World roundup: October 18 2024

Stories from Israel-Palestine, the Central African Republic, Ukraine, and elsewhere

TODAY IN HISTORY

October 18, 1009: Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim destroys the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

October 18, 1081: A Norman army under Robert Guiscard defeats the Byzantines, under Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, outside the Balkan city of Dyrrhachium (the modern Albanian city of Durrës). Guiscard decided to invade the Byzantine Empire following the 1078 deposition of Emperor Michael VII Doukas, whose son had been intended to marry the Norman leader’s daughter. After some initial success, the undisciplined Byzantine army fell apart and the Normans routed it. Dyrrhachium fell in February 1082, but Alexios established alliances with the Holy Roman Empire and Venice and used them first to redirect Norman attention to Italy and then to regain lost Balkan territory including Dyrrhachium by the mid 1080s. These moves helped stabilize a Byzantine Empire that was still reeling from the 1071 Battle of Manzikert and this uptick in imperial fortunes is now known as the “Komnenian restoration.”

October 18, 1912: The Italo-Turkish War ends with a decisive Italian victory. The war not only brought Libya under Italian control—though that control initially didn’t extend very far inland—it also demonstrated the Ottoman Empire’s weakness and encouraged Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia to form an alliance (the Balkan League) and go to war with the empire. The First Balkan War led to a Second Balkan War when the league broke up, and that led (in part) into World War I.

INTERNATIONAL

The United Nations Development Program’s new “Multidimensional Poverty Index” report estimates that there are currently 1.1 billion people around the world currently living in acute poverty. Unsurprisingly, a disproportionate percentage of them (some 455 million) live in what the report calls “the shadow of conflict.” The vast majority (83.2 percent) live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, and a slim majority (some 584 million) are under 18.

MIDDLE EAST

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

It’s hard to know whether the Biden administration really believes, or cares (my assumption is that it does not), that the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar actually creates an opening for a ceasefire in Gaza, but that is the position it’s taking publicly. Joe Biden is sending Secretary of State Antony Blinken, whose record speaks for itself at this point, back to the region to try to resurrect dormant negotiations toward that aim. His effort is likely to face strong headwinds, as neither the Israeli government nor Hamas have signaled any new openness to a ceasefire in the wake of Sinwar’s death. In Hamas’s case it’s not clear anybody is even empowered to make a decision on a ceasefire at the moment, pending the appointment of new leadership in Gaza and the group’s politburo. In Israel’s case, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu simply has nothing to lose, and much still to gain, by continuing his killing spree.