Activists in the United States demanding an end to Israel’s war on Gaza have rallied outside a hotel hosting the annual White House correspondent’s dinner, condemning President Joe Biden for his support of the military campaign and “under-coverage” of the conflict by Western news outlets.
However, Biden, who attended Saturday’s event in Washington, DC and delivered a 10-minute speech, made no mention of the war in Gaza or the grave humanitarian crisis there.
Protests at the gala event – which is normally devoted to presidents, journalists and comedians taking outrageous pokes at political scandals and each other – took place as antiwar demonstrations also spread through US college campuses, with students pitching encampments and withstanding police sweeps in an effort to force their universities to divest from companies enabling Israel’s military campaign on Gaza.
The protests in the US capital forced Biden’s motorcade to take an alternate route from the White House to the Washington Hilton, where more than 100 protesters, some of them waving Palestinian flags, shouted “shame on you” at guests hurrying inside.
At one point, the crowds chanted, “Western media we see you, and all the horrors that you hide”, while some protesters sprawled motionless on the pavement, next to mock-ups of bloodied flak vests with “press” insignia.
The crowds also cheered when someone inside the Washington Hilton – where the dinner has been held for decades – unfurled a Palestinian flag from a top-floor hotel window.
Since Israel’s war on Gaza began last October, the Israeli military has killed 142 media workers and arrested at least 40 Palestinian journalists, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said 2023 was the deadliest year for those in the profession in a decade, with some 75 percent of those killed worldwide being Palestinians reporting on the war in Gaza.
In his speech, Biden offered a toast for “press freedom and democracy around the world”, but failed to speak about the suffering in Gaza. He spent most of his address poking fun at his main rival in this year’s presidential race, Donald Trump, as well as the two men’s advanced age.
His speech remained focused on what he believes is at stake this election, speaking about how another Trump administration would be more harmful to the country than his first term.
“We have to take this seriously. Eight years ago we could have written it off as ‘Trump talk’, but not after January 6,” he told the audience, referring to the supporters of Trump who stormed the US Capitol after Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 election.
One of the few mentions of Gaza came from Kelly O’Donnell, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), who briefly noted some 100 journalists have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza.
Biden raises a toast during the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington, DC [Tom Brenner/Reuters]
In advance of the event, more than two dozen Palestinian journalists published a letter calling for their colleagues to boycott the gala, accusing the Biden administration of being complicit in Israel’s systematic killing of media workers in Gaza.
“The toll exacted on us for merely fulfilling our journalistic duties is staggering,” the letter stated. “We are subjected to detentions, interrogations, and torture by the Israeli military, all for the ‘crime’ of journalistic integrity.”
One organiser complained that the WHCA – which represents the hundreds of journalists who cover the president – has largely been silent since the first weeks of the war about the killings of Palestinian journalists. The WHCA did not respond to a request for comment.
American-Palestinian journalist Ahmed Shihab Eldin, one of the signatories of the letter, told Al Jazeera that it is “unacceptable” for media workers to stay silent for fear of endangering job security.
“We are seeing journalists in Gaza continuing to be, not just killed, but detained, tortured, and even their families killed,” he said.
Sandra Tamari, executive director of Adalah Justice Project, a US-based Palestinian advocacy group that helped organise the letter from journalists in Gaza, said, “It is shameful for the media to dine and laugh with President Biden while he enables the Israeli devastation and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.”
In addition, the Adalah Justice Project started an email campaign targeting 12 media executives at various news outlets expected to attend the dinner who previously signed onto a letter calling for the protection of journalists in Gaza.
“How can you still go when your colleagues in Gaza asked you not to,” a demonstrator asked guests heading in. “You are complicit.”
Demonstrators try to block arriving guests outside the Washington Hilton, the site of the annual White House correspondents’ dinner [Kent Nishimura/Getty via AFP]
Last summer, temperatures in the southern Spanish city of Seville hit more than 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). The heatwave was so intense it earned itself a name: Heatwave Yago, the city’s second named event in two years.
