Thousands march in Bosnia for the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre
The annual 100-kilometer (60-mile) march retraces in reverse a route taken by men and boys from the Bosniak ethnic group, made up primarily of Muslims, who were massacred as they tried to flee Srebrenica after Bosnian Serb forces captured it in the closing months of the country's 1992-95 interethnic war.
'I am here today to support my son, Sultan, as he sets off on the march,' said Amir Kulagic, who was among those who took the route in 1995 and recalled that his 'ordeal lasted for seven days and eight nights.'
Kulagic said he was proud that his son and his nephew decided to retrace the path but also sad because he could not accompany them due to poor health.
Also joining the march was Nirha Music, now a U.S. citizen, born after the war to a mother who survived Srebrenica.
'We are walking to see what our people went through,' Music said.
'It is not easy; all I can think about is, this is how it was when they were killing us and when they were getting us together to kill us,' she added.
Most of the massacre victims were hunted down and summarily executed as they tried to flee through forests. Their bodies were plowed into hastily dug mass graves and later excavated with bulldozers and scattered among other burial sites to hide evidence of the crime.
Newly identified victims are reburied each year on July 11 — the anniversary of the day the killing began in 1995 — in the vast and still expanding memorial cemetery outside Srebrenica.
So far, the remains of more than 6,700 people have been found and buried there. The remains of seven more victims, recently identified through DNA analysis, will be buried there on Friday.
The Srebrenica massacre has been declared a genocide by international and national courts, but Serb leaders in Bosnia and neighboring Serbia continue to downplay or even deny it despite the irrefutable evidence of what happened.
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The Guardian
19 hours ago
- The Guardian
Israel trying to deflect blame for widespread starvation in Gaza
Israel is pursuing an extensive PR effort to remove itself from blame for the starvation and killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is responsible. As dozens of governments, UN organisations and other international figures have detailed Israel's culpability, officials and ministers in Israel have attempted to suggest that there is no hunger in Gaza, that if hunger exists it is not Israel's fault, or to blame Hamas or the UN and aid organisations for problems with distribution of aid. The Israeli effort has continued even as one of its own government ministers, the far-right heritage minister, Amichai Eliyahu, appeared to describe an unapologetic policy of starvation, genocide and ethnic cleansing that Israel has denied and said is not official policy. 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Telegraph
20 hours ago
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The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Israel tries to deflect blame for widespread starvation in Gaza
Israel is pursuing an extensive PR effort to remove itself from blame for the starvation and killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is responsible. As dozens of governments, UN organisations and other international figures have detailed Israel's culpability, officials and ministers in Israel have attempted to suggest that there is no hunger in Gaza, that if hunger exists it is not Israel's fault, or to blame Hamas or the UN and aid organisations for problems with distribution of aid. The Israeli effort has continued even as one of its own government ministers, the far-right heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu, made comments this week describing an unapologetic policy of starvation, genocide and ethnic cleansing which Israel has suggested is not official policy. Amid evidence of a growing number of deaths from starvation in Gaza including children, and shocking images and accounts of malnutrition, Israel has tried to deflect blame for what has been described by the head of the World Health Organization as 'man-made mass starvation'. That view was endorsed by a joint statement this week by 28 countries – including the UK – which explicitly blamed Israel. 'The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths,' the statement said. 'The Israeli government's aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazan's of human dignity. 'We condemn the drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.' Some Israeli officials have been marginally more cautious in public statements, including the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has promised vaguely that there 'will be no starvation' in Gaza. But a recent off-the-record briefing for journalists by a senior Israeli security official has pushed a more uncompromising position, stating that there 'is no hunger in Gaza' and claiming that images of starving children on front pages around the world showed children with 'underlying diseases'. David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesperson, told Sky news this week: 'There is no famine in Gaza – there is a famine of the truth.' Contradicting that claim, Médecins Sans Frontières said that a quarter of the young children and pregnant or breastfeeding mothers it had screened at its clinics last week were malnourished, a day after the UN said one in five children in Gaza City were suffering from malnutrition. Israel's attempts to deflect blame, however, are undermined by its single and overarching responsibility: that, as an occupying power in a conflict, it is legally obliged to ensure the provision of means of life for those under occupation. And while Israel has consistently tried to blame Hamas for intercepting food aid, that claim has been undermined by a leaked US assessment seen by Reuters which found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group Hamas of US-funded humanitarian supplies. Examining 156 incidents of theft or loss of US-funded supplies reported by US aid partner organisations between October 2023 and May 2025, it said it found 'no reports alleging Hamas' benefited from US-funded supplies. Israel has also recently intensified efforts to blame the UN for the problems with aid distribution, citing a 'lack of cooperation from the international community and international organisations'. Israel's claims are contradicted by clear evidence of its efforts to undermine aid distribution. Despite international warnings of the humanitarian risks posed by banning Unrwa, the main UN agency for Palestinians and the organisation with the most experience in Gaza, from Israel, its operations were closed down, complicating aid efforts. Instead Israel, backed by the US, has relied on the private, inexperienced and controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose sites have been the focus of numerous mass casualty incidents, where desperate Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers. And Israel's efforts to hamper with aid efforts have continued. Last week it said it would not renew the work visa of Jonathan Whitall, the most senior UN aid official in Gaza; and a UN spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, told reporters on Thursday that Israel had rejected eight of the 16 UN requests to transport humanitarian aid in Gaza the previous day. He added that two other requests, initially approved, led to staff facing obstruction on the ground as he described a pattern of 'bureaucratic, logistical, administrative and other operational obstacles imposed by Israeli authorities'. All of which has injected a new sense of urgency into the catastrophe in Gaza as UN agencies warned that they were on the brink of running out of specialised food needed to save the lives of severely malnourished children. 'Most malnutrition treatment supplies have been consumed and what is left at facilities will run out very soon if not replenished,' a World Health Organization spokesperson said on Thursday. More starvation deaths appear inevitable.
