World roundup: March 6 2024

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

TODAY IN HISTORY

March 6, 961: The Siege of Chandax ends with a Byzantine victory and the imperial recovery of the island of Crete.

March 6, 1204: The Siege of Château Gaillard, which had begun the previous August, ends with a French victory that sets up the eventual conquest of Normandy. Château Gaillard was one of French King Philip II’s most important victories in his 1202-1204 campaign to take Normandy from the Angevin Empire, which had been weakened by civil war after the death of King Richard the Lionheart in 1199 and the accession of the less capable King John. Philip defeated an English relief army and ignored John’s diversionary invasion of Brittany, and his army was eventually able to breach the castle and force its garrison to surrender. The fall of Château Gaillard opened the rest of Normandy to French invasion, and the April 1 death of John’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, further weakened the Angevin Empire. Normandy was fully under French control by August.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

We’re running out of ways to say “there’s still no ceasefire in Gaza,” but as of Wednesday evening there was, in fact, still no ceasefire in Gaza. Talks involving representatives of Hamas and the Egyptian and Qatari governments are continuing in Cairo but this is essentially preaching to the choir. The Israeli government is at best participating indirectly and the Biden administration continues to devote most of its public effort toward blaming Hamas for the lack of a deal. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that there’s new impetus behind the idea of “a short break to buy time for a longer pause in hostilities,” which sounds like the sort of idea one conceives when one has run out of ideas. The ostensible aim remains to secure a deal before the start of Ramadan, when tensions between Israelis and Palestinians generally intensify anyway, but Ramadan begins Monday evening at the latest and an agreement still seems to be a long way off.