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Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998-2008 by Lindsay Bremner

21 March 2011 By Catherine du Toit Books

Bremner speaks of a way of being in the world that is nomadic

Lindsay Bremner’s central thesis is that a city becomes a city analogously to the way in which a book becomes a book. Reading is to a book what dwelling, walking, playing, working and the rest is to the city. City dwellers are like readers. Just as anonymous readers assert the uniqueness of a work, so anonymous citizens, through their inattentive, distracted, careless daily lives assert the ‘citiness’ of a city. For this there are no words, only routines, gestures, desires, textures, sounds, shadows, light, glamour, noise and money.

This is the concept of the city asserted by Benjamin’s flâneur, Kracauer’s mass ornament, Debord’s dérive, de Certeau’s walker, Rendell’s rambler, Mbembe and Nuttall’s migrant labourer, and Le Marcis’ AIDS sufferer - a city accessible only through the practice of walking, of knowing with the feet, a city that runs like a thread through Bremner’s own work on Johannesburg, in her attempts to reveal the manner in which it constitutes itself and its citizens as modern, urban and cosmopolitan.

The book also quite literally records Bremner’s own walking about, between archives, urban theory, critical theory, government offices, party caucuses, community meetings, gated enclaves, shopping malls and city streets. The volume speaks of a way of being in the world that is essentially nomadic - and perhaps part of a feminine topology - and that through movement, seeks to make connections among things.

Writing the City into Being segways into a discussion of the work of Clive Chipkin, as Johannesburg makes the transition from apartheid city to ‘world-class city’. Attempts to redistribute resources and to confront the separations of apartheid have caused lacunae to open up in the bureaucratic processes of planning, leading to uncontrolled speculation, opportunity and crime. As a result, Johannesburg has become one of the most written about, photographed, exhibited, globally-circulating and contested cities in the world.

South African cities, as instruments of the apartheid political economy, were not easily assimilated into the general urban discourse. However, this is not to say that its urban scholars were not engaged, as Bremner elegantly demonstrates with her whirlwind tour through the key players on the global stage, ranging from the beginning of the twentieth century to the four primary sites of architectural urban research today.

Bremner then challenges her readers to consider that African cities might serve as starting points for cities generally, since they remind us that urbanisation is a complex, constant process with no single predetermined end point: all cities in Africa are works in progress, driven largely by the creative inventiveness of ordinary people.

Three themes conceptualise, theorise and bring into relation a number of conditions of radical uncertainty, unpredictability, ethereality and insecurity that characterise contemporary city-making: ‘Smooth Space’, ‘Immaterial Architecture’ and ‘Terror’ serve as the titles to photographic essays forming the central section, followed by 10 essays and an extensive bibliography with endnotes on pink paper - this is a modest volume, but satisfyingly dense and beautifully produced.

The essays, both written and photographic, present a facsimile of Johannesburg, which is at once complex, instantly recognisable and compelling. ‘Six Ways of Being a Stranger’ describes six characters haunting not only the delicate postcolonial project in South Africa, but also, Bremner argues, everywhere in our globalised world.

‘Remaking Johannesburg’ reveals the logic of the city’s past performance and theorises the strategies of the present, analysing the architecture of fear, in between and landscapes of desire, in which highly defended public realms of the new city are invested with meaning through their configuration as little bits of Italy. Anyone familiar with the architecture of Sun City, photographer David Goldblatt’s recent work, or indeed any number of luxury hotels around the world, will recognise this intermingling of consumption and fantasy, which allows the reality of a place to be temporarily forgotten.

As a young architect, grappling with issues around identity, authenticity and truth to materials, I was mortified by an established commercial architect’s assertion that there were three types of architecture in South Africa: lightly themed, medium themed and Sun City. But as it turns out, he saw the future, or perhaps even built it.

