The demise of one of Hong Kong’s last major pro-democracy parties, the League of Social Democrats, is the latest blow to the city’s crumbling democratic credentials.
The league is the third major opposition party to disband this year. The announcement coincides with the fifth anniversary this week of the national security law, which was imposed by Beijing to suppress pro-democracy activity.
The loss of this grassroots party, historically populated by bold and colourful characters, vividly illustrates the dying of the light in once-sparkling Hong Kong.
The city is now greyed and labouring under a repressive internal security regime that has crushed civil society’s freedoms and democratic ambitions.
Authoritarian crackdown
The world witnessed Hong Kong at its brightest during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, when hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters camped out on city streets for several months.
We also saw the brutal sequel in 2019, when paramilitarised police sought to put down further civil unrest and protesters fought back.
Since then, “lawfare” has been the preferred strategy of China’s national government and its Hong Kong satellite. The new approach has included a vast security apparatus and aggressive prosecutions.
When Beijing intervened in July 2020, it was nominally about national security. In reality, the new law was designed and used to bring Hongkongers to heel.
Civil freedoms were further curtailed by a home-grown security law, introduced last year to fill the gaps.
International standards such as the Johannesburg Principles, endorsed by the United Nations, require national security laws to be compatible with democratic principles, not to be used to eliminate democratic activity.
Prison or exile
The League of Social Democrats occupied the populist left of the pro-democracy spectrum. It stood apart from contemporaries such as the Democratic Party and the Civic Party, which were dominated by professionals and elites, and have since been disbanded.
The League was most notably represented by the likes of “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung– known for his Che Guevara t-shirts and banana-throwing – and broadcaster and journalism academic Raymond Wong Yuk-man, also known as “Mad Dog”.
Despite their rambunctious styles, these men had real political credentials and were repeatedly elected to legislative office. But Leung is now imprisoned for subversion, while Wong has left for Taiwan.
Leung Kwok-hung was sentenced to subversion under the national security law. Edwin Kwok/Shutterstock
Party leaders such as Jimmy Sham Tsz-kit and Figo Chan Ho-wun were also prominent within the Civil Human Rights Front. It was responsible for the annual July 1 protest march that attracted hundreds of thousands of people every year. The front is yet another pro-democracy organisation that has dissolved.
Sham and Chan have been jailed for subversion and unlawful assembly under the colonial-era Public Order Ordinance, which has been used to prosecute hundreds of activists.
Zero tolerance
The demise of these diverse organisations are not natural occurrences, but the result of a deliberate authoritarian programme.
Under China, Hong Kong’s political system has been half democratic at best. But it now resembles something from the darkest days of colonialism, with pre-approved candidates, appointed legislators and zero tolerance for critical voices.
Activists and watchdogs are stymied by the national security law. It criminalises – among other things – engagement and lobbying with international organisations and foreign governments.
Then there are the millions of ordinary Hongkongers whose dreams of a liberal and self-governing region under mainland China’s umbrella – as promised in the lead up to the 1997 handover – have been shattered.
But countless ex-protesters remain in the city, where it is impermissible to speak critically of power, and where mandatory patriotic education may ensure new generations will never even think to speak up.
Much blame lies with the British, who failed to institute democratic elections until the last gasp of their rule in Hong Kong. This was despite the colony tolerating liberalism and habit-forming democratic activity over a longer period.
Now China, after almost three decades in charge, has responded to democratic challenges by defaulting to authoritarian control. Hong Kong can only be grateful it has been spared a Tiananmen-style incident. Nor has it experienced the full genocidal extent of the so-called “peripheries playbook” Beijing has used in Tibet and Xinjiang.
Turmoil and authoritarian swings in the United States and elsewhere give China an opportunity to present as a voice of reason on the international stage.
But we should not forget its commitment to repressive politics at home, nor what its support of belligerent regimes such as Putin’s Russia might mean for Taiwan, the region and the world.
Above all, we should not forget the people, in Hong Kong and elsewhere, who made it their life’s work to achieve democracy only to be rewarded with prison or exile.
Brendan Clift does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In 1962, poet and Auschwitz survivor Yehiel Dinur took the stand in Jerusalem in the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Dinur was a much-anticipated witness, bearing the audience’s hope this man, a poet, would be able to explain – to capture and to transmit – the experience of Auschwitz, and of the Holocaust; that he could speak the unspeakable. Prosecutor Gideon Hausner hoped such a witness might “do justice to the six million personal tragedies”.
Dinur used the name Katzetnik 135633 in his writings, also translated as “Prisoner 135663”. On the stand, he said: “I believe wholeheartedly that I have to continue to bear this name until the world awakens.”
Awakening, understanding, empathy and change are the sentiments many survivors hope for, or ask for, during and after periods of trauma. The 20th century saw many of those pleas. The 21st century has done no better at honouring the promise, captured in the title of the 1984 Argentinian commission report on forced disappearances, Nunca Mas: never again. No matter how many such pleas appear before the courts, before the aggressors, before those in solidarity, the horrors of war, torture, starvation and genocide seem to happen again – and again.
Three recent books from the region where war was been raging since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 2023, and the ensuing war on Gaza, are part of these pleas.
Review: Eyes on Gaza – Plestia Alaqad (Macmillan), Letters from Gaza – edited by Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq & Mahmoud Alshaer (Penguin), Gates of Gaza – Amir Tibon (Scribe)
Eyes on Gaza is an on-the-ground account of the death and destruction of the first 45 days of the war by now 23-year-old Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad, who moved to Melbourne with her family in November 2023. Letters from Gaza is a collection of 50 stories, poems and fragments from Palestinian writers enduring the past 20 months. And Gates of Gaza is the story of Israeli journalist Amir Tibon, a resident of Nahal Oz, one of the border kibbutz attacked by Hamas on October 7.
Plestia Alaqad. Plestia
These are all first-person testimonies of experiences of being under attack, though those attacks differ. We might say they fit into the genre adopted in truth commissions, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa: a response to the nation’s years of living under the apartheid laws, discarded when Nelson Mandela took power in 1994.
The commission was one effort to heal from this past. But, like the Eichmann trial, it needed stories to explain the histories of violence, and it needed the pain to be voiced to explain its impacts on communities, families and relationships.
The use of people’s narratives to “bear witness” to the complex layers of legally sanctioned and militarily executed pain, loss and the traumas they can produce, is sometimes effective in helping audiences understand them. The Bringing Them Home Report in 1997 used this form to explain the incidence and impacts of the forced removal of Indigenous children by the Australian state. It was effective as one form of creating a shared reality for all in Australia, who then understood the term “stolen generations” and the pain, loss and genocidal intent to which this phrase refers.
More recently, the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria, Australia’s first formal truth-telling inquiry into historic and ongoing systemic injustices perpetrated against First Nations Peoples by colonisation, has also brought histories of loss, dispossession and abuse to light, using stories. Stories can make sense of the impact incurred through the intertwined web of policies, statistics, discrimination and quotidian violence at the hands of the state.
The work of testimony
The narratives in these books written since October 7 2023 are part of this genre of testimony or storytelling. But at least two of these books are not attempting to explain the past. They might be described better as pleas to stop what the International Court of Justice has called “a plausible genocide” happening in the present.
They are, in one reading, wishes for the world to understand the experience of pain, rage, loss, fear, distress and defeat that accompanies destruction and unbearable loss. A wish for the world to hear, or perhaps feel, the words on the page – and make the pain stop.
They wish the world would “awaken” to what is happening right now.
The dynamic of awakening is the stock in trade of truth commissions. One party testifies or speaks to an experience, and the audience wakes up to what has been happening. As a result, they either change or facilitate change. The truth, captured as testimony, is supposed to set people free. Not just the speaker, but the community of speakers weighed down by history – or by the struggles of the past or the present.
In legal forms the reason to speak is clear. The reason to speak in literature, biographies and works of nonfiction is less clear. What does the author want from us, the readers? But perhaps more importantly, what can we offer?
She wants the genocide to stop. She wants a free Palestine. She wants her home and her life back. The stories in this book show readers outside Gaza some of the life and death of those first six and a half weeks.
Her last entry before she leaves Gaza for Egypt – and then Australia – is dated Day 45. During those 45 days, she puts on a press helmet and jacket, which both give her protection and weigh her down. And then she speaks: to cameras, to followers, to anyone who will listen. Her social media feeds documenting the war gained worldwide attention, her Instagram following rising from around 3,700 to 4.1 million today.
There are too many deaths to be witnessed – by her and the reader. She describes genocide as an understatement for what is occurring in Gaza: “we lose more people than our hearts can handle”. She has seen so much death, heard so many screams. By day 30,
all you can hear is a voice crying for help from under the rubble. You turn your back and walk away, because there’s nothing you can do to help.
But Plestia’s project is more than documenting death. She is careful to show many aspects of life in Gaza. She shows how Palestinians retain relationships, family and pets. How a young boy just needs his “pot plant” from his destroyed house, under skies filled with drones and bombs. This is a plea for the genocide to stop, but it is also a celebration of being Palestinian. It is an homage to life in Gaza.
It is also a plea to see Palestinians as more than numbers – and more than how they are depicted by Israel.
“The world,” she says, “sometimes treats us like terrorists, trying to justify its complacency in allowing us to be massacred. And we know the perception, we read the propaganda just like everyone else. But the reality is that we’re the opposite.”
She describes gentle moments of love and care between her fellow journalists and the people they interview. The children they bring sweets for, the “bird lady” who renames her tortoise “Plestia” after her. Both Plestia the tortoise and the “bird lady” are now living in a tent. She speaks of the doctors who work tirelessly.
In the midst of brutal amputations and unimaginable burns, she recounts the care of a doctor giving cream for a skin rash that has tormented her, diagnosed as a product of her anxiety. Anxiety seems a gentle diagnosis for symptoms produced by witnessing and documenting such brutality.
Anxiety over her helplessness, perhaps, over the lack of sleep, of nourishing food: dwindling even in those first 45 days. Anxiety seems like a Western preoccupation, from this writing distance. What Plestia experiences seems more like layers of embodied distress. Her empathy allows her to feel, perhaps too much. Empathy can be an enemy.
Around page 100, she begins to deteriorate. “It’s funny how genocide changes a person,” she writes, describing herself as “Genocide Plestia”. She’s devastated, exhausted. She has lost hope. The journal entries are shorter, more repetitive.
They recite her helplessness with what Jacqueline Rose, co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, has called the “repetitive thud of referentiality”.
You feel Plestia’s effort to try to speak with some life in the pages, to use writing as a therapeutic tool. You wish it for her, but she has trouble summoning the energy, the life, any hope. As she poignantly quips: “Fake it till you make it doesn’t work during a Genocide”. What is there to say in such relentless days of loss?
You want Plestia to get up, you want a happy ending, for a conclusion to the painful story, but the problem is time. The reader’s time, the reality of time since she wrote her book.
Day 45, her last day in Gaza, is Monday November 20 2023. I read this book in June 2025, 646 days later – and it hasn’t stopped. When Plestia leaves Gaza and finally arrives here in Melbourne, the conditions she describes have been ongoing for more than 20 months. A recently released survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research estimates almost 84,000 people died in Gaza between October 2023 and early January 2025, as a result of the war. And that was six months ago.
50 letters from Gaza
The numbers are a way of reducing the experience of grief, devastation, loss (and the viewer’s guilt) to simple digits. Digits have no face and no sound. This is helpful to viewers, but it does not do justice to the 84,000, as Gideon Hausner knew well. No one awakens by hearing the numbers. But they matter.
In Letters from Gaza, psychologist Ahmed Mortaja fears becoming a news story, “a dull number … I don’t want my name and my family name to be reduced to mere numbers, whether odd or even”.
This book, a fragmented collection of 50 poems, stories and accounts, is devoted to giving life to those numbers. To animating the loss, so readers can apply their own imaginations, so we can understand the incomprehensible. It is a collection of fragments of lives since October 7 2023, squeezed into expressive pages. There is no “letter” more than six pages long. They are backed up against each other, permeating one another.
Each letter tells a different story and the same story. Each finds a detail that has no language: flowers in a girl’s hair, dreams of careers that will perhaps never be, the sounds of explosions. They are stories of the impossible search for bread, the longing for a bed and a pillow. And, as in Plestia’s account, they evoke the relentless buzz of the drones in the sky in Gaza: everywhere, all day, every day since October 7 2023. Like tinnitus, like torture.
The book begins with an effort to give names to numbers. On the first page, in the publisher’s note, we read that two of the authors, Sara al-Assar and Basma al-Hor, cannot be contacted. Because of communication lines and constant displacements, the details “may not reflect their current location or circumstances”. Authors may have died or been further displaced. Communication towers are destroyed. Tents are moved as people are moved on. Tents are destroyed.
In Plestia’s accounts, there are displacements to safe zones that then become unsafe, so they move again and again – until the only choice is tents, often without food or blankets. She describes seeing 33,000 people in a displacement shelter, this number increasing daily. Just as numbers are not people, tents are not homes. In Letters from Gaza, the displaced tents are character, metaphor and reality.
The stories are different, as are the deaths and losses within them, but these painful accounts help explain each other. The personal stories help animate words like displacement, refugee camp, genocide, so they do not fall into the pile of legal terms disconnected from names.
But after the United Nations declarations in the opening pages, we hear no more of law – and little of justice. As Palestinian human rights lawyer and founder of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Raji Sourani said: Gaza is in danger of becoming “the graveyard of international law”. What is left are stories. The short stories, poems and brief accounts are packaged so they do not ask too much of the reader – just enough to provoke tears, and perhaps donations. Many readers will feel some of the helplessness in these pages.
There are stories of hunger; the loss of grandmothers and children. I cried many times reading this book, but the next story would quickly arrive and sometimes bring relief. There is something sad, but ordinary, about details like a cat who finds a tent too hot. Unlike Plestia’s clear analysis and summation of the genocide in Gaza, the politics of this book are comparably quiet. Not absent, but quiet. The word genocide is mentioned four times, “Holocaust” only once. (I counted.)
In Letters from Gaza, no one says Israel, only “the occupiers”. Husam Maarouf writes, “we no longer want anything from you […] Only to die in safety.” His entry is dated March 1 2024; he may well be dead. Batool Abu Akleen makes simple requests of the reader (or perhaps of God): “I want a grave, I don’t want my corpse to rot in the open road.” But the book seems to intentionally not accuse. We are told:
this is not a book about war. It is a book about human souls that strive to avoid being hunted down by war. It is about how innocents are forced to learn how to survive when everything around them is about killing, destruction and death.
But the accusation is there. How could it not be? Against Israel as occupier and aggressor – and the reader as bystander.
Accusation sometimes comes embedded in questions. “Is one person’s pain greater than another’s?” asks Gaza poet and teacher Doha Kahlout. This question resonates with one inscribed on the Holocaust Memorial Tree in Hungary: “Whose agony is greater than mine?”
When comparing agony, only one can live
Jewish author, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, writing on Palestine and Israeli peace struggles, cautions against pitting stories from Israel and Palestine against each other, such that “only one can live”. Only one story, one narrative, one version of pain and loss.
Holding multiple stories of suffering in mind is very difficult: for the survivor, for the listener and even for the psychoanalyst. Many survivors suffer symptoms of trauma that reduce the world to interpretation through their experience of its painful histories.
In Eyes of Gaza, writing from Melbourne, Plestia shows a moment of this:
On the train home, I see a lady with a suitcase, and the first thing that I think of is displacement, imagining how everyone in Gaza carries their whole life in their bag […] Then the announcement: Next Stop […] And I’m snapped back into reality.
In this moment, the suitcase is only read through the lens of the past. It’s what is described colloquially as living in the past – a type of banal flashback, often a symptom of trauma. But when pain colonises bodies and narratives, recognising the pain of others is difficult to see. It may be impossible to see the experiences of the other’s world through any other lens than one’s own pain. Whose agony is greater than mine? is a competitive statement, not a question.
