Nobel Peace Prize could honor UNRWA, ICJ, UN chief Guterres
Prize will be announced on Oct. 11 in Oslo
Experts say UNRWA a potential winner, but would be controversial
Updated 03 October 2024
Reuters
OSLO/STOCKHOLM: The United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA), the International Court of Justice and UN chief Antonio Guterres are among the favorites for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, experts said, in a year marked by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Given past form, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is capable of springing a complete surprise in the Oct. 11 announcement — including not giving the prize at all. Bookmakers have Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic penal colony in February, as a favorite to win this year’s award. But that is not possible as he cannot receive the prize posthumously. Another bookies’ favorite, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, is unlikely to win because he is the leader of a nation at war. Instead, with 2024 marked by the now spreading Israel-Hamas war, a Ukraine conflict in its third year and bloodshed in Sudan displacing more than 10 million, the committee may want to focus on humanitarian actors helping to relieve civilian suffering. “UNRWA could be one such candidate. They’re doing extremely important work for civilian Palestinians that experience the sufferings of the war in Gaza,” Henrik Urdal, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, told Reuters. A prize to UNRWA would be controversial, he added, given the allegations made by Israel that some of its staff took part in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel by militant group Hamas that triggered the war in Gaza. Some countries halted their funding to UNRWA as a result of the allegations. Most donors have since resumed. In August, an internal UN investigation said that nine staff members may have been involved in the attack and have been fired. UNRWA has said Israel is trying to have the organization disbanded. The agency, set up in 1949 in the aftermath of the war over Israel’s creation, provides humanitarian assistance to millions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
UN Secretary- general Guterres The secretive five-strong awarding committee, appointed by the Norwegian parliament, may also want to focus on the need to bolster the international world order built after the Second World War and its crowning institution, the United Nations. That could mean a prize to its secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, with or without its top court, the ICJ, said Asle Sveen, a historian of the Nobel Peace Prize. “Guterres is the top symbol of the UN,” Sveen told Reuters. “(And) the ICJ’s most important duty is to ensure that international humanitarian law is applied globally.” The ICJ has condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and called on Israel to ensure that no genocide is committed in Gaza in an ongoing case Israel has repeatedly dismissed as baseless. But the committee could also decide that no one gets the prize, something that has happened on 19 occasions, the last time in 1972. “Maybe this is the year in which the Nobel Peace Prize committee should simply withhold the prize and focus attention on the fact that this is a warring planet,” Dan Smith, head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told Reuters. Thousands of people can propose names, including former laureates, members of parliaments and university professors of history or law. Nominations are secret for 50 years, but those who nominate can choose to reveal their choices. Some of the known nominees include the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, Pope Francis and British naturalist David Attenborough. In total 286 candidates have been nominated for this year’s prize. Last year’s prize went to Narges Mohammadi, an imprisoned Iranian women’s rights advocate, in a rebuke to Tehran’s theocratic leaders and boost for anti-government protesters.
10 killed as Israeli airstrike targets shelter for displaced families in Gaza, medics say
Israel has killed more than 45,500 Palestinians in the war in Gaza, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave
Updated 02 January 2025
AFP
CAIRO: An Israeli airstrike killed at least 10 Palestinians in a tent encampment sheltering displaced families in southern Gaza Strip early on Thursday, medics said.
The 10 people, including women and children, were killed in a tent in Al-Mawasi, designated as a humanitarian area in western Khan Younis, according to the medics.
Fifteen people were also wounded, the medics added. The Israeli military has not immediately commented.
Israel has killed more than 45,500 Palestinians in the war in Gaza, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced and much of the tiny coastal strip is in ruins.
The war was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and another 251 taken hostage to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
11 years on, Syria protesters demand answers on abducted activists
No group has claimed the four activists’ abduction and they have not been heard from since
Updated 02 January 2025
AFP
DOUMA, Syria: A few dozen protesters gathered in the Syrian city of Douma on Wednesday demanding answers about the fate of four prominent activists abducted more than a decade ago.
Holding up photographs of the missing activists, the demonstrators called on Syria’s new rulers — the Islamist-led rebels who seized power last month — to investigate what happened to them.