It is a relief therefore to find that this volume offers so much more to those seeking to understand the relationship of architecture to cities in a rapidly changing and fragmenting world. And engagingly, Bremner does not try to present this vision all as her own. In parallel, Le Roux, Judin, Vladislavic, Weizman et al’s explorations are all carefully cross-referenced in this book. Perhaps Bremner’s real triumph here, aside from writing with depth and authority, is to bring such a multitude of voices into a single coherent work, evidencing the fact that she has written a new Johannesburg into being.

+ Authoritative work - Fast-moving subject

Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998-2008

Author: Lindsay Bremner

Publisher: Fourthwall Books, 2010

Since 1896, The Architectural Review has scoured the globe for architecture that challenges and inspires. Buildings old and new are chosen as prisms through which arguments and broader narratives are constructed. In their fearless storytelling, independent critical voices explore the forces that shape the homes, cities and places we inhabit.

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Johannesburg

The elusive metropolis.

• Edited by: Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe
• With contributions by: AbdouMaliq Simone
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Copyright year: 2008
• Main content: 392
• Other: 24 illustrations
• Published: October 24, 2008
• ISBN: 9780822381211

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Bustling city life | Vibrant culture

The history of joburg, city of gold.

J J ohannesburg, the metropolis with the country’s tallest skyscrapers, was once just veld (bush), dotted with rocky outcrops, scrubby bush and a network of streams. Today it is a cosmopolitan city of more than four million people, one of the few of its size in the world that is not located on a river or at the sea. It is located in Gauteng, the smallest of the country’s nine provinces, which contributes around 40% to South Africa’s GDP.

Johannesburg has seen waves of different peoples occupying the area that is now the city: Stone Age ancestors dating back 500 000 years; Bushmen from 1 000 years ago; 500-year-old Iron Age furnaces belonging to Tswana people, and Boer farmhouses dating from the 1860s. But the city really started in 1886 when gold was discovered by Australian gold prospector George Harrison.

Soon tents and wagons appeared, to be replaced by wood and iron structures, and again replaced by brick buildings. A town was demarcated, and a large, bustling market square. Buildings got taller and taller, and today the city boasts one of the tallest buildings in Africa - the 50-storey Carlton Centre, built in 1973.

T T he gold rush saw prospectors from around the world trek up to the Witwatersrand, precipitating the Anglo-Boer or South African War of 1899-1902, in which the British fought the Boers over control of the then Transvaal and its gold.

After the war another wave of migrants entered Johannesburg - up to 60 000 Chinese labourers were imported to kick start the mines again, only to be repatriated six years later. But Chinese merchants had established themselves in the city, and still have a presence. The mines also brought European migrants to the burgeoning town. They provided the capital to reach deeper into the earth to get the gold, while black South Africans were recruited at low wages to mine the gold.

The first forced removals in the town in 1904 saw residents of Brickfields removed 25km down south after their brickmaking settlement in the town was burnt to the ground to contain a bubonic plague outbreak. They were settled in Klipspruit. This was the start of the city’s and the country’s largest township, Soweto. And so the segregated city was born.

Another migrant appeared on the dusty streets of the town - Mahatma Gandhi. He fought for equal treatment for Indian and Chinese residents, developing Satyagraha or passive resistance, adopted by the African National Congress at its formation in 1912. Like Nelson Mandela decades later, Gandhi was locked up in the Old Fort Prison in Hillbrow, the town’s first prison, both of them for the same reason: fighting for equal rights for their compatriots. The striking Constitutional Court now sits among three prisons: the Old Fort, the notorious No 4 black men’s prison, and the Women’s Gaol.

G G old was the backbone of Johannesburg’s rapid growth. In time, industries were established, and more and more people came seeking jobs and a slice of its wealth, especially after the 1913 Natives Land Act, which robbed black people of their land. Buildings soared upwards and suburbs stretched in all directions, today covering an area of some 1 700km². The Sachsenwald Forest that was planted in the first decade of the city’s life has today become an urban forest of 10 million trees.

