Habib Siddiqui

The Christian population in the Occupied territories of Palestine has decreased significantly. The most optimistic estimates place the overall number of Palestinian Christians in the whole of Occupied Palestine at less than two percent. However, it is not because of  religious tensions between them and their Muslim brethren. But because of “the pressure of Israeli occupation, ongoing constraints, discriminatory policies, arbitrary arrests, confiscation of lands added to the general sense of hopelessness among Palestinian Christians,” who are finding themselves in “a despairing situation where they can no longer perceive a future for their offspring or for themselves”, as a recent study found. It was conducted  by Dar al-Kalima University in the West Bank town of Beit Jala and published in December 2017. It interviewed nearly 1,000 Palestinians. Seventy years ago, Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, was 86 percent Christian. The demographics of the city, however, hav...

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - A Bosnian court jailed a former Bosnian Serb soldier for 20 years on Wednesday for setting ablaze 57 Muslim Bosniaks, of whom 26 including a two-day-old baby died, near the eastern town of Visegrad early in Bosnia’s 1992-95 war. Radomir Susnjar, 64, known as Lalco, was also found guilty of robbery and illegal detention of civilians, the court said. The group of Muslim Bosniaks had been seized after an attack on the village of Koritnik and locked in a house that was set ablaze with an accelerant and explosives while Susnjar and other Bosnian Serb Army members shot at it to prevent anyone fleeing. “The attack resulted in the killing of 25 civilians and a two-day-old baby whose remains were never found,” the court said in a statement. One civilian sustained serious injuries while others managed to escape. Susnjar had lived in France for many years before being tracked down and arrested on a Bosnian warrant. He was held in custody there for four years before...

Crimes committed against Rohingyas in Bangladesh should also be taken into cognizance, say lawyers for 86 victims in a 32-page submission to the ICC A total 86 Rohingya victims of the Tula Toli massacre carried out by Myanmar military at the end of August, 2017, have asked judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to allow Fatou Bensouda, the ICC prosecutor, to launch an investigation into the atrocities against them. In a 32-page submission to the ICC judges, two legal representatives from London also said that the crimes committed against the Rohingyas in Bangladesh should be taken into account for investigation. The Tula Toli massacre was a mass-killing of Rohingya people that occurred during a Myanmar army clearance operation in the village of Tula Toli (also known as Min Gyi) in Maungdaw township of Rakhine state, near the Bangladesh–Myanmar border. According to eyewitnesses, Myanmar soldiers carried out the massacre with the support of Rakhine locals, killing ...

By Olivia Solon (NBC News) Microsoft has invested in a startup that uses facial recognition to surveil Palestinians throughout the West Bank, in spite of the tech giant’s public pledge to avoid using the technology if it encroaches on democratic freedoms. AnyVision, which is headquartered in Israel but has offices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore, sells an “advanced tactical surveillance” software system, Better Tomorrow. It lets customers identify individuals and objects in any live camera feed, such as a security camera or a smartphone, and then track targets as they move between different feeds. According to five sources familiar with the matter, AnyVision’s technology powers a secret military surveillance project throughout the West Bank. One source said the project is nicknamed "Google Ayosh," where "Ayosh" means occupied Palestinian territories and "Google" denotes the technology’s ability to search for people. The ...