Seville, among other cities in Europe and around the world, is facing temperatures that it was not built to handle. In the summer of 2022, extreme heat melted railway lines and airport tarmac in London, England. In July 2023, Germans started considering midday siestas to escape the sweltering heat.
As temperatures soar, cities accustomed to cooler temperatures are seeking ways to adapt that avoid relying on energy-intensive solutions like air conditioning.
A small research group in Seville is taking inspiration from ancient Middle Eastern cultures that learned to live with the heat before electricity could provide respite.
Some see their efforts as honouring the wisdom of ancient thinkers, while others say that these old systems are far more than a technology – they reflect a mindset of sustainability that today’s world is desperately trying to resurrect.
‘Special relationship between humans and nature’
Majid Labbaf Khaneiki is one of a handful of experts helping bring 3,000-year-old underground aqueduct technology, called qanats, to the modern world.
Early qanat tunnels, which were built manually with picks and shovels, appeared in China, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. However, scholars estimate the first qanat was born in the early first millennium in Persia, and then spread to arid regions throughout the world.
The ancient system is made up of a network of underground canals – 20 to 200 metres below the desert’s surface – that transport water from higher altitudes to lower ones. Built on a slight slope, the canals use gravity to transport the water. A series of well-like vertical shafts allow for access and maintenance.
From above, the system looks like thousands of lined-up anthills winding through the desert. The real excitement happens underground where the water is collected before it travels through the canals.
A qanat near Timimoun, Algeria. Qanats often look like anthills in the desert [DeAgostini/Getty Images]
Khaneiki, a 49-year-old professor in archaeohydrology at the University of Nizwa in Oman, has spent his entire career studying ancient tunnels that carry water under the surface of arid and semi-arid environments. He grew up in a house filled with history books and a father with a passion for archaeology.
Khaneiki’s family hails from a small arid village in Eastern Iran called Kanek – the linguistic root of his last name. Khaneiki spent some summers there growing up. “The only water that supplied that village was the qanat,” he says, adding that it ran directly through the village, allowing it to become an oasis of green in the middle of the desert.
“The qanat was actually a congregation point for people. I remember I met other children exactly at the place and we used to play there,” he says. “The qanat system goes hand-in-hand with social interaction. Maybe that’s why I’m so interested in it, because it is sort of an intrinsic part of my identity and personality.”
Khaneiki has kind eyes, and his conviction in qanats as systems of the future — not just the past — is emphatic. “My last name should have been qanat builder,” he says with a laugh. In the course of a few minutes, he rattles off modern qanat projects in Azerbaijan, Spain and Pakistan.
He explains how different the process of building these qanats is compared with the collaborative effort of ancient systems. For example, in Azerbaijan, the government built a new qanat using modern machinery in order to bring more jobs and resources to communities outside the populated cities and assuage internal migration. “This was a very top-down managerial way of doing it,” he says. “In the past, it was bottom-up”.
“The qanat system is not only tunnels in the ground,” Khaneiki says. “It is a lifestyle.”
A qanat (underground water channel) in Shafiabad village near Kerman in Iran. Qanats have been used to supply water in Iran since the 1st millennium BC [Leisa Tyler/LightRocket via Getty Images]
The ancient qanat system enabled irrigation in desert environments, allowed for agriculture to flourish and fostered community cooperation. It is seen as the basis for decentralised water management in Iran, and a more sustainable solution to modern pumping and dams.
“Qanats are one of the oldest notions of a company in the world,” says Negar Sanaan Bensi, a lecturer and researcher in the faculty of architecture at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. “They are based on a huge shareholding system” that requires different people living in a region to work together and use the water resources available.
It worked similarly to how a startup does today. A couple of people came together to start digging with hand-held tools for water. Once they got what they needed, more people would join and expand the tunnel, and take their share of the resources. Over time this spread throughout the country, with each municipality managing their local qanat. “They started with four or five people,” says Khaneiki. “But in the end they had hundreds of people cooperating.”
