World roundup: May 14 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere

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TODAY IN HISTORY

May 14, 1560: The Battle of Djerba ends

May 14, 1796: English doctor Edward Jenner administers an experimental smallpox vaccine to the eight year old son of his gardener, inoculating the boy with pus from a woman who was infected with cowpox. This technique was already in use, but Jenner then intentionally exposed the child to smallpox and is thus credited with proving that the vaccine actually worked.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

There are a number of things to talk about here and only a finite amount of newsletter in which to talk about them, so let’s take it point by point:

• The first and most urgent point to make is that the Israeli military (IDF) has begun its long-awaited assault on the southern Gazan city of Rafah. Indeed the operation is at this point well underway, with Israeli forces on Tuesday reaching some of the city’s residential areas according to Reuters. So far the United Nations estimates that some 450,000 Palestinians, out of around 1.3 million who were clustered into Rafah before this operation began, have now fled to other parts of Gaza. As was completely predictable, the IDF has not evacuated these people in an orderly fashion to waiting shelter where their humanitarian needs could be met. It has, instead, simply told people to run for their lives. Most seem to have relocated to the coastal area of al-Mawasi, which does not appear to be equipped to handle the influx of displaced persons.

• I’m sure many of you have watched the above news unfolding and thought, either sincerely or ruefully, “what about that ‘red line’ Joe Biden drew about the IDF invading Rafah without an actual evacuation plan?” Funny you should ask. Biden himself revived the red line last week in an interview with CNN on Wednesday in which he said, “if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone in Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically ... to deal with the cities.” That same day, Biden’s State Department revealed that it had in fact already frozen one shipment of Israel-bound munitions that contained a large number of 2000 pound bombs that are wholly inappropriate for use in densely populated areas and yet have been an IDF favorite in Gaza. But the administration later made clear that there are still “billions of dollars” in arms heading to Israel despite this one specific action, and it seems to have decided to dodge its own “red line” by simply redefining “invasion of Rafah” to mean something other than the invasion of Rafah that is now obviously well underway. In case you were wondering, the administration says the IDF still doesn’t have an actual evacuation plan, which has become apparent over the past few days.

• While the IDF invades Rafah it’s also surging forces back into parts of Gaza that it claimed to have cleared weeks or even months ago, displacing somewhere around 100,000 Palestinians in the process. According to Israeli officials, militant groups have reoccupied those areas as the IDF has withdrawn from them. This has a lot of outside observers questioning Israeli strategy in obliterating areas and moving on rather than leaving some sort of authority in place, which in turn has them questioning Israel’s postwar planning. I guess if you actually believe the Israeli aim is to “defeat Hamas” this would be somewhat confusing. But if the aim is to pulverize Gaza and then go back and pulverize it again and again until…well, who can say, maybe until its population decides to leave, then it seems to make perfect sense.

• Needless to say the chances of a ceasefire now appear incredibly remote. It seems like ages ago, but it was actually just last week that Hamas declared that it had agreed to an Egyptian-drafted, Israeli-amended ceasefire proposal. This turns out not to have been the case, though Israeli claims that the proposal to which Hamas agreed was completely different from the one they’d offered are belied by comments from US officials suggesting that they were pretty simpatico. Nevertheless, the Israelis quickly rejected the proposal and then moved forward with the Rafah operation, causing negotiations to collapse and setting the entire ceasefire effort back according to officials in Qatar.

• In an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press” program earlier this month, UN World Food Program director Cindy McCain acknowledged a “full-blown famine” in parts of Gaza. This was before the IDF had really begun its Rafah operation, which as of Monday had shut down the two largest humanitarian checkpoints—the Rafah crossing with Egypt and the Kerem Shalom crossing with southern Israel—into the Gaza Strip. Israeli officials responded to McCain by insisting that they were “surging” aid into Gaza generally and northern Gaza especially, though again that was before they shut down the two southern checkpoints. Israeli protesters have been attempting to block aid trucks, particularly those being sent from Jordan to northern Gaza via the West Bank. From what I can tell there’s no indication how much of an effect these efforts are having on aid delivery. Israeli authorities say they’ve arrested individuals in connection with attacks on aid trucks but haven’t offered any additional detail.

