World roundup: June 24 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Russia, Haiti, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

June 24, 1812: Napoleon leads his Grande Armée into Russia. Despite capturing Moscow in September, this was easily Napoleon’s greatest military catastrophe. The Russian army simply stayed out of Napoleon’s way until he was forced to withdraw, at which point his army ran smack into a Russian winter for which they were evidently unprepared. Estimates of the size of Napoleon’s army and thus of the scale of the catastrophe vary, but they range from around 450,000 men to around 685,000, with estimates of the number who returned from the expedition ranging from an optimistic 120,000 to as low as 70,000. The disaster was not the end of Napoleon’s empire, but it was a big step on the road toward its end.

Russian illustrator Vasily Vereshchagin’s 1897 Napoleon near Borodino depicts the emperor and his staff observing the largest battle of the campaign, the September 7 Battle of Borodino (Wikimedia Commons)

June 24, 1932: A joint civilian-military junta led by the People’s Party forces Siamese King Prajadhipok to adopt constitutional reforms. The coup, known as the “Siamese Revolution,” is one of the seminal events in the history of modern Thailand, as it replaced the country’s centuries-old absolute monarchy with a constitutional monarchy. The legacy of the coup continues to be debated to the present day, with some arguing that the transition to constitutional monarchy would have happened anyway.

June 24, 1948: Soviet authorities blockade the western portion of Berlin, setting off one of the most serious crises of the early Cold War. Two days later, the US, UK, and others launched the Berlin Airlift to keep the city supplied. Over the next several months the Airlift operation dropped thousands of tons of supplies into West Berlin daily, rendering the Soviet blockade largely toothless. The Soviets lifted the blockade in May 1949, though the US and UK continued conducting airlifts through September ostensibly out of concern that the blockade could be reimposed. The blockade/airlift became a seminal event in the drawing up of Cold War lines in Europe.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

A disturbing press release from the Save the Children NGO highlights both the toll that the Israeli military’s (IDF) destruction of Gaza has taken on the territory’s children and how little we know about its total human cost:

Up to 21,000¹ children are estimated to be missing in the chaos of the war in Gaza, many trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families, said Save the Children. The agency’s child protection teams are reporting that the latest displacements caused by the offensive in Rafah have separated more children and further increased the strain on families and communities caring for them.

It is nearly impossible to collect and verify information under the current conditions in Gaza, but at least 17,000 children are believed to be unaccompanied and separated and approximately 4,000 children are likely missing under the rubble², with an unknown number also in mass graves. Others have been forcibly disappeared, including an unknown number detained and forcibly transferred out of Gaza, their whereabouts unknown to their families amidst reports of ill-treatment and torture.

Meanwhile, the aid agency’s child protection teams warn of the urgent action needed to protect separated and unaccompanied children – action that is severely undermined by the deteriorating security situation.

Elsewhere: