Friday, October 9, 2026

"Art can play an important role in supporting children’s healthy development during conflicts and emergencies." UNRWA works

Friends Lareen (left) and Layan (right) exhibited their artwork at UNRWA’s Asmaa Shelter in Gaza City. © June 2026 UNRWA PhotoThe children's art was exhibited in five temporary spaces across the Gaza Strip. © June 2026 UNRWA PhotoA total of 250 children

UNRWA

@UNRWA

Through art, Lareen and Layan are finding ways to express their thoughts, hopes and emotions.

They were among 1,000 children in #Gaza who took part in UNRWA-supported art activities that provided a safe and encouraging space for creativity and self-expression.

With support from the European Union, these activities help children explore their talents and share their stories.

Read the full story: unrwa.org/newsroom/photo

#UNRWAworks

#FundUNRWA

https://x.com/UNRWA/status/2108561074555424976

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]

02 September 2026

A steady sound of voices fills UNRWA’s Asmaa shelter-turned-exhibition space in Beach Camp in Gaza City. As people move through the crowded room, they pause to smile, point, and take photos of the colourful artwork that brightens the once-white walls. Standing among them are 11-year-old friends Lareen and Layan. The young students-turned-artists proudly show off their posters and upcycled cardboard figures.

"I love drawing flowers," says Layan. "One day, I want to become an architect."

Alongside 1,000 other children living in UNRWA shelters across the Gaza Strip, the young friends have participated in art activities organised by the Agency. Under the supervision and guidance of UNRWA psychosocial counsellors, the students have learned how to express their thoughts, aspirations, and emotions through art, creating posters, drawings, artistic models, and sculptures.

"We were so happy to participate. We collected things from around us and learned how to turn them into something beautiful. We made new friends and spent time together in a healthy environment, away from the destruction around us," says Lareen, who is among the 250 children selected to exhibit their art in one of the five temporary exhibition spaces across the Gaza Strip.

The art activities and exhibitions were made possible through funding from European Union Humanitarian Aid, which provided the paint, paper, and other materials needed for drawing, colouring, and crafting, as well as the psychosocial support that helped create a safe and encouraging environment for the participants.

Art can play an important role in supporting children’s healthy development during conflicts and emergencies. Through art, they learn how to express complex emotions they might otherwise find difficult to articulate, while strengthening their confidence and fostering a sense of normalcy. For children in the Gaza Strip, opportunities to learn, play, and express themselves have been disrupted by more than two years of war, repeated displacement, and the loss of loved ones.

Wael, an UNRWA focal point for Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in the Gaza Strip, has witnessed how the art activities have made a difference.

“The children transformed their feelings, experiences, and aspirations into powerful artworks that speak of both their struggles and their hope for a better future. The initiative gave them a voice, while strengthening their well-being and helping them rebuild hope in the most challenging circumstances.”

The project also attracted older children eager to develop their artistic talents.

For 16-year-old UNRWA school graduate Khadija, living in the Asmaa shelter in Beach Camp, art became a means of documenting the realities faced by children in the Gaza Strip. Having lost both her home and her brother during the war, she used her artwork to reflect on the experiences that continue to shape her community.

"I saw a child whose arms had been amputated playing hopscotch in the street," she recalls. "These are the real losses in life, the moments of joy that disappear. We have been deprived of everything. I want to express the suffering of the children..." READ MORE https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/photos/paint-paper-and-pencils-help-children-gaza-strip-cope-trauma-and-loss

Smaller than a Mouse- a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye published in her most recent book "Sidekick" 2026

Smaller than a Mouse

We demonstrated on a steaming day,

carrying signs,

five hundred thousand people

in the streets of New York

saying no to war,

gathering crowds for blocks and miles,

crush and press of world's religions

and secular codes, multi-flavored

WE SHALL NOT KILL

and the next day our story,

the story of saying no to war,

was written up in a three-sentence news item

on the back of the front section of the New York Times

smaller than the story of a mouse found

in a chain restaurant soup.

This is the truth.

Poem by award winning Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye published in her most recent book "Sidekick" 2026

https://boaeditions.org/book/sidekick/

Praise for Naomi Shihab Nye

“On every page, Shihab Nye's insistent call is the same: people, all people, deserve to live safe and healthy lives, free from fear and violence. She mourns, rages, takes politicians to task, but always lands on the side of compassion.” —Shelf Awareness

Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty volumes including six collections of poetry from BOA Editions: Sidekick (2026), Red Suitcase (1994), Fuel (1998), You & Yours (2005), Transfer (2011), and The Tiny Journalist (2019). She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter Bynner Fellow. Her numerous awards include a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award from BOA, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Patterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Prize the Betty Prize from Poets House for her service to poetry, and the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters. She served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2010–2015, and in May 2019 she was named the 2019–2021 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation.

