Ukraine continues to resist the Russian invasion not only with its army, but also with a network of citizen initiative organizations that deal with all kinds of daily problems and are supported by volunteers without any kind of protection. After almost five years of war, this network is at the limit of its strength. This is confirmed by a report that the NGO Novact presented this Thursday to the Parliament of Catalonia. The report has followed 200 civil initiatives in the country between February 2022 and June 2026 and includes 105 interviews with community leaders, institutions, and local organizations. Civil society has taken on the coordination of emergencies, evacuations, and emergency repairs, particularly in areas under occupation or near the front line, in the west of the country.

Many people do not know this, but 20% of Israel's population is Palestinian. And for the first time in its history, this minority could be key in tipping the result of the Israeli elections on October 27th. Polls point to a 50-50 tie between the governing bloc of Benjamin Netanyahu's right and far-right and the liberal opposition forces. With this almost unprecedented scenario, the Arab minority would hold the key to Netanyahu's defeat, a candidate who is under an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for the genocide in Gaza. However, in a context of strong anti-Arab racism, neither the government nor the opposition wants to reach agreements with the parties that represent them. Last month, the electoral board banned all Arab parties from running in the elections, as well as the communists of the only party that brings together Arabs and Jews. The decision was so discriminatory that the Supreme Court reversed it, but only partially. The United Arab List (Ra'am) will be able to run, as will the Unified List. The candidate from one of their parties, Sami Abu Shehadeh, remains banned. The Jewish communist candidate Ofer Cassif will also be able to run. In contrast, Israeli far-right parties with candidates who are under international sanctions for human rights violations have been able to run without problems.

The Houthi missile attacks against Riyadh airport, which on Saturday caused at least 14 deaths and more than 300 injuries, have once again placed Yemen at the center of international news. The explosions in the Saudi capital are hogging the headlines, but outside the media spotlight, a much more decisive battle is being fought within the country. Houthi forces have surrounded Taiz, the third most important city in Yemen, and are disputing control of the strategic Bab el-Mandeb strait, the gateway to the Red Sea. The poorest country in the Arab world is once again plunged into war, after five years of relative calm. The blows that Saudi Arabia is receiving put Donald Trump in the dilemma of having to defend his ally when the pockets of his voters are still suffering the impact of the fiasco of the attack against Iran, and just three weeks before the legislative elections.

Ukraine raises the stakes against Donald Trump. After the US president had agreed with Vladimir Putin to purchase 300,000 tons of diesel from him to try to lower the price and announce an "immediate" truce from both sides against energy infrastructure, Kyiv has realized that, once again, the White House is playing in favor of the Kremlin and that it cannot trust Washington. Not only has Russia not stopped the attacks, but, in addition, President Volodymyr Zelensky has denounced in the last few hours the blackout of intelligence information from the United States, which makes the task of its air defenses to stop Russian ballistic missiles and drones much more difficult.

The University of Barcelona presented this Wednesday the Ferrer Foundations Chair for Palestinian Studies, the first to be promoted in Europe dedicated exclusively to this subject. The chair will have a multidisciplinary approach, with faculty from the fields of international law, ecology and the environment, Arab studies, contemporary history, communication, and the arts. These studies will be financed with the support of the foundations linked to the pharmaceutical laboratories Ferrer, which have action for Palestine among their lines of activity.

The announcement that Donald Trump made on Sunday regarding an energy truce between Russia and Ukraine has no value on the ground. This was confirmed this Wednesday afternoon by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, from Downing Street, after Russia once again punished Kyiv with a large-scale attack of ballistic missiles and drones during the early hours. The impacts in residential areas have caused at least eight deaths and around twenty injuries, and the projectiles have damaged several energy facilities, which has once again left parts of the capital in the dark and aggravated supply difficulties.

An oil tanker sailing off the north coast of Qatar was hit this Thursday by "several projectiles" which caused an undetermined number of casualties, according to a British maritime security agency. The attack comes after Iran announced it would close a route in the Strait of Hormuz used to bypass the blockade imposed by Tehran on maritime traffic. This week, attacks against oil tankers sailing there have reached their highest level since the start of the war against Iran—at least 12 have been recorded against crude oil and liquefied natural gas transport vessels—according to maritime security companies, which has once again pushed the price of oil above $100 a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz is vital to the global economy: before the start of the war, approximately one-fifth of the planet's oil and liquefied natural gas passed through this maritime route.

Three years after the start of Israel's genocidal offensive on Gaza, Dr. Abdelrahman, an orthopedist at one of the few hospitals that remain partially operational in the Strip, explains to ARA the impossible conditions in which they work, without basic tools, with a systematically destroyed healthcare system and a population facing a chronic humanitarian crisis. Before the war, he worked at the Indonesian Hospital, in the north of the Strip, which was put out of service because it is located in the area under the control of the Israeli army. He has moved to the Nasser Medical Complex, in Khan Yunis, the largest one that continues to function in the south of the Palestinian enclave, where the majority of the population has been displaced by bombings on civilian areas.

