'Unseen' News and Views
The Al Basma fertility clinic in Gaza City after an Israeli missile strike. December 2023. Credit: Mohammad Ajjour.
New paper on exploitation of Palestinian women working in illegal Israeli settlements
Children and their families are returning to their homes or the remains of their homes to check the status of their homes. (Photo: Alef Multimedia Company/Oxfam)
12 March 2025 – Oxfam has released a briefing paper Palestinian Women Working in Illegal Israeli Settlements: Dependencies, Exploitation, and Opportunity Costs, shedding light on the harrowing daily realities faced by many vulnerable Palestinian women employed in exploitative and harsh conditions in illegal Israeli settlements, where their rights are being systematically violated.
GENEVA, 13 March 2025 – Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians as part of a broader effort to undermine their right to self-determination and carried out genocidal acts through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities, according to a new report issued today by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.
The European Commission’s proposal for a new “Returns Regulation” for undocumented migrants, announced March 11, is both cruel and unrealistic.
It would mean longer detention, harsher treatment, and fewer rights for people, without any meaningful promise of more repatriations.
(UN News)* — Online attacks against women are getting worse, according to the UN, causing lasting damage that can spill over into real world violence. Leading activists from Spain and Latin America met at UN Headquarters on Wednesday [] to rally women and share strategies on fighting back.
“We were already overstretched, under resourced and literally under attack, with last year being the deadliest year on record to be a humanitarian worker. But it is far tougher for the 300 million plus people who we serve,” he said.
(UN News)* — The UN’s top relief official warned on Wednesday [that the global humanitarian system has reached breaking point, with funding cuts forcing life-or-death decisions over which aid programmes to sustain and which to shut down.
– NATO geopolitical strategy has now joined the ‘coalition’ of Western geoeconomic forces accelerating planetary heating, now led again by re-elected US President Donald Trump.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Industrial Revolution
Economic development is typically associated with the spread of industrialisation over the last two centuries.
The Industrial Revolution involved greater energy use to increase productive capacities significantly.
Burning biomass and fossil fuels greatly expanded mechanical energy generation. The age of industry in the last two centuries has thus involved more hydrocarbon combustion to increase output.
Uneven development has also transformed population geography.
The Israeli army is building an AI language model using millions of intercepted conversations between Palestinians, which could accelerate the process of incrimination and arrest, a joint investigation reveals.
An Israeli soldier photographs a Palestinian man using an AI facial recognition tool during a raid in Wadi Qutyna, Al-Mughayer, occupied West Bank, 17 Jan 2025. (Avishay Mohar/Activestills)
6 Mar 2025 – The Israeli army is developing a new, ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence tool and training it on millions of Arabic conversations obtained through the surveillance of Palestinians in the occupied territories, an investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian can reveal.
GAZA STRIP, Occupied Palestinian Territory, 10 March 2025 – Two weeks into her ninth month of pregnancy, Roozan Abu Jbarah hoped she would manage to give birth safely.
“I’ve been having pain and my water broke,” she told UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency.
“What I’m most concerned about is the baby’s health, because the basic things haven’t been available.”
‘1.8 million people – over half of them children – urgently need water, sanitation and hygiene assistance.’
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 