Khaneiki is now looking at how qanats are being used for new purposes and new forms – not for irrigation and cultivation, but for tourism and architectural purposes, he says, pointing to their traditional design and cultural significance, and the designation of some qanats as UNESCO tourism sites. China, which has 800 qanat systems, has built a museum explaining the history and engineering of the different systems. There are also statues of qanat builders digging tunnels with a pickaxe or collecting soil.
“They [qanats] are also coming back to life for the purposes of climate change,” Khaneiki says.
A shade structure in a sitting area at the unopened CartujaQanat pilot project, an architectural experiment in cooling solutions inspired by Persian-era canals [Angel Garcia/Bloomberg via Getty Images]
How the old is being made new
Thousands of kilometres away from the arid regions of the Middle East, and even farther away from China, scientists Jose Sanchez Ramos and Servando Alvarez are using the concept of qanats to provide an oasis in the city of Seville.
As part of a city initiative to find solutions to rising temperatures, Ramos and Alvarez were given the opportunity to choose a location to experiment with bringing down temperatures in an outdoor space without relying on energy-intensive technologies.
One of those options was on La Isla de La Cartuja, an area northwest of the centre of Seville. The neighbourhood was once the location of the 1992 Seville Exposition, which drew 41 million visitors. Although the city has made some attempts to urbanise the space, these days it looks largely abandoned, with overgrown shrubbery, cracked sidewalks and a decrepit monorail station.
However, the area is home to a research and development complex that employs 15,000 people, a football stadium and the International University of Andalucía (UNIA). An abandoned amphitheatre used in the Expo has become the centre of Ramos and Alvarez’s work.
An auditorium at the unopened CartujaQanat pilot project [Angel Garcia/Bloomberg via Getty Images]
The project, named CartujaQanat, is modelled after the Persian qanat system and seeks to cool the ground temperature of a space the size of two soccer fields by 6 to 7 degrees Celcius within La Isla de La Cartuja.
Partially funded by the European Union’s Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) office, this 5-million-euro ($5.1m) project involves a channel 20 metres underground that will carry water – but the purpose is not to transport that water.
Vertical vents along the canal drive the coolness of the water upwards, allowing it to reduce the ground temperature. “The key to the climate control techniques is the day-night cycle,” says Ramos.
During the nighttime, the water underground – about 140 cubic metres [36,984 cubic gallons] – cools off with the naturally low temperatures. Some of the water is pumped up and sent to the roof of the amphitheatre, which is covered in solar panels. Nozzles fan out the water on top of the panels, creating what’s called a “falling film”. This mechanism helps expedite the cooling process by reducing the depth of the water and allowing it to cool faster in the low outdoor temperatures.
During the day, solar-powered pumps push cooled water above ground where it gets funnelled through small pipes and pushed in front of fans that spray the cool air into the ground floor of the amphitheatre. Outside, a separate set of nozzles in small pools of water spray mist into the air, cooling by evaporation.
A pump room at the unopened CartujaQanat pilot project [Angel Garcia/Bloomberg via Getty Images]
Other elements help to keep the temperatures down: Vegetation planted on the inside walls cools via transpiration (excess water from leaves evaporates into the air), trees provide shade outside, and the roof is painted a heat-reflecting white.
The creators are hoping the space will become a communal point for university students and people who work at nearby companies. “The project aims to bring life back on the street,” says Ramos. “This will provide climatic refuge while allowing both shelter in the middle of the summer and the possibility of continuing to organise outdoor activities in the hot months.”
Alvarez says that the area should be completed by June, just in time for the summer when Spain experiences its highest temperatures.
The creators are hoping the space will become a communal point for university students and people who work at nearby companies [Angel Garcia/Bloomberg via Getty Images]
A cool future
Ramos and Alvarez met more than 30 years ago when Ramos was one of Alvarez’s students at the University of Seville. “He asked good questions,” says Alvarez. “The people that pose interesting problems to me in the classroom are the people who I try to recruit for the future.”
