Video: Activist Greta Thunberg and Game of Thrones actor to sail to Gaza
NewsFeed Video: Activist Greta Thunberg and Game of Thrones actor to sail to Gaza
Activist Greta Thunberg says silence is more dangerous than sailing to Gaza, as she boarded a vessel that will try to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The Gaza Freedom Flotilla had to abandon its last attempt on May 2 when it was bombed.
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Al Jazeera
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- Al Jazeera
The Take: How Israel's military industry profits from war in Gaza
Israel's war on Gaza has turbocharged its already booming military-tech industry, with weapons and surveillance systems tested on Palestinians continuing to be sold around the world. Israel's role as a global arms innovator has only deepened since October 7, 2023, and some governments and corporations are profiting. In this episode: Episode credits: This episode was produced by Khaled Soltan, Sonia Bhagat and Ashish Malhotra, with Phillip Lanos, Spencer Cline, Kingwell Ma, Kisaa Zehra, Mariana Navarette, Manny Panaretos and our guest host, Kevin Hirten. It was edited by Kylene Kiang. Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editor is Hisham Abu Salah. Alexandra Locke is The Take's executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera's head of audio. Connect with us: @AJEPodcasts on Instagram, X, Facebook, Threads and YouTube
Al Jazeera
8 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
UN demands probe as Israeli forces kill more people near aid site in Gaza
Israeli forces have opened fire again on Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid from a distribution site in Gaza, killing at least three people and injuring more than 30, as the United Nations demands an independent investigation into the repeated mass shootings of aid seekers in the strip. The shooting erupted at sunrise on Monday at the same Israeli-backed aid point in southern Gaza where soldiers had opened fire just a day earlier, according to health officials and witnesses. 'The Israeli military opened fire on civilians trying to get their hands on any kind of food aid without any kind of warning,' Al Jazeera's Tareq Abu Azzoum reported from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza. 'This is a pattern that's been widely condemned by international aid organisations because it enhances the breakdown of civil order without ensuring humanitarian relief can be received by those desperately in need.' Witnesses said Israeli snipers and quadcopter drones routinely monitor aid sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is backed by Israel and the United States. A Red Cross field hospital received about 50 people wounded in the latest shooting, including two who were dead on arrival, said Hisham Mhanna, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross. Most had been hit by bullets or shrapnel. A third body was taken to Nasser Hospital in nearby Khan Younis. Moataz al-Feirani, 21, said he was shot in the leg while walking with thousands of others towards the food site. 'We had nothing, and they [the Israeli military] were watching us,' he told The Associated Press news agency, adding that surveillance drones circled overhead. The shooting began about 5:30am (02:30 GMT) near the Flag Roundabout, he said. The pattern of deadly violence around the GHF aid distribution site has triggered mounting international outrage, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday demanded an independent inquiry into the mass shooting of Palestinians. 'It is unacceptable that Palestinians are risking their lives for food,' he said. 'I call for an immediate and independent investigation into these events and for perpetrators to be held accountable.' The Israeli military has denied targeting civilians, claiming its soldiers fired 'warning shots' at individuals who 'posed a threat'. The GHF has also denied the shootings occurred although doubts about its neutrality have intensified since its founding executive director, former US marine Jake Wood, resigned before operations even began after he questioned the group's 'impartiality' and 'independence'. Critics said the group functions as a cover for Israel's broader campaign to depopulate northern Gaza as it concentrates aid in the south while bypassing established international agencies. Aid is still barely trickling into Gaza after Israel partially lifted a total siege that for more than two months cut off food, water, fuel and medicine to more than two million people. Thousands of children are at risk of dying from hunger-related causes, the UN has previously warned. Elsewhere in the territory, Israeli air attacks continued to hammer residential areas. In Jabalia in northern Gaza, Israeli forces killed 14 people, including seven children, in an attack on a home, according to the Palestinian Civil Defence agency. At least 20 people remained trapped under the rubble. Two more Palestinians were killed and several wounded in another attack in Deir el-Balah, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa, while a drone attack in Khan Younis claimed yet another life. Gaza's Ministry of Health reported that at least 51 Palestinians have been killed and 503 injured in Israeli attacks across the territory in the latest 24-hour reporting period alone. Despite growing international condemnation, Israel's military on Monday ordered the displacement of even more civilians from parts of Khan Younis, warning it would 'operate with great force'. Roughly 80 percent of the strip is now either under Israeli military control or designated for forced evacuation, according to new data from the Financial Times, as Gaza's 2.3 million residents are crammed into an ever-shrinking patch of land in southern Gaza near the Egyptian border. Israel has made little secret of its aim to permanently displace Gaza's population as officials openly promote 'voluntary migration' plans. The Financial Times reported that the areas Palestinians are being pushed into resemble a 'desert wasteland with no running water, electricity or even hospitals'. Satellite images showed Israeli forces clearing land and setting up military infrastructure in evacuated areas. Analysts who reviewed dozens of recent forced evacuation orders said the trend has accelerated since the collapse of a truce in March. 'The Israeli government has been very clear with regards to what their plan is about in Gaza,' political analyst Xavier Abu Eid told Al Jazeera. 'It is about ethnic cleansing.'
Al Jazeera
11 hours ago
- Al Jazeera
Ngugi wa Thiong'o was not just a writer, he was a militant
Ngugi wa Thiong'o loved to dance. He loved it more than anything else – even more than writing. Well into his 80s, his body slowed by increasingly disabling kidney failure, Ngugi would get up and start dancing merely at the thought of music, never mind the sound of it. Rhythm flowed through his feet the way words flowed through his hands and onto the page. It is how I will always remember Ngugi – dancing. He passed away on May 28 at the age of 87, leaving behind not only a Nobel-worthy literary legacy but a combination of deeply innovative craft and piercingly original criticism that joyfully calls on all of us to do better and push harder – as writers, activists, teachers and people – against the colonial foundations that sustain all our societies. As for me, he pushed me to go far deeper up river to Kakuma refugee camp, where the free association of so many vernacular tongues and cultures made possible the freedom to think and speak 'from the heart' – something he would always describe as writing's greatest gift. Ngugi had long been a charter member of the African literary canon and a perennial Nobel favourite by the time I first met him in 2005. Getting to know him, it quickly became clear to me that his writing was inseparable from his teaching, which in turn was umbilically tied to his political commitments and long service as one of Africa's most formidable public intellectuals. Ngugi's cheerfulness and indefatigable smile and laugh hid a deep-seated anger, reflecting the scars of violence on his body and soul as a child, young man and adult victimised by successive and deeply intertwined systems of criminalised rule. The murder of his deaf brother, killed by the British because he did not hear and obey soldiers' orders to stop at a checkpoint, and the Mau Mau revolt that divided his other brothers on opposite sides of the colonial order during the final decade of British rule, imbued in him the foundational reality of violence and divisiveness as the twin engines of permanent coloniality even after independence formally severed the connection to the metropole. More than half a century after these events, nothing would arouse Ngugi's animated ire more than bringing up in a discussion the transitional moment from British to Kenyan rule, and the fact that colonialism didn't leave with the British, but rather dug in and reenforced itself with Kenya's new, Kenyan rulers. As he became a writer and playwright, Ngugi also became a militant, one devoted to using language to reconnect the complex African identities – local, tribal, national and cosmopolitan – that the 'cultural bomb' of British rule had 'annihilated' over the previous seven decades. After his first play, The Black Hermit, premiered in Kampala in 1962, he was quickly declared a voice who 'speaks for the Continent'. Two years later, Weep Not Child, his first novel and the first English-language novel by an East African writer, came out. As he rose to prominence, Ngugi decided to renounce the English language and start writing in his native Gikuyu. The (re)turn to his native tongue radically altered the trajectory not just of his career, but of his life, as the ability of his clear-eyed critique of postcolonial rule to reach his compatriots in their own language (rather than English or the national language of Swahili) was too much for Kenya's new rulers to tolerate, and so he was imprisoned for a year without trial in 1977. What Ngugi had realised when he began writing in Gikuyu, and even more so in prison, was the reality of neocolonialism as the primary mechanism of postcolonial rule. This wasn't the standard 'neocolonialism' that anti- and post-colonial activists used to describe the ongoing power of former colonial rulers by other means after formal independence, but rather the willing adoption of colonial technologies and discourses of rule by newly independent leaders, many of whom – like Jomo Kenyatta, Ngugi liked to point out – themselves suffered imprisonment and torture under the British rule. Thus, true decolonisation could only occur when people's minds were freed from foreign control, which required first and perhaps foremost the freedom to write in one's native language. Although rarely acknowledged, Ngugi's concept of neocolonialism, which owed much, he'd regularly explain, to the writings of Kwame Nkrumah and other African anti-colonial intellectuals-turned-political leaders, anticipated the rise of the now ubiquitous 'decolonial' and 'Indigenous' turns in the academy and progressive cultural production by almost a generation. Indeed, Ngugi has long been placed together with Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as the founding generation of postcolonial thought and criticism. But he and Said, whom he'd frequently discuss as a brother-in-arms and fellow admirer of Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad, shared a similar all-encompassing focus on language, even as Said wrote his prose mostly in English rather than Arabic. For Said and Ngugi, colonialism had not yet passed, but was very much still an ongoing, viscerally and violently lived reality – for the former through the ever more violent and ultimately annihilatory settler colonialism, for the latter through the violence of successive governments. Ngugi saw his link with Said in their common experience growing up under British rule. As he explained in his afterword to a recently published anthology of Egyptian prison writings since 2011, 'The performance of authority was central to the colonial culture of silence and fear,' and disrupting that authority and ending the silence could only come first through language. For Said, the swirl of Arabic and English in his mind since childhood created what he called a 'primal instability', one that could be calmed fully when he was in Palestine, which he returned to multiple times in the last decade of his life. For Ngugi, even as Gikuyu enabled him to 'imagine another world, a flight to freedom, like a bird you see from the [prison] window,' he could not make a final return home in his last years. Still, from his home in Orange County, California in the United States, he would never tire of urging students and younger colleagues to 'write dangerously', to use language to resist whatever oppressive order in which they found themselves. The bird would always take flight, he would say, if you could write without fear. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
