As a tenuous ceasefire was taking hold in mid-October, The Oaklandside sat down with Lujain Al-Saleh, an Oakland resident with family in Gaza, to find out what it's been like as a Palestinian American to witness so intimately the long two years of war in Gaza, which the United Nations determined, in September, was a genocide. After we spoke, Israel violated the ceasefire with airstrikes across Gaza that killed more than 100 people, including at least 46 children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
A coalition of over 100 U.S. groups is demanding that Israeli officials release 16-year-old Palestinian American Mohammed Zaher Ibrahim from imprisonment, warning that authorities are starving him and denying him medical care as they've barred the child from seeing his family for over six months. The groups called on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to act to end Mohammed's "unjust" imprisonment in Israel's Ofer prison, a facility notorious for its abuses against Palestinians, including children.