“We are here because we want to know the whole truth about two women and two men who were disappeared from this place 11 years and 22 days ago,” said activist Yassin Al-Hajj Saleh, whose wife Samira Khalil was among those abducted.
In December 2013, Khalil, Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada and Nazem Al-Hammadi were kidnapped by unidentified gunmen from the office of a human rights group they ran together in the then rebel-held city outside Damascus.
The four played an active role in the 2011 uprising against Bashar Assad’s rule and also documented violations, including by the Islamist rebel group Jaish Al-Islam that controlled the Douma area in the early stages of the ensuing civil war.
No group has claimed the four activists’ abduction and they have not been heard from since.
Many in Douma blame Jaish Al-Islam but the rebel group has denied involvement.
“We have enough evidence to incriminate Jaish Al-Islam, and we have the names of suspects we would like to see investigated,” Hajj Saleh said.
He said he wanted “the perpetrators to be tried by the Syrian courts.”
The fate of tens of thousands of people who disappeared under the Assads’ rule is a key question for Syria’s interim rulers after more than 13 years of devastating civil war that saw upwards of half a million people killed.
“We are here because we want the truth. The truth about their fate and justice for them, so that we may heal our wounds,” said Alaa Al-Merhi, 33, Khalil’s niece.
Khalil was a renowned activist hailing from the Assads’ Alawite minority who was jailed from 1987 to 1991 for opposing their iron-fisted rule.
Her husband is also a renowned human rights activist who was detained in 1980 and forced to live abroad for years.
“We as a family seek justice, to know their fate and to hold those resposible accountable for their actions,” she added.
Zeitouneh was among the 2011 winners of the European parliament’s human rights prize, A lawyer, she had received threats from both the government and the rebels before she went missing. Her husband Hamada was abducted with her.
Protesting was unthinkable just a month ago in Douma, a former rebel stronghold that paid a heavy price for rising up against the Assads.
Douma is located in Eastern Ghouta, an area controlled by rebel and jihadist factions for around six years until government forces retook it in 2018 after a long and bloody siege.
The siege of Eastern Ghouta culminated in a devastating offensive by the army that saw at least 1,700 civilians killed before a deal was struck that saw fighters and civilians evacuated to northern Syria.
Douma still bears the scars of the civil war, with many bombed out buildings.
During the conflict, all sides were accused of abducting and summarily executing opponents.
How two civilian deaths highlighted the tragic toll of Middle East conflict
Mohamad Nasrallah, 18, died in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut while Gevara Ebraheem, 11, died in a Hezbollah rocket attack on Majdal Shams
The death of these two young people has come to symbolize the loss of a generation’s potential amid the Israel-Hezbollah conflict
Updated 02 January 2025
Jonathan Gornall
LONDON: As Israeli air attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs intensified, 18-year-old university student Mohamad Nasrallah left his home and sought refuge in the more northerly neighborhood of Hamra, near the Lebanese American University where he was studying.
On Sept. 26, Mohamad and his sister, Mirna, made the fatal decision to return briefly to their home to collect some belongings.
Later, it emerged they had returned to collect some items to donate to the many displaced Lebanese who had fled north to escape the anticipated Israeli ground invasion, which would begin on Oct. 1.
While they were there, their building was hit by an Israeli airstrike, killing Mohamad and seriously injuring his sister.
Israeli security forces and medics transport casualties along with local residents, at a site where a Hezbollah rocket from Lebanon fell in Majdal Shams village in the Israeli-annexed Golan area on July 27, 2024. (AFP file)
Two months earlier, on July 27, an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket with a 50 kg warhead had struck the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.
The rocket landed on a soccer pitch, killing 12 children enjoying a Saturday evening game and injuring dozens more.
Hezbollah has always denied its role in the attack, although it seems certain that the missile was fired from southern Lebanon and had overshot its intended target — an Israeli military base a few kilometers north of Majdal Shams.
The following day, 11 of the 12 victims, aged 11 to 16, were buried in their white coffins.
Druze women mourn near the coffin of a loved one in Majdal Shams village in the Israeli-annexed Golan area on July 28, 2024, a day after a Hezbollah strike from Lebanon. (AFP file photo)
Initially, there had been hopes that the twelfth victim, 11-year-old Gevara Ebraheem, had somehow survived the blast.
