World roundup: November 18 2024

Stories from Lebanon, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

November 18, 1803: The Battle of Vertières, the final major battle of the Haitian Revolution, results in a decisive Haitian victory over a heavily outnumbered French expeditionary army. The French, under the Vicomte de Rochambeau, negotiated their withdrawal from the island and Haitian leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence on January 1, 1804.

November 18, 1910: A group of some 300 suffragettes marches on the Houses of Parliament in London to protest UK Prime Minister H. H. Asquith’s decision to dissolve parliament. Activists saw this as a betrayal of Asquith’s pledge to take up the issue of women’s suffrage prior to the January 1910 general election. The violent resistance they met from Metropolitan police and male bystanders, which killed two protesters and in several cases escalated to sexual assault, caused the suffragettes to dub the event “Black Friday.” One consequence was a return to direct action instead of organized protests by the suffragettes, as it was felt the former gave participants a better chance of evading the police.

November 18, 1916: The Battle of the Somme, which had begun on July 1, ends with over one million dead and wounded in total and only very minor Allied tactical gains to show for it. Strategically the battle did help the green British army gain experience while forcing Germany into a war of attrition that it couldn’t possibly sustain. But mostly the Somme stands as the best example of the meat grinder approach to war, and the callous indifference to lower rank casualties among the officer class, that characterized World War I.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency and the World Food Program have told Reuters that 98 humanitarian aid trucks (part of a 109 truck convoy) were looted after entering Gaza on Saturday. It’s one of the largest such incidents since October 7 2023 and speaks to one of the biggest challenges in getting aid to Palestinian civilians in the territory—according to the WFP, entire routes through Gaza are effectively impassable due to the threat posed by criminal actors. Hamas later claimed that its security forces killed more than 20 suspected looters in a retaliatory operation. Aid agencies have accused the Israeli military (IDF) of “allowing” criminal groups to loot aid convoys (or to extort protection money out of convoy drivers), though this seems less like a deliberate choice than the result of the IDF’s unwillingness to countenance the existence of any sort of Gazan security force. Numerous extortion operations have reportedly popped up across Gaza in the absence of law enforcement.