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It was just an ordinary Thursday maths class at Abu Ubaida Bin al-Jarrah School in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza. Nine-year-old Ritaj Abdulrahman Rihan sat at her desk, carefully copying down a subtraction exercise for four-digit numbers that her teacher had assigned to the class of 40 pupils. She finished writing the questions, but the blank lines left for her answers would never hold her calculations—instead, they were stained deep red with her blood.

A sniper from Israeli forces stationed near the self-declared “Yellow Line” boundary had shot Ritaj in the head while she sat studying. The young girl was rushed to a local hospital immediately, but medical staff pronounced her dead before her parents could reach her side to say a final goodbye.

For Ritaj’s family, the tragedy carries an unbearable weight. Two years of relentless Israeli military attacks had already destroyed their home, forcing the family to take shelter in a makeshift displacement camp. Even amid the chaos and constant risk of violence, Ritaj’s parents prioritized their daughter’s education: the couple walked 1 kilometer each way every day to get Ritaj to and from class, determined that she would have the chance to learn like any child in the world.

Ritaj was the couple’s first child, their eldest joy, and had only just returned to full-time schooling that academic year. For two years, repeated military offensives and forced displacement had kept her out of the classroom, and this was her first chance to attend regular classes following the US-brokered ceasefire that took effect in October 2025. Even though classes were held in partially damaged buildings or makeshift structures rather than a fully intact school, her father Abdulrahman said any education was better than none for his daughter.

“We were happy she had grown up enough and remained alive and healthy after two years of genocide to carry a school bag and notebooks. She was finally back at school. She was clever and loved school,” Abdulrahman told Middle East Eye, recalling the shock he received just an hour after dropping his daughter off that morning.

The school was chosen specifically because it sits 2 kilometers away from the Yellow Line, the unilaterally imposed military boundary Israel has drawn inside the Gaza Strip, in what was marketed as a relatively safe area. The boundary, put in place after the October ceasefire, bars Palestinian civilians from entering large swathes of northern, southern and eastern Gaza on penalty of death. Despite this designation, Israeli troops and snipers positioned along the line have repeatedly opened fire on residential neighborhoods and civilian infrastructure well within the declared safe zone.

“The school is supposed to be in a safe area. It is not close to the Yellow Line, and this is why we felt comfortable enough to send her there to learn,” said Ritaj’s mother Ola Rihan. She recalled dressing her daughter that morning, combing and braiding her hair, sending her off with a smile—only to receive her daughter’s body hours later, wrapped in a burial shroud instead of the new dress Ola had bought for her to wear to an upcoming family wedding.

Along with Ritaj’s body, Ola received her daughter’s bloodstained math notebook, a memento she calls the clearest evidence of Israel’s crimes against Palestinian children. “This is her notebook, and here is the lesson she was studying today, but could not finish. These are the pages stained with my daughter’s blood. This is not ink; this is my daughter’s blood,” Ola said, holding the damaged notebook for reporters. “Ritaj was the most precious thing I had. She was a piece of my soul.”

The unfulfilled plans for Ritaj’s future only deepen the family’s grief: Ola had purchased a new dress and pair of shoes for Ritaj to wear to her uncle’s wedding the following week. The young girl had been excited for the event, but she never got the chance to put the clothes on. Today, they sit in the family’s tent, unworn, a reminder of the future that will never happen.

This is not the first loss Ola has endured at the hands of Israeli attacks. She already lost her mother, a sister, her sister’s young children, and an uncle to previous violence in Gaza. Now, with the death of her daughter, she says the cumulative trauma has left the family exhausted, broken by unending shock after shock.

Ritaj’s killing is far from an isolated incident. Since the October 2025 ceasefire, Israeli forces have killed and injured dozens of Palestinian civilians in and near the Yellow Line, even in areas labeled as safe for returning residents. The boundary has expanded month by month, swallowing more Gaza territory and displacing thousands of civilians who had returned to their homes under the terms of the ceasefire agreement. In many cases, Israeli forces have demolished entire residential neighborhoods and bombed homes after bringing the land under their boundary control.