Since then they have been working together to cool down Seville. In the 1990s, they developed wind tunnels along Seville’s avenues, taking inspiration from a Persian wind catcher called a bagdir, a tower with openings at the top that catch the wind and channel it downwards.
Alvarez says that they often look to other countries for solutions, especially those that have been dealing with intense heat for centuries.
For example, modern Moroccan buildings are being designed to include large north-facing windows and smaller south-facing windows that bring in natural light while maximising cooling. Los Angeles in the United States, and Ahmedabad in India, are using a new type of white paint to reflect up to 98.1 percent of sunlight and absorb UV light, which helps to combat urban heat and reduce energy consumption. White reflective paint has been used for centuries in Morocco and Greece, earning one famous city the name “Casablanca” (white house).
“[The Arab world] did it because they needed to … either you move or you die or you find something to cool your buildings. And they found something,” says Alvarez. “[CartujaQanat] is really a tribute to them,” he adds.
The team has already started applying some of their learnings to other parts of Seville.
“Bioclimatic” bus stops, which use a smaller-scale version of the CartujaQanat approach, are being installed in time for summer. Inside the shelter, air that has been cooled by a closed water system is pumped out via tiny holes, powered by solar panels on the roof – similar to a refrigerator,” Sanchez told local newspaper Sur last summer. He and Khaneiki say that they hope to have more citizen participation as the project moves forward
The efforts in Seville are a modern-day reimagining of the systems built thousands of years ago, Khaneiki says. “These are qanats built for modern people by modern people. This is a resurrection of qanats in the new era.”
A US buyer wins the bidding war, exceeding – by more than 10 times – the auctioneer’s presale estimate.
A gold watch found on the body of the richest passenger on the Titanic has been auctioned in the United Kingdom for 1.17 million British pounds ($1.46m) – a record sum paid for an object linked to the infamous 1912 shipping disaster.
The watch, engraved with the initials JJA after the United States-based business magnate John Jacob Astor, was sold on Saturday by the auctioneers Henry Aldridge & Son.
A US buyer won the bidding war, exceeding – by more than 10 times – the auctioneers’ presale estimate of between 100,000-150,000 pounds ($126,000-189,500).
A used first class menu from the first night on the Titanic sold yesterday at British auction house Henry Aldridge & Son for $100,000.
A pocket watch found on second class passenger Sinai Kantor sold for $122,000. pic.twitter.com/ynF0UIt7I9
Astor was 47 when he died as the Titanic sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912, one of 1,500 people on board who died. He was reputed to be one of the richest men in the world at the time.
He died after having helped his wife, Madeleine, board one of the lifeboats. She survived the disaster.
Astor’s body was found a week after the disaster, with the watch among his personal belongings. A statement from the auction house said the watch was completely restored after being returned to Astor’s family and worn by his son.
In November 2023, a pocket watch recovered from the body of passenger Sinai Kantor, 34, a Russian immigrant who died in the catastrophe, was also sold by the same auction house in the UK for 97,000 pounds ($118,700).
A rare menu from the ill-fated liner’s first-class restaurant that showed what the most well-to-do passengers ate for dinner on April 11, 1912 – three days before the ship struck the iceberg that caused it to sink in the Atlantic Ocean – sold for 83,000 pounds ($101,600).
It’s the latest attack on security forces in a region where tensions have long simmered between locals and the state.
Armed assailants have ambushed and killed three police officers in southern Chile before setting their car on fire, authorities said, the latest attack on police to revive security concerns in the South American country.
In a statement on X on Saturday, President Gabriel Boric called the attack in Arauco province’s Canete municipality “cowardly” and declared three days of national mourning to honour the officers, identified as Sergeant Carlos Cisterna, Corporal Sergio Arevalo and Corporal Misael Vidal.
