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A house in the mountains of Puerto Rico that was damaged by Hurricane Maria broadcast a call for help from its roof. A new study out of Harvard University estimated that the death toll from the storm far surpassed the White House's figures, sparking censure of the Trump administration's handling of the crisis. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
TV star Roseanne Barr's racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett and ABC's subsequent cancellation of her eponymous show constitute just the latest and most high-profile episode highlighting the ways in which people of color are routinely dehumanized. Barr insulted Jarrett, an African-American woman, by using both an anti-black comparison to apes and an Islamophobic accusation of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood. To their credit, ABC executives canceled "Roseanne" within hours.
But the network should have known better than to revive the self-avowed ardent Donald Trump supporter's show in the first place. Much like serial Twitter abuser Trump, this wasn't the first time Barr had spewed racist garbage on Twitter. In rebooting "Roseanne," ABC legitimized a high-profile racist supporter of a racist president.
Barr's words are a symbol of just how overtly the racist dehumanization of people of color continues to play out in Trump's America. On the same day as that controversy, news broke of a far higher death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year than was previously reported. A Harvard University study published in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that more than 4,600 Puerto Rican deaths were attributable to the hurricane--a number several orders of magnitude greater than the official U.S. estimate of 64. Because the study extrapolated numbers from a small sample size, the actual death toll could be as low as 800 or as high as 8,000.
In comparison, the 2005 devastation from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was linked to about 1,800 deaths. In that instance, people across the United States and even the world watched scenes of devastation in horror, and they rightly blamed George W. Bush's administration for inaction and a botched response to the calamity that mostly affected African-Americans. In the case of Puerto Rico, a Spanish-speaking U.S. territory, President Trump has not been held nearly as accountable in the court of public opinion for the government's poor response to the hurricane disaster, in part because of the undercount of deaths.
The message that the lives of people of color are worth less is also felt around the world--such as in countries where the U.S. wages wars, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, or where the U.S. supports wars like Saudi Arabia's assault on Yemen and Israel's violence against Palestinians in Gaza.
The message that the lives of people of color are worth less is also felt around the world--such as in countries where the U.S. wages wars, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, or where the U.S. supports wars like Saudi Arabia's assault on Yemen and Israel's violence against Palestinians in Gaza. The people of color who inhabit these lands are considered expendable, their lives subject to the whims of "collateral damage."
Those people of color who flee our wars are also met with contempt abroad. In France, Malian refugee Mamoudou Gassama, who risked his life crossing the Mediterranean, was offered French citizenship after carrying out a bold rescue of a child dangling from a fourth-floor balcony in Paris. As political commentator Wajahat Ali noted wryly on Twitter, "In order to be seen as a human, a migrant has to literally leap, climb tall buildings and save lives." The rest of the refugee population in France and Europe at large struggles daily to be seen as human.
Here in the United States, even acts of incredible heroism by people of color don't guarantee attention from our current head of state. Three weeks after a black man named James Shaw risked his life to tackle a shooter at a Waffle House in Tennessee, Trump reached out to him in a phone call that Shaw described as "lackluster." Meanwhile the president was victorious in his push to silence black people from speaking out about racism when the NFL decided recently to fine football players who refuse to stand for the national anthem. Trump had conflated peaceful anti-racist protests by players with disrespect for the U.S. military and the flag, and the NFL appears to have capitulated.
Black communities in the U.S. know intimately what the project of dehumanization feels like. When two men were arrested on April 12 at a Philadelphia Starbucks, it was business as usual in America. This week as Starbucks closed shop en masse for a high-profile afternoon racial sensitivity training session for its staff in light of the incident, the corporation hoped to fix the problem in one fell swoop while restoring its liberal reputation. Despite the fact that the training will likely fall far short of what is needed, and is probably a major publicity stunt, it is a start. But there were two sets of perpetrators during the arrest: the white manager who called the cops on the black men, and the officers who believed the manager and hauled the men away in handcuffs without determining properly if they deserved to be arrested. When will police be required to receive anti-racist training? It is precisely this sort of racist mistreatment by police that NFL players like Colin Kaepernick were protesting and that the NFL and Trump have decided to ignore.
