SPECIAL REPORTS

2025 Feb wk2 -- Feb wk1 -- Jan wk5P2 -- Jan wk5 -- Jan wk4P3 --  Jan wk4 -- Jan wk3P2 -- Jan wk3 -- Jan wk2P2 -- Jan wk2 -- Jan wk1 P2 -- Wk1
2024 Dec wk5 -- Dec wk4 P2 -- Dec wk4 -- Dec Wk3 P3 -- Dec Wk3 P2 -- Dec Wk 3 -- Dec Wk 2 P3 -- WK2 P 2 -- wk2 -- wk1 P 3 -- wk1 P 2 -- wk1 -- Nov wk5 P3 -- wk5 P2 -- wk5 -- wk4 P3 -- wk4 P2 -- Nwk4
 Click here for an overview by week in 2024

Special reports: Updates February and earlier, 2025-'24: Actual: Our ‘return’ to northern Gaza is not the end of exile and On idle talk and genocide in Gaza & Earlier:  A thousand days of Israeli impunity, still no justice for Shireen Abu Akleh & Why has Trump hit the world criminal court with sanctions? & Trump must not be allowed to torpedo the Palestinian right to remain & Jordan faces ‘geopolitical blackmail’ &  Advocates warn Trump’s threat to deport pro-Palestine students & Overview special reports

November 28 - 24 and earler stories, 2024 Is Netanyahu immune from ICC arrest warrant-NO!   TRIBUTES TO MOTHERS AND CHILDREN

Shireen Abu Akleh In commemoration of Shireen Abu Akleh, the 'voice of Al Jazeera' killed while revealing the true face of israel Updated: December 6, 2024: Attacks, arrests, threats, censorship: The high risks of reporting the Israel-Gaza war   Click here for earlier stories/news

February 7 - 1, 2025 Fact: Gaza is not for sale... despite the continues suffering and betrayals on netanyahus' Western allies side. And more fact-finding news

January 31 - 28, 2025 In pictures and words: Bittersweet homecoming for Palestinians returning to Gaza City... Read more and decide for yourself

January 28 - 24, 2025 "Now it's time to grief" If the ones guilty of the genocide let us and it doesn't look like it. By the way, did you know that during WW2 the american allies knew all about the transportation routes that brought the jews to the gaschambers but simply let the trains roll. And now there was this so-called 'holocaust remembrance day' but... too many haven't learned anything from history... Read more and decide for yourself  Pre-ceasefire & Post-Ceasefire December 30 - 26, 2024 'Betrayed' and 'abandoned' Sixth baby dies from severe cold

 When one hurts or kills a women
one hurts or kills hummanity and is an antrocitie.
Gino d'Artali
and: My mother (1931-1997) always said to me <Mi figlio, non esistono notizie <vecchie> perche puoi imparare qualcosa da qualsiasi notizia.> Translated: <My son, there is no such thing as so called 'old' news because you can learn something from any news.>
Gianna d'Artali.



