Category World News

Washington, DC – Yuli Novak, the executive director of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, has a warning for politicians in the United States and across the world: The situation in Israel-Palestine is “disastrous”.

Despite the US-brokered ceasefire that scaled back the Israeli attacks in Gaza, Novak told Al Jazeera this week that the conditions are more dangerous than ever.

“Our warning is that we haven’t seen the worst,” she said, stressing that Israel must be held accountable for its abuses in Gaza.

Over the past two years, numerous human rights groups have released reports accusing Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza — a campaign to destroy the Palestinian people.

United Nations investigators, for instance, determined that Israel’s actions in the territory matched the definition of genocide under international law.

But B’Tselem provided another layer of analysis with its landmark report, called Our Genocide, in July.

It dissected the decades-long history of Israeli policies that laid the groundwork for the carnage in Gaza, including the apartheid system, demographic engineering, the systemic dehumanisation of Palestinians, and a culture of impunity for abuses.

Those conditions, Novak said, have been further entrenched since the war began.

“As long as these things are still in place, we are very concerned that the violence that we’ve seen is not over,” she said.

Killings continue

Since the ceasefire started, Israel has killed at least 360 Palestinians in Gaza, including 32 in a wave of air strikes across the territory earlier this week.

The Israeli government has also continued to impose restrictions on humanitarian aid to the enclave, including on temporary shelters needed to replace tents for tens of thousands of Palestinians who faced flooding earlier this month.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more than 69,000 Palestinians and turned most of Gaza into rubble.

In the occupied West Bank, conditions have been worsening, with intensifying settlement expansion and deadly Israeli military raids.

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting that Israeli forces forcibly displaced 32,000 Palestinians from their homes in Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams.

Israeli settlers have also increased their attacks, regularly descending on Palestinian villages to torch homes and vehicles and at times kill civilians — often with the protection of the Israeli military.

Novak stressed that settler attacks are a form of Israeli state violence.

“They are Israeli civilians living in the West Bank being armed by the state. Sometimes, many of them wear [army] uniforms. Sometimes these are soldiers on reserve duty that are on a break,” she said.

Some Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have condemned settler violence, but Novak dismissed the move as a ploy to blame Israel’s policies on a “small group of crazy settlers”.

Novak also highlighted that most of the killing and destruction in the West Bank is carried out by official Israeli forces, not settlers. “So this is another arm of the violence that Israel inflicts on Palestinians,” she said.

Meeting US lawmakers

Novak and her B’Tselem colleague Kareem Jubran have been in Washington, DC, this week, where they met with US lawmakers, including Democratic Senators Peter Welch, Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen, as well as Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.

Novak said the group wants to stress the need for accountability for the genocide in Gaza.

“We are talking about a governing system, the Israeli system, that conducted genocide for two years — war crimes on a daily basis — and got away with it with no accountability,” she said.

“The current situation is probably the most dangerous that we’ve ever been in because not only this violence and this criminality took place, it was also normalised, and in any moment, it can start again, go back to the same scale.”

US President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that there is peace in the Middle East for the first time in 3,000 years because of the truce he helped broker in Gaza.

And earlier this week, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution backing the US president’s 20-point plan for Gaza, which calls for an end to the fighting, gradual Israeli withdrawal and the deployment of an international force to the territory.

The plan would also see Hamas disarm and Gaza’s governance handed over to an international commission, dubbed “the Board of Peace”.

It has no accountability or compensation mechanism for the horrors that Israel unleashed on Gaza for two years.

Novak said Trump’s plan is disconnected from the reality on the ground.

“It just allows everybody to move on, instead of dealing with the situation and demanding Israel not only to be held accountable but also stop this kind of systematic oppression over the Palestinians,” she said.

Trump’s plan

Since the Security Council embraced the ceasefire deal, Israel has faced less international pressure. Even the push for measures like suspending the country from the Eurovision singing contest and European football have lost momentum.

On Monday, Germany announced it was lifting restrictions on weapons exports to Israel, citing the truce.

“That is probably what scares us the most because we see regression here,” Novak said.

Jubran, B’Tselem’s field research director, also stressed the need for accountability, saying that the previous rounds of wars on Gaza from 2006 onwards enabled the genocide.

“That’s what allowed the genocide system to be more brazen in order to do its crime against the Palestinians in Gaza,” he told Al Jazeera.

Despite the lack of political or legal accountability, Novak hailed the growing international public awareness of Israel’s atrocities, which she said politicians are choosing to ignore.

“If there is something that gives us hope in this really, really terrible moment, it is the fact that many people around the world are able to see through the Israeli propaganda and just to make sense of what their eyes saw, and some of the voices of the victims were able to come out from Gaza and from the West Bank,” she said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he is working on a proposal from the United States to end the Russia-Ukraine war, as Kyiv faces growing pressure from Washington and sustained attacks by Russian forces on the battlefield nearly four years into the conflict.

Zelenskyy said on Friday that he discussed US President Donald Trump’s plan in a call with French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

“We are working on the document prepared by the American side. This must be a plan that ensures a real and dignified peace”, the Ukrainian leader wrote on X.

“We are coordinating closely to make sure that the principled stances are taken into account. We coordinated the next steps and agreed that our teams will work together at the corresponding levels”.

Zelenskyy’s comments come as media reports indicate that Trump’s 28-point proposal to end the war endorses several of Russia’s top demands, and its war narrative, including that Ukraine cede additional territory, curb the size of its military and be barred from joining NATO.

At the same time, the West would lift sanctions on Russia, and Moscow would be invited back into the Group of Eight (G8), which it was expelled from for seizing and annexing Crimea in 2014, the AFP news agency said.

I held a joint call with President of France @EmmanuelMacron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom @Keir_Starmer, and @bundeskanzler Friedrich Merz. I am grateful for their principled support for Ukraine and for all our people.

We discussed the plan for peace for Ukraine and all… pic. twitter.com/Lz6Tq38QUR

Citing two unnamed people familiar with the matter, the Reuters news agency reported on Friday that the Trump administration has threatened to cut intelligence sharing and weapons supplies for Kyiv to pressure it into accepting the plan.

The sources told the agency that Ukraine “was under greater pressure from Washington than during any previous peace discussions” as the US wants the country to sign “a framework of the deal” by next Thursday.

For their part, Ukraine’s European allies, which were not consulted on the US proposal, have stressed the need to safeguard “vital European and Ukrainian interests”, Germany said after the talks with Zelenskyy.

Merz, Macron and Starmer welcomed the “US efforts” to end the war, which began in February 2022 when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour.

But they assured the Ukrainian leader of their “unwavering and full support for Ukraine on the path to a lasting and just peace”.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, also said the EU and Ukraine want peace but will not give in to Russian aggression. “This is a very dangerous moment for all”, Kallas told reporters.

“We all want this war to end, but it matters how it ends,” he said. In the end, Ukraine must decide the terms of any agreement because Russia has no legal right to any concessions from the nation it invaded.

Fighting rages incessantly

Ukrainian forces are also facing significant challenges on the battlefield and deadly bombings by Moscow as the Trump administration pressures Ukraine to accept the deal.

According to Ukrainian officials, more bodies have been extracted from the rubble following a Russian missile attack earlier this week that killed at least 31 people.

The strike, which struck a residential apartment block, left 94 people injured, including 18 children.

On the eastern bank of the Oskil River, in the eastern Kharkiv region of Ukraine, about 5, 000 Ukrainian soldiers were reportedly trapped. The Ukrainian military did not respond right away.

The report comes as Ukrainian forces have been attempting to stop a Russian assault on Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad, which are both in exile.

