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Demonstrators around the world have rallied to mark the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People condemning Israel’s war on Gaza and calling for a permanent ceasefire.

Protests were held on Wednesday in Manila, Tunis, Tehran, Karachi, Beirut, Harare, Tokyo, Stockholm, London, Johannesburg, Quezon City, Milan and elsewhere.

The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People is observed on November 29 each year to mark the anniversary of Resolution 181, when the UN General Assembly on this day in 1947 adopted a resolution to partition Palestine into two states.

Israel launched a massive military campaign in the Gaza Strip after Palestinian group Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7, killing about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials.

The aerial and ground offensive on the tiny coastal enclave has since killed some 15,000 people, including 6,150 children and 4,000 women, according to Palestinian health authorities.

On Thursday, mediator Qatar said Israel and Hamas had agreed to extend a fragile truce that started on November 24 for another day.

Colombo, Sri Lanka – On most days, the Dolci Falasteen restaurant in Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo is quiet.

Located on a main road in a busy neighbourhood, the eatery is an escape from the busy mood of the city. Traditional Arabic lanterns cast a warm glow over its cosy dining area.

But on a Sunday afternoon, seven weeks after Israel launched its ruthless assault on Gaza, the restaurant that specialises in Palestinian cuisine is bustling with young entrepreneurs. They have united for a common cause: to raise funds for Palestine.

Aisha Altaf, a 24-year-old entrepreneur who runs a cosmetics business, is behind the fundraiser. The LURE Foundation, which she established recently, had offered other businesses a chance to put up stalls at the fundraiser and donate at least 10 percent of their proceeds to Gaza. Most vendors donated their whole income.

“After constantly seeing graphic content of what’s happening to the people in Gaza, I felt immense guilt for having the most basic things like sleeping on a bed, having water, and hot meals,” Altaf told Al Jazeera.

“This is most definitely a genocide, and whoever cannot see it is simply choosing to ignore all the facts.”

‘We feel helpless’

LURE Foundation has partnered with the Africa Muslims Agency, a humanitarian organisation set up in 1987, that will use the money to supply aid to Gaza. So far, they have received more than 2.1 million Sri Lankan rupees ($6,400) in donations and from the fundraiser.

“We plan to provide hot meals for the helpless victims. As winter is approaching, we are also providing winter jackets for children, especially those that are displaced and sleeping on the street,” Altaf said.

At the event, 14-year-old Mumina Hilmy, clad in a black cloak with red and green stripes, is running her own stall with her mother’s help. She is selling bracelets and key tags that she crocheted with the colours of the Palestinian flag.

“I made these during my free time and recess at school,” Hilmy told Al Jazeera.

Miquelaa Fernando, 25, who bought a bracelet, said she is happy to support a bigger cause.

“We feel helpless when so many bigger organisations and governments haven’t done anything to help other than the ceasefire [in Gaza]. By coming here, I felt this is something I could do to show some form of support,” she said.

For entrepreneurs and visitors, the fundraiser — cosmetics, food, perfumes, toys and stationery were on sale — was a symbol of solidarity with Palestine.

Sajida Shabir, a 26-year-old restaurateur, sold home-made food like chicken rolls, cookies, chilli paste and mayonnaise under her brand Hungryislander’s Kitchen. Her mother and sister were there to support her.

“I’ve donated through other platforms earlier. But rather than just donating money, I’m putting in my effort here through sales. So it makes me feel good about it,” she said.

Umar Farook, 56, who visited the stalls, said he would support Palestine whenever he could.

“Palestinians have the right to live in their own country. The international community must make sure that happens. Palestine will win,” he said.

Sri Lanka’s stance on the conflict

When Sri Lanka was under British rule, the then-Chief Justice Sir Alexander Johnston had proposed to establish a Jewish settlement in the island, then known as Ceylon. But the proposal was not successful, according to a paper published by the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies, an Israeli think tank, in 2021.