• The deterioration of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis has been compounded by the fact that the IDF keeps killing aid workers. Israeli soldiers opened fire on a UN vehicle on Monday, killing a foreign security officer. That’s the first international UN worker the Israelis have killed since October 7, though they’ve killed at least 190 Palestinian UN workers along the way. Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch issued a new report on Tuesday accusing the IDF of attacking no fewer than eight humanitarian aid convoys in Gaza since October 7, killing or wounding at least 31 aid workers in the process. For some reason HRW thinks this is happening too frequently to be chalked up to simple “mistakes” on the IDF’s part.

• A CNN investigative report, based on accounts from “Israeli whistleblowers,” finds that the IDF is torturing Palestinian prisoners in its Sde Teiman detention facility in the Negev Desert. In addition to more typical forms of physical violence the whistleblowers allege that prisoners are being forced to wear diapers, are being kept handcuffed to such an extent that they’re losing limbs as a result, and are going without proper medical care for their less serious injuries. According to one of the accounts Israeli personnel are doing this not to extract information but purely in revenge for the October 7 attacks. These accounts broadly align with testimony from Palestinians who have been held in Israeli custody.

• The UN General Assembly on Friday voted 143 to 9, with 25 abstentions, to support Palestine’s application for full UN membership. This is a mostly symbolic action—the US vetoed Palestine’s actual membership bid last month—though the resolution did grant the Palestinian delegation expanded rights to participate directly in UNGA activity. That’s also essentially symbolic, as is everything else the UNGA does.

• The UN’s International Court of Justice will hold a hearing on Thursday and Friday over the Israeli operation in Rafah. South Africa, which brought a genocide case against Israel before the ICJ in late December, is requesting new emergency orders from the court. Given that the Israelis have ignored the court’s previous emergency orders without consequence it’s unlikely that anything it does now would impact Israeli decision-making.

LEBANON

An Israeli airstrike killed at least two people in or around the southern Lebanese city of Tyre on Tuesday. At least one of them was apparently a senior Hezbollah figure.

EGYPT

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Egyptian government may downgrade its diplomatic relationship with Israel over the Rafah operation. Egyptian officials are particularly upset with the IDF’s seizure of the Gazan side of the Rafah checkpoint, which apparently came with only a few hours’ notice to the Egyptians even though Israeli officials had assured Cairo that they wouldn’t move against the checkpoint without giving the Egyptians and Palestinian civilians in the area plenty of warning. The Israelis now say they had to seize the checkpoint to interdict Hamas smuggling operations. They seem intent on maintaining control of the checkpoint for the time being, and as a result the Egyptians are refusing to reopen it from their side.

YEMEN

According to The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour, the Biden administration has given a green light to the Saudi government’s desire to revive its peace talks with the Houthi movement in northern Yemen. The Saudis and Houthis reached agreement on a UN-developed “roadmap” in late December. Said roadmap was shortly thereafter put on ice when the US and UK began striking Houthi targets in response to the movement’s repeated attacks on commercial shipping in and around the Red Sea. Four months later those strikes have achieved next to nothing and the Saudis are anxious to put their own Yemen issues to rest. The US is going along with this in the apparent hope that it will help entice the Saudis to pursue that elusive diplomatic normalization agreement with Israel. The nominal Yemeni government, which previously supported the roadmap, is now demanding revisions even though if anything its leverage in this process has actually diminished since December (and it had almost none back then).

KUWAIT

Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Mishal al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah dissolved his country’s parliament for up to four years on Friday, declaring (I assume ironically) that he “will not permit for democracy to be exploited to destroy the state.” This ends five years of political gridlock between the Kuwaiti monarchy and the opposition-controlled parliament, which has resulted in multiple snap elections that never seemed to return a ruler-friendly legislative body. Kuwait was the only Gulf monarchy whose legislature had an appreciable amount of authority, which I think it’s safe to assume will no longer be the case whenever the body finally reconvenes. The monarchy can spend what would have been a full parliamentary term without any legislative shackles, which is likely bad news for the opposition.

ASIA

GEORGIA

Despite thousands of protesters who hit the streets of Tbilisi to express their opposition, the Georgian parliament on Tuesday passed a controversial “foreign agents” bill that obliges media outlets and other organizations to register with the government if as little as 20 percent of their funding comes from outside Georgia. Critics in Georgia as well as in the US and European Union have characterized the bill as undemocratic, and EU officials have suggested it might undercut Georgia’s accession process. Of particular concern both domestically and internationally is the bill’s supposed similarity to a Russian law that has been used to crack down on political opposition. Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili has pledged to veto the bill but her veto powers are limited and can be easily overridden by parliament.