Five people were killed and three others were hurt by a Russian attack on the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia on Thursday, according to emergency services. The Zaporizhia region, which borders the two banks of the Dnipro River and is home to the city in southeast Ukraine, is gaining ground for Russia.

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, claimed on Friday that Zelenskyy should be persuaded to “get it now rather than later” by the country’s advances on the battlefield.

When the Virgin Mary stepped into a packed square from the nearby church Saint-Augustin and Saint Fidele, Halq al-Wadi, also known as La Goulette, in Tunisia, about fell in the night.

Carried on the shoulders of a dozen churchgoers, the statue of the Virgin was greeted with cheers, ululations and a passionately waved Tunisian flag.

Hundreds of people – Tunisians, Europeans, and sub-Saharan Africans – had gathered for the annual procession of Our Lady of Trapani.

Sub-Saharan Africa was a major source of the participants in the procession and the Catholic Mass that followed.

Isaac Lusafu, a native of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, told Al Jazeera, “The Holy Virgin is who brought us all here today.” “Today the Virgin Mary has united us all”.

As people prayed and sang hymns in a large, tightly packed square just outside the church gates, the statue moved in a circle. A mural of the famous Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, who was born in La Goulette, was all under the watchful eye of the area’s eminently fictional home, where thousands of Europeans lived.

A melting pot

Sicilian immigrants brought the Catholic feast of Our Lady of Trapani to La Goulette in the late 1800s in order to provide for the city’s poor southern European fishermen looking for a better life.

Immigration to Tunisia from Sicily peaked in the early 20th century. The statue of the Virgin was left, and almost everyone who had been fishing, along with their families and descendants, has since returned to Europe. Every year on August 15, the statue is carried out of the church in procession.

Tunisian journalist and radio host Hatem Bourial described it as “a unique event.”

He went on to describe how, in the procession’s heyday in the early 20th century, native Tunisians, Muslims and Jews alike, would join Tunisian-Sicilian Catholics in carrying the statue of the Virgin Mary from the church down to the sea.

Participants would ask Mary to bless the fishermen’s boats there. According to Bourial, many residents yelled “Long live the Virgin of Trapani,” while others threw their traditional red cap, the chechia, into the air.

As well as its religious significance – for Catholics, August 15 marks the day that Mary was taken up into heaven – the feast also coincides with the Italian mid-August holiday of Ferragosto, which traditionally signals the high point of the summer.

Silvia Finzi, a Tunisian born in the 1950s, described how many La Goulette residents would declare the worst of the punishingly hot Tunisian summer was over after the statue was brought down to the sea.

According to Finzi, an Italian professor at the University of Tunis, “the sea had changed once the Virgin had been taken down.”

“People would say ‘ the sea has changed, the summer’s over’, and you wouldn’t need to go swimming to cool down any more”.

Exodus from Europe

The first European immigrants began to arrive in La Goulette in the early 19th century. After Tunisia became a French protectorate in 1881, their numbers quickly increased. More than 100, 000 Italian immigrants were reportedly present in Tunisia at their highest point in the early 1900s, which is estimated to have included primarily Sicilians.

In the decade after 1956, when Tunisia gained its independence from France, the vast majority of its European residents left the country, as the new government pivoted towards nationalism.

The Vatican and Tunisia reached an agreement in 1964 that gave the government control of the majority of the country’s now largely deserted churches so they could be used as public buildings. Additionally, the agreement put an end to all public Christian holidays, including the La Goulette procession.

For more than half a century, August 15 was marked only with a Mass inside the church building, and the statue of Our Lady of Trapani remained immobile in its niche. The date remained significant for La Goulette’s severely depleted Catholic population, but it largely ceased to be significant for the community as a whole.

Nostalgia

In 2017, the Catholic Church received permission to restart the procession, initially just inside the church compound. The procession left the church property this year, but it only made it to the square outside when Al Jazeera arrived.

Young Tunisian Muslims with little connection to La Goulette’s historical Sicilian population were many of the attendees.

