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As the war enters its 637th day, these are the main developments.

Here is the situation on Wednesday, November 22, 2023.

Fighting

• Ukraine’s military spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun said Russia had reduced ground assaults and air strikes on the eastern town of Avdiivka but had not abandoned “their plans to surround” the town. Ukrainian forces repelled eight attacks on Tuesday, he said. The military said there had also been an increase in Russian attacks on nearby Maryinka. The Russian defence ministry’s latest update mentioned that its troops were attacking villages south of Avdiivka, but gave few details.
• Russia’s defence ministry said its marines were “stopping all attempts by the Armed Forces of Ukraine to carry out amphibious landings on the Dnipro islands and the left [eastern] bank of the Dnipro River” in the southern Kherson region. Pro-Russian bloggers said Russian forces had been harrying Ukrainian forces near the village of Krynky, on the eastern bank upriver from the city of Kherson. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed Kyiv had suffered “colossal losses”.
• At least two people were killed after Russia fired a new barrage of missiles and drones hitting a hospital in the town of Selydove in the eastern Donetsk region, and a mine nearby. The air force said it destroyed nine out of 10 drones and a cruise missile launched by Russia. Moscow also targeted Ukraine with four guided missiles.
• Ukraine’s Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said no decision had been made about the jobs of two senior military commanders – Joint Forces Commander Serhiy Nayev and Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, chief of the Tavria military command – after local media reported that they might be sacked. The Tavria command spearheaded Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the southeast, but has failed to make a significant breakthrough in the face of heavily-defended Russian lines.

• Odesa Governor Oleh Kiper said Russia targeted port infrastructure in the Black Sea city of Odesa but no one was injured. The southern military command said Russia used Х-31 missiles and also struck the Belhorod-Dniester district in the region, hitting administrative buildings.
• The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said more than 10,000 civilians had been killed since Russia began its full-scale invasion of the country last year. With corroboration work continuing, the actual toll was likely to be “significantly higher”, it added.

Politics and diplomacy

• Ukraine marked the 10th anniversary of the pro-Europe Maidan protests, which eventually brought down the Kremlin-backed President Viktor Yanukovych. In a statement, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the protests marked the “first victory” in Ukraine’s battle against Russia. It was “a victory against indifference. A victory of courage. The victory of the Revolution of Dignity,” he said.
• European Council President Charles Michel travelled to Kyiv in a gesture of support for Ukraine, which he said had made “remarkable” progress in recent years. At a press conference, Zelenskyy said he hoped the European Union would agree to open formal accession talks at a summit next month. Michel said the discussion was likely to be “difficult” but he would “do everything in my power to convince my colleagues that we need a decision in December”. The decision needs the agreement of all 27 member states.
• Russia’s foreign ministry Ambassador-at-Large Rodion Miroshnik said Russia could not co-exist with the present government in Kyiv. “The current regime (in Kyiv) is absolutely toxic, we do not see any options for co-existence with it at the moment,” Miroshnik told reporters in Moscow.
• Ukraine’s defence ministry said criminal proceedings had begun into the misuse of more than $1m of government funds by a military unit in the northern Chernihiv region. The ministry found that the cost of generators had been inflated and that they had remained in warehouses instead of being delivered to where they were needed.

• Ukrainian authorities announced investigations into two lawmakers on suspicion of involvement in attempts to bribe top reconstruction officials. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) said it had caught one of the lawmakers, a member of parliament’s anti-corruption committee, allegedly offering the country’s first-ever documented bribe in Bitcoin. The other lawmaker is suspected of arranging the handover in a Kyiv supermarket parking lot of $150,000 in cash stuffed inside a Chinese decorative box. NABU did not name the officials.

Weapons

• German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius announced Germany will support Ukraine with new military aid worth 1.3 billion euros ($1.42bn) that will include four additional IRIS-T air defence units to guard against Russian missile attacks. The package will also include 155mm artillery shells as well as anti-tank mines, Pistorius told reporters on a trip to Kyiv. Berlin is the second-biggest supplier of military assistance to Kyiv after the United States.

In the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on October 7, Israel embarked on a violent, bloody campaign against the Palestinian people. The residents of Gaza have borne the brunt of it, with more than 14,000 people killed by indiscriminate Israeli bombardment, including more than 5,500 children.

The onslaught has extended to the West Bank as well, where the Israeli army and settlers are carrying out raids and killing civilians daily; more than 200 have been murdered, thousands detained and scores tortured. Palestinian citizens of Israel, too, have been subjected to arrests, harassment, and economic retribution, through dismissals from jobs.