One of these suburbs was Sophiatown. It witnessed the city’s second largest forced removal in the 1950s, when 65 000 people were removed by apartheid decree to make way for working-class whites. The suburb was the incubator of bountiful talent: writers like Nat Nakasa, Bloke Modisane and Don Mattera; and musicians Hugh Masekela, Dolly Rathebe, Dorothy Masuka and Thandi Klaasen. Artist Gerard Sekoto lived in the suburb for a while, recording life on the streets in vivid colours.

The city became the microcosm of the country’s fight against race discrimination. It was here that two giants of the anti-apartheid struggle, Mandela and Walter Sisulu, learnt the ropes of resistance. It was on a dusty soccer field in Kliptown in 1955 that the Freedom Charter was ratified, bringing together people from around the country to express their desires for an equal society.

The ANC was banned in 1960, and turned to armed struggle. On 11 July 1963 the top leadership of the ANC was arrested at a farm on the outskirts of Joburg, at Liliesleaf, hatching a plan for armed resistance. The farmhouse is now a World Heritage site, documenting in graphic detail the events of the day. Eight men were sentenced to life imprisonment for treason, among them Mandela and Sisulu. The resistance had been silenced.

I I t took Soweto schoolchildren on a winter’s day in Orlando in June 1976 to rise up against the apartheid government, to remind the world of apartheid’s brutal oppression. This catapulted Johannesburg and South Africa into the tumultuous 1980s, when apartheid was rapidly unwinding. Soweto was often the battleground of that demise - police chased protestors into the Regina Mundi Church, where you can still see the bullet holes in the ceiling and walls. Soweto has become a sprawling township of more than one million people. Its most famous road, Vilakazi Street, is where two Nobel laureates lived: Mandela and Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.

It was in Joburg that Mandela lived after his release from prison in 1990. He settled in Houghton with his third wife, Graça Machel, and it is here that he died. It is in Joburg that other great struggle stalwarts died and are buried: Sisulu and his wife Albertina, Ahmed Kathrada, Beyers Naude, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Joe Slovo, Helen Joseph, Lillian Ngoyi and many others.

Today Johannesburg still struggles to undo apartheid’s segregation, but the city hardly stops to take a breath, such is the drive of its residents to explore, make money, be better, have fun. Some of that fun happens in its many parks and green lungs; some of it dancing on top of its tall buildings, some of it in its many excellent restaurants, pubs and shebeens, usually with residents basking in its beautiful sunsets.

Johannesburg

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A A bout the author

Lucille Davie has a BA Education degree, and a Tesol English 2 nd Language Certificate. She taught for 20 years, and was a journalist for 19 years. For 13 years she wrote on the history and heritage of Johannesburg for the joburg.org.za website, and on a broad range of subject for mediclubsouthafrica.com . For three years she wrote a monthly column for the Saturday Star , entitled Jozi Rewired. A selection of all these articles is available on lucilledavie.co.za

In 2014 she wrote a book for Johannesburg City Parks & Zoo, entitled A Journey Through Johannesburg’s Parks, Cemeteries and Zoos. She now conducts Joburg tours, teaches English to expat children and adults, and writes about Jozi people and other Jozi stuff. Her interests include reading, writing, mountain biking, swimming, and travelling. She has completed 4 Dusi Canoe Marathons, ridden the Cape Argus Cycle Tour, and climbed Mt Kilimanjaro.

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Johannesburg the Edgy City

• Reference work entry
• First Online: 30 October 2022
• pp 1052–1064
• Cite this reference work entry

• Loren Kruger 2  

Apartheid versus post-apartheid Johannesburg ; Art deco versus international style in Johannesburg architecture ; Global north versus global south in Johannesburg

Throughout its history, Johannesburg has been descibed as a city of innovation and illegality, disorderly and violent but also a wonder city and, most recently, an Afropolis. The city has reinvented itself every generation or so, but these contradictions are not new and understanding them requires a review of Johannesburg’s past as well as its present.

