World roundup: April 19 2024

Stories from Iran, Niger, Ukraine, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

April 19, 1775: Two military engagements between British regulars and American colonial militia in the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord mark the start of the American Revolution. The British force succeeded in destroying some cannons and ammunition at Concord but was driven back into Boston by the militia. A large (15,000 man) militia army recruited from across New England then surrounded and besieged the city, which the British evacuated the following March.

English painter William Barnes Wollen’s 1910 The Battle of Lexington (Wikimedia Commons)

April 19, 1943: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, perhaps the largest World War II Jewish revolt against Nazi rule, begins in occupied Poland. Jewish resistance groups had formed in the Ghetto, spurred to a large extent by the previous year’s Grossaktion Warsaw, in which the Nazis deported some 260,000 or more Warsaw Jews to the Treblinka death camp. Nazi forces entered the Ghetto on April 19 in an attempt to implement a second mass deportation but encountered the armed resistance. The Nazis then began a month-long suppression campaign that included the systematic torching of homes and other buildings within the Ghetto. The uprising ended on May 16 with the Nazis having killed outright or deported (to death camps) some 56,065 Jews according to official Nazi figures.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Biden administration and the European Union blacklisted several individuals and entities connected with the Israeli settler movement on Friday. Two of the groups sanctioned by the US have reportedly been raising money to assist settlers previously blacklisted by the administration. Both the US and EU targeted the extremist Lehava organization and its founder, Ben-Zion Gophstein, who is known to be a close adviser to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. They did not target Ben-Gvir himself or anyone else in the Israeli government, under the ongoing delusion that the settlement movement is the product of just a few isolated bad actors. The new sanctions come in the wake of another settler pogrom in the West Bank last weekend, which Local Call’s Oren Ziv describes:

According to the human rights group Yesh Din, Israeli settlers attacked 11 Palestinian villages and towns on Saturday alone. They threw stones, set fire to more than 100 vehicles, damaged scores of homes and businesses, and slaughtered hundreds of livestock. In the village of Beitin, near Ramallah, settlers shot dead 17-year-old Omar Hamed. In Al-Mughayyir, slightly further north, 25-year-old Jihad Abu Aliya was killed in circumstances that are still somewhat unclear: settlers were attacking the village at the time, but the Israeli army stated that Abu Aliya was killed by their fire. Another incident captured on a security camera shows Israeli soldiers standing guard while settlers set fire to a car in the town of Deir Dibwan, also near Ramallah.

The pogroms continued into Monday, when Israeli settlers shot dead two Palestinian shepherds — Abdelrahman Bani Fadel, 30, and Mohammed Ashraf Bani Jama, 21 — on land belonging to the community of Khirbet al-Tawil, east of the town of Aqraba near Nablus. According to testimonies from villagers, a large group of settlers, some of them armed, entered privately-owned Palestinian land near the residents’ homes at around 4 p.m. with a herd of cows (settlers are increasingly choosing to herd cows over sheep and goats because they eat more and are harder to frighten). Later, more settlers arrived, some of them armed and masked. Soldiers also arrived on the scene. 

Shortly thereafter, according to eyewitnesses, in broad daylight, settlers opened fire on the Palestinians, killing the two men. The IDF Spokesperson subsequently announced that the shooting had not been carried out by soldiers. The event was live streamed on the Facebook page of the adjacent Palestinian town; in the video, dozens of shots can be heard ringing out in several clusters for more than a minute.

In other news: