Tag Archives: refugee camp

‘Catastrophic’: Israeli Forces Unleash Humanitarian Disaster in Jenin

Israeli bulldozers, said one eyewitness in the occupied West Bank refugee camp, “turned our streets into crumbs” as thousands flee amid destruction of critical infrastructure.

By Jon Queally. Published 7-4-2023 by Common Dreams

Innocent people who were taken out of the camp where they were exiled, regardless of children, the old, the sick or women. Photo: Vildan Ergün/Twitter

Thousands of people who live in Jenin in the occupied West Bank are reportedly fleeing the poverty-stricken refugee camp as Israeli military forces Tuesday continued to batter the city’s water, power, and healthcare infrastructure.

Muhammad Abu Talal, a resident of the camp, told Middle East Eye on Tuesday—a day after a large-scale assault by the IDF left at least 10 Palestinians dead and scores more wounded—that the refugee camp’s “streets are all dug up and uprooted” by bulldozers used by the Israeli forces.

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‘Very, Very Scary’: Intensifying Cyclone Mocha Takes Aim at World’s Largest Refugee Camp

“This is a near worst-case scenario for one of the most storm surge flood vulnerable regions in the world,” one scientist warned. “I hate to say it but we’re looking at a potential mass casualty event.”

By Kenny Stancil Published 5-12-2023 by Common Dreams

View of the sprawling Kutupalong refugee camp near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Photo: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development/flickr/CC

Officials in Bangladesh and Myanmar are preparing Friday to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people as a tropical storm turbocharged by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis strengthens in the Bay of Bengal.

Cyclone Mocha is forecast to intensify further before making landfall on Sunday between western Myanmar and the Bangladeshi city of Cox’s Bazar, home to the world’s largest refugee camp. Roughly 1 million Rohingya people forced to flee Myanmar amid the country’s ongoing genocide against them live in the highly exposed district.

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Human Rights Watch Urges Biden to End Trump’s ‘Devastating’ Remain In Mexico Policy

The policy under Trump, and made only worse under the pandemic, “has needlessly and foreseeably exposed children and adults to a high risk of violence and other harm.”

By Julia Conley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 1-6-2021

Screenshot: ABC News

Human Rights Watch in a new report Wednesday urged President-elect Joe Biden to “quickly and decisively” end a two-year-old policy under which tens of thousands of asylum seekers have been forced to stay in squalid and often dangerous makeshift shelters in Mexico.

The report, titled “‘Like I’m Drowning’: Children and Families Sent to Harm by the U.S. ‘Remain in Mexico’ Program,” includes interviews with several children and adults who have faced abduction, extortion, rape, and other violence—often at the hands of immigration officers or Mexican police—under the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), commonly called “Remain in Mexico.” Continue reading

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Israel Launches Week-Long Bombing Campaign in Gaza Amid Ongoing War Crimes Investigation

Israeli leaders have characterized the latest bombardment as retaliatory, citing “incendiary balloons” and “riots” as justification.

By Kathryn Shihadah   Published 8-18-2020 by MintPress News

Israeli bombing of Gaza on 8-12-2020. Photo: Sucheta/Twitter

Last Monday night Israeli fighter jets executed airstrikes on the besieged Gaza Strip for the ninth night in a row in an act that may be another on Israel’s long list of possible war crimes.

Israeli leaders characterized the actions as retaliatory, naming Gazan “incendiary balloons” and “riots” as justification. Continue reading

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Syria’s Rukban Now Little More Than a US-Controlled Concentration Camp – and the Pentagon Won’t Let Refugees Leave

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a concentration camp is defined as “a place where large numbers of people are kept as prisoners in extremely bad conditions, especially for political reasons.” It is undeniable that the Rukban camp fits this definition to the letter.

By Whitney Webb. Published 3- 28-2019 by MintPress News

The residents of al-Rukban camp suffer from severe humanitarian conditions especially during the winter. There are no heating elements, which forces the children of the camp to build mud houses rather than tents to alleviate the cold weather and storms that hit the area. Photo: Syria Live Map

The United States military has rejected offers to resolve the growing humanitarian crisis in the Rukban refugee camp in Syria, which sits inside a 55 km zone occupied by the U.S. along the Syria-Jordan border. The U.S. has also refused to let any of the estimated 40,000 refugees — the majority of which are women and children — leave the camp voluntarily, even though children are dying in droves from lack of food, adequate shelter and medical care. The U.S. has also not provided humanitarian aid to the camp even though a U.S. military base is located just 20 km (12.4 miles) away.