Navanethem “Navi” Pillay is awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to promote peace and international law... "Her independence, expertise and steadfastness have made her one of the most respected international jurists of our time."

Announcement, Nobel Peace Prize 2026

9 October 2026

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 goes to a person who with exceptional courage and integrity has led the way towards a more comprehensive global legal order. This year’s laureate has been instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay for her efforts to promote peace and international law.

Navi Pillay’s commitment to universal legal principles and her firm moral compass are constants in a long career. Born into a family of Indian Tamil origin under apartheid in Durban, South Africa, Pillay became a lawyer and legal pioneer, confronting deep structural discrimination, segregation and exclusion. A common thread runs from her early work defending Nelson Mandela and others who stood up against apartheid to her service as a judge in some of the key international court cases of our time.

This year’s laureate has significantly enlarged the scope and impact of international law. She has served as a judge on the High Court in South Africa, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court. She was the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and, until recently, she chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Today Navi Pillay is a judge on the International Court of Justice in the case where Myanmar stands accused of genocide.

In historic international court cases, she has shown that legal measures can help prevent acts of war and violence. Navi Pillay has also contributed to strengthen the institutions of international law. Her independence, expertise and steadfastness have made her one of the most respected international jurists of our time.

The first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded 125 years ago. Already then, the Norwegian Nobel Committee underscored the importance of resolving conflicts through international law – a theme that has remained prominent throughout the history of the peace prize. The reach of international law expanded after the Second World War, in particular with the creation of the UN institutions. The key insight was that lasting peace must be built on legal principles, not on the will of the strong or a fragile balance of power. Additional legal mechanisms were introduced in the post-war decades, and momentum picked up further after the end of the Cold War.

However, the rules-based international order has never been perfect. The greatest powers have often evaded responsibility... READ MORE https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2026/press-release/

The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to South Africa's Navi Pillay for her work on international law and human rights. | Photo Credit: FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP

The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay for her efforts to promote peace and international law. The Prize’s press statement described Pillay as a person with exceptional courage and integrity, who has led the way towards a more comprehensive global legal order.

“The system of international law is under tremendous pressure, and its institutions are under attack,” Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said. “We see a shift towards power politics at the expense of legal frameworks and global respect for law and justice.”

“Navi Pillay is one of the great defenders of international legal principles in our time. Her distinguished career reminds us of the need to support, fortify and expand the global rule of law,” he added.

Pillay became South Africa’s first non-white woman high court judge in 1995, following the end of apartheid. She also served as a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court. She was UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014 and later chaired the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory... READ MORE https://frontline.thehindu.com/news/navi-pillay-nobel-peace-prize-2026-human-rights/article71563867.ece

It’s easier to blame brutes and sadists for extreme violence. But as we see in the documentary, modern genocides are fueled by people who are uncomfortably recognizable

Opinion

Israel

How do human beings rationalize genocide? NAZA provides a chilling look

Omer Bartov (the dean’s professor of holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and the author, most recently, of Israel: What Went Wrong?)

Fri 9 Oct 2026

"The term NAZA distances the operatives even further from what the term stands for, which is itself a mere euphemism"

Werner Best, a senior SS official and jurist who helped organize the Nazi death squads that murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, is also known for his statement: “We must destroy the enemy without hating him.” He belonged to a younger generation of Nazi technocrats, who despised the foul-mouthed, beer-bellied, brown-shirted “old fighters” of the Nazi party in the 1920s, and believed in organizing genocide neatly and dispassionately. After the fall of the regime, Best escaped justice for the rest of his long life, dying peacefully in Germany in 1989. His chilling statement came to my mind while I was watching the film NAZA.

I grew up in Tel Aviv and have visited there often in recent years. That is why the interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, which make up this documentary, felt strangely familiar. The conversations are conducted at night on rooftops, and the camera scans the cityscape, lingering on apartment windows as their inhabitants watch TV and make dinner. The landscape was intimately recognizable, and I felt a natural affinity with those people living their lives. I also recognized the way the interviewees talked – their speech patterns and choice of words. They reminded me of my son, who served more than a decade ago in the intelligence unit many of them might have belonged to.

