Angelina Jolie visits Egypt’s Rafah crossing that’s delivering aid to Gaza
Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing into Gaza, speaking with volunteers delivering aid to the enclave. The former special envoy for the UN refugee agency also met with Palestinians displaced by Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Belfast rallies for Palestine hunger strikers as memories of 1981 return
Activists take part in the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally as it makes its way along Royal Avenue to Donegall Place before reaching Belfast City Hall
On New Year’s Eve, as fireworks lit the Belfast sky, the city’s streets were abuzz — and not only in celebration.
Hundreds gathered in solidarity with activists from the Palestine Action group who are on hunger strikes in prison. Their chants echoed past murals that do not merely decorate the city, but testify to its troubled past.
Along the Falls Road, Irish republican murals sit beside Palestinian ones. The International Wall, once a rolling canvas of global struggles, has become known as the Palestinian wall. Poems by the late Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer, killed in an Israeli air strike in December 2023, run across its length. Images sent by Palestinian artists have been painted by local hands.
More recently, new words have appeared on Belfast’s famed walls. “Blessed are those who hunger for justice.” Painted alongside long-familiar images of Irish republican prisoners like Bobby Sands are new names now written into the city’s political conscience: the four pro-Palestinian activists currently on hunger strike in British prisons, their bodies weakening as the days stretch on.
“This is not a city that will ever accept any attempt to silence our voice or our right to protest or our right to stand up for human rights,” said Patricia McKeown, a trade union activist who spoke at the protest.
“These young people are being held unjustly and in ridiculous conditions – and they have taken the ultimate decision to express their views … and most particularly on what’s happening to people in Palestine – why would we not support that?” she asked.