The growing desperation inside the Rukban camp has received sparse media coverage, likely because of the U.S.’ control over the area in which the camp is located. The U.S. has been accused of refusing to let civilians leave the area — even though nearly all have expressed a desire to either return to Syrian government-held territory or seek refuge in neighboring countries such as Turkey — because the camp’s presence helps to justify the U.S.’ illegal occupation of the area. Continue reading

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Canada Builds Border Camp for Asylum Seekers Fleeing US

Hundreds of Haitians, fearful of deportation under President Donald Trump, have crossed the border to seek refugee status in Quebec

By Jessica Corbett, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 8-9-2017

Thousands of asylum seekers have fled the U.S. for Quebec, Canada, in recent months because of U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant statements and policies. (Photo: Morgan/Flickr/cc)

Canada’s military has troops assembling heated tents that will be capable of temporarily housing up to 500 asylum seekers who continue crossing into the country where it borders New York State.

“Around 250 asylum seekers are arriving each day in Montreal, the largest city in Canada’s mainly French-speaking province of Quebec,” Reuters reported on Wednesday. A spokesperson for the Canada Border Services Agency told CBC-Radio Canada there are currently 700 people waiting to be processed, and although the wait time is two or three days, the asylum seekers do not have access to beds. Continue reading

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Trump’s Syrian “safe area” is just another wall

Without a true and robust commitment to save lives, Trump’s idea for a safe area in Syria looks more like a death trap.

By Bill Frelick. Published 3-21-2017 by openDemocracy

Photo: YouTube

Just as the Berlin Wall was the iconic symbol of the Cold War era, so the emblematic symbol of President Donald Trump’s administration, if he has his way, could well be the Mexican wall. It represents a simplistic, concrete solution to a complex human problem, but also, like the Berlin Wall, a fitting symbol for the larger Trump doctrine.

Trump’s wall concept goes beyond the US-Mexico border. He speaks favorably of Israel’s separation wall and Hungary’s border fence.

Although he has yet to comment on the wall Turkey is constructing on its border with Syria, Trump has said, “I think Europe has made a tremendous mistake by allowing in these millions of people. Continue reading

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CIA-Armed Syrian Rebel Group Just Beheaded a 10-Year-Old Boy on Video

By Claire Bernish. Published 7-19-2016 by The Anti-Media

Photo: Screenshot via Twitter

Photo: Screenshot via Twitter

Handarat, Syria — One of several U.S.-backed Syrian rebel groups has been caught on video taunting—and then beheading—a boy as young as 10 years old.

They claim the youth was a captured Palestinian fighting on behalf of pro-government forces—but his extremely young age, and the fact the group has received training and aid in financing and weapons from the United States government, could incite profoundly negative consequences in a situation already fraught with controversy. Continue reading

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The War in Afghanistan Has Turned a Generation of Children Into Heroin Addicts

By Michaela Whitton. Published 5-9-2016 by The Anti-Media

By davric (collection personnelle) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

By davric (collection personnelle) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

One of the many catastrophic legacies left behind by the longest war in U.S. history is that Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s opium. As with most parts of the world, the most vulnerable pay the heaviest price of war, and the country has faced a harrowing escalation in the number of child heroin addicts.

“What’s happened in Afghanistan over the last 13 years has been the flourishing of a narco-state that is really without any parallel in history,” Kabul-based journalist Matthieu Aikins told Democracy Now back in 2014. Continue reading

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Why fear makes for bad policy

By ew and MNgranny for Occupy World Writes. Published 11-20-2015

If you follow us regularly, you’ve probably noticed that we try to stay as apolitical as possible. We feel that our job is to provide news and viewpoints that you may not see covered in the traditional corporate media while not providing unnecessary political spin on current events.

However, every once in a while, an event or series of events happen that force us to ditch our “above the fray” stance and dive into the mud ourselves, either as individuals or collectively as Occupy World Writes. We have been known to hit our boiling point, either individually as authors of pieces or collectively as the Occupy World Writes staff. The events in this country after the Paris attacks are the latest to affect us in this manner.

