Category World News

Oualata is one of a quartet of fortified towns, or ksour, whose historical significance as trading and religious centers earned it the title “World Heritage.” They still contain remnants of a rich medieval past today.

The earthen facades of Oualata are punctuated by acacia wood doors with traditional designs that local women have painted on the walls. Family libraries safeguard incredibly valuable collections of cultural and literary heritage that have been passed down through generations.

Oualata is acutely vulnerable to the harsh Sahara environment because of its close proximity to the Malian border. The town’s historical walls have become strewn with stone and holes as a result of particularly severe recent rains, which have caused piles of stone and seasonal downpours.

Standing next to her crumbling childhood home, which is now her inheritance from her grandparents, Khady said, “Many houses have collapsed because of the rains.”

Oualata’s decline has only been accelerated by depopulation.

Sidiya, a member of a national foundation dedicated to protecting the country’s ancient towns, claimed that “the houses became ruins because their owners left them.”

Oualata’s population has remained stagnant for generations as residents relocate and leave their historic structures foreclosed. The traditional structures, which are covered in red mud-brick known as banco, were designed to withstand the desert’s climate but still need maintenance after the rainy season.

Only about one-third of the Old Town’s buildings are actually inhabited, leaving the majority of it to be abandoned.

Desertification is “our biggest issue,” according to the statement. “Oualata is covered in sand everywhere,” Sidiya said.

About 80% of the country is affected by desertification, which is a “adverse state of land degradation” caused by “climate change (and) inappropriate operating practices,” according to the Mauritania’s Ministry of Environment.

Even Oualata’s mosque was submerged in sand by the 1980s. Bechir Barick, a geography lecturer at Nouakchott University, said that “people were praying on top of the mosque” rather than inside.

Oualata is still home to remnants of its past as a major gateway to the trans-Saharan caravan routes and a renowned center of Islamic learning despite the relentless sand and wind.

Mohamed Ben Baty, the town’s imam, is the author of nearly a millennium of scholarship and is a member of a renowned line of Quranic scholars. 223 manuscripts, the oldest of which date back to the 14th century, are housed in the family library he controls.

He hurriedly opened a cupboard in a cramped, cluttered room to display its priceless, centuries-old documents, which are fragile and have survived unheilingly.

Ben Baty pointed to pages that had water stains and were once very poorly maintained and vulnerable to destruction as he approached the books, which were then stored in plastic sleeves. In the past, books were kept in trunks, he said, recalling a roof collapse eight years ago during the rainy season when the water seeped in and could ruin them.

More than 2, 000 books were restored and preserved digitally in Oualata thanks to funding from Spain in the 1990s. However, a small number of enthusiasts like Ben Baty, who doesn’t reside in Oualata year-round, are now relying on their dedication to keeping these documents preserved.

Because the library contains a lot of valuable documentation for researchers in various fields, including languages, the Quran, history, and astronomy, he said, “the library needs a qualified expert to ensure its management and sustainability.”

The nearest town, Oualata, is a two-hour drive across rugged terrain, and the island’s isolation prevents tourism development. The town’s location in a region where many nations advise against traveling, citing the threat of rebel violence, makes things even more difficult.

Three decades ago, Sidiya acknowledges that the planting of trees around Oualata was insufficient in response to efforts to combat the encroaching desert.

Oualata and the three other historic towns that were reunited in 1996 on the UNESCO World Heritage List have been the subject of a number of initiatives. One of the four towns hosts a festival each year to raise money for restoration, investment, and to encourage more people to stay.

When a number of Palestinians who were starving rushed to a distribution center run by the contentious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, at least three people died. The operation was criticized by aid organizations because Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to acknowledge that it was a means of imposing a downward pressure on Gaza’s population.

I’ve written a lot about Palestinians’ trials and tragedies for a long time.

Every word of every column that has appeared on this page, devoted to Palestine’s precarious fate and the unwavering souls who refuse to leave it, has been treated as a duty and obligation.

