Issa Amro, renowned Palestinian human rights defender and founder of Youth Against Settlements, spoke to us from Hebron, in the southern West Bank, where violence against Palestinian rural communities continues to escalate. This time, the crime was the murder of Awdah Hathaleen, a grassroots activist, close friend of Issa, and key figure in the nonviolent resistance against the Israeli occupation. “He spent his life defending the rights of his people. And now he has been murdered with total impunity. The settler who killed him was released and his family was punished. That's how apartheid works.”
Amro describes an unbearable reality: daily pogroms, settler attacks, arbitrary arrests, hunger, forced displacement. But the most serious thing, he says, is international indifference: “These are not isolated acts. It is a system. Israel violates international law every day and no one stops it. The genocide in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, everything happens in full view of the world.”
