Human Rights Glance
Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist who participated in protests at Columbia University and was detained by Ice earlier this year, has filed a lawsuit demanding the Trump administration release its communications with anti-Palestinian groups he says contributed to his March arrest and efforts to detain him.
The groups, a number of which have boasted about their involvement in sharing dossiers on Palestine activists with the administration, have claimed credit for Khalil’s arrest, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is part of the legal team representing Khalil, and they say there is evidence that indicates the Trump administration “acted on information and misinformation – provided by these groups in cracking down” on Khalil and other pro-Palestine activists.
“For months, shady organizations and individuals carried out a smear and harassment campaign designed to intimidate and silence me,” said Khalil in a statement to the Center for Constitutional Rights.
“The public deserves full accountability for every bad actor who helped make that possible, including those at Columbia who fabricated and amplified these smears and opened the door for state retaliation against Palestinian speech.”
OHCHR condemned this week’s attacks as abhorrent and said they reflected a wider pattern of increased violence against Palestinians.
The UN humanitarian relief chief, Tom Fletcher, has sounded the alarm over rising violence in the occupied West Bank, where attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians and their property continue to escalate.
Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said that the Higher Planning Council will approve the construction of 1,973 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank during its next session.
Brooklyn-based writer and reporter Jasper Nathaniel was going through the Turmus Ayya olive fields in the West Bank when he captured the spine-chilling footage showing masked Israeli settlers beating Palestinian settlers senseless, armed with crude melee weapons.
The most popular and potentially unifying Palestinian leader — Marwan Barghouti — is not among the prisoners Israel intends to free in exchange for hostages held by Hamas under the new Gaza ceasefire deal.