Writing has the power and obligation to expose injustice and express gratuitous suffering, which is a privilege that writers have over the ability to reach so many people and places.

I’m standing where I am throughout. Any honest author is aware of how exhausting and foolish that can be, but because I am required to tell the truth truth openly and, if necessary, repeatedly.

The moral imperative of this terrible, disfiguring hour is, in my opinion, to end what has happened to Palestinians and continues to happen to them.

A response is necessary because silence frequently results in complicity and consent, whether intentionally or accidentally.

Each of us who feels like we have a duty and obligation reacts in a unique way.

Some address lawmakers in their speeches. In demonstrations, some people encircle the arms. Some travel to Gaza and the West Bank to avert the prevailing devastation and despair they are causing.

I write.

Writing in support of Palestinians is not intended to be a polemical provocation, nor can it be dismissed as a rejection of their humanity, dignity, and rights.

It’s a conscience-based act in my opinion.

I don’t write to mollify. In order to provide readers with a convenient and comfortable ethical exit ramp, I object to categorizing what has happened and is happening in Palestine as “complex.”

No complex occupation exists. The process of oppression is simple. Apartheid is not difficult. The cause of the Genocide is not complex. It is cruel. It is incorrect. It must renounce politeness.

Writing about Palestinians in this direct, unwavering manner resounds with responses from all directions.

Some readers praise your “courage.” Some thanks you for “speaking” to them, not yelling, and naming names. Despite the risks and reproaches, some readers urge you to keep writing.

Some readers refer to you as ugly names, which is much less charitable. Some people wish harm and misfortune for you and your family. Some readers try to fire you, but they don’t.

Whatever the reaction, whether it be kind or unkind, thoughtful or thoughtless, or the consequences, whether or not, you can always keep writing.

However, one of the drawbacks of writing about Palestinians is losing the comforting serenity and tender pleasure of long-standing friendships.

On this depressing note, I suppose I’m not the only one.

For refusing to ignore or sanitize the horror we see day after day, students, teachers, academics, artists, and many others have been exiled, charged, or even jailed.

My struggles are modest in comparison, despite being stinging and disconcerting. Even though dear, detached friends seem to have a price for openness.

These friendships, which were established over decades through varied experiences, including happy and unhappy ones, have suddenly vanished.

I was aware that something could go wrong. I had no fear of it. I accepted it.

However, it sprang when it did.

It came a little late. Voicemail was used to make phone calls. Emails didn’t receive any responses. Inevitably, the silence and absence grew until they became a clear verdict.

I therefore declined to request explanations. That would be pointless, in my opinion. A door had been forced to close and close.

I admired and respected my friends. With whom I trusted, trusted, and sought advice from, and sought their counsel.

Gone.

I wish them and their loved ones the best. I’ll miss their counsel and assistance, occasionally both wise and occasionally.

Some of them are Jewish, while others are not. I have no regrets about their choice. They have used their prerogative to determine who can and cannot be referred to as friends.

Their litmus test, which we all have, was once passed by me. I’ve already let it go.

Some of my former friends have enchanted me with Israel, I am aware of. Some people reside there with their families. Some people may be grieving as well, concerned about what will follow.

I don’t ignore their apprehensions or doubts. I don’t contest their safety’s value.

The unspoken root of the irreversible divide is where, in my opinion, we are.

Palestine’s freedom and sovereignty cannot be compromised.

That is not coexistence, let alone peace. It is oppressive, brutal, and unforgiving.

This profound and lasting loss replaces the clarity that results from rejection. It increases your sense of genuineness and loyalty in relationships.

Perhaps the people I assumed I knew were completely unknowable. And perhaps those who believed they knew me were completely unaware of me.

A reckoning is taking place. It can be messy and painful, like most things, big or small, near or far.

We are attempting to navigate a pitiful world that, on the whole, rewards tolerance and punishes dissention.

I can assure those friends who have chosen to stay away that I think you have a right to do what you are doing. I am just like that.

Not to hurt, I write. I request a response.

I make a point that Palestinians’ lives matter.