“Today the entire country is in mourning. There is heartbreak, sorrow, anger. But these emotions do not paralyse us, they force us, they mobilise us,” Boric wrote. “We will find the whereabouts of the perpetrators of this terrible crime.”
Authorities said the officers responded to three false emergency calls and were attacked in their vehicle with heavy-calibre weapons. They burned inside the armoured patrol vehicle on a road near the city of Concepcion, some 400km (about 250 miles) south of the capital, Santiago.
It remains unclear who carried out the assault but a long-simmering conflict between the Mapuche Indigenous community and landowners and forestry companies in the region has intensified in recent years. The conflict forced the government to impose a state of emergency and deploy the military to provide security.
In Chile, about one in 10 citizens identify as Mapuche, the tribe that resisted Spanish conquest centuries ago and was defeated only in the late 1800s after Chile won its independence.
Large forestry companies and farm owners control large tracts of land originally belonging to the Mapuche, many of whom now live in rural poverty.
Boric, who travelled to the area on Saturday with a large contingent, including top military and congressional officials and the president of the Supreme Court, offered condolences to the victims’ families, promising the killers would be found and brought to justice.
“There will be no impunity,” he said after firefighters dousing the burning police car made the grisly discovery.
In Santiago, hundreds of people gathered outside the presidential palace to protest against the killings, which coincided with National Police Day, celebrating the 97th anniversary of the establishment of the Carabineros, Chile’s military police force. It was the second such fatal attack on the force this month.
Ricardo Yanez, the Carabineros’s general director, told reporters the officers had been dispatched in response to fake distress calls from the rural road, where they were met with a barrage of gunfire.
“This was not coincidental, it was not random,” he said of the ambush.
The spate of bloodshed has tested Boric, who came to power in 2022 promising to ease tensions in the region, where armed Mapuche activists have been stealing timber and attacking forestry companies that they claim invaded their ancestral lands.
Boric’s administration has touted its success in reducing Chile’s national homicide rate by 6 percent, according to government figures from 2023 published earlier this week.
“This attack goes against all the enormous strides that have been made,” said Interior Minister Carolina Toha, a centre-left former mayor of Santiago.
The law is backed mainly by Shia Muslim parties who form the largest coalition in Iraq’s parliament.
Iraq’s parliament has passed a law criminalising same-sex relationships with a maximum 15-year prison sentence, in a move it said aimed to uphold religious values, but was condemned by rights advocates as the latest attack on the LGBTQ community in Iraq.
The law adopted on Saturday aims to “protect Iraqi society from moral depravity and the calls for homosexuality that have overtaken the world,” according to a copy of the law seen by the Reuters news agency.
It was backed mainly by conservative Shia Muslim parties who form the largest coalition in Iraq’s parliament.
The Law on Combating Prostitution and Homosexuality bans same-sex relations with at least 10 years and a maximum of 15 years in prison, and mandates at least seven years in prison for anybody who promotes homosexuality or prostitution.
The amended law makes “biological sex change based on personal desire and inclination” a crime and punishes transgender people and doctors who perform gender-affirming surgery with up to three years in prison.
The bill had initially included the death penalty for same-sex acts but was amended before being passed after strong opposition from the United States and European nations.
‘A serious blow to human rights’
Until Saturday, Iraq did not explicitly criminalise gay sex, though loosely defined morality clauses in its penal code had been used to target LGBTQ people, and members of the community have also been killed by armed groups and individuals.
“The Iraqi parliament’s passage of the anti-LGBT law rubber-stamps Iraq’s appalling record of rights violations against LGBTQ people and is a serious blow to fundamental human rights,” Rasha Younes, deputy director of the LGBTQ rights programme at Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.
“Iraq has effectively codified in law the discrimination and violence members of the LGBTI community have been subjected to with absolute impunity for years,” the AFP news agency quoted Amnesty International’s Iraq Researcher Razaw Salihy as saying.
“The amendments concerning LGBTI rights are a violation of fundamental human rights and put at risk Iraqis whose lives are already hounded daily,” Salihy added.
Lawmaker Raed al-Maliki, who advanced the amendments, told AFP that the law “serves as a preventive measure to protect society from such acts”.
Major Iraqi parties have in the past year stepped up criticism of LGBTQ rights, with rainbow flags frequently being burned in protests by both governing and opposition conservative Shia Muslim factions last year.
More than 60 countries criminalise gay sex, while same-sex sexual acts are legal in more than 130 countries, according to Our World in Data.
The two men, identified as Keith Siegel and Omri Miran, send love to their families and ask to be released in the video.
Hamas’s military wing has published a video of two Israeli captives held in Gaza, showing footage of them calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to make a deal to secure their release.
The video released on Saturday is similarly filmed to previous captive videos made public by the group, which Israel has condemned as “psychological terrorism”.
The two men, identified as Keith Siegel, 64, and Omri Miran, 47, speak individually in front of an empty background. They send their love to their families and ask to be released.
Miran was taken captive from his home in the community of Nahal Oz in front of his wife and two young daughters during the October 7 Hamas attack.
“I have been here in Hamas captivity for 202 days. The situation here is unpleasant, difficult and there are many bombs,” Miran is heard saying in the footage, indicating it was taken earlier this week.
“It’s time to reach a deal that will get us out of here safe and healthy … Keep protesting, so that there will be a deal now.”
Saturday’s video comes as Hamas says it is studying Israel’s latest counterproposal for a Gaza ceasefire after reports that mediator Egypt had sent a delegation to Israel to jump-start stalled negotiations.
The video was published during the Passover holiday, when Jews traditionally celebrate the biblical story of gaining freedom from slavery in Egypt.
At one point, Siegel breaks down crying as he recounts celebrating the holiday with his family last year and expresses hope that they will be reunited.
“We are in danger here, there are bombs, it is stressful and scary,” he said, burying his face in his arms as he cried.
“I want to tell my family that I love you very much. It’s important to me that you know that I am fine.”
The latest video comes just three days after Hamas released another video showing captive Hersh Goldberg-Polin alive.
About 250 Israelis and foreigners were taken captive during the Hamas assault, which killed 1,139 people, according to Israeli tallies.
In response, Israel launched an assault on Gaza, pledging to destroy Hamas and bring the captives home. The war has so far killed at least 34,388 Palestinians.
The Israeli military has said 129 of the captives are still being held in Gaza, including the bodies of 34 people who died in captivity.
Reporting from Tel Aviv, Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith said the families and friends of the captives were relieved to see evidence that they were alive.
“They’ve said ‘time is running out. We need our Prime Minister [Benjamin Natanyahu] to accept any deal fast’,” he said.
Smith was speaking from a protest against Netanyahu.
“These protests are calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Netanyahu. They’re calling for an end to the war and they’re calling for the release of hostages,” he said.
“Many of the protesters here are saying Netanyahu is deliberately prolonging this war in Gaza because it saves him from the ultimate reckoning of the ballot box.”
The blast, which also wounded several soldiers, occurred at an army base in Kampong Speu province, Hun Manet says.
Twenty soldiers have been killed in an ammunition explosion at a base in the west of Cambodia, according to Prime Minister Hun Manet.
The blast, which also wounded several soldiers, occurred on Saturday afternoon at an army base in Kampong Speu province, Hun Manet said in a statement on Facebook, without giving more details on the incident.
Hun Manet said he was “deeply shocked” when he received the news of the explosion at the base in Kampong Speu province.
It was not immediately clear what caused the explosion and Hun Manet did not comment on the issue in his post.
He offered condolences to the soldiers’ families and promised the government would pay for their funerals and provide compensation both to those killed and those injured.
Pictures on social media showed a destroyed one-storey building wreathed in smoke, as well as injured people being treated at a hospital, with residents of a nearby village also sharing images online of broken windows.
