分类： world

By midday on Jerusalem Day 2026, the narrow, usually bustling lanes of Jerusalem’s Old City Muslim Quarter had fallen eerily silent. Most storefronts were shuttered with metal security shutters pulled tight, and Palestinian residents who once filled the area had locked themselves indoors or fled entirely.

Fadi, a 48-year-old local shop owner, summed up the harsh reality facing local traders as he dragged his outdoor display table inside and secured his shop for the day. “If I don’t want to get attacked, I have to close,” he explained.

Under ordinary conditions, Thursdays draw throngs of visitors and locals to the Old City’s historic markets, turning the quarter into a vibrant hub of commerce and community. This year, however, the annual ultra-nationalist Flag March, a provocative event marking Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War, forced local Palestinians to cede their own neighborhood to the procession. Organizers intentionally route the march directly through the Muslim Quarter as a deliberate show of dominance, turning the area into a flashpoint for sectarian violence year after year.

Even hours before the official event was set to kick off, far-right Israeli settlers, identifiable by their traditional knitted kippahs and long side curls (peyot), began roaming the quarter. A group of teenage settlers passing a still-open Palestinian shop launched into a torrent of anti-Palestinian slurs, and the confrontation quickly escalated into a physical assault on two shop owners. The shopkeepers defended themselves with plastic chairs while activists from the grassroots group Protective Presence stepped in to de-escalate the clash. The entire confrontation lasted less than 30 seconds, but it set the tone for the rest of the day: the young attackers faced no immediate intervention or arrest, offering an early preview of the impunity that would define the day’s violence.

Despite a heavy visible deployment of armed Israeli police across the Old City, dozens of Palestinian business owners later reported their storefronts had been vandalized or ransacked by march participants. This pattern of violence repeats annually, tied directly to Israel’s national celebration of its 1967 occupation of East Jerusalem and the formal declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s unified capital. In recent years, the march has been increasingly dominated by far-right political factions, growing more aggressive and volatile as it is weaponized to assert unchecked Israeli control over the city’s majority-Palestinian resident population.

Human rights and community activists have repeatedly documented that Israeli security forces rarely intervene to stop attacks on Palestinians or protect their property during the march, even when offenders are young and easily contained. To fill this gap left by intentional state neglect, local and international activist groups have organized volunteer protective presence teams to monitor the event and support Palestinian residents.

“Every year there is bullying, verbal hate and physical violence,” explained Yonatan Shargian, an organizer with the grassroots movement Standing Together. He noted that while the number of volunteers has grown in lockstep with rising violence, their work serves a broader purpose beyond de-escalation: sending a message that “this place belongs to all of us, and everyone deserves to feel safe and protected”.

Further tension ignited near the holy site of Al-Aqsa Mosque, when far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir led a group of hundreds of settlers into the mosque compound. The politician waved an Israeli flag and declared “The Temple Mount is in our hands”, echoing the extremist movement’s demand for full Israeli sovereignty over the site, which is the third-holiest in Islam. Joining Ben Gvir was lawmaker Yitzhak Kroizer, who later posted on Facebook calling for the full removal of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the construction of a Third Jewish Temple in its place.

As the afternoon wore on, hundreds of ultra-nationalist marchers gathered at Damascus Gate, the main entry point to the Muslim Quarter and Al-Aqsa Compound. Groups of teenage boys and adult men took turns chanting virulent hate speech, including calls for “Death to Arabs” and overtly racist, misogynistic slurs targeting Palestinian people. While activist volunteers stayed close to escort the few Palestinians who remained in the area to their homes, both volunteers and on-site journalists soon became the primary targets of aggression.

At one point, a crowd of young ultra-nationalists surrounded a working journalist, shoved him against a wall, threw his phone to the ground, and spat in his face. As they had after every attack throughout the day, Israeli police intervened only to break up the confrontation after the violence was already over, allowing the attackers to break into celebratory victory chants. In this instance, the crowd jeered “May your village burn” as they dispersed.

Shortly after the incident, activists and journalists were forced out of the procession route to clear the way for the main Flag March. What began as scattered small groups swelled into a massive sea of participants, moving through Damascus Gate in successive waves toward the Western Wall. The entire area was flooded with Israeli national flags, alongside dozens of the so-called Third Temple flags: a widely recognized symbol of the movement to demolish Al-Aqsa Mosque and build a Jewish temple on the site.

Provocative signage and accessories dotted the crowd, including a large banner reading, “It’s not Al-Aqsa, it’s the Temple Mount. You want a massacre? You’ll get the Nakba,” referencing the 1948 displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the founding of Israel. Many marchers also wore stickers featuring Ben Gvir’s image alongside a noose, a reference to the recently passed death penalty bill for Palestinian political prisoners that the minister championed in the Israeli Knesset.

Before entering the Old City, each group of marchers paused to sing nationalist and religious hymns, openly celebrating their display of control over the Palestinian neighborhood. While the day was marked by widespread violence, many long-time activist observers noted that 2026’s event felt comparatively less chaotic than previous years—a shift they attributed not to less extremism, but to the fact that most Palestinians had already been forced out of the area, leaving far fewer targets for abuse.

For a national holiday that celebrates the unification of Jerusalem under Israeli control, the mass absence of Palestinian residents from their own neighborhood offered the clearest possible reflection of what that “unification” actually entails: the quiet, systematic erasure of the Palestinian community that has lived in the city for generations.

At 95 years old, Fatema Obaid carries a lifetime of trauma that few can imagine: she has survived two catastrophic displacement events, watched 70 of her family members killed in ongoing violence, and endured months of Israeli bombardment, systematic starvation, and repeated forced displacement across the Gaza Strip. Yet this grandmother, who first lived through the 1948 Nakba as a young girl, has rejected repeated Israeli military orders to leave Gaza City in the current conflict, warning that fleeing a second time would usher in an even crueler catastrophe than the one she endured 75 years ago.

Speaking from an unfinished apartment in western Gaza City, where she now shelters alongside her surviving grandchildren, Obaid framed the current violence as an escalation of the displacement and dispossession that began with the 1948 Nakba. “In the first Nakba, it is true that hundreds of thousands lost their land, homes and villages,” she told Middle East Eye in an interview published in 2026. “But in this Nakba, we have lost an entire history. We lost entire families, and entire generations have been destroyed for decades to come. What they could not do in 1948, they are doing now.”

Obaid was born and raised in Gaza City’s Shujaiya neighbourhood, close to the de facto border between Israel and Gaza that emerged after the 1949 armistice agreement. In 1948, Zionist militias launched widespread attacks on Palestinian towns and villages across historic Palestine, forcibly expelling some 750,000 Palestinians—roughly 75 percent of the territory’s Palestinian population—to make way for the creation of the state of Israel; an event widely categorized by scholars as ethnic cleansing. Obaid and her family were temporarily displaced for several months that year, but eventually returned to their home in Shujaiya, which remained outside Israeli control after the 1949 ceasefire.

More than 75 years later, Obaid has found herself reliving the same trauma of displacement, but this time with far greater brutality. She draws a sharp line between the 1948 catastrophe and the current war, arguing there is no comparison between the two events.

Obaid’s experience mirrors that of generations of Palestinians in Gaza. In 1948, tens of thousands of expelled Palestinians flooded into Gaza, expecting to return to their homes within days when the fighting ended. Instead, the enclave became a permanent, overcrowded refuge for displaced families. Today, around 1.6 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants—approximately 73 percent of Gaza’s total population—reside in the strip.

Since the start of Israel’s military campaign in October 2023, Obaid has been displaced more than 10 times. Her childhood home in Shujaiya and the entire surrounding neighborhood have been reduced to rubble, now incorporated into an Israeli-imposed no-go zone. “I have lived in Shujaiya since I was born. Even after marrying my cousin, I moved only a few streets away,” she recalled. “We fled for a few months in 1948 but eventually returned. Only during this Nakba did we lose our homes, our neighbourhood and all of eastern Gaza. They bombed our house and killed more than 70 members of my family—my sons, grandchildren, nephews, their children and many others from our extended family.”

Historical records place the Palestinian death toll from the 1947–1949 Nakba between 13,000 and 15,000. By comparison, Israeli forces have killed more than 72,000 Palestinians in Gaza over the past two years of the current campaign, with nearly two million residents displaced. Even after the recent ceasefire agreement, around 1.5 million Palestinians remain uprooted, most living in unsanitary makeshift tent camps across southern Gaza.

Shortly after Obaid was forced to flee Shujaiya for another part of Gaza City in October 2023, the Israeli military issued repeated mass expulsion orders ordering all northern Gaza residents to move south. When hundreds of thousands refused to comply, UN experts concluded that Israel imposed systematic starvation as “a savage weapon of war” to force Palestinians out of their territory. For months, Gaza City residents were cut off from basic supplies including wheat flour and clean drinking water, and the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification officially declared famine in Gaza City in August 2025.

Even amid this unrelenting hardship, Obaid has refused to leave Gaza City. “There were days when we could not find even a sip of water,” she said. “We counted every sip we drank, could barely find food, and were forced to flee from one place to another each time. It destroyed my health, but I did not want to leave Gaza City. I did not want to be buried outside it at the end of my life. I did not want to relive a catastrophe we have endured for nearly eight decades.”

