Russia is also included on the UN’s blacklist – and it faces enormous pressure from sanctions. The same consequences must apply to Israel

• Janine di Giovanni is executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes reporting unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Palestine

Yousef, a Palestinian journalist, and I stood on a beach in Gaza during the first intifada – the uprising that began in 1987, defined by popular resistance and young men throwing stones. He was in his early 20s at the time, but he had already spent time in Ansar III, the dreaded Israeli prison in the Negev desert. He had recently been released.

This was before post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was widely understood, but I knew my friend was deeply traumatised. Staring at the sea, his hands shook as we spoke. Even though he was free, he doubted he would ever feel safe again. Prison had meant beatings, torture, sleep deprivation. “The soldiers kept asking me if I wanted to be a woman,” he said. “That is the worst thing – to threaten to destroy your manhood.”

Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and the executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Palestine. She is the author of The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Murderous governments and armed groups always considered reporters like Marie Colvin a nuisance – now they see them as legitimate targets

A friend wrote to me last week to tell me that my name appeared in the Epstein files. “But it’s for a good cause,” he wrote. “Nothing sinister.”

In 2012, shortly after my friend and colleague Marie Colvin was killed in Homs, Syria, I met with the now-disgraced Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen. Rød-Larsen was a renowned fixer who had negotiated the 1993 Oslo accords.

Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and the executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza. She is the author of The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

It’s chilling to watch as Trump and Netanyahu adopt the methods of regimes their countries once condemned

• Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and the executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza

In Syria, where I worked during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s terror, people were often taken away to torture cells before dawn by masked men. The timing was deliberate. It disoriented them at their most vulnerable, ensuring the torture to come would be even more agonising. The testimonies I recorded from survivors almost always contained the same phrase: “The morning they came for me.” One young woman, shattered by rape and violence, later told me that her life had split in two – before and after the masked men came for her.

In Iraq, those who spoke against Saddam Hussein – even abroad, even casually – were punished in cruel ways by a vengeful leader determined to crush any hint of dissent.

Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and the executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza. She is the author of The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

As a war correspondent I’ve seen this strategy used before. Putin is weaponising the savage eastern European winter

In the winter of 1993, during the siege of Sarajevo, people burned books and furniture to keep warm. Water froze in pipes. Electricity vanished for the duration of the war. Children slept in coats and hats, their breath visible in dark rooms. Cold itself became a weapon of war.

I remember, when I was reporting from the Bosnian capital, seeing doctors operating by candlelight or wearing camping headlamps. I remember old people chopping wood in the park in the centre of the city until there were no trees left, then dragging it home on sledges. I remember the ground being too frozen to bury the many dead on the football pitch, which later became a cemetery. I remember a terrible, frozen day when I went to an old people’s home near a frontline and counted dead body after dead body, all frozen in their sleep.