Hun Manet, a graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, was promoted to be a four-star general shortly before he was elected to serve as prime minister, succeeding his father Hun Sen.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrations continue in universities across the United States, as they also spread to schools in Europe and Australia.
In the second week of protests calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, thousands of students are calling on dozens of universities to divest from Israel.
Some universities have been forced to cancel their graduation ceremonies, while others have seen entire buildings occupied by protesting students.
One of the latest to join the movement is The City University of New York (CUNY), where hundreds of students have set up an encampment on campus with banners with slogans like “No More Investment in Apartheid”.
Gabby Aossey, a student organiser at the CUNY protest told Al Jazeera the mobilisation of young pro-Palestinian people in the US is “beautiful to see”.
“Young people are really starting to show up and demand that schools are held accountable for their relationship with the Israeli colonisation,” Aossey said.
Across the US, university leaders have tried, and largely failed, to quell the demonstrations. The police have intervened violently, with videos emerging from different states showing hundreds of students – and even faculty members – being forcefully arrested.
At Columbia University, where more than 100 pro-Palestinian activists were arrested by armed police officers on campus about a week ago, university leaders said in a statement on Friday that if the university calls the New York Police Department again, it would “further inflame what is happening on campus”.
Some university leaders and state officials have strongly condemned the protests, calling them “anti-Semitic”.
Demonstrators reject the accusation, with many Jewish activists and some Orthodox Jews joining the ranks.
“As a child of Holocaust survivors, it disturbs me to my core to see my own people perpetrating something that we’ve been through,” Jewish antiwar protester Sam Koprak told Al Jazeera at a campus gathering.
‘End complicity with genocide’
The protests, which have sprouted all around the globe in the near seven-month period since the start of the war on Gaza, continue to spread this week outside the US as well.
In Berlin, activists set up a camp in front of parliament to demand the German government stop exporting arms to Israel. At the renowned Sciences Po university in the French capital Paris, protesters on Friday blockaded a central campus building, forcing classes to be held online.
The latest pro-Palestine rally in Sweden on Saturday saw people marching in the streets to chants of “Free Palestine” and “Boycott Israel”.
Hundreds gathered on Saturday afternoon in central London in solidarity with Palestinians, with a smaller group organising a pro-Israel event.
“People are gathering here on Parliament Square just outside the houses of parliament for the latest in a series of very major protests in the heart of London,” said Al Jazeera’s Harry Fawcett, reporting from London.
Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, an organiser of the march, said he expected hundreds of thousands to attend from across the United Kingdom.
“Once again, we are delivering a double message. One is to the Palestinian people, a message of solidarity. We see you, we hear you, we stand with you,” he said.
The second message, Jamal said, is addressed to the British political establishment “to end their complicity with Israel’s genocide against Palestinian people”.
Jamal dismissed critics saying that protests have been anti-Semitic.
“This tactic of conflating anti-Semitism with legitimate criticism of the State of Israel is a very familiar one, and is used globally by Israel to silence those who are advocating for Palestinian rights,” he said.
Meanwhile, Rina Shah, a Washington-based political strategist and former senior congressional aide, said protests in US universities are a display of democracy in action, a welcome sight in an election year marked by concerns of voter apathy chiefly due to Israel’s war on Gaza.
“So when I see a movement like this of students taking peaceful, non-violent action and expressing their concern about the US government backing of Israel, of where our tax money is going, I think that’s extremely healthy,” she told Al Jazeera.
“These students are out there concerned about America’s role in backing [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu. On the one hand, we are supplying weapons and funds to do what he wants to do in Gaza, while on the other we are sending humanitarian aid to Gaza. This is the hypocrisy these students are concerned about.”
President Cyril Ramaphosa has hailed South Africa’s achievements under his party’s leadership as the country celebrated 30 years of democracy since the end of apartheid.
April 27 is the day “when we cast off our shackles. Freedom’s bells rang across our great country,” Ramaphosa, 71, said on Saturday, reminding South Africans about the first democratic election in 1994 that ended white-minority rule.
“South Africa’s democracy is young. What we’ve achieved in these short 30 years is something of which all of us should be proud. This is an infinitely better place than it was 30 years ago,” he said in a speech marking “Freedom Day” at the Union Buildings, the seat of government, in Pretoria.
South African President Cyril Ramphosa delivers a speech as he attends Freedom Day celebrations in Pretoria, South Africa [Themba Hadebe/AP]
The first inclusive election saw the previously banned African National Congress (ANC) party win overwhelmingly and made its leader, Nelson Mandela, the country’s first Black president, four years after being released from prison.
With the ANC winning a landslide victory, a new constitution was drawn up, and it became South Africa’s highest law, guaranteeing equality for everyone, regardless of race, religion, or sexuality.
The ANC has been in government since 1994 and is still recognised for its role in freeing South Africans, but for some, it is no longer celebrated in the same way as poverty and economic inequality remain rife.
ANC struggling in the polls
Ramaphosa used the occasion to list improvements shepherded by the ANC, which is struggling in the polls due on May 29 and risks losing its outright parliamentary majority for the first time.
“We have pursued land reform, distributing millions of hectares of land to those who had been forcibly dispossessed,” he said.
“We have built houses, clinics, hospitals, roads and constructed bridges, dams, and many other facilities. We have brought electricity, water and sanitation to millions of South African homes.”
Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull, reporting from the capital Pretoria, said that while there is freedom of speech, many South Africans will say there is no economic freedom.
“The country has a 32 percent unemployment rate. The World Bank describes this society as the most unequal on earth,” Hull said.
“Corruption is rife. Infrastructure is in a dire state, and in an election due just next month, polls predict that for the first time, the ANC could fall beneath 50 percent of the vote. That, if it happens, would in itself be a pretty significant milestone in this country.”
People listen to South African President Cyril President, right, through a screen, during Freedom Day celebrations in Pretoria, South Africa [Themba Hadebe/AP]
An Ipsos poll released on Friday showed support for the governing party, which won more than 57 percent of the vote at the last national elections in 2019, has fallen to just more than 40 percent.
Were it to win less than 50 percent, the ANC would be forced to find coalition partners to remain in power.
The party’s image has been badly hurt by accusations of graft and its inability to effectively tackle poverty, crime, inequality, and unemployment, which remain staggeringly high.
The governing party is being largely blamed for the lack of progress in improving the lives of so many South Africans.
Thandeka Mvakali, 28, from the Alexandra Township in Johannesburg, said life is no different from the time of her parents during apartheid.
“It’s almost the same. You can see, we are living in a one bedroom, maybe we are 10 inside the house, for my family, we are 10 and then maybe two is employed, like my mother [and] my brother,” Mvakali told Al Jazeera.
“All of us we are not employed, we did go to school but there’s no job in South Africa.”
Mvakali added that she will vote for the first time in the May 29 elections because she is “hoping” her vote will count this time.
Ramaphosa acknowledged the problems, but denounced critics as people who wilfully “shut their eyes”.
“We have made much progress and we are determined to do much more,” he said.
Students at US universities protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza have pledged to continue occupying school grounds despite growing efforts by university leaders and police to clear the demonstrations.
As the protests that began at Columbia University in New York spread outside the United States, demonstrators nationwide are demanding that schools slash financial ties to Israel and divest from companies they say are enabling Israel’s nearly seven-month war on Gaza that has killed at least 34,388 people and 77,437 others.
Decisions to call in law enforcement to remove protesters have led to hundreds of arrests in various universities. They have also prompted faculty members at California, Georgia and Texas universities to initiate or pass largely symbolic votes of no confidence in their leadership.
But the tensions pile pressure on school officials, who are already scrambling to resolve the protests with graduation ceremonies set for next month.
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