World roundup: June 26 2024
Stories from Israel-Palestine, Kenya, Russia, and elsewhere
PROGRAMMING NOTE: If you’re interested in US presidential politics please check out ourAmerican Prestige livestream event during tomorrow evening’s big Biden-Trump debate. Danny and I are planning to welcome several guests, including journalist Emily Tamkin, FX columnist Alex Aviña, ettingermentum of the popular Ettingermentum Newsletter, and Courtney Rawlings of the Quincy Institute. Don’t miss it!
TODAY IN HISTORY
June 26, 1243: The Battle of Köse Dağ
June 26, 1409: The Council of Pisa elects Peter of Candia as Pope Alexander V. This otherwise unremarkable event is noteworthy inasmuch as there were already two other popes in place at the time, Gregory XII in Rome and Benedict XIII in Avignon. Pisa was held at the height of the “Western Schism,” after a group of cardinals in Rome had elected their own pope to counter the French-controlled papacy in Avignon. A group of senior Catholic officials decided to call a general council to depose both popes and elect a new one. As you might expect, neither of the other two popes recognized his deposition. As a result, the Church found itself with three popes instead of two or, ideally, one.
June 26, 1794: The French Republican army defeats the Coalition at the Battle of Fleurus, in the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium nowadays). The victory forced the Coalition to retreat and thereby opened the Netherlands to French forces. This marked the death knell for the Dutch Republic and set France on course to winning the War of the First Coalition. The battle is also notable in that it involved the first successful use of aircraft (a French reconnaissance balloon) in a military context.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
Over at The Nation, Kavitha Chekuru and Laila Al-Arian of Al Jazeera have compiled survivors’ accounts of an Israeli military (IDF) raid on an apartment building in Gaza City back in December that left at least 11 civilians dead. Whether you have or haven’t seen their documentary, The Night Won’t End, at YouTube, this detailed account of one of the several atrocities highlighted in that film may help further illuminate the violence Palestinians in Gaza have been facing:
Satellite imagery from Planet Labs from the morning of December 19 shows Israeli tanks about one block from the Anan apartment building. A few hours later, survivors testified that soldiers entered the building.
“They came from that door—they blew up the door and went in—we were shocked,” said Ahmed Anan, Yahya’s father. “We just sat and we thought, what do they want from us? The soldiers were in front of us. They told us to raise our hands up, we raised our hands up. ‘Take off your clothes’—we took off our clothes.” He was downstairs with his daughter and young grandson. Eventually, he said, they forced all of them to leave the building while the rest of the family remained inside.
“I knew my kids and the rest of my family were upstairs,” he said. “What were they going to do to them?”
Yahya was upstairs with most of his family. He said that as soon as soldiers entered their apartment, he and the others shouted that they were civilians, over and over. “They came in firing randomly,” he said, walking through the remnants of the apartment. As he talked, he pointed to some of the bloodstains.
In other items:
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