By EDITH M. LEDERER (Associated Press)

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — An independent review of the neutrality of the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees found that Israel never expressed concern about anyone on the staff lists it has received annually since 2011. The review was carried out after Israel alleged that a dozen employees of the agency known as UNRWA had participated in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

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Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

In a wide-ranging 48-page report released Monday, the independent panel said UNRWA has “robust” procedures to uphold the U.N. principle of neutrality, but it cited serious gaps in implementation, including staff publicly expressing political views, textbooks used in schools the agency runs with “problematic content” and staff unions disrupting operations.

From 2017 to 2022, the report said the annual number of allegations of neutrality being breached at UNRWA ranged from seven to 55. But between January 2022 and February 2024, U.N. investigators received 151 allegations, most related to social media posts “made public by external sources,” it said.

In a key section on the neutrality of staff, the panel, which was led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, said UNRWA shares lists of staff with host countries for its 32,000 staff, including about 13,000 in Gaza. But it said Israeli officials never expressed concern and informed panel members it did not consider the list “a screening or vetting process” but rather a procedure to register diplomats.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry informed the panel that until March 2024 the staff lists did not include Palestinian identification numbers, the report said.

Apparently based on those numbers, “Israel made public claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees are members of terrorist organizations,” the panel said. “However, Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence of this.”

Israel’s allegations led to the suspension of contributions to UNRWA by the United States and more than a dozen other countries. That amounted to a pause in funding worth about $450 million, according to Monday’s report, but a number of countries have resumed contributions.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Monday called on donor countries to avoid sending money to the organization.

“The Colonna report ignores the severity of the problem, and offers cosmetic solutions that do not deal with the enormous scope of Hamas’ infiltration of UNRWA,” ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein said. “This is not what a genuine and thorough review looks like. This is what an effort to avoid the problem and not address it head on looks like.”

Colonna, speaking at the United Nations as the report was released, said the panel had been well received by Israelis while conducting its review and she urged the Israeli government not to discount it. “Of course you will find it is insufficient, but please take it on board. Whatever we recommend, if implemented, will bring good.”

The report stresses the critical importance of UNRWA, calling it “irreplaceable and indispensable to Palestinians’ human and economic development” in the absence of a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “pivotal in providing life-saving humanitarian aid and essential social services, particularly in health and education, to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.”

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric welcomed this commitment to UNRWA and said the report “lays out clear recommendations, which the secretary-general accepts.”

UNRWA’s Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini said last week he accepts all recommendations. As Israel has called for the breakup of the agency, Lazzarini told the U.N. Security Council that dismantling UNRWA would deepen Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and speed up the onset of famine.

International experts have warned of imminent famine in northern Gaza and said half the territory’s 2.3 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation if the Israeli-Hamas war intensifies.

Separately, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also ordered the U.N. internal watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, to carry out an investigation into the Israeli allegations that 12 UNRWA staffers participated in the Oct. 7 attacks. That report is eagerly awaited.

In its interim report on March 20, the panel noted UNRWA’s “significant number of mechanisms and procedures to ensure compliance with the humanitarian principles of neutrality” but also identified “critical areas that need to be addressed.”

By CHRISTINE FERNANDO (Associated Press)

CHICAGO (AP) — As President Joe Biden and Donald Trump step up their campaigning in swing states, a quieter battle is taking place in the shadows of their White House rematch.

The Republican National Committee, newly reconstituted under Trump, has filed election-related lawsuits in nearly half the states. Recent lawsuits over voter roll maintenance in Michigan and Nevada are part of a larger strategy targeting various aspects of voting and election administration.

It’s not a new strategy. But with recent internal changes at the RNC and added pressure from the former president, the legal maneuvering is expected to play an increasingly significant role for the party as Election Day in November approaches. The lawsuits are useful for campaign messaging, fundraising and raising doubts about the validity of the election.

Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the RNC and the Trump campaign, said the lawsuits were one of the organization’s main priorities this year.