I make it clear that edict, force, and intimidation cannot eradicate Palestinians.

I make it clear that no one should perform this ritual every day.

I firmly believe that humanity must be universal and that justice must not be limited.

I demand that Palestinian children discover a life beyond occupation, resentment, and grief.

I make sure Palestinian children have the same opportunity to play, learn, and thrive as our children.

I make it clear that a nation must be shaken of the killing lust that has spread like a fever that won’t go away.

Too much harm has been caused.

Can we come to a consensus on that?

The account will indicate that I wasn’t among the silent during this obscene moment of slaughter and starvation when I stopped writing.

For better or worse, it will record me on the record.

On May 27, thousands of Palestinians surged towards an aid distribution site in Rafah – desperate for food after months of starvation – only to be met with gunfire from panicked private security contractors. What the world witnessed at the Tal as-Sultan aid site was not a tragedy, but a revelation: The final, violent unmasking of the illusion that humanitarian aid exists to serve humanity rather than empire.

Marketed by Israel and the United States as a model of dignity and neutrality, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s new distribution hub disintegrated into chaos within hours of opening. But this was no accident. It was the logical endpoint of a system not designed to nourish the hungry, but to control and contain them.

As starving people in Gaza – made to wait for hours under the scorching sun, tightly confined in metal lanes to receive a small box of food – eventually began to press forward in desperation, chaos broke out. Security personnel – employed by a US-backed contractor – opened fire in a failed attempt to prevent a stampede. Soon, Israeli helicopters were deployed to evacuate American staff and began firing warning shots over the crowd. The much-advertised aid site collapsed completely after only a few hours in operation.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation had promised something revolutionary with this initiative: Aid free from the corruption of Hamas, the bureaucracy of the UN, the messiness of Palestinian civil society. What it delivered instead was the purest distillation of colonial humanitarianism – aid as an instrument of control, dehumanisation, and humiliation, dispensed by armed contractors under the watchful eye of the occupying military.

The problem with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s failed initiative was not only the dehumanising and dangerous way in which it attempted to deliver aid at gunpoint. The aid itself was humiliating in both quality and quantity.

What people were given was not enough to survive on, let alone to restore any sense of human dignity. The boxes handed out contained just enough calories to prevent immediate death – a calculated cruelty designed to keep people alive on quarter-full stomachs while their bodies slowly consume themselves. No vegetables for nutrition. No seeds for planting. No tools for rebuilding. Just processed food, engineered to maintain a population in permanent crisis, forever dependent on the mercy of their destroyers.

Photos from the distribution centre – showing desperate human beings visibly worn down by hunger, disease, and relentless war, corralled into metal lanes like livestock, waiting for scraps as they stared down the barrel of a gun – drew comparisons with well-known images of suffering and death from the concentration camps of the last century.

The similarity is not accidental. The “aid distribution centres” of Gaza are the concentration camps of our time – designed, like their European predecessors, to process, manage, and contain unwanted populations rather than help them survive.

Jake Wood, the foundation’s executive director, resigned days before the collapse of the Tal as-Sultan operation, stating in his resignation letter that he no longer believed the foundation could adhere to “the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence”.

This was, of course, a damning example of bureaucratic understatement.

What he meant – though he could not say it outright – was that the entire enterprise was a lie.

An aid initiative to help an occupied and besieged population can never be neutral when it coordinates with the occupying army. It cannot be impartial when it excludes the occupied from decision-making. It cannot be independent when its security depends on the very military that engineered the famine it is trying to address.

Tuesday’s choreographed humiliation was months in the making. Of 91 attempts the UN made to deliver aid to besieged North Gaza between October 6 and November 25, 82 were denied and 9 were impeded. Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, accused Israel of conducting a “starvation campaign” against Palestinians in Gaza as early as September 2024. In a report to the UN General Assembly, he warned that famine and disease were “killing more people than bombs and bullets”, describing the hunger crisis as the most rapid and deliberate in modern history. Between May 19 and 23, only 107 aid trucks entered Gaza after more than three months of blockade. During the temporary ceasefire, 500 to 600 trucks were needed each day to meet basic humanitarian needs. By that measure, over 40,000 trucks would be required to meaningfully address the crisis. At least 300 people, including many children, have already died of starvation.

