GAZA CITY: Recognition of a Palestinian state by Britain, Canada and Australia on Sunday drew sharply contrasting reactions, with Palestinians in Gaza hailing it as a sign of hope while Israelis voiced anger and concern.
In Gaza, many saw the recognition as an affirmation of their existence after nearly two years of war between Hamas and Israel.
“We shouldn’t just be numbers in the news,” said Salwa Mansour, 35, displaced from Rafah to Al-Mawasi, which the Israeli military has declared a humanitarian zone.
“This recognition shows that the world is finally starting to hear our voice and that in itself is a moral victory.
“Despite all the pain, death and massacres we’re living through, we cling to anything that brings even the smallest bit of hope,” she added.
Britain and Canada became the first members of the Group of Seven advanced economies to take the step to recognize a Palestinian state in a bid to pressure Israel to end the war in Gaza.
In an effort to seize Gaza City, the territory’s largest urban center, the Israeli military has recently intensified its air assaults and launched a major ground offensive.
So far, more than 550,000 people have fled the city and moved southward, the military said on Sunday.
On Sunday, at least 32 people were killed in Gaza City in Israeli strikes, according to the territory’s civil defense agency, a rescue force operating under Hamas authority.
Mohammed Abu Khousa, a resident of Deir el-Balah, said he hoped that other countries would also follow suit in recognizing a Palestinian state.
“When a country like Britain and Canada recognize us, it chips away at Israel’s legitimacy and gives our cause a new spark of hope,” he said.
“This could push more countries to recognize us, and hopefully bring an end to the war.”
‘Not enough’
But not all Palestinians were positive about the decision, with some expressing skepticism over its ultimate outcome.
Recognition alone “is not enough, because there are countries that have previously recognized Palestine. They recognized years ago, but it did not lead to any results,” said Mohammed Azzam, a resident of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
“On the contrary, every day the settlers’ attacks increase, the killing increases, the arrests increase, the raids and thefts increase, and the checkpoints fill the entire West Bank.
“They have cut off the West Bank, its cities and villages. Even if the European countries recognized (Palestine), in reality this does not help us at all,” he said.
Following the move by Britain, Canada and Australia, far-right Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir both called for the annexation of the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967, in contravention of international law.
Since the start of the Gaza war in October 2023, violence has soared in the West Bank, and Israel has expanded settlements throughout the Palestinian territory.
‘Bitterness’
In Jerusalem, Israelis saw the move as dangerous and premature.
“I don’t feel that a terrorism place like Gaza, where even their own people don’t get what they need, should be a country,” said Tamar Lomonosov, a resident of Beit Shemesh.
“They’re just trying to find a solution to kill and fight with Israel.”
Muriel Amar, a 62-year-old Franco-Israeli who was speaking ahead of France’s own planned recognition, warned that the move would ignore key realities, including the fate of hostages still held in Gaza.
“As long as they haven’t returned home, I don’t see how we can consider turning the page,” she said.
“It would also be a confirmation for terrorist groups like Hamas that they are in the right, and it would cause... bitterness on the Israeli side.”
The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
During their attack Palestinian militants also took 251 hostages, of which 47 still remain in Gaza, including 25 the Israeli military says are dead.
Since then Israel’s retaliatory military response has killed at least 65,283 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, figures which the United Nations finds reliable.
Gazans hail, Israelis condemn Western recognition of Palestinian state
https://arab.news/jc63y
Gazans hail, Israelis condemn Western recognition of Palestinian state
- In Gaza, many saw the recognition as an affirmation of their existence
- Israelis saw the move to recognize Palestinian statehood as “dangerous” and “premature”
A year after Assad fled, his victims struggle to heal
- A year ago, Mohammad Marwan found himself stumbling, barefoot and dazed, out of Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus as opposition forces pushing toward the capital threw open its doors to release the prisoners
- ‘We were in something like a state of death in Saydnaya ... Now we’ve come back to life’
HOMS, Syria: A year ago, Mohammad Marwan found himself stumbling, barefoot and dazed, out of Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus as opposition forces pushing toward the capital threw open its doors to release the prisoners.
