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Disappearance of 4 Afro-Ecuadorian children after detention by military has sparked mass indignation

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https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/12/27/disappearance-of-4-afro-ecuadorian-children-after-detention-by-military-has-sparked-mass-indignation

Rally outside prosecutors office in Guayaquil demanding the immediate return of the four disappeared children. Photo: CDH Guayaquil.

The case has revived an existing social trauma about the disappearance of children, especially poor and Black ones, at the hands of the State. There is a general feeling of pain and uncertainty among the population.

Four children in Guayaquil, Ecuador were disappeared after they were arrested by state forces on December 8. The news of their parents desperately searching for their underage children has dominated the news in Ecuador for the last several weeks even amid the festive season. On December 8, Ismael and Josué Arroyo (15 and 14 years old), Saúl Arboleda (15 years old), and Steven Medina (11 years old) were detained by a military contingent patrolling the area where the boys were playing football. The four young Afro-Ecuadorian boys have not been seen since then.

What is known about the disappearance of the children?

According to the relatives of the victims, the children went to play a football game in the neighborhood of Las Malvinas, south of Guayaquil. At some point after the game, soldiers came and arrested the four of them. A now widely circulated video,clearly shows how the military captured and beat the child detainees, and then took them away in a white van. While Ecuador also has a police force to carry out arrests and general internal public safety tasks, in the last Popular Consultation carried out in the country, people voted to grant the army special powers to carry out internal security controls. The military’s powers have vastly increased since President Daniel Noboa declared a state of emergency in the country in January 2024.

One of the children’s parents, Luis Arroyo, reported that shortly after their detention, he received a call from his son asking for help and to be rescued. That call was the last time he heard his son’s voice. A key witness, who reportedly lent his cell phone to the boy to call his father, reported that the child had been beaten by the military and was naked.

After several days without answers, it was reported that four charred corpses were found in Taura, near a military base. The parents have already been summoned to the city morgue to confirm if they are their children. However, the state of decomposition and calcination of the bodies is so advanced that it is not possible to know with the naked eye if the remains correspond to the four missing children. Currently, forensic analyses are being carried out to determine the correspondence between the missing children and the remains that were found. Several experts have stated that, if such correspondence is confirmed, the crime could be defined as an “extrajudicial execution”.

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Article continues at https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/12/27/disappearance-of-4-afro-ecuadorian-children-after-detention-by-military-has-sparked-mass-indignation

Continue ReadingDisappearance of 4 Afro-Ecuadorian children after detention by military has sparked mass indignation

Israeli Strikes on Gaza Kill Over 20—Including Children—on First Day of New Year

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Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Palestinian children inspect the damage at the site of an Israeli strike on the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza on January 1, 2025.
 (Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images)

Israel’s military bombed two refugee camps in the besieged enclave, pushing the official death toll since October 7, 2023 to 45,553.

Israel’s U.S.-backed assault on the Gaza Strip continued unabated on the first day of 2025, with airstrikes and drone attacks across the besieged enclave killing more than 20 people on Wednesday, including women and children.

One Israeli strike on the Jabilia refugee camp in northern Gaza killed at least 15 people, including four children and one woman, according to Al Jazeera. Others are still missing under the ruins of the house targeted by Israeli forces, which have systematically destroyed the Palestinian territory’s civilian infrastructure during the nearly 15-month assault.

The Associated Press reported that “another strike overnight in the built-up Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza killed a woman and a child, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, which received the bodies.”

“A third strike early Wednesday in the southern city of Khan Younis killed three people, according to the nearby Nasser Hospital and the European Hospital, which received the bodies,” AP added.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health said Wednesday that the Israeli military’s latest attacks pushed the official death toll in the enclave since October 7, 2023 to 45,553—a count that experts believe dramatically understates the actual toll.

https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1874346542192353408?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1874346542192353408%7Ctwgr%5Eae097d6d6339706dead403a150043f9f769b5124%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fisraeli-airstrikes-new-year

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Israel’s incessant attacks and obstruction of humanitarian assistance have turned Gaza into what one aid group recently called a “death trap,” with no safe place for civilians who are at growing risk of disease and starvation—emergency conditions exacerbated by winter weather.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said Tuesday that six babies have frozen to death in Gaza in recent days.