But the dispassionate, technical and calm tone of the 24 men and women, as they describe in great detail the killing of people in Gaza, who are just as human as those in the surrounding buildings, brought back other associations – with men like Best and his ilk. It is the disjuncture between the familiar and intimate, on the one hand, and the coldly efficient and murderous, on the other, that makes this film unforgettable and an important statement about the world we currently inhabit.

When modern societies engage in extreme violence, they rely on two types of people: those who beat, torture and kill at close quarters, and those who plan, organize and order the killing at a safe distance from the actual gore of it all. Many people prefer to believe the brutes and the sadists are responsible, largely because they are not like “us”. But modern genocide is the product of those who belong to the second category: the technocrats, bureaucrats and cold planners of extermination, who don’t get their hands dirty.

This is by no means unique to Germany or Israel. It was also the case in the Cambodian genocide, in Rwanda, in the genocide of the Armenians, in the destruction of the Herero – there were always those who provided plans, orders, legitimizations, bureacratic apparatuses and technical means, and those who cracked skulls, wielded machetes and fired bullets point blank. The latter exist in any society. But a genocide cannot occur without the former.

NAZA is the Hebrew acronym for nezek agavi, or collateral damage. As is the nature of acronyms, the term NAZA distances the operatives even further from what the term stands for, which is itself a mere euphemism. One does not ask how many human beings the operator may condemn to death by targeting a suspected enemy; one does not even ask... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2026/oct/09/naza-mass-killing-gaza-israel

Thursday, October 8, 2026

Back to School, in Gaza My nephews study in a big tent surrounded by bombed-out houses. They have no access to chairs or desks, so they sit on the dirt. By Mosab Abu Toha in The New Yorker

Palestinian children walk to school amid the rubble of destroyed buildings as the academic year begins in Khan Younis, on September 19th.Photograph by Bashar Taleb / AFP / Getty

Back to School, in Gaza

My nephews study in a big tent surrounded by bombed-out houses. They have no access to chairs or desks, so they sit on the dirt.

By Mosab Abu Toha

October 7, 2026

When I was growing up, in northern Gaza, my parents took my siblings and me to a stationery store about a week before each school year started. I would pick out my favorite notebooks, pencils, sharpener, eraser, and ruler, and place them in my backpack. My parents also took us to the market, to buy jeans, shirts, shoes, socks, and a belt. The night before school began was the second most important day of my year, after Eid. I would lay out my outfit and backpack next to the mattress where I slept. Then I would tuck my new shoes under my pillow.

Most schools in Gaza are three- or four-story concrete structures with a U-shaped layout and a central courtyard for assemblies and recreation. My middle school, Al-Fakhoora School, in Jabalia Camp, was run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. It had two practical-arts rooms, where students could learn carpentry, blacksmithing, and metalworking. There was also a science lab, a computer lab, and a library. On the first day, my mother or father would accompany us while we found our classrooms and teachers. My favorite subjects were English and physical education.

Schools were where we accessed many public services. From birth until the age of fifteen, we received many of our vaccinations at UNRWA schools. I remember UNRWA teams performing comprehensive dental screenings at least twice. The agency also gave out new and used textbooks for free. (Students sometimes quarrelled over who got the new ones.) When we got home, our parents helped us fit the books with protective covers. After ninth grade, I began attending government schools, but for a year or two UNRWA continued to provide daily food rations to my younger siblings. I recall them returning home with things they hadn’t finished in class—a sandwich, yogurt, some fresh fruit, juice, nutrient-fortified milk... READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/back-to-school-in-gaza

Praise for Assal Rad's book DON'T SAY PALESTINE How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide

Assal Rad, headline fixer & author of DON'T SAY PALESTINE How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide

If you’re not writing the truth about crimes against humanity, you’re culpable in them.

Activist and Middle East historian Assal Rad is known as the “headline fixer” for her powerful posts that illustrate how mainstream Western media’s coverage of the Gaza Genocide is filled with double standards. Israelis are described as “children” and “civilians,” while Palestinians are “people under 18” and “collateral damage”; Israelis are killed; Palestinians die. Even in the wake of the so-called ceasefire, major Western media continually obfuscates Israeli violence in Palestine: For example, the Associated Press reported that “Gaza’s living conditions worsen as strong winds and hypothermia kill 5.” No, Rad corrects: Gaza’s living conditions worsen as Israel blocks aid.

