Palestine, Afghanistan, Sudan
Today's three stories you should know
Palestine
Palestinian journalists jailed by Israel have reported being beaten, tortured, starved, electric-shocked and raped, according to testimony published by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The media rights group said it interviewed 59 journalists, all detained since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, and all but one reported being abused. Two journalists said they had been raped. One reporter, Amin Baraka, said he was threatened over his work for Al Jazeera. “An Israeli soldier told me, word for word in Arabic, ‘Al Jazeera correspondent Wael al-Dahdouh defied us and remained in the Gaza Strip, so we killed his family. We will kill your family, too,’” he told CPJ.
More from Al Jazeera here.
Afghanistan
The U.N. food agency is turning away three out of four acutely malnourished children in Afghanistan because it does not have the funding to help them, an official told AP. The country has long relied on foreign aid but, when the Taliban returned to power in 2021, Western nations cut off aid, plunging civilians into poverty and hunger. Now, the situation has been made worse by drought, two earthquakes and the return of more than five million refugees forced out of Pakistan and Iran. John Aylieff, Afghanistan Country Director for the World Food Program, said the agency had logged more than 500 child deaths in recent months. “How many more Afghan children will die here before the world wakes up and realizes that that’s enough?” he said. “Before the world says, ‘OK, we’ve crossed a threshold, we are not willing to stand by anymore, and we’re coming now to help.’ How many? What is the number? I really don’t know.”
More from AP here.
Sudan
A spree of mass killings in Sudan’s El-Fasher city following its capture by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia in October bore the hallmarks of genocide, an independent U.N.-backed investigation has concluded. The RSF, which has been at war with Sudan’s military-led government for almost three years, took control of the city after a brutal 18-month siege. It then killed and raped thousands of people, the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan said. According to the report, non-Arabs were targeted for slaughter and the siege had deliberately imposed conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of non-Arab communities, a key component of genocide.
More from Reuters here.