The systems that dehumanize people of color have remained largely bipartisan even in recent years, as detrimental policies aimed at people of color were being quietly pursued by Democrats and President Obama when they held political power.
We see over and over the dehumanization of people of color in our country and our world. As I concluded in my recent documentary "Making America Racist Again," racism was not invented by Trump, the Republicans or conservatives. It is built into the fabric of this country right from the start, through the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the exploitation of immigrant labor and more. The systems that dehumanize people of color have remained largely bipartisan even in recent years, as detrimental policies aimed at people of color were being quietly pursued by Democrats and President Obama when they held political power (e.g., unchecked police brutality, disproportionate incarceration of people of color, mass detention of undocumented mothers and children). Now Trump and the GOP are able to point out Democratic hypocrisy and have ratcheted up those horrors. Trump has even repeatedly used the term "animals" to refer to his favored anti-immigrant symbol, the MS-13 gang.
A case in point is a set of photos of undocumented immigrant children being held in metal cages that a news outlet recently posted alongside an article about Trump's policy of separating children from undocumented parents. Except that those photos, which were widely shared on social media, were from 2014, when Obama's approach also resulted in immigrant suffering (though the children pictured were actually unaccompanied minors, not separated from their parents by U.S. authorities). Now Trump and his defenders are scoring political points because the Democrats simply did not do enough to distinguish themselves from Republicans on immigration.
Just as a border patrol agent recently shot a young undocumented Guatemalan woman named Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez, under Obama another border patrol agent fatally shot an immigrant youth through the U.S. border fence with Mexico. That agent was just acquitted of all charges in the killing of 16-year old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez. Of course, Trump is worse than Obama, but not by as much as you'd probably assume. The Democratic Party ought be as clearly distinct from its rivals as possible on the issues of immigration and race--not interchangeable, as the embarrassing photos of immigrant children being held in metal cages suggest.
If Starbucks, ABC, the NFL, the Democratic Party or even the U.S. government truly wanted to fix the problems of racism, real inequalities that diminish the rights of people of color and in turn dehumanize them need to be addressed. After all, our very democracy is in jeopardy as racism drives a faction in the country toward fascism. A recent study found a correlation between those white Americans who voted for Trump and those who favor fascism, or as NBC's Noah Berlatsky wrote, "When intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy." The stakes are high.
There are deep, systemic approaches to addressing racism that go well beyond a four-hour training session or the cancellation of a racist's TV show.
There are deep, systemic approaches to addressing racism that go well beyond a four-hour training session or the cancellation of a racist's TV show. Some of those solutions are as old as the civil rights movement, when figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began linking racism to poverty and war. Today the Movement for Black Lives is centered on a similar set of concrete systemic solutions focusing on economic justice, and even more recently there has been a modern-day revival of the Poor People's Campaign. There are strong movements to end wars and curtail our support for warring regimes. There are calls for better government support for the vulnerable victims of climate change such as those in Puerto Rico. There are networks of immigrant rights organizations advocating for justice for the undocumented.
These and others are the appropriate places to begin the long and necessary work of restoring the humanity and dignity of people of color.
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next. It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk. Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. |
TV star Roseanne Barr's racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett and ABC's subsequent cancellation of her eponymous show constitute just the latest and most high-profile episode highlighting the ways in which people of color are routinely dehumanized. Barr insulted Jarrett, an African-American woman, by using both an anti-black comparison to apes and an Islamophobic accusation of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood. To their credit, ABC executives canceled "Roseanne" within hours.
But the network should have known better than to revive the self-avowed ardent Donald Trump supporter's show in the first place. Much like serial Twitter abuser Trump, this wasn't the first time Barr had spewed racist garbage on Twitter. In rebooting "Roseanne," ABC legitimized a high-profile racist supporter of a racist president.
Barr's words are a symbol of just how overtly the racist dehumanization of people of color continues to play out in Trump's America. On the same day as that controversy, news broke of a far higher death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year than was previously reported. A Harvard University study published in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that more than 4,600 Puerto Rican deaths were attributable to the hurricane--a number several orders of magnitude greater than the official U.S. estimate of 64. Because the study extrapolated numbers from a small sample size, the actual death toll could be as low as 800 or as high as 8,000.