In the war of greater pain, an Israeli child in fear may be read against a Palestinian child enduring the loss of their limbs and their whole family. Only one (story) can live.
To hold two competing stories of pain, loss and agony in mind requires a feat of mental health endurance few are capable of: the Nelson Mandelas of this world. Working in the field of transitional justice, I have met a few.
Most have experienced great loss and know there is no comparison at the level of agony. They resist “the repetitive thud of referentiality” because it drowns out conversation, annihilating curiosity and empathy alike. They know all stories must have their time.
In October 2023, “liberal” London Jewish journalist and filmmaker Michael Segalov, once a “staunch defender of Israel”, tried to hold competing stories. He wrote about seeing Israel–Palestine through the lens of “fear and trauma – of the Shoah, of the Nakba, of generations now born into perpetual fear”.
Early Jewish settlers were not “imperial soldiers”, but “a persecuted population failed by global governments pre and post Holocaust”, he points out. But by 1948, the year after the UN resolution that called for Palestine to be divided into Arab and Jewish states, “more than 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees, 15,000 killed”.
“While these lands might well feel a Jewish ancestral home,” he wrote, “within living memory, it was shared with another people: the majority.” In 1922, in the first census carried out under the British Mandate, the population of Palestine was 763,550: 89% were Arabs and 11% Jewish.
As Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad El Sarraj stressed while talking with Jessica Benjamin during peace negotiations, we must “stand simultaneously for the recognition of all injuries, while at the same time being clear that one side was coming from the position of Occupied and less powerful, the other Occupying and dominating”. Stories matter, politics matters.
And some stories take more time than others – some stories are given more time than others. This is a matter of politics and practicality.
Surviving the October 7 attacks
Israeli journalist Amir Tibon and his family survived the October 7 attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border; they are now internal refugees in northern Israel. He and his partner settled in Nahal Oz and raised a family. On the morning of October 7, they heard the sounds of the attack and raced to their safe room, spending the next five hours in there trying to keep their children – Galia, 3 years old and Carmel, aged 19 months – quiet.
Amir Tibon and his family survived the Oct 7 attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz, on the Gaza border. Scribe
In discussing Tibon’s book, Gates of Gaza: a story of betrayal, survival and hope in Israel’s borderlands, I risk comparison and competition. Sometimes stories speak to each other, even when they speak to the silences. I resisted this one’s proximity to the above stories. But that is also to resist reality. It is to resist the importance of difference. All experience is valuable, but sometimes comparison reveals inequality.
Plestia knows this well. The survivor guilt of which she writes is part of the hierarchy experienced by all survivors of mass violence. That she and her family survived, that she migrated, is to feel guilt for escaping the fate of those who have been starved, tortured, obliterated.
Yehiel Dinur spoke from this position of guilt on the stand in 1962, saying he was speaking for those who died in Auschwitz. In the face of others’ death, all survivors struggle with justification. Competition is one form of this: Whose agony is greater than mine?
Tibon was a resident of Nahal Oz, having moved there with his partner because of its beauty, nine years before October 7. He describes it as having “a strong, left-wing, liberal political leaning”, and says residents of the border areas are “some of the strongest advocates of Israeli–Palestinian peace”. He writes that the kibbutz movement has, “for decades”, been in favour of “a compromise that would allow Jews and Arabs to share this land, with agreed-upon borders – borders that, of course, would have to be protected”.
In the 300-plus pages, Tibon describes the morning of October 7 in detail. The fear of his children and his partner as they stayed quiet in a safe room for some five hours. The sounds of shootings and desperation as he read pleas and accounts from other residents on the community’s WhatsApp group as the attacks unfolded.
The narrative of that morning is interspersed with accounts from people who survived in his community: his parents, some of those who attended the Nova music festival, and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldiers. The narrative moves between that morning and a history of the kibbutz, framed in a history of Israel’s political lurching between right and left – and back again – over the 87 years since its recognition as a nation state by the UN.
In one reading, this is a history book of 87 years – not just an account of five hours. It is a particular history.
The narrative of those five hours is intense, peppered with stories of his parents racing from Tel Aviv to the kibbutz. Tibon’s father is a crucial figure in this narrative. A retired IDF general with “more than three decades” in the military, including combat experience, he seemingly has the capacity to assess situations and navigate a war zone with skill. It is his father who finally knocks on the “safe room” door in the afternoon (about halfway through the book). Tibon reports hearing “a strong bang and a familiar voice” from inside.
The father, we could say, is the embodiment of Tibon’s feelings for – and belief in – a strong, kind Israel. An army general, protective husband and grandfather (in Hebrew, Saba), he is longed for by Tibon’s young children, who “loved their grandparents”, particularly his father, “who pampered and spoiled them at every opportunity”. This grandfather’s presence at the safe-room door allows the family to re-enter the safety of Israel.
If the father is Israel, the sleeping children are its citizens. Carmel and Galia slept through much of the conflict, barely awakened by gunshots. They were rushed to the safe room the moment the shots were heard.
Once you know the stories from Letters of Gaza, it is hard not to compare this to the waking of Mohammed Al Zaqzooq’s three boys – Baraa, Jawad and Basil – to the sound of “Huge missiles in large numbers making terrifying sounds” and the need to flee. Not least, because Amir’s children were barely awakened by shots outside. Their safe room kept the noise muffled and the danger at bay. This is not to say their fear won’t impact on their actions later. Transgenerational trauma has a way of influencing the future.
Mohammed’s children moved quickly, within half an hour, to a refugee camp. At the time of writing, they remain there. His story is five pages long. Amir’s is 300-plus. Amir, an author and award-winning diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, Israel’s liberal paper of record, has access to a computer, electricity and the security required to think, research and write.
But why does he write this book? In the acknowledgements, he describes himself as needing to be encouraged, unsure of the worth of telling the story of his five hours in the safe room. But he describes much more than five hours.
His book is a story of Israel – and particularly, of its informal settlements. In the early 1950s, he writes, 20 young soldiers – ten men and ten women – were taken by bus to this site to settle it. Nahal Oz is so close to Gaza, it has “agricultural lands which literally touch the border fence”. The kibbutzim functioned as a kind of human border, with increased populations: the 20 broke into couples, then families. Within a few years, they had a small farming community, with a person devoted to security.
Empty land?
This is not a story of military invasion and colonisation, however. It is a story of settlement on land represented as empty. We know this story well in Australia. In this context, it can be a plea for a recognition of innocence.
As Amir tells it, there were no Palestinians in the place before: no one was removed or relocated. Only in passing does he mention the Bedouin who passed through the area before.
In Australia, Irene Watson and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have, in different ways, explained lands do not need to be sites of permanent agriculture to be crucial to the survival of some groups or nations. Borders and settlements can disturb land, law and life regardless of whether houses are demolished or not.
The beauty of Nahal Oz, Amir writes, was due to its access to water and its site on fertile land, where trees provided shelter and probably food. Its loss was likely no small thing to people who required sustenance and shelter as they moved through. After the settlement, they no longer could.
After Israel set up its border there, only Israelis could pass through without being subject to the checkpoints that are well documented sites of humiliation and arbitrary punishment for Palestinians.
By 1997, the walls went up near Nahal Oz. But the walls to shield Nahal Oz from Gaza – and particularly from its people – were not enough. Amir describes the elaborate and extensive tunnels used by Palestinian soldiers to enter Israel (he calls them “terrorists” and “suicide bombers”).
The tunnels became the problem of Palestinian attacks on Israeli settlers. To deal with this problem, the concrete walls were built, reaching 160 metres underground, preventing any permeation. Then, on October 7, the walls could not provide security. Then, there was only the safe room.
The safe room is an obvious metaphor in this book. It is Israel under attack. One of these rooms has been built into every house in the kibbutz, so families can be safe from the mortar attacks from Gaza – a regular occurrence since the 1987 Intifada.
Plestia tells us that the materials for a safe room are not allowed to be brought into Gaza. There are no safe rooms there. Tibon doesn’t mention this; maybe he doesn’t even know this fact, which is its own symptom of the political and social environment in Israel.
