Opinions

Imagine walking for days and nights to escape gunfire. You carry your child in your arms, guiding them through the darkness to avoid drone attacks. You have no food, no water, and nowhere safe to go.

This is the reality for families in Darfur and across Sudan, where civilians are being trapped, targeted, and terrorised as the country’s brutal war enters its third year. In el-Fasher and other parts of Darfur, entire communities have been besieged. Those who try to flee are attacked; those who remain face starvation, violence, and disease.

Behind these headlines are women and children who are suffering the most. Sexual violence is being used systematically to punish, to terrorise, and to destroy. Women and girls are abducted, forced to work for armed groups during the day, and then assaulted at night, often in front of others. Many survivors are children themselves. Some of the girls who have become pregnant through rape are so young and malnourished that they are unable to feed their babies.

Perpetrators no longer attempt to hide their crimes. Violence has become so widespread that recording or documenting cases can cost you your life. In Tawila, North Darfur, only one clinic run by Doctors Without Borders can provide care for rape survivors.

Boys are also being drawn into the conflict. Over the past 10 days, three trucks filled with children were reported heading towards Nyala, while in South Darfur, children are being armed and sent to fight. Families are disappearing without a trace.

Aid workers are also targeted. They are being kidnapped for ransom, assaulted, sometimes killed, and targeted because armed groups believe humanitarian organisations can pay. Many of those delivering aid are Sudanese women who risk their lives every day to bring food, water, and protection services to others.

Violence has also taken on an ethnic dimension. One displaced person told us, “I cannot go back, they will know by my skin colour which tribe I am from, and they will kill me.”

Sudan is now the world’s largest displacement crisis and one of its most severe humanitarian emergencies. More than 30 million people need urgent assistance. Fifteen million have been forced from their homes. Hunger and cholera are spreading fast. Clinics have been destroyed, schools are closed, and 13 million children are out of school, their education and futures slipping away.

Yet even amid this devastation, Sudanese women’s organisations are leading the response. They are running safe spaces, supporting survivors of violence, and keeping children learning where they can. They know their communities and continue their work despite constant danger. Their courage deserves not only recognition but also support.

The humanitarian response, however, remains catastrophically underfunded. Only about a quarter of what is needed has been received. Without immediate resources, millions will be left without food, medical care, or shelter as famine looms. Funding protection and psychosocial support for women and children is not optional. It is life-saving.

And this is not only a crisis of violence but also a crisis of indifference. Each day the world looks away, more lives are lost and more futures erased. The international community must support investigations into war crimes, including sexual violence, ethnic killings, and attacks on aid workers. Silence is not neutrality. Silence gives a blank cheque for horror to continue.

We must act now, urgently. Governments and donors must fully fund the humanitarian response and ensure access for those delivering aid. They must press all parties to immediately stop attacks on civilians, guarantee safe passage for those fleeing, and allow relief operations to reach those cut off by the fighting.

Humanitarian workers and grassroots organisations are risking their lives so that others might live. The world must match their courage with urgent action.

Above all, Sudan’s women and girls must be part of shaping peace. They are already leading by organising, sheltering, and rebuilding amid the chaos. Their courage offers a glimpse of the country Sudan could still become.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

And so another member of the old “war on terror” team has left the world. Dick Cheney, who served as the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States during the two-term administration of George W Bush (2001-2009), died on Monday at the age of 84.

According to a memorial statement issued by his family, Cheney was “a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing”.

And yet many inhabitants of the Earth will remember the late VP for rather less warm and fuzzy things than love and fly fishing. As the chief architect of the “global war on terror” – which was launched in 2001 and enabled the US to terrorise various locations worldwide under the guise of fighting “terrorists” – Cheney died with untold quantities of blood on his hands, particularly in Iraq.

In the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Cheney swore that the “Iraqi regime” had been “very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents” and that the country had continued “to pursue the nuclear programme they began so many years ago”. Per the vice president’s hallucinations, this pursuit of weaponry was “for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale”.

As Foreign Policy magazine charmingly noted in its 2012 compilation of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers”, which included Cheney as well as numerous other characters with objectively dubious credentials in terms of thinking: “If scaring us silly were a religion, Dick Cheney would be its high priest.”

But Cheney’s fearmongering – and repeated lies concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction – worked like a charm in paving the way for the infliction of “death on a massive scale” in the country. It also paved the way for the lining of certain pockets, such as those associated with the US oil and engineering firm Halliburton, where Cheney himself served as CEO from 1995 until 2000 and which just happened to win $7bn in no-bid contracts in post-invasion Iraq.

Anyway, it was business as usual in the land of conflicts of interest and revolving doors.

Until his dying day, Cheney espoused a no-regrets approach to the illegal perpetration of mass slaughter and attendant suffering, telling CNN 12 years after the effective pulverisation of Iraq: “It was the right thing to do then. I believed it then, and I believe it now.” Never mind the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, the forcible displacement of millions, and the dousing of the country in toxic and radioactive munitions that will continue to impact Iraqi health basically for eternity.

Escalating cancer rates among the population have been attributed in part to the US military’s use of depleted uranium weapons, the traces of which “represent a formidable long-term environmental hazard as they will remain radioactive for more than 4.5 billion years”, as Al Jazeera has observed.

But, hey, I hear the fly fishing is great in Baghdad.

And the Iraq war is hardly Cheney’s only nonregret. In response to the 2014 CIA torture report on the US use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as rectal rehydration and waterboarding to extract information, Cheney stuck by his guns: “I would do it again in a minute.”

Nor is the “war on terror” the sole defining sadistic episode in the legacy of a man who was a fixture on the American political scene for decades. In December 1989, for example, the US military unleashed hell on the impoverished neighbourhood of El Chorrillo in Panama City, Panama, killing potentially several thousand civilians and earning El Chorrillo the nickname “Little Hiroshima”.

The US defence secretary presiding over the operation was none other than Cheney, this time under the leadership of George HW Bush, whose administration was eager to cure the American public of its post-Vietnam War aversion to military combat abroad with an excessive display of high-tech firepower and an easy “victory”. After the bout of devastation, during which many of El Chorrillo’s wooden shacks went up in flames along with their inhabitants, Cheney boasted that the deadly spectacle had “been the most surgical military operation of its size ever conducted”.

The “surgical” stunt in Panama was a test run for Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, which was also overseen by Cheney in his own sort of test run for the future infliction of mass death in the country.

Now Cheney is no more, joining his former comrades in war crimes Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell in the great beyond. In the wake of his demise, US news agencies and media outlets have restricted themselves to memorialising him as a “polarising” and “controversial” figure who, as The Associated Press diplomatically put it, “was proved wrong on point after point in the Iraq War, without losing the conviction he was essentially right”.

As usual, the corporate media can never bring themselves to call a spade a spade – or a war criminal a war criminal. But against the current backdrop of Israel’s US-backed genocide in the Gaza Strip and other global calamities, the loss of another mass murderer can hardly be considered bad news.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

It has been two weeks since world leaders gathered in Sharm el-Sheikh and declared, once again, that the path to peace in the Middle East had been found. As with previous such declarations, the Palestinians, the people who must live that peace, were left out.

Today, Israel holds the fragile ceasefire hostage while the world is fixated on the search for the remaining bodies of its dead captives. There is no talk of the Palestinian right to search for and honour their own dead, to mourn publicly the loss.

The idea of reconstruction is dangled before the residents of Gaza. Those who call for it from abroad seem to envision just clearing rubble, pouring concrete, and rehabilitating infrastructure. There is no talk of rebuilding people – restoring their institutions, dignity, and sense of belonging.

But this is what Palestinians need. True reconstruction must focus on the people of Gaza and it must begin not with cement but with the restoration of classrooms and learning. It must begin with young people who have survived the unthinkable and still dare to dream. Without them – without Palestinian educators and students at the centre – no rebuilding effort can endure.

Reconstruction without exclusion

The plans for governance and reconstruction of Gaza currently circulating are excluding those Palestinians most affected by the genocide. Many aspects of these plans are designed to control rather than empower – to install new overseers instead of nurturing local leadership. They prioritise Israel’s security over Palestinian wellbeing and self-determination.

We have seen what such exclusion leads to in the Palestinian context: dependency, frustration and despair. As scholars who have worked for years alongside Palestinian academics and students, we have also seen the central role education plays in Palestinian society.

That is why we believe that reconstruction has to start with education, including higher education. And that process has to include and be led by the Palestinians themselves. Palestinian educators, academics and students have already demonstrated they have the strength to persevere and rebuild.

Gaza’s universities, for example, have been models of resilience. Even as their campuses were razed to the ground, professors and scholars continued to teach and research in makeshift shelters, tents, and public squares – sustaining international partnerships and giving purpose to the most vital part of society: young people.

In Gaza, universities are not only places of study; they are sanctuaries of thought, compassion, solidarity and continuity – the fragile infrastructure of imagination.

Without them, who will train the doctors, nurses, teachers, architects, lawyers, and engineers that Gaza needs? Who will provide safe spaces for dialogue, reflection, and decision-making – the foundations of any functioning society?

We know that there can be no viable future for Palestinians without strong educational and cultural institutions that rebuild confidence, restore dignity and sustain hope.

Solidarity, not paternalism

Over the past two years, something remarkable has happened. University campuses across the world – from the United States to South Africa, from Europe to Latin America – have become sites of moral awakening. Students and professors have stood together against the genocide in Gaza, demanding an end to the war and calling for justice and accountability. Their sit-ins, vigils and encampments have reminded us that universities are not only places of learning but crucibles of conscience.

This global uprising within education was not merely symbolic; it was a reassertion of what scholarship is about. When students risk disciplinary action to defend life and dignity, they remind us that knowledge divorced from humanity is meaningless.

The solidarity they have demonstrated must set the tone for how institutions of higher education approach engagement with and the rebuilding of Gaza’s universities.

The world’s universities must listen, collaborate and commit for the long term. They can build partnerships with Gaza’s institutions, share expertise, support research and help reconstruct the intellectual infrastructure of a society. Fellowships, joint projects, remote teaching and open digital resources are small steps that can make a vast difference.

Initiatives like those of Friends of Palestinian Universities (formally Fobzu), the University of Glasgow and HBKU’s summits, and the Qatar Foundation’s Education Above All already show what sustained cooperation can achieve. Now that spirit of solidarity must expand – grounded in respect and dignity and guided by Palestinian leaders.

The global academic community has a moral duty to stand with Gaza, but solidarity must not slide into paternalism. Reconstruction should not be a charitable gesture; it should be an act of justice.

The Palestinian higher education sector does not need a Western blueprint or a consultant’s template. It needs partnerships that listen and respond, that build capacity on Palestinian terms. It needs trusted relationships for the long term.

Research that saves lives

Reconstruction is never just technical; it is moral. A new political ecology must grow from within Gaza itself, shaped by experience rather than imported models. The slow, generational work of education is the only path that can lead out from the endless cycles of destruction.

The challenges ahead demand scientific, medical and legal ingenuity. For example, asbestos from destroyed buildings now contaminates Gaza’s air, threatening an epidemic of lung cancer. That danger alone requires urgent research collaboration and knowledge-sharing. It needs time to think and consider, conferences, meetings, exchanges of scholarships – the lifeblood of normal scholarly activity.

Then there is the chaos of property ownership and inheritance in a place that has been bulldozed by a genocidal army. Lawyers and social scientists will be needed to address this crisis and restore ownership, resolve disputes and document destruction for future justice.

There are also the myriad war crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people. Forensic archaeologists, linguists, psychologists and journalists will help people process grief, preserve memory and articulate loss in their own words.

