World roundup: May 22 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, Kenya, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

May 22, 853: A Byzantine army/fleet attacks and sacks the Egyptian port city of Damietta.

May 22, 1990: The Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen) are united as the Republic of Yemen. After the formation of a unified government that tended to favor northern Yemen, southern Yemen attempted to secede in 1994, touching off a short (May-July) Yemeni civil war. A lingering southern secessionist movement has once again become prominent amid the current Yemeni conflict.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The Israeli military’s invasion of Rafah—which is still not happening as far as Joe “Red Line” Biden is concerned—advanced further into that city on Wednesday after what Reuters called “one of the most intense nights of bombardment of the southern Gaza city since Israel launched its offensive there this month.” The United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimates that the assault has displaced over 800,000 Palestinians, enough that we can now safely conclude that the IDF’s “credible plan” for evacuating them was to shout “run for your lives” just before the tanks started rolling through.

On the international front, meanwhile, the governments of Ireland, Norway, and Spain announced on Wednesday that they will recognize Palestine as a state, effective May 28. They will join the 140 countries that already recognize a Palestinian state and are the first countries to do so since Mexico last June. Ireland and Spain will be the first European Union member states to recognize Palestine since Sweden did so in 2014 (a number of central and eastern EU members recognized Palestine well before they joined the EU), and it’s possible that more will follow suit. While this isn’t by any means a decisive development it does indicate that the Israeli government is losing control of its narrative even in Europe, an extraordinary turn of events given where we were less than eight months ago.