World roundup: June 21 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

June 21, 1791: French King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette attempt to flee Paris to meet up with royalist troops at Montmédy in what’s become known as the “Flight to Varennes.” As the name suggests, they didn’t make it and were arrested in the town of Varennes-en-Argonne. The attempted escape made it clear to the French public that Louis was conspiring to end the revolution and caused popular sentiment to turn toward abolishing the monarchy rather than maintaining it under constitutional limitations.

English painter Thomas Falcon Marshall’s 1854 The arrest of Louis XVI and his family at the house of the registrar of passports, at Varennes in June, 1791 (Wikimedia Commons)

June 21, 1813: A Bonapartist army under the command of then-Spanish King Joseph Bonaparte is badly defeated near the Spanish city of Vitoria by a joint British, Portuguese, and Spanish army commanded by Arthur Wellesley, Marquess (later Duke) of Wellington. Wellington outmaneuvered the Bonapartists so thoroughly that, in their retreat, Joseph’s men left behind their artillery as well as the (soon to be former) king’s considerably baggage train. While the Battle of Vitoria didn’t entirely end the Peninsular War (only Napoleon’s surrender and abdication in April 1814 did that), it did chase Joseph out of Spain. By December, the Allied army’s position was secure enough to restore—with Napoleon’s acquiescence—the previously abdicated Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne.

June 21, 1942: Axis forces under Erwin Rommel capture the Libyan city of Tobruk. Rommel was promoted to field marshal for his trouble, but the Allies retook the city in November.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Al Jazeera released a new documentary on Friday called The Night Won’t End. It is a window into the nightmare that people in Gaza have been experiencing virtually nonstop for eight and a half months. If you can make it through the graphic imagery I would urge you to watch it:

The Israeli military (IDF) killed dozens of Palestinians on Friday in incidents across the Gaza Strip. Among the dead were at least 30 people whose bodies were transported to al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City and at least 25 who were killed by Israeli attacks on al-Mawali along the southern Gazan coast. You may recall that Mawali is home to a tent city packed with civilians driven out of Rafah because the IDF declared that area a “safe zone” for evacuation. Over the past few weeks we’ve gone from the IDF insisting that it would never dream of striking such an area to attacking it on a near-daily basis with little/no comment. The IDF also killed at least two Palestinians in an operation in the West Bank city of Qalqilya on Friday. Israeli authorities described them as “wanted terrorists” tied to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group.