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A bombshell opinion piece from veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has upended global discourse around the Israel-Palestine conflict, laying bare harrowing firsthand testimonies of widespread sexual violence perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and settlers against Palestinian detainees. The publication has triggered an immediate, fierce backlash from the Israeli government, which has labeled the reporting a baseless “blood libel” and accused the outlet of advancing an anti-Israel agenda.

In his landmark column published Monday, Kristof details graphic accounts of abuse: one Palestinian journalist, 46-year-old Sami al-Sai, described being assaulted by both male and female Israeli soldiers who sexually violated him with rubber batons, grabbed his genitals with brutal force until he screamed in agony, and filmed the attack. Other survivors shared equally chilling testimonies: one woman recalled being repeatedly stripped and beaten by multiple groups of soldiers, saying she lost consciousness so often she cannot confirm whether she was also raped, a common gap in documentation given the deep stigma around sexual violence in conservative Palestinian society.

Kristof emphasizes that while few victims agreed to be named out of fear and cultural taboo, their overlapping accounts form a clear pattern of systematic abuse. He notes that decades of state-sponsored dehumanization of Palestinians has created conditions where such violence can thrive, and that the true scale of abuse is almost certainly far higher than documented, as many survivors never come forward. This stigma is particularly acute for male survivors, who face additional pressure to stay silent to protect their family’s reputation.

Crucially, this reporting is not entirely new. A full month before Kristof’s column, the West Bank Protection Consortium published a report documenting at least 16 separate cases of sexual crimes committed by Israeli soldiers and settlers amid forcible displacement in the West Bank. Earlier this year, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights Francesca Albanese told the UN Human Rights Council that Israel’s prison system has become a “laboratory of calculated cruelty,” where inmates are raped with objects including bottles, metal rods and knives. What makes Kristof’s work unprecedented is that it is the first in-depth look at this issue published by a major legacy Western media outlet like the New York Times, which has a long history of sidelining and questioning Palestinian narratives of abuse.

The Israeli government moved swiftly to condemn the publication. In a series of posts on X, the Israeli Foreign Ministry called the column one of the worst modern examples of blood libel, accusing Kristof of inverting reality by framing Israel as a perpetrator of violence when, the ministry claims, Hamas committed widespread sexual violence against Israeli citizens during the October 7, 2023 attacks. The ministry added that the publication is a deliberate part of an organized anti-Israel campaign, and vowed to “fight these lies with the truth.” The government also pointed to a recent report on alleged Hamas sexual violence that the New York Times declined to publish, which was instead picked up by CNN and endorsed by former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The ministry argued that this rejection, paired with Kristof’s publication, exposes the outlet’s clear anti-Israel bias.

Critics have also raised questions about why the investigation was run in the Times’ opinion section rather than its hard news section, which adheres to different editorial standards. Kristof pushed back on this criticism, noting that opinion journalism centered on original on-the-ground reporting has long been his practice as a columnist. Even so, the placement failed to satisfy many of Kristof’s more than 1.2 million followers on X, regardless of their stance on the conflict.

A further controversy emerged when former Israeli news personality David Shuster claimed on X that the New York Times was internally debating removing the column over its “problematic” content. The paper’s public relations team quickly refuted the claim, issuing a firm statement defending both the reporting and Kristof’s decades-long track record covering sexual violence as a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.

In his own social media responses to critics, Kristof challenged opponents to allow independent monitoring of Palestinian detention facilities, writing: “For skeptics, why not agree on Red Cross and lawyer visits for the 9,000 Palestinian ‘security’ prisoners? If you think these abuse allegations are false, such monitoring visits would be protective. So why not?” The Israeli government has refused to grant the International Committee of the Red Cross access to Palestinian detainees for years.

Kristof also argued that the United States is complicit in these abuses, noting that American tax dollars fund and subsidize the Israeli security establishment. He called on the U.S. government to condition military aid to Israel on an end to the abuse of detainees, and urged U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, an avowed Zionist, to meet with survivors and ensure that those who spoke out for the column do not face retaliation for their courage.

Notably, Kristof did include mention of allegations of sexual violence by Hamas during the October 7 attacks at the opening of his column, a context the Israeli Foreign Ministry omitted from its condemnation. The organization that first brought those Hamas allegations to global media later withdrew its claims, casting significant uncertainty over their veracity.