Ola argues that the targeting of children even in schools is a deliberate policy: “Our children are killed all the time. Even after they finally managed to attend school. The occupation wants to stop the educational process. It does not want a generation to grow up educated and capable.” The family pleads for an end to the violence that has stolen so many of their loved ones, saying they cannot bear to lose another member to the ongoing conflict.

The Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints, carries 20 percent of the globe’s total oil and natural gas supplies, making its ongoing instability a matter of urgent international concern. As military tensions between the US-Israeli bloc and Iran have escalated into active strikes across the region, commercial shipping operations through the strategic waterway have ground to a complete halt.

While diplomatic negotiations have recently resulted in a temporary ceasefire agreement to de-escalate hostilities, normal commercial traffic has yet to resume through the strait. Industry analysts and global policymakers warn that prolonged disruptions to energy transit through Hormuz could send shockwaves through already fragile global energy markets, driving up fuel prices, exacerbating inflationary pressures, and derailing fragile post-pandemic economic recovery efforts worldwide.

Beyond economic risks, the unresolved standoff puts thousands of civilian seafarers, port workers, and regional civilian populations at grave risk of injury or death amid the lingering threat of renewed military conflict. International stakeholders have widely echoed the urgent call to fully halt military activities, lock in lasting peace, and restore stability to the Hormuz region to protect civilian lives and prevent further damage to the global economy.

Deep inside a flimsy displacement tent in Gaza City, 63-year-old Inshirah Hajjaj was fighting to fall asleep one night, brushing off the scurry of a small mouse near her pillow. What she could not have anticipated was that a far larger rodent would begin gnawing at her toes, an attack she barely felt due to advanced diabetes that has deadened sensation in her limbs.

Hajjaj did not discover the bite until the following morning, when her sister-in-law spotted the open wound and reacted in horror. “At the time, I thought my foot had simply brushed against something sharp inside the tent, and I hadn’t felt it,” Hajjaj told Middle East Eye in an interview. “But in the following days, my toes began to swell and turn blue. Then I started waking up to find new wounds appearing every morning.”

Hajjaj is far from alone in this nightmare. For months, hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians across Gaza have been battling an exploding rodent infestation that has spread rapidly through overcrowded, makeshift tent settlements, a public health disaster unfolding directly alongside the widespread destruction of Israeli military operations. Today, roughly 1.5 million of Gaza’s total 2.2 million residents are crowded into temporary shelters—from tattered canvas tents to hastily built informal structures—after two years of bombardment that has levelled an estimated 80 percent of all residential structures across the Strip.

The conditions that created this infestation are directly tied to the collapse of basic infrastructure in Gaza. With Israel banning the entry of most construction materials and raw materials remaining in critically short supply, displaced families have been forced to build rudimentary, unregulated sanitation systems: open-air latrines with no connecting sewage networks, and buried waste barrels that leak into surrounding soil. Stagnant wastewater and accumulating organic waste have created ideal breeding conditions for rats and insects, allowing their populations to explode across every displacement camp in the territory.

After noticing her worsening condition, Hajjaj traveled to a local field hospital for care. There, doctors confirmed she was suffering from early-stage blood poisoning caused by the rat bite. “How painful it is for a chronic patient with advanced diabetes to have rats feeding on parts of my body at night without me even noticing,” she said. The trauma of the attack has lingered long after the initial wound. “Last night, I went to the bathroom and found a large rat standing right in front of me. I was terrified. I started screaming for my relatives to rescue me before I lost consciousness,” she recalled. “I never imagined rats would eat my feet. It devoured my body while I slept. It had been eating my feet every day without mercy. After the rat gnawed at my toes, I don’t think I will ever be able to sleep peacefully again.”

For 28-day-old Adam al-Ustaz, the danger came even sooner, just weeks after he was born into displacement in the al-Maqousi area of northwestern Gaza City. His father, Youssef, woke in the middle of the night to the infant’s ear-piercing screams. When he switched on his mobile phone flashlight, he found Adam’s small face soaked in blood, with a large rat hiding under a small camp table nearby.

Youssef rushed his newborn son to Rantisi Hospital, where doctors confirmed the wounds were rat bites. Adam is one of hundreds of children across Gaza treated for rodent attacks in recent months, alongside a surge in preventable digestive and respiratory illnesses worsened by the unsanitary camp conditions. “I don’t know what this child’s fault is, to be born in a tent made of worn-out fabric and to be vulnerable to attacks by rats every night,” al-Ustaz said. “We repeatedly tried to buy rat poison, but it is extremely scarce and prohibitively expensive for displaced families. If our home had not been destroyed, we would have lived in safety, without my child facing creatures that threaten his life every day.”

United Nations data underscores the scale of destruction that has created this public health emergency. Jorge Moreira da Silva, executive director of the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS), confirmed that Gaza is now covered in more than 60 million tonnes of rubble from destroyed buildings, a clearance project that experts estimate will take decades to complete. UN calculations show that every resident of Gaza is surrounded by an average of 30 tonnes of collapsed building debris, which provides ample shelter for rat populations to spread undisturbed.

Local authorities in Gaza say they are completely overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis, with thousands of complaints about rodent invasions flooding into the Gaza Municipality every single day. “Despite our efforts to address the rodent problem, such as partial sewage interventions and removing random garbage dumps, we cannot eliminate the problem under current conditions,” Hosni Muhanna, spokesperson for the Gaza Municipality, told Middle East Eye. “The scale of the disaster far exceeds available capacities. The war decimated infrastructure, especially sewage networks. It left over 25 million tonnes of rubble in Gaza City alone, along with 350,000 tonnes of solid waste accumulating in residential neighbourhoods.”

Muhanna added that the municipality cannot launch large-scale pest control or waste clearance operations due to sweeping Israeli restrictions on border crossings, which block the entry of critical supplies including pest control chemicals, fuel, heavy machinery, and spare parts needed for rubble removal. “Any meaningful response would require far more than rat poison,” he explained, noting that the rodent crisis is inextricably tied to the wider humanitarian and military crisis playing out across Gaza.

The UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) has also highlighted the growing emergency in its recent situation reports, confirming that rodent populations have spread across nearly all official and informal displacement sites, and warning that there is an “urgent need for pest-control materials and chemicals” to curb the infestation. Local medical professionals have issued additional warnings that rat bites and scratches can turn life-threatening in Gaza’s current environment, as the ongoing Israeli siege has left the territory critically short of life-saving antibiotics and basic medical supplies.

For Hajjaj and thousands of other displaced Palestinians, the suffering extends far beyond physical injury. The constant threat of rodent attacks has created a pervasive state of psychological trauma, with no end to the crisis in sight amid stalled reconstruction and ongoing military pressure. “Waste surrounds our tents on every side, and the rubble of bombed houses is everywhere,” Hajjaj said. “Every day we see dozens, even hundreds of mice spreading through the debris and into the camps. The greatest suffering is not only the injury itself but the absence of any refuge or solution as I face a future with no reconstruction in sight.”

On a Wednesday that would see Israel launch one of its deadliest single waves of attacks on Lebanese territory in months, a British military drone carried out a mysterious flight over Lebanon, including low-altitude circling near the eastern city of Baalbek, flight tracking data analyzed by Middle East Eye (MEE) confirms.

The unmanned Royal Air Force (RAF) MQ-9B Protector drone took off from RAF Akrotiri, the UK’s strategically located permanent military base on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, in the early hours of Wednesday, and entered Lebanese airspace at approximately 6:20 a.m. local time, according to the analysis. From 6:30 a.m. to 6:50 a.m., the aircraft maintained a circular flight path over a region near the towns of Baalbek and Younine, located in eastern Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley just kilometers from the Syrian border.

Flight tracking logs show the drone crossed into Syrian airspace around 8 a.m., flying north past the central Syrian city of Homs before traversing the northwestern province of Idlib. No public flight data records the drone’s movements for the following roughly 12 hours, but the aircraft reappeared near Baalbek at approximately 8:15 p.m. — several hours after Israel’s large-scale early-afternoon strikes that left more than 300 people dead across Lebanon. It then traveled west across Baalbek, passed north of the capital Beirut, exited Lebanese airspace around 8:30 p.m., and returned to its base in Cyprus.

The Protector drone is a workhorse of RAF operations, regularly deployed for missions ranging from long-range surveillance and search and rescue to armed combat operations alongside NATO and U.S. forces, official RAF documentation confirms. What makes this flight notable is its timing: it operated over Lebanon both before and after Wednesday’s devastating Israeli strike wave, which came just one day after a two-week ceasefire between Iran and the United States was brokered. The purpose of the flight has not been disclosed by UK defense officials.

MEE has submitted two key questions to the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD): whether the flight was coordinated and cleared in advance with the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), and whether any intelligence or surveillance data collected during the mission was shared with Israeli or U.S. authorities. As of publication, no response has been received.

Local casualty data confirms the scale of the Israeli strikes that coincided with the British drone’s presence: Lebanon’s civil defense rescue organization reports 18 people killed and 28 wounded in strikes targeting Baalbek alone. Wednesday’s attacks were unannounced and intensive, hitting central Beirut and its suburbs simultaneously alongside multiple locations in southern Lebanon and the eastern Beqaa Valley.

The UK has a long-standing military relationship with Lebanon, focused primarily on border security assistance: since 2009, British military trainers have trained tens of thousands of LAF personnel, most assigned to the force’s Land Border Regiments, and the UK has funded the construction and upgrade of dozens of border observation posts along Lebanon’s northern and eastern frontiers.

RAF Akrotiri, the launch point for Wednesday’s drone flight, has already been a source of significant controversy during the ongoing regional conflict. Throughout Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip, the base has hosted hundreds of RAF surveillance flights over the besieged enclave. The MoD has repeatedly claimed these flights were conducted exclusively to support Israeli hostage rescue operations, but the program has been wrapped in layers of official secrecy. Over the past two years, evidence has emerged that British officials share surveillance intelligence with Israel, and that RAF aircraft captured footage of Gaza on days when Israeli strikes killed British citizens in the territory.

A source familiar with British intelligence capabilities in the Middle East told MEE last year that the Gaza surveillance flights gave Britain an unobstructed, high-altitude “bird’s-eye view of the genocide” unfolding in the enclave. The source added that the UK, a core member of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance alongside the U.S., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, is the “number one gatherer of intelligence” across the Middle East, with better situational awareness of on-the-ground events than any other external actor.

The UK also maintains a deep, formal defense partnership with Israel: in 2020, the two countries signed a classified military cooperation agreement designed to formalize and expand bilateral defense ties. The full text of the agreement has never been released to the public. Former Conservative UK defense minister James Heappey stated in 2021 that the accord would “streamline and provide a mechanism for planning our joint activity”. In 2024, Labour defense minister Luke Pollard confirmed the government would not declassify the agreement due to its high security classification, and the MoD confirmed last October that the agreement remains in full force, according to reporting from Declassified UK.

During the open conflict between the U.S.-Israeli alliance and Iran that began in late February, the UK repeatedly stated it would not participate directly in offensive operations, but it did allow American bombers to use British military bases to launch strikes targeting Iranian missile sites.

In comments released Thursday, British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said the UK government believes Lebanon must be included in the terms of the Iran-U.S. ceasefire agreed Tuesday night. That ceasefire has been marked by conflicting claims over its scope: Pakistan, which mediated the bilateral truce, stated the two-week pause in fighting would extend to all fronts, including Lebanon. Israel has rejected that claim, and its large-scale strikes on Lebanon continued unchanged through Wednesday.

Following international outcry over Wednesday’s high-casualty strikes and threats of expanded retaliation from Iran, Israeli officials announced they would reduce the scope of their offensive operations in Lebanon and agreed to hold direct talks with the Lebanese government in Washington next week.

