March 29-30
- Erdogan’s bet
- “Hidden city” beneath pyramids?
- Ice-cold innovation
- … and much more.
⬇️ STARTER
Yet another Gaza journalist killed by Israel — Remember Hossam Shabat's final article
Hours before he was killed in an Israeli airstrike, 23-year-old journalist Hossam Shabat filed an article with Drop Site News describing Israel's scorched-earth campaign in his hometown of Beit Hanoun. His editor Sharif Abdel Kouddous shares his thoughts, and we share Shabat's final piece.
Hossam Shabat is dead. I am beyond rage and despair as I write these words. The Israeli military bombed the car of this 23-year-old freelance journalist on Monday morning as he was traveling in Beit Lahia, in Gaza. Videos fill my screen of his body lying on the street, carried to the hospital, grieved by his colleagues and loved ones. These are the kinds of tragic scenes Hossam himself would so often document for the world. He was an exemplary journalist: brave, tireless, and dedicated to telling the story of Palestinians in Gaza.
Hossam was one of a handful of reporters who remained in northern Gaza through Israel’s genocidal war. His ability to cover one of the most brutal military campaigns in recent history was almost beyond comprehension. He bore witness to untold death and suffering on an almost daily basis for 17 months. He was displaced over 20 times. He was often hungry. He buried many of his journalist colleagues. In November, he was wounded in an Israeli airstrike. I still can’t believe I am referring to him in the past tense. Israel obliterates the present.
When I contacted Hossam in November to ask him to write for Drop Site News, he was enthusiastic. “Greetings habibi. May God keep you. I am very happy to have this opportunity,” he wrote. “There are so many ideas, scenes, stories.”
His first dispatch for Drop Site was a searing account of a vicious mass expulsion campaign by the Israeli military in Beit Lahia that forced thousands of Palestinian families to flee one of the last remaining shelters in the besieged town:
Some of the wounded fell on the road with no hope of getting treatment. "I was walking with my sister in the street,” said Rahaf, 16. She and her sister were the sole survivors in their family of an earlier airstrike that killed 70 people. “Suddenly my sister fell due to the bombing. I saw blood pouring from her, but I couldn't do anything. I left her in the street, and no one pulled her out. I was screaming, but no one heard me."
His writing was lyrical and arresting. I struggled to translate and edit his pieces — to do them justice, to convey his emotive use of Arabic into something relatable in English. In the typical editorial see-saw back and forth of finalizing a piece, I would often return to him with clarifications and questions, asking him for additional details and direct quotes. He was always quick to respond despite his extraordinary circumstances.
In January, Hossam filed a piece about the three days between when the “ceasefire” deal was announced and when it was scheduled to be implemented, a period when Israel escalated its bombing campaign across Gaza:
They targeted the al-Falah school; they bombed an entire residential block in Jabaliya; they killed families, like the Alloush family, whose bodies have not yet been recovered and still lie under and over the rubble. The children I saw that night appeared happy but they were no longer living, their faces frozen in a mix of smiles and blood.
In early December, when writing a preamble to one of his articles, I asked him to confirm his age. “Hahaha. I’m young. 24,” he wrote. Then moments later he clarified: “Actually, I haven’t turned 24 yet. I’m 23.” [...]
— Read the full piece by Sharif Abdel Kouddous for Mada Masr, which also includes Hossam Shabat’s final article — now on Worldcrunch.🎲 OUR WEEKLY NEWS QUIZ
What do you remember from the news this week?
1. U.S. National Security officials were caught dissing which ally in a leaked chain of sensitive messages?
2. Russia and Ukraine have agreed to a naval ceasefire in which body of water?
3. Brazil’s Supreme Court has decided that which former president should stand trial on charges related to an alleged coup plot?
4. A strange spiral-shaped cloud graced northwestern European night skies. What is thought to have caused it?
Aliens, man / Global warming / A SpaceX rocket / Moon tornadoes
[Answers at the bottom of this newsletter]
#️⃣ TRENDING
🎭 5 CULTURE THINGS TO KNOW
• Oscar-winning Palestinian director released from Israeli detention after being assaulted. Hamdan Ballal, one of the directors of the Oscar-winning 2024 documentary No Other Land, was released from an Israeli police station in Kiryat Arba, the West Bank settlement after he was detained following clashes in the West Bank. Ballal’s lawyer said he had been “arbitrarily” held in police detention and beaten in custody by Israeli soldiers. Following his release, the director was moved to a hospital in Hebron, where he was treated for his injuries.