A series of contentious developments emerged from Israel this week, spanning intelligence leadership, national aviation infrastructure, international cultural participation, and occupied territory policy, drawing sharp criticism and urgent warnings from across sectors.

First, outgoing Mossad Director David Barnea has delivered a formal rebuke of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pick to replace him, Roman Gofman, arguing the nominee is categorically unfit to lead the country’s premier intelligence agency. In a four-page legal brief submitted to Israel’s Supreme Court ahead of a Tuesday hearing on the legality of Gofman’s appointment, Barnea laid out damning claims about Gofman’s ethical conduct. The nomination, announced last month, immediately ignited public backlash, as Gofman – currently Netanyahu’s military secretary – stands accused of exploiting a 17-year-old Israeli citizen for an intelligence operation. After the teenager was arrested by hostile forces during the mission, Gofman allegedly abandoned and disowned the operative. Citing this incident, Barnea wrote that Gofman “does not meet the standards of integrity required for this role” and warned his leadership would put all Mossad personnel at grave risk. Barnea emphasized that the role of Mossad chief demands uncompromising personal ethics, and Gofman’s history of poor judgment reveals a persistent character flaw that could cause irreversible damage to the agency. “Within an organization that operates outside regular legal constraints and public oversight – a structure unique among Western intelligence services – such a flaw poses unacceptable risk,” Barnea added.

Separately, a senior Israeli aviation official has issued a stark warning that the country’s primary international gateway, Ben Gurion Airport, has been effectively converted into an auxiliary American military base since the outbreak of the war with Iran, with severe consequences for civilian travel and the national economy. In a formal letter addressed to Transport Minister Miri Regev, Israel Civil Aviation Authority Director-General Shmuel Zakay warned that the facility now operates largely as a military airfield, with only minimal civilian air activity remaining. Zakay warned that unless the overcrowding from U.S. military deployments is addressed immediately, Israeli travelers will face sustained, sharp increases in flight costs. He added that Israel’s defense establishment has consistently failed to grasp the severity of the crisis, noting that “under the current circumstances, the State of Israel has no international airport capable of operating efficiently.” Business daily Calcalist, which first reported the letter, noted the problem is compounded by war-driven spikes in aviation fuel costs, and the fact that Israeli commercial carriers have been forced to park dozens of civilian aircraft at foreign airports to free up space for U.S. military jets, adding millions in extra operational costs. Last month, Calcalist reported that offsite aircraft parking alone has cost Israeli airlines more than 60 million shekels in recent months. Only after weeks of pressure from the Transport Ministry did U.S. and Israeli officials agree to reposition just 12 U.S. military aircraft out of Ben Gurion. Data from Israeli business publication TheMarker underscores the scale of the crisis: just 24 airlines currently operate regular service to Israel, with three domestic carriers accounting for 89% of all airport traffic in April 2024. Total passenger volume plummeted 74% compared to the same period last year.

In a separate development related to international cultural participation, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has held internal discussions about reassigning Israel from the main Eurovision Song Contest to the newly launched Eurovision Asia competition, Israeli news outlet Ynet reported Monday. According to sources familiar with the talks, the EBU has already surveyed current and prospective participating countries in the upcoming Asian contest to gauge how they would react to Israel’s inclusion in the lineup. The proposal has already faced “partial opposition” from a number of Asian participating nations, including several Muslim-majority countries that are set to take part in the inaugural event. Eurovision Asia will hold its first edition in Bangkok this November, with 10 competing countries confirmed so far – including Malaysia and Bangladesh, both of which have no diplomatic relations with Israel. Ynet reports that Israeli officials have not yet been formally notified of the proposal, which would ultimately require Israel’s consent to move forward. A source close to the discussions told Ynet that “Israel is geographically located in Asia, which is why the issue was examined,” adding that “no final decisions have been made yet, but this option is actively on the table.” Israel’s participation in the 2024 main Eurovision contest has already sparked massive global controversy over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, with five participating countries – the Netherlands, Spain, Slovenia, Ireland and Iceland – announcing full boycotts of this year’s event in protest.