Every discipline has a role to play. Education ties them together, transforming knowledge into survival – and survival into hope.

Preserving memory

As Gaza tries to move on from the genocide, it must also have space to mourn and preserve memory, for peace without truth becomes amnesia. There can be no renewal without grief, no reconciliation without naming loss.

Every ruined home, every vanished family deserves to be documented, acknowledged and remembered as part of Gaza’s history, not erased in the name of expedience. Through this difficult process, new methodologies of care will inevitably come into being. The acts of remembering are a cornerstone of justice.

Education can help here, too – through literature, art, history, and faith – by giving form to sorrow and turning it into the soil from which resilience grows. Here, the fragile and devasted landscape of Gaza, the more-than-human-world can also be healed through education, and only then we will have on the land once again, “all that makes life worth living”, to use a verse from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Rebuilding Gaza will, of course, require cranes and engineers. But more than that, it will require teachers, students and scholars who know how to learn and how to practise skilfully. The work of peace begins not with cement mixers but with curiosity, compassion and courage.

Even amid the rubble, and the ashlaa’, the strewn body parts of the staff and students we have lost to the violence, Gaza’s universities remain alive. They are the keepers of its memory and the makers of its future – the proof that learning itself is an act of resistance, and that education is and must remain the first step towards sustainable peace.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Ben Rhodes, a former United States deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, famously called Washington’s foreign policy establishment “the Blob” to describe its entrenched ecosystem of think tanks, former officials, journalists and funders that perpetuate a narrow vision of power, global order and legitimate actors. This apparatus not only sustains conservative inertia but also defines the limits of what is considered possible in policy. In Sudan’s two-and-a-half-year conflict, these self-imposed boundaries are proving fatal.

A particularly insidious practice within the Blob is the invocation of moral and rhetorical equivalence, portraying the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) as comparable adversaries. This ostensibly balanced US stance, evident in establishment analyses and diplomatic statements, represents not an impartial default but a deliberate political construct. By equating a criminalised, externally backed militia with a national army tasked with state duties, it sanitises RSF atrocities, recasting them as mere wartime exigencies rather than orchestrated campaigns of ethnic cleansing, urban sieges and terror.

Reports from Human Rights Watch on ethnic cleansing in West Darfur, civilian killings, rape and unlawful detentions in Gezira and Khartoum and United Nations fact-finding missions confirm the RSF’s deliberate targeting of civilians. Furthermore, a report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) monitor from late 2024 attributed roughly 77 percent of violent incidents against civilians to the RSF, underscoring this asymmetry, yet the Blob’s discourse frequently obscures it.

This notion has dominated US and international discourse on Sudan’s war since its outbreak when the then-US ambassador to Khartoum, John Godfrey, tweeted in the first month of the war a condemnation of RSF sexual violence but vaguely attributed it to unspecified “armed actors”. By refraining from explicitly identifying the perpetrators despite extensive documentation of the RSF’s responsibility for systematic rapes, gang rapes and sexual slavery, his wording essentially dispersed accountability across the warring parties and contributed to a climate of institutional impunity. RSF militiamen carry out their atrocities with confidence, knowing that responsibility will be blurred and its burden scattered across the parties.

What drives this equivalence? The Blob’s institutions often prioritise access over veracity. Framing the conflict symmetrically safeguards diplomatic ties with regional allies, particularly the RSF’s patrons in the United Arab Emirates while projecting an aura of neutrality. However, neutrality amid asymmetric criminality is not objectivity; it is tacit complicity. Elevating an internationally enabled militia to parity with a sovereign military confers undue legitimacy on the RSF, whose methods – including the besieging and starving of cities such as el-Fasher, the systematic use of rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war, the deployment of drones against mosques and markets, and acts of genocide – are demonstrably systematic, as corroborated by investigative journalism and human rights documentation. To subsume these under “actions by both parties” distorts empirical reality and erodes mechanisms for accountability.

Compounding this is the Blob’s uncritical assimilation of RSF propaganda into its interpretive frameworks. The RSF has strategically positioned itself as a vanguard against “Islamists”, a veneer that conceals its historical criminal nature, patronage networks, illicit resource extraction and foreign sponsorship.

In a similar vein, the RSF has publicly expressed sympathy and strong support for Israel, even offering to resettle displaced Palestinians from Gaza in a bid to align with US interests. This discourse serves as an overture to the Blob, leveraging shared geopolitical priorities to portray the RSF as a pragmatic partner in regional stability.

Certain establishment pundits and diplomats have echoed this narrative, casting the RSF as a viable bulwark against an “Islamist resurgence”, thereby endowing a force implicated in war crimes with strategic and ethical credibility. When the Blob internalises this “anti-Islamist” trope as analytical shorthand, it legitimises an insurgent militia’s rationalisations as geopolitical truths, marginalising the reality of the war and the Sudanese who repudiate militarised binaries and sectarian lenses.

Contrast this with the recurrent accusations of external backing for the SAF from an ideologically disparate coalition, including Egypt, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and Iran. These claims, often amplified in mainstream media narratives and aligning with RSF discourse, expose profound inconsistencies: Egypt’s secular anti-Islamist state, Turkiye’s Islamist-leaning government, Saudi Arabia’s Sunni Wahhabi monarchy and Iran’s Shia theocracy embody clashing regional rivalries, evident in proxy wars from Yemen to Libya, rendering their purported unified support for the SAF implausible unless opportunistic pragmatism overrides ideology.

Moreover, the evidentiary threshold falls short of the robust, independent documentation implicating the UAE in RSF operations, relying instead on partisan assertions and circumstantial reports that appear designed to muddy asymmetries. Critically, any verified SAF assistance typically involves conventional arms transactions with Sudan’s internationally recognised government in Port Sudan, a sovereign authority, as opposed to the unchecked provisioning extended to the RSF, a nonstate actor formally designated by the US as genocidal. This fundamental distinction highlights the Blob’s contrived equivalence, conflating legitimate state-to-state engagements with the illicit empowerment of atrocity perpetrators.

Even more corrosive is the Blob’s propensity to credential “pseudo-civilian” entities aligned with the RSF and its external sponsors, particularly those bolstered by UAE influence, such as Somoud, led by former Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, who also chairs the Emirati business-promotion organisation, the Centre for Africa’s Development and Investment (CADI). These networks are often presented in Blob forums as “civilian stakeholders” or “pragmatic moderates”, sidelining authentic grassroots entities inside Sudan.

This curation of externally amenable proxies transforms mediation into theatre, channelling international validation towards RSF-aligned gains and ignoring Sudanese agency rather than supporting any real civic architects of Sudan’s democratic aspirations. Documented UAE-RSF logistical and political linkages alongside Gulf-orchestrated narrative amplification should serve as a warning against endorsing such fabricated authority.

These lapses are not merely intellectual; they yield tangible harms. Legitimising the RSF through equivalence or narrative cooption dilutes legal and political tools for redress, confining policy options to performative ceasefires and superficial stability blueprints that preserve war economies and armament flows. It defers genuine deterrence, such as targeted interdictions, robust arms embargoes and the exposure of enablers until atrocities become irreversible.

The repercussions do not end there. They deepen, fuelling the militia’s authoritarian ambitions in alliance with its civilian partners. Drawing on this contrived equivalence, they have recently declared Ta’asis, parallel governing structures in western Sudan, claiming a layer of legitimacy while, at least rhetorically, brandishing the threat of partition despite the clear international consensus against recognising such authority.

To counter the Blob’s pathologies, a paradigm shift is imperative. Analysts and policymakers must abjure false symmetry, distinguishing symmetric warfare from asymmetric atrocity campaigns. Where evidence is found of systematic rights abuses, international rhetoric and actions should reflect this imbalance through targeted sanctions and disruptions while avoiding generic “both-sides” statements.

They must also repudiate RSF narratives. The “anti-Islamist” rhetoric is partisan sloganeering, not objective analysis. US engagement should centre on civilian protection, privileging authentic civil society testimonies over manufactured proxies. The question of who governs Sudan is, first and foremost, the prerogative of the Sudanese people themselves, who in April 2019 demonstrated their sovereign agency by toppling Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist regime without soliciting or relying on external assistance.

Equally important is to withhold recognition from contrived civilians. Mediation roles should hinge on verifiable grassroots mandates. Entities tethered to foreign patrons or militias merit no elevation as Sudan’s representatives.

Finally, policymakers must dismantle enablers. Rhetorical and legal measures must be matched by enforcement through transparent embargo oversight, flight interdictions and sanctions on supply chains. Justice without implementation offers only solace to victims.

Should the Blob prove intransigent, alternative forces must intervene. Sudanese civic coalitions, diaspora advocates, independent media and ethical policy networks can amass evidence and exert pressure to compel a recalibration of global approaches. A diplomacy that cloaks complicity in neutrality perpetuates atrocity machinery. Only one anchored in Sudanese agency, empirical truth and unyielding accountability can forge a viable peace.

Sudanese seek no sympathy, only a recalibration among the influential: Cease equating aggressors with guardians, amplifying perpetrator propaganda and supplanting vibrant civic realities with orchestrated facades. Until Washington’s elite perceives Sudanese not as geopolitical subjects but as rights-bearing citizens demanding justice, its epistemic maze will continue to license carnage over conciliation.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

On Sunday, Argentinians voted in midterm elections that attracted an uncommonly high level of international attention. This was in part due to the potential $40bn bailout promised to cash-strapped Buenos Aires by Washington. Ahead of the vote, United States President Donald Trump had made clear the cash injection was contingent upon the election results.

And Trump’s far-right buddy Javier Milei, the equally uniquely coiffed president of Argentina, did not fail to deliver. Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, pulled off a rather startling win, scoring more than 40 percent of the votes cast, according to early results. Half of the seats in Argentina’s lower Chamber of Deputies and a third of the seats in the Senate were up for grabs.

Trump naturally wasted no time in appropriating the electoral feat as a personal victory, claiming that Milei “had a lot of help from us. He had a lot of help.”

Before the election, Trump explained that his generous gesture to Milei – made even as the US president was overseeing sweeping cuts to healthcare and other services at home – was his own way of “helping a great philosophy take over a great country”.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent similarly contended that the “bridge” the US was extending to Milei was in the hopes “that Argentina can be great again”.

Call it MAGA – the South American version.

But as is the case with the US itself, it’s not quite clear when, precisely, in history Argentina was ever so “great”. Of course, there were the good old days of the US-backed Dirty War when a right-wing military dictatorship murdered and disappeared tens of thousands of suspected leftists, many of them dropped from aircraft into the ocean or Rio de la Plata.

As historian Greg Grandin documented in his biography of eternal US diplomat Henry Kissinger, the statesman advised the junta’s foreign minister, Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti, in 1976: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.”

Another great “philosophy”.

Now, Trump stands poised to preside over a renewed era of US influence in the South American nation. And while the days of dropping bodies from airplanes may be over, there is still plenty of room for right-wing brutality.

Milei, who self-defines as an “anarcho-capitalist” and who assumed the presidency in 2023, made a charming habit of wielding a chainsaw at political rallies to symbolise his approach to governance – which has been to slash spending on healthcare, education and other public services while overseeing mass layoffs and pension cuts.

In the first six months of Milei’s austerity programme, poverty in Argentina soared to nearly 53 percent. Inflation has dropped, but so has purchasing power, and surveys indicate that most Argentines do not earn enough to pay their monthly expenses. Sunday’s legislative win – pardon, Trump’s victory – was crucial to maintaining the “chainsaw” strategy, which anyway has worked out just fine for certain elite sectors of the Argentinian populace.