“More babies will likely die due to the cold, lack of shelter, and basic winter supplies,” the organization warned. “Blankets, mattresses, and warm clothes are sitting outside Gaza waiting for approval to get in. The siege must be lifted.”

Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, said Tuesday that “horrors continue” in Gaza “under the world’s watch,” pointing to Israel’s killing of aid workers, attacks on U.N. shelters, and torture of detainees.

“In northern Gaza, since the intensification of the military operation nearly three months ago, there has been a significant increase in attacks on our staff, buildings, and operations,” said Lazzarini. “I reiterate my call for independent investigations into the systematic disregard for the protection of humanitarian workers, premises, and operations. This cannot become the new standard and impunity cannot become the new norm.”

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Experiencing issues with this image not appearing. I suspect because it's so critical of Zionist Keir Starmer's support of and complicity in Israel's genocides.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE

Memo to the UK Labour Party

Continue ReadingIsraeli Strikes on Gaza Kill Over 20—Including Children—on First Day of New Year

UNICEF Says Deaths of More Gaza Children ‘Tragically Foreseeable’ as Israeli Assault Continues

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Original article by Eloise Goldsmith republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

A Palestinian girl cries as Palestinians who escaped from the attacks of the Israeli army and took shelter in the Khan Yunis, located in the south of the Gaza Strip and who are struggling with hunger wait in line to receive meals distributed by charities in Khan Yunis, Gaza on December 27, 2024. (Photo: Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“These preventable deaths lay bare the desperate and deteriorating conditions facing families and children across Gaza,” said the humanitarian aid organization.

UNICEF, the United Nations agency tasked with providing humanitarian aid for children, released a statement Thursday decrying the recent deaths of Gazan children, particularly those who have perished because of cold and lack of adequate shelter.

“Cold injuries, such as frostbite and hypothermia, pose grave risks to young children in tents and other makeshift shelters that are ill-equipped for freezing weather. For newborns, infants, and medically vulnerable children, the danger is even more acute,” said UNICEF regional director for the Middle East and North Africa Edouard Beigbeder.

“With temperatures expected to drop further in the coming days, it is tragically foreseeable that more children’s lives will be lost to the inhumane conditions they are enduring, which offer no protection from the cold,” he added.

https://twitter.com/UNICEF/status/1872384846846431492?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1872384846846431492%7Ctwgr%5E6f1a792901315a3f1c8e39691b87095191875d39%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fgza-children-deaths-unicef

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The Quds News Network reported Thursday, citing the head of pediatrics and obstetrics at Nasser Hospital in Gaza, that four Gazan newborns have died in the past few days because of low temperatures and lack of shelter.

“These preventable deaths lay bare the desperate and deteriorating conditions facing families and children across Gaza,” said Beigbeder.

One of those babies was Sila Mahmoud Al-Faseeh, a 3-week-old girl, who died Sunday “from the extreme cold” in a tent where her forcibly displaced family is sheltering on a beach in al-Mawasi, an Israeli-designated “safe zone” for displaced Palestinians that has repeatedly come under attack.

Sila’s father, Mahmoud al-Faseeh, told The Associated Press that the family attempted to keep the baby warm as the temperatures fell to 48°F (9°C)—below the fatal threshold for hypothermia—in their unsealed tent on cold ground.

“It was very cold overnight and as adults we couldn’t even take it,” al-Faseeh said. “We couldn’t stay warm.”

Over 14,500 children have reportedly been killed since October 7, 2023 as of mid-December, according to UNICEF, though the Gaza Government Media Office cites a higher figure.

The U.S. government successfully sought the retraction of a report from an organization monitoring food crises that warned of looming famine in north Gaza under what the report called Israel’s “near-total blockade,” according to Thursday reporting from The Associated Press. The move drew concern from aid groups, per AP.

In November, more than two dozen international relief groups operating in Gaza warned that humanitarian assistance entering the enclave had “fallen to an all-time low” due to Israel’s continued blockade.

