Torture
US refuses to say it won’t kill Assange
Wikileaks journalist remains imprisoned as US continues to pursue discredited extradition case – and refusal to give binding guarantee would result in his immediate release if UK justice system was fit for purpose
The US has refused to give a specific, binding guarantee to a UK court that it will not execute journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has been held for years in solitary confinement in Belmarsh prison while he fights the US government’s attempt to extradite him so it can imprison him for years beyond his lifespan, after Assange exposed war crimes in Iraq by the US military.
The case should have been laughed out of court three years ago, when the main US witness admitted he had been lying all along in his claim that Assange induced him to hack US systems. Instead, Assange has been submitted to what former UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer described as sustained psychological torture – and still faces the likelihood of imprisonment for more than a century.
His recent appeal was adjourned to give the US time to affirm properly that it would not kill him if he was extradited, a sick joke when there has been longstanding evidence of US plans to murder him outside the US.
Incredibly, the High Court has refused to admit fresh evidence of CIA plots to kidnap or kill Julian Assange.
The judges say the rationale for kidnapping or killing Assange would be removed if he is extradited, and the evidence is thus not worth consideration.
Read that again. pic.twitter.com/PqwJIg4yAn— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) March 26, 2024
The judges even refused to admit fresh evidence of the US’s plans to assassinate Assange, instead offering the US another opportunity to have him in their hands if they would promise not to put him to death. The US.
But Assange’s wife Stella has revealed that the US has refused to say that it will not kill him and has offered only a boilerplate statement about the death penalty, while denying Assange the free speech protections it would offer to any US citizen:
The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty.
It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution’s previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he is not a U.S citizen. Instead, the US has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can “seek to raise” the First Amendment if extradited.
The diplomatic note does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about his future – his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism.
The Biden Administration must drop this dangerous prosecution before it is too late.
The US statement says the death penalty will be ‘neither sought nor imposed’, but this is non-binding and meaningless given its previous attempts to kill him. The refusal to guarantee there will be no death penalty in Assange’s specific case should mean under UK and European human rights laws that the extradition is immediately refused by the UK court and Assange should already be free. Even if the assurances had been given, the likelihood that the US’s treatment of Assange would lead to his death should be enough to quash the bid.
The fact that he is not yet free of the threat of extradition, let alone walking around in the freedom he should have, is a damning indictment of the state of UK justice and democracy.
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Chris Hedges: The Crucifixion of Julian Assange
Washington DC — (Scheerpost) — Prosecutors representing the United States, whether by design or incompetence, refused — in the two-day hearing I attended in London in February — to provide guarantees that Julian Assange would be afforded First Amendment rights and would be spared the death penalty if extradited to the U.S.
The inability to give these assurances all but guaranteed that the High Court — as it did on Tuesday — would allow Julian’s lawyers to appeal. Was this done to stall for time so that Julian would not be extradited until after the U.S. presidential election? Was it a delaying tactic to work out a plea deal? Julian’s lawyers and U.S. prosecutors are discussing this possibility. Was it careless legal work? Or was it to keep Julian locked in a high-security prison until he collapsed mentally and physically?
If Julian is extradited, he will stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, which carries a potential sentence of 170 years. Another charge for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” carries an additional five years.
The court will permit Julian to appeal minor technical points — his basic free speech rights must be honored, he cannot be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality, and he cannot be under threat of the death penalty.
No new hearing will allow his lawyers to focus on the war crimes and corruption that WikiLeaks exposed, permit Julian to mount a public interest defense, or discuss the political persecution of a publisher who has not committed a crime.
The court, by asking the U.S. for assurances that Julian would be granted First Amendment rights in the U.S. courts and not be subject to the death penalty, offered the U.S. an easy out — give the guarantees and the appeal was rejected.
It is hard to see how the U.S. can refuse the two-judge panel, composed of Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Jeremy Johnson, which issued on Tuesday a 66-page judgment accompanied by a three-page court order and a four-page media briefing.
The hearing in February was Julian’s last chance to request an appeal of the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel, and many of the rulings of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in 2021.
If Julian is denied an appeal, he can request an emergency stay of execution from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But it is possible the British court could order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction, or decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard there.
Julian has been engaged in a legal battle for 15 years. It began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad.
Julian took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London for seven years, fearing extradition to the U.S. He was arrested in April 2019 by the Metropolitan Police, who were permitted by the Embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh, a high-security prison in southeast London.
The case against Julian has made a mockery of the British justice system and international law. While in the embassy, the Spanish security firm UC Global provided video recordings of meetings between Julian and his lawyers to the CIA, eviscerating attorney-client privilege.
The Crucifixion of Julian Assange | Mr. Fish
The Ecuadorian government — led by Lenin Moreno — violated international law by rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permitting police into their embassy to carry Julian into a waiting van. The courts have denied Julian’s status as a legitimate journalist and publisher. The U.S. and Britain have ignored Article 4 of their Extradition Treaty, which prohibits extradition for political offenses. The key witness for the U.S., Sigurdur Thordarson — a convicted fraudster and pedophile — admitted to fabricating the accusations he made against Julian in exchange for immunity for past crimes..
Julian, an Australian citizen, is being charged under the U.S. Espionage Act, although he did not engage in espionage and was not based in the U.S. when he was sent the leaked documents. The British courts are considering extradition, despite the CIA’s plan to kidnap and assassinate Julian, plans that included a potential shoot-out on the streets of London, with involvement by London’s Metropolitan Police.
Julian has been held in isolation in a high-security prison without trial, although his only technical violation of the law is breaching bail conditions after he obtained asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador. This should only entail a fine.
Finally, unlike Daniel Ellsberg, Julian did not leak the documents. He published documents leaked by U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
The judges accepted three of the nine legal grounds as potential points for appeal, and they denied the other six. The two-judge panel also rejected Julian’s lawyers’ request to present new evidence.
Julian’s legal team asked the court to introduce into the case the Yahoo! News report that revealed, after the release of the documents known as Vault 7, that the then-director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, considered assassinating Julian. Julian’s lawyers also hoped to introduce a statement from Joshua Dratel, a U.S. attorney, who said that Pompeo’s use of the terms “non-state hostile intelligence service” and “enemy combatant” were phrases designed to give legal cover for an assassination. The third piece of evidence Julian’s lawyers hoped to introduce was a statement from a Spanish witness in the criminal proceedings underway in Spain against UC Global.
The CIA is the engine behind Julian’s extradition. Vault 7 exposed hacking tools that permit the CIA to access our phones, computers and televisions, turning them — even when switched off — into monitoring and recording devices. The extradition request does not include charges based on the release of the Vault 7 files, but the U.S. indictment followed the release of the Vault 7 files.
Justice Sharp and Justice Johnson dismissed the report in Yahoo! News as “another recitation of opinion by journalists on matters that were considered by the judge.” They rejected the argument made by the defense that Julian’s extradition would be in violation of Section 81 of the U.K. Extradition Act of 2003, which prohibits extraditions in cases where individuals are prosecuted for their political opinions. The judges also dismissed the arguments made by Julian’s attorneys that extradition would violate his protections under the European Convention of Human Rights — the right to life, the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment, the right to a free trial and protections against punishment without law respectively.
The U.S. largely built its arguments on the affidavits of U.S. prosecutor Gordon D. Kromberg. Kromberg, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, has stated that Julian, as a foreign national, is “not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information.”
Ben Watson, King’s Counsel, who represented the U.K. government during the two-day hearing in February, conceded that if Julian is found guilty under the Espionage Act, he could receive a death penalty sentence.
The judges urged the U.S. and the U.K. Secretary of State to offer the British court assurances on these three points by April 16.
If the assurances are not provided, the appeal will proceed.
If the assurances are provided, lawyers for both sides have until April 30th to make new written submissions to the court. At that point, the court will convene again on May 20 to decide whether the appeal can proceed.
The goals in this Dickensian nightmare remain unchanged. Erase Julian from the public consciousness. Demonize him. Criminalize those who expose government crimes. Use Julian’s slow-motion crucifixion to warn journalists that no matter their nationality, no matter where they live, they can be kidnapped and extradited to the U.S. Drag out the judicial lynching for years until Julian, already in a precarious physical and mental condition, disintegrates.
This ruling, like all of the rulings in this case, is not about justice. It is about vengeance.
Feature photo | The Crucifixion of Julian Assange – Partial | Mr. Fish
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
The post Chris Hedges: The Crucifixion of Julian Assange appeared first on MintPress News.
Assange: justice denied again as court declines to admit new evidence of US murder plots
Wikileaks founder will remain in Belmarsh prison while judges seek further meaningless ‘assurances’ from US
The High Court has this morning again denied justice to persecuted Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Despite admitting that the US is denying Assange’s rights to free speech and is pursuing him in a way that it would not pursue one of its own citizens, judges have decided to keep Assange in Belmarsh prison while it asks for further ‘assurances’ that the US will not kill him – even though there has been longstanding evidence of US plans to murder him outside the US.
Shamefully, the court has also declined to admit fresh evidence of US plots to assassinate him, claiming that the evidence is irrelevant because the US’s incentive to murder Assange would not apply if it had him in custody, as Declassified UK has pointed out:
Incredibly, the High Court has refused to admit fresh evidence of CIA plots to kidnap or kill Julian Assange.
The judges say the rationale for kidnapping or killing Assange would be removed if he is extradited, and the evidence is thus not worth consideration.
Read that again. pic.twitter.com/PqwJIg4yAn— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) March 26, 2024
The extradition case should have been laughed out of court three years ago, when the main US witness admitted he had been lying all along in his claim that Assange induced him to hack US systems. Instead, Assange has been submitted to what former UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer described as sustained psychological torture – and still faces the likelihood of imprisonment for more than a century in US retaliation for Wikileaks exposing its war crimes in Iraq and as a deterrent to other journalists who might expose its crimes in future.
Shame on the UK and its travesty of justice and democracy. Free Julian Assange. Protect real journalism.
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Craig Murray selected to stand for Workers Party in Blackburn
Left-wing former ambassador will stand at next general election
Former UK ambassador Craig Murray has been selected by the Workers’ Party GB to stand as its candidate in Blackburn at the next general election.
Murray, who has been targeted by UK security services for standing up for human rights in Palestine and against corruption in the UK and was removed by the government from his ambassador role for objecting to the use of intelligence obtained by torture, runs a well-known left-wing news site. Like party leader George Galloway, he is a Scot.
He was jailed for eight months in 2021, serving half the sentence before release, after a farcical conviction in a Scottish court for supposed ‘jigsaw identification’, even though so-called ‘mainstream’ media had actually identified the person involved and Murray had not. Alba Party MP Kenny MacAskill called Murray’s sentencing:
vindictive and a sad day for Scottish justice.
The Blackburn seat is currently held by Labour. The seat has a similar demographic to nearby Rochdale, which was won last month in a landslide by Galloway.
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Video: ‘unfounded, unverified’ – what UN really said about Israel’s ‘Hamas rape’ claims
Pro-Israel spin and complicit mainstream media claim UN report upheld Israel’s claims – it didn’t and even the UN’s political collusion collapses under scrutiny
Israel’s supporters, compliant ‘mainstream’ media and a host of professional and unpaid amplifier accounts have spent the past few days trumpeting the supposed ‘confirmation’ by the United Nations of Israel’s claims of rapes, mutilations and sexual violence by Hamas during the 7 October raid.
In reality, while they claimed ‘evidence’ was ‘clear and convincing’ of sexual violence ‘committed against captives’, this evidence appears to be purely the claims of captives, since there was no mention of – and no realistic possibility of collecting – forensic evidence from the period and locations of captivity.
Such claims are, of course, at odds with the testimony of female captives that they were treated well and even ‘like queens’. And Pramila Patten added her finding that even if such violence was occurring, it in fact delegitimises Israel’s use of violence, which is preventing the return of captives.
Patten then claimed there were ‘reasonable grounds’ to think that sexual violence took place at the Nova rave and on the road back toward Gaza – already demonstrably farcical when Israeli helicopter gunships are well known to have been firing constantly and repeatedly at anything that moved. And Patten even linked her claim of reasonableness to the mass killing and burning of bodies – killings and burnings which have been firmly linked to the mass chain-gun and missile ‘friendly fire’ of Israeli helicopters known to have fired indiscriminately at Israeli and Palestinian alike under the ‘Hannibal directive‘.
So extensive was this ‘friendly fire’ that hundreds of Palestinian bodies were originally misidentified by Israel as Israelis, proving that the fire came from Israeli sources. In fact, the Israeli military knew – and has admitted to Israeli media – that it killed an ‘immense’ number of its own people on the day of the raid. Patten either ignored, or was ignorant of, this admission.
