I've decided to ignore the twitter outrage today and stick to my personal anthem for 2017 instead. youtu.be/kNKu1uNBVkU

RT @IsraHazel: All Syrians are saying that liberating Sednaya's prison is more significant than destroying Berlin's wall. Years of fear, to…

Thirteen and a half years ago in March 2011, a group of teenagers in Dara'a, Syria spray painted: "Your turn has come, doctor," in reference to Bashar al-Assad. They were arrested and tortured, which led to protests in what would become the Syrian uprising. Today is for them.

My advice to journos covering Syria: this is a complex story to tell with a criminal regime, bad actors, foreign influence & uncertainty of what's to come. Tell complex stories, but center your stories in the agency of Syrians. It's their story, their country, their freedom.

#Syria's longest prisoner, Raghid Tatari, freed tonight after 43 years in prison. His "crime" was the winning against Hafez's son Bassel in a equestrian competition.

It is so crazy that after almost 14 years he goes out with barely a whimper. Hope for Syria they can turn a page here and build a country for all Syrians. ❤️

I need people to remember that a black man won the popular vote twice and a woman won the popular vote once but lost bc (among other things) of electoral college/bad strategy. Do not let people say this country won’t vote for a woman. The majority of voters literally did lol.

I just literally want one precedented time. just one moment of precedented-ness

At this point I think I deserve a refund for my three years of law school since between recent SCOTUS decisions and today, basically everything I learned is no longer valid.

This ruling (which is wrong six ways from Sunday) can (and will) be immediately appealed to the Eleventh Circuit. To me, the only question is whether the Special Counsel also asks for the case to be reassigned on remand…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Algeria's proposed draft UN Security Council resolution - which demands Gaza ceasefire and release of all hostages while asking Israel to immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah - is not balanced, a US State Department spokesperson said on Thursday

Killing 35,000 people - *even if only 60% are non-combatants* - is not and will never be just a mistake or a tragedy. It demands immediate investigation by all competent bodies, with the support of all states.

“If the Israeli assault stopped today, and we decided to hold a funeral every single day for each Palestinian killed in the last eight months, it would take us 100 years to honour them all.” Majed Bamya, Palestine’s UN envoy, addresses the UN Security Council ⤵️

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society: “Despite the occupation's threats to shell; the decision has been made. We did and will not leave. Our medics will carry on their humanitarian duties. We won’t leave people face death alone.”

Issam was the sweetest colleague. He let me take a kitten I was nursing on assignment once, and made it a bed in his helmet. But he always reminded me, whenever I got careless: “Our goal is to cover the news, not become it”. I am so sorry this happened to you my dear Issam. RIP.

Irish PM Varadkar on Gaza: "To me, it amounts to collective punishment. Cutting off power, cutting off fuel supplies and water supplies, that's not the way a respectable democratic state should conduct itself." Puts him at odds with most Western leaders.rte.ie/news/primetime/2023/1…

Meanwhile....

The awful killing of Issam Abdallah today takes it to more than 10 journalists who have been killed in just seven days.

Egypt has taken “unprecedented measures” to reinforce its border with Gaza and prevent any breaches, a senior Egyptian security official says - AP

"I’m personally a Holocaust survivor as an infant, I barely survived. My grandparents were killed in Aushwitz and most of my extended family were killed. I became a Zionist; this dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland and the barbed wire of Aushwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful army…and then I found out that it wasn’t exactly like that, that in order to make this Jewish dream a reality we had to visit a nightmare on the local population. There’s no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population. Jewish Israeli historians have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of Palestinians was persistent, pervasive, cruel, murderous and with deliberate intent - that’s what’s called the 'Nakba' in Arabic; the 'disaster' or the 'catastrophe'. There’s a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust, but in Israel you’re not allowed to mention the Nakba, even though it’s at the very basis of the foundation of Israel. I visited the Occupied Territories (West Bank) during the first intifada. I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw; the brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it, the cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations...and this went on, and now it’s much worse than it was then. It’s the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st century. I could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, who was born in Jerusalem, can’t even visit! So then you have these miserable people packed into this, horrible…people call it an 'outdoor prison', which is what it is. You don’t have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights, that’s a complete falsity. You think the worse thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians. And 'anybody who criticises Israel is an anti-Semite' is simply an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews who are willing to stand up for what is true."

The horrific attacks in Israel cannot justify the limitless destruction of Gaza. The evacuation orders, coupled with the complete siege, are not compatible with IHL. We are committed to providing aid to Gaza and we reiterate our readiness to visit the hostages there. Read more👇 icrc.org/en/document/israel-…