Back in her Shujaiya home, Obaid had spent more than 80 years curating a collection of personal mementos that carried her life story: her long white wedding dress, the jackets and clothing of her late husband who died 20 years ago, cooking pots and gifts from her family and in-laws, and decades of personal savings. Every last one of these items was lost when she was forced to flee in panic. “Every time we fled, we fled in terror. We had no time to gather any belongings. We couldn’t even take a bottle of water with us. I escaped wearing only this same dress,” she said.

The only possession that survived both cataclysms is a pair of simple earrings that her father gave her as a young girl before the 1948 Nakba. “I have kept them all these years. I could never sell them or replace them, because they were once held in my father’s hands. They carry his memory with them. I never take them off, and that is why they have survived with me,” she explained. “They are the only thing left from before the Nakba. They survived two Nakbas, while so many members of my family were killed. These earrings are still alive.”

Obaid is among the dwindling number of remaining first-hand witnesses to the 1948 Nakba still living in Gaza who have lived through the current genocide. Since October 2023, Israeli attacks have killed at least 4,813 elderly Palestinians in Gaza, and many more have died from hunger, untreated chronic illness, and the total collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system amid Israel’s ongoing blockade and repeated forced displacement orders.

“People laugh when I say only one and a half of my sons are still alive; one who survived, and the other who was severely injured and is currently unable to walk,” Obaid said. She reflected on a lifetime marked by loss: her mother died shortly after she was born, and she has endured a lifetime of hardship, repeated displacement, and the death of most of her family. “At this age, I have lost my sons and many members of my family, endured starvation, and suffered repeated displacement,” she said. “But nothing is more painful than being uprooted from your own land and knowing that, after all these years, you will die in displacement.”

A devastating scuba diving accident in a remote deep underwater cave off the Maldives has left five Italian divers dead, with rescue teams launching a dangerous, high-priority search operation Friday to recover the four remaining missing bodies. The tragedy unfolded Thursday morning, when the group — which included one certified diving instructor — set out to explore an uncharted cave system near Alimathaa in the Vaavu Atoll, an area marked by extreme depth that even experienced divers avoid under normal circumstances.

Initial reports confirmed the divers failed to resurface by midday Thursday, triggering an immediate large-scale search and rescue deployment. Maldivian authorities mobilized coast guard vessels, search aircraft, and specialized dive teams to the accident site, where they recovered the first victim’s body from approximately 60 meters (200 feet) below the ocean surface late Thursday. An initial search sweep for the remaining four divers, who are believed to be trapped inside the deep cave, returned no results.

Maldivian presidential spokesperson Mohamed Hussain Shareef emphasized the extreme risks of the search area, noting that the cave reaches such extreme depths that even divers with top-tier commercial equipment do not attempt entry. Italy’s Foreign Ministry confirmed the accident occurred while the group explored cave systems at around 50 meters (164 feet) depth, adding that the full circumstances of the fatal incident remain under active investigation.

Complicating recovery efforts, a yellow weather alert was already in effect for the region Thursday, with rough ocean conditions and poor water visibility persisting into Friday. Search teams were scheduled to conduct a preliminary assessment dive Friday to map access to the cave, but adverse weather could push back the recovery timeline, Italian officials confirmed. Italy’s ambassador to the Maldives has already joined the search mission on-site, and a specialist Italian diving expert has been deployed to assist Maldivian coast guard and search vessels with the operation. Maldivian officials have stated they will not hesitate to request additional international support if the complex mission requires it.

The Italian Embassy in the Maldives has been in direct contact with the victims’ families, who have been updated on the status of the recovery mission and are receiving consular assistance. As of Friday, no further details on the identities of the victims have been released to the public, and the joint investigation into the accident is ongoing. The Maldivian government has maintained regular communication with Italian authorities throughout the response to the incident.

When discussions turn to World War II concentration and internment camps, Auschwitz, the haunting symbol of Nazi atrocities in Europe, immediately comes to mind for most people. Half a world away, however, in China’s eastern Shandong Province, sits a lesser-known site that holds a equally powerful story of suffering, courage, cross-cultural solidarity and enduring hope for peace: the former Weihsien Internment Camp, now preserved at the Courtyard of the Happy Way in Weifang.

The site’s origins stretch back to 1882, when an American missionary built a sprawling complex that housed a church, school, and hospital. After Japan launched its full-scale invasion of China during World War II, the occupying Japanese military seized the property and repurposed it into an internment camp to detain non-Chinese citizens from Allied nations. Established in retaliation for the United States’ internment of Japanese and Japanese American civilians following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the camp would go on to hold more than 2,000 civilians from 30 different Allied countries, making it the largest Allied civilian internment camp in Asia during the war.