Al Jazeera - Feb 10 2025 - By Nour Elassy - Poet and writer based in Gaza
<<Our ‘return’ to northern Gaza is not the end of exile
The ongoing Nakba will end only when the world decides to uphold our right of return.
For 15 months, I was displaced from my home in northern Gaza. For 15 long months that felt like 15 years, I felt like a stranger in my own homeland. Not knowing when the exile would end, I lived with an unbearable sense of loss, with memories of a home frozen in time that I could see in my mind but could not go back to. When the ceasefire was announced, I did not believe at first that it was actually happening. We had to wait a week before the Israeli army allowed us to go back north. On January 27, finally, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians embarked on a journey back to their homes. Sadly, I was not among them. I had broken my leg during an incident last year and it is still not healed. I could not make the 10km trek through the sand and dust of al-Rashid Street, whose asphalt the Israeli army had dug out. My family also could not afford the exorbitant amount private cars were charging to drive us via Salah al-Din Street. So my family and I decided to wait. I spent the day looking at footage and images of Palestinians walking back on al-Rashid Street. Children, women and men were walking with smiles on their faces, chanting “Allahu Akbar!” and “we are back!”. Family members – having not seen each other for months, sometimes a year – were reuniting, hugging each other and crying. The scene was more beautiful than I had imagined it would be. Seeing those images, I could not help but think about my grandfather and the hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians who in 1948 arrived in Gaza and waited – just like us – to be allowed to go back home. My grandfather Yahia was born in Yaffa to a family of farmers. He was just a child when Zionist forces expelled them from their home city. They had no time to pack up and go; they just took the house keys and fled. “They erased our streets, our homes, even our names. But they could never erase our right to return,” my grandfather used to say with tears in his eyes. He transferred his longing for his home to my mother. “My father used to describe the sea of Yaffa,” she would say, “the way the waves kissed the shore, the scent of orange blossoms in the air. I have lived my whole life in exile, dreaming of a place I have never seen. But maybe one day, I will. Maybe one day, I will walk in the streets my father walked as a child.” My grandfather died in 2005 without ever seeing his home again. He never found out what had happened to it – whether it was demolished or taken over by settlers. The images of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians walking on foot back to their homes made me wonder: what if my grandfather had also been allowed to walk back home? What if the world had stood up for justice and upheld the Palestinians’ right to return? Would we now have black-and-white photos of smiling Palestinians walking on dusty, crowded roads on the way back to their villages and towns? Back then – like today – the Zionist forces had made sure that Palestinians would not have anything to go back to. More than 500 Palestinian villages were completely destroyed. Desperate Palestinians kept trying to go back. The Israelis would call them “infiltrators” and shoot them. Palestinians who tried to go back to the north before the ceasefire were also shot. On February 2, my family and I finally travelled north by car. There was joy, of course: the joy of reuniting with our relatives, of seeing the faces of cousins who survived even after losing some of their loved ones, of breathing familiar air, of stepping onto the land where we grew up. But the joy was laced with agony. Although our home is still standing, it has suffered damage from nearby bombings. We no longer recognise the streets of our neighbourhood. It is now a disfigured wasteland. Everything that once made this place liveable is gone. There is no water, no food. The smell of death is still lingering in the air. It looks more like a graveyard than our home. We still decided to stay. The world calls the movement of Palestinians back to the north a “return”, but to us, it feels more like an extension of our exile. The word “return” should carry with it a sense of triumph, of long-awaited justice, but we do not feel triumphant. We did not return to what we once knew. I imagine that this is what would have been the fate of many Palestinians returning to their destroyed and burned villages after the Nakba of 1948. They, too, would have probably felt the shock and despair we feel now at the sight of mountains of rubble. I also imagine that they would have worked hard to rebuild their homes, having experienced the hardship of displacement. History would have been rewritten with stories of resilience rather than unending exile.
My grandfather would have run back to his home, keys in his hands. My mother would have seen the sea of Yaffa she had so much longed for. And I would not have grown up with the generational trauma of exile. Most of all, a return back then would have probably meant that the never-ending cycles of Palestinian dispossession, lands stolen and homes bulldozed or exploded would never have happened. The Nakba would have ended.
But it didn’t. Our ancestors were not allowed back and now we live the consequences of justice being denied. We have been allowed to return, but only to see wholesale destruction, to start over from nothing, with no guarantees that we will not be displaced again and that what we build will not be destroyed again. Our return is not the end of exile.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.>>
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/2/10/our-return-to-northern-gaza-is-not-the-end-of-exile