He does describe “the unimaginable destruction that Israel has unleashed on Gaza in the aftermath” of the October 7 attacks. He is critical of this “destruction”, though he does not use the term genocide. (There are those who wait for the International Court of Justice to decide if it was more than “plausible” – and there are those who cannot wait.)
Tibon is critical of Israel’s right wing, which cultivates war. He wants peace. But peace here is its own violence.
Like the rhetoric of reconciliation in South Africa, calls for peace can do violence to historical experiences of injustice. There, reconciliation discourse has been criticised, along with its apolitical leanings. Reconciliation in South Africa has largely meant people subject to historical injustices must reconcile themselves to their losses and their reality.
A story attributed to Father Mxolisi Mapanbani, of Tom and Bernard and the bicycle, has been used many times to critique “reconciliation” rhetoric in South Africa. It is helpful here.
Tom and Bernard are friends and live opposite each other. One day, Tom stole Bernard’s bicycle. Every day, Bernard saw Tom cycling to school on it. After some time, Tom went up to Bernard and said, “Let us reconcile and put the past behind us.” Bernard said, “Okay, let’s reconcile – what about the bicycle?” “Oh no,” said Tom, “I’m not talking about the bicycle, I’m talking about reconciliation.”
In the Australian context, after Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations in 2008, human rights and social justice campaigner Tom Calma described this form of reconciliation as the “unfinished business of justice”.
The apology might have offered some form of acknowledgement, and gone some way toward creating a shared reality on the injustices of the past, but while justice remains unfinished, many are not at peace.
Amir wants peace. He doesn’t want to live in a safe house – but he wants his house and his family to live securely in Nahal Oz. He wants Palestinians to be at peace with this reality.
The word “peace”, like “reconciliation”, does a lot of work to present Tibon on the side of “the good”. Just like, in Letters From Gaza, the relative lack of the word “genocide” keeps the accusation at bay and politics in the background – and it keeps its calls for recognition of suffering at the fore. In this book about “human souls”, the editors call for a recognition of shared humanity.
Tibon is careful not to group “terrorists” under that name – though he uses a Hebrew word that means exactly that. (Mehablim, he calls the people who attacked Nahal Oz.) Why? Though he writes in English and undoubtably spoke Hebrew throughout the siege, why does he speak of the Palestinian attackers as Mehablim?
The answer might be found in the fact no Palestinian name, beyond former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, appears in these pages. He has interviewed many people, but none of them are Palestinian. Their narrative remains outside his text.
We must find the humanity of the Palestinians in other stories.
If the safe room is a metaphor for Israel, the tent – as described in so many of the stories in Letters from Gaza, and in Plestia’s account of those 45 days – is a metaphor for the lives of Palestinians in Israel, and perhaps the world’s eyes.
A tent is permeable, fragile, disposable. Bodies within it are subject to displacement, starvation, genocide. Every house in Tibon’s kibbutz has a safe room. There have been at least seven bombings of tent camps in Gaza. How can you not do the maths?
Stories, awakening and halting the bombs
Stories demand people are not reduced to mathematics. They place the reader in the scene and plead for identification and understanding. Writing on the Eichmann trial, Holocaust historian and legal scholar Lawrence Douglas describes “the words of the survivors that built a bridge from the accused to the world of ashes”.
Afrikaaner journalist and poet Antje Krog writes, on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, “In all the stories a landscape is created.”
But this landscape, if it is to have any effect, must be mapped across previous perceptions. For that, it must do damage to the secure world – the pre-existing imaginative landscape – of the reader or of the listener.
Moral philosopher Rai Gaita describes remorse as “a dying to the world”: a little death is required of the listener or reader who is implicated as a bystander, encountering the suffering of others. A death of complacency. A small disintegration that may mean our own peaceful worlds are no longer tenable.
This is why stories, particularly, are mobilised in truth commissions. They animate the impossible numbers – the dry policies and repetitive loss – with scenes of humanity. Testimony – personal stories – link the words (genocide, massacre, terror) to an imagination of a scene, a person, a child or a parent. To people we can identify or empathise with.
Like the two worlds connected in Ahmed Mortaja’s poem, Hubb and Harb, In Letters from Gaza:
tonight I will fall asleep telling myself that the noise outside is fireworks, a celebration and nothing more.
That the frightened screams of children are the gleeful terror of suspense before something long-awaited, like Eid.
Tonight, I will fall asleep scrolling through the photos on my phone, telling myself that my evening with friends wasn’t that great – really, I was bored – so now I’m skimming through memories to pass the time.
If empathy were all it took to halt the counting of the 646 days in Gaza, then Letters from Gaza and Eyes on Gaza would achieve their aim. But empathy rarely produces political change.
Stories – the 50 voices in Letters from Gaza, accounts like Plestia’s – make us cry, perhaps make us donate, but they do not halt the bombs. This, and more, might be what Yehiel Dinur meant when he asked for the world to “awaken”, that it change, that it stop what Tibon calls “the unimaginable destruction”.
Until then, Dinur pledged to remain Katzetnik 135633. Until then, we will likely only know “Genocide Plestia”: “it’s funny how genocide changes a person”.
Juliet Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The greenhouse effect was discovered more than 150 years ago and the first scientific paper linking carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere with climate change was published in 1896.
But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists could definitively detect the effect of human activities on the Earth’s atmosphere.
In 1956, United States scientist Charles Keeling chose Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano for the site of a new atmospheric measuring station. It was ideal, located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and at high altitude away from the confounding influence of population centres.
Data collected by Mauna Loa from 1958 onward let us clearly see the evidence of climate change for the first time. The station samples the air and measures global CO₂ levels. Charles Keeling and his successors used this data to produce the famous Keeling curve – a graph showing carbon dioxide levels increasing year after year.
But this precious record is in peril. US President Donald Trump has decided to defund the observatory recording the data, as well as the widespread US greenhouse gas monitoring network and other climate measuring sites.
We can’t solve the existential problem of climate change if we can’t track the changes. Losing Mauna Loa would be a huge loss to climate science. If it shuts, other observatories such as Australia’s Kennaook/Cape Grim will become even more vital.
The first year of measurements at Mauna Loa revealed something incredible. For the first time, the clear annual cycle in atmospheric CO₂ was visible. As plants grow in summer, they absorb CO₂ and draw it out of the atmosphere. As they die and decay in winter, the CO₂ returns to the atmosphere. It’s like Earth is breathing.
Most land on Earth is in the Northern Hemisphere, which means this cycle is largely influenced by the northern summer and winter.
The annual cycle of carbon dioxide is largely due to plant growth and decay in the northern hemisphere.
It only took a few years of measurements before an even more profound pattern emerged.
Year on year, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere were relentlessly rising. The natural in-out cycle continued, but against a steady increase.
Scientists would later figure out that the ocean and land together were absorbing almost half of the CO₂ produced by humans. But the rest was building up in the atmosphere.
Crucially, isotopic measurements meant scientists could be crystal clear about the origin of the extra carbon dioxide. It was coming from humans, largely through burning fossil fuels.
Mauna Loa has now been collecting data for more than 65 years. The resulting Keeling curve graph is the most iconic demonstration of how human activities are collectively affecting the planet.
When the last of the Baby Boomer generation were being born in the 1960s, CO₂ levels were around 320 parts per million. Now they’re over 420 ppm. That’s a level unseen for at least three million years. The rate of increase far exceeds any natural change in the past 50 million years.
The reason carbon dioxide is so important is that this molecule has special properties. Its ability to trap heat alongside other greenhouse gases means Earth isn’t a frozen rock. If there were no greenhouse gases, Earth would have an average temperature of -18°C, rather than the balmy 14°C under which human civilisation emerged.
The greenhouse effect is essential to life. But if there are too many gases, the planet becomes dangerously hot. That’s what’s happening now – a very sharp increase in gases exceptionally good at trapping heat even at low concentrations.
Greenhouse gases are the reason Earth isn’t an icebox. But the rate humans are emitting them is leading to very rapid changes. Reid Wiseman/NASA, CC BY-NC-ND
Keeping our eyes open
It’s not enough to know CO₂ is climbing. Monitoring is essential. That’s because as the planet warms, both the ocean and the land are expected to take up less and less of humanity’s emissions, letting still more carbon accumulate in the air.
Continuous, high-precision monitoring is the only way to spot if and when that happens.
This monitoring provides the vital means to verify whether new climate policies are genuinely influencing the atmospheric CO₂ curve rather than just being touted as effective. Monitoring will also be vital to capture the moment many have been working towards when government policies and new technologies finally slow and eventually stop the increase in CO₂.
The US administration’s plans to defund key climate monitoring systems and roll back green energy initiatives presents a global challenge.
Without these systems, it will be harder to forecast the weather and give seasonal updates. It will also be harder to forecast dangerous extreme weather events.
Scientists in the US and globally have sounded the alarm about what the closure would do to science. This is understandable. Stopping data climate collection is like breaking a thermometer because you don’t like knowing you’ve got a fever.
If the US follows through, other countries will need to carefully reconsider their commitments to gathering and sharing climate data.
Australia has a long record of direct atmospheric CO₂ measurement, which began in 1976 at the Kennaook/Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station in north-west Tasmania. This and other climate observations will only become more valuable if Mauna Loa is lost.
It remains to be seen how Australia’s leaders respond to the US retreat from climate monitoring. Ideally, Australia would not only maintain but strategically expand its monitoring systems of atmosphere, land and oceans.
Alex Sen Gupta receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Katrin Meissner receives funding from the Minderoo Foundation and has received funding from the Australian Research Council in the past.
Timothy Raupach receives funding from QBE Insurance, Guy Carpenter, and the Australian Research Council.
Ancient wooden tools found at a site in Gantangqing in southwestern China are approximately 300,000 years old, new dating has shown. Discovered during excavations carried out in 2014–15 and 2018–19, the tools have now been dated by a team of archaeologists, geologists, chronologists (including me) and paleontologists.
The rare wooden tools were found alongside an assortment of animal and plant fossils and stone artifacts.
Taken together, the finds suggest the early humans at Gantangqing were surprisingly sophisticated woodworkers who lived in a rich tropical or subtropical environment where they subsisted by harvesting plants from a nearby lake.
The location of the Gantangqing site and excavation trenches. Liu et al. / Science
Why ancient wooden tools are so rare
Wood usually decomposes relatively rapidly due to microbial activity, oxidation, and weathering. Unlike stone or bone, it rarely survives more than a few centuries.
Wood can only survive for thousands of years or longer if it ends up buried in unusual conditions. Wood can last a long time in oxygen-free environments or extremely dry areas. Charred or fire-hardened wood is also more durable.
At Gantangqing, the wooden objects were excavated from low-oxygen clay-heavy layers of sediment formed on the ancient shoreline of Fuxian Lake.
Wooden implements are extremely rare from the Early Palaeolithic period (the first part of the “stone age” from around 3.3 million years ago until 300,000 years ago or so, in which our hominin ancestors first began to use tools). Indeed, wooden tools more than even 50,000 years old are virtually absent outside Africa and western Eurasia.
As a result, we may have a skewed understanding of Palaeolithic cultures. We may overemphasise the role of stone tools, for example, because they are what has survived.
What wooden tools were found at Gantangqing?
The new excavations at Gantangqing found 35 wooden specimens identified as artificially modified tools. These tools were primarily manufactured from pine wood, with a minority crafted from hardwoods.
Some of the tools had rounded ends, while others had chisel-like thin blades or ridged blades. Of the 35 tools, 32 show marks of intentional modification at their tips, working edges, or bases.
Two large digging implements were identified as heavy-duty digging sticks designed for two-handed use. These are unique forms of digging implements not documented elsewhere, suggesting localised functional adaptations. There were also four distinct hook-shaped tools — likely used for cutting roots — and a series of smaller tools for one-handed use.
Nineteen of the tools showed microscopic traces of scraping from shaping or use, while 17 exhibit deliberately polished surfaces. We also identified further evidence of intensive use, including soil residues stuck to tool tips, parallel grooves or streaks along working edges, and characteristic fracture wear patterns.
The tools from Gantangqing are more complete and show a wider range of functions than those found at contemporary sites such as Clacton in the UK and Florisbad in South Africa.
The team used several techniques to figure out the age of the wooden tools. There is no way to determine their age directly, but we can date the sediment in which they were found.
Using a technique called infrared stimulated luminescence, we analysed more than 10,000 individual grains of minerals from different layers. This showed the sediment was deposited roughly between 350,000 and 200,000 years ago.
Dating the different layers of sediment excavated at the site produced a detailed timeline. Liu et al. / Science
We also used different techniques to date a mammal tooth found in one of the layers to roughly 288,000 years old. This was consistent with the mineral results.
Next we used mathematical modelling to bring all the dating results together. Our model indicated that the layers containing stone tools and wooden implements date from 360–300,000 years ago to 290–250,000 years ago.
What was the environment like?
Our research indicates the ancient humans at Gantangqing inhabited a warm, humid, tropical or subtropical environment. Pollen extracted from the sediments reveals 40 plant families that confirm this climate.
Plant fossils further verify the presence of subtropical-to-tropical flora dominated by trees, lianas, shrubs and herbs. Wet-environment plants show the local surroundings were a lakeside or wetlands.
Animal fossils also fit this picture, including rhinoceros and other mammals, turtles and various birds. The ecosystem was likely a mosaic of grassland, thickets and forests. Evidence of diving ducks confirms the lake must have been at least 2–3 metres deep during human occupation.
The site contained evidence of plants such as storable pine nuts and hazelnuts, fruit trees such as kiwi, raspberry-like berries, grapes, edible herbs and fern fronds.
There were also aquatic plants that would have provided edible leaves, seeds, tubers and rhizomes. These were likely dug up from shallow mud near the shore, using wooden tools.
These findings suggest the Gantangqing hominins may have made expeditions to the lake shore, carrying purpose-made wooden digging sticks to harvest underground food sources. To do this, they would have had to anticipate seasonal plant distributions, know exactly what parts of different plants were edible, and produce specialised tools for different tasks.
Why the Gantangqing site is important
The wooden implements from Gantangqing represent the earliest known evidence for the use of digging sticks and for the exploitation of underground plant storage organs such as tubers within the Oriental biogeographic realm. Our discovery shows the use of sophisticated wood technology in a very different environmental context from what has been seen at sites of similar age in Europe and Africa.
The find significantly expands our understanding of early hominin woodworking capabilities.
The hominins who lived at Gantangqing appear to have lived a heavily plant-based subsistence lifestyle. This is in contrast to colder, more northern settings where tools of similar age have been found (such as Schöningen in Germany), where hunting large mammals was the key to survival.
The site also shows how important wood – and perhaps other organic materials – were to “stone age” hominins. These wooden artifacts show far more sophisticated manufacturing skill than the relative rudimentary stone tools found at sites of similar age across East and Southeast Asia.
The excavation, curation, and research of the Gantangqing site were supported by
National Cultural Heritage Administration (China), Yunnan Provincial Institute of
Cultural Relics and Archaeology, Yuxi Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism,
Chengjiang Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism, Australian Research Council
(ARC) Discovery Projects, Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC), National Natural
Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
Satellite photo of rural Saga prefecture, Japan, showing farmland disuse, consolidation and intensification and urban development.Google Earth Pro, CC BY-NC-ND
Since 1970, 73% of global wildlife has been lost, while the world’s population has doubled to 8 billion. Research shows this isn’t a coincidence but that population growth is causing a catastrophic decline in biodiversity.
Yet a turning point in human history is underway. According to UN projections, the number of people in 85 countries will be shrinking by 2050, mostly in Europe and Asia. By 2100, the human population is on course for global decline. Some say this will be good for the environment.
In 2010, Japan became the first Asian country to begin depopulating. South Korea, China and Taiwan are following close behind. In 2014, Italy was the first in southern Europe, followed by Spain, Portugal and others. We call Japan and Italy “depopulation vanguard countries” on account of their role as forerunners for understanding possible consequences in their regions.
