IDF continues destruction of Palestinian homes
France24, 6/1–Mohammed Al-Najjar, a 33-year-old Gazan, said Saturday he was "shocked" and feeling "lost" as he returned home, only to find much of Jabalia refugee camp in ruins after an Israeli offensive. "All the houses have been reduced to rubble," Najjar told AFP in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip. "You are lost, you do not know where exactly your house is in the middle of this massive destruction."
Israeli forces carried out a massive bombardment campaign in Jabalia in recent weeks, part of a fierce ground offensive in northern Gaza -- an area the military had previously said was out of the control of Hamas militants. "I was shocked by the extent of the destruction in the latest aggression on Jabalia camp," said Najjar. At least 36,379 Palestinians have been killed and 82,407 wounded in Israel’s war in Gaza, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.
Battle for Myanmar picks up steam
Foreign Affairs, 5/31–The conflict in Myanmar, now in its fourth year, has claimed thousands of civilian lives and displaced more than three million people. Since toppling the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021, the military junta under General Min Aung Hlaing has failed to consolidate its authority. Over the last seven months, the military has suffered a succession of humiliating defeats at the hands of opposition forces.
Myanmar is undergoing fragmentation: large parts of the country, including most of Myanmar’s international borders, are now under the dominion of various ethnic armed groups. These groups are expanding control of their ethnic homelands and building autonomous statelets…Many of these groups joined forces with ethnic armies that have been fighting the Myanmar state for decades. Violence has now engulfed much of the country, pitting regime forces against hundreds of resistance groups, from small units to organized militias equipped with modern light arms.
European clean energy demands blood minerals
Al Jazeera, 5/2–As the green revolution revs up, the European Union has signed a deal with Rwanda that will ensure a supply of precious minerals needed to build cleantech like solar panels and electric vehicles. What’s not to like? As the European Commission described it, after inking a Memorandum of Understanding back in February, the deal will “nurture sustainable and resilient value chains for critical raw materials.” But all is not as it seems. It turns out that Rwanda is a country that exports more than it mines. Vast amounts of minerals like coltan and gold are smuggled from the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo to Rwanda, where they enter global supply chains.
The racket has been extensively documented by United Nations experts reporting on the DRC war – a spillover from the Rwandan genocide, which has dragged on nearly three decades, the outside world largely ignorant of the widespread use of rape to subjugate enemies and the massacres that have killed a staggering six million people. The DRC says M23 rebels, who claim they are protecting local Tutsis from Hutu genocidaires in the resource-rich east, play an instrumental role in moving the goods over Lake Kivu.
War in Ukraine escalating
Sky News, 6/1–On Thursday, President Joe Biden partially lifted restrictions on how Ukraine can use military supplies sent by the US. "Russia regards all long-range weapons used by Ukraine as already being directly controlled by servicemen from NATO countries. This is no military assistance, this is participation in a war against us," Medvedev said." And such actions could well become a casus belli [an act that provokes a war]." He said it would be a "fatal mistake" on the part of the West to think that Russia was not ready to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine - and spoke of the potential to strike unnamed hostile countries with strategic nuclear weapons…A Putin-backed think tank also suggested on Thursday that Russia should consider a "demonstrative" nuclear blast to scare Ukraine from using Western weapons inside its territory.