and

Al Jazeera - Feb 8 2025 - By Adnan Mahmutović - Professor at Stockholm University
<<On idle talk and genocide in Gaza
For 15 months, meaningless statements and idle talk kept the genocide in Gaza going. It is time to put an end to them.
Today, writing feels like planting the proverbial tree in the face of the apocalypse. Decades ago, I started writing to make words mean again. When I fled as a refugee from Bosnia to Sweden in the 1990s, there was a time when words stopped working in every way possible. I could not even say “tree” and connect it to the big beautiful things outside the camp. I was crazy like Hamlet, crying “Words, words, words!” Sound and fury. Signifying nothing. We Bosnians were reluctant to use the word “genocide” until the mighty court told us we could, and even then, or especially then, the industry of denial wanted to prevent us from calling a spade a spade. The deniers taught us words do have weight. The right words can lead to action. Not like these empty phrases we have been hearing about the genocide of Palestinians. I learned English late in life, mainly because I was ashamed that Swedes spoke it well and I could not string two words together to save my life. With time, I learned that the stories of our forced exile, although unique, mirrored the experience of displacement of millions of other people. Somehow, they created magical intimacies with people who were so vastly different from us, who sometimes hailed from places I had never even heard of, but they had heard of me. They had read my stories. I imagined that this miraculous human connection was akin to me falling in love with this long-dead foreigner called Shakespeare at Stockholm University. His words came from the mouth of a tiny Pakistani professor with the biggest voice I had ever heard. Ishrat Lindblad, may she rest in peace, had grey hair, a colourful sari, and a British accent. “To be, or not to be, that is the question,” she would recite in class. She would become my teacher, my fiercest critic, and then my biggest fan. Always a friend. She was the reason I became a teacher, too. She was the reason I understood why Muslims pray for their teachers five times a day, right after they pray for their parents. She was a good listener and did not speak a lot, but when she spoke, it mattered. Never an empty phrase. Never a wasted word. Always from the heart. For the longest time I wondered why God keeps repeating in the Quran that there will be no idle talk in Paradise. It was one of the most puzzling things to read. I mean, everyone can understand that the allure of the afterlife is expressed through things like gardens, rivers of milk and honey, riches, and unimaginable pleasures.
But to state over and over that Paradise will be free from “trivial” or “wasteful” chatter was curious at best. I could not imagine anyone saying: “Hey, I’ll work hard and be good and sacrifice everything to skip all this empty talk.” Now I can. Remembering and reliving my past as we watch the rawest forms of power exercised on the Palestinian people, I am once again brought to that moment when “tree” was not a tree and I could not string two words together even if you had me at gunpoint. I am sometimes disgusted in the halls of my university where people are supposed to say meaningful things but what I mostly hear is empty talk. I do not recognise my Sweden, the country that took in thousands of us Bosnians at a time of its greatest economic crisis and it did well after that. A former head of a Swedish church told me how he once flew to Sarajevo with aid, landed on a dangerous tarmac, unloaded, and flew back. Everyone contributed. During World War II, Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews in Hungary by issuing protective passports and sheltering them in buildings declared as Swedish territory. I am a beneficiary of the Wallenberg Foundation which helped me finance my PhD 20 years ago. Now Sweden is cutting aid. Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency’s budget for “sustainable peace” has been significantly reduced in just a few years, especially for the MENA region. We condemn and cut ties according to convenience. We aid according to self-interest. The insolence of office. Sweden abstained on a United Nations resolution demanding a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. Up there, in that big colosseum of nations, resolutions sound like New Year’s resolutions of us mere mortals, and the question is if one decisive thumbs-down can be moved to thumbs-up by the crowds. And so “enterprises of great pith and moment … turn awry and lose the name of action”, as Hamlet said. It has been almost a year since I wrote “Schrödinger’s Genocide”, and I wish the world had proved me wrong on anything. I’ve been writing, for words are my tools. I’ve written to the Swedish government about the future of education in Gaza, once there is peace. Written to friends and foes. So much is being said and written right now. We are drowning in words. It is as if every word has become a meme on endless loops and writing anything still feels like planting the proverbial tree in the face of the apocalypse. Even now as the bombing has stopped and the long-awaited exchange of captives has started, I know from our own history of genocide that crimes continue under the pretense of a ceasefire, under the silence of the media and the meddling of foreign powers. If the war really does come to an end, there are other kinds of fires that will have to be put out by those surviving men, women, and children, whom we will eventually displace from our attention just as others before us have, allowing the cycle of their physical displacement to continue. Their images might slowly disappear from our feeds but we must not allow condemnations and calls for action to remain mere words. We must not stop demanding justice and respect for Palestinian rights.”
“Words, words, words,” I hear the ghost of Shakespeare on the breath of my late teacher, and wonder, is it nobler “to suffer those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?”
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.>>
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/2/8/on-idle-talk-and-genocide-in-gaza

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