TODAY IN HISTORY
October 9, 1740: Dutch colonial authorities and native sympathizers brutally suppress an uprising among ethnic Chinese citizens of the Indonesian city of Batavia (modern Jakarta). By the end of the massacre, on October 22, more than 10,000 people were dead—nearly all of them Chinese—and the city’s remaining Chinese residents were moved into a “Chinatown” outside the city that functioned more as a detention camp than a residential neighborhood.
October 9, 1967: Ernesto “Che” Guevara is executed by Bolivian authorities one day after being captured while attempting to organize a revolution.
INTERNATIONAL
South African lawyer Navanethem “Navi” Pillay won the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. Over her career Pillay has worked in a variety of positions at the United Nations, as a judge on the International Criminal Court, and as the president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Most recently she chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which concluded in September 2025 that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. For that reason the Israeli government has decided that both she and the Nobel committee are effectively Hamas.
Between her work on Gaza and her work at the ICC it sure seems like the committee was making a number of statements about Israel’s conduct and the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to destroy the court. On that subject, later in the day the administration rolled out a new sanctions package that cuts the ICC off from US financial institutions and the US dollar while giving US-based firms and individuals six months to unwind any business dealings with the court. The new sanctions drew condemnation from the ICC itself as well as the UN and a group of European countries plus Canada and Japan. Whether any of those countries will do anything materially to defy the US and support the ICC remains to be seen.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
There are several items of note:
The IDF killed at least one person near central Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp on Friday. It has now killed at least 1467 Palestinians and wounded more than 5000 in Gaza since the “ceasefire” came into effect last October, which the NGO Islamic Relief has calculated comes to about one casualty every 90 minutes on average.
The United Nations International Organization for Migration made a new appeal for more durable shelter materials in Gaza on Friday, saying that heavy rains caused by the current El Niño system are likely to cause flooding and weaken the heavily damaged structures that many people in the territory use as shelter against the elements. The Israeli government continues to block the entry of durable tent shelters, forcing people to rely on lighter tents that are unsuitable to winter weather (and are in need of replacement anyway) or to seek whatever shelter they can find among Gaza’s ruins.
Reuters reported on Friday that “Palestinian Vice President Hussein Al Sheikh has informed France that a Palestinian legislative election planned for November 28 will be postponed, possibly until September 2027.” The Palestinian Authority has apparently concluded that “the anticipated political, security and economic conditions” in the Palestinian territories will not be conducive to holding an election, which is hard to argue even if this decision also benefits the PA’s old guard who are now assured of at least one more year in power.