Lebanese government data puts the total death toll from Israeli air strikes across Lebanon at roughly 1,900 people since the outbreak of the war in late February, with more than one million Lebanese displaced from their homes. The conflict spread to Lebanon in early March, after Hezbollah launched a large rocket barrage across the Israeli border. The group said the attack was both in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, a key spiritual and political patron for the movement, and a pre-emptive strike to stop a planned large-scale Israeli invasion of Lebanon, a assessment that has been corroborated by independent reporting in Israeli media.

As Pakistan finalizes security preparations for a high-stakes diplomatic gathering in Islamabad, negotiators from the United States and Iran are gearing up for what may prove one of the most consequential international negotiations of the year, set to open Saturday April 11, 2026. The talks aim to shore up a fragile two-week-old ceasefire that has already been pushed to the breaking point, undermined by ongoing Israeli military operations in Lebanon and intractable disagreements over core truce terms between Washington and Tehran.

The negotiations, which are scheduled to run for up to 15 days, will tackle a series of explosive, long-simmering issues beyond the immediate ceasefire, including constraints on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and unimpeded commercial navigation through the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz — the chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil shipments pass. Even as Islamabad has ramped up security across the capital to safeguard the delegations, Iran has explicitly tied its continued participation in the talks to an immediate end to Israeli attacks on Lebanese territory.

Leading the American delegation is US Vice President JD Vance, while Iran has kept details of its negotiating team closely held. Top Iranian officials have already gone as far as to argue that ongoing Israeli strikes in Lebanon render the entire diplomatic process in Pakistan meaningless. “The holding of talks to end the war is dependent on the US adhering to its ceasefire commitments on all fronts, especially in Lebanon,” Esmaeil Baqaei, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, confirmed this week.

The fragile truce faced a fresh wave of uncertainty Thursday, when US President Donald Trump publicly questioned its effectiveness in a social media post, accusing Iran of failing to uphold its commitments to allow free oil passage through the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing oil to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!” Trump wrote.

Early Friday, ship-tracking data highlighted the growing volatility around the strait, which Iran effectively controls. A Botswana-flagged liquefied natural gas tanker that had begun moving toward the exit of the Persian Gulf along a route approved by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unexpectedly reversed course mid-voyage, stoking market jitters over potential further disruptions to global energy supplies.

On Thursday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei announced that Tehran would shift management of the strait into what he called a “new phase,” framing the move as a reflection of the Iranian people’s “decisive victory” in the ongoing conflict. The announcement came 40 days after the death of former supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in US-Israeli airstrikes at the outbreak of hostilities.

The de facto partial closure of the strait has already sent global energy prices skyrocketing, rippling through global supply chains to raise costs for gasoline, food, and essential consumer goods far beyond the Middle East. As of Friday, the spot price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, traded near $96 per barrel — a 35% jump since the start of the conflict.

International economic officials have already sounded the alarm over the conflict’s far-reaching impact. Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, warned Thursday that the Iran war has darkened the outlook for the global economy, regardless of whether the current fragile ceasefire survives. “Had it not been for this shock, we would have been upgrading global growth,” Georgieva told reporters ahead of next week’s joint IMF-World Bank spring meetings. “But now, even our most hopeful scenario involves a growth downgrade.”

Tensions continued to climb Friday, after Israel carried out fresh airstrikes targeting 10 rocket launchers in Lebanese territory. The strikes came just two days after Israel launched its heaviest bombardment of Lebanon since February 28, an attack that killed more than 300 people and delivered a major blow to ceasefire hopes. Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who is widely tipped as a potential lead negotiator for Tehran in talks with Vance, warned Thursday that continued Israeli attacks on the Iran-aligned militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon would carry “explicit costs and strong responses.”

In a separate development Thursday, Kuwait announced it had faced a drone attack overnight and blamed Tehran for the strike, though Iran’s Revolutionary Guard quickly issued a denial of any involvement in the incident.