With regard to the day of the raid, the UN panel said that of all Israel’s claims, three were positively disproven – and all the rest were unverified, with many based on the ‘inaccurate’ and ‘unreliable’ claims of a group of people who didn’t know what they were talking about. This was not hinted at by the UN panel, but stated flatly and unequivocally – with the two UN women concluding that they had been unable to verify any sexual violence:
And Pramila Patten went on to admit that:
- there was no forensic evidence of rape – or ‘very very little’, with no specification of any evidence that was found
- there was no evidence of ‘systematic’ sexual violence, despite a team of scientists taking part in the UN visit
- she had not tied any sexual violence anywhere to Hamas or any group
Despite this, Israel’s mouthpieces and propagandists have stridently insisted the opposite of the women’s findings, including the political padding and leaving out the inconvenient – but very clearly expressed – reality of what Patten and her colleague said they found, or more accurately did not find.
As with every other claim by Israel so far since its genocide in Gaza began, the claim to have been vindicated by the UN findings falls apart under scrutiny. In contrast, rape, torture and sexual violence toward Palestinian women by Israeli troops and security personnel is credible and widespread.
But even if Israel’s claims didn’t collapse under scrutiny, they would be no excuse for the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza – and Patten and her colleague were absolutely clear about that.
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Video: Israel removing anaesthetics from aid supplies to Gaza
More than a thousand children have had one or more limbs amputated without anaesthetic
Doctors in Gaza have accused Israel of removing anaesthetic from aid supplies entering the territory. According to the Grayzone‘s Max Blumenthal, speaking to Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom channel, Israeli officials are targeting anaesthetics during the final inspection before aid – already woefully inadequate quantities – goes through, forcing more than a thousand Palestinian children to undergo limb amputations without pain relief:
At least one surgeon was forced to perform an amputation on his own child, who died in terrible suffering.
This week, South Africa filed a detailed genocide case against Israel with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its actions in Gaza. As well as depriving children and other hideously wounded civilians of pain relief, Israel has killed more than 30,000 innocents, 70% of them women and children, and has blockaded food, water and energy and targeted homes, schools and hospitals, including UN-run facilities, for bombing and shelling, in what genocide experts say is a ‘textbook case’.
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Urinating on Prisoners: Why Humiliation is Functional in Israel’s War on Palestinians
When Zionist militias, using advanced Western arms, conquered historic Palestine in 1947-48, they expressed their victory through the deliberate humiliation of Palestinians.
Much of that humiliation targeted women, in particular, knowing how the dishonor of Palestinian females represents, according to Arab culture, a sense of dishonor to the whole community.
This strategy remains in use to this day.
When scores of Palestinian women were released following prisoner exchanges between the Palestinian Resistance and Israel, starting on November 24, there was very little room to hide the facts.
Unlike the 75-year-ago Palestinian community, this current generation no longer internalizes Israel’s intentional humiliation of women and men alike, as if an act of collective dishonor.
This has allowed many newly released female prisoners to speak openly, often on live TV, about the kind of humiliation that they were exposed to while in Israeli military detention.
The Israeli army, however, continues to act with the same old mindset, perceiving the humiliation of Palestinians as an expression of dominance, power and supremacy.
Over the years, Israel has perfected the politics of humiliation – a notion that is predicated on the psychological power of shaming whole collectives to emphasize the asymmetrical relationship between two groups of people: in this case, the occupier and the occupied.
This is precisely why, in the early days of the Israeli war on Gaza, Israel detained all Palestinian workers from the Strip who happened to be working inside Israel as cheap laborers at the time of the October 7 operation.
The dehumanization they experienced at the hands of Israeli soldiers demonstrated a growing trend among Israelis to degrade Palestinians for no reason whatsoever.
One of the worst documented episodes took place on October 12, when a group of Israeli soldiers and settlers assaulted three Palestinian activists in the West Bank. Israeli newspapers Haaretz and The Times of Israel described how the three were assaulted, stripped naked, bound, photographed, tortured and urinated upon.
Those images were still fresh in the minds of Palestinians when new images emerged from northern Gaza.
Photos and videos published in Israeli media showed men stripped down to their underwear, being placed in large numbers on the streets of Gaza, while surrounded by well-equipped and supposedly menacing Israeli soldiers.
The men were handcuffed, tied together, forced to hunch down and then, eventually, thrown into military trucks to be taken to an unknown location.