In comparison, the 2005 devastation from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was linked to about 1,800 deaths. In that instance, people across the United States and even the world watched scenes of devastation in horror, and they rightly blamed George W. Bush's administration for inaction and a botched response to the calamity that mostly affected African-Americans. In the case of Puerto Rico, a Spanish-speaking U.S. territory, President Trump has not been held nearly as accountable in the court of public opinion for the government's poor response to the hurricane disaster, in part because of the undercount of deaths.
The message that the lives of people of color are worth less is also felt around the world--such as in countries where the U.S. wages wars, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, or where the U.S. supports wars like Saudi Arabia's assault on Yemen and Israel's violence against Palestinians in Gaza.
The message that the lives of people of color are worth less is also felt around the world--such as in countries where the U.S. wages wars, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, or where the U.S. supports wars like Saudi Arabia's assault on Yemen and Israel's violence against Palestinians in Gaza. The people of color who inhabit these lands are considered expendable, their lives subject to the whims of "collateral damage."
Those people of color who flee our wars are also met with contempt abroad. In France, Malian refugee Mamoudou Gassama, who risked his life crossing the Mediterranean, was offered French citizenship after carrying out a bold rescue of a child dangling from a fourth-floor balcony in Paris. As political commentator Wajahat Ali noted wryly on Twitter, "In order to be seen as a human, a migrant has to literally leap, climb tall buildings and save lives." The rest of the refugee population in France and Europe at large struggles daily to be seen as human.
Here in the United States, even acts of incredible heroism by people of color don't guarantee attention from our current head of state. Three weeks after a black man named James Shaw risked his life to tackle a shooter at a Waffle House in Tennessee, Trump reached out to him in a phone call that Shaw described as "lackluster." Meanwhile the president was victorious in his push to silence black people from speaking out about racism when the NFL decided recently to fine football players who refuse to stand for the national anthem. Trump had conflated peaceful anti-racist protests by players with disrespect for the U.S. military and the flag, and the NFL appears to have capitulated.
Black communities in the U.S. know intimately what the project of dehumanization feels like. When two men were arrested on April 12 at a Philadelphia Starbucks, it was business as usual in America. This week as Starbucks closed shop en masse for a high-profile afternoon racial sensitivity training session for its staff in light of the incident, the corporation hoped to fix the problem in one fell swoop while restoring its liberal reputation. Despite the fact that the training will likely fall far short of what is needed, and is probably a major publicity stunt, it is a start. But there were two sets of perpetrators during the arrest: the white manager who called the cops on the black men, and the officers who believed the manager and hauled the men away in handcuffs without determining properly if they deserved to be arrested. When will police be required to receive anti-racist training? It is precisely this sort of racist mistreatment by police that NFL players like Colin Kaepernick were protesting and that the NFL and Trump have decided to ignore.
The systems that dehumanize people of color have remained largely bipartisan even in recent years, as detrimental policies aimed at people of color were being quietly pursued by Democrats and President Obama when they held political power.
We see over and over the dehumanization of people of color in our country and our world. As I concluded in my recent documentary "Making America Racist Again," racism was not invented by Trump, the Republicans or conservatives. It is built into the fabric of this country right from the start, through the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the exploitation of immigrant labor and more. The systems that dehumanize people of color have remained largely bipartisan even in recent years, as detrimental policies aimed at people of color were being quietly pursued by Democrats and President Obama when they held political power (e.g., unchecked police brutality, disproportionate incarceration of people of color, mass detention of undocumented mothers and children). Now Trump and the GOP are able to point out Democratic hypocrisy and have ratcheted up those horrors. Trump has even repeatedly used the term "animals" to refer to his favored anti-immigrant symbol, the MS-13 gang.
A case in point is a set of photos of undocumented immigrant children being held in metal cages that a news outlet recently posted alongside an article about Trump's policy of separating children from undocumented parents. Except that those photos, which were widely shared on social media, were from 2014, when Obama's approach also resulted in immigrant suffering (though the children pictured were actually unaccompanied minors, not separated from their parents by U.S. authorities). Now Trump and his defenders are scoring political points because the Democrats simply did not do enough to distinguish themselves from Republicans on immigration.