• Extensive Picasso exhibition opens in Hong Kong. “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia — A Conversation,” described as the most extensive exhibition of works by Pablo Picasso to open in Asia in decades, has launched at the M+ museum in Hong Kong. The exhibition, which will run until July 13, aims to offer a fresh perspective on Picasso’s legacy by featuring more than 60 of the Spanish painter and sculptor’s works dating from the late 1890s to the early 1970s, the alongside around 130 works by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists.
• Napster sold for $207 million over 20 years after shutting down. The music piracy platform turned streaming app Napster was sold to tech startup Infinite Reality for $207 million, more than two decades after it shut down over copyright violations lawsuits launched by the record industry and popular rock band Metallica. Infinite Reality said it hopes to transform Napster into a social music platform where artists can connect with fans and better monetize their work by selling digital and physical merchandise.
• Claims of “hidden city” beneath Egypt pyramids spark division among experts. A debate has erupted among Egyptologists after Italian researchers said they uncovered a vast underground network beneath the Pyramids of Giza thanks to radar images showing a hidden world of structures more than 610 meters (2,000 feet) beneath the surface. Other experts are not convinced, with some calling the claims “huge exaggeration” and saying the technology used isn’t able to penetrate that deep into the earth.
• São Paulo art museum unveils sprawling expansion after six years. The Museu de Arte de São Paulo has unveiled its much anticipated expansion that more than doubles the Brazilian facility’s total space, adding around 11,000 square meters to the campus and a 14-storey tower adjacent to the original building. The expansion adds five new galleries as well as new conservation laboratories, a restaurant and a café. The project took six years and $43 million, with a last phase including an underground tunnel connecting the tower to the original building set to be completed later this year.
💍❤️🔥 SMILE OF THE WEEK
Amid large-scale protests in Istanbul, with demonstrators calling for the release of opposition Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, one young man decided to propose to his girlfriend right in front of a riot police cordon. A video of the peculiarly-timed proposal soon went viral on TikTok.
📰 IN OTHER NEWS
🍛 At the kitchen table or in a restaurant, some people categorically refuse to share a dish, a few French fries or a dessert. But where does this aversion come from?
— LE FIGARO
📸 In partnership with the ZUMA photo agency, here is our selection of the top images for this week: from anti-Hamas protests in Gaza to the Pope's first public appearance since his hospitalization and cherry blossom photographers in Tokyo.
— WORLDCRUNCH
💍 In a world of fleeting relationships and endless options, choosing just one person for life might seem outdated — or even absurd. But for Alard Von Kittlitz, it’s exactly this all-in commitment that makes marriage one of the most meaningful, liberating and intimate experiences we can have.
— DIE ZEIT
🧃❄️ BRIGHT IDEA
Behold the world’s first self-chilling beverage can! After more than 500 prototypes, New Jersey-based deltaH Innovations has developed Cool>Can. Made from 100%-recyclable material, it requires no electricity to turn beverages from room temperature to ice-cold in under two minutes. Just press a button, and an internal reaction chills your drink of choice while a color-changing snowflake tells you when it’s ready to enjoy!
👓 WORLDCRUNCH MAGAZINE
Our weekly digital magazine is live — Check it out: full access for subscribers!
⏩ LOOKING AHEAD
• U.S. President Donald Trump’s 25% tariff on imported cars and light trucks is set to take effect on Wednesday. The United States could also sign a mineral deal with Ukraine next week — an agreement had been delayed after the heated dispute between the countries’ presidents in late February.
• Starting next week, Google will shift all development of its Android operating system to internal branches, effectively closing the public’s direct view into the live development process that had been accessible through the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
• The 18th edition of One World Romania, an international documentary and human rights film festival, will kick off in Bucharest on Friday. More than 50 documentary films, including seven Romanian feature films, will be screened over the 10-day event.
• The Islamic holy month of Ramadan ends on Sunday, coincidentally just hours after a partial solar eclipse visible from North America, Europe, Africa and Russia. Eid Mubarak!
News quiz answers:
1. Messages inadvertently shared with a journalist at The Atlantic revealed how U.S. National Security officials feel about European allies, whom they call in a leaked chain of Signal messages, including one from U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly reading “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading.”
2. The U.S. said it had brokered a localized naval ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia in the Black Sea.
3. Brazil’s Supreme Court decided to put the country’s former President Jair Bolsonaro on trial for allegedly conspiring to stage a coup after losing the 2022 presidential election. If convicted in court proceedings expected later this year, Bolsonaro could face 12 to 40 years in prison.
4. A spiral-shaped light phenomenon was observable over northern Europe earlier this week, is thought to have been caused by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket discharging fuel.
✍️ Newsletter by Worldcrunch
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*Photo: Imago/ZUMA