But the ongoing violence is not meant to quench the thirst for “vengeance”, as some have suggested. It is systematically moving towards a long-term goal: the complete erasure of Palestinian existence within historic Palestine. This plan was in the workings already even before October 7; it has now simply been accelerated.

On Gaza, Israeli officials have been more than clear. There will be a full expulsion of the population. As Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter stated on November 11: “We are practically repeating the Nakba if you will, this is the Nakba of Gaza.”

A leaked internal document from the Ministry of Intelligence has confirmed that the Israeli government is aiming to make good on these threats.

Israeli plans for a Nakba in the West Bank are also coming to the fore. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said there need to be “belts” around the illegal Israeli settlements that “Arabs” will be banned from entering.

Earlier this year, he also outlined plans to ensure territorial continuity for the Israeli settlements, which would effectively amount to more expulsions of Palestinians from their land and its annexation.

For the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, who make up 21 percent of the Israeli population, the plan may not be that publicised, but it is there. They too face a Nakba and it too has been long in the making.

Forced expulsion postponed

After the establishment of the Israeli settler-colonial state in 1948, which resulted in the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their towns and villages, the Israeli government scrambled to prevent the return of refugees, which the United Nations had guaranteed in Resolution 194 of 1948.

That is why it decided to establish military rule in the Palestinian territories it occupied, where almost 150,000 Palestinians had managed to remain. This special regime aimed at not only preventing any Palestinians from trying to go back to their homes, but also at surveilling and persecuting the remaining population, with the ultimate goal of eventually expelling them.

Archival documents, described in Israeli historian Adam Raz’s book The Kafr Qasim Massacre: A Political Biography, showed that a plan was prepared in the early 1950s to deport the Palestinians to Jordan, Lebanon, and Sinai in the event of war.

In 1956, when Israel, along with Britain and France, invaded Egypt trying to gain control of the Suez Canal, it saw an opportunity to turn on the remaining Palestinian population. Israeli border guards attacked the village of Kafr Qasim on the border between Israel and the West Bank, then administered by Jordan, killing 49 people, including 23 children. The attack was aimed at instilling fear in the Palestinian population and compelling them to flee – a tactic already employed in 1948.

But it backfired. News of the massacre spread, which resulted in international pressure on the Israeli authorities to backtrack on pursuing their forced transfer strategy. Furthermore, their own intelligence assessment showed that many of the remaining Palestinians did not pose a major “security” threat.

Over the following decade, military rule over the remaining Palestinians persisted; they were denied the right to movement, civil liberties, and basic services. They were only granted these rights after 1966. They were also given Israeli citizenship, but that did not make them equal to the Jewish citizens of the state.

Those who were displaced were still denied the right to return to their homes; their lands remained confiscated. Palestinian communities were never granted the same level of services as Jewish settlements and towns were; they never received the same care from the state in terms of education, healthcare, etc.

Their economic prosperity was curbed, dooming many of them to hardship and poverty. All this was accompanied by an assimilation strategy aimed at erasing the Palestinian identity and sense of nationhood and rendering the Palestinians a silent, faceless minority with a second-class citizenship.

The ‘transfer strategy’ revisited

After the 1950s, the population transfer strategy was put on the back burner, but it was never completely renounced. In the 2000s, it came back, albeit in an updated form.

In September 2000, the second Intifada broke out as the so-called “peace process” failed to deliver on Palestinian statehood and Israel continued to expand its illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967. The trigger was a provocative raid by former Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam’s third-holiest site.

As Palestinian demonstrations erupted in occupied East Jerusalem and spread to the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians in Israel took to the streets, fully embracing the national Palestinian cause. They organised protest actions, which were brutally suppressed by the Israeli security forces.

These events shook the Israeli establishment and intelligence and forced them to reconsider their strategy of assimilation toward the Palestinians within Israel. This is how the transfer strategy was put back on the table and remodelled to fit the new reality.

Instead of resorting to massacres to scare Palestinians into leaving, the Israeli authorities decided to disrupt and destroy Palestinian communities from within and thus trigger an exodus.

Economic opportunities for Palestinians sharply dwindled after 2000, leading to a high unemployment rate. The neglect from which Palestinian communities already suffered then worsened even more, while the Israeli authorities allowed and facilitated organised crime to proliferate.

In parallel, the Israeli authorities pushed for further entrenching apartheid within Israel through legal measures. Perhaps the most significant among them was the Jewish Nation-State Law that was passed in 2018.

