World roundup: March 1 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Ethiopia, Ukraine, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

March 1, 1811: Having invited the leaders of the Mamluk community to his Cairo citadel for a celebration, Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali traps them in a courtyard and has his soldiers massacre them. The incident brought the Mamluk sociopolitical order to an abrupt end after some 450 years (with brief interruptions) at the top of the Egyptian political hierarchy.

Muhammad Ali observing the carnage in 19th century French painter Horace Vernet’s Massacre of the Mamluks at the Cairo Citadel (Wikimedia Commons)

March 1, 1896: An Ethiopian army under Emperor Menelik II defeats an Italian army under Oreste Baratieri, the governor of Italian Eritrea. Their defeat forced the Italians and their local allies to retreat to Eritrea and brought the First Italo-Ethiopian War to an end with an Ethiopian victory. The Italians would, of course, be back a few decades later.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Mushtaha writes for +972 Magazine about the conditions he and so many others are experiencing in Gaza:

My life in northern Gaza since October 7 has been one unending nightmare. Fear, anxiety, hunger, thirst, and cold have become my daily companions. I am unable to comprehend the gravity of our situation, nor come to terms with the losses. Our lives here cannot be understood or explained in any rational way. 

Nearly 150 days of brutal war have deprived me of everything I had. Literally, I’ve lost it all — not only my home and belongings, but also my identity, my spirit, my mind, my dreams, my aspirations. And it has forever changed me. It made me selfish, only thinking about my own family’s survival. It made me resentful of the Arab and Muslim world, whose silence seems to signal obliviousness to our plight. 

My thoughts are consumed by the question of when the war will end. When will Israel stop committing war crimes, and decide to respect and uphold the most basic human rights? When will Israel and Hamas reach an agreement to end our suffering — which is not borne by Hamas’ leaders abroad, but by all of us in Gaza? And why, I constantly wonder, am I enduring all this pain?

The United Nations seems to be on the verge of declaring Gaza to be in a state of famine. The UN tends to be conservative about making that declaration, which means once it does make it the situation may already be past a point of no return. This is a bit unique in that it’s a man-made famine and the same people who made it are standing in the way of ending it. The US government has the leverage to force Israeli leaders to accept a full-blown relief operation but instead the Biden administration is planning to start airdropping aid into the territory. This is better than nothing but not by much, and there’s a real danger that the administration will be so busy patting itself on the back for doing less than the bare minimum that it won’t use any of that leverage. Airdrops should be a last resort when no other options are possible. For the Biden administration to turn to them to try to resolve a famine it’s both helping to cause and refusing to stop is outrageous in every sense of the word.

There are a number of additional news items: