Nuseirat 274

A harrowing account of an Israeli raid on the Nuseirat refugee camp to free four captives that killed 274 Palestinians.

A daring Israeli raid on a refugee camp in central Gaza left a terrible trail of death and destruction. On June 8, 2024, Israeli special forces disguised as Palestinians carried out a covert operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp, aimed at rescuing four captives held by Hamas. At the same time, the Israeli military launched heavy air raids, and the two-pronged attack targeted private homes, public markets and alleyways full of civilians.

Where might the stolen Louvre jewels end up; will the robbers be caught?

Following a three-day closure due to a jewelry heist, the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, reopened on Wednesday.

A group of thieves robbed the iconic museum in the French capital on October 19 and broke into the city’s famous museum, stealing eight pieces of jewelry containing priceless pieces from the Napoleonic era. The jewels have not been recovered, but the robbers are still at large.

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What we currently know about the location of the jewelry, where it might be found, and where the thieves might be able to hide it.

What did the Louvre steal?

A group of robbers climbed a truck-mounted ladder at 9:30 am (07:30 GMT) to the second floor of the museum’s gilded Galerie d’Apollon before attempting to gain access to the French crown jewels using an angle grinder to a window. Around 30 minutes after the museum’s opening to the public, the heist took place.

The items that were stolen were:

  • A tiara from Queen Marie-Amelie and Queen Hortense’s jewelry collection
  • a necklace from the same duo’s sapphire jewelry collection
  • The sapphire jewelry set includes one earring.
  • Empress Marie-Louise’s collection includes an emerald necklace.
  • Emerald earrings from the Marie-Louise collection
  • A “reliquary” brooch known as the “reliquary” brooch
  • Empress Eugenie’s tiara
  • a large brooch of Empress Eugenie

The crown of Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon III, was also taken by the robbers. The French Ministry of Interior claims that it was found nearby and that it must have been dropped by the thieves.

What is the value of the stolen goods?

According to Parisian public prosecutor Laure Beccuau, the haul of jewels is estimated to be worth 88 million euros ($102 million).

This damage is not comparable to the historical damage caused by this theft, according to Beccuau.

Empress Eugénie’s ensembles of jewelry, including her crown, tiara, and large bodice bow, will be on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, on October 21, 2023. Three days after thieves robbed jewels worth about 88 million euros ($102 million) during a daring daytime heist, the Louvre reopened its doors in Paris on October 22, 2025.

What distinguishes this heist from previous museum heists?

The Louvre has been robbed before, not once. However, previous robberies typically involved the theft of jewelry, such as the Mona Lisa, which was taken in 1911.

Because of the high intrinsic value of the stolen object, American art historian Noah Charney said on Tuesday, “A jewelry theft is a very different thing to think about.”

Because it is typically made of canvas and only panel, pigment, and oil, a painting doesn’t have a high intrinsic value. The value of jewelry is still significant if you sell the components and break down what was stolen, according to Charney.

The jewels could not be located now.

According to Dutch art historian Arthur Brand, the jewels are most likely still there.

Due to the high risk associated with acquiring them, selling them on the black market would lower their value.

According to Brand, “they are very hot,” and the black market price will be significantly lower than the regular market, where the black market prices would be between 10 and 30% of their value. On the black market, this means that the $ 102 million jewels could be sold for between $ 10 and $ 30.

If the jewels are significantly recut and no longer recognized, Charney claimed the thieves won’t need to go to the black market. Re-cutting gems also lowers their value, though. Athief may lose some of the value and size of an antique diamond if they attempt to re-cut it to a contemporary shape.

The stolen jewels may eventually be sold in major diamond markets like Antwerp in Belgium, where some buyers may not care about their origins, according to Corinne Chartrelle, a former officer with the French Police’s unit for cultural property trafficking.

According to Brand, “they might try to sell the jewels in nations like India, Israel, or Dubai.”

Will anyone find the thieves?

“The thieves will undoubtedly be caught,” he declared. According to Brand, 50% of the jewels are recovered, depending on how long it will take to catch the thieves.

The BRB (Brigade de Repression du Banditisme), a specialized Paris police unit with experience handling high-profile thefts, has been given the task of public prosecutor to look into the heist.

Former BRB officer Pascal Szkudlara, who previously worked for the police, described how the unit handled the $4 million theft of media personality Kim Kardashian’s engagement ring in Paris. Szkudlara claimed he had a “100 percent” belief that the thieves would eventually be apprehended.

In an effort to find suspicious people in and around the building, police are expected to review surveillance camera footage going back weeks.

However, time is tight because, even if the thieves are caught, the jewels will never be returned to their original condition if they are recut.

Have there recently been any additional robberies in European museums?

The Louvre robbery comes in response to recent jewelry thefts from other European museums. Among the recent events are:

Museum of Natural History, France, September 2025

A 24-year-old Chinese woman was detained in Barcelona on September 30 after stealing six gold nuggets from Paris’ Museum of Natural History. The gold nuggets had a price tag of about 1.5 million euros ($1.74).

It is unknown who may have melted the melted gold, but the woman was detained while attempting to dispose of it. In a cyberattack, the museum’s alarms and security system were disabled, but it’s not clear whether the thieves were responsible for the cyberattack or whether the theft was opportunistic.

Drents Museum, Netherlands, January 2025

The Drents Museum in Assen, northeast of the Netherlands, where thieves stole four artefacts, including three gold bracelets and a gold helmet, which are thought to be around 2,500 years old.

The ancient Dacians, a society that once lived in the region that is now Romania, were the subject of an exhibit.

The Dutch Public Prosecution Service (PPS) announced in late July that the heist investigation had come to an end and that three suspects had been identified. According to Dutch media reports, the suspects have been detained and formally indicted. Their most recent hearing took place in an Assen court on October 16.

The PPS did not provide location information for the stolen goods. It stated in an update on May 9 that it still believed the main suspects were still in possession of them and that they hadn’t been completely destroyed. The PPS stated that there is no current information about whether an external client was responsible for the theft.

May 2024: Ely Museum, UK

A gold torc and gold bracelet from the Bronze Age were taken from the Ely Museum in Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom, on May 7.

A 5, 000-pound ($6, 671) reward was provided later that month for information that led to the theft. No information has been released regarding the theft’s progress or the recovery of the stolen goods.

Germany’s Celtic and Roman Museum opens on November 20, 2022.

483 antiquated gold coins were taken from the Bavarian Celtic and Roman Museum in Manching. According to what the New York Times reported at the time, an official estimated the coins’ estimated value of $1.7 million.

The Church of England owes Zimbabwe more than an apology

Seven Zimbabweans made the announcement on October 4 that they were suing the Church of England for allowing the brutal abuse they endured from John Smyth, a prominent member of the church’s evangelical movement. Their cause was not just justice for the past. It was an indictment of a school that had no idea how violently organized it was when it was promoted as a form of religion.

Smyth wasn’t a singular predator. He was a member of the powerful inner circle of the Church. He oversaw Christian camps where more than 100 boys and young men were abused in the United Kingdom, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. He was a well-known British barrister and an evangelical leader. He embodied the authority and social privilege that kept him safe from scrutiny. The Church chose silence over accountability when his abuse first surfaced in England in the early 1980s, allowing him to carry his cruelty to Africa. His victims in Zimbabwe included 16-year-old Guide Nyachuru, who was found dead in a camp swimming pool in 1992. He was one of the boys who were victims of Christianity. More than 30 years later, the family of Nyachuru is suing the Church, demanding accountability for the abuse and the Church’s deliberate inaction, along with six other survivors.

The Church is now in the Church’s shoes. What started out as one man’s crimes were hidden, but now a much older truth is revealed: the Church of England’s authority in Africa was never only for the spiritual. It was founded on empire-sanctification, complicity, and conquest.

The Makin Review, an independent inquiry into the abuse committed by Smyth, released its long-awaited findings on November 7, 2024. The report was damning. It revealed how prominent Church officials had systematically covered up his crimes for decades, calling him “a problem that was solved and exported to Africa.”

Archbishop Justin Welby accepted both personal and institutional responsibility for what survivors described as a decades-long conspiracy of silence and announced his resignation four days later. His departure marked a symbolic shift in accountability, but those who had to endure Smyth’s cruelty found little comfort in his demise. The Church should use this transition as an opportunity for real accountability, as opposed to another regrettable gesture, as Sarah Mullally is now the archbishop-designate.

In the Smyth case, the Church’s failures were more than just moral failings. They exemplified its imperial practices in modern times, with the emphasis on preserving privilege at home and exporting problems to colonies. The logic of dominance, which once permitted silence during a conquest, was.

My family was raised in the Anglican Church’s long shadow.

My father attended one of Zimbabwe’s oldest and most admired Anglican schools, St. Augustine’s High School in Penhalonga, in the 1950s. In the 1970s, his elder brother went there to pursue a distinguished Anglican priesthood, teacher, and head teacher at St. Mathias Tsonzo.

I received my christening at St. Paul’s in Marlborough and baptized at Kambuzuma’s Anglican Church. I feel deeply ashamed of my relationship to the Church because of this.

I never fully confronted its past or present brutalities, as many others have. Robert Mugabe, the country’s first and foremost Catholic, advocated a policy of reconciliation that called for justice without progress and forgiveness when it gained independence from Britain in April 1980. We were told to move on and never look back after decades of colonial rule and to re-visit before the Berlin Conference of 1884.

There hasn’t been much effort to hold the Church accountable for its expansive role in the colonization of Zimbabwe for 45 years.

The Anglican Church established itself as the spiritual arm of conquest in 1890 when Bishop George Knight-Bruce gave blessing to the Pioneer Column, a paramilitary expedition funded by the British South Africa Company (BSAC) to seize Mashonaland and Matabeleland for the empire.

Empire and evangelism were seen as essential components of the divine order by Knight-Bruce and his successors. While preaching salvation through submission to the colonial state, they seized large tracts of land from the BSAC.

St. Augustine’s, St. Faith’s, and St. David’s (Bonda) in Manicaland were the Anglican Church’s mission stations by the turn of the 20th century. These were evangelical outposts, centers for colonial consolidation, settlement, and colonial consolidation that later morphed into significant educational and medical institutions, not their original locations.

They also taught the virtues of industry and obedience as Christian virtues in the service of the empire, and they also trained and disciplined African laborers. The classroom served as a tool of subtle erasure and indoctrination, while the pulpit served as an assimilation tool. Subjugation was disguised as enlightenment in both the sermon and the Bible.

The Church of England benefited morally, spiritually, and materially from the bloodletting of local communities because Zimbabwe’s colonization was primarily a business enterprise. Children were taught to reject their culture and submit to an English superior. The soldier’s rifle and the missionary’s cross both supported the other’s success. Conversion evolved into a different type of conquest.

This belief guided generations of African Christians, including myself, in our belief that Western dominance was a divine design.

Not a peculiarity in Zimbabwe, this.

Anglican missionaries were deeply entangled in African imperial aggression. In Kenya, for instance, the Church incorporated the colonial system of mass incarceration and violence in the 1950s. Its brutality enabled domestic violence in England, which is both polished and brutal in practice.

The Anglican Church served as a model for moral authority while Smyth was able to abuse Zimbabwean children under the pretext of religion.

In the 1980s, I was fortunate to emerge from St. Paul’s youth program on Friday afternoons. Others had a different perspective. Because the Church’s leaders in Britain saw lives as disposable, they endured Smyth’s violence.

The Church’s inability to confront its past and change its moral culture directly contributed to this official dehumanization. The monster Smyth became in Zimbabwe as a result of centuries of Anglican hypocrisy, entitlement, denial, and racism perfected on slave plantations and in the colonies.

Despite my background, I no longer identify as a Christian or an Anglican. I haven’t visited an Anglican church in 16 years, and I don’t intend to.

Indeed, I no longer pray to the English God. I have a terrible faith in the Church of England and its teachings.

I’m not an atheist, but rather one who is seeking a belief, redemption, and identity that are rooted in the knowledge that the Manyika of Manicaland practiced their religion well before colonization. Our ancestors lost their voice, voice, and sacred connection to the divine in what the Church called civilisation.

The Church of England continues to ignore Zimbabwe’s harm to this day. It has steadfastly resisted the crimes it sanctioned in Africa, insisting that it will offer “no apology for spreading the gospel around the world,” despite sporadically expressed regret.

Little evidence exists that the Church will face this legacy with the courage and sincerity it demands now that Sarah Mullally has been chosen as archbishop-designate. Its public displays of contrition are still performative and hollow.

However, the Church’s wealth, which was the result of centuries of tithes, land seizures, slavery, and imperial investments, now exceeds 11.4 billion pounds ($14.88 billion). A Church that was shaped by empire still acts as though African pain deserves sympathy but not reparative justice despite its wealth, reverent words, and purported moral leadership.

The Church will continue to be the Church it has always been: the principal accomplice and moral heir to the empire until it pays compensation for stolen land, funds reparations, and redeems what it destroyed.

The “Zimbabwean seven” case demonstrates the spiritual ruin of a place that was sustained by white divinity’s delusions.

Zimbabwe is owed more to the Church of England than an apology. If it still has a soul, it must be reckoned with by us.

Israeli minister says ‘99%’ of settlers are law-abiding

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Israeli settlers are “the most law-abiding people on earth” and face punishment if they violate the law, according to Israel’s foreign minister. However, settlers are rarely held accountable for their frequent support for the Israeli army and continue to assault Palestinians daily.

Israel deports 32 activists aiding Palestinian olive farmers amid attacks

In response to the increase in Israeli army and settler attacks in the occupied West Bank, Israel has ordered the deportation of 32 foreign activists who support Palestinian farmers who grow olives.

The activists were detained last week in the Nablus Governorate’s Burin because they were protesting an Israeli general order that only allowed those who work on the land during the harvesting period.

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Since the start of the current season, the Israeli army and settlers have attacked olive pickers with 158 attacks., according to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission.

A number of violations were committed during the assaults, including mass shootings, arrests, and beatings. At least 74 attacks targeted olive-growing regions, with 29 instances involving the destruction of farmland and trees. 765 olive trees were completely destroyed.

Palestinian farmers are putting themselves at risk when picking olives, according to the UN and human rights organizations.

The UN Human Rights Office’s head, Ajith Sunghay, stated in a statement on Tuesday that “settler violence has skyrocketed in scale and frequency.”

We have already experienced severe attacks by armed settlers against Palestinians, women, children, and international solidarity activists two weeks after the 2025 harvest began.

According to Sunghay, the UN estimates that 80 to 100 000 Palestinian families depend on their livelihoods from the olive harvest.

The activists would be deported over their alleged affiliation with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), according to a statement released by Interior Minister Yariv Levin and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Wednesday.

The activists were denied entry to the country for a 99-year period, according to the statement, without providing their nationalities or where they would be deported.

Since the start of the conflict in Gaza, settler violence against Palestinians has increased.

According to the United Nations, more than 1, 000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers in the occupied West Bank since October 7, 2023, and thousands of Palestinians have been forced to flee as a result of Israeli-imposed movement restrictions, home demolitions, and Israeli-imposed restrictions on movement.

According to the UN, there were 757 settler attacks that left a 13 percent increase in casualties or property damage in the first half of 2025, up from the same period last year.

Israeli settlers allegedly attacked Palestinian olive harvesters and activists with clubs during a settler attack in Turmus Aya on Sunday, according to a video released from the town of Turmus Aya. One woman suffered serious injuries when she was taken to the hospital.

In Beita’s Jabal Qamas area, settlers beat and set on fire three vehicles earlier this month, injuring at least 36 people, including journalists.

The West Bank and East Jerusalem are home to more than 700,000 settlers, who reside in 150 settlements and 128 outposts, both of which are prohibited by international law. Israeli soldiers frequently accompany or protect settlers, and they are frequently armed.