testing

livus, 5 days ago

From the article:

The report details only cases that UN investigators were able to verify, so it accounts for just part of the total number of deaths and injuries of children in the course of last year.

In all, the UN verified “8,009 grave violations against 4,360 children” in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank – more than twice the figures for the DRC, the next worst place for violence against children.

Of the total number of child victims verified, 4,247 were Palestinian, 113 were Israeli.

In all, 5,698 violations were attributed to Israeli armed and security forces, and 116 to Hamas’s armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Israeli settlers were judged responsible in 51 cases, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades was involved in 21.

Between 7 October and the end of December last year, the UN verified the killing of 2,051 Palestinian children, and said the process of attributing responsibility was ongoing, but the report noted: “Most incidents were caused by the use of explosive weapons in populated areas by Israeli armed and security forces.”

The report conceded it reflected only a partial picture of the situation in Gaza.

“Owing to severe access challenges, in particular in the Gaza Strip, the information presented herein does not represent the full scale of violations against children in this situation,” it said.

The report also found grave abuses by Israeli forces in the West Bank, with 126 Palestinian children killed and 906 detained. The UN verified five cases where soldiers used boys “to shield forces during law enforcement operations”.

In the course of 2023, in the run-up to the Hamas 7 October attack on Israel, the UN said Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s armed wings organised “summer camps”, in which children were exposed to “military content and activities”.

In the first three months of the war, the UN verified 23 separate cases of the denial of humanitarian access by Israeli authorities “related to denied coordination of humanitarian aid missions and prevention of access to medical care”.

In the course of the Israeli offensive in Gaza, the UN found “nearly all critical infrastructure, facilities and services have been attacked, including shelter sites, United Nations installations, schools, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities, grain mills and bakeries”.

“Children are at risk of famine, severe malnutrition and preventable death,” the UN report said. “I am appalled by the dramatic increase and unprecedented scale and intensity of grave violations against children in the Gaza Strip, Israel and the occupied West Bank,” Guterres tells the general assembly in the report.

GrymEdm, 19 days ago

Upvoted because it’s a story worth knowing, but as far as I can tell this is just further harassment/condemnation of anything pro-Palestinian. As of the end of April, independent review “finds no evidence for Israel’s claims about UNRWA and Hamas”.

Israel has declared organizations as terrorists on bad premises before. E.g. - in 2021 Defence for Children International was formally labelled a terrorist organization after they reported the rape of a 13-year-old Palestinian to the US State Department. Josh Paul, a director involved with the investigation, gives details in an interview about why he resigned from the State Dept. post-Oct. 7th. The short version is: the allegations of rape were credible, Israel was confronted, the next day Israeli forces seized all the local assets of Defence for Children International and declared them terrorists.

EU nations have formally rejected “terrorist organization” labels being applied to humanitarian/watchdog agencies in Israel/OPT before.

livus, 19 days ago

From the article:

The South East Asian nation is at a crossroads - after decades of military rule and brutal repression, ethnic groups, along with a new army of young insurgents, have brought the dictatorship to crisis point.

In the past seven months, somewhere between half and two-thirds of the country has fallen to the resistance. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, including many children, since the military seized power in a coup in 2021. Some 2.5 million have been displaced, and the military facing an unprecedented challenge to its rule and in an attempt to thwart the growing resistance regularly bombs civilians, schools and churches from its warplanes (the resistance has none).

Before Nay Myo Zin’s sound equipment is switched on, the army opens fire on his position.

Undeterred, with a flick of the switch and microphone in hand, he bellows: “Everyone, cease fire! Cease fire, please. Just listen for five minutes, 10 minutes.” Somewhat surprisingly, the barrage stops.

He tells them of the 4,000 soldiers who surrendered to the opposition in northern Shan State, and the recent insurgent drone attacks on military buildings in the country’s capital Nay Pyi Taw. The message is, we are winning, your regime is falling, it is time to give up.

Here in Hpasang and across Karenni state, across much of the country, battles and stalemates have taken hold as a great rolling rebellion threatens the rule of the military junta. The military coup in 2021 brought an end to the elected civilian government, and its leader Aung San Suu Kyi remains imprisoned, along with other political leaders.

Yet this is an under-reported conflict - with much of the world’s attention on Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict. There is no press freedom, foreign journalists are rarely allowed to enter officially and when they do are heavily monitored. There is no way to hear the resistance side of this story through government approved visits.

We travelled into Myanmar and spent a month in the east of the country living alongside resistance groups fighting across Karenni State, which borders Thailand, and Shan state, which borders China...

electric_nan, 21 days ago

These people gonna face less consequences than people protesting against Israel in Germany.