But the bastardisation of “aid” and transformation of “humanitarianism” into a mechanism of control did not begin on October 7, either.

Palestinians have been living this lie of “aid” for 76 years, since the Nakba transformed them from a people who fed themselves into a people who begged for crumbs. Before 1948, Palestine exported citrus to Europe, manufactured soap traded across the region, and produced glass that reflected the Mediterranean sun. Palestinians were not rich, but they were whole. They grew their own food, built their own homes, educated their own children.

The Nakba did not merely displace 750,000 Palestinians – it engineered a transformation from self-sufficiency to dependency. By 1950, former farmers were lining up for UNRWA rations, their olive groves now feeding someone else’s children. This was not an unfortunate side effect of war but a deliberate strategy: To break Palestinian capacity for independence and replace it with a permanent need for charity. Charity, unlike rights, can be withdrawn. Charity, unlike justice, comes with conditions.

The United States, UNRWA’s largest donor, simultaneously provides most of the weapons destroying Gaza. This is not a contradiction – it is the logic of colonial humanitarianism. Fund the violence that creates the need, then fund the aid that manages the consequences. Keep people alive, but never allow them to live. Provide charity, but never justice. Deliver aid, but never freedom.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – and the tragic spectacle it created on Tuesday – was the perfection of this system of colonial humanitarianism. Aid delivered by private contractors, coordinated with occupying forces, distributed in militarised zones designed to bypass every institution Palestinians have built to serve themselves. It was humanitarianism as counterinsurgency, charity as colonial control – and when its obscene operation predictably collapsed, Palestinians were blamed for their desperation.

Palestinians have long known that no Israeli or US-backed aid initiative would truly help them. They know that a dignified life cannot be sustained with food packages distributed in concentration camp-like facilities. Karamah – the Arabic word for dignity that encompasses honour, respect, and agency – cannot be air-dropped or handed out at checkpoints where people wait in metal lanes like cattle.

Of course, Palestinians already possess Karamah – it lives in their steadfast refusal to disappear, in their insistence on remaining human despite every effort to reduce them to mere recipients of charity meant to keep them barely alive.

What they need is true humanitarian aid – aid that provides not just calories, but a chance at a future.

True humanitarian aid would dismantle the siege, not manage its consequences. It would prosecute war criminals, not feed their victims with just enough to die slowly. It would restore Palestinian land, not try to compensate for its theft with boxes of processed food handed out in cages.

Until the international community understands this simple truth, Israel and its allies will continue to dress instruments of domination as relief. And we will continue to witness tragic scenes like the one in Rafah yesterday, for years to come.

What happened in Rafah was not a failure of aid. It was the success of a system designed to dehumanise, control, and erase. Palestinians do not need more bandages from the same hands that wield the knife. They need justice. They need freedom. They need the world to stop mistaking the machinery of oppression for humanitarian relief – and start seeing Palestinian liberation as the only path to dignity, peace, and life.

Activists in Paris dyed a fountain red to symbolise what they called “the bloodbath” taking place in Gaza. The protesters said a lack of political will to confront Israel’s actions in Gaza was increasingly being seen as “a form of complicity” with genocide.

According to an internal cable that was seen by news outlets on Tuesday, US President Donald Trump’s administration has mandated that its embassies abroad stop holding new visa interview dates for students and foreign visitors.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in the memo that the pause is in place because the State Department intends to expand the selection of student applicants on social media.

What this pause might mean, as we all know from the beginning.

What transpired?

Rubio demanded that US embassies everywhere the world stop holding new visa interviews for foreign students in a cable that was obtained by several news organizations.

According to the cable, “The Department is reviewing the current operations and procedures for screening and vetting of student and exchange visitor (F, M, J) visa applicants,” and plans to provide guidance on expanded social media vetting for all of these applicants.

