International Glance
Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, when asked to explain the apparent about-face that led him to advocate the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, quoted a beloved Israeli pop ballad. “What you can see from there, you can’t see from here,” he said, referring to the shift in perspective he had supposedly undergone since coming to power.
Although the 2005 Gaza disengagement was perhaps less a change of heart than one of strategy, as his senior adviser later admitted, the lyric became a byword of Israeli politics, an oft-cited reminder that perspective is everything.
Israeli-born Holocaust historian Omer Bartov invoked the same line when he was asked how he had come to view Israel’s ferocious assault on Gaza as a genocide. Living in the US, where he has spent more than three decades, he said, had given him the necessary distance to see the annihilation of Gaza for what it was. “I think it’s very hard to be dispassionate when you’re there,” he said.
Bartov did more than simply apply the word genocide to Israel’s actions: he shouted it from the establishment-media rooftops, making the case in a lengthy July 2025 essay in the New York Times titled: I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. (He had addressed some of the arguments in a Guardian essay the year prior.) Bartov’s declaration cost him several close relationships, he told me, even though subsequent events have not only validated his analysis but further demonstrated the lack of concern for Palestinian suffering that has become prevalent in Israeli society.
In recent months, European expressions of concern over the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have regularly hardened into outright condemnation. Last September, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, expressed horror and outrage at aid restrictions that she said created a “man-made famine” in Gaza. Brussels has inveighed against settler violence and land grabs in the West Bank, which undermine the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. Responding to the bombing of Lebanon following the US-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said: “Israel’s right to self-defence does not justify this destruction.”
The 13th Khartia Brigade has become one of the most visible and fastest-growing formations within Ukraine’s National Guard. What began as a volunteer unit defending Kharkiv in the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion has since expanded into a corps, operating along some of the most contested sections, including Bakhmut in 2023 and, more recently, the battles around Kupyansk, where it helped retake roughly 90 percent of the city.
Two U.S. Embassy officials died in a car crash on Sunday alongside one Mexican official and an officer in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. 
A senior State Department delegation traveled to Cuba on April 10 for talks with the government, a State Department official confirmed to USA TODAY. A senior State Department official also had a separate meeting with former Cuban leader Raul Castro's grandson during the visit, the person said.
On 8 April, Israel's military launched the psychopathically titled Operation Eternal Darkness against Lebanon, with predictably macabre results. In the span of a mere 10 minutes, Israel struck more than 100 sites across the country, killing more than 300 people and wounding at least 1,150.
The president of the Palestine Football Association (PFA), as well as two other officials from the organisation, have been denied visas to Canada for the annual Fifa Congress, which is being held in Vancouver on 30 April, The Guardian revealed on Friday.