Despite the headwinds facing the Islamabad talks, there is a parallel diplomatic track in the works: a US State Department official confirmed Friday that Israel-Lebanon negotiations are scheduled to kick off next week in Washington, a development that could offer a small boost to regional ceasefire efforts. Still, many analysts remain deeply skeptical that any breakthrough is imminent.

Abid Abou Shhadeh, a Jaffa-based Israeli political analyst and activist, described the US-Iran ceasefire talks as “extremely problematic” from Israel’s perspective. According to a report from Al Jazeera, Shhadeh noted that Israeli leadership has no interest in any diplomatic settlement with Lebanon, a position aligned with public opinion: recent polls published in Israeli media show 79% of the Israeli public supports continuing military operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In a groundbreaking moment for the global Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV will make the first official papal visit to Algeria this April, kicking off a multi-nation African tour that will also take him to Cameroon, Angola and Equatorial Guinea from April 13 to 15. The visit carries deep personal and historical meaning, tied closely to the pontiff’s lifelong connection to Saint Augustine, the iconic fourth-century theologian whose origins are deeply rooted in what is now northeastern Algeria.

Pope Leo, born Robert Francis Prevost in the United States, has identified himself as a devoted Augustinian from his earliest days in the Church. He joined the Augustinian Order at age 22 after studying mathematics and philosophy in Philadelphia, and eventually rose to lead the order as its prior general. His connection to Algeria stretches back more than two decades: in 2001, he first visited the North African country to attend an international symposium on Saint Augustine hosted by the University of Annaba. As Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco, Archbishop of Algiers, revealed, he encouraged the newly elected pope to prioritize an Algerian visit within the first months of his pontificate.

Saint Augustine, one of the most influential thinkers in Christian history, was born in 354 CE in Thagaste, a Amazigh-Roman settlement that is today the Algerian city of Souk Ahras. He later served as bishop of Hippo Regius, the ancient name for Annaba, the second stop on Pope Leo’s upcoming itinerary. In his first public address after his election in Rome’s St. Peter’s Square last May, the pope highlighted his Augustinian identity, quoting the theologian’s famous words: “With you I am a Christian, and for you I am a bishop.” The remark resonated strongly in Algerian media, which has emphasized the new pope’s deep reverence for the North African-born scholar.

For Algerian historian Abdenasser Smail, author of the recently published *Saint-Augustin, un Nord-Africain universel*, the visit is as much an act of historical reckoning as it is a religious pilgrimage. “Augustine is a figure rooted in North African geography and culture. Yet, this essential dimension has long been obscured, both in Western representations and in contemporary Algerian national narratives,” Smail explained. He argues that the pope’s tribute to Saint Augustine corrects this historical erasure, noting that even in majority-Muslim Algeria, citizens can take pride in the thinker as a native son. “Being proud of one’s history doesn’t mean adopting another faith. It means recognising that this land has produced multiple great figures. To deny this is not to defend Islam. It is to impoverish our own memory,” Smail added.

Pope Leo’s itinerary reflects the dual religious and historical significance of the trip. After arriving in the capital Algiers, he will deliver a public address at the Martyrs’ Monument, a memorial to those who died in Algeria’s war of independence from French rule, followed by a meeting with the country’s top government leaders at the Great Mosque’s conference center. In Algiers, he will also pray at the chapel dedicated to the 19 Christian religious figures killed during Algeria’s brutal 1992–2002 civil war, a period known locally as the “Black Decade.” These victims, which included Bishop Pierre Claverie of Oran and the seven monks of Tibhirine, were declared martyrs by former Pope Francis and beatified in 2018 in the first such ceremony ever held in a Muslim-majority nation. The trip will conclude with a visit to Annaba’s Saint Augustine Basilica, which is currently undergoing maintenance in preparation for the pontiff’s arrival.

Algerian authorities have placed exceptional importance on the historic visit, with President Abdelmadjid Tebboune personally overseeing all preparations. Annaba has undergone extensive public works, including road resurfacing, street cleaning and infrastructure upgrades along the route to the basilica, to welcome the pope.

