Refugees and Displaced Persons

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      ‘Notes on Displacement’ Review: Seeking a Fresh Start in Europe

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      The artist and director Khaled Jarrar accompanies a group of people from Syria on their way to Germany in this documentary.As its title implies, “Notes on Displacement” is more of a scattered assemblage of scenes than a polished documentary. It follows the director, the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar, over travels from Greece to Germany — by boat, bus, train and frequently by foot — as he accompanies a group of refugees from Syria seeking a fresh start in Europe.Nadira, the matriarch of the main family in the film, was born in Nazareth in 1936, and Mona, her now-adult daughter, was born in a refugee camp for displaced Palestinians in Damascus. Part of what Jarrar aims to show is the psychology — and absurdity — of being uprooted in two ways. (“When you get a German passport,” Jarrar tells Nadira near the end, “you can visit Palestine.”)Jarrar, credited with the cinematography and sound, trails his subjects from camp to camp. (“Our dream,” one person says of the twists and turns, “has become to know where we are.”) Although the director occasionally identifies himself as an artist or insists to an authority figure that he has a right to continue filming, there are some points when he needed or chose to keep his camera hidden from view.It is clear that this rudimentary setup means that a lot of the trek was lost. Many night scenes are barely legible, and there are still other moments when Jarrar, on the fly, appears to have been more concerned with recording sound than image. But this hectic, disorienting style is surely part of the message, given that the filmmaker pointedly saves basic biographical information for the closing titles. In its form, “Notes on Displacement” mirrors the terrifying, dangerous journey it chronicles.Notes on DisplacementIn Arabic, with subtitles. Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Israel-Hezbollah Cease-Fire: What to Know

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      Under the agreement, Israel will gradually withdraw its forces from Lebanon over the next 60 days, and Hezbollah will not entrench itself near the Israeli border.A cease-fire meant to end the deadliest war in decades between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah officially took effect early Wednesday, less than a day after President Biden announced the deal and Israel approved its terms.Thousands of Lebanese began to return to their homes in the first hours of the cease-fire. The fighting has killed thousands in Lebanon and around 100 Israeli civilians and soldiers. The conflict has also displaced about one million people in Lebanon, in addition to doing vast physical damage there, and about 60,000 people in Israel.Lebanon’s government agreed on Wednesday morning to the deal. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed it on Tuesday night and argued that a truce would allow Israel to rebuild its weapon stockpiles while it works to isolate Hamas, the Hezbollah ally that Israel is fighting in Gaza.Here’s what you need to know:A 60-day truceHow will it be enforced?What are the obstacles to a permanent deal?Why did the sides agree to stop fighting?How did we get here?A 60-day truceThe agreement, mediated by American and French diplomats, calls for Israel and Hezbollah to observe a 60-day truce.During that period, Israel would withdraw its forces gradually from southern Lebanon.Hezbollah forces would move north away from the Israeli border and the Lebanese military will send more troops to Lebanon’s south.The withdrawals would effectively create a buffer zone between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, along the Israeli border.If the truce holds though the 60-day period, negotiators hope the agreement will become permanent.How will it be enforced?Under the terms of the deal, a U.N. peacekeeping force, along with the Lebanese Army, will keep the peace in the border zone, as envisioned in a 2006 United Nations Security Council resolution that ended the previous Israel-Hezbollah war but that was never fully carried out.The cease-fire will be overseen by several countries, including the United States and France, as well as by the United Nations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Loss and Damage Fund Is Taking Shape at COP Climate Talks

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      The U.N. climate summit in Azerbaijan has cleared the for way aid to flow when lower-income countries are hit.A long-awaited fund designed to help lower-income countries respond to natural disasters is finally taking shape at the U.N. climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.Wealthy nations agreed to create the fund at the 2022 climate summit in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, after decades of resistance. Last year, a group of nations, including the United States and the European Union, made the first financial commitments.Now, the fund has a leader and is looking to start distributing money within the next year.Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, who has Senegalese and American citizenship and has held roles at financial firms and at development banks, started this month as the inaugural executive director of the initiative, which is formally known as the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage.At this year’s climate summit, known as COP29, formal agreements were signed that will allow the fund to begin formally receiving the money that has been pledged and to start distributing it soon. The fund is being managed by the United Nations, and the World Bank is serving as a financial trustee.Sweden this month became the latest country to make a pledge, with its $19 million contribution bringing total commitments to around $720 million.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israel Strikes Humanitarian Zone in Gaza