Amira Hass (Jerusalem, 1956) was the first Israeli journalist who decided to settle in the Palestinian occupied territories, first in Gaza and then in the West Bank, more than 30 years ago, to explain "the regime of occupation domination". And she is still dedicated to the same thing. Daughter of Holocaust survivors, she has become an international benchmark for field journalism, as rigorous as it is uncomfortable. This Monday she was awarded the Manuel Vázquez Montalbán international journalism prize, presented by the Journalists' Association of Catalonia.

Democracy is threatened not only by the rise of authoritarianism, but also by growing social inequalities. The philosopher Erica Benner (Tokyo, 1962), one of the great contemporary specialists on Machiavelli, warns that economic inequalities, the concentration of power in the hands of a minority, and the loss of the idea of the common good corrupt democratic systems from within. Benner has visited Barcelona at the invitation of Cidob, where she has reflected on the crisis of democracy and the rise of the new right.

Not taking the official version for granted. This is synonymous with doing journalism, and this is what the Journalists' Association of Catalonia recognized this Monday, with the Manuel Vázquez Montalbán International Award presented to the Israeli journalist Amira Hass. The tenacious journalist from the newspaper Haaretz, who has lived for three decades in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has a difficult mission: to explain to the occupiers what is happening to the occupied.

The government of Turkey has carried out a major police operation in recent days against bars, organizations, and homes of activists from the LGBTI community in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Mersin, and other cities, in one of the worst episodes of the offensive it has maintained against the collective for more than a decade. There are at least 63 people detained and a total of 162 under investigation, in addition to nine associations and thirteen businesses, according to the Prosecutor's Office. Websites of various entities have also been blocked, including those dedicated to raising awareness about HIV. Protests against rights violations and discrimination have also been repressed.

“They riddled the car with bullets. I told the children to hide under the seats”: this is how Zeinab Molaierad remembers the death of her 9-year-old son, Kian Pirfalak, in September 2022. The family was returning home to the Iranian city of Izeh when plainclothes officers opened fire on the vehicle. The authorities attributed the deaths that evening to a terrorist attack. It is one of the hundreds of cases collected in the Amnesty International report Architects of Atrocities, a thousand-page investigation published this Wednesday, coinciding with the second anniversary of the murder of the young Mahsa Gina Amini, arrested by the morality police for not wearing her veil in accordance with their strict rules. A death that triggered a historic protest movement drowned in blood by the regime of the ayatollahs.

Morocco projects stability, modernization, new and large cutting-edge infrastructure, a stadium that rivals the Santiago Bernabéu to host the final of the next football World Cup, and regional alliances strong enough to bury the Western Sahara issue. But behind this facade, there is a society marked by youth unemployment, political disaffection, territorial inequalities, the crisis of public services, and demographic change. It is the reality from which tens of thousands of Moroccans who saw an exit in Ceuta tried to flee this summer.

The Dutch sociologist and geographer Hein de Haas (1969) is one of the leading European experts on migration. Director of the International Migration Institute at the University of Oxford and professor at the University of Maastricht, his latest book, The Myths of Immigration (Península), dismantles the discourses on the right and on the left. He has lived and worked in Morocco.

The Kremlin broke the truce promised to Donald Trump's emissaries tonight and has returned to bombing Kyiv with missiles, with a toll of 3 dead and 19 injured. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is facing more internal problems. Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko announced his resignation on Monday amidst corruption scandals that are splashing the management of the war and while the crisis over the dismissal of the young Minister of Defense is still simmering.

With a historic result of 44% of the vote, the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has fallen just three seats short of an absolute majority in the parliament of the state of Saxony-Anhalt. The party, founded in 2013 during the height of the euro crisis, will not be able to govern alone as it wanted, and most parties have committed to the policy of a 'cordon sanitaire' to block its path. But the game of alliances with a small group that has managed to enter parliament still gives it the possibility of accessing power in a federal state for the first time since Nazism.

Ansam al Ruhal (Beit Lahia, Gaza Strip, 1999) was until two months ago a nurse at the Indonesian Hospital, one of the few medical centers still operational in northern Gaza, amidst the relentless Israeli offensive on the ground. She arrived in Barcelona in June, welcomed by the refugee student program at the University of Barcelona (UB). She is 27 years old and has survived five wars. As a child, she was injured in an Israeli attack that killed two of her sisters.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the international order born out of World War II seems to be in its terminal phase. The symptoms are clearly visible: wars that drag on, borders as spaces of conflict, a new arms race, protectionism, trade wars, disinformation, electoral interference, a crisis of liberal democracies, and a growing inability of international institutions to impose rules.

For a few months in 2015, Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis and his comrade Alexis Tsipras challenged all the economic and political powers in Europe – the feared troika: the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank – when they resisted the austerity plan that Berlin and Brussels wanted to impose on Greece. As Greece's Finance Minister, Varoufakis leaked the content of the Eurogroup discussions and stood up to the men in black who landed in the Athens offices with the aim of brutally dismantling public healthcare and education and applying the austerity recipe, until the people in Greece said enough.