A major reason for this is undoubtedly the high status accorded to the Virgin Mary in Islam – an entire chapter of the Quran is dedicated to her.

Other participants’ hints of nostalgia for La Goulette’s multiracial and ethnic past.

Rania, 26, told Al Jazeera, “I love the procession. “Lots of people have forgotten about it now, but European immigration is such an important part of Tunisia’s history”.

Un ete a La Goulette (A Summer in La Goulette), a 1996 movie, is a film Rania, a student, has become a source of love for her.

The movie is an ode to La Goulette’s past, featuring dialogue in three different languages, and haunting images of sunlit courtyards and shimmering beaches.

Directed by the renowned Tunisian filmmaker Ferid Boughedir, it follows the lives of three teenage girls – Gigi, a Sicilian, Meriem, a Muslim, and Tina, a Jew – over the course of a summer in the 1960s.

The film ends, however, with the start of the 1967 War between Israel and a number of Arab states and the exodus of nearly all of Tunisia’s undocumented Jews and Europeans.

New migrations

Sub-Saharan Africa’s population has increased, and Tunisia has seen a rise in new migrant communities.

The majority of these newcomers, who are in the thousands, are from Francophone West Africa. Many come to Tunisia in search of work, others hope to find passage across the Mediterranean to Europe.

Many of Tunisia’s sub-Saharan migrants are Christians, who are subject to widespread discrimination, making up the majority of Tunisia’s church-going population.

A mural in the La Goulette church, which was inspired by Our Lady of Trapani’s feast, reflects this fact. Painted in 2017, it depicts the Virgin Mary sheltering a group of people – Tunisians, Sicilians and sub-Saharan Africans – under her mantle.

Passports are everywhere in the air around the Virgin in the mural. These represent the documents that immigrants threw into the sea in order to avoid deportation, according to the church’s priest, Father Narcisse, who is from Chad.

The mural highlights the fact that the Madonna of Trapani, once considered the protector of Sicilian fishermen, is today called upon by immigrants of far more varied backgrounds.

The deep connections between the two Mediterranean shores were highlighted by this celebration, according to Tunisian Archbishop Nicolas Lhernould, in its original form. Tunisians, Africans, Europeans, locals, migrants, and tourists are among the more diverse groups that are present today.

“Mary herself was a migrant”, Archbishop Lhernould said, referring to the New Testament story which narrates Mary’s flight, together with the child Jesus and her husband Joseph, from Palestine to Egypt.

He argued that “we are all migrants, just passing through, citizens of a kingdom that is not of this world” from a Christian point of view.

La Goulette’s spirit

Little Sicily, an area known for its clusters of apartment buildings in the Italian style, was once located in La Goulette. The vast majority of these structures – modest buildings built by the newly-arrived fishermen – have been torn down and replaced, and little more than the church remains to testify to the area’s once significant Sicilian presence.

Only 800 Italians from Tunisia’s original immigrant community were left as of 2019 totaling 800.

Rita Strazzera, a Tunisian born to Sicilian parents, said, “There are so few of us left.” The Tunisian-Sicilian community meets very rarely, she explained, with some members coming together for the celebration on the 15th August, and holding occasional meetings in a small bookshop opposite the church.

Little Sicily’s spirit is still present, though not completely gone. Old La Goulette echoes in both film and memory, and Strazzera told Al Jazeera in other, more unexpected ways.

“Every year, on All Saints ‘ Day, I go to the graveyard”, said Strazzera, referring to the annual celebration when Catholics remember their deceased loved ones.

“And there are Tunisians, Muslims, people who may have had Sicilian parents or Sicilian grandparents and who have visited their graves because they are aware of what Catholics do,” said one of the mourners.

According to Strazzera, “there have been many mixed marriages, and more of them are visiting the graves every year.” When I see them, it’s like a reminder that Little Sicily is still with us”.