For 24 hours he had been considered missing, even after the family discovered that he had not, as they were at first told, been taken alive to Ziv Medical Center in nearby Safed.
In fact, as Israeli authorities revealed that Sunday evening, after a painstaking examination of the scene, forensic investigators had concluded that the small child had been virtually obliterated by the blast.
Hundreds of mourners attended Gevara’s funeral the following day, when Majdal Shams received a visit from Israel’s then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who pledged the children’s deaths would be avenged.
Druze women mourn near the coffins of young people in Majdal Shams village in the Israeli-annexed Golan area on July 28, 2024, a day after a Hezbollah strike from Lebanon. (AFP file photo)
“There’s no difference between a Jewish child who was murdered in the south of Israel on Oct. 7 and a Druze child who was murdered in the Golan Heights,” he told mourners at Gevara’s funeral.
He added: “It’s the same thing, these are our children … Hezbollah will pay a price for this.”
Not everyone shared Gallant’s wish for vengeance. Nabeeh Abu Saleh, a paramedic who had rushed to the scene of the attack to find his nephew among the dead, told the Associated Press: “We buried our children. We don’t want retaliation.
“We have families in Lebanon, in Syria, and we have brothers here.”
Nevertheless, just three days later, senior Hezbollah member Fuad Shukr, deemed responsible for the Majdal Shams attack, was killed, along with an Iranian military adviser, in a targeted Israeli airstrike on his residential building in Beirut.
Also reported killed were his wife, two other women, and two children.
A banner bearing the image of slain Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr is seen at the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted the Haret Hreik neighborhood in Beirut's southern suburbs on November 21, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah. (AFP)
In one sense, it might seem invidious to highlight just two deaths out of the tens of thousands that have occurred in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon since the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
But in the face of so much death, there is a danger of succumbing to the proverb attributed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin — that one death is a tragedy, but thousands merely a statistic — and losing sight of the individual suffering behind each number.
Although they lived lives separated by birth, borders, and beliefs, Mohamad Nasrallah and Gevara Ebraheem share one thing in common — in death, they were mourned as individuals by families, friends, and communities.
What is more, as young people whose hopes, dreams, and potential have been violently cut short, they must also be grieved as representatives of a lost future.
While Gevara meant everything to his surviving parents and younger brother, few details have emerged about his life.
Residents of the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-annexed Golan carry the coffin of 11-year-old Guevara Ibrahim on July 29, 2024, two days after a Hebollah rocket attack that killed him and 11 others. (AFP file photo)
A photograph released by his family shows a happy boy, as mad about soccer as any child his age. In it, he sports Real Madrid’s 23-24 home kit. In another photograph, held aloft by mourners at his funeral, Gevara, smiling broadly, is wearing a red Zeus club football top.
But like all children in the region whose futures hang daily in the balance, it is clear that Gevara was both aware of the precarious and volatile nature of the world around him, and yearned desperately for better days ahead.
IN NUMBERS
• $8.5 billion Cost of Lebanon’s physical damage and economic losses caused by conflict.
• 6.6% Reduction’s of Lebanon real GDP growth in 2024 due to conflict.
According to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, just days after the start of the Gaza war, the 10-year-old posted a simple but moving plea on Facebook: “We don’t want war,” he wrote. “We want to live in peace.”
Gevara would be granted only the peace of the grave. The path in life that he might have taken, and the light he might have been able to bring to the world, will now never be known.
But his death is no less poignant than that of Mohamad Nasrallah, whose future was already more clearly defined.
On Dec. 10, Mohamad’s friends and family gathered on the Beirut campus of the Lebanese American University to pay tribute to one of its brightest students, as he was described in a report on the memorial published on the university’s website on Dec. 17.
Residents in the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights celebrate on December 9, 2024, after fighters declared that they have taken the Syrian capital in a lightning offensive, sending President Bashar al-Assad fleeing and ending five decades of Baath rule in Syria. (AFP file)
Mohamad, a business student with dreams of establishing a startup, “had already accomplished so much” and “had built strong friendships at LAU and everywhere he went.”
The memorial was attended by Mohamad’s father Ali, mother Fadia, and sisters Dana, Sally, and Mirna, who was still recovering from her injuries.