Until now, Milei’s party commanded less than 15 percent of the seats in Congress. This meant that the president was forced to govern at the mercy of an opposition that insisted on overturning his vetoes on things like increasing benefits for people with disabilities and restoring congressional funding for paediatric healthcare and universities.

Naturally, Milei’s sociopathic efforts are near and dear to Trump’s heart, and the US head of state has repeatedly come out in his defence: “Everybody knows he’s doing the right thing. But you have a radical-left sick culture that’s a very dangerous group of people, and they’re trying to make him look bad.”

To be sure, it takes a hell of a “radical-left sick culture” to say that children should have healthcare or that folks with disabilities should be lent a hand.

Incidentally, Milei’s government has effectively done its part to increase the number of Argentinians with disabilities by, inter alia, wantonly firing rubber bullets and tear gas at pensioners and other demonstrators protesting against violent austerity measures. In March, 33-year-old Jonathan Navarro was blinded in one eye by a rubber bullet while protesting on behalf of his father and other retirees.

For his part, Trump, who no doubt sympathises with the need for militarised responses to peaceful demonstrators, recently graciously joked with Milei about the possibility of sending Tomahawk missiles to Argentina: “You need them for your opposition, I guess.” Trump and Milei also see eye to eye on the subject of Israel, and in August, the Argentinian president proposed a $1m initiative to boost relations between Latin America and the genocidal state.

The list of similarities goes on. Trump has never been one to look down on corruption or nepotism – as long as he’s the one benefitting – and Milei wasted no time in appointing his own sister as secretary-general to the presidency. Karina Milei has played the starring role in one of various scandals to have rocked her brother’s administration – scandals that were supposedly threatening to jeopardise his party’s performance in Sunday’s midterms.

In August, leaked audio recordings featured Diego Spagnuolo, who at the time was the head of Argentina’s National Disability Agency, discussing bribes allegedly pocketed by Karina Milei in exchange for pharmaceutical contracts concerning the procurement of medications for people with disabilities.

Anyway, only a “radical-left sick culture” would have been bothered by such an arrangement.

Now that the midterm elections appear to have breathed new life into Milei’s unhinged free-market experiment, impoverished Argentinians certainly have a lot to lose. But Washington has much to gain, as Trump made clear in his victory speech after the results were released: “We’ve made a lot of money based on that election because the bonds have gone up. Their whole debt rating has gone up.”

The president went on to add that the US was “not in that for the money, per se”. Remember those words as Argentina is chain-sawed to greatness again.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Pakistan seems to have caught the geopolitical winds just right. Last month, Pakistan signed a defence agreement with Saudi Arabia. Under this bold pact, an attack on one will be regarded as an attack on both, a dramatic escalation of security guarantees in a region already crowded with rivalries. At the same time, Islamabad has quietly dispatched rare earth mineral samples to the United States and is exploring deeper export agreements. Washington, for its part, appears newly interested in treating Pakistan as more than a peripheral irritant.

These moves suggest momentum. Commentators in Islamabad and Riyadh call it a renaissance of Pakistani foreign policy, a belated recognition of the country’s strategic indispensability. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s presence at the Gaza peace summit only reinforced the impression of a nation returning to centre stage in the Muslim world.

But this is no overnight miracle. It is the product of necessity, pressure and shifting alignments in a volatile region. Behind the optics lie harder realities.

The first driver of Pakistan’s foreign policy push is the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Washington’s abrupt exit left a vacuum it still struggles to fill. With a hostile Iran and an entrenched Taliban, the US needs a counterweight in the region. Pakistan, with its geography, intelligence networks and long entanglement in Afghan affairs, suddenly matters again.

US President Donald Trump’s demand that the Taliban hand over the Bagram airbase, five years after signing the deal that paved the way for the US withdrawal, underscores America’s search for leverage. If that gambit fails, Pakistan becomes the obvious fallback: the only state with both logistical capacity and political connections to help Washington maintain a presence in the region.

The second factor is the uneasy US-India relationship. Over the past decade, Washington has drawn New Delhi deeper into its Indo-Pacific strategy, strengthening its global profile in ways Pakistan sees as threatening. Yet US-India friction has grown. Disputes over visas and tariffs have festered. India’s embrace of Moscow has raised eyebrows in Washington.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s August visit to Beijing sent a clear signal that India is willing to hedge its bets with China. Economically, his “Make in India” programme, modelled on East Asia’s low-cost export strategies, could undercut US manufacturing. For Trump, eager to maintain balance in Asia, Pakistan appears useful again as a counterweight to India’s flirtations with Beijing.

The third and most precarious driver is mineral diplomacy. Islamabad’s outreach to Washington centres on promises of access to rare earth minerals, many of which are located in the restive region of Balochistan. On paper, this looks like a win-win: Pakistan gains investment, and the US secures critical resources. But the reality is darker. Balochistan remains Pakistan’s poorest province despite decades of extraction. Infrastructure projects stand underused, airports lie empty and unemployment remains stubbornly high.

The Balochistan Mines and Minerals Act 2025, passed by the provincial legislature in March, has only deepened discontent. Under the act, Islamabad is formally empowered to recommend mining policies and licensing decisions in Balochistan, a move that has provoked opposition across the political spectrum. Critics argue it undermines provincial autonomy and recentralises control in Islamabad. Even right-wing religious parties, such as the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI-F), seldom aligned with nationalist groups, have expressed opposition, portraying the law as yet another attempt to dispossess local communities of their rightful stake in the province’s resources.

This backlash underscores a dangerous trend. Resource exploitation without local participation fuels resentment and insurgency. By opening mineral wealth to foreign investors without social safeguards, Islamabad risks deepening the alienation of a province already scarred by conflict and militarisation. What looks like salvation in Islamabad can look like dispossession in Quetta.

Taken together, these drivers show that Pakistan’s foreign policy shift is less a renaissance than a calculated pivot under pressure. The Afghan vacuum, the recalibration of US-India ties and the lure of mineral diplomacy all explain Islamabad’s newfound prominence. But none erases underlying fragilities. Washington may once again treat Pakistan as disposable when its priorities change. India’s weight in US strategy is not going away. And Balochistan’s grievances will only deepen if resource deals remain extractive and exclusionary.

The applause in Riyadh, the visibility at the Gaza summit and the polite handshakes in Washington should not be mistaken for a strategic rebirth. Pakistan is manoeuvring carefully, improvising under pressure and seeking to turn vulnerabilities into opportunities. But the real test lies at home. Unless Islamabad can confront governance failures, regional inequalities and political mistrust, foreign policy gains will remain fragile.

In the end, no defence pact or minerals deal can substitute for a stable social contract within Pakistan itself. That is the true renaissance Pakistan still awaits.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

In recent months, a new baseline idea has taken hold in European and United States debates on Ukraine: “Article 5‑like” guarantees. In March, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was the first to suggest a mechanism inspired by Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which provides for collective action in the event of an attack on a member. US President Donald Trump’s team then promoted a US “Article 5‑type” guarantee outside NATO in August. In September, French President Emmanuel Macron capped this shift by gathering 26 European partners in Paris to pledge a post-war “reassurance force”.

These proposals may sound reassuring, but they should not. In a world where we face nightly drone raids, blurred lines at sea, and constant pressure on critical infrastructure, replicating NATO’s words without NATO’s machinery would leave Ukraine exposed and Europe no safer.

Russia’s activity inside NATO territory has moved from rare to routine. On September 10, two dozen Russian-made drones crossed into Polish airspace during a wider strike on Ukraine; NATO jets shot down those that posed a threat, and Poland activated Article 4 of the NATO Charter, which allows for consultations in the event of a threat.

In the following weeks, Denmark temporarily shut down several airports after repeated drone sightings. Days later, French sailors boarded a tanker suspected of being part of a Russia-linked “shadow fleet” and of taking part in the drone disruptions.

Germany also reported coordinated drone flights over a refinery, a shipyard, a university hospital, and the Kiel Canal. Meanwhile, across the Baltic Sea, months of damage to undersea cables and energy links have deepened concern.

Each of these episodes is serious. Yet, none of them clearly crossed the legal threshold that would have triggered collective defence under Article 5.

That is the core problem with “NATO‑style” guarantees. Article 5 is powerful because it establishes that an attack on one is an attack on all, but it still needs a political process that begins with consultations and leaves each ally free to decide how to respond. It was written for visible aggression: Columns of troops on a border; ships firing across a line; fighter jets attacking territory.

Today’s reality is different. Drones launched from outside Ukrainian territory, one-night incursions over allied infrastructure, or cable cuts by vessels are meant to sit just under formal thresholds. A copy of Article 5 outside NATO’s integrated command, without a standing allied presence or pre-agreed rules for Ukraine, would be even slower and weaker than the original.

When mulling a security mechanism for Kyiv, allies need to recognise that it is no longer a security consumer; it is a security contributor. After Poland’s incident, allies began asking for Ukrainian counter-drone know-how. Ukrainian specialists have deployed to Denmark to share tactics for fusing sensors, jamming, and using low‑cost interceptors.

NATO leaders now say openly that Europe must learn how to defeat cheap drones without firing missiles that cost hundreds of thousands of euros. This is a notable shift: Ukraine is not just receiving protection; it is helping to build it.

Ukraine’s allies also need to remember what happened in 1994. Under the Budapest Memorandum, Kyiv gave up the world’s third‑largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for political “security assurances” from several countries, including Russia and the US. Those assurances were not legally binding.

In 2014, Russia seized Crimea and fuelled war in Donbas while denying its troops were there, using soldiers without insignia to keep the situation ambiguous. Even if Ukraine had been in NATO then, that ambiguity would have raised doubts about whether Article 5 applied. In 2022, Russia invaded openly.

Clearly, non-enforceable promises and debates over thresholds do not stop a determined aggressor. This is why we need guarantees that trigger action automatically, not statements that can be argued over in the moment.

What would work is a package that is tougher than Article 5 on the issues that matter against a sub‑threshold attacker: Time, automaticity, presence, intelligence, and production.

First, there needs to be automatic triggers. A legally ratified “if‑then” mechanism should activate within hours when clear markers are met: State‑origin drones or missiles entering Ukrainian airspace from outside; mass drone incursions into border regions; destructive cyberattacks or sabotage against defined critical infrastructure. The initial package would include both military steps and heavy sanctions. Consultations would adjust the response, not decide whether there will be one.

Second, there needs to be a joint aerial and maritime shield that treats Ukrainian skies and nearby seas as one operating picture. Allies need to keep persistent airborne radar and maritime patrol coverage; fuse sensors from low to high altitude; delegate rules for downing drones along agreed corridors; combine electronic warfare, directed‑energy and radio‑frequency tools, and low‑cost interceptors with classic surface‑to‑air missiles. The test is economic: Europe must make Russian drone raids expensive for Moscow, not for itself.

Third, there must be visible presence and ready logistics. Before a ceasefire is concluded, allies need to build forward logistics: ammunition, spare parts, and maintenance hubs in Poland and Romania with a standing air bridge into Ukraine. Following an agreed ceasefire, they can rotate multinational detachments, air defence crews, maritime patrol teams, and engineers through Ukrainian ports and airfields. The aim would be not to establish permanent bases, but to ensure any renewed attack instantly draws in several capitals.

Fourth, there needs to be an intelligence compact. Allies need to move from ad hoc sharing to an institutional arrangement with Ukraine that integrates satellite, signals, open‑source, and battlefield sensors into common, near‑real‑time products. Fast attribution is central: The right to defend yourself relies on what you can prove, and deterrence relies on an adversary knowing you can prove it quickly.

