🎓 “Peace be upon you. From the students of Harvard, to the youth of Dahieh, to the sons of Nabatieh, and the people of Tyre.”
Harvard Medical School graduate Leen Ezzeddine, from the southern Lebanese town of Arabsalim, used her graduation speech to remind her peers of the students in Gaza and southern Lebanon who do not benefit from the same “arbitrary luck and circumstance” that she and her classmates have enjoyed.
Ezzeddine said her presence at that podium was “evidence of what survives the border, the bomb, and the exile,” and of “what becomes possible when people the world has tried to erase are allowed to live.”
This is a hard article to read, but I hope you'll do so. I've spent some time reporting on widespread rape and other sexual violence of Palestinian male and female prisoners by Israeli authorities, and the article is now published. The assault victims were warned not to give speak of what they endured -- they were sometimes told they would be killed or raped if they gave interviews -- but they found the courage to do so. One man described being raped three times in a single day in Israeli prison, the third time after he tried to protest. A young woman said the guards would come in at the beginning of each shift and strip her naked and abuse her. Another reported that she was shown photos of herself being raped and warned they would be released unless she cooperated with Israeli intelligence. Even three children who had been detained told me they had been sexually abused. Look, whatever our position on the Middle East, we should be able to agree on being anti-rape. Sexual assaults were horrific when Israeli women were targeted on Oct. 7, and they're equally horrific when Israeli authorities use them against Palestinians day after day after day. We should be able to find common ground in opposing rape. Here's a gift link to the article: https://t.co/aMMHId49OO
Join me on Substack to get links to all my work in your inbox. Here's my latest, promoting my new 10,000-word report about the 75 doctors and medical staff from Gaza seized & imprisoned by Israel & mostly held, to date, for between 500 & 900 days https://t.co/oemJajarmp
Who Are the 75 Doctors and Medical Staff from Gaza Still Held in Israel’s Gruesome Prisons for Palestinians? - new from me: a major report into the 75 doctors and medical staff held without charge or trial, in brutal conditions, & mostly for 500-900 days https://t.co/GEjIcknyS3
I just appeared on ABC News to:
– Call out Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon yesterday
– Reject the propaganda that these were “Hezbollah targets”
– Expose the so-called negotiations with Lebanon’s weak unrepresentative government
– Show how they’re meant to sabotage an Iranian imposed ceasefire and push Lebanon toward civil war
Watch:
@EODHappyCaptain in the Warsaw uprising of 1944 they reclaimed unexploded German bombs to create grenades and improvised explosive devices. Same happened in Gaza with unexploded Israeli bombs. this always happens.
Raz Segal: “the genocide in Gaza is far from over” because it has become a model of permanent settler colonial elimination in a world shaped by the brutality of force. From “never again” to “again and again.” https://t.co/MqMNAwbGKh
More than a month after a ceasefire was announced and all living Israeli hostages were released, Israeli authorities are still committing genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, by continuing to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, without signaling any change in their intent. https://t.co/BHs2gm2wiZ
There's a large crowd gathered in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters for my transfer. I think I'm even on TV. Hopefully I have better security than JFK did. Hey there's Jack Ruby again...