Finally, the Israeli parliament has advanced controversial legislation that would create a new state-run antiquities authority with full jurisdiction over all archaeological and heritage sites across the occupied West Bank. Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Tuesday that the bill passed its preliminary parliamentary vote and will now move to the Knesset committee stage for further debate and amendments. If passed, the new body would take full control of all heritage, archaeology and antiquity matters from the Israeli army’s Civil Administration, which currently manages the sector in the occupied territory. The authority would gain powers to approve and conduct excavations, manage heritage sites, oversee all archaeological work, and enforce relevant laws across the entire West Bank – including Areas A and B, which are nominally under the administrative control of the Palestinian Authority. The legislation frames its purpose as streamlining management, reducing unregulated looting and damage to archaeological sites, and establishing direct state responsibility for heritage sites in what Israel refers to as Judea and Samaria. However, Emek Shaveh, an Israeli non-governmental organization that advocates for fair cultural heritage rights, has harshly condemned the bill, arguing it does nothing to protect antiquities and instead weaponizes cultural heritage as a tool of policy against the Palestinian population to advance Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank. In testimony to the Knesset earlier this year, the group warned the law puts Palestinian communities located near archaeological sites at direct risk of displacement and seizure, and that expanded state oversight of heritage sites “opens the door wide to the advancement of racist and destructive policies.” Emek Shaveh also emphasized that the legislation violates international law, existing diplomatic agreements Israel is a signatory to, and global professional ethical standards for archaeological management.

As the first semi-finals of the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest kicked off, Palestinian artists from the besieged Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank launched a coordinated call for a widespread boycott of the global competition, condemning its decision to allow Israel’s participation amid ongoing military operations that have devastated Palestinian communities. Spearheaded under the campaign banner #VoteJustice4Palestine, the movement calls on boycotters to amplify *The Drone Song* online, a viral work recorded by Gaza-based musician Ahmed Abu Amsha that has become an unofficial anthem of Palestinian cultural resilience.

In the aftermath of the 40-day US-Israeli war on Iran, four interconnected developments have emerged from inside the country, painting a complex picture of military adaptation, domestic unrest, political division, and regional strategic risk, according to an Iranian press review compiled by Middle East Eye. None of the reporting included in this digest has been independently verified by MEE.

First, Iran’s military is working to reverse-engineer captured US-made Tomahawk missiles to replicate their advanced technology, Iran’s semi-official Mehr News Agency has claimed. The report states that multiple Tomahawk missiles fired during the war were either intercepted and downed by Iranian air defenses or failed to detonate on impact, leaving large portions of the weapons intact for analysis. Mehr added that some missiles failed to explode either due to faulty detonator systems or because Iranian electronic warfare units disrupted their guidance and detonation mechanisms. Iranian military engineers are now studying these intact components to develop the country’s own indigenous long-range missile systems. “In the 40-day war, Iran’s strategy switched to gaining knowledge from the battlefield. Every Tomahawk missile that landed and did not explode was an advanced textbook for Iranian engineers,” the agency reported. While Mehr’s claim has not been confirmed by independent third-party sources, Iranian officials have previously confirmed that they recovered and neutralized dozens of unused American and Israeli munitions in the weeks after a ceasefire took effect on April 7. On the final day of the conflict, Iran’s ILNA news agency released a public photograph of an unexploded missile that struck a section of Tehran’s iconic Grand Bazaar, identifying the weapon as a US-built Tomahawk. This approach to weapons development is not new for Iran: the country has been locked out of international arms markets under sweeping global sanctions since 1979, and for decades it has relied on reverse-engineering captured foreign weapons to build its domestic missile and drone programs.

Second, conflicting official statements have left thousands of Iranians displaced by US-Israeli airstrikes on Tehran uncertain about their long-term temporary housing. When the war first began, Tehran’s municipal government announced that any resident whose home was destroyed or rendered uninhabitable in attacks would be offered free accommodation in city-owned hotels until they could rebuild or secure permanent new housing. But on Saturday, Iran’s reformist Etemad daily newspaper reported that dozens of displaced households currently staying in capital city hotels had already received eviction notices ordering them to leave by the end of the week. One displaced resident, whose apartment suffered catastrophic damage in an airstrike explosion, told the outlet that they had nowhere else to go. “The fire department and the Red Crescent say my house is uninhabitable. Even if it was not destroyed, there are no stairs left in the building for me to reach my apartment,” the resident said. A day after Etemad published its report, Tehran Municipality spokesperson Abdolmotahar Mohammadkhani released a corrective statement saying displaced residents should reach out directly to municipal authorities to have their individual cases resolved. Mohammadkhani confirmed that the city has already housed 6,677 displaced people across 45 hotels and municipal housing complexes, and stressed that “as long as their housing problems are not solved, the municipality will cover all accommodation costs.”