Introduction

Since its foundation as a gold rush town on the South African Witwatersrand (Afrikaans: white watershed; abbrev. Rand) in 1886, Johannesburg has received scrutiny at home and abroad for its unruly mixture of innovation and illegality. Censured by critics as a “disorderly city” (Murray 2008 ) beset by intractable problems of violence, inequality, and uneven development (Beavon 2004 ), it has also been praised by its boosterish (now former) mayor as...

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Loren Kruger

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Jeremy Tambling

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Kruger, L. (2022). Johannesburg the Edgy City. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62419-8_240

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City of Johannesburg

The poem "City of Johannesburg" is written as a protest poetry against the maltreatment and poor state of Africans, it talk about issues and situations unbearable. Literature as a mirror of society, encourage the poet to mirror his society.

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This thesis adopts a contrapuntal reading of Johannesburg through the work of Ivan Vladislavić. While it evaluates the dominant and pervasive readings of the city in current and historical scholarship, carefully considering the way in which its gold-mining origins have shaped a city that is dominated by a culture of surface, violence, and socio-historical amnesia, it ultimately aims to show how Vladislavić’s fiction subverts and challenges these prevailing means of perceiving Johannesburg. As part of inaugurating a depth reading of the city, Vladislavić sets about defamiliarising both the textual and urban landscape as a means of engendering a momentary state of lostness. The experience of lostness means that habitual markers are no longer able to guide or provide comfort to the textual and urban navigator. As a result, lostness dislodges accustomed ways of seeing, reading, and writing the city, thus allowing for both textual and urban rediscovery to ensue. The abandonment of conventions of meaning allows Vladislavić to render the city afresh. What his depictions reveal are the less commonly noticed aspects of Johannesburg city-life – in other words, what lies beneath its culture of surface. This depth reading uncovers a variety of palimpsests of both an urban and natural variety. Moreover, in this process, nature, something we tend to view as peripheral to the urban environment, is exposed and shown to exist in the shadows of the postcolonial city – haunting culture. This revelation ultimately deconstructs Johannesburg’s often paranoid culture of surface and proffers the ameliorative alternatives of natural flow, provisionality, and flux.

Not No Place. Johannesurg, Fragments of Spaces and Times

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A book that was formed through 6 years of collaborative research into the city of Johannesburg, through historical archives, fictional accounts, films, as well as walks, drives, letters, friendship and love. In the book we attempt to understand a city that is composed not of one single image, but of several often incommensurable imaginaries. A city of the future, that all too easily forgets its recent, short and violent apartheid past. The book draws on Walter Benjamin's notes that formed the posthumously published 'Passegenwerk' (Arcades Project) to bring together a series of fragments, from archives, photographs, novels, films, artistic interventions, drawings, maps, forgotten books to trace the way Johannesburg has been and is imagined. The double negative of the 'Not No Place' ascribes this same ambiguity within the Utopian impulses of a city described as elusive, emerging, extreme, divided, in transition, world-class, afropolitan. We did not find an equivalent conceptual structure to the ‘arcade’, but rather a set of complexities around ‘place’ that in each instance produced their own vocabulary. Not a single image, but many fragmentary images. Note that this is a proof copy and not the final complete manuscript that went to print in 2013.

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ABSTRACT. From early years, literary criticism and urban studies have perceived Johannesburg as a city escaping the strictures of literary and civil concepts, the paradigms of literary genre and of concept city. Unlike Cape Town, whose history spans centuries, and the chance for her shape and existence to consolidate and to have been “properly” re-told—by both inhabitants and visitors—appears to be more tangible, the City of Gold remains formless, evasive and still immersed in the process of discovering her narrative/narratives. The present article seeks to provide some insights into a recent postmodern, post-antiapartheid project of rendering the cityness of Johannesburg put forward in Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked, the first nonfiction work by South African iconoclastic novelist Ivan Vladislavić who, as I hope to show, has developed an accretive style for recounting in the brief, at times photographic at other times epiphanic “prose poems,” his encounters in and with the city of Johannesburg. The following looks at the diverse contexts of Vladislavić’s explorations in search of a method, which includes his earlier work, where he reflects on attempts to comprehend the city in the course of semiotic analysis reducing the urban to language,and the later where he cooperates with David Goldblatt on a multimedia representation of Johannesburg. Finally, the article gives examples of Vladislavić’s strategy whose objective is to un-lock the city rather thanconstruct its legible image.

