Last month, the Upper Tribunal for Immigration and Asylum granted six displaced Palestinians entry into the UK to stay with a British family member. After their home in Gaza was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, the family, anonymised by the court for their own protection, took refuge at the al-Mawasi ‘humanitarian zone’. From there, in January 2024, they applied for entry to the UK. The Home Office rejected their application and the First-Tier Immigration Tribunal dismissed their appeal. On further appeal, the Upper Tribunal reversed the decision, with the two immigration judges holding that the family, who faced ‘a high risk of death or injury’ if they remained in Gaza, were entitled to come to the UK under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to family life. According to the prime minister, this judgment was ‘wrong’.
For the last six months I’ve been working for Solidarités International, a French NGO. It’s one of the many organisations that have been hit by Donald Trump’s executive order freezing humanitarian aid for ninety days. In 2023 the US government provided $72 billion of international aid, around 40 per cent of the global total. From the comparatively shabby three-storey building in Paris where I work (L’Oréal’s headquarters are next door), SI employs more than three thousand staff to provide water and sanitation in at least 25 countries. Its annual turnover is almost $200 million but it relies on state-funded, project-by-project allocations, rarely for periods of more than two years, nearly half of which are disbursed by Washington.
On 9 February, two branches of the Muna family’s bookshops in East Jerusalem were ransacked by Israeli police. They entered in civilian clothes, used Google Translate to decipher the titles of the English language books and confiscated box loads, picking out in particular any with a Palestinian flag on the cover. CCTV images show black bin bags being filled with books to be used as evidence against the Munas. The police arrested both Mahmoud (in front of his eleven-year-old daughter, Leila) and his nephew Ahmad, and took them to the notorious Moscobiyya interrogation centre in West Jerusalem.
Diana Melly photographed in 1960 by Ida Kar © National Portrait Gallery, London
‘Being pretty is a major disaster for women,’ Diana Melly once told a friend, and beauty certainly had a hand in her destiny that she spent a lifetime resisting.
When Iman shows his wife, Najmeh, his new gun, it comes with the news that he’s been promoted to the post of investigating prosecutor in Iran’s judiciary. He needs the gun for security, he says. Yet he’s also proud of the power his masters have given him. Or have they really taken it away? The moment comes early in Mohammad Rasoulof’s new film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
Donald Trump recently deported a planeload of 88 Brazilians, who arrived with cuts and bruises after being handcuffed, beaten and denied food and water during the flight from Louisiana. The plane had trouble with its engines and air-conditioning, and was forced to make unscheduled stops in Panama and Manaus, where the deportees were transferred to a Brazilian air force plane for the last leg to Belo Horizonte.
A class at a tent school in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on 28 September 2024. Photo © Rizek Abdeljawad / Xinhua / Alamy
Last month, my sister, her husband and their three children returned to their damaged flat in northern Gaza after enduring almost thirteen months of forced displacement. My sister said that her four-year-old son struggles to walk on tiles and nearly fell while using the unfamiliar stairs. Since May 2024 they had been living in a tent, which provided little protection against intense heat, cold or heavy rains. One day they were flooded. At other times they faced severe food shortages. None of this stopped them setting up a school at the camp.