Category World News

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.

When Abimbola Ogundairo saw a pretty wooden map she thought would be great decor for her walls, she did something most regular buyers wouldn’t think of: She messaged the manufacturers with a simple, yet charged question.

“Which map projection did you use?” she asked, referring to the method of representing maps on a flat plane.

The sellers never responded, but Ogundairo suspected they used a problematic projection. Discouraged, she refused to place an order.

Ogundairo’s obsession with map projections is not random. The 28-year-old is leading an African-led campaign to get more of global institutions and schools to immediately stop using the Mercator Map projection – the most common version of the world map that is generally recognised – because it shrinks Africa, and much of the Global South, while disproportionately enlarging the rich and powerful regions of the world.

Greenland, for example, is shown to be relatively the same size as Africa, but, in reality, can fit in the continent 14 times over. Europe, portrayed as bigger than South America, is actually half its size.

Advocates like Ogundairo are pushing instead for “equal area” map projections, which they say more accurately represent the prominence of the African continent.

Since early May, Ogundairo, as lead campaigner at Africa No Filter, a nonprofit working to change negative perceptions of Africa, has hassled big institutions like the United Nations with a “Correct the World” campaign. People are encouraged to sign an online petition to pressure their governments into compliance. Most people, Ogundairo said, don’t know about the distortions and react with surprise and outrage.

“We’ve had a lot of, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t even know this was happening,’” Ogundairo told Al Jazeera. “I have an uncle who decided to support this because I told him you can fit the US, China, and India into Africa, and he felt so betrayed. He was like ‘Oh my God, I had no idea.’”

Institutions have been harder to crack, Ogundairo said, but she expected some resistance to this sensitive, controversial topic.

For centuries, experts have debated the question: Can anyone accurately depict a three-dimensional, spherical world on a flat surface? Is it possible to take a rounded object, like a football, for example, cut it up, paste it on a board, and have a precise representation?

Many experts conclude the answer is a resounding no. Maps, they say, are inherently a lie, always compromising on something: Area, distance, or something else. Others, though, argue that near-perfect maps exist and must be highlighted.

Ogundairo believes the commonly used Mercator map affects Africa and Africans negatively, and that its widespread use for centuries is connected to the many decades of colonialism the continent endured. Now, she said, some 70 years after independence from colonial masters, is the time to press for change.

“We live in a world where size is often equated with power,” Ogundairo said, adding that the Mercator map feeds tropes that Africa is a country.

“It has a damaging impact on the way we make decisions in our everyday lives, on how we make business decisions, the way we dream, and even the way non-Africans view the continent as a tourist destination and an investment destination. It’s the most lingering lie about Africa,” she said.

A heated, centuries-long debate resurfaces

Cartographers as far back as the early 20th century knew the Mercator projection was problematic.

Developed by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1599, the projection was one of the first ever to represent arched, imaginary sailing courses as visible, straight lines. Its simplicity for sea navigation cemented its popularity at the time, but its huge errors soon became hard to ignore.

“It preserves shapes and angles, and that’s good for navigation, but it’s terrible for scale,” geography professor Lindsay Frederick Braun of the University of Oregon said of the Mercator map. The map is most suitable for local area mapping and is used by digital platforms like Google Maps.

When enlarged into a world map, though, Mercator becomes problematic, Braun said. The map’s mistakes were not likely to be a conspiracy against Africa or the Global South, but its continued use, he added, is inherently political.

“Part of the reason Mercator got wide use is because it was widely available for nautical charts, but also because it rings true as a vision of the world to the people who were looking at it, the people whose countries are a little bigger.”

Several map projections over time have tried to fill Mercator’s gaps, but all of them compromise on one or more factors. That has made it hard for social justice crusaders looking to support a projection that better represents the Global South.

One cartographer’s claims, though, shook the cartography world in 1973, causing an outpouring of condemnation on the one hand, and on the other, a loyal cult following.

German activist Arno Peters declared his Peters Projection as the “only” precise map, and the true alternative to the Mercator model.

Peters, whose parents had been imprisoned by Nazis and who focused on social inequalities as a journalist and academic criticised the Mercator projection as “Euro-centred”.

The fervour with which he and his supporters promoted the projection as a scientific feat and a social justice breakthrough bordered on what some called propaganda. It caused concerned groups like the United States National Council of Churches to take notice and immediately adopt the map.

Critics, though, were quick to call out Peters on two things. The map, observers pointed out, was only distorted differently: Where the Mercator projection makes areas near the poles appear much larger, the Peters projection relatively represents accurate sizes throughout, but slightly stretches areas near the equator vertically, and areas near the poles horizontally.

“There was also the fact that this map had already been presented by another cartographer decades ago,” Braun said, explaining the second problem.

Scottish scientist James Gall indeed first published an identical projection in a science journal in 1855, but it went unnoticed. There is no proof, some researchers say, that Peters outrightly plagiarised Gall, but critics say his failure to credit the earlier researcher is still problematic.

In 2016, the debate resurfaced with renewed vigour after public schools in the US city of Boston switched to what many now refer to as the “Gall-Peters” projection. Officials said the move was part of a three-year effort to “decolonise the curriculum”. Teachers said they were amazed to see students questioning their view of the world after the switch.

However, many experts and map enthusiasts were annoyed by the fact that Boston chose Peters, and as such, gave the projection renewed relevance.

Al Jazeera reached out to the Boston Public Schools (BPS) for comment.

A perfect map?

Amid the Boston schools’ drama, one group of researchers decided they’d had enough of Peters and set out to do something.

Cartographer Bernard Jenny, who teaches immersive visualisation at Australia’s Monash University, said he was approached by Tom Patterson, a retired cartographer with the UN National Parks, for the task. Together with software engineer Bojan Savric, the team in 2018 created an equal area map they called the “Equal Earth” projection.

That version, which sees Africa expand impressively, is increasingly seen as the closest thing to a perfect area map. It’s the same one Ogundairo’s team is pushing for.

“But that’s maybe a slightly pretentious name,” Jenny laughed over a Zoom call, explaining that Equal Earth is still not a perfect representation of the Earth. “We were just tired of the Peters resurgence and wondered why people would go with that when it’s not even the best in terms of anything,” he said.

The new projection tries to correct the Robinson projection, created in 1963 by American Arthur H Robinson. Many scientists use Robinson’s map because it is more visually balanced, although it compromises on area, size and scale, and particularly enlarges areas close to the north and south poles.

“We tried to come up with a version of Robinson that does not distort area,” Jenny explained. “So we stretched it in a way such that the different areas are not enlarged or shrunken. So Greenland is 14 times smaller than Africa on the globe, and it’s also 14 times smaller on the Equal Earth map.”

Jenny said the team never set out specifically to correct some of the most highlighted errors of the Mercator projection. Subconsciously, though, he said, they knew they wanted their map to better represent historically distorted regions like Africa.

“I would guess any reasonable geographer would support that idea,” the scientist said.

Equal Earth rose in popularity after a NASA scientist saw it online right after it was published, and the organisation immediately switched to it.

The World Bank, too, has picked it up. The institution, since 2013, has experimented with different projections, including the Robinson map, but in 2024 settled on the Equal Earth map.

“The World Bank Group is committed to ensuring accurate representation of all people, on all platforms,” a spokesperson told Al Jazeera.

Progress is slow but steady, Ogundairo of Africa No Filter said. Prominent organisations changing their stances means a universal pivot is possible, she said. Yet, there’s much more work to be done by Africans, she added.

Just as Mercator painted an image that prominently represented his part of the world, Africans, too, need to lead the way in pushing for what they want, Ogundairo said. One missing factor is that Africans have not insisted enough on change, in her view. It’s why her campaign is also urging African countries and the African Union to be particular about how they are represented on the map.