Palestinian UN envoy breaks down in tears over children dying in Gaza
A Palestinian UN envoy broke down in tears over children dying in Gaza, delivering an emotional address to the Security Council on Wednesday (28 May) as he described the "unbearable" suffering of Palestinian children amid the ongoing war.
Riyad Mansour struggled to hold back his emotions, saying that he has grandchildren and he 'knows what they mean to their families'.
Slamming his fist on the table, he said that Palestinians all around the country are 'outraged' by the loss of life.
Mr Mansour said more than 1,300 Palestinian children have been killed and around 4,000 injured since Israel resumed military operations in Gaza following the collapse of a ceasefire in March.
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The Guardian
34 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘Publishing is a dream, but this has also been one of the hardest years of my life ': Palestinian author Yasmin Zaher
Buying a Birkin bag is not easy. You can't just waltz into an Hermès store and pluck one off the shelf, even if you're prepared to drop the many thousands required to pay for it. 'The great majority of people are refused a Birkin, they get told that there aren't any available in the store, which is a lie, they just don't want to give it to them,' explains the protagonist of Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher's debut novel The Coin, which this month won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize for authors aged 39 or under. Zaher's unnamed narrator, a Palestinian woman living in New York, has to get to grips with Hermès's exclusive and elusive sales policies – which seem to privilege loyal customers – after being drawn into a Birkin reselling operation. The Birkin scheme is just a side quest, though; her day job is teaching in a school for underprivileged boys. But the protagonist's true occupation, in this quirky, unconventional novel, described by Elif Batuman as 'bonkers' and Slavoj Žižek as a 'masterpiece', is cleaning: the meticulous, fanatical cleaning of her body and its surroundings. She develops a routine – which she calls a 'CVS Retreat', named after the US pharmacy chain – involving scrubbing and shaving every inch of her body with products and tools bought at the chemist in a process taking three to four hours, 'about the average time it takes a New York lunatic to complete the marathon'. One spot she's unable to clean with her Turkish hammam loofah is the square in the centre of her back. After one of her CVS Retreats, she begins to feel something 'blazing and spinning' in that area, and believes it is a coin, a silver shekel, that she swallowed during a car ride as a child. Naturally, the coin becomes a fixation. 'Obsession is a very good way to create a character's downfall,' says Zaher. The writer herself has an 'inherited obsession' with cleanliness, passed down from her mother and the other women in her family. Early in the novel, the narrator says that when you enter a woman's house, 'you never think of all the madness entailed' in making it 'sparkling clean'. Working on The Coin, Zaher became more intensely fixated on hygiene, and on fashion, with which she has a 'love/hate' relationship. While Zaher feels 'seduced' by fashion, 'it's also a tool for discrimination, for classism, for elitism, and I despise all of those things'. Zaher, 33, was born in Jerusalem, before leaving for Yale University at 17 to study biomedical engineering. 'I come from a traditional culture. Writing wasn't something that I thought was possible. So I went into the 'minority path': I studied science and I wanted to be a doctor, because that's what people like me did. And at some point in my mid-20s, I had the courage to do what I actually wanted to do.' She went on to study creative writing at the New School, where she was advised by the novelist Katie Kitamura. She started writing The Coin after moving to New York, drawing on Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to GH, about a woman who undergoes an existential crisis after crushing a cockroach in her apartment. Lispector 'really inspired me to write wildly, to not think too much about what I was saying, about it making sense', or about 'morality', says Zaher. She wrote the first draft 'very quickly' – it was 'so messy and so illogical and so strange' – and then spent six years editing it. Meanwhile, she worked as a journalist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Agence France-Presse, covering mostly culture, and 'obviously politics, because we have a lot of that'. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion For most of the book, Palestine is mentioned only in glimpses; debris left in the bath after a CVS Retreat is 'beautiful like summer in Palestine, uneven and seared'. The character's 'initial standpoint', says Zaher, 'is that she's going to America and she's going to reinvent herself as this glamorous woman who has no past, no roots, no constraints on her', but 'her past and Palestine keep bubbling up to the surface'. The same happened to Zaher when she was writing the book: 'I set out to write a novel that was fun, sexy, full of pleasures, and against my will, in a way, the past was coming up for me, and the painful present was coming up for me, and at some point I had to submit to that.' Although the character in New York is 'totally fictional', almost all of her childhood memories are Zaher's real memories, including the swallowed coin. By the end of the novel, we learn that during the Nakba – the forced displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war – the protagonist's great-grandfather's land was seized by Israelis. The Dylan Thomas prize's ceremony happened to fall on Nakba Day, 15 May. Publication of The Coin marked a 'lifelong dream' coming true, but it has also coincided with 'one of the hardest years of my life', she says. Being Palestinian 'is a very dominant identity. You live with it all the time. You're all the time being reminded of it, externally, internally. And even more so now,' says Zaher. 'My fear is that the book gets attention because I'm Palestinian.' Yet the central character is not 'this perfect victim that people expect to see in a novel written by a Palestinian writer'. Zaher instead sees her character as 'almost a perpetrator'. She is often judgmental and rude, and her relationships with students are inappropriate (one boy, Jay, regularly helps clean her classroom; she begins leaving him money, and at one point kisses him on the forehead). 'I don't like novels where there are good people and bad people,' says Zaher. 'I find that boring. I'm always attracted to novels that bring me closer to my bad, secret fantasies, my repressed bad qualities. I think it's because reading is engaging in fantasy, and writing is also engaging in fantasy, so it's an exploration of parts of us that we cannot live in real life.' Aside from Lispector, key literary inspirations have been Kurt Vonnegut – 'he made me understand that there's this thing called contemporary literature' and that you 'don't have to imitate the classics' – and Michel Houellebecq. 'I really connect with the loneliness of his characters, and I think he's a very courageous writer.' Zaher now lives in Paris, with her husband, whom she met while living in New York. She's working on her next book, a 'newsroom mystery' set in Jaffa and inspired by her time at Haaretz. Asked what impact the £20,000 prize, the UK's most prestigious for young writers, might have on her work, she says she is generally a private person, and tries 'to not think about these things'. But 'it would be nice if the book would reach more people who really connect with it'. Is she still obsessive? 'After seven years of being inside this novel, I think I'm a lot less clean than I used to be, and I also care about fashion a lot less. In a way it sort of healed me of my own obsessions.' The Coin by Yazmin Zaher is published by Footnote. To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Israel accused of firing on crowds approaching aid hubs
The US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has denied claims that scores of Palestinians were killed on their way to collect aid on Sunday. GHF, in charge of distributing aid in the Strip, said that 'our aid was again distributed today without incident' adding that it was 'aware of rumours being actively fomented by Hamas suggesting deaths and injuries'. Officials at a Red Cross field hospital in Gaza said 21 Palestinians were killed, with witnesses claiming the IDF fired from tanks at civilians about a kilometre from a distribution site. Medics and witnesses said that Palestinian crowds headed to Israeli-guarded buffer zones around the Rafah and Netzarim distribution stations were fired on by tanks or drones, according to Bloomberg News. Some Palestinians blamed a lack of clarity about when and how to safely approach the GHF sites from active combat zones. The IDF said it was reviewing the incident, saying it was 'unaware of injuries caused by IDF fire within the humanitarian aid distribution site'. Hamas has called on civilians in Gaza not to collect aid from the new distribution sites, which are run by GHF and private American contractors. Critics say the aid centres are also being used to screen Palestinians and collect facial recognition data. The terror group also announced last week that it executed four people accused of looting aid. On Saturday, the World Food Programme said that 77 trucks with humanitarian aid 'were stopped along the way, with food taken mainly by hungry people trying to feed their families '. The GHF, registered in Switzerland, was established with Israeli backing to find a way to distribute aid that couldn't be taken by Hamas. Israel says it is essential to prevent the terror group from hoarding or reselling the aid. The non-profit organisation, which began distribution last week, got off to a rocky start amid delays and scenes of chaos as Palestinians crowded aid stations. Leading humanitarian aid groups, including the UN, have refused to work with the GHF to distribute aid, claiming the US-backed NGO lacks neutrality and doesn't live up to their standards. While some Palestinians expressed concern over biometric and other checks Israel said it would employ, Israeli officials said it will allow screening of recipients to exclude anyone found to be connected with Hamas. Israeli media shared CCTV footage from the GHF's distribution site in Rafah at the alleged time of the shootings. No shooting is seen on the footage where hundreds of Palestinians are gathered to collect aid. The incident did, however, allegedly take place about a kilometre from the site. Meanwhile, the GHF said that over 4.7 million meals were distributed to Palestinians over the past week, including 887,000 on Sunday morning. Israel's Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories said on Saturday that 579 trucks carrying humanitarian aid – including flour, food, medical equipment, and pharmaceutical drugs – entered Gaza over the past week. The UN accused Israel of failing to provide safe routes for them in order to pick up and distribute aid. 'We and our partners could collect just over 200 of them, limited by insecurity and restricted access,' said Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general. 'If we're not able to pick up those goods, I can tell you one thing, it is not for lack of trying.' Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the UN, said that his country had provided 'safe routes' for the distribution and that more than 400 trucks with aid were waiting to be picked up by the UN on the Gazan side of the border. 'But the UN did not show up. Put your ego aside, pick up the aid and do your job,' Mr Danon said.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Gaza doctor who lost nine children in Israeli airstrike dies from wounds in same attack
A Palestinian father who had lost nine of his 10 children in an Israeli airstrike has died from wounds sustained in the same attack, local health officials said on Sunday. Hamdi al-Najjar, 40, a doctor at Nasser hospital, was critically injured when Israeli forces bombed the family house in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis on May 23, killing nine of his children. He had just returned home after accompanying his wife Alaa, a paediatrician at the Nasser medical complex, to work when the building was struck. He had initially survived alongside his son Adam, 11, who is still in hospital. Even by the terrible standards of the Gaza conflict, their deaths had shocked the international community. Footage shared by the director of Gaza's health ministry and verified by the Guardian showed the burnt, dismembered bodies of Najjar's children being pulled from the rubble of their house near a petrol station as flames still engulfed what remained of the family's home. His wife Alaa had received the bodies while she was still at work. Sources at the Nasser hospital who transferred the children's bodies one by one to the morgue said their mother was not able to identify them, so bad were the burns. Doctors told the Guardian her husband was suffering from severe injuries – brain damage and fractures caused by shrapnel, along with shrapnel wounds and fractures in the chest. He was placed on a ventilator and fitted with medical tubes. On Sunday, they said, he passed away from the severe wounds sustained in the attack. Following an appeal issued by Adam's uncle, Ali al-Najjar, 50, and reported by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Italy's foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said the country was ready to receive Adam for medical care and was working to arrange his evacuation on 11 June. Italy had expressed a willingness to evacuate both the father and mother as well, but due to Najjar's critical condition, transferring him out of Gaza was deemed too dangerous. His wife had agreed for their son, Adam, to be taken to Italy with an aunt and three cousins, but said she would remain by her husband's side. After Najjar's death, sources within the Italian foreign ministry have indicated that his wife may now also be evacuated to Italy.