Just as a border patrol agent recently shot a young undocumented Guatemalan woman named Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez, under Obama another border patrol agent fatally shot an immigrant youth through the U.S. border fence with Mexico. That agent was just acquitted of all charges in the killing of 16-year old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez. Of course, Trump is worse than Obama, but not by as much as you'd probably assume. The Democratic Party ought be as clearly distinct from its rivals as possible on the issues of immigration and race--not interchangeable, as the embarrassing photos of immigrant children being held in metal cages suggest.
If Starbucks, ABC, the NFL, the Democratic Party or even the U.S. government truly wanted to fix the problems of racism, real inequalities that diminish the rights of people of color and in turn dehumanize them need to be addressed. After all, our very democracy is in jeopardy as racism drives a faction in the country toward fascism. A recent study found a correlation between those white Americans who voted for Trump and those who favor fascism, or as NBC's Noah Berlatsky wrote, "When intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy." The stakes are high.
There are deep, systemic approaches to addressing racism that go well beyond a four-hour training session or the cancellation of a racist's TV show.
There are deep, systemic approaches to addressing racism that go well beyond a four-hour training session or the cancellation of a racist's TV show. Some of those solutions are as old as the civil rights movement, when figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began linking racism to poverty and war. Today the Movement for Black Lives is centered on a similar set of concrete systemic solutions focusing on economic justice, and even more recently there has been a modern-day revival of the Poor People's Campaign. There are strong movements to end wars and curtail our support for warring regimes. There are calls for better government support for the vulnerable victims of climate change such as those in Puerto Rico. There are networks of immigrant rights organizations advocating for justice for the undocumented.
These and others are the appropriate places to begin the long and necessary work of restoring the humanity and dignity of people of color.
TV star Roseanne Barr's racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett and ABC's subsequent cancellation of her eponymous show constitute just the latest and most high-profile episode highlighting the ways in which people of color are routinely dehumanized. Barr insulted Jarrett, an African-American woman, by using both an anti-black comparison to apes and an Islamophobic accusation of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood. To their credit, ABC executives canceled "Roseanne" within hours.
But the network should have known better than to revive the self-avowed ardent Donald Trump supporter's show in the first place. Much like serial Twitter abuser Trump, this wasn't the first time Barr had spewed racist garbage on Twitter. In rebooting "Roseanne," ABC legitimized a high-profile racist supporter of a racist president.
Barr's words are a symbol of just how overtly the racist dehumanization of people of color continues to play out in Trump's America. On the same day as that controversy, news broke of a far higher death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year than was previously reported. A Harvard University study published in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that more than 4,600 Puerto Rican deaths were attributable to the hurricane--a number several orders of magnitude greater than the official U.S. estimate of 64. Because the study extrapolated numbers from a small sample size, the actual death toll could be as low as 800 or as high as 8,000.
In comparison, the 2005 devastation from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was linked to about 1,800 deaths. In that instance, people across the United States and even the world watched scenes of devastation in horror, and they rightly blamed George W. Bush's administration for inaction and a botched response to the calamity that mostly affected African-Americans. In the case of Puerto Rico, a Spanish-speaking U.S. territory, President Trump has not been held nearly as accountable in the court of public opinion for the government's poor response to the hurricane disaster, in part because of the undercount of deaths.
The message that the lives of people of color are worth less is also felt around the world--such as in countries where the U.S. wages wars, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, or where the U.S. supports wars like Saudi Arabia's assault on Yemen and Israel's violence against Palestinians in Gaza.
The message that the lives of people of color are worth less is also felt around the world--such as in countries where the U.S. wages wars, like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, or where the U.S. supports wars like Saudi Arabia's assault on Yemen and Israel's violence against Palestinians in Gaza. The people of color who inhabit these lands are considered expendable, their lives subject to the whims of "collateral damage."
Those people of color who flee our wars are also met with contempt abroad. In France, Malian refugee Mamoudou Gassama, who risked his life crossing the Mediterranean, was offered French citizenship after carrying out a bold rescue of a child dangling from a fourth-floor balcony in Paris. As political commentator Wajahat Ali noted wryly on Twitter, "In order to be seen as a human, a migrant has to literally leap, climb tall buildings and save lives." The rest of the refugee population in France and Europe at large struggles daily to be seen as human.