The law declares that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, effectively confirming it as an ethnocracy and denying the collective rights of Palestinian citizens and their Palestinian identity.

On the basis of it, the Israeli authorities undertook the full suppression of non-Jewish national aspirations, including any talk of land restitution or return to displaced villages or any expression of identity through cultural, political or economic activities. Even the Palestinian flag was banned.

The “Unity Uprising” in 2021 – when Palestinians in Israel joined their brothers and sisters in occupied East Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank, and Gaza, in protesting and resisting the eviction of Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah and encroachment on Al-Aqsa – made the Israeli authorities even more anxious.

Israeli officials began being even more vocal in their threats against the Palestinians in Israel. They spoke of a “civil war” and a “new Nakba”, while the Supreme Court ruled in favour of stripping Palestinians of their citizenship for “breach of loyalty”.

A Nakba for the Palestinians in Israel

After Hamas’s October 7 operation, threats and intimidation against the Palestinians in Israel escalated. Ultimatums such as “you must choose to be either Israelis or terrorists with Hamas”, have been frequently repeated in Israeli media. Some commentators have even suggested that “sympathetic” Palestinians should be expelled to Gaza.

The suspicion of treason and disloyalty against the Palestinian community has become pervasive. There have been hundreds of arrests and detentions for questioning over the past month and a half. Palestinian rights organisation Adalah has recorded at least 70 indictments against Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.

In one particularly publicised case – that of actress Maisa Abd Elhadi – the charge has been “incitement to terrorism” for a post on Instagram and the Ministry of Interior has already requested the revocation of citizenship.

Meanwhile, some Palestinian politicians, like Mansour Abbas, leader of the United Arab List, have embraced this new reality of suspicion and demands for demonstrations of loyalty from the Palestinian community.

Abbas, who had previously rejected the “apartheid” label for Israel, has criticised protests against the war on Gaza and called for the resignation of his fellow Knesset Member Iman Khatib-Yassin over her scepticism about the Israeli version of the events of October 7.

All of these events point to what the Nakba for Palestinians in Israel will look like. The Israeli authorities will continue their policies of letting the Palestinian community become unliveable, suppressing any political activity or expression of Palestinian identity.

Those who resist or express dissent will be summarily accused of “terrorism” and stripped of their nationality. Those who stay silent would have the choice to either leave “voluntarily” or obediently accept the status of oppressed second-class citizens, fully embracing and endorsing the Zionist project. Any non-Zionist political presence in Israel will be fully erased.

The Nakba that Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are facing may not be as violent and brutal as the one their brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank are enduring. But its consequences and ultimate goal are the same: the complete elimination of Palestinian presence in historical Palestine.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Tacloban, The Philippines – Twice a month for the last 10 years, pig farmer Alejandro Sumayang has planted mangrove plants along the shoreline a few metres from his home.

Pushing a stick into the muddy ground, he creates a hole for the seedling, tying it to a piece of bamboo to prevent the tide from washing it away.

“This is what shields me,” he said, crouching to inspect a recently planted row of plants.

The back of Sumayang’s makeshift house faces the Pacific Ocean in the Philippines’s central Leyte province. Ten years ago, on November 8, 2013, tsunami-like waves whipped up by Super Typhoon Haiyan crashed into his home in Silago, leaving only broken wooden beams standing amid the wreckage.

Haiyan was one of the strongest typhoons ever to make landfall. More than 6,300 people were killed as the storm swept across the island of Leyte, flattening homes and causing a storm surge that swamped entire neighbourhoods. The government said at least 13 million people were affected.

Leyte was struck again by a typhoon in December 2021. Typhoon Rai rivalled Haiyan’s intensity.

“I’d have lost my house again if we hadn’t planted anything. From afar we could see the waves losing their momentum, breaking apart before they reached the shore,” Sumayang told Al Jazeera.

About 20 typhoons a year enter Philippine territory. For the last 12 years, the Southeast Asian archipelago has kept the top spot for the most vulnerable and at-risk country for natural disasters in the World Risk Index produced by Germany’s Ruhr University Bochum.

In Haiyan’s wake, several coastal communities began mangrove reforestation efforts, arguing nature was the most effective way to deal with the effects of climate change.

Four villages in Silago were among the first to start, working with NGOs and village officials to begin planting a year after the disaster. The characteristic bulbous roots and flat leaves of the varying types of mangrove now line 215sq km (83 sq miles) of the town’s coastal area.

The Leyte Center for Development (LCDE), a humanitarian organisation which supported the planting in Silago, believes the plants helped save 2,000 coastal residents from Rai’s onslaught.