Photo via YouTube

Photo via YouTube

It started last Sunday, with Governors Rick Snyder (R-MI) and Robert Bentley (R-AL) proclaiming that they would not allow Syrian refugees to be relocated to their respective states. As it sits now, a total of 31 states have stated that they refuse to allow Syrian refugees to relocate to their states. 30 of these states have Republican governors; the one exception (New Hampshire) has a governor with an eye on a Senate seat next year. Of course, they legally don’t have a leg to stand on, as the federal government make the laws dealing with refugees and immigration, and not the individual states.

As the week went on, the Republican candidates for president began to jockey for the spotlight. For example, back in February in an interview with Fox News, Ted Cruz said that Syrian refugees should be permitted into the United States and argued that this could be done without jeopardizing national security. This week, he said that we should allow only Syrian refugees who are Christian into the country (we wonder how we could tell who was Christian). Chris Christie went from saying that women and children should be let in to becoming one of the governors to say no to relocation. The rest of the candidates followed suit. Then, the real crazies , presidential candidates and state legislators alike, started stepping up to the plate.

On Tuesday, Tennessee House GOP Caucus Chairman Glen Casada said:

“We need to activate the Tennessee National Guard and stop them from coming in to the state by whatever means we can. I’m not worried about what a bureaucrat in D.C. or an unelected judge thinks. … We need to gather (Syrian refugees) up and politely take them back to the ICE center and say, ‘They’re not coming to Tennessee, they’re yours.’ “

Not to be outdone, Rhode Island State Senator Elaine Morgan sent an email to her fellow senators on Tuesday saying:

“I do not want our governor bringing in any Syrian refugees. I think our country is under attack. I think this is a major plan by these countries to spread out their people to attack all non Muslim persons. The Muslim religion and philosophy is to murder, rape, and decapitate anyone who is a non Muslim. 

“If we need to take these people in we should set up [a] refugee camp to keep them segregated from our populous. I think the protection of our US citizens and the United States of America should be the most important issue here.”

On Wednesday, she claimed that she inadvertently sent it before editing, saying she meant to limit her characterization to “the fanatical Muslim religion and philosophy.” Then, she said:

“We have veterans in the streets starving, alcoholics, drug addicts. I can see taking [Syrian refugees] in, but keeping them all centralized – it sounds a little barbaric, but we need to centralize them and keep them in one central area.”

So- we have the chairman of the most powerful caucus in his state’s legislature saying that we should round up all the Syrian refugees who are legally here, and a state senator saying that we should put them all in camps. Then, we have the two front runners for the Republican presidential nomination; Dr. Ben Carson and Donald Trump.

Carson, while speaking to reporters after an Alabama campaign stop, said:

“For instance, you know, if there is a rabid dog running around your neighborhood, you’re probably not going to assume something good about that dog, and you’re probably gonna put your children out of the way. Doesn’t mean that you hate all dogs by any stretch of the imagination.”

“By the same token, we have to have in place screening mechanisms that allow us to determine who the mad dogs are, quite frankly. Who are the people who wanna come in here and hurt us and wanna destroy us? Until we know how to do that, just like it would be foolish to put your child out in the neighborhood knowing that that was going on, it’s foolish for us to accept people if we cannot have the appropriate type of screening.”

OK- the person holding second place in the polls for the GOP nomination just compared Muslims to dogs, the most offensive remark one could make to a Muslim. What does the leader, Donald Trump, have to say?

Earlier this week, Trump said in an interview with Sean Hannity that the government should shut down some Muslim mosques. Then today, an interview was published on Yahoo which implied that Trump was contemplating creating a national database to track Muslims in this country, as well as possibly requiring special IDs for them. While the ID part seems to be more the interviewer’s own take than anything that Trump actually said, the database part was confirmed by Trump himself this evening in Newton, Iowa.

“I would certainly implement that. Absolutely, There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases, We should have a lot of systems.”

But would Muslims be legally required to sign onto the database? Trump again:

“They have to be — they have to be.”

We have said before, and we repeat now, that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. We ask you all to read the 14 points of fascism, and then take an honest look at the current situation. If you aren’t frightened by the similarities, you aren’t paying attention.

The goal is not to put more boots on the ground. It is not to see where the next profit center of war should be contested. It is about saving lives. Human lives. When we can refer to refugees from a country that has been at war for over 5 years to that of dogs, and talk of rounding them up like farm livestock, we have truly forgotten our values, morals and principles as a nation and no longer deserve to be called “civilized.”

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