Here in the United States, even acts of incredible heroism by people of color don't guarantee attention from our current head of state. Three weeks after a black man named James Shaw risked his life to tackle a shooter at a Waffle House in Tennessee, Trump reached out to him in a phone call that Shaw described as "lackluster." Meanwhile the president was victorious in his push to silence black people from speaking out about racism when the NFL decided recently to fine football players who refuse to stand for the national anthem. Trump had conflated peaceful anti-racist protests by players with disrespect for the U.S. military and the flag, and the NFL appears to have capitulated.
Black communities in the U.S. know intimately what the project of dehumanization feels like. When two men were arrested on April 12 at a Philadelphia Starbucks, it was business as usual in America. This week as Starbucks closed shop en masse for a high-profile afternoon racial sensitivity training session for its staff in light of the incident, the corporation hoped to fix the problem in one fell swoop while restoring its liberal reputation. Despite the fact that the training will likely fall far short of what is needed, and is probably a major publicity stunt, it is a start. But there were two sets of perpetrators during the arrest: the white manager who called the cops on the black men, and the officers who believed the manager and hauled the men away in handcuffs without determining properly if they deserved to be arrested. When will police be required to receive anti-racist training? It is precisely this sort of racist mistreatment by police that NFL players like Colin Kaepernick were protesting and that the NFL and Trump have decided to ignore.
The systems that dehumanize people of color have remained largely bipartisan even in recent years, as detrimental policies aimed at people of color were being quietly pursued by Democrats and President Obama when they held political power.
We see over and over the dehumanization of people of color in our country and our world. As I concluded in my recent documentary "Making America Racist Again," racism was not invented by Trump, the Republicans or conservatives. It is built into the fabric of this country right from the start, through the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the exploitation of immigrant labor and more. The systems that dehumanize people of color have remained largely bipartisan even in recent years, as detrimental policies aimed at people of color were being quietly pursued by Democrats and President Obama when they held political power (e.g., unchecked police brutality, disproportionate incarceration of people of color, mass detention of undocumented mothers and children). Now Trump and the GOP are able to point out Democratic hypocrisy and have ratcheted up those horrors. Trump has even repeatedly used the term "animals" to refer to his favored anti-immigrant symbol, the MS-13 gang.
A case in point is a set of photos of undocumented immigrant children being held in metal cages that a news outlet recently posted alongside an article about Trump's policy of separating children from undocumented parents. Except that those photos, which were widely shared on social media, were from 2014, when Obama's approach also resulted in immigrant suffering (though the children pictured were actually unaccompanied minors, not separated from their parents by U.S. authorities). Now Trump and his defenders are scoring political points because the Democrats simply did not do enough to distinguish themselves from Republicans on immigration.
Just as a border patrol agent recently shot a young undocumented Guatemalan woman named Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez, under Obama another border patrol agent fatally shot an immigrant youth through the U.S. border fence with Mexico. That agent was just acquitted of all charges in the killing of 16-year old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez. Of course, Trump is worse than Obama, but not by as much as you'd probably assume. The Democratic Party ought be as clearly distinct from its rivals as possible on the issues of immigration and race--not interchangeable, as the embarrassing photos of immigrant children being held in metal cages suggest.
If Starbucks, ABC, the NFL, the Democratic Party or even the U.S. government truly wanted to fix the problems of racism, real inequalities that diminish the rights of people of color and in turn dehumanize them need to be addressed. After all, our very democracy is in jeopardy as racism drives a faction in the country toward fascism. A recent study found a correlation between those white Americans who voted for Trump and those who favor fascism, or as NBC's Noah Berlatsky wrote, "When intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy." The stakes are high.
There are deep, systemic approaches to addressing racism that go well beyond a four-hour training session or the cancellation of a racist's TV show.
There are deep, systemic approaches to addressing racism that go well beyond a four-hour training session or the cancellation of a racist's TV show. Some of those solutions are as old as the civil rights movement, when figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began linking racism to poverty and war. Today the Movement for Black Lives is centered on a similar set of concrete systemic solutions focusing on economic justice, and even more recently there has been a modern-day revival of the Poor People's Campaign. There are strong movements to end wars and curtail our support for warring regimes. There are calls for better government support for the vulnerable victims of climate change such as those in Puerto Rico. There are networks of immigrant rights organizations advocating for justice for the undocumented.