Some of the men were eventually released to tell horror stories, which often had bloody endings.
But why is Israel doing this?
Throughout its history – violent birth and equally violent existence – Israel has purposely humiliated Palestinians as an expression of its disproportionately greater military power over a hapless, confined and mostly refugee population.
This tactic was infused more during certain periods of history when Palestinians felt empowered as a way to break their collective spirit.
The First Intifada, 1987-93, was rife with this kind of humiliation. Children and men between the ages of 15 to 55 would be habitually dragged into schoolyards, stripped naked, forced to kneel down for endless hours, beaten, and insulted by Israeli soldiers using loudspeakers.
Those insults would cover everything that Palestinians hold dear – their religions, their God, their mothers, their holy places and more.
Then, boys and men would be forced to perform certain acts, for example spitting in each other’s faces, shouting certain profanities, slapping themselves or each other. Those who refused would be immediately overpowered, beaten and arrested.
These methods continue to be applied in Israeli prisons, especially during times of hunger strikes, but also during periods of interrogations. In the latter cases, men would be threatened with the rape of their wives or sisters; women would be threatened with sexual violence.
These episodes are often met with collective Palestinian defiance, which directly feeds into Palestinian popular resistance.
The image of the Palestinian fighter, dressed in military fatigue, brandishing an automatic rifle while proudly walking the streets of Nablus, Jenin, or Gaza, in itself does not serve an actual military purpose. It is, however, a direct response to the psychological impact of the kind of humiliation inflicted upon Palestinian society by the Israeli occupation army.
But what is the function of a Palestinian military parade? To answer this question, we must examine the sequence of the event.
When Israel arrests Palestinian activists, they attempt to create the perfect scenario of a humiliated and defeated community: the terror felt by the people when nightly raids begin, the beating of the family of the detained, the shouts of insults, and other well-choreographed horror scenes.
Hours later, Palestinian youth emerge on the streets of their neighborhoods, proudly parading with their guns amid the ululation of women and the excited looks of children. This is precisely how Palestinians respond to humiliation.
Palestinian armed Resistance has grown much stronger in recent years, with Gaza currently serving as a case in point.
As the Israeli military is failing to reoccupy Gaza and subdue its population, utilizing the politics of humiliation on a mass scale is simply impossible.
To the contrary, it is the Israelis who do feel humiliated, not only because of what has taken place on October 7, but everything else that has taken place since then.
Unable to operate freely in the heart of Gaza, Khan Yunis, Rafah or any other major population centers in the Strip, the Israeli army is forced to humiliate Palestinians in whatever little margins they can control, Beit Lahia, for example.
Frustrated by their military failure to deliver on their promises of subduing Gazans, ordinary Israelis have taken to social media to taunt Palestinians in their own way.
Israeli women, often along with their own children, would dress up in ways that would convey a racist representation of Arab women crying over the bodies of their dead children.
As bombs rain on Palestinians in Gaza, Israelis like Eve Cohen have taken to TikTok in Arab face to claim Palestinian mothers are faking their deaths. pic.twitter.com/DIYICk9Y3o
— Rafael Shimunov (@rafaelshimunov) October 22, 2023
This type of social media mockery seems to have appealed to the imagination of Israeli society, which still insists on its sense of superiority even at a time when they are still paying the price of their own violence and political arrogance.
This time around, however, Israel’s politics of humiliation is proving ineffective because the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis is on its way to being fundamentally altered.
One is only humiliated if he or she internalizes that humiliation as a sense of shame and disempowerment. But Palestinians, this time around, are experiencing no such feelings. On the contrary, their ongoing sumud (resilience) and unity have generated a sense of collective pride unequaled in history.
Feature photo | Israel forces strip and detain a group of men they claim are militants in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, December 7, 2023. Credit | Quds News
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out’. His other books include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
The post Urinating on Prisoners: Why Humiliation is Functional in Israel’s War on Palestinians appeared first on MintPress News.
Video: former US Israel adviser arrested after disgusting Islamophobic hate-speech tirades
Stuart Seldowitz’s foul and shameless verbal assaults on street food vendor finally have consequences. He now offers to apologise
Pro-Israel former US government adviser Stuart Seldowitz has been arrested after a shameless and disgusting series of tirades against a Muslim street food vendor.
