Human Rights Glance
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.
A campaign of ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Bedouins in the occupied West Bank is being driven not by rogue extremists, but by the Israeli state, according to a major new report. 
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.
A federal judge on Tuesday permanently blocked Alabama from executing a man with nitrogen gas after declaring the method violates the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Alabama became the first state in the nation to use the execution method in January 2024, but has faced repeated legal challenges to its use.
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.
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.
US President Donald Trump has threatened or used force against countries representing roughly one in 11 people worldwide, according to a CNN analysis.