Since gaining independence in 1948, Sri Lanka established relations with both Israel and Palestine and has called for a two-state solution.

For three decades, Sri Lanka, a predominantly Buddhist nation, was at war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a group that fought for a separate state for Tamils in the northern and eastern parts of the country.

Uditha Devapriya, an international relations analyst, said Sinhalese nationalist groups who believe Sri Lanka is the chosen land for Buddhists have been sympathetic with the similar notions that Zionism has held with regards to Israel as the promised land for Jews.

But these groups, which have opposed international calls to probe alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka, see double standards in Western powers allowing Israel to get away with the mass killings in Gaza.

“Now Sinhala nationalists are using the Gaza Strip tragedy to show the hypocrisy of the Western powers,” Devapriya, chief analyst of international relations at Colombo-based think tank Factum, told Al Jazeera.

“It’s a perfect opportunity for them to reflect on how the West treated Sri Lanka during the war while showing favourable treatment to Israel.”

For several years, countries such as the United States that staunchly support Israel have backed United Nations resolutions calling for probes into alleged war crimes committed during Sri Lanka’s war.

Earlier this month, President Ranil Wickremesinghe accused the West of double standards. “What applies to us must also apply in Gaza,” he had said.

Meanwhile, many Sri Lankan Tamils see parallels between Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza — in which nearly 15,000 people have been killed — and the final stages of the civil war during which the Sri Lankan government allegedly committed war crimes. The government denies the claims.

“The aggression on Gaza should be seen as similar to the killing of Tamils at Mullivaikal [where the final battle of the war occurred],” Sri Prakas, joint secretary for the Mass Movement for Social Justice said in a statement.

Protests in solidarity with Palestine

Dozens of demonstrations have taken place in Sri Lanka opposing Israel’s Gaza assault, which followed an attack by Hamas fighters on southern Israel on October 7, in which 1,200 people were killed. At protests across Sri Lanka, people have marched with placards saying “Stop the Genocide” and “End Israeli Apartheid”.

A continuing truce has seen dozens of Palestinian prisoners and Israeli captives released over the past six days, as Palestinians in Gaza return to their bombed homes and devastated cities.

 

In the northern city of Jaffna, once a focal point of Sri Lanka’s civil war, a group of Tamils held a protest calling for an end to the attacks.

Pro-Palestinian protesters were also there in their hundreds at a demonstration in Colombo, attended by leaders of the Buddhist, Christian, Muslim and Hindu faiths.

Father Lionel Peiris, who was part of a fact-finding mission sent by the World Council of Churches to Palestine during the first Intifada in the late 1980s, also protested.

“When people are being slaughtered, and when their land and houses are being taken, look at it as humans. Feel sadness. Feel sorrow and anger. You can’t let that happen,” Peiris told Al Jazeera.

“[Benjamin] Netanyahu’s government has completely dehumanised Palestinians. This can’t go on.”

Tassy Dahlan, an educational consultant, attended at least five protests in support of Palestine, including ones opposite the US embassy and the UN Compound in Colombo.

“There are Muslim, Christian and Jewish children who have been killed. Their lives have been snapped away because of the political agendas of some countries who are turning a blind eye to humanity,” Dahlan told Al Jazeera.

People have laid flowers, lit candles, tied ribbons and posted notes of solidarity at a memorial at the Palestine embassy in Colombo.

Meanwhile, Melani Gunathilaka, a civil rights activist, has been battling disinformation about the conflict on social media.

“Groups with money and power dictate the narratives. That’s why I try to share verified information, and read the research done on these topics by experts, to set the record straight,” Gunathilaka told Al Jazeera.

Back at the Dolci Falasteen restaurant, as the fundraiser drew to a close, Altaf admitted feeling a “little less helpless” – but then also expressed hope.

“Let us embrace unity, collaboration and empathy. Together, we have the power to build a better future for all. Every action we take has a ripple effect, impacting lives beyond our own borders,” she said.