Consulate sections should not add any additional appointment capacity for student or exchange visitor visas in preparation for an expansion of the social media screening and vetting requirements.

The F-1 student visa is most common among international students. Students who enroll in exchange or scholarship programs like the Fulbright fellowship, professors who take part in exchange programs, and interns are eligible for the J-1 visa. Students who enroll in training programs in the US are eligible for an M-1 visa.

Under the condition of anonymity, a US official confirmed to The Associated Press that the suspension is temporary and does not apply to students who have already scheduled their visa interviews. How long will the halt last is a mystery.

The US State Department’s spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, said at a regular press briefing that the country will use “every tool” to screen anyone who wants to enter the country. She later declined to comment on the reports about the memo.

On Tuesday, Bruce said, “We will continue to use every tool we can to determine who is coming here, whether they are students or not.

How many students from other countries visit the US annually?

According to the Institute of International Education (IIE) and the US State Department’s annual Open Doors report, the number of international students in US institutions increased by an all-time high of 1.13 million during the academic year 2023-2024. The number of international students enrolled in US colleges and universities increased by 6.6 percent from the previous year.

Which nations are these students from?

In Asia, 71.5% of the international students who enrolled in the US between 2023 and 2024, according to the Open Doors report.

With 331, 602 students from India enrolling in US universities, that country was the top source. China sent 277, 398 students to the US following India. South Korea, which sent 43, 149 students to the US, is in third place.

90,600 students from Europe, or 8% of the world’s student population, were sent to the US from Europe.

Which universities accept the majority of foreign students?

The Trump administration’s approval of enrolling international students was suspended last week amid a wider row between Harvard and the administration. About 27 percent of Harvard’s student body is made up of international students, who are currently accounted for by 6, 800.

Other  major universities have comparable proportions of the campus population, with international students accounting for similar proportions.

22 percent of the students at Yale, Northwestern University, and New York University are from outside the United States. International students make up 30% of the total student body at the University of Rochester, which is higher.

The highest number of international students at NYU, according to the Open Doors report, was 272 between 2023 and 2024. Columbia University placed third with 20, 321 students, while Northeast University placed second with 21, 023 international students.

Are most student visas issued now in the US?

According to the memo, how many students who are aiming to enroll in academic programs at US universities this fall (autumn) will be impacted by the State Department’s proposed pause.

By the middle of March or early April, the majority of US universities make admissions announcements. Between March and June, Fulbright makes its final decisions rolling. After receiving their admissions decision, students typically apply for a student visa. After submitting their applications, applicants typically take between a few weeks and a few months to receive their visas.

F-1 student visas can be issued up to 365 days before the program’s start date, according to the US State Department website, but only 30 days before the program’s start date can students enter.

What happens to US students who need to renew their visas?

Students who need their visas renewed or extended in the US are unsure whether the pause will be affected by it.

The application process is the same as the F-1 student visa application process, which requires applicants to complete an online form and schedule an interview at a US embassy outside the US. The F-1 student visa is typically granted for a five-year period.

PhD programs typically last four years, while undergraduate programs typically last three to eight. Therefore, many PhD students must renew their US visas while completing their program. International students who complete one degree and apply for another in the US, such as those who have earned bachelor’s degrees and are pursuing master’s degrees, may need to renew their US visas as well.

What justifies this most recent move by the Trump administration?

The Trump administration’s most recent move is to impose sanctions on US universities, particularly international students who have backed Palestinians in Gaza for the past year.

The US State Department revoked Ranjani Srinivasan, 37, a PhD candidate in urban planning at Columbia University,’s student visa in early March. Up until 2029, her visa was valid. Srinivasan claimed that her speech and limited social media activity had made her face. She had posted and shared content that was critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza on social media. Additionally, she had signed a number of open letters supporting Palestinian rights.

Srinivasan claimed she never participated in any organized campus organization, and that she did not attend the US campus protests in April 2024, when Columbia campus encampments were robbing.