Unlike the extensively documented Nazi concentration camps of Europe, the Weihsien Internment Camp’s history has remained largely out of global public consciousness, even for descendants of those who were imprisoned there. For Professor John Stanley, a history scholar at Pennsylvania’s Kutztown University, this forgotten chapter of World War II became a life-long research passion, sparked by a 1991 trip to the site with his father, Charles A. Stanley, who had been interned at Weihsien as an infant. Imprisoned alongside his parents at 10 months old in 1943, Charles remained in the camp until it was liberated by US soldiers and a Chinese translator in August 1945. Like many other survivors, Charles never spoke of his experience growing up; the trauma of internment led generations of survivors to leave this painful chapter of their lives unspoken.

Stanley’s 1991 visit was originally organized to dedicate a memorial to Eric Liddell, the legendary 1924 Olympic 400-meter gold medalist who died of illness in the camp due to severe shortages of food and medical care. That trip ignited Stanley’s broader interest in Chinese and East Asian history, and he has spent decades uncovering the details of daily life in the camp and the critical role local Chinese residents played in supporting the imprisoned civilians.

Among the detainees were several prominent figures, including Arthur W. Hummel Jr., who would later go on to serve as the second United States Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China. Hummel successfully escaped the camp months before liberation with help from local Chinese rescuers. Stanley’s research highlights that the support local residents provided went far beyond escape aid: it kept internees hopeful as the war dragged on and outside news grew increasingly scarce.

Most famously, local residents risked harsh punishment, even death, to smuggle scarce food and supplies into the camp through an informal underground network referred to as the “black market.” While eggs were the most common contraband thrown over the camp’s walls, Stanley even documented accounts of a live chicken being smuggled in to feed hungry detainees.

Zhang Zhiren, a Europe-based writer who spent years researching the camp for his book *Weihsien West Civilians Concentration Camp: 1943-1945*, says the quiet bravery of local Chinese people who risked their lives to help is the most moving part of the camp’s history. His book details the harsh conditions detainees faced: overcrowding, malnutrition, inadequate medical care that led to the deaths of at least 31 internees, and complete isolation from outside news. It also documents the selfless acts of solidarity from nearby residents who, despite facing their own hardship under Japanese occupation, chose to help the trapped foreigners.

One of the most notable stories of courage centers on Zhang Xingtai, a local villager who worked as a latrine cleaner inside the camp. Japanese guards dismissed him as an unthreatening ordinary farmer, but Zhang secretly operated as a critical information lifeline for internees cut off from the outside world. Working alongside his son, he smuggled outside news into the camp and carried notes from internees out — and it was the pair that secretly spread the word of Japan’s surrender to detainees days before the formal liberation, at enormous risk to their own lives.

Tragedy is also part of this story: Zhang documents the death of a local Chinese child who was electrocuted on the camp’s perimeter fence while attempting to deliver food to starving internees. Japanese guards refused to allow the child’s family to retrieve his body, leaving the small body caught on the electric wire as a grim warning.

“What strikes me most is that the people of Weifang did not care what nationality the internees were,” Zhang explained. “They only knew that people were suffering, and they had a duty to help. This simple kindness crossed all lines of war and national borders.”

As the decades passed after the war, survivors remained largely silent about their experiences, and the camp’s history began to fade from collective memory. Today, as the number of living survivors dwindles, Zhang and other researchers are working to preserve this shared history for future generations. Zhang notes that the story of mutual aid between Chinese civilians and foreign internees 80 years ago serves as a powerful example of shared humanity in the face of war, perfectly embodying the vision of a global community with a shared future.

The importance of this history has not gone unrecognized. In 2021, International Cities of Peace, a global non-profit dedicated to advancing the international peace movement, designated Weifang as the 308th International City of Peace — only the second Chinese city to receive the designation, after Nanjing. This year marks the fifth anniversary of that designation, and International Cities of Peace chair J. Frederick Arment has praised Weifang for its intentional work to heal historical trauma and turn a site of suffering into a beacon of hope for future peace.

In 2024, to mark the 45th anniversary of formal diplomatic relations between China and the United States, the story of the Weihsien Internment Camp reached a new international audience through a special traveling exhibition hosted in San Francisco. Stanley attended the opening as a representative of survivors’ descendants, and he praised Weifang’s ongoing work to preserve the camp’s original buildings and share its story with global audiences.

“These efforts show a real commitment to raising public awareness of the true human cost of war, and why we must work to avoid it whenever possible,” Stanley said. Speaking to the enduring relevance of the camp’s legacy today, he expressed hope that remembering this story would encourage global leaders to prioritize diplomacy and collaborative conflict resolution through international institutions, rather than turning to violence or coercive pressure to resolve disputes.