CrossFireArabia
Ofer Cassif writes
Hours after No Other Land won the academy awards, Israel occupation forces handed a demolition order for a school in Masafer Yatta.
Even Shakespeare couldn’t have written such a travesty of justice. Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, and elsewhere, deserve liberation, they deserve to live free from occupation in their own sovereign state.
CrossFireArabia
Israeli Army Radio has reported that personalities close to US President Donald Trump informed the Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister, Ron Dermer, that the US president had decided to cut off contact with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Army Radio explained that these acquaintances close to Trump informed Dermer that Netanyahu was manipulating the US president, stressing that what Trump hates most is being perceived as being manipulated.
The radio quoted an Israeli official as saying that Minister Dermer’s conversation with senior Republican officials, did not work because of his displayed arrogance.
This came hours after a report in the Israel Hayom newspaper asserting that the US president is “disappointed” with Netanyahu and intends to take “steps” in the Middle East “without waiting for him.”
Since the start of his new presidential term on January 20, 2025, Trump has offered diverse and unlimited support to the Netanyahu government, which has been waging a genocidal war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023.
However, the Israel Hayom daily quoted an unnamed sources as saying that “there is a decline in the personal relations and mutual disappointment between Netanyahu and Trump.”
The newspaper added that two senior sources close to Trump said, in closed conversations in recent days, that he has decided not to wait for Israel any longer and is moving forward with steps in the Middle East without “waiting for Netanyahu.”
The sources did not elaborate on the nature of the steps Trump intends to take unilaterally, but there is a complaint in Tel Aviv that Trump sometimes acts without coordination with Israel.
The most recent example is the ceasefire agreement reached by the United States and the Yemeni Houthi group, which does not include Israel and which Israel was unaware of before its announcement according to Al Jazeera.
CrossFireArabia
A recently rediscovered painting by 19th-century Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi Bey sold for £1 million ($1.3 million) at a London auction Tuesday, drawing strong interest from collectors and institutions.
Preparing Coffee, from 1881, resurfaced after more than a century in private European collections, known until recently only from a black-and-white photograph taken in the same year by renowned photographers Jean Pascal Sebah and Policarpe Joaillier.
The sale made it the highest-valued lot in an auction that saw 50 artworks sold in rapid succession.
It was acquired by an anonymous buyer through a phone bid.
First acquired around 1910 by Prince Sadiq Yadigarov, an art collector from Georgia, it passed to his son Archil, and then, around 1930, to a private collector in Vienna — related to Archil by marriage — where it remained by descent until 2008.
Since then, it has been held in another Austrian private collection until its recent emergence.
Set within a richly tiled, colonnaded interior — perhaps an imagined harem complex in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace — it depicts two young women preparing a ritual coffee.
The setting is fictional but constructed with exquisite attention to detail, a “sumptuous and jewel-like impression of luxe,” as Sotheby’s catalogue describes it.
Born into an elite Ottoman family, Hamdi Bey was sent to Paris in the early 1860s to study law but instead found his calling in painting and archaeology.
By adopting Western artistic technique to depict Eastern subjects, Hamdi Bey not only responded to the growing 19th-century market for Orientalist art but also used his deep understanding of Muslim culture to create nuanced, respectful portrayals of Ottoman life according to Anadolu.
