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A Israeli settler implicated in a brutal pre-dawn assault on a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank that left multiple residents injured and humiliated has been released from house arrest, the Israeli military confirmed in a public statement issued Monday.

Tal Yinon Dardik, who is alleged to have participated in the March 13 attack on the small Palestinian community of Khirbet Humsa, will no longer be confined to his place of residence, but is required to check in at a local police station twice a day under the terms of the court ruling that cleared his release.

The decision to end Dardik’s house arrest followed a ruling by the Jerusalem District Court that the original terms of his detention were unworkable. Dardik had been held under house arrest at his mother-in-law’s home in Adei Ad, a Israeli settlement located in the central West Bank, but the court found the arrangement unsustainable after Dardik’s mother-in-law refused to continue hosting him.

Dardik has become a cause célèbre for Israeli settler activist groups and right-wing political figures, who mounted a sustained public campaign to push for his release. He has repeatedly denied any involvement in the attack, which unfolded when dozens of masked settlers stormed Khirbet Humsa before sunrise, targeting multiple Palestinian residents including women, children and elderly people in a coordinated assault that left dozens traumatized.

One of the most severe assaults targeted 29-year-old Qusai Abu al-Kebash, who has told reporters that settlers stripped him naked, bound his arms and legs, fastened a plastic zip-tie around his genitals, and paraded him through the village in front of his family and neighbors. An American peace activist who was staying in the village at the time of the attack gave a firsthand account of the violence to Israeli newspaper Haaretz earlier this year, describing being attacked as she slept in a tent.

“Six masked Israeli settlers armed with heavy wooden sticks swarmed me while I was asleep,” the activist recalled. “They immediately beat the three of us to the ground, smashing our faces with their fists and clubs. They zip-tied our hands and feet, and were yelling things like, ‘We are going to kill you!’” During the attack, she said, settlers pulled down Abu al-Kebash’s pants, poured cold water over him, and beat him repeatedly into the dirt. “All he could do was curl into a fetal position and scream when they beat him with their clubs,” she added.

Multiple village residents confirmed the assault lasted roughly an hour, and estimated that as many as dozens of masked settlers took part in the incursion. A Palestinian woman who was in the village during the attack said she was beaten, dragged out of her home, had her head covering torn off and portions of her clothing ripped. “They pulled the girls out and beat them, even the little ones. They mocked us and celebrated our humiliation,” she told Haaretz. A 74-year-old resident added that three attackers beat him repeatedly on his head, hands and stomach, while another destroyed the village’s security cameras, internet router and outdoor lighting.

The release of Dardik comes after months of political pressure from senior Israeli figures, including Defense Minister Israel Katz, who has openly criticized the original restrictions placed on Dardik and ordered government and military officials not to renew his detention. Katz visited Dardik in prison last month while Dardik was conducting a hunger strike to protest his detention. He also previously threatened to fire Major General Avi Bluth, head of the Israeli military’s Central Command, after Bluth appealed a court ruling that would have allowed Dardik to move his house arrest to a location of his choosing. Katz ultimately backed down from the threat after widespread public outcry.

The attack is one of a sharp rising tide of settler violence targeting Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank in recent years. The International Court of Justice has repeatedly ruled that all Israeli settlements built in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem violate international law, yet more than 700,000 Israeli citizens currently reside in these illegal settlements. United Nations data shows that attacks on Palestinian herding communities like Khirbet Humsa have spiked dramatically in recent years, with at least 5,910 Palestinians internally displaced by settler violence between January 2023 and April 2024.

On a rainy Tuesday evening in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, hundreds of mourners including mountaineers, diplomatic representatives and civil society members gathered on the open lawns of a local sports complex to hold a somber candlelight vigil for 10 climbers who lost their lives in a catastrophic avalanche on Broad Peak, one of the world’s highest mountains. As attendees shielded flickering candle flames from the steady downpour, they offered prayers and remembered the climbers who never came back from their expedition.

The disaster unfolded on July 30, when a massive avalanche swept across an international climbing expedition operating on the 8,051-meter Karakoram range peak, the 12th tallest mountain on the globe located just kilometers from K2, the world’s second-highest mountain. Among the deceased was celebrated British-Nepali mountaineer Nirmal Purja, a leading figure in the global climbing community. Six of the 10 confirmed victims were Nepali citizens, and the international expedition included climbers from six nations: Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, China, Britain and the United States.

