Latest news with #Ospina
The Hill
26-05-2025
- Health
- The Hill
Live updates: Israeli strikes pound Gaza as a US-backed group plans to start aid operations
Israeli strikes pounded the Gaza Strip on Monday, killing dozens including children, local health officials said. Israel's military said it targeted militants. Israel has vowed to seize control of Gaza and fight until Hamas is destroyed or disarmed and exiled, and until the militant group returns the remaining 58 hostages seized in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the war. Israel says more aid is entering Gaza after it blocked all food, medicine and fuel for 2 1/2 months. It let a trickle of aid enter last week after experts' warnings of famine and pressure from some top allies. It says Hamas has been siphoning off aid, but U.N. aid groups say there is no significant divergence of aid. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is supposed to take over aid distribution under a new, U.S. and Israeli-backed system, says it's going ahead with its launch of operations despite the resignation of its executive director. Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 251 people in the 2023 attack. Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed around 54,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count. Here's the latest: The Israeli military says 170 trucks with food, medicine and medical supplies crossed into the Gaza Strip on Monday. It says the trucks belonging to the United Nations and other aid groups came in through the Kerem Shalom crossing after a rigorous security inspection. After pressure from allies and warnings of famine, Israel started letting in some aid last week after a nearly three-month blockade. U.N. agencies say much more is needed, pointing out that around 600 trucks a day entered during the recent ceasefire to meet basic needs. Colombia's newly appointed ambassador to the Palestinian territories says the South American nation is willing to provide medical treatment to 'thousands' of Palestinians who have been injured during Israel's military offensive in the Gaza Strip. Ambassador Jorge Ivan Ospina told The Associated Press that Colombia is particularly interested in providing medical treatment to children who have been wounded in Israeli strikes. He didn't say how patients would be evacuated to Colombia, or how Palestinian families could seek treatment there. 'The world cannot turn a blind eye' to civilians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, Ospina said. 'People cannot die of hunger. They must receive immediate medical attention and must be rehabilitated.' Colombia, which backs a two-state solution to the conflict, broke off diplomatic ties with Israel last year. The Israeli prime minister spoke at a special government meeting marking Israel's conquest of the city's eastern sector. The meeting was held in a divisive east Jerusalem location known as The City of David. It is a popular archaeological and tourist site in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, with some of the oldest remains of the 3,000-year-old city. Critics accuse the site's operators of pushing a nationalistic agenda at the expense of local Palestinian residents. At the meeting, the government approved a resolution to encourage and financially support foreign countries in establishing or relocating their embassies to Jerusalem, according to a joint statement by Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and the Minister for Jerusalem Affairs and Jewish Heritage Meir Porush. Israel captured east Jerusalem, home to the city's most sensitive holy sites, in the 1967 Mideast war and annexed the area in a move that is not internationally recognized. The Palestinians seek east Jerusalem as the capital of a future independent state. 'Jerusalem, our eternal capital, was reunited 58 years ago in the Six-Day War. It will never be divided again,' Netanyahu said in remarks at the start of the meeting. 'We will preserve a united, complete Jerusalem, and the sovereignty of Israel.' Groups of young Israelis made their way through Muslim neighborhoods of Jerusalem's Old City ahead of an annual march marking Israel's conquest of the eastern part of the city. Palestinian shopkeepers had closed up early and police lined the narrow alleys ahead of the march, which often becomes rowdy and sometimes violent. The march commemorates Jerusalem Day, marking Israel's 1967 capture of east Jerusalem, including the Old City and its holy sites sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Police said they had detained a number of individuals to prevent confrontations. Friedrich Merz told a forum organized by WDR television that 'what the Israeli army is now doing in Gaza — I don't understand, to say it openly.' 'Affecting the civilian population to the extent that has increasingly been the case in recent days can no longer be justified by a fight against the terrorism of Hamas,' Merz said. The Israeli protesters who stormed the UNRWA compound in east Jerusalem were joined by Yulia Malinovsky, one of the legislators behind an Israeli law that banned UNRWA. Israel has accused the agency, which is the biggest aid provider in Gaza, of being infiltrated by Hamas, allegations denied by the U.N. There was no immediate comment from Israeli police. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees says Israeli protesters have broken into its compound in east Jerusalem. UNRWA West Bank coordinator Roland Friedrich said around a dozen Israeli protesters, including a member of parliament, forcefully entered the compound on Monday. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said Jewish worship was allowed at a flashpoint Jerusalem holy site as he visited the holy hilltop compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. 'Today, thank God, it is possible to pray on the Temple Mount, to bow (in prayer) on the Temple Mount,' he said, according to a statement from his office. Palestinians and the broader Muslim world view Jewish visits to the sacred site as a provocation. An understanding between Israeli and religious authorities at the site holds that Jews cannot pray there. Hamas is warning Palestinians in Gaza not to cooperate with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, claiming that the group aims to further Israel's plans to transfer Gaza's population to other countries. Hamas didn't offer evidence for the claim. U.N. agencies and aid groups have refused to cooperate with the GHF, saying it would fail to meet Gaza's mounting needs, give Israel control over who receives aid and cause mass displacement by forcing Palestinians to relocate to distribution hubs. Noem's visit comes in solidarity with Israel after the fatal shooting in Washington last week of two Israeli Embassy employees. Noem said that President Donald Trump had asked her to come to Israel after the shootings of Sarah Milgrim, an American citizen, and Yaron Lischinsky, an Israeli. A suspect identified as Elias Rodriguez said he 'did it for Palestine,' according to court papers. Noem told Israel's leaders that Trump 'stands with you as we fight this hatred in the world.' She said Milgrim and Lischinsky's lives 'will bring a unity among us that will help us defeat our enemies.' The military says the projectiles were fired toward southern Israel. Two landed inside Gaza and one was intercepted by Israel's missile defense system. Militants in Gaza still occasionally fire rockets toward Israel, a sign of their tenacity even after more than 19 months of grueling war in the territory and an intensifying Israeli offensive. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's executive director, Jake Wood, said he was stepping down because the GHF would not be allowed to operate independently. The foundation — made up of former humanitarian, government and military officials — is the linchpin of a new aid system for Gaza that would wrest aid distribution away from aid groups who have traditionally carried out the task. 'Our trucks are loaded and ready to go,' GHF said, adding that it plans to reach more than 1 million Palestinians by the end of the week. It was the strongest language to date from Anthony Albanese on the Gaza humanitarian crisis. 'It is outrageous that there be a blockade of food and supplies to people who are in need in Gaza,' Albanese told reporters in the Australian capital Canberra on Monday. Albanese said that Australia finds 'Israel's excuses and explanations completely untenable and without credibility.' 'People are starving, and the idea that a democratic state withholds supply is an outrage,' he added.
The Guardian
14-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Creating art under Trump will become harder but it will remain vital
One of the most pernicious effects of a bully's intimidation is making victims afraid of being true to themselves, because it's the essential and authentic parts of them that incite the bully's contempt. During his first week in office Donald Trump issued a blitzkrieg of executive orders. Among them, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity and Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.' According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, among the things these orders direct the administration's agencies and staff to do are: Terminate diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, positions, and programs in the federal government; terminate equity-related grants and contracts; and repeal prior executive orders designed to ensure equal opportunity in the workplace, including a decades-old executive order from the Johnson Administration ... ' In the art scene these moratoriums had almost immediate consequence. Cheryl Edwards, a visual artist and curator based in Washington DC, had been working on an exhibition titled Before the Americas which was to be mounted at the Art Museum of the Americas, a cultural venue managed by the Organization of American States (OAS), an organization established in 1948 that includes all 35 independent nations of the western hemisphere. In 2021 Edwards was approached by the current museum director, Adriana Ospina, and the previous director, Pablo Zúñiga, to, in her words, curate an exhibition to include African American artists in the DC area. They agreed on a framework engaging the question 'Because we are people in a society that existed before slavery, how does that manifest itself in the work of artists in this area and the work of artists in their collection?' She was given a budget of $20,000 (with a $5,000 curator's fee), the money being allocated by the previous US ambassador to the OAS under Joe Biden, Francisco O Mora. Edwards's show was scheduled to open on 21 March, but she was informed by Ospina on 6 February that her show was 'terminated'. Edwards attests this happened 'because it is DEI'. Similarly, Andil Gosine, a Canadian artist and curator, who is also a professor of environmental arts and justice at York University in Toronto, invested several years