Third, a prominent jailed Iranian reformist political philosopher has publicly called on Iran’s hardline government to pursue national reconciliation with the Iranian public and end open conflict with the United States and Israel. Mohammad Reza Tajik, a leading reformist figure who was detained during the 2009 Green Movement anti-government protests, published the commentary on Jamaran, a website aligned with the grandson of Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s first supreme leader. Tajik, a longstanding public critic of the government’s violent crackdown on political opposition, argued that ruling officials must address both widespread domestic public discontent and mounting international pressure to make adaptive policy choices in the post-war period. “It is only in the light of practical reason that one can discern what, in the present conditions, is to be done and what is to be left undone; and in this darkness of the world’s night, it becomes clear which is the path and which is the path astray,” he wrote. Tajik pointed to the deep public anger that followed the government’s bloody crackdown on nationwide anti-establishment protests in January, saying that ruling leaders must demonstrate a clear willingness to reform to restore public trust. “Through clear signs of a will to change, and a turning away from what has left so many citizens feeling dissatisfied, powerless, alienated, abandoned and without effect, these many [must] be given hope for the coming of that day of joy when they will be reconciled,” he added.

Finally, two recent high-profile developments involving the United Arab Emirates – the public exposure of secret military cooperation with Israel and Abu Dhabi’s withdrawal from OPEC – have sparked widespread speculation across Iranian political circles about the Gulf state’s future role in regional tensions. Iranian political analysts have focused heavily on how these moves signal a shift in the UAE’s long-term regional strategic posture. Writing in the reformist daily Shargh, Iranian analyst Mehdi Bazargan pointed to recent statements by US officials that downplayed reported Iranian attacks on the UAE that took place on May 4 and 5, arguing that the comments signal Washington may be stepping back from its security commitments to Abu Dhabi. Bazargan argued that after observing the trajectory of the recent US-Israeli war and the level of consistent US military backing for Israel, the UAE may choose to deepen its military alignment with Tel Aviv. “Trump’s words show that Washington is not currently willing to go to war with Iran again at the expense of the security of the Emiratis,” Bazargan wrote. “Even if some actors like Israel can push him towards a new escalation of tension with Iran, the end result will be nothing but the formation of a ‘scorched earth’ in the UAE.” The analyst also criticized the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations between the UAE and Israel, calling it a fundamental strategic mistake. The agreement, he argued, was built on the incorrect assumption that the US and Israel could guarantee the UAE’s security against Iranian military retaliation. “Normalising relations with Israel in practice exposed Abu Dhabi to a more complex game whose requirements exceed the country’s actual capacities,” he wrote. “The idea of enjoying security benefits without accepting the consequences on the ground is now at odds with the harsh regional realities.” Speculation about the UAE’s role in the recent conflict intensified after The Wall Street Journal published a report on Monday claiming that the UAE had launched quiet offensive military strikes against Iranian targets earlier this spring, confirming Abu Dhabi’s active participation in the US-Israeli war. Citing anonymous sources familiar with the operation, the outlet reported that Emirati forces targeted an oil refinery on Iran’s Lavan Island in the Persian Gulf in early April. The UAE government has not made any public statement acknowledging or confirming the strike.

For Palestinians across the globe, May 15 is not an ordinary date on the calendar – it is a day etched in collective memory as a commemoration of loss, resilience, and a decades-long struggle for justice. Annually, millions gather to mark the Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, a defining turning point that refers to the 1948 displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people by Zionist militias to clear the way for the establishment of the State of Israel. To contextualize this event, the history of Palestine’s governance stretches back centuries under Ottoman rule, a period that ended when British forces seized control of the territory at the conclusion of World War I.

Following the war, the League of Nations granted Britain a formal mandate to administer Palestine, a framework that explicitly excluded input from the territory’s native Palestinian majority. While the official stated goal of the mandate system was to guide local populations toward self-governance and eventual independence, Palestine’s mandate deviated sharply from this promise: it embedded the 1917 Balfour Declaration, a pledge to create a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, at a time when Jewish residents made up less than 10 percent of the total population. Over the course of the mandate era, from 1923 to 1948, Britain facilitated large-scale Jewish immigration from Europe, growing the Jewish population tenfold from roughly 60,000 before the mandate to 700,000 by 1948. British authorities also provided military training, weapons, and autonomy to Zionist armed groups, while violently suppressing native Palestinian uprisings that demanded independence and opposed the unregulated immigration project.