Fifth, there needs to be a production deal. Multi‑year funding should anchor co‑production in Ukraine of drones, air‑defence components, and artillery rounds, alongside European and US plants making the high‑end systems Ukraine and Europe still lack. Allies should commit to buy Ukrainian systems at scale and tie guarantees to contracted output, not to communiques. Empty magazines make empty promises.

These measures would not copy the letter of Article 5. They would meet a different threat with tools that can counter it. Europe’s recent experience, in Poland’s skies, at German shipyards, at Danish airports, and in the Baltic Sea shows how an adversary can apply steady pressure without triggering classic definitions of “armed attack”.

If Ukraine receives only “NATO‑style” language, it will inherit those same gaps outside the alliance. If instead Ukraine and its partners lock in automatic responses, a shared air picture, visible presence, real‑time intelligence, and an industrial base that keeps pace, they will build something stronger: A guarantee that works in the world as it is, not the world at it was.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

When the ceasefire in Gaza was announced, I experienced a range of mixed emotions. I felt joy that the bombs had finally stopped, but also dread that they could resume at any time. I felt optimistic that we could go back to normal life, but also anxious that this could once again be short-lived.

As an English teacher, I hope to see education restored as soon as possible. Education is the only means of reviving hope and helping children start to overcome the trauma of two years of genocide. It can provide a sense of normalcy and purpose. That is why it ought to be Gaza’s top priority.

Before the start of the genocide, I taught English to elementary and middle school pupils at an educational centre and a public girls’ school in Gaza City.  The school was destroyed in the first weeks of the war; the education centre was badly damaged.

My family and I were forced to flee our home. A few months later, I started teaching in a tent; it was a local initiative run by volunteers. There were no desks in the tent; my students – ranging from six to 12 years of age – were sitting on the floor. The conditions of teaching were difficult, but I was committed to helping kids continue their education.

By late December 2024, pens, books, and notebooks started to entirely vanish from shops and markets. A single notebook would cost anywhere from 20 to 30 shekels ($6 to $9), if it was available at all. This was out of reach for the majority of families.

When the shortage of paper, books and pens became palpable, some of my pupils started arriving at class without anything to write on; others would collect scraps of paper from the rubble of homes and arrive at class with that; others still would write in tiny letters on the backs of old sheets of paper preserved by their families. Because pens were so scarce, several children would often have to share a single pen.

Since writing and reading, the cornerstone of education, became so difficult to do, we educators had to come up with alternative teaching strategies. We did group recitation, oral storytelling, and songs.

Despite the lack of supplies, children had an amazing will to continue learning. Seeing them struggling with old scraps of paper filled me with admiration and anguish; I was proud of their will to learn in spite of everything, and their perseverance inspired me.

I had a special notebook my grandmother had gifted me years ago, which I used as a diary. I wrote in it my dreams and my secrets. After the war, I filled the pages with stories of bomb explosions, homeless families sleeping in the street, starvation I had never experienced before, and suffering in the absence of even the most basic necessities.

On one particular school day in August, when the majority of my pupils showed up without any paper, I knew what I had to do. I took my notebook and I started tearing its pages, one by one, giving them to my students.

With so many kids, my notebook’s pages ran out in a single day. My students then had to go back to the scraps of paper or cardboard.

The truce may have put a stop to the bombs, but my students are still without paper and pens. Humanitarian aid has started coming into Gaza once again. Food, medicine, and materials for shelter are coming in. These are all crucial. But we also urgently need educational supplies and support to put education back on track for Gaza’s 600,000 schoolchildren.

Books, pens and paper are not just school supplies. They are a lifeline that can help the children of Gaza triumph over war, destruction and immense loss. They are critical tools that can sustain their perseverance and willpower to live, learn and see a bright future.

Children can recover from the trauma of war and regain a sense of security with the aid of education. Learning gives them back the structure, self-assurance, and hope for a brighter future that are necessary for both community healing and psychological rehabilitation.

We need to give children who lost two years of education the opportunity to write, learn, and dream again.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Mnangagwa allies push for a term extension to 2030 as ZANU-PF factions split and opposition promises a legal fight.

Zimbabwe’s governing ZANU-PF has said it will begin a process to extend President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s term by two years, potentially keeping him in power until 2030.

The plan was endorsed on Saturday at the movement’s annual conference in the eastern city of Mutare, where delegates instructed the government to begin drafting legislation to amend the Constitution, Justice Minister and ZANU-PF legal secretary Ziyambi Ziyambi said.

Mnangagwa, 83, is constitutionally required to leave office in 2028 after serving two elected terms. Any change would require a constitutional amendment – and potentially referendums – legal experts say.

Delegates erupted in applause after the motion passed, reinforcing ZANU-PF’s pattern of securitised rule since independence in 1980. The party controls parliament, giving it significant leverage, though some insiders warn that a legal challenge would be likely.

Mnangagwa has previously insisted he is a “constitutionalist” with no interest in clinging to power. But loyalists have quietly pushed for a prolonged stay since last year’s disputed election, while rivals inside the party – aligned with Vice President Constantino Chiwenga – are openly resisting an extension.

Blessed Geza, a veteran fighter from the liberation war and a Chiwenga ally, has been using YouTube livestreams to condemn the push, drawing thousands of viewers. Calls for mass protests have gained little traction amid a heavy police deployment in Harare and other cities.

The president made no mention of the extension during his closing remarks at the conference. Chiwenga has not commented on Mnangagwa’s term extension bid or the protests.

Dire economic situation

Mnangagwa came to power in 2017 amid promises of democratic and economic reforms following the toppling of the longtime President Robert Mugabe.

Mnangagwa has presided over a dire economic collapse marked by hyperinflation, mass unemployment, and allegations of corruption. Critics accuse ZANU-PF of crushing dissent, weakening the judiciary, and turning elections into a managed ritual rather than a democratic contest.

Legal opposition figures have warned that any attempt to rewrite the Constitution will face resistance in court.

“We will defend the Constitution against its capture and manipulation to advance a dangerous unconstitutional anti-people agenda,” opposition lawyer Tendai Biti said in a statement on X.

Ten elderly activists – most in their 60s and 70s – were arrested in Harare on Friday for allegedly planning a protest demanding Mnangagwa’s resignation.

They were charged with attempting to incite “public violence” and remain in custody pending a bail hearing on Monday. Earlier this year, authorities detained nearly 100 young people in similar circumstances.

The renewed manoeuvring has exposed an accelerating power struggle inside ZANU-PF. One faction wants Mnangagwa to remain until 2030; another is preparing the ground for Chiwenga, the former army general who helped topple Robert Mugabe in the 2017 coup.

It has been a week since the ceasefire was announced in Gaza. When we heard the news in the occupied West Bank, we celebrated. We felt relief and hope that the genocide is finally over. But we also realised that there is no ceasefire for us.

The daily violence we have been subjected to for decades is showing no signs of abating. Since October 7, 2023, the brutality of our occupier has only intensified. Today, life in the West Bank has become almost impossible.

Violence, dispossession and paralysis

After the ceasefire deal was announced, a friend’s little daughter cheered; she then asked to go with her grandparents to pick olives. He told her that it would be difficult to do, to which she responded, “Why? Isn’t the war over?”

How do you explain to a child that the war ending in Gaza does not mean Palestinian families in the West Bank still can access their land to harvest olives? People still cannot reach their groves because of barriers set up by the Israeli military or they fear attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers, or both.

There are daily violent assaults on Palestinian farmers and their land. Since October 7, 2023, there have been 7,154 attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestian people and property – some of them deadly.

Almost 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army and settler mobs, including 212 children; more than 10,000 Palestinians have been displaced. Settlers and soldiers have destroyed 37,237 olive trees since October 7, 2023.

Even life in urban areas has become unbearable.

As a resident of Rawabi, a city north of Ramallah, I, too, feel the suffocation of the occupation every day.

If I need to travel outside my city to run errands, shop, obtain official paperwork, or anything else, I could get stuck at a checkpoint for hours and never make it to my destination. There are four iron gates, a military tower, and a barrier between Rawabi and Ramallah; they can make the 10-minute trip between Rawabi and Ramallah last an eternity.

Throughout the West Bank, there are 916 Israeli barriers, barriers and iron gates, 243 of which were constructed after October 7, 2023. These open and close at the Israeli army’s whim, meaning a Palestinian can get stuck at one barrier for hours. This disrupts every aspect of life – from family visits to urgent medical care to school attendance and transportation of goods.

We have also been denied access to Jerusalem and thus our freedom of worship at Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Few Palestinians are given the special permits needed to enter the city. We last had access to Jerusalem more than 20 years ago. This means an entire generation of young people know nothing about the city except from the pictures and stories told by their parents and grandparents.

Even at night, the Palestinians are not left alone by the occupation. Any Palestinian home may be subject to a raid by the Israeli army, with soldiers breaking the front door, terrorising the family inside and detaining without charge some of its members. Neighbours would, too, be terrorised with Israeli soldiers firing tear gas canisters for no reason, just to cause more suffering.

The right to a normal life—to worship, to spend quality time with friends and family, to move freely, to access regular medical care and education —are all denied to the Palestinians in the West Bank.

The spectre of annexation

Over the decades since the occupation of 1967, Israel has managed to control almost half of the land of the West Bank. It has done so by constructing settlements and confiscating land from its Palestinian owners by declaring it either “state land” or “military zone”. The theft of Palestinian land accelerated after October 7; at least 12,300 acres (4,9787 hectares) were seized in two years.

In many cases, confiscated land is used to establish new settlement outposts or to expand existing settlements.

Settlement construction in the West Bank is not random. Rather, land is selected in a way that encircles Palestinian villages and towns, creating a settlement belt around them that prevents any form of geographical continuity between Palestinian territories, thus thwarting the dream of a future state.

To maintain these illegal settlements, Israel has also laid its hands on the West Bank’s natural resources. It has seized almost all water resources. This has ensured a massive water reservoir in the West Bank to serve the settlement expansion.

For the Palestinians, this has been disastrous. They are now almost completely dependent on Israeli water company “Mekorot”, which gives very small quotas of water to densely populated Palestinian areas, while settlers receive several times the Palestinian share per capita.

Every summer, when drought settles in, Palestinians are forced to buy extra water at exorbitant prices from Mekorot. Meanwhile, Palestinian wells and rain water tanks are often attacked and destroyed.

Since October 7, 2023, the Israeli government has accelerated its efforts to carry out annexation. We feel that the seizure of Area C – an area established by the Oslo Accords where Israel has full civilian and security control – is imminent. This would mean razing Palestinian villages and communities and expelling people towards Area A, which constitutes just 18 percent of the West Bank. Area B will follow. The process of forced expulsion has already started with Bedouin communities in the two areas.

This is our reality here in the West Bank. While peace conferences and meetings were held and peace in the Middle East is declared, we know nothing of it. Every day, every hour, every minute, we are harassed, intimidated, dispossessed and killed.

For decades, Israel has rejected political solutions and pursued a policy of controlling land, people, and resources. It has continued to wage war on us even when its bombardment has stopped. The only way to achieve true peace is to acknowledge the occupation and end it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

As the Group of 20 leaders gather in Cape Town, clean air features on the agenda as a standalone priority for the first time in the forum’s history. The reality, however, is stark. Outdoor air pollution claims 5.7 million lives each year, and a report released last week highlights the lack of international development finance for clean air. Only $3.7bn was spent globally in 2023, representing barely 1 percent of aid, with only a fraction reaching Africa.

As the minister chairing the G20’s environment workstream this year, I am proud to have worked with member countries and international organisations to place air pollution firmly on the agenda. When Japan held the presidency in 2019, the focus was on marine plastics. Last year, under Brazil’s leadership, the G20 prioritised finance for forests. This year, we sought to treat the right to breathe clean air with the urgency it deserves.