The situation has also exacted a punishing psychological toll on the children of Gaza. A report from the Community Training Centre for Crisis Management released in November found that, of the more than 500 Palestinian children it surveyed in Gaza last summer, 96% of them fear imminent death, 92% are not accepting of reality, 79% suffer from nightmares, and 49% wish to die because of the war, and many more “show signs of withdrawal and severe anxiety, alongside a pervasive sense of hopelessness.”

Original article by Eloise Goldsmith republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
Experiencing issues with this image not appearing. I suspect because it's so critical of Zionist Keir Starmer's support of and complicity in Israel's genocides.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Continue ReadingUNICEF Says Deaths of More Gaza Children ‘Tragically Foreseeable’ as Israeli Assault Continues

‘We Have Run Out of Body Bags to Bury the Dead’ in Gaza

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Original article by Jon Queally republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Bodies of Palestinian, who lost their lives in Israeli attacks on the family home of journalist Mohammed al-Qirrawi in the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, are taken from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital for burial in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on December 15, 2024.
 (Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)

A relentless series of assaults in central and northern Gaza by Israeli forces, according to reports on the ground, have killed numerous civilians—including children, rescue workers, and journalist—in recent days with no end in sight.

Rescue workers, children, and journalists are among the civilians killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza on Sunday, as the death toll continues to mount in a military campaign Amnesty International earlier this month said has all the markings of an active and ongoing genocide.

“Due to the rising Israeli bombings and killings in northern Gaza, we have run out of body bags to bury the dead,” said Palestinian journalist Hossam Sabath, reporting from northern Gaza on Sunday. “Now we resort to using any piece of clothing or a blanket for their burial.”

On the ground in the town of Beit Hanoun, where Israeli troops reportedly killed at least 20 people—including civilians—in a series of raids in the area on Sunday, Sabath said the the “scenes of charred bodies are too distressing for us to broadcast. However, they are part of the documented evidence of genocide involving the burning of people alive. We are ready to hand them over to any human rights organization.”

According to the Gulf Times:

Israeli troops killed at least 22 Palestinians, most of them in the northern Gaza Strip, on Sunday in airstrikes and other attacks on targets that included a school sheltering displaced Gazans, medics and residents said.

They said at least 11 of the dead were killed in three separate Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City houses, nine were killed in the towns of Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun and Jabalia camp and two were killed by drone fire in Rafah.

Residents said clusters of houses were bombed and some set ablaze in the three towns. The Israeli army has been operating in the towns for over two months.

In Beit Hanoun, Israeli forces besieged families sheltering in Khalil Aweida school before storming it and ordering them to head towards Gaza City, the medics and residents said.

Al Jazeera‘s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, quoted witnesses who reported “severe injuries” among those who survived the attacks further north.

“They have nowhere to go because the Israeli military forces are encircling the area with tanks and armored vehicles, and hammering the school with heavy artillery,” Mahmoud reported.

A family of four were among those killed, including two children, after the classroom where they were sheltering took a “direct hit” from Israeli artillery fire that arrived without prior warning, the outlet reported.

“Many of the injured are in the courtyard of the school and inside the other classrooms,” according to Mahmoud. “They can’t get any treatment because none of the hospitals in Beit Hanoon are operational.”

Separately, Al-Jazeera reports Sunday that an Israeli bombing killed three members of the Palestinian civil defense search-and-rescue team in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp. The new agency also reported that one of its own staff, cameraman Ahmed al-Louh, was killed in the same attack.

https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1868319320817951144?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1868319320817951144%7Ctwgr%5E054aeb6423f5f95d68857c54da697214ea958dfa%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fbody-bags-gaza

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Ahram Online reports:

In its first response to the incident, Gaza’s government media office condemned the killing of al-Louh and called on the international community to act against the systematic crimes against Palestinian journalists. “The number of martyred journalists has now risen to 195 with the martyrdom of colleague Ahmed al-Louh,” the office stated.

Al Jazeera reiterated its condemnation of the attack, describing al-Louh’s death as part of a broader assault on press freedom in Gaza. “Ahmed al-Louh was dedicated to documenting the realities of the ongoing conflict under the most dangerous conditions,” the network said.

“The unprecedented killing of journalists by the Israeli military continues with impunity,” said fellow reporter Sharif Kouddous.