These and others are the appropriate places to begin the long and necessary work of restoring the humanity and dignity of people of color.
"Thank you to the hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country who are standing up and speaking out for our voting rights, fundamental freedoms, and essential services like Social Security and Medicare."
In communities large and small across the United States on Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people collectively took to the streets to make their opposition to President Donald Trump heard.
The people who took part in the organized protests ranged from very young children to the elderly and their message was scrawled on signs of all sizes and colors—many of them angry, some of them funny, but all in line with the "Hands Off" message that brought them together.
"Thank you to the hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country who are standing up and speaking out for our voting rights, fundamental freedoms, and essential services like Social Security and Medicare," said the group Stand Up America as word of the turnout poured in from across the country.
A relatively small, but representative sample of photographs from various demonstrations that took place follows.
Demonstrators gather on Boston Common, cheering and chanting slogans, during the nationwide "Hands Off!" protest against US President Donald Trump and his advisor, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, in Boston, Massachusetts on April 5, 2025. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP)
"Everyone involved in this crime against humanity, and everyone who covered it up, would face prosecution in a world that had any shred of dignity left."
A video presented to officials at the United Nations on Friday and first made public Saturday by the New York Times provides more evidence that the recent massacre of Palestinian medics in Gaza did not happen the way Israeli government claimed—the latest in a long line of deception when it comes to violence against civilians that have led to repeated accusations of war crimes.
The video, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), was found on the phone of a paramedic found in a mass grave with a bullet in his head after being killed, along with seven other medics, by Israeli forces on March 23. The eight medics, buried in the shallow grave with the bodies riddled with bullets, were: Mustafa Khafaja, Ezz El-Din Shaat, Saleh Muammar, Refaat Radwan, Muhammad Bahloul, Ashraf Abu Libda, Muhammad Al-Hila, and Raed Al-Sharif. The video reportedly belonged to Radwan. A ninth medic, identified as Asaad Al-Nasasra, who was at the scene of the massacre, which took place near the southern city of Rafah, is still missing.
The PRCS said it presented the video—which refutes the explanation of the killings offered by Israeli officials—to members of the UN Security Council on Friday.
"They were killed in their uniforms. Driving their clearly marked vehicles. Wearing their gloves. On their way to save lives," Jonathan Whittall, head of the UN's humanitarian affairs office in Palestine, said last week after the bodies were discovered. Some of the victims, according to Gaza officials, were found with handcuffs still on them and appeared to have been shot in the head, execution-style.
The Israeli military initially said its soldiers "did not randomly attack" any ambulances, but rather claimed they fired on "terrorists" who approached them in "suspicious vehicles." Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an IDF spokesperson, said the vehicles that the soldiers opened fire on were driving with their lights off and did not have clearance to be in the area. The video evidence directly contradicts the IDF's version of events.
As the Times reports:
The Times obtained the video from a senior diplomat at the United Nations who asked not to be identified to be able to share sensitive information.
The Times verified the location and timing of the video, which was taken in the southern city of Rafah early on March 23. Filmed from what appears to be the front interior of a moving vehicle, it shows a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck, clearly marked, with headlights and flashing lights turned on, driving south on a road to the north of Rafah in the early morning. The first rays of sun can be seen, and birds are chirping.
In an interview with Drop Site News published Friday, the only known paramedic to survive the attack, Munther Abed, explained that he and his colleagues "were directly and deliberately shot at" by the IDF. "The car is clearly marked with 'Palestinian Red Crescent Society 101.' The car's number was clear and the crews' uniform was clear, so why were we directly shot at? That is the question."
The video's release sparked fresh outrage and demands for accountability on Saturday.
"The IDF denied access to the site for days; they sent in diggers to cover up the massacre and intentionally lied about it," said podcast producer Hamza M. Syed in reaction to the new revelations. "The entire leadership of the Israeli army is implicated in this unconscionable war crime. And they must be prosecuted."
"Everyone involved in this crime against humanity, and everyone who covered it up, would face prosecution in a world that had any shred of dignity left," said journalist Ryan Grim of DropSite News.
"They're dismantling our country. They're looting our government. And they think we'll just watch."