In South Africa, our Constitution guarantees every person the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or wellbeing. That principle guides our domestic policy and informs our leadership of the G20’s discussions.

This is the first G20 presidency on African soil, a fitting setting to confront this crisis. Africa is the fastest urbanising continent on Earth, and the choices we make today in how we power our homes, move our people, and build our cities will shape health, climate, and economic outcomes for decades to come. The burden of air pollution is already visible in hospital admissions, school absenteeism, and productivity losses across the continent. According to the World Bank, outdoor air pollution causes global economic losses equivalent to nearly 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) each year.

This reality is now reshaping the global debate. In May, governments adopted the world’s first global goal on air quality at the World Health Organization’s World Health Assembly, which aims to halve deaths caused by poor air by 2040. It was a landmark step, but without finance to match ambition, such commitments risk remaining words on paper.

Our G20 deliberations identified four barriers to cleaner air. The first is limited institutional capacity. The second is inadequate monitoring and data, leaving policymakers and citizens without reliable information. The third is weak cooperation across borders. The fourth is the shortage of finance relative to the scale of the problem.

The Clean Air Fund’s recent report makes this plain. In 2023, support for outdoor air quality in sub-Saharan Africa fell by 91 percent to only $11.8m. Globally, just 1 percent of aid was spent on clean air, and only 1 percent of that reached sub-Saharan Africa. In other words, less than one-10,000th (1/10,000) of global development funding supports clean-air efforts in one of the regions most in need.

That is not only inequitable; it is also economically short-sighted. Clean-air action reduces healthcare costs, boosts productivity, and supports the transition to more resilient economies.

South Africa’s own experience demonstrates what is possible. Through the National Air Quality Framework and the National Environmental Management Act, we have built a foundation for accountability and transparency in monitoring air quality. We have strengthened coordination between national and municipal governments, introduced targeted interventions in the Highveld and Vaal Triangle, and expanded our air-quality monitoring network so that communities can access real-time data. These measures are supported by our broader Just Energy Transition, which directs investment towards cleaner transport, renewable power, and improved waste management.

The lesson is that progress requires both political will and predictable finance. Domestic measures alone are not enough. International financial institutions and development banks must embed clean-air objectives within climate and development portfolios.

This year’s G20 discussions also underscored the importance of data. You cannot manage what you cannot measure. Expanding reliable air-quality monitoring networks in low-income countries is one of the smartest investments the international community can make. It empowers local decision-makers, supports innovation in clean technologies, and strengthens accountability.

The message from Cape Town is clear: clean air belongs at the top table. That recognition must now be matched by sustained progress to deliver measurable outcomes. In practice, this means embedding clean-air objectives at the heart of development finance and prioritising regions that have been left behind, especially across Africa, where pollution levels are high but funding remains negligible.

Clean air is not a peripheral issue; it is central to achieving climate goals, health targets, and sustainable growth. The science is clear: the same pollutants that harm human health also warm the planet. Tackling them together delivers faster and more cost-effective results.

We therefore call for a collective effort among governments, development partners, and the private sector to ensure that clean air becomes a central measure of success in the global transition. The right to breathe clean air is universal. Delivering it requires fairness, commitment, and finance that match ambition.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Last week, a ceasefire was announced after two years of genocide in Gaza. The bombs have stopped falling, but the devastation remains. The majority of homes, schools, hospitals, universities, factories, and commercial buildings have been reduced to rubble. From above, Gaza looks like a grey desert of rubble, its vibrant urban spaces reduced to ghost towns, its lush agricultural land and greenery wiped out.

The occupier’s aim was not only to render the Palestinians of Gaza homeless but also unable to provide for themselves. Uprooting the dispossessed and impoverished, those who have lost their connection to the land, is of course much easier.

This was the goal when Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered my family’s plot of land in the eastern part of Maghazi refugee camp and uprooted 55 olive trees, 10 palms and five fig trees.

This plot of land was offered to my refugee grandfather, Ali Alsaloul, by its original owner as a place to shelter in during the Nakba of 1948. Ali, his wife, Ghalia, and their children had just fled their village, al-Maghar, as Zionist forces advanced on it. Al-Maghar, like Gaza today, was reduced to rubble; the Zionists who perpetrated the crime completed the erasure by establishing a national park on its ruins – “Mrar Hills National Park”.

Ali was a farmer and so were his ancestors; his livelihood had always come from the land. So when he settled in the new location, he was quick to plant it with olive trees, palms, figs and prickly pears. He built his house there and raised my father, uncles and aunts. My grandfather eventually bought the land from its generous owner, by paying in installments over many years. Thus, my family came into the possession of 2,000 square metres (half an acre) of land.

Although my father and his siblings married and moved out of their family home, this plot of land remained a favourite place to go, especially for me.

It was just two kilometres away from our house in Maghazi refugee camp. I enjoyed doing the 30-minute walk, part of which went through a complete “jungle”: a stretch of green populated with clover, sycamore, jujube and olive trees, colourful birds, foxes, leashed and unleashed dogs and many beehives.

Every autumn, in October, when the olive picking season began, my cousins, friends and I would gather to collect the olives. It was an occasion that brought us closer together. We would get the olives pressed and get 500 litres (130 gallons) of olive oil from the harvest. The figs and dates were made into jams to have for breakfast or for suhoor during Ramadan.

The rest of the year, I would often meet my friends Ibrahim and Mohammed between the olive trees. We would light a small fire and make a kettle of tea to enjoy under the moonlight, while we talked.

When the war started in 2023, our land became a dangerous place to go. The farms and olive groves around it were often bombed. Our plot was also hit twice at the beginning of the war. As a result, we could not harvest the olives in 2023 and then again in 2024.

When the famine took hold of Gaza in the summer, we started sneaking into the plot to get some fruit and some firewood for cooking, since a kilo of that cost $2. We knew that Israeli tanks might storm in at any moment, but we took the risk anyway.

Seven families – we, friends and neighbours – benefited from the fruit and wood of that land.

One day in late August, a friend of mine called me with a terrible rumour he had heard: the Israeli tanks and bulldozers had advanced into the eastern part of Maghazi and levelled it all, uprooting trees and burying them. I gasped; our lifeline was gone.

Days later, the rumour was confirmed. The Israeli army had uprooted more than 600 trees in the area, mostly olive trees. Those who had fled from the area shared what they had seen. What was once a lush green stretch of land had been bulldozed into a yellow, lifeless desert.

Earlier in August, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported that 98.5 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land had been damaged or made inaccessible. I guess the destruction of our plot shrank that 1.5 percent remaining land even further.

As Israel was completing the erasure of Palestinian agricultural land, it started allowing commercial but not aid trucks into Gaza. The markets were flooded with products with packaging covered in Hebrew.

Israel was starving us, destroying our ability to grow our own food, and then making us buy their products at exorbitant prices.

Ninety percent of people in Gaza are unemployed and can’t afford to buy an Israeli egg for $5 or a kilo of dates for $13. It was yet another genocidal strategy that forced the two million starving Palestinians in Gaza to choose between two horrible options: dying from hunger or paying to support the Israeli economy.

Now, aid is finally supposed to start coming into Gaza under the ceasefire agreement. This may be a relief to many starving Palestinians, but it is not a solution. Israel has rendered us fully dependent on aid, and it is the sole power that determines if, when and how much of it enters Gaza. Per the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, 100 percent of Palestinians in Gaza experience some level of food insecurity.

Much of Gaza’s agricultural land remains out of reach, as Israel has withdrawn from just a part of the Gaza Strip. My family will have to wait for the implementation of the third phase of the ceasefire deal – if Israel agrees to implement it at all – to see the Israeli army withdraw to the buffer zone and regain access our land.

We have now lost our land twice. Once in 1948 and now again in 2025. Israel wants to repeat history and dispossess us again. It must not be allowed to convert more Palestinian land into buffer zones and national parks.

Getting back our land, rehabilitating and planting it is crucial not just for our survival, but also for maintaining our connection to the land. We must resist uprooting.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Hunger is neither a natural condition of humankind nor an unavoidable tragedy: it is the result of choices made by governments and economic systems that have chosen to turn a blind eye to inequalities – or even of promoting them.

The same global order that denies 673 million people access to adequate food also enables a privileged group of just 3,000 billionaires to hold 14.6 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP).

In 2024, the wealthiest nations helped drive the largest surge in military spending since the end of the Cold War, reaching $2.7 trillion that year. Yet they failed to deliver on their own commitment: to invest 0.7 percent of their GDP in concrete actions to promote development in poorer countries.

Today, we see situations not unlike those that prevailed 80 years ago, when the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations was created. Unlike then, however, we are not only witnessing the tragedies of war and hunger feeding into each other, but also facing the urgent climate crisis. And the international order established to address the challenges of 1945 is no longer sufficient to address today’s problems.

Global governance mechanisms must be reformed. We need to strengthen multilateralism, create investment flows that promote sustainable development, and ensure that states have the capacity to implement consistent public policies to fight hunger and poverty.

It is essential to include the poor in public budgets and the wealthy in the tax base. This requires tax justice and taxing the superrich, an issue we managed to include for the first time in the final declaration of the G20 Summit, held in November 2024, under Brazil’s Presidency. A symbolic but historic change.

We advocate for this practice around the world — and we are implementing it in Brazil. Our Parliament is about to approve substantial tax reform: for the first time in the country, there will be a minimum tax on the income of the wealthiest individuals, exempting millions of lower-income earners from paying income tax.

During our G20 Presidency, Brazil also proposed the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty. Although recent, the initiative already has 200 members — 103 countries and 97 partner foundations and organisations. This initiative is not just about exchanging experiences, but about mobilising resources and securing commitments.

With this alliance, we want to enable countries to implement public policies that truly reduce inequality and ensure the right to adequate food. Policies that deliver rapid results, as seen in Brazil after we made the fight against hunger a government priority in 2023.

Official data released just a few days ago show that we have lifted 26.5 million Brazilians out of hunger since the beginning of 2023. In addition, Brazil has been removed, for the second time, from the FAO’s Hunger Map, as laid out in its global report on food insecurity. A map we would not have returned to if the policies launched during my first two terms (2003-10) and President Dilma Rousseff’s (2011-16) had not been abandoned.

Behind these achievements lie a set of coordinated actions on multiple fronts. We have strengthened and expanded our national income transfer programme, which now reaches 20 million households and supports 8.5 million children aged six and below.

We have increased funding for free meals in public schools, benefitting 40 million students. Through public food procurement, we have secured income for small-scale family farmers, while offering free, nutritious meals to those who truly need them. In addition, we have expanded the free supply of cooking gas and electricity to low-income households, freeing up room in family budgets to strengthen food security.

None of these policies, however, is sustainable without an economic environment that drives them. When there are jobs and income, hunger loses its grip. That is why we have adopted an economic policy that prioritises wage increases, leading to the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded in Brazil. And to the lowest level of per capita household income inequality.

Brazil still has a long way to go before achieving full food security for its entire population, but the results confirm that state action can indeed overcome the scourge of hunger. These initiatives, however, depend on concrete shifts in global priorities: investing in development rather than in wars; prioritising the fight against inequality instead of restrictive economic policies that for decades have caused massive concentration of wealth; and facing the challenge of climate change with people at its core.

By hosting COP30 in the Amazon next month, Brazil wants to show that the fight against climate change and the fight against hunger must go hand in hand. In Belem, we aim to adopt a Declaration on Hunger, Poverty, and Climate that acknowledges the profoundly unequal impacts of climate change and its role in worsening hunger in certain regions of the world.

