CrossFireArabia
Well-known English actor Michael Caine finally cuts through the silence, showing sympathy for the children of Gaza who are being starved to death due to the ongoing, crippling Israeli siege on the Strip.
“Feed the children of Gaza, no child should be starving,” he rebukes Israel.
https://x.com/andres20ad/status/1948757483477958735
CrossFireArabia
Rome dimmed the lights of the iconic Trevi Fountain for one hour Friday night in a symbolic call for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, following a city council resolution last month that was titled, “Rome will not remain silent.”
“Let’s stop the war in Gaza” was also projected onto the front facade of the historic Palazzo Poli, which is behind the fountain, in a symbolic demand for a ceasefire.
A group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered in front of the fountain and waved Palestinian flags in protest of what they described as genocide by Israel in Gaza.
The projected message referenced “war,” but demonstrators held signs that read: “What’s happening in Gaza is not a war, it’s genocide.”
Some chanted slogans accusing Israel of committing atrocities against Palestinians worse than those perpetrated by Nazi Germany against Jews during World War II.
They also criticized the US and the EU for being complicit in their silence.
The group shouted “Free Palestine”, “Stop the genocide” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
The demonstration drew attention from tourists, with some showing support with the pro-Palestinian group according to Anadolu.
CrossFireArabia
In a place that gazes over the horizons and links the sky with the sea, Ismael Abu Al Hattub was martyred. He wasn’t killed in battle but in a simple café on a Gaza beach. It was the place that he was planning to hold his photography exhibition, but failed to see the light.
This beach which he loved, wrote about and photographed under fire and siege, stamped his final existence and obituary.
He once saw a temporary retreat in the place snatched by the gray strikes made by Israeli raids. Abu Al Hattub saw the beach as mirroring the new disdain life has become…a platform for death, blood and mayhem.
He wasn’t merely a journalist but a witness, holding his camera, as if it was open to the world for a life stage in which reality had become a goal to strike. He led his visual project from the ruins of Gaza and made his picture image an “ambassador” to be narrated to the world.
At the height of the military strikes and bombing, with the homes brought to the ground, Abu Al Huttab used to document not only through his lens but by his heartbeat writing on World Press Day that “in Gaza the camera is targeted, the word is struck down and the vest is dammed by the thudding missiles.
These words were not poetic descriptions but a stark reality his body lived through. Last November 2024 he escaped from certain death while he was photographing the Al Ghafari Tower that was viciously struck.
He came back after a year of hardship and pain to continue what he started, to become a voice in the era of silence and the eye in the stage of blindness.
Between the skies and the sea
Between the tents, the debris and wreckage and between the displaced people on roads Abu Al Hattub collected his photographs refusing to tuck away his camera till the strange sounds of death.
And as a result, he sent his photos to be seen in a joint Palestinian platform exhibit in Los Angeles. However, this wasn’t an ordinary exhibition but an echo dangling on western walls narrating the heinous situation of Gaza.
“From the middle of Gaza under the airstrikes, displacement and starvation I was determined to hold this exhibition from afar to tell the story of our people who have no refuge but the beach,” he wrote.
He would say in every “image there is a soul” and the photos are able to defeat the walls and penetrate the thick international silence.
A dream buried in the sand
He was supposed to train, this week, digital security to a group of journalists in Gaza, he had a date with the interested generation of the future. However, his fate with death was sealed. It was a cruel moment by an even cruellest pretending-to-be master race.
His life passed before our eyes after his face was changed into a collective presence as the tent he was living in became his platform, the sea a sanctuary and the lens resistance.
Journalist Muthana Al Najjar wrote: “The owner of the tent exhibition in the middle of Los Angeles, ascended to the heavens after joining the martyrs after a raid on a makeshift café…he tried to show the Gaza tragedy to the world through an exhibition titled in between the sky and the sea and was made absent in an air strike on the beach he loved so much.”