ARMENIA

A crowd of tens of thousands turned out in Yerevan last Thursday to demand the resignation of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Opponents of the PM have had a litany of grievances mostly related to his handling of the Nagorno-Karabakh situation and his negotiations with the Azerbaijani government. His decision last month to hand over control of four border villages to Baku has reinvigorated the protest movement. As is the case in Georgia it’s impossible to know whether these protesters speak for a majority of Armenians, though for whatever it’s worth Pashinyan’s poll numbers do not look terribly strong.

PAKISTAN

An apparent drone strike killed at least four people in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province early Tuesday morning. There’s no indication as to responsibility but there aren’t many parties active in Pakistan who would be using missile-capable drones so chances are this was a Pakistani military strike. If the intention was to target members of the Pakistani Taliban or its various offshoots then the attack seems to have failed, as there’s no indication any of the victims were militants of any description.

CHINA

The Biden administration on Tuesday drastically increased tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles as well as other tech products like computer chips and medical equipment, with Joe Biden accusing Beijing of trying to “flood our market” via “unfair” trade practices. The headline in most media coverage has been the EV tariffs, which Biden quadrupled to more than 100 percent. However, as dramatic as that sounds it’s a mostly symbolic gesture inasmuch as the US doesn’t import many Chinese EVs. The rest of the package covers an array of Chinese imports totaling some $18 billion per year, which also sounds dramatic but is a fairly small portion of the $427 billion or so in products the US imported from China last year.

Donald Trump has made trade protectionism a significant part of his campaign pitch so this would seem to be Biden’s attempt to grab that issue from him. The tariff increases have already drawn sharp criticism from Beijing though one assumes Chinese officials will see this move for what it is and not get too worked up about it.

AFRICA

SUDAN

UN Secretary-General António Guterres issued a statement on Monday saying that he’s “alarmed by reports of the use of heavy weaponry in densely populated areas, resulting in dozens of civilian casualties, significant displacement and the destruction of civilian infrastructure” in the Sudanese city of El-Fasher. The Rapid Support Forces group has surrounded El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state and the one major city in Darfur that’s still at least nominally controlled by the Sudanese military, for several weeks and there were reports of fairly heavy fighting on its outskirts over the weekend that left at least 27 people dead just on Friday.

An estimated 2.5 million civilians are now believed to be trapped by the RSF encirclement, and mounting casualties are beginning to strain the city’s medical resources. The RSF is reportedly recalling allied militia fighters from other parts of Sudan and from neighboring Libya, aiming to strengthen its position before it attempts to take the city. If/when the RSF does take El-Fasher its forces are likely to target non-Arab civilians for particularly heavy violence. Human Rights Watch has accused the group of carrying out the ethnic cleansing of non-Arab communities in other parts of Darfur that it has seized.

NIGER

The US Defense Department said on Monday that it will send a negotiating team to Niger at some point this week to begin talks on the withdrawal of US military forces from that country. This trip was apparently supposed to take place in late April and the reason for the delay is unclear. Meanwhile, Nigerien Prime Minister Ali Lamine Zeine gave an interview to The Washington Post on Tuesday in which he chalked the rupture in US-Niger relations up to the US government’s decision to freeze military support for Niger after the country’s June 2023 military coup and a visit by a US delegation in March in which the US team essentially ordered Nigerien officials to cut ties with Russia and Iran. That more or less confirms what’s been reported since Niger’s ruling junta announced, following that March visit, that it was scrapping its military cooperation agreement with the US.

CHAD

To I assume no great surprise, Chadian junta leader Mahamat Déby won last Monday’s presidential election with a robust and thoroughly believable 61 percent of the vote. There was little suspense as to the outcome since the outcome was already set before the first vote was ever cast. Déby’s…victory, I guess, makes him the undisputed successor to his father, Idriss Déby, whose similarly pseudo-democratic presidency ended when he was killed by rebels in April 2021. It also restores a veneer of civilian rule atop Chad’s still essentially military government.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

Allied Democratic Forces militants are believed to have been responsible for an attack on a village in the eastern DRC’s Ituri province late Monday that left at least 11 people dead. Congolese and Ugandan forces responded to the attack but were apparently too late to prevent it.