I will also take these messages to the World Food Forum and to the meeting of the Council of Champions of the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty, events I will have the honour of attending today, the 13th, in Rome, Italy. These are messages that show that change is urgent and possible. For humanity, which created the poison of hunger against itself, is also capable of producing its antidote.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

For decades, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) prepared for war, confident in its advantage over any adversary. Its member states invested heavily in state-of-the-art weapons. Stealth aircraft, precision weaponry, secretive submarines and city-sized aircraft carriers stood as the guardians of the West.

This power appeared unshakable until recently. On September 10, during another massive Russian aerial attack on Ukraine, more than 20 Russian drones crossed into neighbouring Poland. The NATO member had to scramble multimillion-euro military equipment – F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, military helicopters and Patriot surface-to-air missile systems – in order to shoot down potential threats. Several drones were shot down, including three Shaheds and several cheaply made foam dummies.

That interception operation was not only costly, but it also busted the myth of Western military might. Trillions of dollars in investment in the military industrial complex could not protect NATO borders from two dozen inexpensive drones.

In the following days, unidentified drones shut down airports in Norway, Denmark and Germany, costing airlines millions of euros; in Belgium, drones were also spotted near a military base.

The European media is full of stories about unidentifiable drones, air defences, and speculation over possible directions of a Russian strike. Romania? Poland? The Baltic States? Along the entire eastern border of the European Union, there is no place where the population feels truly safe.

It is hard to imagine the scale of chaos should Russian forces actually go on the offensive. How many countries would act under NATO’s Article 5, which allows for collective action against a military threat against a single member, and how swiftly? By then, where would the Russian forces be?

The central question remains: can the North Atlantic alliance and its modern military technology stop such an advance?

The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that the answer is no. Russian forces display a persistence in combat possible only under dictatorial regimes, where soldiers are indoctrinated and fear their own command more than the enemy.

Modern methods of warfare against armies modelled on World Wars I and II are not nearly as effective as generals once claimed. One just has to look at the front line in Ukraine and the constantly evolving military strategies.

Faced with a formidable military power with seemingly unlimited budget and unconstrained military reach, the Ukrainians had to adapt quickly. They began deploying drones against Russian armour, but the enemy did not remain idle against these attacks. It started constructing improvised metal cages over tank turrets to absorb explosions.

Precision strikes with Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) cluster munitions taught them to disperse ammunition in small points, avoiding concentrations of troops and equipment.

Drones on both sides monitor the front line, but it is scorched earth: no movement of tanks or infantry can be seen. Russian advances proceed covertly, mostly at night, with two- or three-man teams crossing bombardment zones, gradually assembling for surprise attacks. Troops on both sides are dug deep underground; what is visible is only the casualty count — several thousand each week.

Is Europe prepared for this type of war? Are NATO soldiers capable of surviving for weeks in foxholes and ruins, without communicating, to avoid detection and destruction?

A survey conducted by Gallup last year suggests the answer is no. In Poland, 45 percent of respondents said they would voluntarily defend their country if war threatened. In Spain, the figure was 29 percent; in Germany, only 23 percent; in Italy, a meagre 14 percent; the EU average was 32 percent.

More than three years into the war with Russia, Ukraine itself is suffering from severe shortages of personnel. Forced conscription has become increasingly unpopular, and draft evasion is widespread, according to Ukrainian media and Western observers. Even with Western weapons and funding, the shortage of soldiers limits Ukraine’s ability to hold the line or conduct meaningful offensives.

Currently, the active personnel of NATO’s European allies number around 1.47 million; that includes the United Kingdom. That seems considerable, until it is compared with Ukraine, where an 800,000-strong army has been facing a 600,000-strong Russian force over a 1,000-kilometre (621-mile) front for more than three years, gradually retreating.

Then there is also the difficult question of how many countries would actually send troops to the eastern front, and in what numbers. Would the NATO member states on the eastern flank be left to fend for themselves, only supplied with arms by their Western allies? And would that lead to tensions within the alliance, and its possible paralysis or even breakup?

Europe has only two options to feel even partially secure: either continue to spend trillions of euros rapidly expanding its own military capabilities, or try to put an end to the Russian aggression by providing full financial and military support to Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has stated that his nation requires $60bn annually to fend off Russian aggression. It is a heavy burden for the West, especially in these challenging times. Yet it is negligible compared with the price Ukraine is paying — in money, military and civilian lives, lost territory, and destroyed infrastructure.

While Europe hesitates with calculators in hand, Ukraine fights. Every day the war continues, the risk of it spreading westward increases.

The time for swift decisions is now.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump announced that the United States, working with Egypt, Turkiye and Qatar, had finally reached a ceasefire deal for Gaza. For a moment, it seemed as if Gaza’s long nightmare was coming to an end.

But the ceasefire didn’t bring peace; it only shifted the suffering into a quieter, more insidious form, where the real damage from the rubble began to settle into Gaza’s weary soul. Years of relentless shelling had built up fear and heartbreak that no outsider could erase.

During those two brutal years of bombing and near-total destruction, everyone in Gaza was focused on one thing: Staying alive. We were fighting for every minute, trying not to break down, starve, or get killed. Life became an endless loop of terror and waiting for the next strike. No one had the luxury to dream about tomorrow or even to mourn the people we’d lost. If there was any kind of shelter, and that was a big if, the goal was simply to move from one shattered refuge to another, holding on by a thread. That constant awareness that death could come at any moment turned every day into an act of survival.

Then, when the explosions finally eased, a quieter kind of pain crept in: All the grief we had buried to get through the chaos. Almost everyone had someone torn away, and those pushed-aside memories came rushing back with a force that took the breath out of us. As soon as the rockets fell quiet, another fight began inside people’s chests, one full of mourning, flashbacks and relentless mental anguish. On the surface, it looked like the war was over, but it wasn’t. It was far messier than that. Even when the shelling eased, the emotional wounds kept bleeding.

When the noise finally faded, people began to ask the questions they had forced themselves to ignore. They already knew the answers – who was gone, who would not be coming back – but saying the words out loud made it real. The silence that followed was heavier than any explosion they had survived. That silence made the truth impossible to avoid. It revealed the permanence of loss and the scale of what had vanished. There were holes everywhere, in homes, in streets, in hearts, and there was no way to fill them.

People in Gaza breathed a fragile sigh of relief when the news of a ceasefire arrived, but they knew the days ahead could hurt even more than the fighting itself. After 733 days of feeling erased from the map, the tears locked behind their eyes finally began to fall, carrying with them every ounce of buried pain. Each tear was proof of what they had endured. It was a reminder that a ceasefire does not end suffering; it only opens the door to a different kind of torment.
As the guns fell quiet, people in Gaza were left to confront the full scale of the devastation. You could see it in their faces – the shock, the fury, the grief – the weight of years under fire.

Roads that once hummed with life had fallen silent. Homes that had sheltered families were reduced to dust, and children wandered through the ruins, trying to recognise the streets they had grown up on. The whole place felt like a void that seemed to swallow everything, as bottled-up grief burst open and left everyone floundering in powerlessness. During the onslaught, the occupiers had made sure Palestinians could not even stop to mourn. But with the ceasefire came the unbearable realisation of how much had truly been lost, how ordinary life had been erased. Coming face to face with the absence of loved ones left scars that would not fade, and the tears finally came. Those tears ran down exhausted faces and broken hearts, carrying the full weight of everything remembered.

It was not only the mind that suffered. The physical and social world of Palestinians lay in ruins. When the bombing eased, people crawled out of their makeshift tents to find their homes and towns reduced to rubble. Places that had once meant comfort were gone, and streets that had once been full of life were now heaps of debris.

Families dug desperately through the rubble for traces of their old lives, for roads and signs that had vanished, for relatives still trapped beneath the debris. Amid the wreckage, the questions came: How do we rebuild from this? Where can we find any spark of hope? When an entire world has been destroyed, where does one even begin? Israel’s strategy was clear, and its results unmistakable. This was not chaos; it was a deliberate effort to turn Gaza into a wasteland. By striking hospitals, schools and water systems – the foundations of survival – the aim was to shatter what makes life itself possible. Those strikes sowed a despair that seeps into everything, fraying the bonds of community, eroding trust and forcing families to wonder whether they can endure a system built to erase them.

The destruction went deeper than bricks and bodies. The constant shadow of death, the bombs that could fall anywhere, and the psychological toll made fear feel ordinary, hope seem foolish, and society begin to unravel. Children stopped learning, money disappeared, health collapsed, and the fragile glue holding communities together came undone. Palestinians were not only struggling to survive each day; they were also fighting the slow decay of their future, a damage etched into minds and spirits that will last for generations.

When the fighting subsided, new forms of pain emerged. Surrounded by ruins and with no clear path forward, people in Gaza faced an impossible choice: Leave their homeland and risk never returning, or stay in a place without roads, schools, doctors or roofs. Either choice ensured the same outcome – the continuation of suffering by making Gaza unlivable. Endless negotiations and bureaucratic deadlocks only deepened the despair, allowing the wounds to fester even as the world spoke of “peace”.

The ceasefire may have stopped the shooting, but it ignited new battles: Restoring power and water, reopening schools, rebuilding healthcare, and trying to reclaim a sense of dignity. Yet the larger question remains: Will the world settle for symbolic aid and empty speeches, or finally commit to helping Palestinians rebuild their lives? Wars carve deep wounds, and healing them takes more than talk. It demands sustained, tangible support.

After two years under siege, Gaza is crying out for more than quiet guns. It needs courage, vision and real action to restore dignity and a sense of future. The ceasefire is not a finish line. It marks the start of a harder struggle against heartbreak, memory and pain that refuses to fade. If the world does not act decisively, Palestinian life itself could collapse. Rebuilding communities, routines and a measure of normalcy will be slow and difficult, but it has to happen if Gaza is to keep going. Outwardly, the war may have paused, but here it has only changed shape. What comes next will demand everything we have left: Endurance, stubborn hope, the will to stay standing.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

On November 7, 2023, children stood before cameras at al-Shifa Hospital and spoke in English, not their mother tongue, but in the language of those they thought might save them. “We want to live, we want peace, we want to judge the killers of children,” one boy said. “We want medicine, food and education. We want to live as other children live.” Even then, barely a month into the genocide, they had no clean drinking water, no food and no medicine. They begged in the colonisers’ language because they thought it might make their humanity legible.

I wonder how many of those children are dead now, how many never made it to this moment of “peace”, and whether they died still believing the world might answer their call.

Now, almost two years later, US President Donald Trump posts that he is “very proud” of the signing of the first phase of his “peace plan”. French President Emmanuel Macron praises and commends Trump’s initiative, while Israeli leader Yair Lapid calls on the Nobel Committee to award Trump a peace prize. Leaders have lined up to claim credit for ending a genocide they spent two years, and the previous 77, funding, arming and enabling.

But Gaza never needed saving. Gaza needed the world to stop killing it. Gaza needed the world to simply let its people live on their land, free of occupation, apartheid and genocide. Gaza’s people merely needed the objective, legal and moral standard generously afforded to those who murdered them. Gaza’s genocide exposed a world that preaches justice yet funds oppression, and a people who turned survival itself into defiance.

All that to say, glory to the Palestinian people, to their steadfastness and to their collective power. Palestinians refused to submit to a narrative imposed upon them, that they were beggars seeking aid, “terrorists” who needed to pay, or anything less than a people whose dignity deserved to be upheld without reservation or degradation.

Gaza did not fail. We did. Gaza resisted when the world expected it to break. Gaza stood alone when it should never have had to stand alone. Gaza endured despite international abandonment, despite governments that funded its destruction and now celebrate themselves as peacemakers.

As a man of faith, I am reminded of this:

“When they are told, ‘Do not spread corruption in the land,’ they reply, ‘We are only peacemakers!’” (Quran 2:11)

Nothing says peace like two years of starvation, bombardment and mass graves, when, instead of delivering food, they delivered shrouds.

And while Gaza bled, the powerful perfected the art of denial. And when I see the people of Gaza celebrating in the streets, I know that this celebration belongs to them alone, not to Donald Trump, who has announced he will visit the region to take credit for what he calls a “historic occasion”, and not to Western leaders who profited from Gaza’s devastation while pretending neutrality. The people rushing to cameras to claim credit are the same ones who made the genocide possible, who funded it with billions in military aid, armed it with precision-guided missiles and provided diplomatic cover at the United Nations while repeatedly vetoing UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions. The United States approved an additional $14.3bn in military aid during the genocide, bypassing congressional oversight multiple times to rush Apache helicopter missiles, 155mm artillery shells, night-vision equipment and bunker-busting bombs that landed on the heads of families as they slept.

Those of us sitting in the comfort of the West should feel shame. Americans like to imagine themselves on the right side of history. We tell ourselves that had we lived during Jim Crow or the Holocaust, we would have done anything to stop it. But we have 340 million people in America, and we could not stop our tax dollars from funding extermination. We could not even deliver baby formula, as we watched babies’ bodies waste away. Many sat in complicity, made excuses for the inexcusable, blamed Palestinians for their own deaths, and turned away from the horror because acknowledging it would have meant confronting our own government’s role in funding it. Our failure did not eclipse Palestinian agency; it made it more visible.

The only pressure that mattered came from the people Israel could not silence, Palestinians who livestreamed their own deaths so the world could not claim ignorance or accept Israel’s falsehoods as truth. Gaza survived because of its own resistance, a resistance to which its people are entitled. The ceasefire came because Palestinian steadfastness broke something the bombs could not touch, because the facade of Israeli victimhood crumbled under the weight of livestreamed atrocity, and because global public opinion turned against Israel despite every effort to manufacture consent for genocide. What it accomplished is written in civilian death rolls, not in security. That is what forced this ceasefire.

Palestine’s most celebrated poet, Mahmoud Darwish, knew how this would go: “The war will end. The leaders will shake hands. The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son. That girl will wait for her beloved husband. And those children will wait for their heroic father. I don’t know who sold our homeland. But I saw who paid the price.” Now they broker peace between the killer and the killed, the butcher and the slain, and call it progress. The price was paid in Palestinian blood. And somewhere, an old woman, a new bride or an orphaned daughter is still waiting for their loved ones to come home.

There must be full accountability, not just for Israel but for every government and corporation that made this genocide possible. There must be a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel immediately, economic sanctions until there is complete withdrawal from occupied territory, freedom for the more than 10,000 Palestinian hostages, and reparations for reconstruction determined and distributed by Palestinians themselves. War criminals must be prosecuted at The Hague, regardless of which nation objects. This is just the start. Justice is not a diplomatic option; it is the minimum measure of our shared humanity.

The “peace” Trump’s plan promises died with every child in Gaza, every displaced family, and every day the world called genocide “self-defence”, ignoring the International Court of Justice’s 2004 ruling that an occupier cannot claim self-defence against the occupied.

The only just future is complete liberation — one democratic state with equal rights for all, beginning with Gaza’s right to determine its own fate without siege, without occupation and without foreign control disguised as peacekeeping. But first, the people of Gaza have earned the right to mourn, to count their dead and bury them properly, and above all, to feel this small moment of joy. Palestinians have earned, through unimaginable suffering, the right to define what freedom looks like. The rest of the world has no standing to tell them otherwise.

For those of us in the West, we must make sure that the world does not return to normal. We cannot be lulled back to sleep by the temporary cessation of air strikes while the occupation continues. Israel cannot continue as if it did not commit the gravest crime of our generation. The hundreds of thousands of martyred and maimed Palestinians demand justice that cannot be denied.

We cannot rest until the entire system of occupation and apartheid is dismantled and replaced with liberation. This is only the beginning. Free Palestine, from the river to the sea.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) was created in December 1949, almost two years after the UN voted for the partition of Palestine. It was, and still is, the only UN agency dedicated solely to one dispossessed population — the Palestinians.

In the decades following its creation, UNRWA was engaged in almost all aspects of Palestinian life — from food distribution to healthcare and education to utilities provision. Amid the genocide in Gaza, the agency was sidelined, and its operations were restricted under Israeli pressure.

Now, as a ceasefire is on the horizon, we need UNRWA to fully restore its work and help bring an end to the famine. It is the only organisation that has the capacity to distribute aid fairly and efficiently.

UNRWA has always been part of my family’s life. My parents, my siblings, and I studied in UNRWA’s schools, where we received free education under the supervision of dedicated teachers. We also relied on UNRWA’s food distributions many times, especially when my family experienced financial difficulties. In our childhood, we visited the agency’s clinics regularly for primary healthcare, vaccinations, and basic treatment. This service was always accessible, especially for those who could not afford private care.

After the outbreak of the Israeli genocide in Gaza on October 7, 2023, UNRWA continued to provide services as best it could. However, Israel, backed by its Western allies, launched a fierce campaign against the agency. In January 2024, the Israeli government claimed that some UNRWA staff members had been involved in the attacks; as a result, 19 employees were investigated, and some were dismissed.

These allegations gave the justification for Western donor countries to suspend their funding to UNRWA, including the United States and European Union member states. That severely impacted UNRWA’s resources at a time when two million people in Gaza almost fully depended on them.

After the ceasefire agreement was announced in January this year, the aid situation began to improve. UNRWA was able to resume aid distribution in an orderly and fair manner.

It had clear schedules and designated aid centres in each neighbourhood. To avoid chaos, each family had to register in advance using their ID number. They would get a message from UNRWA specifying the day and the exact hour they had to collect their parcels. When they arrived at the centre, their information would be checked by staff or volunteers to ensure that no one was skipped or received more than they deserved. Each family would receive a food parcel based on its size. This system gave Palestinians a sense of order in the middle of very difficult conditions.

Unfortunately, this situation did not last. On March 2, Israel blocked aid from entering the Strip, and on March 19, it resumed its genocide. Once again, people had to face displacement and unbearable conditions they thought they would never have to endure.

On April 25, UNRWA announced that its food supplies had run out. Since then, we have been enduring another severe famine. UNRWA, along with many humanitarian agencies, halted their aid operations, leaving over a million people to suffer from hunger and malnutrition.

A month later, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was created to take over aid distribution as a response to Israeli claims that aid was being stolen by Hamas.

Unlike UNRWA, GHF does not offer an organised system of distribution. Its aid sites are located in dangerous areas, and its process of handing over parcels is chaotic. There are no schedules, no registration, no fair distribution. Every day, a limited number of food parcels are just dumped in a fenced-off area, and people are allowed to rush in and get whatever they can. “Order” is enforced through live fire by Israeli soldiers or foreign mercenaries, who by now have killed more than 2,500 Palestinians seeking aid.

Apart from the deadly aid at GHF, Israel has allowed only a meagre amount of aid to enter Gaza; most of it has been looted before reaching its intended destination. In late July, it started allowing commercial trucks as well. All of the goods they carry go to merchants and are sold at exorbitant prices.

The famine has been relentless.

Every day, I see children in my neighbourhood rushing to get a bit of food from a takyah — a small soup kitchen run by a Palestinian charity. These local organisations usually buy the little food available in the local markets with donations from abroad. The meals are simple — rice, lentils, pasta, or soup. Families who are unable to afford food prices depend entirely on these meals.

Ironically, in August, many of the same countries that had suspended funding to UNRWA called for immediate action to end the famine in Gaza.

“Famine is unfolding before our eyes. Urgent action is needed now to halt and reverse starvation,” said a statement signed by the foreign ministers of 19 EU member states, along with Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and Japan.

Yet, by cutting funding to UNRWA and allowing Israel to devastate the agency, these countries deprived more than two million people of their basic right to food

If they are serious about ending the genocide and the starvation, they must restore their support for the very agency that was created to prevent such suffering and force Israel to allow it to fully restore its services.

UNRWA was always a lifeline for the people of Gaza. It was the only agency that gave us a sense of stability and hope in the middle of chaos. For us to survive this genocide and what comes after it, UNRWA would have to be refunded and protected. Allowing Israel to destroy it would be tantamount to allowing Palestinians to be wiped out.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

It’s hard to imagine a stranger twist to the MAGA’s “war on woke” than FBI Director Kash Patel’s announcement that the Bureau is cutting ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In a social media post, Patel wrote that the agency won’t partner with “political fronts masquerading as watchdogs”. The decision came after right-wing backlash over the ADL’s inclusion of Turning Point USA and its late leader, Charlie Kirk, in its “glossary of extremism”.

Not surprisingly, the organisation, with whom the FBI had collaborated on issues related to tracking anti-Semitism and other forms of extremism for well over half a century, quickly declared much of its “research” “outdated” and began scrubbing its websites of criticism of conservative figures and organisations.

Patel is certainly not wrong that the ADL is a deeply political organisation. Although it was founded in 1913 “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all”, since the 1970s, the organisation has focused ever more intently on shielding Israel from criticism. In parallel, it has also monitored right-wing racist and anti-LGBTQ+ extremism so that it could remain solidly within the liberal Jewish fold in the US.

Today, the ADL claims to be one of the country’s leading organisations fighting anti-Semitism and other forms of hate. But in fact, its primary mission continues to be to protect Israel from any criticism by using its considerable resources to ensure that any serious, systematic criticism of its policies, even by Jews, be considered – and when possible, punished – as anti-Semitic.

The ADL was a close partner to the Joe Biden administration in its campaign against pro-Palestinian mobilisation on university campuses, and until last week, it was a close partner to Donald Trump’s administration, as well. It is under the guise of fighting anti-Semitism on campuses that the organisation has contributed to the massive assault on freedom of dissent and freedom of thought in US higher education.

When pro-Palestinian demonstrations broke out at Columbia University in 2024, triggering a wave of similar protest action across the country, the ADL led the charge against the university, calling for “swift action” on “virulent antisemitism” on college campuses. For the Biden administration, a quick and harsh crackdown on campus protests was critical to enable it to pursue its policy of unconditional support for Israel’s ever more violent prosecution of the war in Gaza without major public backlash.

For the Trump administration, the ADL and other pro-Israel Jewish organisations served another purpose: their relentless focus on the “new anti-Semitism” that overlapped seamlessly with anti-Zionism and that was allegedly infecting higher education, was the perfect cudgel with which to bludgeon universities into submission.

By working closely with the government, the ADL was able to engage in the classic “arsonist and fireman” scam: accusing universities across the country of anti-Semitism, and then offering itself as the organisation that could put out the anti-Jewish fire.

How does the trick work? The ADL continuously puts out statements criticising universities for enabling or doing nothing to combat anti-Semitism on campus. In particular, its Antisemitism Report Card – which has faced strong criticism for its flawed methodology – grades schools across the country on the prevalence of anti-Semitism on their campuses.

Similar to the US News and World Report college rankings, a bad ADL “grade” can tarnish a school’s reputation with an important segment of the college-aged population. Accusations of anti-Semitism would then motivate leading university donors to threaten to withdraw their support.

Given its access to centres of political power – at least until now – the ADL has been suitably positioned to collaborate on addressing alleged anti-Semitism on university campuses and reassuring donors and the government.

And so, for example, in July, Columbia announced it was partnering with ADL to create programmes aimed at combating anti-Semitism.