“This is something that’s very important to President Trump,” she said. “He has said that this is something the RNC should do year-round.”

Democrats and legal experts are warning about how the lawsuits might overwhelm election officials and undermine voter confidence in the the results of the balloting.

The Democratic National Committee has a legal strategy of its own, building “a robust voter protection operation, investing tens of millions of dollars,” to counter the GOP’s efforts that seek to restrict access to the polls, spokesperson Alex Floyd said.

“The RNC is actively deploying an army of lawyers to make it harder for Americans’ ballots to be counted,” he said.

Election litigation soared after the 2020 election as Trump and his allies unsuccessfully challenged his loss to Biden in dozens of lawsuits.

Experts that year wondered whether the blitz of legal action was an aberration caused by false claims of a stolen election and changes to voting processes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, said Miriam Seifter, attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

They quickly realized that wasn’t the case as the 2022 midterms also generated a high number of election-related lawsuits. This year is projected to be similar, she said.

“Litigation seems to now be a fixture of each parties’ political and electoral strategies,” Seifter said.

Voter ID rules, mail ballots and voter roll maintenance are among the RNC’s litigation targets. The latest is a lawsuit this month alleging that Michigan has failed to keep its voter rolls up to date.

Maintaining accurate voter rolls by updating voters’ status is routine for election officials, who watch for death notices, changes in motor vehicle records or election mail being repeatedly returned. Michigan also uses ERIC, an interstate data-sharing pact that helps states update voter lists but has been targeted by conspiracy theories.

Opponents of the lawsuit have said it relies on unsubstantiated, flawed data and runs the risk of purging legitimate voters.

“They’re claiming there’s a problem because one piece of data doesn’t match another piece of data,” said Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor. “But the pieces of data they’re trying to match don’t measure the same thing. It’s like saying, ‘I just looked at the clock and it’s different from the temperature on my thermometer.’”

This is not a new tactic, said Caren Short, director of legal and research for the League of Women Voters, which has filed to intervene in the Michigan lawsuit. She said most previous lawsuits have been from “more fringe groups” rather than directly from the RNC.

“Now seeing a prominent political party attempting to purge people from the rolls, it’s very concerning,” she said.

In the past four years, Michigan’s voter rolls have been targeted in three similar unsuccessful lawsuits. Just days after the Michigan lawsuit was filed, the RNC filed a similar one in Nevada.

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A federal appeals court earlier sided with the RNC in a lawsuit in Pennsylvania questioning whether officials should count improperly dated absentee ballots. A Wisconsin lawsuit is targeting absentee voting procedures and ballot drop boxes. An RNC lawsuit in Arizona is aiming to invalidate or adjust the state’s 200-page elections manual while another in Mississippi seeks to prevent mail ballots from being counted if they are postmarked by Election Day but received days later.

Various other groups have filed similar litigation recently, including a lawsuit against the Maryland State Board of Elections claiming the state’s voting system is not in compliance with federal and state law.

Marly Hornik, CEO of United Sovereign Americans, one of the groups behind the Maryland lawsuit, said more lawsuits are intended in other states this year. On its website, United Sovereign Americans, which Hornik said formed last summer, announced plans to file lawsuits in 23 states.

The GOP and affiliated groups are involved in dozens of other cases with more on the way, RNC officials have said. In this election cycle, the RNC’s legal team has been involved in more than 80 lawsuits in 23 states, said Alvarez, the RNC spokesperson.

She said part of the reason for the flurry of lawsuits was the lifting of a federal consent decree in 2018 that had sharply limited the RNC’s ability to challenge voter verification and other “ballot security.”

During an interview this month with Fox News, the RNC chairman, Michael Whatley, emphasized the party’s plans to prioritize election-related litigation. He said the RNC is recruiting and training tens of thousands of poll observers and working with thousands of attorneys.

On Friday, the RNC announced plans to train poll watchers, poll workers and lawyers and send out more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers to monitor vote-counting across battleground states in November.