Days after the tragedy, search and recovery teams wrapped up their on-mountain operation, recovering the remains of eight victims. Two climbers’ bodies remain trapped in the avalanche debris and have not yet been retrieved. Rita Dhital, Nepal’s ambassador to Pakistan, attended the vigil to honor the fallen climbers, and shared memories of meeting Purja at her residence before the expedition began. “Giving up is not in my blood,” Dhital recalled Purja telling her, repeating his mantra that defined his decades of high-altitude climbing. She confirmed that all six Nepali climbers’ remains have already been returned to their waiting families.

Dhital extended public gratitude to the Pakistani mountaineers, rescue teams, government authorities and military personnel who risked their own lives to carry out the recovery operation in dangerous, unstable alpine conditions. She gave special recognition to renowned Pakistani climber Sirbaz Khan, who led the recovery team on the mountain, as well as the Alpine Club of Pakistan for coordinating the mission.

Sirbaz Khan told the Associated Press that his team began the mission with high hopes of finding the missing climbers alive. “I had hoped that I would hug them after finding them alive,” he said. Instead, the team discovered the fallen climbers buried deep under thick layers of avalanche snow, digging through the frozen drifts by hand with shovels to extract each body one by one. Recovering the bodies and moving them down the steep, hazardous mountain slope was an equally grueling challenge, he explained: rescuers used fixed ropes and improvised stretchers to carry the remains off the high mountain, after finding the strength to continue despite the emotional shock of finding their fellow mountaineers dead. Khan said he remains deeply grieved by the tragedy, but finds small comfort in knowing most families have been able to lay their loved ones to rest.

Irfan Arshad Khan, president of the Alpine Club of Pakistan (who is not related to recovery team leader Sirbaz Khan), confirmed that the remains of seven climbers, including all six Nepali victims, have already been sent back to their home countries. He explained that severe, unrelenting bad weather repeatedly blocked rescue helicopters from reaching the remote avalanche site, forcing the entire search and recovery team to carry out most of the work on foot across dangerous, snow-covered terrain. Eventually, the team brought eight recovered remains to a landing zone accessible by air, allowing them to be airlifted off the mountain.

Addressing attendees at the vigil, Irfan Arshad Khan said the gathering was to honor the memory of fallen climbing comrades. “The days following the avalanche tested not only the endurance of those searching the mountain but also the courage of rescuers who continued on foot when helicopters could not reach them,” he told the crowd. High-altitude mountaineering accidents are an all-too-common risk in northern Pakistan, which is home to five of the world’s 14 highest peaks above 8,000 meters, including Broad Peak and K2.

Five years have passed since the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan, and a shocking 2.4 million Afghan adolescent girls are still barred from accessing secondary education, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) confirmed in an announcement Tuesday from Ankara, Turkey. The UN agency has reiterated its urgent call for the immediate reversal of the ban that shuts women and girls out of formal education at the secondary and post-secondary levels.

As the only country globally with a formal, nationwide ban on secondary and higher education for female learners, Afghanistan’s policy represents a severe breach of basic human rights, according to Hoda Jaberian, UNESCO’s program coordinator for education in emergency contexts. Speaking via video link at a press briefing, Jaberian emphasized that a five-year exclusion from schooling is far more than a temporary disruption to a young person’s life: it effectively erases an entire secondary school cycle for millions of girls.

“UNESCO continues to call for the immediate and unconditional restoration of girls and women’s right to secondary and higher education. It is not negotiable. It’s a basic human right and we reiterate that there is no substitute for this,” Jaberian stated.

The Taliban first seized national power on August 15, 2021, coinciding with the full withdrawal of U.S. and NATO military forces after 20 years of conflict in the country. Within weeks of taking control, the group implemented a ban on girls’ attendance at secondary schools, and later expanded restrictions to bar women from higher education, most formal employment, and multiple other sectors of public life, effectively sidelining half of Afghanistan’s population from public society.

Despite repeated appeals from the United Nations, global humanitarian organizations, human rights defenders, and even multiple majority-Islamic nations, the Taliban government has refused to lift the ban, framing the policy as an internal Afghan matter that is not subject to international pressure.

Jaberian noted that the current restrictions have completely undone nearly two decades of incremental progress in expanding female access to education across Afghanistan. When the Taliban was first ousted from power in 2001, access to schooling for girls was extremely limited across most of the country. By 2021, just before the group’s return to power, nearly 1 million Afghan girls were enrolled in secondary education, marking major gains for gender equity in learning. Today, that progress has been almost entirely erased.

“But unfortunately, much of that progress now has been completely reversed,” Jaberian added.

