ON February 9, 2024, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his army would advance into Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza not occupied by the Israelis. Most of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza had fled to its southern border with Egypt after being told by the Israelis on October 13, 2023, that the north had to be abandoned and that the south would be a “safe zone.” As the Palestinians from the north, particularly from Gaza City, began their march south – often on foot – they were attacked by Israeli forces, who gave them no safe passage.

ON January 26, 2024, the judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) released their twenty-nine-page order that found ‘plausible’ (paragraph 54) evidence that Israel was conducting a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. The court intervened in that war due to South Africa’s application that Israel had violated its obligations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). South Africa came to the ICJ two months and three weeks into Israel’s brutal military bombardment against the Palestinians.

HUNDREDS of millions of people, across the world, have been deeply moved by the atrocity of the Israeli war on Palestine. Millions have attended marches and protests, many of them participating in such manifestations for the first time in their lives. Social media, in almost all the world’s languages, is saturated with memes and posts about this or that terrible action.

IN 1948, the Lebanese historian Constantin Zurayak used the Arabic word Nakba (catastrophe) to refer to the forced removal of Palestinians from their lands and homes by the newly formed Israeli state (in his August 1948 book, Ma’na al-Nakba or The Meaning of the Nakba). A decade ago, in Beirut, I met with the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury – then editor of the Arabic-language Journal of Palestinian Studies, who told me that the Nakba of 1948 was not an event but part of a process.

PORTUGAL is moving for snap elections after the prime minister Alberto Costa was forced to resign on the allegations of corruption. Though it was later reported that the investigative agencies were confused with the name Costa and had wrongly blamed the prime minister (instead of the finance minister Costa), the damage was done.