Palestinian Olympian wore shirt showing bombed children at Opening Ceremony
Boxer Waseem Abu Sal, one of two flag-bearers for the Palestinian delegation during yesterday’s opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, wore a shirt with embroidered images of fighter jets dropping missiles over children playing sport.
“This shirt represents the current image in Palestine,” Abu Sal told AFP today.
“The children who are martyred and die under the rubble, children whose parents are martyred and are left alone without food or water,” said the 20-year-old, who lives in the occupied West Bank and is unable to train with his Cairo-based coach, a Palestinian from Gaza who cannot travel to him due to Israeli restrictions.
Jibril Rajoub, president of the Palestine Olympic Committee, told the news agency the team had checked with the local organising committee of the Paris Olympics to see if Abu Sal’s shirt contravened Olympic regulations.
“It’s a message of peace. It’s a message to attract attention,” he said. “This is antiwar, against killing. This abides with the Olympic Charter.” He added, “We presented it, they approved it.”
The Palestine Olympic Committee wrote to the International Olympic Committee last week asking for a ban on Israeli athletes at the Paris Olympics, which has been rejected.
Rajoub said the Palestinian team intended to use the Paris Olympics to draw attention to the suffering of civilians in Gaza.
Indonesia says need for sustainable peace in Gaza urgent
Retno Marsudi, the foreign minister of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, has said the need for sustainable peace was urgent. Speaking on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum in Laos, Retno also said international law should be applied to all parties involved.
“We cannot continue closing our eyes to see the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza,” Retno said.
Following his comments, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States was “working intensely every single day” to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and find a path to more enduring peace and security.
Stop sending more bombs, ceasefire will happen...
‘Ceasefire has to happen now’: EU’s Borrell
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has repeated his call for a ceasefire in Gaza, after an Israeli attack on a field hospital in Khan Younis reportedly killed 30 people.
“Yet another attack on a school used as a shelter for internal displaced people in Khan Younis,” he said on X. “At the same time an already very fragile population is asked to relocate again and again, with no end in sight,” the diplomat added.
He concluded, “Ceasefire has to happen now. International Humanitarian Law has to be respected. Humanitarian assistance to civilians needs to be delivered at scale.”
Do something, it's time for sanctions. Clearly you repeating a ceasefire has to happen after each massacre isn't working.
Ceasefire talks to resume in Italy on Sunday
Some sources have been speaking to the Israeli media saying that Israel could be headed for a crisis, rather than some sort of breakthrough, in these negotiations.
The say that Netanyahu is taking a big gamble here taking a much harder and tougher stance in these negotiations.
Just three weeks ago, Netanyahu himself released a list of four nonnegotiable items going into these talks and it’s something that mediators behind the scenes have been saying was deterring these negotiations, something that were nonstarters
for the Israelis so there was no room really for negotiations.
So some sources are saying that they are trying to find a pathway forward for the talks as a whole, for the war, and for a ceasefire that is longer than what just it is this deal that’s on the table because it seems that there are a lot of gaps that cannot be bridged right now.
