Dina Khaled Zaurub, a 22-year-old artist killed by an Israeli airstrike on 12 April. Photo © Dina Khaled / Facebook
Most wars kill men, and leave widows and fatherless children. The war on Gaza follows a different pattern. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in 36 of the 224 Israeli strikes on residential buildings and tents for the displaced between 18 March and 9 April, ‘the fatalities recorded so far were only women and children.’ More than 15,000 children in Gaza have been killed since October 2023 and 39,000 have lost either one or both of their parents. According to Unicef, ‘Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita anywhere in the world.’ On 18 March, Israel killed 174 children in 24 hours. It isn’t hard to kill children when they make up 47 per cent of the trapped population that you’re carpet bombing. One young Gazan, when asked by an interviewer what she would like to be when she grows up, replied that children do not grow up in Gaza.
Towards the end of February, Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan accused the Senate president, Godswill Akpabio, the third most powerful man in Nigeria, of sexual harassment. According to Akpoti-Uduaghan, in December 2023, on a visit to the Senate president’s house, Akpabio held her hand while giving her a tour, her husband walking behind them. In one of the mansion’s many sitting rooms, she says, he asked her if she liked his house and told her: ‘I’m going to create time for us to come spend quality moments here. You will enjoy it.’ In a second incident, Akpoti-Uduaghan says that Akpabio told her a motion she put forward would appear before the Senate if she ‘took care of him’.
Mario Vargas Llosa has died at the age of 89. In a recent issue of the London Review, Tony Wood wrote about the Peruvian novelist’s trip to Moscow in 1968, when his disenchantment with socialism began (or so he later claimed).
When Adolescence was released on Netflix last month, it was pegged as an incisive inquiry into the manosphere and the ways that misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate are poisoning the minds of young boys. In fact the series is quite light on that, beyond parsing some red pill emojis and making a few references to podcasts. Should all under-sixteens be banned from smartphones and social media? The proposal is fervently discussed even though it’s obviously unworkable.
On 1 April, the memorial site at the former Buchenwald concentration camp announced that the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm would no longer be speaking at the eightieth anniversary commemoration of the camp’s liberation. Boehm was disinvited because of pressure from the Israeli embassy. How did the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor become the object of such a campaign by the Israeli government?
El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) opened in 2023. It has capacity for up to forty thousand prisoners, although is said to be only half full. CECOT was built to incarcerate members of violent gangs, who by 2015 had made El Salvador the Western Hemisphere’s most dangerous country. Dispensing with warrants and court hearings, in 2022 the government jailed almost 2 per cent of the population, many on the basis only of their tattoos. The official murder rate fell from 18 per day to one every three days. In early February, Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, toured Central American capitals. In San Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the ‘world’s coolest dictator’, offered to make his prisons available, for a fee, to hold ‘criminal’ migrants deported from the US.
Barbara Everett, who died on Friday, 4 April at the age of 92, was for many years a fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. Her books include Poets in Their Time and Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare’s Tragedies. She published editions of Antony and Cleopatra and All’s Well That Ends Well, as well as writing many influential essays on the plays. Among her subjects in the LRB have been Shakespeare’s romances, the Sonnets, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure and Falstaff.