By 1947, growing unrest led Britain to announce it would abandon its mandate and cede authority over the Palestine question to the newly formed United Nations. In November of that year, the UN adopted a partition plan that would split historic Palestine into two entities: 55 percent of the territory would be allocated to a Jewish state, while 45 percent would go to an Arab Palestinian state, with Jerusalem designated as an internationally administered city. Like earlier arrangements, the plan was developed without any consultation with Palestinian leaders, and it never went into effect. Almost immediately after the plan was announced, Zionist armed groups launched a systematic campaign of expulsion, drawing on detailed military blueprints that had been drafted as early as 1945.

This military strategy coalesced into Plan Dalet, the official operational framework for Zionist forces that explicitly called for the destruction of Palestinian villages through arson, demolition, and mining, and mandated that in cases of local resistance, armed groups would destroy resistance forces and expel the entire civilian population outside the borders of the proposed Jewish state. Over the course of the campaign, Zionist militias deployed a range of brutal tactics to force Palestinian flight, including large-scale bombing campaigns, targeted massacres of civilian communities, and psychological warfare designed to terrorize residents into leaving. Unarmed civilian men, women, and children were killed indiscriminately, with many buried in unmarked mass graves.

Between December 1947 and May 14, 1948 – the day Zionist leaders unilaterally declared the establishment of the State of Israel, 24 hours before the British Mandate was set to officially expire – an estimated 175,000 Palestinians were expelled, and more than 200 Palestinian villages and urban neighborhoods were destroyed and seized. Following the declaration of statehood, neighboring Arab armies entered the territory to oppose Zionist expansion, leading to a full-scale war that concluded with armistice agreements between Israel and neighboring Arab states in July 1949. By the end of the conflict, the newly formed State of Israel controlled 78 percent of historic Palestine, with the remaining 22 percent held by Arab forces; that remaining territory, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, would fall under Israeli military occupation 19 years later in the 1967 Six-Day War, and remains under occupation to this day.

Final casualty and displacement figures from the 1948 campaign are staggering: an estimated 13,000 Palestinians were killed, more than 530 Palestinian villages and towns were completely destroyed and depopulated, at least 30 documented massacres were carried out, and roughly 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homeland. Around 150,000 Palestinians remained within the borders of the new Israeli state, the vast majority of them internally displaced from their original homes. In the years after the war, the Israeli government passed a series of laws that seized all abandoned property and assets left by expelled Palestinians – including land, homes, cash, stocks, businesses, furniture, and other personal belongings. It also enacted the Law of Return, which grants immediate Israeli citizenship to any Jewish person from anywhere in the world who relocates to Israel, while permanently barring Palestinian refugees from returning to their ancestral homes.

Today, the legacy of the 1948 Nakba endures for Palestinians across the globe. There are 5.8 million registered Palestinian refugees living in formal refugee camps across the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, with an additional 2 million internally displaced Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship within Israel’s 1948 borders. For Palestinians, the Nakba is not merely a historical event confined to 1948; it is an ongoing process of displacement, marked by decades of military occupation, blockade of Gaza, home demolitions, land confiscation, and systemic dispossession that continues to shape Palestinian life to this day. Every May 15, communities across the world gather to honor the lives lost, the homes destroyed, and the ongoing struggle for Palestinian self-determination, ensuring the memory of the Nakba remains central to the national Palestinian identity.

On a muted, drizzly early spring morning on the Greek island of Rhodes, Tarik Tuten, a local resident with a soft Turkish lilt, wanders the quiet sea-pebble alleys of the island’s Old Town – a ritual he has followed for decades, regardless of company. As the island has not yet been flooded by the annual summer tourist rush, only stray cats share these winding lanes with us, and the overcast sky casts a soft, melancholic haze over the faded Levantine architecture around us.