Dana, Mohamad’s eldest sister, 10 years his senior, recalled how her brother had been determined to graduate top of his class and be selected as his year’s commencement speaker.
“Our brother and his ambitions were larger than life,” she said. That she was addressing his classmates instead at his memorial “brought her to tears,” the LAU reporter wrote.
Some of Mohamad’s many friends also spoke at the memorial. Angelina El Zaghir beseeched her fellow classmates to “speak his name and carry forward his life, dreams, and love, because Mohamad would have wanted us to.”
Dani Taan pledged to make his best friend proud.
A woman from the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights waves to her relative across the fence in the UN-patrolled buffer zone separating Israeli and Syrian forces on December 17, 2024. (AFP file photo)
Mohammad Shouman said he took strength from “looking around and seeing that my tears are part of a collective well, which pours water from your martyrdom and hope from your existence.”
It fell to Dr. Raed Mohsen, the university’s dean of students and co-founder of the Lebanese Association for Mediation and Conciliation, to urge Mohamad’s fellow students to embrace that hope and reject despair.
“Witnessing your resolve to strive for a better future offers us some consolation,” he said. “We can see Mohamad’s unfaltering spirit in every one of you.”
As 2024 draws to a close, it is a message that will resonate with thousands of families across the region, each one mourning their own Mohameds and Gevaras and hoping against hope that 2025 will mark the beginning of that better future.
Tens of thousands of people in Istanbul protest Gaza war
Demonstrators waved Turkish and Palestinian flags and chanted “Free Palestine” in the protest
Bilal Erdoğan, the son of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, addressed the crowd, urging support for Gaza and condemning Israel’s actions
Updated 01 January 2025
AP AFP
ISTANBUL/JERUSALEM: Tens of thousands of people gathered on Istanbul’s Galata Bridge on New Year’s Day on Wednesday to express solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Demonstrators waved Turkish and Palestinian flags and chanted “Free Palestine” in the protest, organized by the National Will Platform, a coalition of more than 300 pro-Palestinian and Islamic groups.
Bilal Erdoğan, the son of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, addressed the crowd, urging support for Gaza and condemning Israel’s actions there.
He referred to the recent ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad by rebel forces.
“Muslims in Syria were determined, patient and they achieved victory. After Syria, Gaza will emerge victoriously from the siege,” he said.
Drone video showed thousands of people filling the bridge and the adjacent Eminönü and Sirkeci districts.
President Erdoğan has been a fierce critic of the Israeli offensive in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Israel’s military said two projectiles were fired from Gaza on Wednesday in the first minutes of the new year, one of which was intercepted while the other landed in an open area.
Alert sirens sounded around midnight (2200 GMT) in the western Negev, the Israeli military said, and “two projectiles were identified crossing from the central Gaza Strip into Israeli territory.”
“One projectile was successfully intercepted and the second projectile fell in an open area,” the army said on Telegram.
The military said it has intercepted several rockets fired from northern Gaza in recent days.
Since October, Israeli operations in Gaza have focused on the north, with officials saying their land and air offensive aims to prevent Hamas from regrouping.
The Gaza war was triggered by the unprecedented Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed more than 45,500 people in Gaza.
Israel’s former defense chief Gallant quits politics
Yoav Gallant was fired from the Israeli government in November after disagreements over the conduct of the war in Gaza
Updated 01 January 2025
Reuters
JERUSALEM: Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who had often taken an independent line against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government allies, said on Wednesday he was resigning from parliament.
Gallant was fired from the government in November by Netanyahu, after months of disagreements over the conduct of the war against Hamas in Gaza, but kept his seat as an elected member of the Knesset.
“Just as it is on the battlefield, so it is in public service. There are moments in which one must stop, assess and choose a direction in order to achieve the goals,” Gallant said in a televised statement.
Gallant had often broken ranks with Netanyahu and his coalition allies of far-right and religious parties, including over exemptions granted to ultra-Orthodox Jewish men from serving in the conscript military — a hot button issue.
In March 2023, Netanyahu fired Gallant after he urged a halt to a highly contested government plan to cut the Supreme Court’s powers. His dismissal triggered mass protests and Netanyahu backtracked.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Gallant and Netanyahu, along with a Hamas leader, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict, which Israel has contested.