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      The Israeli military said it had been targeting a loaded weapons launcher in the area, where thousands of displaced people are sheltering in a tent camp.The moment a projectile hit the ground in Al Mawasi, southern Gaza, as filmed by a local videographer on Wednesday.Yousef Hamada, via StoryfulThe Israeli military has bombed a densely populated tent encampment in southern Gaza designated as a humanitarian zone for thousands of displaced Palestinians, saying the airstrike targeted a loaded weapons launcher in the area.The Palestinian news agency Wafa and a paramedic based at a medical center where the wounded were taken said that at least one person had been killed in the airstrike on the zone, called Al-Mawasi, which took place on Wednesday. Wafa reported that the victim was a child and that more than 20 other people had been injured.The Israeli military said that it had targeted the launcher because it posed a threat to Israeli civilians but did not give further details or say what type of weapons the launcher was carrying. The military added that it had issued advanced warnings to civilians in the area to evacuate.The Israeli military has carried out a number of strikes on Al-Mawasi in the past and has accused Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, of systematically using the humanitarian zone and civilian infrastructure to attack Israelis.Video on social media, verified by The New York Times, captured a projectile and a large explosion. The projectile hits the ground with a deafening boom, and people can be seen running away as a cloud of dust flies into the sky.Other video from the scene captured the aftermath of the explosion, showing a large crater and damage to a number of tents.The international aid group Doctors Without Borders said that one of its clinics, which was about 250 yards from where the strike hit, was also damaged and medical equipment destroyed.Gabriella Bianchi, a spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders, said that the aid group had not received any direct warning that a blast was imminent. Residents who received alerts on their phones from the Israeli military did inform the staff, Ms. Bianchi said, but that left only a few minutes to evacuate personnel and hundreds of patients.In a statement on social media, Doctors Without Borders condemned the attack, saying, “The use of heavy weapons in zones declared by Israeli authorities as safe, is further proof of the blatant disregard for Palestinian lives and humanitarian law.” More

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      Israel’s Military Announces Small Expansion of Gaza Humanitarian Zone

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      The move comes just before a Biden administration deadline for Israel to deliver more aid to the enclave or risk a cutoff of military supplies.Israel’s military said on Monday that it had expanded a humanitarian zone it created in southern Gaza. The move came just before the expiry of a Biden administration deadline for Israel to deliver more aid to the enclave or risk a cutoff of military supplies.In a statement, the Israeli military said that the zone would now include field hospitals; tent compounds; shelter supplies; and provisions of food, water, medicine and medical equipment, though it did not specify whether any new additions had been made to the resources already present. The military provided a map showing that nine areas had been added to the zone.Aid agencies have said that supplies are desperately needed to offset the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, especially in the north, where Israel has stepped up military operations against the militant group Hamas.The Israeli military’s announcement came as the 30-day deadline set on Oct. 13 by the Biden administration is set to expire. In one of the starkest American warnings since the war began, the administration said that failure to provide more aid to Gaza’s 2.2 million residents before that deadline “may have implications for U.S. policy,” including on the provision of the military assistance upon which Israel depends.The White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday that the United States would this week evaluate “what kind of progress” Israel had made on allowing aid into Gaza. Speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Mr. Sullivan said President Biden would then “make judgments about what we do in response.”Humanitarian supplies crossing into the Gaza Strip on Monday. Aid agencies have said that help is desperately needed to offset the humanitarian crisis in the enclave.Amir Levy/Getty ImagesIt remains unclear whether the expansion announced by Israel’s military would lead to any improvement in conditions inside the humanitarian zone, also known as Al-Mawasi — a coastal area of southern Gaza that was sparsely populated before the war but is now overcrowded with displaced families. The area, designated as safe for civilians by Israel’s military earlier this year, has frequently been damaged by Israeli strikes and lacks sufficient medical services. Israel’s military has said that its strikes target Hamas militants and that it takes steps to avoid civilian casualties.Israel has since issued evacuation orders that affected parts of the humanitarian zone, effectively shrinking the already overcrowded area by more than a fifth. Israel has repeatedly ordered Palestinians in other areas of Gaza to evacuate to the humanitarian zone, despite protests from aid groups that the area lacks adequate shelter, water, food, sanitation or health care. The Biden administration’s deadline is set to expire just days after a United Nations-backed panel warned that famine was imminent in the northern Gaza Strip and that action was needed “within days, not weeks” to alleviate the suffering in the enclave.Myra Noveck More

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      Rohingya Refugees Are Stranded at Sea for Days as Residents Reject Them