Ten Israeli women and children and four Thai nationals held captive in Gaza were freed by Hamas on Wednesday, after which Israel released another 30 Palestinian women and child prisoners.

It was the sixth and latest exchange of captives under a temporary ceasefire agreement in the Gaza war.

Two Russian-Israeli women were also freed by Hamas in an earlier release.

The Palestinians released from Israeli jails included 16 minors and 14 women. Over the years, Israel has imprisoned thousands of Palestinians, many held in administrative detention without charge.

Among the freed Palestinians was prominent activist Ahed Tamimi. The 22-year-old Palestinian icon was arrested during Israeli raids in the occupied West Bank on November 6.

On Friday, Israel and Hamas agreed to a four-day temporary truce and captive exchange. This was extended for two days late on Monday and extended for a second time early on Thursday morning.

Since Friday, at least 74 captives from Israel and 210 Palestinians have been released. Further prisoner exchanges are expected to take place.

On October 7, Israel launched a massive military campaign in the Gaza Strip following a cross-border attack by Hamas which killed 1,200 people.

Israeli attacks have since killed at least 15,000 Palestinians, including 6,150 children and 4,000 women, in Gaza.

The North American wolverine will receive long-delayed federal protections under a Biden administration proposal released on Wednesday in response to scientists warning that climate change will likely melt away the rare species’ snowy mountain refuges.

Across most of the United States, wolverines were wiped out by the early 1900s from unregulated trapping and poisoning campaigns. About 300 surviving animals in the contiguous US live in fragmented, isolated groups at high elevations.

In the coming decades, warming temperatures are expected to shrink the mountain snowpack wolverines rely on to dig dens where they birth and raise their young.

The decision Wednesday by the US Fish and Wildlife Service follows more than two decades of disputes over the risks of climate change, and threats to the long-term survival of the elusive species.

The animals resemble a small bear and are the world’s largest species of terrestrial weasels. They are sometimes called “mountain devils” for their ability to thrive in harsh alpine environments.

Protections were rejected under former President Donald Trump. A federal judge in 2022 ordered the administration of President Joe Biden to make a final decision this week on whether to seek protections.

In Montana, Republican lawmakers urged the Biden administration to delay its decision, claiming the scientists’ estimates were not accurate enough to make a fair call about the dangers faced by wolverines. The lawmakers, led by hard-right conservative Representative Matt Rosendale, warned that protections could lead to future restrictions on activities allowed in wolverine habitats, including snowmobiling and skiing.

In September, government scientists conceded some uncertainty about how quickly mountain snowpacks could melt in areas with wolverines. But they said habitat loss due to climate change — combined with other problems such as increased development like houses and roads — will likely harm wolverine populations in decades to come.

“The best available information suggests that habitat loss as a result of climate change and other stressors are likely to impact the viability of wolverines in the contiguous US through the remainder of this century,” they concluded.

The scientists added that some of those losses could be offset if wolverines are able to recolonise areas such as California’s Sierra Nevada and Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

Environmentalists argued in a 2020 lawsuit against the Fish and Wildlife Service that wolverines face localised extinction from climate change, habitat fragmentation and low genetic diversity.

Wolverine populations that are still breeding live in remote areas of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington state. In recent years, individual animals have been documented in California, Utah, Colorado and Oregon.

The wildlife service received a petition to protect wolverines in 2000 and the agency recommended protections in 2010. The Obama administration proposed protections and later sought to withdraw them but was blocked by a federal judge who said in 2016 that the snow-dependent animals were “squarely in the path of climate change.”

Protections were rejected in 2020 under Trump, based on research suggesting the animals’ prevalence was expanding, not contracting. Federal wildlife officials at the time predicted that despite warming temperatures, enough snow would persist at high elevations for wolverines to den in mountain snowfields each spring.

They reversed course in a revised analysis published in September that said wolverines were “less secure than we described”.