Beyond honoring Saint Augustine, the visit also offers a gesture of support to Algeria’s small but deeply rooted Catholic community. Out of Algeria’s total population of 46 million, just around 4,200 Catholics live across the country’s four dioceses, a sharp decline from the colonial era when thousands of European Catholics resided in the territory. Most current faithful are foreign migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, with only a few hundred native Algerian Catholics remaining. The community traces its modern evolution to the work of Cardinal Leon-Etienne Duval, who served as Archbishop of Algiers from 1954 to 1988. Duval famously condemned French colonial torture and massacres just one year after the outbreak of Algeria’s independence war, supported Algerian self-determination, and transformed the Catholic Church in the country from a colonial institution into a locally rooted, state-recognized organization that retained its social service missions after independence in 1962.

Today, the small Catholic community coexists peacefully with Algeria’s majority-Muslim population, and its status as an officially recognized religious body allows it to operate openly, even running schools and medical clinics that serve all Algerians. “I live my faith discreetly, as required by the fact that I live in a Muslim society, but I have never received a single derogatory remark,” said Simon, an Ivorian student studying in Algiers who attends weekly mass and participates in the community’s charitable outreach for disadvantaged Algerian children. For Algeria’s Catholic faithful, the pope’s visit is a momentous occasion. “It’s a gift, a grace, for our little flock here in Algeria,” Simon added.

However, the visit also brings forward unresolved issues around religious freedom and human rights that have drawn international attention. While the Catholic Church enjoys official recognition, other Christian groups face severe restrictions. A 2006 Algerian decree requires all religious communities practicing faiths other than Islam to obtain state authorization for their activities and places of worship. The Protestant Church of Algeria, despite official recognition in 2011, has seen all its public places of worship closed by authorities, who accuse evangelical Protestants of proselytizing and unlawful conversions – activities banned under Algerian law. Multiple pastors face legal prosecution, and many minority religious adherents decline to speak publicly for fear of government reprisal. The restrictions also extend to other minority groups, including the Ahmadiyya community, whose members are labeled heretics by the Sunni majority.

In advance of the visit, three major international human rights NGOs – EuroMed Rights, Human Rights Watch and the MENA Rights Group – issued an open letter urging Pope Leo to raise these concerns, as well as the issue of widespread arbitrary detention, during his meetings with Algerian leaders. “Hundreds of protesters, activists, journalists and human rights defenders have been arbitrarily detained, unjustly prosecuted and sentenced to prison terms for exercising their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly,” the groups wrote, calling on the pontiff to press Algerian authorities to end religious discrimination and release unjustly detained individuals.

It was an ordinary Wednesday afternoon for thousands of Lebanese civilians going about their daily routines across Beirut, the Beqaa Valley and southern Lebanon. But just after 2 p.m. local time, that quiet normalcy was shattered forever when Israeli warplanes launched a simultaneous wave of intensive airstrikes targeting densely populated residential neighborhoods, leaving more than 300 people dead and over 1,150 injured, according to Lebanon’s official health ministry.

For 15-year-old Abdelwahab, who only provided his first name to reporters, the strike on Beirut’s working-class Corniche el Mazraa district interrupted his efforts to earn money for his mother’s cancer treatment, where he worked selling bottled water from a small street kiosk near the Cola roundabout. The first sensation he recalled after the blast was an eerie, deafening silence, quickly replaced by thick plumes of mixed black and white smoke, choking dust, and the panicked screams of injured and trapped survivors. When the air began to clear, Abdelwahab ran toward the destroyed site near a local branch of Rifai Nuts, a beloved Lebanese roastery where surrounding apartment buildings and a public parking lot had been torn apart by the impact.

Among the rubble, the teen first spotted a severed, burned arm – a sight that would haunt him, but he pushed past the shock to start pulling survivors and victims from the wreckage. “There was nothing to do but help. Even a one-year-old would try,” he explained to reporters from Middle East Eye. He carried broken bodies from the debris, half-closing his eyes to block out the gore that threatened to stop him, and kept working long after official civil defense teams arrived on scene. Even with a face mask, he said, the acrid smell of smoke and decomposing bodies clung to him.