Prioritizing election litigation also is reflected in recent changes within the RNC since Whatley and Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, took control and reshaped the organization with a renewed focus on “election integrity.” The RNC now has “election integrity directors” in 13 states.

Christina Bobb, who has promoted false claims of a stolen 2020 election and was part of a Trump-backed fake elector scheme, was tapped to lead the department.

“One of our biggest changes from last cycle to this cycle was making the election integrity department its own department with its own dedicated budget and focus,” Alvarez said.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said most of the lawsuits are unlikely to win in court but “serve as a basis for fundraising and are trying to keep this issue front and center as a campaign issue.”

Democracy groups and legal experts said the lawsuits could pave the way for false narratives challenging the validity of the 2024 election while consuming time and staff at election offices across the country. Post-election lawsuits also could delay or obstruct certification of the results.

“I worry about these lawsuits that are not designed to clarify the rules but instead to lay the groundwork for false claims that an election their side lost was stolen or rigged,” said David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, which advises local election officials nationwide. “We saw this in 2020. We saw it in 2022. And we’re beginning to see the planting of seeds of doubt in the minds of the electorate again in 2024.”

Associated Press writer Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan, contributed to this report.

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Last June, Bernhardt Tiede suffered a likely stroke while living in a prison cell that regularly got up to around 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The 65-year-old—whose story inspired the 2011 Richard Linklater film “Bernie”—is housed at the Estelle Unit in Huntsville. Now, several new parties have joined and expanded a lawsuit Tiede filed last year against the prison system and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton related to its inadequate heat safety measures.

On Monday, Tiede’s attorneys filed an amended complaint, along with the nonprofits Texas Prisons Community Advocates, Lioness: Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, Texas Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants (Texas CURE), and Coalition of Texans with Disabilities. This new complaint expands the suit beyond Tiede’s case, with potential implications for everyone incarcerated in Texas prisons. In the suit, the plaintiffs ask the court to declare that its current heat mitigation policies are unconstitutional and to require the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) to cap prison temperatures at 85 degrees. For 30 years, Texas jails have been required to keep facilities cooler than 85 degrees. Federal prisons in Texas also have a 76 degree maximum, but the state’s prisons have no such upper limit.

“If cooking someone to death does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment, then nothing does,” the complaint said. 

Tiede lives with diabetes, hypertension, emphysema, among other conditions, that all make him more vulnerable to heat. At one point, Tiede was taken by ambulance to a hospital due to heat-related illness. Afterward, “he was returned to the same oven-like cell,” the new complaint says. The incident resulted in permanent partial paralysis, as well as some chronic illnesses, according to the suit. Last August, Tiede filed a civil rights suit in the U.S. Western District Court in Austin and won a temporary injunction moving Tiede to an air-conditioned cell. But that injunction was a temporary relief. TDCJ has the power to move Tiede, and any of the system’s other nearly 130,000 prisoners, to uncooled cells this summer. Last year was the second hottest summer on record in Texas, and climate experts are predicting 2024 will be another brutal one. 

In Texas, less than one-third of the units have fully air conditioned housing areas. Previous lawsuits have led to some progress. Since 2018, TDCJ has installed 8,433 “cool beds”, and another 2,149 are under construction (mostly in state jails). Last year, the Texas Legislature allocated $85 million to the prison system for maintenance projects that have gone toward installing AC in the state’s prisons. (This was after the Texas House approved a budget that would have put more than half a billion dollars toward installing climate control in prisons, but the effort died in the Senate.)

The reality inside an un-airconditioned Texas prison is a miserable one. According to the lawsuit, TDCJ processed nearly 6,000 heat-related grievances over the course of less than a year, from September 2020 to the following August. Men and women housed in stifling units have to improvise ways to try to stay cool, like flooding their cells with toilet water so they can lie in the relatively cool puddles. “Many spend their summer days avoiding any exertion that could bring on heat-related illness (including walking to the chow hall for meals),” the lawsuit said. 

