TEL AVIV: An Israeli museum that hid some of its most valuable artworks after the October 7 attack has now stashed away even more, fearing a strike by Iran.
Paintings by Pablo Picasso and Gustav Klimt are among the treasures moved by Tel Aviv Museum of Art to the “safe” — a secured basement meant to shield them from missiles.
Museum staff moved many of the masterpieces at the start of the Gaza war, which was triggered by the Palestinian group Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israeli soil on October 7.
Now, as Israel braces itself for a threatened bombardment by Iran and its proxies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, they have moved other pieces that were at risk.
It has left some galleries vacant, with blank walls decorated only with empty hooks and the small, printed descriptions for the artworks that previously hung there.
“In the last three, four, five days, when this new threat from Hezbollah and from Iran came on the table again, we understood that we needed to take other precautions,” said museum director Tania Coen-Uzzielli.
“So, we took down several other works of art and the ones we felt that were most in danger.
“And since the situation is not going to be clear, and this threat is always there, we feel that the safe place for them is downstairs in the shelters.”
Some items are on display in a protected space on a lower level, but the most valuable pieces are stored in rows of large, metal grills in the “safe.”
“We have some works by Picasso... from different periods,” said Nathalie Andrijasevic, assistant curator of modern art, rolling out one storage rack.
“They are all usually in the gallery, they are all usually hung right next to each other. Here they are still next to each other, but in a completely different setting.”
The October 7 attack resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Militants also seized 251 people, 111 of whom are still held captive in Gaza, including 39 the military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza has killed at least 39,929 people, according to the health ministry of the Hamas-run territory, which does not provide a breakdown of civilian and militant deaths.
“On October 7, we didn’t know what’s going on. We just knew that something horrible was going on throughout the country,” Andrijasevic said.
“Rockets were firing non-stop. And we were just super-scared that rockets will penetrate the ceiling of the galleries and cause damage to our works.
“And recently, during the past week, we’ve been taking down some more because of the imminent attack that is supposed to happen. Hopefully it will not happen.”
Fearing Iran attack, Israeli museum hides top artworks
https://arab.news/9r347
Fearing Iran attack, Israeli museum hides top artworks
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- Paintings by Pablo Picasso and Gustav Klimt are among the treasures moved by Tel Aviv Museum of Art to the “safe“
- Now, as Israel braces itself for a threatened bombardment by Iran and its proxies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, they have moved other pieces that were at risk
Two rockets fall near US forces in Baghdad, sources say
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- In a statement, the group called on Iraqi security forces to investigate and determine who was behind the attack
CAIRO: Two rockets fell near US forces stationed near Baghdad airport at the Camp Victory base, security sources said early on Wednesday, with reports of material damage but no casualties.
The US embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Iraq’s Iran-backed armed faction, Kataib Hezbollah, said that the targeting of Baghdad’s airport at this time was clearly aimed at disrupting a visit by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian set to begin on Wednesday morning.
In a statement, the group called on Iraqi security forces to investigate and determine who was behind the attack.
EU fears Israeli-occupied West Bank becoming a ‘new Gaza’
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- Borrell said Israel was opening “a new front... with a clear objective: to turn the West Bank into a new Gaza — in rising violence, delegitimising the Palestinian Authority and stimulating provocations to react forcefully”
CAIRO: The European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell warned on Tuesday that increased violence in the occupied West Bank since the Israel-Hamas war erupted meant it risked becoming “a new Gaza.”
Violence in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967 and is separated from the Gaza Strip by Israeli territory, has flared alongside the war that began after Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
Borrell said Israel was opening “a new front... with a clear objective: to turn the West Bank into a new Gaza — in rising violence, delegitimising the Palestinian Authority and stimulating provocations to react forcefully.”
Israel was also “not shying away from saying to the face of the world that the only way to reach a peaceful settlement is to annex the West Bank and Gaza,” Borrell added at a ministerial meeting of the Arab League in Cairo.
He accused “radical members of the Israeli government” of trying to make it “impossible to create a future Palestinian state,” which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and several cabinet members have painted as a threat to Israel.
Some Israeli ministers have recently called to increase military operations in the West Bank.
“Without action, the West Bank will become a new Gaza,” Borrell said.
“And Gaza will become a new West Bank, as settlers’ movements are preparing new settlements,” he told the meeting.
“The international community deplores, feels, and condemns, but finds it hard to act.”
Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank hit a record in 2023, according to Israeli rights group Yesh Din, and the European Union has said last year saw the most settlement building permits issued in decades.
Some 490,000 Israelis live in the West Bank, in settlements which are illegal under international law, alongside three million Palestinians.
Since the Gaza war began on October 7, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 662 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
At least 23 Israelis, including members of the security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks in the West Bank during the same period, Israeli officials say.
On Tuesday, Israel’s military said it was “highly likely” that its forces “unintentionally” shot dead a US-Turkish activist last week, during a protest in the West Bank against settlement expansion.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was killed on Friday in the town of Beita, the site of weekly demonstrations against Israeli settlements.
Parched Iraqi Kurdistan town navigates regional water diplomacy
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- To ensure Qaladiza residents have potable water, a small makeshift dam has been constructed near the town to ensure it retains more of the river’s water
QALADIZA: A river flowing through Iraq’s northern Kurdistan has all but dried up, prompting warnings of an “environmental catastrophe” for the water-stressed border city as it tussles for the resource with neighboring Iran.
The Little Zab originates in neighboring Iran and flows through the outskirts of Qaladiza, a hillside town of 90,000 residents around 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the Iranian border, which uses its water for drinking as well as irrigating crops and farmland along its path.
But the effects of climate change and dam building across the border have left it greatly diminished.
A tributary of the mighty Tigris, the river used to carry seven billion cubic meters of water a year, yet the volume has shrunk dramatically in recent years, said Marf Karim, director of a water treatment facility serving Qaladiza.
He pinned much of the blame on the Kolsa dam, built on the Iranian stretch of the Little Zab in 2017.
“We monitor water levels every day,” Karim told AFP. “With the naked eye we can see a decrease of about 80 percent.”
The plummeting river levels have exposed the river’s grey, rocky bed to the scorching summer sun.
“It’s an environmental catastrophe” affecting the entire region, including its water wells and groundwater reserves, said Karim.
To ensure Qaladiza residents have potable water, a small makeshift dam has been constructed near the town to ensure it retains more of the river’s water. But it does little to solve “the problem of water quality” in the shrinking waterway, he said.
“We need more products to filter out impurities,” he said.
Beset by climate change, Iraq has endured years of drought, rising temperatures and declining rainfall.
But in Qaladiza’s case, resource diplomacy is also at play, exacerbating geopolitical fault lines and regional tensions as growing populations place increasing demands on a dwindling supply of water.
Iran itself is also enduring the effects of worsening conditions.
In June 2023, the meteorological department of Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, which borders Iraq, said “about 56 percent” of its territory was “affected by very severe drought.”
Several dams have been built since the 1990s, but “in 2017 Iran realized that it was still losing some two-thirds of its waters into Iraq, which could then lead into a problem of water shortage inside Iran by 2036,” said Banafsheh Keynoush, a visiting fellow at the Kroc Institute at US university Notre Dame.
Tehran then moved to construct more than 100 dams “to redirect this extra water flow into Iraq, into its own dam reservoirs,” she told AFP.
Iraq, too, has been building dams and trying to reduce demand, including by encouraging farmers to abandon traditional irrigation methods deemed wasteful, all while seeking a greater portion of the water resources it shares with its ally Iran.
Tehran has factored “its water disputes with Iraq into its larger geopolitical calculations,” said Keynoush.
“Progress on resolving these water issues has also been subjected to political and geopolitical negotiations” involving both Baghdad and Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, added the expert.
In November, for example, “Iran decided to release some water into the Zab... just to minimize some tensions with the Kurdistan regional government,” Keynoush noted.
It is “vital” for Iran to prevent any “major upheavals” on its borders, politically but also environmentally, she said.
Qaladiza governor Bakr Baez said water disputes are “essentially a political problem,” but failed attempts to resolve them have had dire real-life consequences.
Farmers now do not have enough water to irrigate their fields, and the vast majority of the area’s 257 fish farms have been affected by the shortages, according to Baez.
Kochar Jamal, the manager of an Iraqi dam downstream, downplayed the impact of the Iranian “cuts” on the water reservoirs he oversees.
This year, water levels at the Dukan dam rose compared to 2023, Jamal said, attributing the increase to greater “amounts of rain in winter and spring.”