Given assumptions that depopulation could help deliver environmental restoration, we have been working with colleagues Yang Li and Taku Fujita to investigate whether Japan is experiencing what we have termed a biodiversity “depopulation dividend” or something else.
Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox.Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.
Since 2003, hundreds of citizen scientists have been collecting biodiversity data for the Japanese government’s Monitoring Sites 1,000 project. We used 1.5 million recorded species observations from 158 sites.
These were in wooded, agricultural and peri-urban (transitional spaces on outskirts of cities) areas. We compared these observations against changes in local population, land use and surface temperature for periods of five to 20 years.
Our study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, includes birds, butterflies, fireflies, frogs and 2,922 native and non-native plants. These landscapes have experienced the greatest depopulation since the 1990s.
Due to the size of our database, choice of sites and the positioning of Japan as a depopulation vanguard for north-east Asia, this is one of the largest studies of its kind.
Japan is not Chernobyl
Biodiversity continued to decrease in most of the areas we studied, irrespective of population increase or decrease. Only where the population remains steady is biodiversity more stable. However, the population of these areas is ageing and will decline soon, bringing them in line with the areas already seeing biodiversity loss.
Unlike in Chernobyl, where a sudden crisis caused an almost total evacuation which stimulated startling accounts of wildlife revival, Japan’s population loss has developed gradually. Here, a mosaic pattern of changing land use emerges amid still-functioning communities.
While most farmland remains under cultivation, some falls into disuse or abandonment, some is sold for urban development or transformed into intensively farmed landscapes. This prevents widespread natural succession of plant growth or afforestation (planting of new trees) that would enrich biodiversity.
In these areas, humans are agents of ecosystem sustainability. Traditional farming and seasonal livelihood practices, such as flooding, planting and harvesting of rice fields, orchard and coppice management, and property upkeep, are important for maintaining biodiversity. So depopulation can be destructive to nature. Some species thrive, but these are often non-native ones that present other challenges, such as the drying and choking of formerly wet rice paddy fields by invasive grasses.
Vacant and derelict buildings, underused infrastructure and socio-legal issues (such as complicated inheritance laws and land taxes, lack of local authority administrative capacity, and high demolition and disposal costs) all compound the problem.
An abandoned house, or akiya, in Niigata prefecture, Japan. Peter Matanle, CC BY-NC-ND
Even as the number of akiya (empty, disused or abandoned houses) increases to nearly 15% of the nation’s housing stock, the construction of new dwellings continues remorselessly. In 2024, more than 790,000 were built, due partly to Japan’s changing population distribution and household composition. Alongside these come roads, shopping malls, sports facilities, car parks and Japan’s ubiquitous convenience stores. All in all, wildlife has less space and fewer niches to inhabit, despite there being fewer people.
What can be done?
Data shows deepening depopulation in Japan and north-east Asia. Fertility rates remain low in most developed countries. Immigration provides only a short-term softer landing, as countries currently supplying migrants, such as Vietnam, are also on course for depopulation.
Our research demonstrates that biodiversity recovery needs to be actively managed, especially in depopulating areas. Despite this there are only a few rewilding projects in Japan. To help these develop, local authorities could be given powers to convert disused land into locally managed community conservancies.
Nature depletion is a systemic risk to global economic stability. Ecological risks, such as fish stock declines or deforestation, need better accountability from governments and corporations. Rather than spend on more infrastructure for an ever-dwindling population, for example, Japanese companies could invest in growing local natural forests for carbon credits.
Depopulation is emerging as a 21st-century global megatrend. Handled well, depopulation could help reduce the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including resource and energy use, emissions and waste, and nature conservation. But it needs to be actively managed for those opportunities to be realised.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Kei Uchida received funding from JSPS Kakenhi 20K20002.
Masayoshi K. Hiraiwa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
After the Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut died around 1458 BCE, many statues of her were destroyed. Archaeologists believed that they were targeted in an act of revenge by Thutmose III, her successor. Yet the condition of the statues recovered in the vicinity of her mortuary temple varies and many survive with their faces virtually intact.
Now a new study by archaeologist Jun Yi Wong re-examines the original excavations and offers an alternative explanation. Much of the damage may in fact be from the “ritual deactivation” of the statues and their reuse as raw material. We asked him to explain.
Who was Queen Hatshepsut and why was she important?
Hatshepsut ruled as the pharaoh of Egypt around 3,500 years ago. Her reign was an exceptionally successful one – she was a prolific builder of monuments, and her reign saw great innovations in art and architecture. As a result, some regard her as one of the greatest rulers – male or female – in ancient Egypt. She has also been described as the “first great woman in history”.
Hatshepsut was the wife and half sister of pharaoh Thutmose II. Following the premature death of her husband, she acted as regent for her stepson, the young Thutmose III. However, about seven years later, Hatshepsut ascended the throne and declared herself ruler of Egypt.
Why was it believed her statues were destroyed in revenge?
After her death, Hatshepsut’s names and representations such as statues were systematically erased from her monuments. This event, often called the “proscription” of Hatshepsut, is currently part of my wider research.
There’s little doubt that this destruction began during the time of Thutmose III, since some of Hatshepsut’s erased representations were found concealed by his new constructions.
The statues that formed the subject of my recently published study were discovered in the 1920s. By this time, Thutmose III’s proscription of Hatshepsut was already well known, so it was immediately (and rightly) assumed it was caused during his reign. Some of the broken statues were even found underneath a causeway built by Thutmose III, so there is little doubt that their destruction took place during his reign.
Because the statues were found in fragments, early archaeologists assumed that they must have been broken up violently, perhaps due to Thutmose III’s animosity towards Hatshepsut. For instance, Herbert Winlock, the archaeologist who led the excavations of 1922 to 1928, remarked that Thutmose III must have “decreed the destruction of every portrait of (Hatshepsut) in existence” and that
Every conceivable indignity had been heaped on the likeness of the fallen Queen.
The problem with such an interpretation is that some of Hatshepsut’s statues have survived in relatively good condition, with their faces virtually intact. Why was there such a great variation in the treatment of the statues? That was essentially the main question of my research.
How did you go about finding the answer?
It was clear that the damage to Hatshepsut’s statues was not caused solely by Thutmose III. Many of them were left exposed and not buried, and many were reused as building material. Indeed, not far from where the statues were discovered, the archaeologists found a stone house that was partially built using fragments of her statues.
Of course, the question is to what extent these reuse activities added to the damage of the statues. Fortunately, the archaeologists who excavated the statues left behind field notes that are quite detailed.
Based on this archival material, it is possible to reconstruct the locations in which many of these statues were found.
The results were quite intriguing: statues that are scattered over large areas, or have significant missing parts, tend to have sustained significant damage to their faces. In contrast, statues found in a relatively complete condition typically have their faces fully intact.
In other words, statues that were subjected to heavy reuse activities are far more likely to have sustained facial damage.
Therefore, it is likely that Thutmose III was not responsible for the facial damage sustained by the statues. Instead, the destruction that he was responsible for was far more specific, namely the breaking of these statues across their neck, waist and knees.
This form of treatment is not unique to Hatshepsut’s statues.
Fascinating. So what does this mean?
The practice of breaking royal statues across their neck, waist and knees is common in ancient Egypt. It’s often referred to as the “deactivation” of statues.
For the ancient Egyptians, statues were more than just images. For example, newly made statues underwent a rite known as the opening of the mouth, where they were ritually brought to life. Since statues were regarded as living and powerful objects, their inherent power had to be neutralised before they could be discarded.
Indeed, one of the most extraordinary discoveries in Egyptian archaeology is the Karnak Cachette, where hundreds of royal statues were found buried in a single deposit. The vast majority of the statues have been “deactivated”, even though most of them depict pharaohs who were never subjected to any hostilities after their death.
This suggests that the destruction of Hatshepsut’s statues was motivated mainly by ritualistic and pragmatic reasons, rather than revenge or animosity. This, of course, changes the way that her relationship with Thutmose III is understood.
Jun Yi Wong receives funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The US president, Donald Trump, says that Israel has agreed to terms for a 60-day ceasefire in Gaza. If that sounds familiar, it is.
The idea of a two-month truce has been discussed since the collapse of the last shortlived ceasefire in March. A similar proposal was floated in May, but Hamas viewed it as an enabling mechanism for Israel to continue the war after a brief pause, rather than reaching a permanent peace deal.
As the devastation in Gaza worsens by the day, will this time be any different?
The proposal, put forward by Qatari mediators, reportedly involves Hamas releasing ten living hostages and the bodies of 18 deceased hostages over the 60-day period, in exchange for the release of a number of Palestinian prisoners.
Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox.Sign up to our daily newsletter to receive all The Conversation UK’s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.
The remaining 22 hostages would be released if a long-term deal is reached. The 60-day ceasefire period would also involve negotiations for a permanent end to hostilities and a roadmap for post-war governance in Gaza.
But the plan is similar to the eight-week, three-phase ceasefire from January to March of this year, which collapsed after the first phase of hostage exchanges. Since then peace talks have hit a recurrent impasse.
For Hamas, a long-term ceasefire means the permanent end to the war and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. Israel, meanwhile, wants to see the complete removal of Hamas from power, the dismantling and disarming of its military wing and the exile of remaining senior Hamas leaders.
But despite the persistent challenges, there are several reasons that this attempt for a ceasefire might be different. First and foremost is the recent so-called “12-day war” between Israel and Iran, which Israel has trumpeted as a major success for degrading Iran’s nuclear capabilities (although the reality is more nuanced).
The perceived win gives Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, political maneuverability to pursue a ceasefire over the objections of far-right hardliners in his coalition who have threatened to bring down the government in previous rounds.
The Iran-Israel war, in which the US controversially carried out strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, also revived Trump’s interest in the Middle East. Trump entered office just as the phased Gaza ceasefire deal was being agreed. But Trump put little diplomatic pressure on Israel to engage in serious talks to get from the first phase of the agreement to phase two, allowing the war to resume in March.
Now however, after assisting Israel militarily in Iran, Trump has significant leverage he can use with Netanyahu. He will have the chance to use it (if he chooses) when Netanyahu visits Washington next week.
Both men also view Iran’s weakened position as an opportunity for expanding the Abraham accords. This was the set of agreements normalising relations between Israel and several Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, which Trump brokered at the end of his first term.
Netanyahu has long eyed a US-backed deal with Saudi Arabia, and a smaller-scale declaration with Syria is reportedly now under discussion as well. But those deals can’t move forward while the war in Gaza is going.
Additional obstacles
However, the recurrent obstacles to a deal remain – and it’s unclear if the proposed terms will include guarantees to prevent Israel resuming the war after the 60-day period.
New issues have also arisen since the last round of talks that could create further challenges. Hamas is demanding a return to traditional humanitarian aid distribution in Gaza – or at least the replacement of the controversial US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
The GHF’s four distribution sites, located in militarised zones, replaced over 400 previously operating aid points, and more than 400 people have been killed while seeking aid near the sites, since May 26. More than 170 international non-governmental organisations and charities have called for the GHF to be shut down.
Israel’s military control over Gaza has also become further entrenched since the last ceasefire. More than 80% is thought to be covered by evacuation orders – and new orders for north Gaza and Gaza City were issued on June 29 and July 2 respectively.
Israeli officials have described the renewed operations as military pressure on Hamas to accept a ceasefire. But Netanyahu has also spoken openly about long-term military occupation of Gaza.
He recently stated that Israel would remain in “full security control of Gaza” even after the war. Even if a temporary ceasefire is agreed, the road ahead is strewn with difficulties in moving towards a long-lasting ceasefire or reaching an acceptable “day-after” agreement.
Still, the current moment offers an opportunity for a breakthrough. Trump has a renewed interest in getting to a ceasefire and Netanyahu has a rare political window to enter an agreement and get hostages home. Hamas, meanwhile, has been weakened, not only by Israel’s relentless military pounding, but by increasing disillusionment from the people of Gaza, who are desperate for an end to the war.
There is no shortage of reasons to end the war in Gaza. The only question is if Israel and Hamas have the will to do so.
Julie M. Norman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
View of the United Nations logo at a 2022 conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)
While the U.S. military’s strikes on Iran on June 21, 2025, are believed to have damaged the country’s critical nuclear infrastructure, no evidence has yet emerged showing the program to have been completely destroyed. In fact, an early U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency assessment surmised that the attack merely delayed Iran’s possible path to a nuclear weapon by less than six months. Further, Rafael Mariano Grossi, director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, stated that Iran may have moved its supply of enriched uranium ahead of the strikes, and assessed that Tehran could resume uranium enrichment “in a matter of months.”
As a scholar of nuclear nonproliferation, my research indicates that military strikes, such as the U.S. one against Iran, tend not to work. Diplomacy — involving broad and resolute international efforts — offers a more strategically effective way to preempt a country from obtaining a nuclear arsenal.
Yet neither military operation reliably or completely terminated the targeted program. Many experts of nuclear strategy believe that while the Israeli strike destroyed the Osirak complex, it likely accelerated Iraq’s fledgling nuclear program, increasing Saddam Hussein’s commitment to pursue a nuclear weapon.
In a similar vein, while Israeli airstrikes destroyed Syria’s nascent nuclear facility, evidence soon emerged that the country, under its former leader, Bashar Assad, may have continued its nuclear activities elsewhere.
Based on my appraisal of similar cases, the record shows that diplomacy has been a more consistently reliable strategy than military force for getting a targeted country to denuclearize.
The tactics involved in nuclear diplomacy include bilateral and multilateral engagement efforts and economic tools ranging from comprehensive sanctions to transformative aid and trade incentives. Travel and cultural sanctions – including bans on participating in international sporting and other events – can also contribute to the effectiveness of denuclearization diplomacy.
The high point of denuclearization diplomacy came in 1970, when the majority of the world signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The treaty obliged nonnuclear weapons states to refrain from pursuing them, and existing nuclear powers to share civilian nuclear power technology and work toward eventual nuclear weapons disarmament.
I’ve found that in a majority of cases since then – notably in Argentina, Brazil, Libya, South Africa, South Korea and Taiwan – diplomacy played a pivotal role in convincing nuclear-seeking nations to entirely and permanently relinquish their pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Case studies of nuclear diplomacy
In the cases of U.S. allies Argentina, Brazil, South Korea and Taiwan, the military option was off the table for Washington, which instead successfully used diplomatic pressure to compel these countries to discontinue their nuclear programs. This involved the imposition of significant economic and technological sanctions on Argentina and Brazil in the late-1970s, which substantially contributed to the denuclearization of South America. In the South Korea and Taiwan cases, the threat of economic sanctions was effectively coupled with the risk of losing U.S. military aid and security guarantees.
In the case of Iraq, the Hussein regime eventually did denuclearize in the 1990s, but not through a deal negotiated directly with the U.S. or the international community. Rather, Hussein’s decision was motivated by the damaging economic and technological costs of the U.N. sanctions and his desire to see them lifted after the first Gulf War.
In the 11 countries in which diplomacy was used to reverse nuclear proliferation, only in the cases of India and Pakistan did it fail to induce any nuclear reversal.
Consistent with the historical track record for diplomacy concerning other nuclear powers, Iran offers compelling evidence of what diplomacy can achieve in lieu of military force.
Diplomatic negotiations between the U.S, Iran and five leading powers yielded the landmark Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015. The so-called Iran deal involved multilateral diplomacy and a set of economic sanctions and incentives, and persuaded Iran to place stringent limits on its nuclear program for at least 10 years and ship tons of enriched uranium out of the country. A report from the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2016 confirmed that Iran had abided by the terms of the agreement. Consequently, the U.S., European Union and U.N. responded by lifting sanctions.
Representatives of the nations involved in signing the 2015 Iran nuclear deal pose for a group photo following talks in July 2015. AP Photo/Ronald Zak
Trump signaled quickly after the recent attack on Iran a willingness to engage in direct talks with Tehran. However, Iran may rebuff any agreement that effectively contains its nuclear program, opting instead for the intensified underground approach Iraq took after the 1981 Osirak attack.