He departed but his pictures remain, and the narrative is there for all to see. He added the youths of Gaza continue to dare to live despite all the odds stacked against them. The Israeli war machine will not win.
He is not the last number to be killed but one of 228 journalists Israeli warplanes targeted during this genocide. Their pens were broken, but their messages remain and whilst the photo lens has dropped in silence the picture will continue to echo.
What Abu Hattub presented was not only a painful picture but a stubborn visual language that doesn’t submit to the American-made bombs and missiles or the continuing siege. He realized that the camera was not objective but rather biased to the truth, justice and people.
Today as the smoke towers above the Gaza Sea, his words remain, his narratives fly over depicting that Gazans are determined to live and stay on their land in the face of extraordinary adversary.
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.
CrossFireArabia
As Israel’s continues its devastating war and relentless humanitarian blockade, the ancient Gaza Strip – once a radiant Mediterranean hub of commerce, culture, and religious coexistence – now faces a deeper erasure: not just from maps, but from the world’s collective memory.
A new exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, titled ‘Gaza’s Saved Treasures: 5,000 Years of History,’ seeks to resist that disappearance. Running from April to November this year, the show presents around 100 archaeological masterpieces that illuminate Gaza’s extraordinary legacy as a crossroads of civilizations – from the Bronze Age to modern times.
The exhibition is both a celebration and a lament: a tribute to Gaza’s millennia-old cultural wealth, and a sober reckoning with what has been lost to Israel’s deadly occupation.
Gaza’s strategic location has always made it a coveted prize for empires – Egyptian, Persian, Roman, and Ottoman – but it was also a channel for connection, where cultures and religions converged.
The exhibit – with amphorae, oil lamps, coins, statuettes, and mosaics on display – tells the story of Gaza as a vital Mediterranean port and cultural meeting point.
Its history – shaped by Canaanite, Egyptian, Philistine, Neo-Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, and Crusader influences – reveals a city that flourished at the heart of ancient trade and intellectual exchange.
Among the most striking items is a dazzling Byzantine mosaic from Jabaliya, part of an ecclesiastical complex reflecting Gaza’s early Christian heritage.
Nearby, amphorae once used in the wine trade testify to the city’s crucial role in Mediterranean commerce, while figurines blend Egyptian motifs with Hellenistic gods, echoing a world of syncretism and porous cultural boundaries.
Race against oblivion
Since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023, the territory’s cultural heritage has suffered catastrophic damage.
According to UNESCO, nearly 70 cultural sites have been destroyed or severely damaged, including the historic Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyry – one of the oldest active churches in the world.
Where once stood mosaics, temples, and centuries-old tombs, there are now craters and rubble due to Israel’s ongoing bombardment. In this context, the exhibition in Paris becomes something urgent and defiant: a safeguard for memory, a museum in exile.
Much of the exhibition’s content is drawn from a trove of over 500 artifacts housed since 2007 at Geneva’s Museum of Art and History, entrusted to Switzerland by the Palestinian National Authority for safekeeping.
Many of the works stem from Franco-Palestinian excavations launched in 1995, supplemented by pieces from private collections – some of which are being shown publicly for the first time.
The curators have taken care not to separate Gaza’s ancient grandeur from the present-day suffering inflicted by Israel.
One dedicated section of the exhibition uses satellite imagery and field reports to map the devastation inflicted on cultural heritage since 2023.
French, Swiss, and Palestinian scholars have contributed rare documentation – including early 20th-century photographs of Gaza – that provide a visual archive of what once was and what may never return.
The exhibition makes no attempt to hide the political context. It explicitly refers to the destruction as part of “Israel’s brutal genocide,” anchoring the cultural annihilation in a broader system of occupation, blockade, and war.
By doing so, the Paris exhibition challenges the silence often surrounding cultural loss in war zones, raising questions about the responsibilities of international institutions and the politics of preservation as reported in Anadolu.