EUROPE

RUSSIA

Vladimir Putin sacked his defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, over the weekend, replacing him with economist and deputy prime minister Andrei Belousov. Shoigu’s firing has been portrayed as something of a surprise but I’m not sure it is—his reputation with Putin seemed to take a hit when the initial phase of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t go well, and now that things are going better for Moscow (more on this below) there’s less reason to be concerned about the effect this shakeup might have on the Russian military. More surprising is the choice of Belousov, who has no obvious military experience in his background. The theory is that his training as an economist will help him put Russian military spending on a course that can be sustained for what could be a lengthy Ukrainian war and an even lengthier period under heavy Western sanctions. As for Shoigu, he’s been shunted into the post of secretary of the Russian government’s Security Council.

Shoigu (center left) and Putin (center right) leaving Russia’s Victory Day celebration in Moscow last Thursday (NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images)

LITHUANIA

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda won the first round of that country’s presidential election on Sunday with 44 percent of the vote, leaving him the clear favorite to win his May 26 runoff against Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė. She came in a distant second on Sunday with around 20 percent of the vote.

UKRAINE

Blues guitarist and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a surprise visit on Tuesday to Ukraine, where he jammed with a band in Kyiv and stressed a US commitment to supporting Ukraine’s war effort. His visit came at a not so great time for that effort, as the Russian military began what appears to be a major new offensive in northeastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv oblast on Friday and has so far captured several villages near the border. The Russian objective is as yet unclear, but Putin has talked in the past about creating a buffer zone along the border in Kharkiv to minimize Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil. A full-blown attempt to retake the province can’t be ruled out, nor can some sort of diversionary effort to draw the overextended Ukrainian military’s attention away from Donetsk oblast to the south. So far the offensive has displaced some 6000 Ukrainians, many of whom say the Russian assault has been more intense than its previous offensive in Kharkiv back in February 2022.

AMERICAS

MEXICO

A new poll gives Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s chosen successor, Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, a commanding lead heading into next month’s election. The survey, from the polling firm Mitofsky, gives Sheinbaum 49 percent support, well ahead of main opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez at around 28 percent support. That actually reflects a bit of tightening from Mitofsky’s April poll, but not enough to make much of a difference if the polling is accurate. Mexican presidents are elected in a single round plurality vote, so Sheinbaum doesn’t have to clear 50 percent to win on June 2.

UNITED STATES

Defense Intelligence Agency officer Harrison Mann, a US Army major, announced on Monday that he’d resigned from his post over the US government’s support for Israel’s decimation of Gaza. He is the first Pentagon official to publicly acknowledge resigning over Gaza to date. Several State Department officials have also resigned.

Finally, the Biden administration has released its report on the IDF’s compliance with international law and—try to contain your shock—it’s found a way to justify continued arms transfers:

President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday concluded its assessment of whether Israel is breaking international and American laws in its U.S.-backed military campaign in Gaza and did not conclude that Israel’s conduct requires Washington to cut off aid for the offensive, according to a copy of the assessment reviewed by HuffPost.

The report has major significance for Biden’s policy of sending Israel huge weapons shipments, which is largely ongoing despite the president’s current pause on providing the country with a specific package of bombs, and despite his threats of halting more supplies if Israel expands its fighting in Gaza in the coming days.

The assessment says “it is reasonable to assess that [U.S.-provided] defense articles... have been used by Israeli security forces since October 7 in instances inconsistent with its [international law] obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.”

But the report avoids holding Israel responsible for specific excesses like strikes on medical workers ― asserting, for instance, that the U.S. government cannot know if Israeli forces used American equipment in the hugely controversial World Central Kitchen strike last month ― and declines to deem Israeli restrictions on the flow of U.S. aid to Palestinians illegal.

The report was made public late on Friday, which is how you know administration officials are definitely proud of what they’re doing. It absurdly argues that the IDF is probably violating the conditions that Joe Biden himself placed on US military assistance back in February, but gosh we just can’t be totally sure that it’s violating them so we have to keep sending weapons. This is a level of consideration that virtually no other country on Earth could expect to receive in similar circumstances, and it requires the observer to believe that the US government has less insight into the behavior of the IDF than, for example, the UN, major media outlets, and international human rights organizations. Where the administration couldn’t just play dumb it simply exempted the IDF from its requirements. As I said, absurd.