On Dec. 5, Amnesty International released a 296-page report—featuring interviews with survivors and witnesses of Israel’s large-scale campaign of bombing, displacement, arbitrary detention, and destruction of Gaza’s agricultural land and civilian infrastructure—that conclude what Israel has been doing in Gaza amounts to genocide.

“Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary-general, upon release of the document. “Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now.”

As the weekend’s latest catalog of death and injuries suggests, it has not stopped.

Original article by Jon Queally republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue Reading‘We Have Run Out of Body Bags to Bury the Dead’ in Gaza

Study Finds 96% of Gaza Children Fear Imminent Death—And Half Want to Die

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Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A Palestinian girl is in shock after surviving an Israeli bombing of an UNRWA school in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza, Palestine on July 14, 2024.  (Photo: Salama Nabeel Eaid Younes/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“The world’s failure to protect Gaza’s children is a moral failing on a monumental scale,” said one advocate.

Amid a relentless Israeli onslaught that has wrought monumental physical and psychological destruction in Gaza, a report published this week revealed that nearly all children in the embattled Palestinian enclave believe their death is imminent—and nearly half of them want to die.

The Gaza-based Community Training Center for Crisis Management, supported by War Child Alliance, surveyed more than 500 Palestinian children in Gaza last June and found that 96% of them fear imminent death, 92% are not accepting of reality, 79% suffer from nightmares, 77% avoid discussing traumatic events, 73% display signs of aggression, 49% wish to die because of the war, and many more “show signs of withdrawal and severe anxiety, alongside a pervasive sense of hopelessness.”

“This report lays bare that Gaza is one of the most horrifying places in the world to be a child,” War Child U.K. CEO Helen Pattinson said in a statement. “Alongside the leveling of hospitals, schools, and homes, a trail of psychological destruction has caused wounds unseen but no less destructive on children who hold no responsibility for this war.”

In a first of its kind report, our Gaza based partner Community Training Centre for Crisis Management asked injured, separated and disabled children and their caregivers about the toll of the ongoing war on their lives. Their answers are devastating but sadly not a surprise.1/5

— War Child UK (@warchilduk.bsky.social) 2024-12-12T11:31:17.537Z

Israel’s 434-day assault on Gaza—which is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case—has left tens of thousands of children dead, maimed, missing, or orphaned and hundreds of thousands more forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened. Doctors and others including volunteers from the United States have documented many cases in which they’ve concluded Israeli snipers and other troops have deliberately shot children in the head and chest.

“The harm caused to Gaza’s children goes beyond statistics. Behind every number is a name, a life, and a future that is being extinguished before it can even begin,” Iain Overton, executive director of the U.K.-based group Action on Armed Violence, said in response to the new report.

“The world’s failure to protect Gaza’s children is a moral failing on a monumental scale,” he added. “We must act decisively and compassionately to ensure that these children’s voices are heard and their futures protected.”

In October, the U.K.-based charity Oxfam International said that Israel’s yearlong assault on Gaza has been the deadliest year of conflict for women and children anywhere in the world over the past two decades. A year ago, the United Nations Children’s Fund called Gaza “the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.” Earlier this year, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres for the first time added Israel to his so-called “List of Shame” of countries that kill and injure children during wars and other armed conflicts.

“The international community must act now before the child mental health catastrophe we are witnessing embeds itself into multi-generational trauma, the consequences of which the region will be dealing with for decades to come,” Pattinson stressed. “A cease-fire must be the immediate first step to allow War Child and other agencies to effectively respond to the intense psychological damage children are experiencing.”

https://twitter.com/Hamza_a96/status/1867609923687002278?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1867609923687002278%7Ctwgr%5Ea36bb4fb878537598f50ff348c576b299898fba0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fgaza-children-trauma

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Addressing the complicity of allies like the United States, Germany, and Britain, who provide weapons and diplomatic cover for Israel, progressive U.K. parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn wrote on social media in response to the new report, “Every single supplier of arms to Israel has blood on its hands—and the world will never forgive them.”

Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingStudy Finds 96% of Gaza Children Fear Imminent Death—And Half Want to Die