Mass incarceration has defined Israel’s colonial project. Since 1967, over 850,000 Palestinians have been arrested and imprisoned by the Israeli regime. Currently there are 4,450 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, including hundreds of administrative detainees being held without charge or trial. But just as mass incarceration remains a defining feature of the Israeli occupation, so too has prisoner resistance. Currently, an ongoing boycott of the Israeli judicial system by all 530 Palestinian administrative detainees has surpassed 100 days.

In case you missed it, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic lately issued a report that finds Israel’s treatment of Palestinians on the West Bank amounts to the crime of apartheid. The study came out on February 28 in the wake of five longer, wider-ranging, apartheid reports published since 2020 – and just before the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine published yet another apartheid report on March 21. Despite its quiet rollout, the study’s high quality and association with Harvard likely mean it will play a significant role in establishing Israel’s apartheid, and represents a victory for Palestinian human rights.

Sahar Francis, the General Director of the Ramallah-based group Addameer, warns that the Israeli government’s efforts to undermine Palestinian civil society organizations may just be beginning.

Addameer is one of six Palestinian NGOs designated by Israel as a terror organization. The prisoners rights group says the accusations against them are unfounded, and could have potentially devastating consequences for the Palestinian human rights movement.

Salah Hammouri is a Palestinian-French lawyer and human rights advocate from Jerusalem who works with the prisoner’s rights organziation Addameer, which was designated as a ‘terrorist organization’ by Israel. Here, Hammouri describes the arrests and imprisonments he has experiences since he was a teenager, and Israel’s motives in the attacks today against him and other human rights defenders. “The state harassment against Palestinian organizations, my fellow human rights defenders and myself is only the continuation of policies by a regime that seeks to quash our people’s will for freedom at all costs, as well as any resistance to the colonial apartheid regime put in place since 1948, which has pushed colonization relentlessly ever since.” Hammouri writes.

More than 100 global foundations and donors, most of them U.S.-based, have signed on to an open letter expressing solidarity with Palestinian civil society after six leading human rights organizations were designated as so-called “terrorist organizations” by the Israeli military: “”As global funders of human rights and democracy, this attempt to ‘chill’ our funding and solidarity will not work. We stand with Palestinian civil society organizations and human rights defenders.”

Great news. Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, a 25 year House veteran and co chair of the Human Rights Commission, issued a stiff letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying it is “urgent” matter for him to get past his “initial leeriness” and “firmly and unambiguously denounce” Israel’s hateful decree that six leading Palestinian human rights groups are “terrorist” organizations.

Six Palestinian human rights activists were targeted by spyware from the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, a new report revealed on Monday, in the first reported instance of Palestinian activists being targeted by the surveillance company. The six activists are all members of the six Palestinian civil society organizations recently branded “terrorist organizations” by Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz.

“This is state terrorism at its finest hour,” Ubai Al-Aboudi, head of one of the Palestinian human rights organizations Israel has labeled terrorist groups, tells a Washington, DC, webinar convened by leading American thinktanks to push back against the secret dossiers Israel has circulated. He and other Palestinian execs say they crossed Israel’s red line when they assisted the ICC investigation of Israeli war crimes and assisted Rep. McCollum’s bill to cut off U.S. funds for Israeli mistreatment of Palestinian children.

In Israel’s latest attack on Palestinian civil society organizations, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced a list of six Palestinian human rights organizations which he claimed have links to militant “terror” groups. On the list were prominent institutions like Addameer, Al-Haq, and Defense for Children International – Palestine.