had been shuttered Monday morning, they quickly uploaded Eghbariah’s article to a publicly accessible website. It has since spread widely across social media.
“It’s really ironic that this piece probably got more attention than anything we normally published,” Lopez added, “even after they nuked the website.”
Malaysia told the ICJ that Israel “must withdraw immediately from the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.
“Second, Israel must offer assurances and guarantees of non-repetition and third, Israel is under obligation to offer full reparations – annulment or repeal of all offending legislative and regulatory measures it has adopted for the [occupied Palestinian Territories],” he said. “Israel must also offer compensation for all the material and moral damage caused by the breach of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination,” he added. Malaysia’s representative also said: As I speak, Gaza is facing devastation … The West Bank is also at risk.
Safeguarding Palestine from destruction is crucial, especially in light of Israel’s non-compliance with the provisional measures of this court.
The Palestinian people have long suffered dehumanisation, demonisation, brutal collective punishment. They have endured and are still enduring the denial of their right to self-determination due to the policies and practices of Israel in the OPT. It is incumbent of each of us to do our part in ending their decades-long suffering.
With the firm belief in this court’s rule, as the custodian of the international law, we remain confident that justice and peace will prevail for the Palestinian people.
Israel’s transfer of settlers to the OPT constitutes a war crime. Israel’s policies and practices which aim to change the demographic composition of the OPT, along with the creation of enclaves and demolition of the Palestinian homes, limitation of their freedom of movement, including the blockade and siege of the Gaza Strip, constitute violations of international humanitarian law and the international human rights law.
They did not recognize me in the shadows
That suck away my color in this Passport
And to them my wound was an exhibit
For a tourist Who loves to collect photographs
They did not recognize me,
Ah... Don't leave
The palm of my hand without the sun
Because the trees recognize me
Don't leave me pale like the moon!
All the birds that followed my palm
To the door of the distant airport
All the wheatfields
All the prisons
All the white tombstones
All the barbed Boundaries
All the waving handkerchiefs
All the eyes
were with me,
But they dropped them from my passport
Stripped of my name and identity?
On soil I nourished with my own hands?
Today Job cried out
Filling the sky:
Don't make and example of me again!
Oh, gentlemen, Prophets,
Don't ask the trees for their names
Don't ask the valleys who their mother is
>From my forehead bursts the sward of light
And from my hand springs the water of the river
All the hearts of the people are my identity
So take away my passport!
🇪🇸 Pedro Sanchez calls out NATO for double standards… “If we are defending International Law in Ukraine, then we must defend International Law in Gaza”…🇵🇸 pic.twitter.com/lAzWAQNrO6
CNN is facing a backlash from its own staff over editorial policies they say have led to a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza.
Journalists in CNN newsrooms in the US and overseas say broadcasts have been skewed by management edicts and a story-approval process that has resulted in highly partial coverage of the Hamas massacre on 7 October and Israel’s retaliatory attack on Gaza.
“The majority of news since the war began, regardless of how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,” said one CNN staffer. “Ultimately, CNN’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice.”
According to accounts from six CNN staffers in multiple newsrooms, and morethan a dozen internal memos and emails obtained by the Guardian, daily news decisions are shaped by a flow of directives from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta that have set strict guidelines on coverage.
They include tight restrictions on quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives while Israel government statements are taken at face value. In addition, every story on the conflict must be cleared by the Jerusalem bureau before broadcast or publication.
CNN journalists say the tone of coverage is set at the top by its new editor-in-chief and CEO, Mark Thompson, who took up his post two days after the 7 October Hamas attack. Some staff are concerned about Thompson’s willingness to withstand external attempts to influence coverage given that in a former role as the BBC’s director general he was accused of bowing to Israeli government pressure on a number of occasions, including a demand to remove one of the corporation’s most prominent correspondents from her post in Jerusalem in 2005.
Mark Thompson. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
CNN insiders say that has resulted, particularly in the early weeks of the war, in a greater focus on Israeli suffering and the Israeli narrative of the war as a hunt for Hamas and its tunnels, and an insufficient focus on the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths and destruction in Gaza.