“It is a testament to the effectiveness of an eco-systems-based approach and it cost the people practically nothing,” said the LCDE’s director Minet Aguisanda-Jerusalem.

Infrastructure ‘obsession’

There has been little support from any officials at the municipal level or above, however.

The government has instead backed man-made interventions including a vast concrete sea wall in Tacloban City, Leyte’s capital.

Construction on the 16.9 billion Philippine peso ($304.5m) Storm Surge Protection Project (SSPP) began in 2016.

The 44.48km (27.6 miles) long concrete seawall was supposed to have been finished by 2020 but only 58 percent of the work has been done.

Delays have been caused by “Right-Of-Way Acquisitions, fluctuating prices of materials [and] request of additional features in the tide embankment”, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) regional office told Al Jazeera in an email.

Along some sections of the SSPP, the wall has already started to crack and crumble, exposing the steel rebars inside to the elements.

But the DPWH is standing by the project. In a report it shared with Al Jazeera, it advised engineering offices on the island “to adopt the SSPP standards in protecting their shores all over the region”.

Professor William Holden, an environmental geographer from the University of Calgary who is studying the situation in Tacloban, says that even when the wall is finished, it will probably not be enough to protect the city.

“Climate change means warmer air holding more water and thus heavier rainfall events. So there’s no way engineers can predict how big of a seawall to build. Future typhoons will eventually dwarf Haiyan,” said Holden, who suspects the maintenance of the SSPP will also prove costly.

Jon Bonifacio, the national coordinator for the environmental advocacy group Kalikasan, worries the wall could even exacerbate the effects of climate change, because it risks trapping any water that enters the city during a storm and causing prolonged flooding.

He is also critical of the social cost of the project, which required thousands of coastal residents to leave their homes, separating them from their livelihoods. He faults the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr for continuing the state’s “obsession with grey infrastructure” as it “ends up displacing impacts rather than eliminating climate change impacts”.

Natural breakwater system

The Philippines is home to 46 of the world’s 70 species of mangrove trees and shrubs, which thrive in the tidal saltwater shallows where the land meets the sea.

While research has shown the plants help reduce coastal communities’ vulnerability to tsunamis and storm surges, they are also under threat.

The Philippines is estimated to have lost about 49 percent of its mangrove forests since 1920.

Professor Eduardo Mangaoang, the founder of the Regional Climate Change R&D Center at Visayas State University in Leyte, urged authorities to heed the beneficial science behind mangroves.

“The stems and bodies are a natural breakwater system against strong waves. It stabilises and holds shoreline soil together and is a nursery for fish,” Mangaoang explained to Al Jazeera.

In 2014, Jecel Espina-Pedel, a 14-year-old from Silago and a self-described “nature lover”, joined the hundreds of others in a coordinated mangrove planting effort.

Gazing out of her window, she remembers seeing the first leaves sprout in just six months. Within a few years, the surrounding soil was totally transformed.

“The ground went from rocky to muddy. We could see small holes which were new habitats. We looked under rocks and saw fish we’d never seen here before,” she explained, still thrilled by what happened.

Pedel comes from a family of fisherfolk. Before long, they were often eating shellfish for dinner and selling the rest of their catch by the roadside.

“It has multiple co-benefits: food sources, science-based, and it creates a carbon sink. It’s internationally recognised. But locally, there isn’t a comprehensive plan for this,” Gerry Arances, the director of the Center for Energy, Ecology and Development in Manila, told Al Jazeera.

For mangroves to survive, the correct varieties of seedlings must be chosen and placed properly along the shore.

In 2015, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) drew flak for using improper methods in a 1 billion Philippine peso ($18m) mangrove reforestation project. In 2023, advocates again criticised the department for repeating the mistake in Bohol and Negros Occidental.

Mangaoang attributes the success in areas like Silago to the attention of local residents who continue planting while keeping the mangroves free of barnacles and other parasites.

The academic travels all over the region promoting mangroves. In his town of Baybay, Leyte, he finally convinced Mayor Jose Carlos Cari to support a community mangrove plan for next year, a first for the region.

Overall, Mangaoang says, community-coordinated mangrove planting is “still at the early stages. Coastal communities have a lot of local practices that need support. They themselves are scientists, they just don’t know it.”

‘We are protected’

The government, however, continues to expand its engineering interventions in Leyte.

In February of this year, construction began on the Tacloban City Causeway. According to the DPWH, the 4.5 billion Philippine peso ($81.1m) 2.5km (1.5 miles) road will reduce city travel time and “protect the life and property of the residents/constituents in the area from erosive tidal actions”.