How much is the ADL paid for this and other collaborations? Calls and emails to the ADL requesting comment were not returned, but from its own statements, it is clear that the organisation has “collaborations” and “partnerships” with a large number of universities across the country through various programmes – the exact number is not public.

To cite one in-house statistic, the ADL boasted that “over 56,000 faculty, staff, administrators and students on 900 college and university campuses nationwide have participated” in its Campus of Difference programmes, although it seems the programme, similar to the “glossary of extremism”, was pulled offline since Trump returned to power, possibly because it used terms like “diversity” and “inclusion”.

The ADL has not been the only one benefitting from whipping up the anti-Semitism campaign on university campuses.

Brown University, which also reached an agreement with the Trump administration earlier this year, has made a pledge to increase cooperation with Hillel. So did UPenn, which now allows donations to Hillel to be made directly through the university. Most damning for me as a University of California faculty member is UCLA’s recent pledge of $2.3m to “eight organizations that combat antisemitism,” including the ADL and Hillel. All eight are unremittingly pro-Israel.

With all this, the ADL, along with other pro-Israel organisations, have played a central role in the coup-de-grace against academic freedom and shared governance, forcing university leaderships to pivot to the right in order to maintain tens of billions of dollars in mostly science funding. They have facilitated the larger project of remaking the university as a system for regenerating mindless conservatism throughout society.

The question that has arisen with the sudden frontal assault by senior Trump administration officials and conservative figures is whether, having played their role all too well, these pro-Israel organisations are no longer needed, and the markedly increasing anti-Israel – and anti-Semitic – rhetoric among Trump’s base will now have freer rein. In hindsight, the ADL’s obsequious support for Elon Musk after his Nazi salute and anti-Semitic comments may well be owed to a sense among the leadership that it would be on shakier ground with Trump than it was with Biden.

Another hint at this realisation comes from ADL’s claim in a newly released report to care for “Jewish faculty under fire” from colleagues and protesters who portray themselves as “anti-Zionist, but [are] truly anti-Semitic”.

This kind of whingeing at a moment when pro-Israel forces had unprecedented support at the highest levels of power reveals a discourse of infantilisation of Jews that is damning in its own right, but also likely indicative of a growing insecurity within the pro-Israel establishment. Suddenly the victim of conservative ire, it needs Jews to feel even more afraid to maintain already fraying support within the community.

Yet an unintended consequence of the ADL being on the outs with Trump and his forces would be to give Jewish faculty and students more room to breathe and to understand the relative privilege, and responsibility, of our position today. It certainly would be welcome.

Seventy years ago, my mother was refused entry to Columbia because of an openly acknowledged Jewish quota. Thirty years later, when I attended the City University of New York, accusations by some CUNY faculty that Jews predominated in the slave trade were mixed with Black-Hasidic violence in Brooklyn and the growing popularity of the Nation of Islam to create an ostensibly toxic brew for Jewish students attending an urban public college.

The ADL was around then, but was focusing on spying on the anti-Apartheid movement – a policy it continues today with progressive activists – and defending Israel against the incipient movements against the occupation. We, Jewish college students, were largely and thankfully left to our own devices. Like every other – far more oppressed – minority, we learned what to ignore and what to learn from, when to stand our ground or fight, and when to let things go. In other words, how to navigate and deal with the discomforts of life as an adult.

The Trump-MAGA slapdown of ADL might well open space for the growing criticism of Israel and for everyone to grow up just a bit when it comes to debating Palestine-Israel. Whether university leaderships seize the opportunity to assert more independence and defend academic freedom or continue to sell out and name names remains, tragically, an open question.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Just when you thought prospects for the future of the Gaza Strip could not get any bleaker, United States President Donald Trump has unveiled his 20-point “peace plan” for the Palestinian territory, starring himself as the chair of a “Board of Peace” that will serve as a transitional government in the enclave. This from the man who has been actively aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians since January, when he took over the US presidency from former honorary genocidaire Joe Biden.

But that is not all. Also on board for the “Board of Peace” is former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who will reportedly play a significant governing role in Gaza’s proposed makeover. To be sure, importing a Sir Tony Blair from the United Kingdom to oversee an enclave of Palestinians smacks rather hard of colonialism in a region that is already quite familiar with the phenomenon.

And yet the region is also already quite familiar with Blair himself, owing in particular to his notorious performance during the 2003 war on Iraq, led by his buddy and then-chief of the so-called war on terror, George W Bush. Swearing by the false allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Blair steered the UK into a war that ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, earning him a most deserved reputation as a war criminal.

In other words, he is not a guy who should under any circumstances turn up on a “Board of Peace”.

And while Bush would subsequently retire to a quiet life of painting dogs and portraits of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Blair continued to make a name for himself as the man the Middle East just cannot get rid of – and to make a pretty penny while at it.

After resigning as prime minister in 2007, Blair was immediately reincarnated as Middle East envoy for the “Quartet” of international powers – representing the US, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations – that is ostensibly forever striving to resolve the Israel-Palestine issue.

But in this case, too, the appointment of an envoy with close relations to Israel – the unquestionable aggressor to the “conflict” – pretty much obviated any advancement in the direction of “peace”.

Furthermore, Blair’s diplomatic activity conveniently overlapped with an array of highly lucrative business dealings in the region, from providing paid advice to Arab governments to signing on as a part-time senior adviser in 2008 with the US investment bank JP Morgan. For the latter post, Blair was said to be compensated in excess of $1m per year.

As Francis Beckett, coauthor of Blair Inc: The Man Behind the Mask, told Al Jazeera in 2016 – the year after Blair stepped down as Quartet envoy – “the difficulty was that when he went to meetings in the Middle East, nobody knew which Tony Blair they were seeing – whether it was Tony Blair the Quartet envoy or Tony Blair the patron of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation or Tony Blair the principal of the consultancy firm Tony Blair Associates”.

But, hey, the point of conflicts of interest is that they pay off.

In a 2013 article for the Journal of Palestine Studies, award-winning journalist Jonathan Cook noted that, while Blair had little to show in terms of “achievements” as Quartet representative, he liked to “trumpet one in particular: his success in 2009 in securing radio frequencies from Israel to allow the creation of a second Palestinian cell phone operator, Wataniya Mobile, in the West Bank”.

There was a catch, however. As Cook details, Israel released the frequencies in exchange for an agreement from the Palestinian leadership to drop the issue at the UN of Israeli war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, which was launched in December 2008 and killed some 1,400 Palestinians in a matter of 22 days.

And what do you know? “Blair had private business interests in negotiating the deal,” and it so happened that “not only Wataniya but also JP Morgan stood to profit massively from the opening up of the West Bank’s airwaves.”

Now, it is hardly an exaggeration to assume that Blair will seek to capitalise on his impending governorship of Gaza, as well, as there are no doubt plenty of opportunities for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in, you know, changing the world to definitively screw over the Palestinians.

One focus of Trump’s 20-point plan, incidentally, is the “many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas … crafted by well-meaning international groups” that will magically produce “hope for future Gaza”. After all, why should Palestinians care about having a state and not being perennially massacred by Israel when they can have capitalism and the tyranny of foreign investors instead?

And the face of that tyranny may well be Blair, whose synonymousness with the slaughter of civilians in the Middle East has not prevented him from being once again tapped as a regional peacemaker.

This is not to say that Blair has no fans aside from Trump and the Israelis. For example, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, a fellow Orientalist and Iraq war cheerleader, once praised Blair as “one of the most important British prime ministers ever” for having decided to “throw in Britain’s lot with President Bush on the Iraq war”, thereby not only defying “the overwhelming antiwar sentiment of his own party, but public opinion in Britain generally”.

There was, it seemed, no end to Friedman’s admiration for Blair’s antidemocratic stoicism: “He had no real support group to fall back on. I’m not even sure his wife supported him on the Iraq war. (I know the feeling!)”

Now, as Gaza’s fate continues to hang at the mercy of Blair and other international war criminals, perhaps his wife should suggest that he take up painting instead.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Earlier this week, 10 countries recognised Palestinian statehood. With them, the number of UN member states recognising Palestine as a state have reached 157 out of 193. This means the vast majority of the world accepts the Palestinians have a state. And yet they continue to be treated as if they do not, with many experiencing the soul-crushing reality of statelessness at borders and in immigration detention.

As a freelance English-Arabic interpreter with Respond Crisis Translation, I frequently support asylum seekers in detention. I have seen firsthand what it is to be a Palestinian stuck in the increasingly inhumane US immigration system.

I met Mohammad (not his real name) while interpreting during his legal proceedings, and over time I interpreted for him on multiple occasions as his lawyer sought to secure his release from detention by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Mohammad decided to escape Gaza before Israel launched its genocidal war. But when he fled his home, he didn’t find freedom.

The journey was brutal and full of precariousness. He was stranded in countries that refused to recognise his homeland or the documents he was carrying; he was kidnapped by cartel groups, beaten, threatened, and robbed of his money. At last, he reached the US. There, believing that, perhaps, the “American dream” could offer him safety, sanctuary and freedom, he encountered ICE.

Mohammad had escaped one prison only to be thrown into another. The cruelty was so relentless that he went on a hunger strike – when he stopped eating, the voice of his hunger was his loudest and only voice, a desperate plea for release.

His hunger strike was more than a refusal of food. It was a refusal of invisibility. A body breaking itself to be heard. He reported being humiliated, placed in solitary confinement, and subjected to psychological pressure during his hunger strike. The hunger strike – meant to assert dignity – became another site of punishment.

Mohammad was forced to break the hunger strike after the court made clear that it would only consider him for release if he was deemed mentally stable and medically clear. To meet this requirement and have a chance at leaving detention, he had no choice but to break his hunger strike.

When Mohammad eventually decided to accept deportation, the court heeded his request. The judge and prosecutor agreed: If he did not wish to stay, he could be deported. But deported to where? The paperwork read “Palestine”, a word that holds meaning for him but exists only fleetingly in the US immigration system. The US does not recognise Palestine as a state, so the court defaulted to “Israel”. But Israel, which occupies the Palestinian territory, does not grant Palestinians free entry to Gaza, nor can they simply enter the West Bank.

For Palestinians, especially from Gaza, borders are not merely lines on a map – they are walls of steel, bureaucracy and laws. You may say that entry is possible through neighbouring countries. Before the war, Palestinians from Gaza could only go back home through Egypt or Jordan. Egypt’s Rafah crossing is now closed. Jordan bars entry unless a Palestinian holds special permits, rare and almost impossible to obtain. Even when “home” is written on a deportation order, it may remain unreachable.

Mohammad’s imagined “redemption” – which was going to the war – was a mirage. Leaving the US system did not mean regaining freedom. It meant facing the cruel truth: To be a Palestinian today is to live without exits, without safe havens, without the guarantee of a return even to the unknown. Even deportation, a process that for others may mean going “back”, for people from Palestine is only another trap.

Mohammad still insists on going back to Gaza. He has so far resisted being deported to other countries. He remains in ICE detention. Lawyers explained that there are financial incentives to prolong detention, since private facilities receive daily payments per detainee. Even with a court decision, release is often delayed.

In the end, his story is not only about one man’s failed asylum claim. It is not only about the US’s continuing refusal to recognise Palestine as a state.

It is about what it means to be stateless in a world that demands documents before it offers dignity. It is about how “home” becomes both a wound and a dream. For Palestinians from Gaza, the dream of freedom and dignity collapses into fluorescent-lit detention centres, and deportation becomes a journey not towards safety but towards another closed door and dark future.

Courts can sign papers, immigration authorities can escort people to aeroplanes, but no authority can erase the blockade that cages Palestine, or the policies that deny its people the right to return and move freely.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.