In Don’t Say Palestine, Rad reveals a pattern of dehumanizing language—in outlets from CNN and the AP to the BBC and The New York Times—so consistently employed throughout the Palestinian genocide that it amounts to a policy. Mainstream Western media consistently downplays Israeli responsibility, “others” Palestinians, and casts doubt on inviolable tenets of international law like the sanctity of hospitals and journalists in war zones. This groundbreaking, eye-opening exposé offers both a moral reckoning and an urgent call to action, mapping with devastating clarity the media’s complicity in whitewashing a human rights crisis.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/834977/dont-say-palestine-by-assal-rad/

"A vital work... Rad's intellectual rigor and moral clarity are unwavering"

PRAISE

“Amidst some of the worst journalistic failures of this century, Assal Rad has consistently done vital work to point out the myriad ways institutional hypocrisy, cowardice, and willful obliviousness work hand-in-hand with state violence to justify and normalize any manner of atrocity. Her intellectual rigor and moral clarity—not only on the journalistic malpractice that so often marks Western media coverage of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but on how this malpractice eventually seeps into all coverage—are unwavering. At a time when it would have been so much more convenient to stay silent, I and so many others are grateful for her willingness to speak.” —Omar El Akkad, National Book Award–winning author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Eighty years ago, George Orwell wrote that ‘In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.’ Assal Rad shows, in painful detail, that in the case of Israel-Palestine, this remains true.” —Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

“Throughout the course of the Gaza Genocide, historian Assal Rad has been a beacon of clarity in a media landscape clouded by lies. In this important new work of media criticism, Rad dissects the biases, distortions, and falsehoods by which press institutions conceal the atrocities of empire—as well as delivering a powerful call for accountability, justice, and truth.” —Molly Crabapple, author of Here Where We Live Is Our Country

“Assal Rad brilliantly exposes how, for the past years, reality itself had been distorted to fit a political ecosystem. Western media does not simply omit or distort reality, but actively launders it. Language reframes and ultimately erases both violence and responsibility. ‘Self-defense’ replaces the naming of genocide. These linguistic choices reveal intentionality in complicity: not neutral but political, shaping whose lives are grievable and whose deaths are rendered acceptable. In Don’t Say Palestine, Rad demonstrates how media narratives create permissive conditions for genocide through strategic omission, selective visibility, euphemism, and the erasing of Palestinian voices. When those same institutions dictate what can and cannot be said, this is not press freedom but censorship. And when they uncritically repeat the claims of a state responsible for unprecedented violence, in ways that obscure or diminish its gravity, this is not reporting—it is complicity.” —Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and author of When the World Sleeps

Israel’s expanding network of checkpoints is UNLAWFUL and must be dismantled immediately. Part of the carceral geography of apartheid, it makes Palestiniams' daily life fully dependent on arbitrariness. Thank you @WIRED for exposing this viciousnes: "Lost time. Lost jobs. Lost friends. Lost family. Lost lives. How Israeli checkpoints suffocate Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank. CHOKE POINTS "

https://x.com/FranceskAlbs/status/2107786279320482146

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt

@FranceskAlbs

Israel’s expanding network of checkpoints is UNLAWFUL and must be dismantled immediately.

Part of the carceral geography of apartheid, it makes Palestiniams' daily life fully dependent on arbitrariness.

Thank you @WIRED for exposing this viciousness: https://www.wired.com/story/how-israeli-checkpoints-choke-palestinian-life-occupied-west-bank/

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies here, there- and everywhere]

Lost time. Lost jobs. Lost friends. Lost family.

Lost lives.

How Israeli checkpoints suffocate Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank.

CHOKE POINTS

The Big Story

Sep 30, 2026 6:00 AM

Aref Jaber is on a neighbor's roof, trying to get home.

At 51, he is clambering over a wall into the next backyard, up onto the next roof, along the line of stone houses that stand between him and his own front door. He has no choice. Alleys and side streets in his neighborhood have been sealed with cement blocks and barbed wire, and a single point of access, called Checkpoint 160, is the only way in or out for the 140 families who live there.

But Checkpoint 160 is closed again; Jaber is not sure why. The whim of a soldier, a crash in the scanning system, breaking news in the region—it could be anything.

For the last three years, he says, this has happened at least two days a week. So the community has devised a system of alternative routes. Jaber calls his neighbors to ask if he can come through. They check their windows for soldiers, and then Jaber scales ladders and traverses roofs. “When I finally get home,” he says, “it feels like I’ve achieved something monumental.”

The enclosure of Jaber’s neighborhood is a dense microcosm of what life is becoming across the occupied West Bank—for Palestinians, that is. At the same time that deadly Israeli settler violence robs communities in the West Bank of their land, and amid the genocide in Gaza, Israel has expanded its infrastructures of military control and domination... READ MORE https://www.wired.com/story/how-israeli-checkpoints-choke-palestinian-life-occupied-west-bank/

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