In response to the formal ban, UNESCO has shifted to supporting alternative learning pathways for Afghan learners through community-based education programs, literacy classes, and vocational skills development initiatives. These programs operate out of informal community spaces—most often in the private homes of trained literacy facilitators—with the tacit approval of Taliban authorities. Currently, more than 1,000 local facilitators, most trained by UNESCO and its local partner organizations, run these community learning programs across the country.

“While the restriction remains, we cannot abandon Afghan learners,” Jaberian said. “UNESCO work with communities and our partners from the communities to preserve every possible pathway to learning.”

A United Nations-backed investigative body has released a damning new report documenting a sharp escalation in human rights abuses and targeted violence against civilians across Myanmar, centered on the military’s growing reliance on low-cost, stealthy light aircraft to carry out unregulated airstrikes in its ongoing civil conflict against anti-government opposition forces. The 12-month investigation, conducted by the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), a body established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2018 to probe violations of international law in the country, was published Tuesday, offering the most comprehensive account of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by all major armed actors in Myanmar’s post-coup conflict.

The report confirms that the frequency and intensity of aerial attacks rose dramatically in the months leading up to the military’s widely discredited national elections held in late 2023 and early 2024, and have continued at the same unrelenting pace in the months since the vote, which critics universally dismissed as a sham to cement the junta’s hold on power following its 2021 coup that ousted elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Along with the surge in airstrikes, investigators documented clear patterns of systematic arbitrary detention, brutal torture, and widespread sexual violence across the country, abuses that intensified as the military sought to neutralize opposition to its staged electoral process. Under a controversial electoral law imposed by the junta, residents can face up to 20 years of imprisonment or even the death penalty for simple acts such as criticizing the elections on social media or distributing materials opposing the vote, leading to hundreds of arbitrary arrests in the lead-up to the poll.

One of the most alarming findings of the investigation centers on the military’s shift to using small, low-cost aerial platforms – including motorized paragliders (also called paramotors), gyrocopters, and commercial drones – to conduct low-altitude strikes with unguided explosives. In multiple verified incidents in Myanmar’s upper Sagaing region, a major hotbed of anti-junta resistance, paramotor pilots have been documented cutting their aircraft engines mid-flight when approaching targets, allowing the craft to glide silently to their destinations. This stealth tactic leaves civilians with little to no warning to escape or find shelter, drastically increasing the risk of unintended civilian deaths and injuries. The report also details the military’s frequent use of the controversial “double-tap” strike tactic, in which a second airstrike is launched shortly after the first, intentionally targeting first responders, civilians aiding wounded people, and community members fleeing the initial attack. This practice, widely condemned as a violation of international humanitarian law, has significantly driven up civilian casualty numbers, the IIMM confirmed.

Concurrent with the release of the UN report, the Arakan Army – one of Myanmar’s largest and most powerful ethnic armed organizations, which has been fighting the junta in western Rakhine State – issued its own allegations of recent civilian harm from military airstrikes. The group reported that between August 1 and August 11 this year, 20 civilians have been killed and another 22 injured in strikes across three Rakhine townships. One of the deadliest attacks involved up to eight military aircraft striking a target for nearly an hour straight, the group said. As of Tuesday, Myanmar’s military-backed junta had not issued any public response to either the UN’s findings or the Arakan Army’s latest allegations. This is consistent with the junta’s long-standing stance that it only targets legitimate military opposition targets, and routinely labels anti-government resistance forces as terrorists.

The IIMM’s investigation did not limit its scrutiny to junta forces: the body confirmed it is also investigating credible allegations of grave human rights abuses committed by anti-military armed groups, including the Arakan Army. The ethnic armed group has been accused of multiple serious crimes in Rakhine State, including rape and other forms of sexual violence targeting Rohingya Muslim women, extrajudicial summary executions, forced recruitment of child soldiers, and the deliberate destruction of Rohingya mosques.

Third-party independent tallies underscore the staggering human cost of Myanmar’s three-and-a-half-year civil war. The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a Thailand-based independent organization that maintains detailed public records of casualties and arrests linked to the post-coup conflict, reports that more than 8,000 civilians have been killed by junta security forces, and more than 31,000 people have been arrested since the 2021 coup. The IIMM gathered evidence for its year-long investigation from more than 1,600 separate sources and witnesses, all of which has been preserved to support future criminal prosecutions of individuals found responsible for atrocity crimes.

“Behind every piece of evidence we collect are people whose lives have been devastated by these crimes,” IIMM head Nicholas Koumjian wrote in the report. “Communities across Myanmar are not only living under the constant threat of violence but are also coping with the profound and lasting impact of what they have endured.”