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City Johannesburg - review

City Johannesburg

This poem City Johannesburg is about a man called Mongane Wally Serote. He wrote about his life during apartheid. He wrote this because one day he got arrested and was left in prison for nine months. When he was finally released he was very angry.  A couple of years later he wrote this poem.

In this poem Serote speaks of the difficulties created for black people by the law which required them to carry a pass at all times, it also speaks of restrictions it placed on black people.

We notice that at the beginning of the poem Serote speaks of life, but further down towards the end of the poem he talks about death. This is quite contrasting, as we notice that he compares the things he loves with death.  ‘When I go back to my dongas, my dust, my people, my death,’ this signifies that although he’s going back to the people and things he loves death is typified as being in a white supremacy, because the white people have the power and control over those less fortunate.  

The poem is written as a narrative poem, irregular and only has one stanza. Some of the lines thought at the poem are short which provided impact.  I think that Serote wrote this poem in order to show people how the ethnic minority of that time were oppressed and the difficulties that they faced by their white counter parts.

This is a preview of the whole essay

Serote uses imagery to convey this for example he uses ‘I salute you’ this is very effective as the image that comes to mind when these words are said is his hand reaching to his head, this in effect suggests a warm greeting or a welcome but instead Serote puts his hands is in his back trousers pocket for his pass. These few lines express a mocking tone as it depicts fear and anxiety and is shown not to be a proper salute. It continues by saying that his pass is his life. These two concepts together show they are both as important as each other.  This is because without his pass he has no life.

It appears that Serote repeats the words ‘Jo’ Burg City’ many times throughout the poem, this suggests that he was very familiar with the city as he has been there so long.  The writer uses similes such as ‘my hand like a starved snake rears my pockets’.  This simile shows how nervous he is because he is looking for his pass, it also has a lot of depth to it because if you imagine a starved shake clenching onto a piece of food.  In the same way you can imagine him clenching to his back pocket.

 ‘For my thin ever lean wallet,’ this quote links in to the previous one because it indicates his lack of money. Therefore it also shows his economic status in that city.

The poet uses a lot of emotive language in this poem to try and make the readers understand the hardship for black people ‘My death,

That is so related to me as a wink in the eye’ The quote ‘the wink in the eye comes across as being emotive because it enables is readers to realise that his death could be as quick as a wink of the eye.  This suggests that with every wink there could be danger of death.

It is apparent that the poem is written with no structure this maybe because the poets feelings at the time were incoherent.  When reading the poem the mixture of emotion appears to be overwhelming therefore it would be difficult to put words into a logical order.

Serote expresses ‘There is no Fun’, ‘nothing in it’ this statement would indicate that ‘Jo Burg City, Johannesburg’ is like being empty or unfilled, the idea of happiness or fond memories appear to be missing, leaving a void in his life needing to be filled.  

I believe that Mongane Wally Serote wrote this poem to try and make his readers aware of the type of treatment that was inflicted upon black people.  He wanted people to understand and see the segregation that was evident in his time and the oppression being mete out upon the less fortunate due to laws conjured by white people.  Serote wanted people to appreciate that these laws were unfair and destroying the lives of vulnerable people.

I conclude by saying that the emotive language used throughout the poem identifies with the oppression ‘where death lurks in the dark like a blade in the flesh’ for me this final statement re-emphasises the blade, which is a knife being held close to a person who if he moves without being told to will be killed. This without a doubt shadows the deep pain and turmoil Serote really feels inside.

This poem has made me realise that black people had no place in life. It also showed me how life had changed for the better. I felt that this poem was very touching as it made me feel sorry for who had to live life knowing that at any time death could be waiting for them.