To keep his fish alive, Qaladiza farmer Ali Hassan has begun digging in the hopes of reaching the water table.
“It’s been three days that we haven’t been able to change the water in the tanks,” said the man in his 50s, standing next to a large digger that was burrowing into the ground.
“Without it, the water will heat up, the fish will die. They need fresh water.”
Losing his fish would also mean a financial loss of at least $13,000, said Hassan.
Driving the digger is another farmer, 48-year-old Omar Mohamed, who said water shortages meant “we can no longer cultivate anything.”
“I’ve had orchards, they’re gone,” he said.
“A neighbor tried to plant okra, another, watermelon. They all failed.”
Palestinians in Gaza see themselves as ‘zombies’: UN official
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- He added that “a lot of people have nothing to eat,” noting that many had no access to electricity or even a bed
BRUSSELS, Belgium: Palestinians in Gaza feel they are “zombies” left to fend for themselves, the UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian Territories said on Tuesday.
“’We’re two million zombies living on our own. All the ties are broken.’ This is how the people of Gaza see themselves,” Muhannad Hadi said, citing a Palestinian he met during one of his many trips to the Gaza Strip.
Hadi was in Brussels for a series of meetings with European officials as the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, was on a visit to the region, including Egypt and Lebanon.
“So anything that you take for granted, or anything you took for granted, or you worked for yesterday in your life, it’s not there for the people of Gaza, for the majority of the people of Gaza,” Hadi said during a visit to Brussels.
He added that “a lot of people have nothing to eat,” noting that many had no access to electricity or even a bed.
“No one should suffer because of war. No one should suffer because of the wrong politics. No one should suffer because of the failed politics that we are seeing,” the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process said.
He accused politicians around the world of “not doing the job they should be doing.”
“That’s why we don’t have a ceasefire, and that’s why we don’t have a solution to their Gaza crisis,” he added.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel that sparked the war resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, including some hostages killed in captivity, according to Israeli official figures.
Militants seized 251 hostages during the attack, 97 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed at least 41,020 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
Polio vaccination starts in north Gaza despite obstacles
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GAZA: A campaign to vaccinate a final 200,000 children in north Gaza against polio began on Tuesday although health and aid officials said the operation was complicated by access restrictions, evacuation orders, and shortages of fuel.
The campaign in north Gaza, the part of the territory hardest hit by Israel’s 11-month military offensive against Hamas, follows the vaccination of more than 446,000 Palestinian children in central and south Gaza earlier this month.
Medical staff had started administering vaccines in the north despite a dire need for fuel, among other challenges, said Dr. Moussa Abed of the primary care unit in Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Vaccination centers are in areas that are militarily very active, challenging to reach, and isolated if things go wrong, said Sam Rose, a deputy director of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
“There are some nerves, but we’ll have to make it work,” he texted Reuters.
On Monday, Israel stopped a convoy that included vehicles and fuel for the vaccination campaign as well as a World Health Organization team trying to get to Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, and the mission had to be aborted, the WHO’s Tarik Jasarevic said.
Israel also issued an evacuation order in north Gaza, the first in more than two weeks, that included areas that are part of humanitarian pause zones agreed upon for the polio vaccinations, according to a UN update on Monday.
“The centralization of services in the south makes it extremely difficult for us to get fuel, to get access to vaccinations, and to all other logistics,” Mahmoud Shalabi of Medical Aid for Palestinians, a UK-based charity, said via a spokesperson, adding there was no fuel available for mobile vaccination teams.
Hossam Medhat Saleh, a Palestinian father, said he had to walk with his three children to reach a vaccination clinic because no transportation was available.
“The dangers of the road are big — as you can see, the destruction, the streets, and infrastructure, in addition to the missiles and cannons (shelling) which continue,” he told Reuters, standing on a dusty street surrounded by smashed cars and buildings.
The campaign to vaccinate some 640,000 children in Gaza under 10 years of age began on Sept. 1, following confirmation by the WHO last month that the type 2 polio virus had partially paralyzed a baby, the first such case in the territory in 25 years.
The campaign in north Gaza aims to conclude a first vaccination round, with a second set to commence after a month.
Israel began its military campaign in Gaza on Oct. 7 last year after Hamas led a shock incursion into southern Israel.
The resulting assault on Gaza has killed more than 40,900 Palestinians, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry, and reduced much of the territory to rubble.