The road embankment will be built on reclaimed land.

That entails bulldozing the mangroves along Cancabato Bay, classified as a protected area by the city for its biodiversity. The bay is a popular fishing ground and its mangrove density was increased by the local fishing community after Haiyan.

“There needs to be proper planning around these issues,” said Ian Fry, the United Nations special rapporteur on the protection of human rights in the context of climate change, after visiting Tacloban during the 10th-year commemoration of Haiyan. He called the potential loss of mangroves a “serious concern”.

Roque Regis, a bay area community leader, estimates their own efforts have added an extra 30 percent to the bay’s mangroves since Haiyan. He called the government “deaf” for ignoring its own protections over the bay and residents’ pleas to halt construction.

After the typhoon, “they displaced everyone living near the coast”, Regis told Al Jazeera. “Now they’re set to do the same in Cancabato Bay. They want to ‘clean up’ the area for tourists. But they’re taking down our homes and our fishing grounds.”

With the Philippine government’s response to climate disaster unfinished, affected communities remain convinced that the solution to future problems remains with nature.

They plan to persist in their defence of the trees that they believe both save and nurture them.

“There were doubters when we started planting, saying the mangroves would be home to snakes, or that they wouldn’t work. But look at us here, we are protected. This is a gift to the people,” said Sumayang.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has created a humanitarian catastrophe for the 2.3 million residents of the besieged Palestinian territory.

Hundreds of thousands have been forced from their homes, some left with just a plastic tent for shelter.

Essential medicines, food, water and fuel are scarce after Israel severely restricted supplies in a “complete” siege of the enclave.

The onset of winter presents even more challenges and dangers – not just from the cold but also from the risk of disease with no functioning sanitation or water treatment systems.

Presenter: Folly Bah Thibault

Guests:
Mansour Shouman – a Palestinian-Canadian in Gaza

Marwan Jilani – director general of the Palestine Red Crescent Society

Dr Mads Gilbert – doctor and activist

The King dropped some references to South Korean popular culture as he hosted the country’s president at a state banquet at Buckingham Palace.

Listening to the King’s banquet address were singers Jennie Kim, Jisoo Kim, Lisa Manobal and Rose Park from the K-pop band Blackpink, South Korea’s biggest girl group who became the first Korean band to headline a major UK festival during the summer.

K-pop, short for Korean popular music, includes styles and genres from around the world, such as hip hop, rock and R&B, on top of its traditional Korean music roots.

The King praised the environmental credentials of Blackpink and highlighted South Korea’s creativity and culture, from Gangnam Style, celebrated in the global hit by Korean rapper Psy, to the popular Netflix series Squid Game.

He told the guests: “I applaud Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Rose, better known collectively as Blackpink, for their role in bringing the message of environmental sustainability to a global audience as ambassadors for the UK’s presidency of COP26, and later as advocates for the UN sustainable development goals.

“I can only admire how they can prioritise these vital issues, as well as being global superstars. Sadly, when I was in Seoul all those years ago, I am not sure I developed much of what might be called the Gangnam Style.”

In his banquet speech, the King also said “Koreans have created a miracle” in their journey from “wartime devastation” to a thriving country where the “industrial efficiency” he witnessed during a visit in 1992 had become the “epitome” of technological innovation.

He added: “Through their own sweat and toil, and under the shadow of tyranny and the ever present threat of aggression, over seven decades Koreans have built a bastion of democracy, human rights and freedom.

“In a world where these values are challenged, sadly, as rarely before in our lifetimes, the Republic of Korea and the United Kingdom stand shoulder to shoulder in defence of all that we hold dear.”

The Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales were also in attendance along with the Princess Royal, while Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and wife Akshata Murty were also guests.

Read more:
Royals roll out red carpet for South Korean president

During the white-tie banquet the guests dined on a menu of warm tartlet of soft poached egg and spinach puree, breast of Windsor pheasant with croquette of celeriac and calvados sauce and salad, with a mango ice cream bombe for dessert.

In his speech Mr Yoon echoed the sentiment of the King, praising the close ties between the UK and South Korea, saying: “When I was young, my friends and I were all fans of The Beatles, Queen, and Elton John. Harry Potter books are adored by many Koreans.

“Most importantly, the United Kingdom is the architect of modern liberal democracy. Most democracies are deeply influenced by British parliamentary democracy. Korea is no exception.”

Alongside the pomp and pageantry, the UK and South Korea are to launch talks on a new trade deal and sign a diplomatic accord as part of Mr Yoon’s three-day state visit.