Indeed, my research shows that combining military threats with diplomacy reduces the prospects of successfully reaching a disarmament agreement. Nations will be more reluctant to disarm when their negotiating counterpart adopts a threatening and combative posture, as it heightens their fear that disarmament will make it more vulnerable to future aggression from the opposing country.
A return to an Iran nuclear deal?
Successful denuclearization diplomacy with Iran will not be a panacea for Middle East stability; the U.S. will continue to harbor concerns about Iran’s military-related actions and relationships in the region.
It is, after all, unlikely that any U.S. administration could strike a deal with Tehran on nuclear policy that would simultaneously settle all outstanding issues and resolve decades of mutual acrimony.
But by signing and abiding to the terms of the JCPOA, Iran has demonstrated a willingness to cooperate on the nuclear issue in the past. Under the agreement, Iran accepted a highly limited and low-proliferation-risk nuclear program subject to intrusive inspections by the international community.
That arrangement was beneficial for regional stability and for buttressing the global norm against nuclear proliferation. A return to a JCPOA-type agreement would reinforce a diplomatic approach to relations with Iran and create an opening for progress with the country on other areas of concern.
Stephen Collins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Canadian researchers recently investigated this idea in a sample of 1,082 undergraduate psychology students. The students completed a survey, which included questions about how they perceived their diet influenced their sleep and dreams.
Some 40% of participants reported certain foods impacted their sleep, with 25% of the whole sample claiming certain foods worsened their sleep, and 20% reporting certain foods improved their sleep.
Only 5.5% of respondents believed what they ate affected the nature of their dreams. But many of these people thought sweets or dairy products (such as cheese) made their dreams more strange or disturbing and worsened their sleep.
In contrast, participants reported fruits, vegetables and herbal teas led to better sleep.
This study used self-reporting, meaning the results rely on the participants recalling and reporting information about their sleep and dreams accurately. This could have affected the results.
It’s also possible participants were already familiar with the notion that cheese causes nightmares, especially given they were psychology students, many of whom may have studied sleep and dreaming.
This awareness could have made them more likely to notice or perceive their sleep was disrupted after eating dairy. In other words, the idea cheese leads to nightmares may have acted like a self-fulfilling prophecy and results may overestimate the actual likelihood of strange dreams.
Nonetheless, these findings show some people perceive a connection between what they eat and how they dream.
While there’s no evidence to prove cheese causes nightmares, there is evidence that does explain a link.
The science behind cheese and nightmares
Humans are diurnal creatures, meaning our body is primed to be asleep at night and awake during the day. Eating cheese before bed means we’re challenging the body with food at a time when it really doesn’t want to be eating.
At night, our physiological systems are not primed to digest food. For example, it takes longer for food to move through our digestive tract at night compared with during the day.
If we eat close to going to sleep, our body has to process and digest the food while we’re sleeping. This is a bit like running through mud – we can do it, but it’s slow and inefficient.
If your body is processing and digesting food instead of focusing all its resources on sleep, this can affect your shut-eye. Research has shown eating close to bedtime reduces our sleep quality, particularly our time spent in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is the stage of sleep associated with vivid dreams.
People will have an even harder time digesting cheese at night if they’re lactose intolerant, which might mean they experience even greater impacts on their sleep. This follows what the Canadian researchers found in their study, with lactose intolerant participants reporting poorer sleep quality and more nightmares.
It’s important to note we might actually have vivid dreams or nightmares every night – what could change is whether we’re aware of the dreams and can remember them when we wake up.
Poor sleep quality often means we wake up more during the night. If we wake up during REM sleep, research shows we’re more likely to report vivid dreams or nightmares that we mightn’t even remember if we hadn’t woken up during them.
This is very relevant for the cheese and nightmares question. Put simply, eating before bed impacts our sleep quality, so we’re more likely to wake up during our nightmares and remember them.
Don’t panic – I’m not here to tell you to give up your cheesy evenings. But what we eat before bed can make a real difference to how well we sleep, so timing matters.
General sleep hygiene guidelines suggest avoiding meals at least two hours before bed. So even if you’re eating a very cheese-heavy meal, you have a window of time before bed to digest the meal and drift off to a nice peaceful sleep.
How about other dairy products?
Cheese isn’t the only dairy product which may influence our sleep. Most of us have heard about the benefits of having a warm glass of milk before bed.
Milk can be easier to digest than cheese. In fact, milk is a good choice in the evening, as it contains tryptophan, an amino acid that helps promote sleep.
Nonetheless, we still don’t want to be challenging our body with too much dairy before bed. Participants in the Canadian study did report nightmares after dairy, and milk close to bed might have contributed to this.
While it’s wise to steer clear of food (especially cheese) in the two hours before lights out, there’s no need to avoid cheese altogether. Enjoy that cheesy pasta or cheese board, just give your body time to digest before heading off to sleep. If you’re having a late night cheese craving, opt for something small. Your sleep (and your dreams) will thank you.
Charlotte Gupta does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
New research led by Viktoria Cologna at ETH Zurich in Switzerland may help to explain what’s going on. Using data from around the world, the study suggests simple exposure to extreme weather events does not affect people’s view of climate action – but linking those events to climate change can make a big difference.
Global opinion, global weather
The new study, published in Nature Climate Change, looked at the question of extreme weather and climate opinion using two global datasets.
The first is the Trust in Science and Science-related Populism (TISP) survey, which includes responses from more than 70,000 people in 68 countries. It measures public support for climate policies and the extent that people think climate change is behind increases in extreme weather.
The second dataset estimates how much of each country’s population has been affected each year by events such as droughts, floods, heatwaves and storms. These estimates are based on detailed models and historical climate records.
Public support for climate policies
The survey measured public support for climate policy by asking people how much they supported five specific actions to cut carbon emissions. These included raising carbon taxes, improving public transport, using more renewable energy, protecting forests and land, and taxing carbon-heavy foods.
Responses ranged from 1 (not at all) to 3 (very much). On average, support was fairly strong, with an average rating of 2.37 across the five policies. Support was especially high in parts of South Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania, but lower in countries such as Russia, Czechia and Ethiopia.
Exposure to extreme weather events
The study found most people around the world have experienced heatwaves and heavy rainfall in recent decades. Wildfires affected fewer people in many European and North American countries, but were more common in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Cyclones mostly impacted North America and Asia, while droughts affected large populations in Asia, Latin America and Africa. River flooding was widespread across most regions, except Oceania.
Do people in countries with higher exposure to extreme weather events show greater support for climate policies? This study found they don’t.
In most cases, living in a country where more people are exposed to disasters was not reflected in stronger support for climate action.
Wildfires were the only exception. Countries with more wildfire exposure showed slightly higher support, but this link disappeared once factors such as land size and overall climate belief were considered.
In short, just experiencing more disasters does not seem to translate into increased support for mitigation efforts.
Seeing the link between weather and climate change
In the global survey, people were asked how much they think climate change has increased the impact of extreme weather over recent decades. On average, responses were moderately high (3.8 out of 5) suggesting that many people do link recent weather events to climate change.
Such an attribution was especially strong in Latin America, but lower in parts of Africa (such as Congo and Ethiopia) and Northern Europe (such as Finland and Norway).
Crucially, people who more strongly believed climate change had worsened these events were also more likely to support climate policies. In fact, this belief mattered more for policy support than whether they had actually experienced the events firsthand.
Prior research shows less dramatic and chronic events like rainfall or temperature anomalies have less influence on public views than more acute hazards like floods or bushfires. Even then, the influence on beliefs and behaviour tends to be slow and limited.
This study shows climate impacts alone may not change minds. However, it also highlights what may affect public thinking: helping people recognise the link between climate change and extreme weather events.
In countries such as Australia, climate change makes up only about 1% of media coverage. What’s more, most of the coverage focuses on social or political aspects rather than scientific, ecological, or economic impacts.
Omid Ghasemi receives funding from the Australian Academy of Science. He was a member of the TISP consortium and a co-author of the dataset used in this study.