In communities across the United States and also overseas, coordinated "Hands Off" protests are taking place far and wide Saturday in the largest public rebuke yet to President Donald Trump and top henchman Elon Musk's assault on the workings of the federal government and their program of economic sabotage that is sacrificing the needs of working families to authoritarianism and the greed of right-wing oligarchs.
Indivisible, one of the key organizing groups behind the day's protests, said millions participated in more than 1,300 individual rallies as they demanded "an end to Trump's authoritarian power grab" and condemning all those aiding and abetting it.
"We expected hundreds of thousands. But at virtually every single event, the crowds eclipsed our estimates," the group said in a statement Saturday evening.
"Hands off our healthcare, hands off our civil rights, hands off our schools, our freedoms, and our democracy."
"This is the largest day of protest since Trump retook office," the group added. "And in many small towns and cities, activists are reporting the biggest protests their communities have ever seen as everyday people send a clear, unmistakable message to Trump and Musk: Hands off our healthcare, hands off our civil rights, hands off our schools, our freedoms, and our democracy."
According to the organizers' call to action:
They're dismantling our country. They’re looting our government. And they think we'll just watch.
On Saturday, April 5th, we rise up with one demand: Hands Off!
This is a nationwide mobilization to stop the most brazen power grab in modern history. Trump, Musk, and their billionaire cronies are orchestrating an all-out assault on our government, our economy, and our basic rights—enabled by Congress every step of the way. They want to strip America for parts—shuttering Social Security offices, firing essential workers, eliminating consumer protections, and gutting Medicaid—all to bankroll their billionaire tax scam.
They're handing over our tax dollars, our public services, and our democracy to the ultra-rich. If we don't fight now, there won’t be anything left to save.
The more than 1,300 "Hands Off!" demonstrations—organized by a large coalition of unions, progressive advocacy groups, and pro-democracy watchdogs—first kicked off Saturday in Europe, followed by East Coast communities in the U.S., and continued throughout the day at various times, depending on location. See here for a list of scheduled "Hands Off" events.
"The United States has a president, not a king," said the progressive advocacy group People's Action, one of the group's involved in the actions, in an email to supporters Saturday morning just as protest events kicked off in hundreds of cities and communities. "Donald Trump has, by every measure, been working to make himself a king. He has become unanswerable to the courts, Congress, and the American people."
In its Saturday evening statement, Indivisible said the actions far exceeded their expectations and should be seen as a turning point in the battle to stop Trump and his minions:
The Trump administration has spent its first 75 days in office trying to overwhelm us, to make us feel powerless, so that we will fall in line, accept the ransacking of our government, the raiding of our social safety net, and the dismantling of our democracy.
And too often, the response from our leaders and those in positions to resist has been abject cowardice. Compliance. Obeying in advance.
But not today. Today we've demonstrated a different path forward. We've modeled the courage and action that we want to see from our leaders, and showed all those who've been standing on the sidelines who share our values that they are not alone.
Citing the Republican president's thirst for "power and greed," People's Action earlier explained why organized pressure must be built and sustained against the administration, especially at the conclusion of a week in which the global economy was spun into disarray by Trump's tariff announcement, his attack on the rule of law continued, and the twice-elected president admitted he was "not joking" about the possibility of seeking a third term, which is barred by the constitution.
"He is destroying the economy with tariffs in order to pay for the tax cuts he wants to push through to enrich himself and his billionaire buddies," warned People's Action. "He has ordered the government to round up innocent people off of the streets and put them in detention centers without due process because they dared to speak out using their First Amendment rights. And he is not close to being done—by his own admission, he is planning to run for a third term, which the Constitution does not allow."
Live stream of Hands Off rally in Washington, D.C.:
Below are photo or video dispatches from demonstrations around the world on Saturday. Check back for updates...
United Kingdom
France
Germany
Belgium:
Massachusetts:
Maine:
Washington, D.C.:
New York:
Minnesota:
Michigan:
Ohio:
Colorado:
Pennsylvania:
North Carolina:
The protest organizers warn that what Trump and Musk are up to "is not just corruption" and "not just mismanagement," but something far more sinister.
"This is a hostile takeover," they said, but vowed to fight back. "This is the moment where we say NO. No more looting, no more stealing, no more billionaires raiding our government while working people struggle to survive."