The animals need immense expanses of wildland to survive, with home ranges for adult male wolverines covering as much as 610 square miles (1,580sq kilometres), according to a study in central Idaho.

They also need protection from trapping, according to scientists. Wolverine populations in southwestern Canada plummeted by more than 40 percent over the past two decades due to overharvesting by trappers, which could have effects across the US border, scientists said.

Wolverine trapping was once legal in states including Montana. They are still sometimes caught inadvertently by trappers targeting other fur-bearing animals.

At least 10 wolverines have been accidentally captured in Montana since trapping was restricted in 2012. Three were killed and the others were released unharmed. In Idaho, trappers have accidentally captured 11 wolverines since 1995, including three that were killed.

New York, United States – Few Nobel Peace Prize winners are called warmongers, but the gravelly-voiced, enigmatic diplomat Henry Kissinger was.

The contradictions of Kissinger, who died on Wednesday at home in Connecticut at age 100, do not end there.

An academic who became a celebrity, Kissinger was a Jewish teenager who fled the Nazis, a self-confessed “secret swinger” who dated pin-ups, a Machiavellian adviser to United States presidents who changed the course of history and a workaholic who remained active beyond his last birthday.

The debate about whether the former US secretary of state was a brainy adviser or a merciless hawk is not likely to reach a conclusion any time soon. He served in the role under two presidents: Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, both Republicans.

Kissinger’s work on the diplomatic opening of China to the US, landmark US-Soviet arms deals and peacemaking between Israelis and Arabs are not disputed. However, his role in the Vietnam War and his support for anti-communist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, remain divisive.

“He viewed the world from 30,000 feet, advancing broad interests and long-term goals in a way that under-appreciated the negative costs people would bear, especially those in societies that were different from the US,” Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told Al Jazeera.

In 2021, at the age of 98, Kissinger co-authored a book on artificial intelligence with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and MIT computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher.

“Henry Kissinger at the age of 90 knew nothing about the digital world, although he had a lot of opinions about it,” Schmidt told podcast host Tim Ferris when the book was published.

“But he has mastered the digital world and artificial intelligence with the alacrity and speed of people who are just getting into it now,” Schmidt said. “That’s unique to him. It’s a gift.”

Kissinger’s son, David Kissinger, also noted his father’s unique longevity ahead of his centenary birthday bash, which was attended by current US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“Not only has he outlived most of his peers, eminent detractors and students, but he has also remained indefatigably active throughout his 90s,” the younger Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post in May 2023.

When questioned about Blinken’s attendance at the party, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel noted the policy “differences” between the two men. Nevertheless, he added, Blinken had had the “opportunity to engage” with the former top diplomat several times since taking office.

Kissinger’s life story has the elements of a classic US immigration success. He was born in 1923 in Furth, Germany, to devout Jewish middle-class parents. Facing a rising tide of anti-Semitism, they fled the Third Reich and settled in New York in 1938.

Kissinger served in the US Army in Germany and saw combat during the decisive and brutal Battle of the Bulge. As a native German speaker, he was assigned counter-intelligence roles and earned the Bronze Star tracking down former Gestapo officers.

He returned to the US in 1947 to start a celebrated academic career at Harvard University that led to part-time White House advisory roles under Presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and set him on the path of his life’s work.

A realist who chided moralising

Kissinger chided colleagues for their Cold War-era moralising and called for pragmatism. A “flexible response” to communist aggression would use conventional and nuclear weapons as a deterrent rather than threats of all-out nuclear retaliation, he said.

“He built his fame by presenting, and representing, himself as the quintessential European realist lent to an immature and naive America to teach her the harsh and immutable laws of international relations,” Mario Del Pero, a historian at Paris-based Sciences Po, told Al Jazeera.

President-elect Richard Nixon made Kissinger his national security adviser in 1968. He began reshaping Washington’s foreign policy machine, bypassing the Department of State and concentrating power in the White House’s National Security Council.