Because of the way many prisons are constructed—old-style brick buildings that trap heat—nighttime in prisons isn’t much better than mid-afternoon. 

“At night it get[s] bad. I lay there and it feels like I want to throw up, and I’m so thirsty that when I get up to drink water out [of] the sink it makes it worse,” one man wrote to the Observer last year. “The fans they sell us … they feel like you are laying under a hair dryer, so really not helping.” 

The lawsuit alleges that at least 40 people died, and hundreds more fell ill, in Texas prisons last year because of the heat. This directly contradicts TDCJ, which told the Observer Monday the agency “has not had a heat-related death since 2012,” despite reporting deaths since then to the Attorney General’s office that list heat as a contributing factor on autopsy reports. 

In June of last year, 37-year-old Elizabeth Hagerty was set to be released. She was transferred from an air conditioned unit to an uncooled one. Shortly after arriving, Hagerty—who suffered from diabetes, hypertension, and asthma—began having trouble breathing, the suit said. She died June 28, a 100 degree day. According to the lawsuit, Hagerty “had a sign in her cell window that read, ‘please give me water,’ but she was ignored.” The suit says high temperatures were cited as a “contributory factor” to her death. 

That same day, June 28, 37-year-old Jon Anthony Southards died at the Estelle Unit. His mother, Tona Southards-Naranjo, who told the Observer she spoke with her son on the phone three times the day he died, is quoted in the lawsuit saying when she saw her son’s body, he had a heat rash “from the top of his head to the backs of his knees.” 

Naranjo told the Observer the medical examiner stated in her son’s autopsy report that heat couldn’t be ruled out as a factor. The family had a separate autopsy done, as well, and the second medical examiner agreed. But still, TDCJ hasn’t released her son’s core body temperature, so they can’t be certain. She said she drove down to the unit the night her son died and took the temperature across the street from the unit. She said it was 98 degrees at 2:35 a.m. “The judge sentenced him to 20 years,” Naranjo said. “A cell sentenced him to death.” 

Advocates are urging TDCJ to keep its prisons cooler than 85 degrees, as what’s sure to be a hot summer looms. Michelle Pitcher

The lawsuit lists 20 deaths between 1998 and 2012, in which the body temperatures ranged from 104.1 degrees to 109.9 degrees Fahrenheit. At least 19 of these people were on medication known to reduce heat tolerance. 

“It is likely that there are many more heat-related injuries and deaths than TDCJ has acknowledged because hyperthermia is known to be an underreported cause of death by medical examiners and pathologists,” the amended complaint said. 

This isn’t the first time an outside group has questioned TDCJ’s lack of reported heat deaths. In 2022, a group of researchers determined that 271 people who died in TDCJ custody between 2001 and 2019 could have died of heat-related issues. 

Heat ranks first among deadly environmental threats. By itself, it’s plenty dangerous. But conditions like hypertension and asthma, as well as many common medications, make it much harder for people to regulate their temperatures.

TDCJ’s own heat mitigation policies don’t dispute that heat can be detrimental to people’s health. But even so, many of the units rely heavily on ventilation and personal fans, strategies that end up just circulating scorching air. For this reason, the inside of Texas prisons are often hotter than outside. The lawsuit includes an excerpt from a 2011 temperature log from the Hutchins Unit in Dallas, where it was noted that the heat index reached “149+” degrees by 10:30 a.m. 

TDCJ’s website lists “enhanced heat protocols” that go into effect from April through October. These measures include increased medical screening, restricting outdoor activities, and training prisoners and guards on how to notice and react to symptoms of heat illnesses. According to the lawsuit, TDCJ’s current policies to mitigate heat—like offering fans and distributing water—are not enough. 

“TDCJ’s heat response amounts to a hospital triage policy during wartime or mass casualty events, where responders must decide who to treat and in what priority order,” the lawsuit said. “It does nothing to address the underlying cause of heat-related illness and death—the heat itself. Unlike responders during wartime, TDCJ can control the heat. It simply refuses to do so.”