Among the dead was Nader Khalil, a 35-year employee of the roastery who had bought water from Abdelwahab’s kiosk every single day. “He was a nice man. What did he do to deserve this?” the teen asked. That night, he returned home to his sick mother and made up gentle stories to hide the horrors he had witnessed, unwilling to add to her burden. The next day, he went back to his kiosk, but the once-busy neighborhood felt hollow: shops were shuttered, traffic was sparse, and the street was nearly empty, drained by both fear and a national day of mourning.

Not far from Abdelwahab’s kiosk, 47-year-old Samir Assaf, a Palestinian refugee who fled the destroyed Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria during that country’s civil war to rebuild his life in Beirut, also survived the strike by chance. Assaf makes a meager living selling tissue packets to drivers at the nearby traffic intersection, supporting his wife and two children. On Wednesday afternoon, he had stepped into the shade for a quick break when the blast hit, throwing him straight to the ground. When he scrambled to his feet, his vision was completely obscured by smoke, and the entire parking lot in front of him was turned to black ash. The only thing he could make out through the haze was the red glow of the traffic light, still burning unchanged in the distance.

“I was able to call my wife to tell her I’m alive. But many people who work nearby didn’t make it,” he said. The strike killed civilians across the neighborhood: the owner of a local flower shop, the building’s doorman, a traveling sheikh, and even young patients being treated at a second-floor children’s clinic. “We felt death, we felt it. May no one ever feel it,” Assaf said.

The day after the attack, Assaf and his family were forced back to Corniche el Mazraa. They had received an Israeli evacuation warning for their home neighborhood of Jnah – a notification that almost always precedes new airstrikes – and were seeking temporary shelter with relatives nearby. But they also came back to see what was left of the street corner where Assaf had built his livelihood and daily routine. For Assaf’s wife Wessam, the destruction brought back unbearable trauma from her time fleeing Syria. “We escaped the Yarmouk refugee camp because of the bombardment, and now we are here and there’s bombardment again. This place reminds me of Yarmouk,” she said.

Similar scenes of destruction and grief unfolded across Beirut on Wednesday. In Ain el Mreisseh, a coastal neighborhood known for its charming historic residential architecture, an Israeli airstrike hit a mid-rise apartment block. Neighboring resident Yousef, who only gave his first name, recalled that the building stood for just seconds before half of it collapsed, killing all the civilians trapped inside. “There was no air, just dust,” he said. “Some people were able to get out, others were not so lucky.”

Official rescue operations launched immediately after the strikes and stretched through Thursday night. Civil defense teams set up massive floodlights to work after dark, using heavy excavators to carefully sift through tons of concrete and twisted rebar, searching for any remaining survivors and missing victims. The air hung thick with dust and unspoken grief: one entire side of the collapsed Ain el Mreisseh building had been torn away, leaving the private interiors of family homes exposed to the street. Fragments of ordinary life stood frozen mid-moment: a dress hanging undamaged in a closet, a table lamp still standing upright, a painting hanging crookedly on a half-broken wall, bathroom tiles still intact beneath piles of rubble.

By nightfall, all but one of the victims had been recovered from the Ain el Mreisseh rubble. The only person missing was 26-year-old Zahraa, niece of a middle-aged man who stood watching over the excavation all night, never leaving the top of the rubble pile. When rescue crews got close to where they believed her body was located, the heavy excavator slowed to a delicate, careful pace, its movements almost gentle to avoid causing further damage. At times, crews put down the heavy machinery altogether and picked up shovels, or even dug with their bare hands.

Around the grieving uncle, dozens of other people – relatives of other victims, neighbors, and even complete strangers – stayed long after their own loved ones had been recovered. They stood with him in total silence, an unspoken act of solidarity to make sure he did not have to wait alone, bound by shared grief in the aftermath of a devastating attack that has upended countless civilian lives across Lebanon.