“Kissinger created a model for operating the machinery of a complex democracy to make strategic choices that lacked public support but served the national interest. He was controversial, but his realpolitik has influenced two generations of policymakers,” added the University of Texas’s Suri.

His favoured “back-channel” talks paved the way for a diplomatic opening with China and detente and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) with the Soviet Union. In foreign affairs, Washington had “no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”, he once wrote.

His biggest challenge was a Vietnam War that, by 1969, was increasingly costly, deadly and unpopular. Kissinger sought “peace with honour” by opening talks with North Vietnam while using devastating bombing campaigns to improve his bargaining power.

The most fundamental problem of politics is not the control of wickedness, but the limitation of righteousness.

Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state

Kissinger’s plan prolonged the war by four years and included secret bombing raids in Laos and Cambodia – claiming the lives of 22,000 American troops, and many more Southeast Asians, and helping the genocidal Khmer Rouge seize power in Cambodia.

Revelations about Kissinger’s secret talks with North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris won him celebrity status. Journalists queried his dating antics with model Candice Bergen, actress Jill St John and others. “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” he replied.

Nobel Peace Prize

A ceasefire deal in January 1973 earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. That same year, his shuttle diplomacy between Israel, Egypt and Syria helped stop the Yom Kippur War from escalating into a proxy face-off between Washington and Moscow.

“He was the first American celebrity diplomat: An iconic foreign policy whiz to save the world and make peace, but who also showed up in People magazine and newspaper style sections,” Thomas Schwartz, a historian at Vanderbilt University, told Al Jazeera.

“He was a swinger who dated beautiful women. Everybody after has been compared to him and lived in his shadow.”

This set a high bar for the geostrategists who followed, from Zbigniew Brzezinski to Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice. For some, however, Kissinger’s supposed brilliance was played up for effect.

“Much has been said of Kissinger’s genius and Bismarck-like realpolitik,” said Del Pero, author of The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy.

“He achieved successes in his tenure, of course, but some of them – the opening to China, the SALT accords with Moscow – were more or less inevitable and were already explored under Johnson. The war in Vietnam was prolonged in the search for chimerical, as much as cynical, peace with honour.”

Kissinger associates

Kissinger left office at the end of Ford’s term but continued to advise presidents, write about global relations and discuss Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and other wars on television. His secretive firm, Kissinger Associates, Inc, counsels clients on business strategy.

His 1979 memoir, White House Years, won a National Book Award for history.

His ruthless pragmatism increasingly came under the microscope, notably by the British American journalist Christopher Hitchens in a 2001 book that made the case of a war crimes prosecutor: The Trial of Henry Kissinger.

Hitchens blasted Kissinger for bombing Cambodia, endorsing the Indonesian occupation of East Timor and orchestrating the overthrow of Chile’s Marxist President Salvador Allende in favour of the right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Activists campaigned for warrants and staged mock arrests of Kissinger. Another journalist, Seymour Hersh, spoke of his “dark side” but rejected a prosecution.

“He’s got his own sentence; he’s got to live with himself,” Hersh said.

Schwartz, author of Henry Kissinger and the Dilemmas of American Power, is more sympathetic. Kissinger is best understood as a realist who defended a country that gave him a lifeline from the gas chambers and an Ivy League schooling.

“Because of his background in Nazi Germany, Kissinger was suspicious that elections didn’t always bring in liberal democracy, but could lead to a different type of people’s choice, mass rule and dictatorship,” Schwartz told Al Jazeera.

“He was attacked for accommodating authoritarians, from the communist Chinese to Pinochet and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. One can take the moral high ground, but history shows it is hard to bring humane democratic alternatives to countries where people fight bloodily over the stakes.”

Assessing Kissinger’s record is now a job for historians. For the father of two, morality was always complex.

In his own words, “The most fundamental problem of politics is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.”

William Roberts and Joseph Stepansky contributed to this report.