into an exhibition at the same museum. His show, titled Nature's Wild with Andil Gosine, was essentially a collaborative project with 50 artists, writers and technicians exploring the themes he had examined in his book of the same title. It was to include artwork by a dozen artists from across the Americas, many of them LGBTQ+ people of color. He received a phone call from Ospina on 5 February informing him that the show had been canceled, despite none of the funding for it coming from OAS (that came from Canada Council). For him that that was 'heartbreaking news'. He says: 'This is the most time, money and heart I've put into anything. This was going to be the pinnacle of my last 15 years of work in the arts.' With his background in international relations (working at the World Bank after graduate school) Gosine understood that the museum's response had to do with fear of losing their budget by showcasing queer artists in the wake of yet another executive order, this one promising a process of 'Reviewing United States Support to all International Organizations'. He explains: 'This is a content question, a gamble on how to deal with a shifting political tide: to conform enough, sacrifice some people, sacrifice your values to survive, and then maybe not get the budget.' According to the Congressional Research Service, in 2023 OAS had a budget of $145.2m, with the US contributing 57% of that. Having the United States rescind their support would clearly lacerate the organization's operations. Nevertheless, Gosine thinks that their anticipatory acquiescence may be for nought. He asks how an organization that is fundamentally concerned with human rights and social justice can reinvent itself enough to mollify this vengeful and disdainful regime. The cancelation of art exhibitions negatively impacts the lives of curators, but these executive orders have an even more corrosive effect on the lives of artists – particularly those whose immigration status is in flux. Erika Hirugami, a formerly undocumented Mexican-Japanese immigrant, doctoral candidate at UCLA, and Los Angeles-based curator who has been working in the arts for 10 years, told me that the pressures placed on immigrants impel them to erase themselves, anticipating law enforcement officials incarcerating and deporting them. She attests that she knows more than 80 artists who 'are terrified because having an exhibition at a museum that says that this artist is undocumented signals a reality that generates a kind of violence'. To better understand this, it helps to think of the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who extensively studied European art museum visitors in the 1960s, concerned with why most art museum visitor profiles seemed to be correlated with a certain socio-economic class. What he found was that given the proliferation of middle-class aesthetics throughout the museum, the majority of working-class people self-selected to not attend, feeling that the museum was not the place for them. He called this de facto rejection of the poor and working class 'symbolic violence', meaning a non-physical violence expressed through the imposition of social norms by a group with greater social power. Worse still, these norms are internalized by all social groups who come to believe that social hierarchy and inequality are natural and inevitable. Hirugami explains that for artists who are undocumented, this administration has sought to normalize living in fear. Practically this means that some artists now forgo being paid for their work for fear of having their means of remuneration traced. Thus, their labor goes unrecognized and unpaid. To protect themselves some artists, according to Hirugami, go 'zero social', making themselves digitally invisible by taking down their websites and social media pages. Arleene Correa Valencia, a formerly undocumented artist living in Napa, California, understands this dread. 'There's no handbook to how to lose that fear,' she says. Valencia was an enrollee in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, and a college student during the previous Trump administration, when she was under almost constant threat of losing her scholarship and means of staying in the country legally. Even now, having achieved permanent resident status, she still worries. 'I still feel like I'm very much a target, especially having come to my residency as a Dreamer. There is this feeling that I did it the wrong way.' Less than two months after taking charge of the federal government, Trump and his agents have devised ways to not only erase certain artists and certain types of art; but also to compel these artists to erase themselves, in the name of self-protection. This is exactly the opposite of their most essential work: to engage the public to experience their work and to move them toward transformation. What is a possible solution? Valencia turns toward her art. She says: My practice has changed in that now I'm more grounded in knowing that my people have this beautiful language of painting. And with that I also, tattooed my head to recognize, my Indigenous background and my connection to Mexico. This is the time where we have to make our markings known, not just on our bodies, but in our work, marks that are true to ourselves.' Indeed, it's crucial to refuse the option of doing violence to oneself by denying those very aspects of the self targeted in the culture war being waged by this administration. To maintain who you are can be its own kind of victory.