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      Residents of a town in western Indonesia shared food with the refugees but declined to host them, leaving them stuck on a boat miles from shore.Rohingya refugees have been barred entry to an Indonesian town because of unrest in other nearby towns that welcomed others, according to a community leader in Aceh Province.Hotli Simanjuntak/EPA, via ShutterstockA boat carrying about 140 Rohingya refugees has been stranded miles off the coast of Indonesia for over a week, banned from arriving on land as Indonesian communities increasingly shun Rohingya refugees arriving by sea.Near the boat, residents of a town in Aceh Province had been working with the United Nations’ refugee agency to provide food and water to the stranded group, said Muhammad Jabal, the chairman of the fisheries association in the South Aceh region. The residents were unwilling to host the group on land because of unrest that Mr. Jabal said was happening in nearby towns that had welcomed other refugees.“They’ve caused disturbances: for example, littering, theft and various security and safety issues,” Mr. Jabal said in a phone interview. “As a community, we request that, if possible, the boat not stay in our area.” He added that he did not know what should be done about the refugees.The impasse follows a recent surge in the number of Rohingya refugees arriving by boat in Indonesia, which has hosted thousands of them before. Last year, a wave of rejections began, prompted in part by misinformation about the Rohingya on social media, said Murizal Hamzah, an Aceh resident and writer of two books about Rohingya.Tiy Chung, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency, said in an emailed statement that the agency was discussing the situation with the authorities on the ground. “We hope to get people disembarked to safety,” he said.The Rohingya people, who are mostly Muslim, are one of the most persecuted ethnic groups in the world. About a million of them have been displaced from Myanmar, many of them after the Rohingya genocide of 2017, forced to flee for safety and livelihoods, along with access to education.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What if Trump Wins Like This?

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      If Donald Trump wins, the people who voted for him would have a range of reasons for putting him in office. There are a lot of potential Trump voters who don’t like him that much, or who really like only parts of his personality or platform and tolerate the rest.There are probably also those who have their own understanding of what they’re getting, possibly rooted in the way they felt about the Trump administration or feel about the Biden one. Some of this could be summarized by how Brian Kemp, the Georgia governor, pitched it recently: “Look, you may not like Donald Trump personally, but you’ll like his policies a lot better than Kamala Harris’s. It’s a business decision.”But how Mr. Trump understands that decision could be different. If he wins like this, how it’s been, how grim he’s taken things across the last two years but especially lately, his explanation for the victory — and the consequences of that reasoning — might be different and darker than even many of the people who voted for him wanted.The way he’s talked about towns like Springfield, Ohio, and the Haitians who officials have said are there legally to work resembles deeply the rhythms of the 2016 campaign: grim conflation of real and fake problems, real people caught up in the gears of awful scrutiny and abuse, the building pressure on politicians and people often in very normal and modest circumstances, and Mr. Trump weaving everything into a fable to prove that he was right.In his campaign speeches, intermixed with the jokes and riffs, Mr. Trump often talks about political retribution, the threat of World War III, the ruin that the country’s become. In just one speech, he talked about how he would “liberate” Wisconsin from an “invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs and vicious gang members,” and about how immigrant gangs had “occupied” “hundreds” of towns and cities across the Midwest, leaving law enforcement “petrified.”Mr. Trump seems to have twisted the reason that programs like Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole exist — for instance, Haiti has been deemed too unstable and dangerous to return to — into a reason for the programs not to exist. “So we have travel warnings,” he said. “‘Don’t go here, don’t go there, don’t go to the various countries’ and yet she’s taking in the worst of those people, the killers, the jailbirds, all of the worst of the people, she’s taking them in.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lore Segal, Mordant Memoirist of Émigré Life, Dies at 96

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      One of thousands of Jewish children transported to England at the dawn of World War II, she explored themes of displacement with penetrating wit in novel-memoirs like “Other People’s Houses.”Lore Segal, a virtuosic and witty author of autobiographical novels of her life as a young Jewish Viennese refugee in England and as an émigré in America, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.Her daughter Beatrice Segal announced her death.On Dec. 10, 1938, 500 Jewish children boarded a train in Vienna as part of the British-organized Kindertransport, as it was known, that would deliver them from Nazi-occupied territory to foster families in England. Ms. Segal, age 10, was registered as No. 152, the pampered only child of comfortably middle-class parents.She would go on to live with four families in seven years, including a pair of pious, garden-and-house-proud sisters straight out of a Barbara Pym novel whose influence would make Ms. Segal, as she wrote later, a temporary snob and an Anglophile forever.The writer at age 11. A year earlier, she was one of 500 Jewish children sent to Vienna as part of the British-organized Kindertransport.via Segal familyHer parents followed her there in 1939, entering the country on domestic servant visas, which was the only route available to them. Her mother, a skilled homemaker, would rise to accept that role. But it would break her father, a former accountant, who died after a series of strokes.Ms. Segal, with the adaptability and callousness of youth, along with her innate sense of the absurd and the detachment of a born writer, fared better. After settling in New York, she found her métier by telling tales of her exile.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More