Seldowitz was filmed – and knew he was being filmed – smiling as he asked the man whether he had raped his daughter, threatened to send details of his family to the Egyptian secret police so they could pull out his father’s fingernails and, appallingly, said that four thousand Palestinian children slaughtered in Gaza wasn’t ‘enough’.
And he went back repeatedly to do it, as videos of him in different outfits show:
Seldowitz was Deputy Director in the US State Department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs from 1999 to 2003. It’s not hard to imagine whose side he was on during his ‘service’ – and his lack of hesitation as he was filmed suggests he thought he was above consequences for his racism and actions.
However, while New York Police reportedly originally said they could take no action because he was exercising his freedom of speech, Seldowitz has now been arrested for aggravated racial harassment and four counts of stalking – and in an embarrassing climbdown that his actions suggest has everything to do with avoiding prosecution, has offered to apologise to the man he abused:
Seldowitz’s arrogance is all too typical of the attitude of supporters of Israeli violence and apartheid, who treat scrutiny as antisemitic and even as ‘holocaust denial’.
Israel has slaughtered more than 15,000 civilians, around half of them children, and has bombed schools, hospitals and the homes of doctors and journalists in its campaign to empty Gaza for its own purposes, committing widespread war crimes. Its pretext – that it is ‘defending itself’ after supposed atrocities by Hamas, is falling apart daily as its ‘evidence’ for Hamas’s presence in hospitals is rightly mocked and its admissions continue, unreported by the so-called ‘mainstream’ media in this country, that Israeli forces killed hundreds of their own people on 7 October.
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The Nakba 2.0: Issa Amro’s Insider Account of Israeli Torture in Hebron
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Coming back to his house on October 7, world-renowned activist Issa Amro was dragged away by 15 armed Israelis, blindfolded, gagged, and cuffed so tightly he now needs an operation on his hands. The settlers and soldiers kept him imprisoned for days, beating and torturing him, constantly simulating his execution.
Speaking with MintPress News, Amro told the story of what life is like for Palestinians living in the West Bank city of Hebron. “In my city where I live now, since October 7, there is a curfew,” he told Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod.
But this curfew is far more restrictive than others. Palestinian families – those who have not already fled the genocidal Israeli violence – are given only six hours a week to leave their homes. They are not even allowed out into their own yards. This means that school has stopped, work has ended, and life is on pause.
In those six hours, Palestinian families must buy all their food, pick up essentials such as medicine and conduct any social activities. But being outside is dangerous, as they have to pass though multiple checkpoints with armed guards and AI smart shooters pointing guns at them. Violence from vigilante settler groups is also a danger.
“It’s scary to walk alone between armed soldiers and armed settlers, all of them pointing their guns at you. Then, when you come back, it takes them five to ten minutes to search every person,” Amro said, revealing that the guards wanted to go so far as to cut open his potatoes and tomatoes to check for “weapons.”
“It’s a kind of jail” right now, Amro said, although he notes that being in jail is considerably safer than being a Palestinian in Hebron right now.
Issa Amro is an activist and the co-founder of the grassroots group Youth Against Settlements. He has led campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience against apartheid and Israeli occupation and has been recognized and given awards by international organizations, including the United Nations. He joins MintPress to chronicle recent Israeli attempts to force Palestinians from their homes and their ancestral land.
While leaving the house is extremely dangerous, staying inside is barely safer. Amro and others have experienced Israeli raids where troops tell Palestinians that they have 24 hours to leave or they will be murdered.
“History is repeating itself,” Amro told Adley and MacLeod today, “Now I understand why my people left in 1948,” referencing the Israeli genocide of three-quarters of a million Palestinians from their land in order to create the state of Israel.
It is no exaggeration to call the current Israeli actions genocidal. Indeed, senior Israeli politicians are directly comparing it to the events of 1948. Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, for example, described his country’s actions as the “Gaza Nakba 2023.” “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” he told local outlet Channel 12 on Saturday. “From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war – as the Israeli army seeks to do in Gaza – with masses between the tanks and the soldiers,” he added.
In this conversation, Amro provides a crucial first-hand perspective rarely heard in corporate media. Watch the full interview only at MintPress News.
Mnar Adley is an award-winning journalist and editor and is the founder and director of MintPress News. She is also president and director of the non-profit media organization Behind the Headlines. Adley also co-hosts the MintCast podcast and is a producer and host of the video series Behind The Headlines. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com or follow her on Twitter at @mnarmuh
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
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