This quiet melancholy, known in Turkish as *huzun*, is a rare feeling in the modern eastern Mediterranean, where coastlines are either torn by conflict or transformed into exclusive playgrounds for the global wealthy. Neither war nor what Tuten calls “Dubaisation” leaves room for this quiet, layered sense of history – but it lingers on every corner of Rhodes’ back streets, where Tuten has spent his whole life navigating forgotten landmarks: overgrown gardens in the old Jewish quarter, a hidden Byzantine church tucked behind oleander and cypress groves.

But this walk is not just a casual ramble. I have come to Rhodes to visit one of the Mediterranean’s most extraordinary hidden cultural treasures: the Hafiz Ahmed Agha Library, a 1793 Ottoman institution that Tuten’s family has stewarded continuously for seven generations – a near-unique survival of a centuries-old *waqf* (pious charitable endowment) still under the care of its founding family.

Nestled unassumingly opposite the 16th-century Suleymaniye Mosque, tucked between a row of tourist-facing jewellery shops, the library is easy for casual summer visitors to miss. Step past its plain exterior wall, however, and you enter a treasure trove of 828 handwritten manuscripts spanning astrology, philosophy, medicine, Islamic law, and economics, penned in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. What makes the institution even rarer than its collection is its unbroken lineage: founded as part of a waqf by Tuten’s seventh-generation ancestor, it has never been seized by the state or broken from its founding family’s stewardship – a miracle of survival, Tuten says, that few other endowments across the former Ottoman Empire can match.

The library’s story begins with a pilgrimage. Tuten’s ancestor, Ahmed Aga of Rhodes, was an Ottoman official and wealthy merchant leading a camel caravan bound for Mecca and Medina on behalf of Sultan Selim III when he was assassinated under unclear circumstances somewhere between modern-day Syria and Saudi Arabia. Aga built a diversified fortune: he held tax farms in the Balkans, owned a soap factory in Izmir, and had stakes in shipping and salt mining, making powerful enemies amid shifting Ottoman political tides. When a new grand vizier took power, Aga was eliminated – a common practice in the era, Tuten explains, though the full story remains untold.

Rather than being dissolved after Aga’s death, his waqf flourished under his son, Ahmed Fethi Pasha, who rose to become one of the Ottoman Empire’s most prominent 19th-century statesmen. Born in the early 1800s, Fethi Pasha climbed the ranks of the Ottoman imperial establishment, distinguishing himself in the 1828–1829 Russo-Turkish War, where his bravery on the battlefield earned him the honorific *fethi*. He went on to serve as the Ottoman ambassador to Russia, Austria, and France, becoming a leading figure of the Tanzimat era – a period of sweeping Western-inspired reform to modernize the Ottoman state. A lover of European technology and design, he founded Istanbul’s Beykoz porcelain factory to satisfy the growing Ottoman bourgeoisie’s appetite for Western-style luxury goods, and oversaw a boom in clock tower construction across the empire that still shapes skylines from the Greek islands to Lebanese mountain villages. His 1852 clock tower, built to honor Sultan Abdulmecid I’s visit to Rhodes, still dominates the Old Town’s skyline as a marker of his forward-thinking vision.

When the library’s long-serving groundskeeper Yusuf pulls open the heavy wooden double gates to the compound, visitors step into a quiet oasis frozen in time. The courtyard, paved in alternating bands of white and black pebbles in the traditional Rhodian *krokalia* mosaic style, is fragrant with orange blossom, lined with rows of potted geraniums and basil, and shaded by loquat trees heavy with fruit. Tuten explains that Yusuf’s wife tends the garden, and the family has intentionally kept its relaxed, unmanicured form – a choice that feels like a quiet rejection of the slick, disposable modern development that has spread across much of the Mediterranean.

The library itself is a study in understated durability, built from Rhodes’ distinctive porous sand-colored limestone, with solemn wooden windows framed by delicate carved lintels and a red-tiled roof bound with Khorasani, an ancient mortar that has held together Byzantine, Ottoman, and Persian architectural masterpieces for centuries. It was built to outlast generations, a stark contrast to the temporary, tourist-focused developments that line much of the island’s coast today. The waqf’s original charter allocated a portion of its rental property income to support a full-time groundskeeper, a role Yusuf has held for 40 years. Tuten notes that Yusuf has rarely traveled more than two hours from the library in his four decades on the job, calling the role a sacred duty rather than just a paycheck.