Arrested in 2018 for fleeing compulsory military service, the father of three had cycled through four other lockups before landing in Saydnaya, a sprawling complex just north of Damascus that became synonymous with some of the worst atrocities committed under the rule of now-ousted President Bashar Assad.
He recalled guards waiting to welcome new prisoners with a gauntlet of beatings and electric shocks. “They said, ‘You have no rights here, and we’re not calling an ambulance unless we have a dead body,’” Marwan said.
His Dec. 8, 2024, homecoming to a house full of relatives and friends in his village in Homs province was joyful.
But in the year since then, he has struggled to overcome the physical and psychological effects of his six-year imprisonment. He suffered from chest pain and difficulty breathing that turned out to be the result of tuberculosis. He was beset by crippling anxiety and difficulty sleeping.
He’s now undergoing treatment for tuberculosis and attending therapy sessions at a center in Homs focused on rehabilitating former prisoners, and Marwan said his physical and mental situations have gradually improved.
“We were in something like a state of death” in Saydnaya, he said. “Now we’ve come back to life.”
Like Marwan, the country is struggling to heal a year after the Assad dynasty’s repressive 50-year reign came to an end following 14 years of civil war that left an estimated half a million people dead, millions more displaced, and the country battered and divided.
Hassan Abdul Ghani, spokesperson for the Syrian Ministry of Defense, said the opposition and its allies had launched a major organizational overhaul after Assad’s forces regained control of a number of areas in 2019 and 2020.
The offensive in November 2024 was not initially aimed at seizing Damascus but was meant to preempt an expected major offensive by Assad’s forces in opposition-held Idlib intending to “finish the Idlib file,” Abdul Ghani said.
Launching an attack on Aleppo “was a military solution to expand the radius of the battle and thus safeguard the liberated interior areas,” he said.
When the Syrian army’s defenses collapsed, the opposition pressed on, “taking advantage of every golden opportunity,” Abdul Ghani said.
Remnants of the civil war are everywhere. The Mines Advisory Group has reported that at least 590 people have been killed by land mines in Syria since Assad’s fall, including 167 children, putting the country on track to record the world’s highest land mine casualty rate in 2025.
The rebuilding that has taken place has largely been individual owners paying to fix their own damaged houses and businesses.
On the outskirts of Damascus, the once-vibrant Yarmouk Palestinian camp today largely resembles a moonscape. Taken over by a series of militant groups then bombarded by government planes, the camp was all but abandoned after 2018.
Since Assad’s fall, a steady stream of former residents have come back.
The most damaged areas remain largely deserted but on the main street leading into the camp, bit by bit, blasted-out walls have been replaced in the buildings that remain structurally sound. Shops have reopened and families have come back to their apartments. But any larger reconstruction initiative appears to still be far off.
“It’s been a year since the regime fell. I would hope they could remove the old destroyed houses and build towers,” said Maher Al-Homsi, who is fixing his damaged home to move back, although the area doesn’t even have a water connection.
His neighbor, Etab Al-Hawari, was willing to cut the new authorities some slack.
“They inherited an empty country — the banks are empty, the infrastructure was robbed, the homes were robbed,” she said.
Bassam Dimashqi, a dentist from Damascus, said of the country after Assad’s fall, “Of course it’s better, there’s freedom of some sort.”
He added: “The job of the state is to impose security, and once you impose security, everything else will come. The security situation is what encourages investors to come and do projects.”
The UN refugee agency reports that more than 1 million refugees and nearly 2 million internally displaced Syrians have returned to their homes since Assad’s fall.
Among them is Marwan, the former prisoner, who says the post-Assad situation in Syria is “far better” than before. But he is struggling economically.
Sometimes he picks up labor that pays only 50,000 or 60,000 Syrian pounds daily, the equivalent of about $5.
Once he finishes his tuberculosis treatment, he said, he plans to leave for Lebanon in search of better-paid work.