Once inside, the library’s resident researcher Aydin Bostanci, a specialist in Islamic manuscripts and Ottoman calligraphy from Greece’s Western Thrace region, leads the tour. Bostanci’s home region is one of the few places that retained its Muslim population after the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey mandated by the Treaty of Lausanne, and Rhodes itself has a similar layered history: around 2,000 descendants of Ottoman Muslims remained on the island after 1923, thanks to the Dodecanese being under Italian occupation from 1912 to 1947, exempting it from the population exchange.

In the high-ceilinged, whitewashed reading room with deep arched windows, Bostanci explains that the library’s rules have never allowed its manuscripts to leave the premises – for centuries, scholars would travel to Rhodes to request volumes, which the librarian would bring to them to read on site. Originally, the waqf also included a *medrese* (religious school) that taught young boys Arabic and Quranic studies, since literacy in Ottoman, Arabic, and Persian was limited to a small class of transitory religious and state officials.

When Bostanci opens the door to the secured book room, the quiet weight of history hits immediately. A central cherry wood cabinet with glass panes holds the library’s collection, where the scent of aged wood mixes with oud – the fragrant resin placed between shelves to repel insects and preserve the fragile pages. Laid out for viewing are the collection’s rarest pieces: a 1735 copy of Ibn Khaldun’s 14th-century *Muqaddimah* (Prolegomena to History), a Mamluk-era Quran, texts on Hadith and astronomy, and an exquisitely illustrated 16th-century Safavid Quran.

Rhodes itself has always been a crossroads of empires, a place where layers of history overlap rather than erase one another. After the Knights Hospitaller were expelled from Jerusalem by Saladin’s armies, they captured Rhodes from the Byzantines in 1309 and built massive fortifications, churches, and a castle that still define the Old Town’s skyline. It took Suleiman the Magnificent six months of siege to oust the knights in 1522 – 70 years after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople – transforming the island from a crusader fortress into a thriving trading entrepot and the Ottomans’ most important Eastern Mediterranean naval base. Commerce flourished, linking North Africa to the Black Sea and drawing multiethnic communities of Orthodox Christians and Jews to the island.

Today, Rhodes draws millions of tourists a year, drawn by its beaches and crowded waterfront cafes serving everything from overpriced sushi to traditional Greek fare. But the island has been a destination for curious travelers for centuries: French writer François-René de Chateaubriand wrote in 1812 that he found Rhodes more welcoming than any other Levantine destination, calling it “a little France in the midst of Greece” thanks to the Knights Hospitaller’s legacy. Even Egypt’s Khedival royal family vacationed here to escape the summer heat, and many elite members who died during their stays are buried at the Murad Reis Mosque near the port – the same cemetery where British writer Lawrence Durrell lived in a small cottage he named Villa Cleobolus for two years after World War II, before he found fame with *The Alexandria Quartet*. Durrell’s 1940s writings on Rhodes helped lay the groundwork for the Greek tourism boom of the 1960s, describing a poor island in flux, no longer Ottoman or Italian, not yet fully Greek.

On my final night, Tuten hosts a dinner for a diverse group of guests at a restaurant in Rhodes’ new city: a mix of people from Greece, Turkey, Istanbul, and Saudi Arabia, bound together by shared connection to the island’s layered history. A Greek writer friend from Istanbul whispers that the scene feels straight out of a Durrell novel: it is the Levant at its best, a messy, convivial mixing of cultures where conversations shift seamlessly between English, Greek, Turkish, and Arabic over wine and pizza.

Local researcher Savvas Pavlidis, whose great-grandfather was Rhodes’ last Ottoman-era mayor, explains that the island’s overreliance on tourism is no accident: after the 1923 population exchange and the severing of historic economic ties between the Dodecanese and the Anatolian mainland, Italian occupiers first turned to tourism to prop up the island’s economy, a path successive Greek governments continued. But while mass tourism shapes much of modern Rhodes, the Hafiz Ahmed Agha Library stands as a testament to the island’s natural connection to its eastern neighbors.

Today, Tuten hosts regular researchers and academics who come to study the library’s manuscripts and learn preservation techniques, but his core goal for the institution is far simpler. Drawing on the shared Greek-Turkish word *muhabbet*, meaning a warm, friendly exchange between people, Tuten says he wants the library to be more than an archive: it is meant to be a meeting place, a convivial space that unites communities across the borders and divisions that have reshaped the eastern Mediterranean over the past two centuries.