Document Details

• Word Count 861
• Page Count 3
• Subject English

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Middle East Crisis Israel Recovers the Bodies of Three Hostages Taken on Oct. 7

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Follow news updates on the crisis in the Middle East .

The dead hostages had been abducted from a music festival on Oct. 7.

Israeli forces have recovered the bodies of three Israeli hostages who were taken captive as they fled a music festival during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, the Israeli military announced on Friday.

Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, identified the bodies as those of Amit Buskila, Shani Louk and Yitzhak Gelernter. He said Israeli troops had recovered the bodies during an operation in Gaza on Thursday night, but did not say where they were found.

All three had attended the Tribe of Nova trance music festival on Oct. 7, where at least 360 people were killed, Admiral Hagari said. During the attack, they fled the festival and headed toward Mefalsim, a kibbutz in southern Israel. Palestinian militants found them there, killed them and brought their corpses back to Gaza, Admiral Hagari said.

The recovery of the remains highlighted the growing anxiety among relatives of hostages over how many of their loves ones are still alive after seven months of war in Gaza. A growing number of Israelis have criticized the Netanyahu government for doing too little to reach a deal with Hamas to secure the release of the remaining captives.

Roughly 125 living and dead hostages abducted on Oct. 7 remain in Gaza, including several U.S. citizens, according to the Israeli authorities. Israel and Hamas have held indirect negotiations in an attempt to reach a deal that would free at least some hostages in exchange for a cease-fire.

In Washington on Friday, John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said there was no new information about the well being or whereabouts of the handful of Americans who were taken on Oct. 7.

Ms. Louk, a 23-year-old German-Israeli citizen, became a symbol of the brutality of the devastating attack. Shortly after Oct. 7, Hamas released a video of a woman lying face down, mostly naked, in the back of a pickup truck in Gaza. Based on the dreadlocks and tattoos, Ms. Louk’s mother said she believed it was her daughter.

In late October, Ms. Louk’s family said the Israeli authorities had confirmed she had been killed. Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, publicly mourned her death, saying at the time that it “shows the full barbarity behind the Hamas attack — who must be held accountable.”

Ms. Buskila, who was 27 when she was abducted, called her family on the morning of the attack, whispering to them that she was “surrounded by terrorists,” her uncle, Shimon Atiyas, told Israeli television in late October. “She told me: ‘Shimon, I’m dying, I love you.’ After that, we didn’t get any information about her fate.”

Mr. Gelernter, who went by the nickname Itzik, was a resident of central Israel who was 56 on Oct. 7. His son, Asaf, described him in an interview with Israeli news media in February as a devoted father and grandfather who was widely beloved. “He was young at heart,” Asaf Gelernter said. He added, “He enjoyed life, he loved life.”

In a statement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel mourned the “terrible loss” of the three hostages. “We will return all of our hostages, the living and the deceased alike,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

A senior Hamas official, Izzat Al-Rishq, declined to confirm whether the hostages had indeed been recovered by Israel, but said on the Telegram messaging app, “Without an exchange that dignifies our people and our resistance, the enemy will only receive its prisoners as lifeless corpses.”

Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers recovered the bodies of the hostages during a mission based on intelligence obtained from interrogating detained Palestinian militants, the Israeli military said in a statement.

For months, Israel and Hamas have been negotiating indirectly through mediators over a cease-fire deal that would secure the release of the remaining hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. In late November, 105 hostages were freed during a weeklong truce between the two sides.

Just two weeks ago, officials familiar with the talks voiced hope that a deal could be reached soon. But the negotiations have stalled, and the two sides remain far apart on key issues, including Israel’s insistence that it still plans to carry out a massive assault on the southern city of Rafah.

“The return of their bodies is a painful and stark reminder that we must swiftly bring back all our brothers and sisters from their cruel captivity — the living for rehabilitation, and the murdered to a proper burial,” said the Hostage Families Forum Headquarters, a group representing many relatives of those held captive.

Katie Rogers contributed from Washington.

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the age of Shani Louk. She was 23, not 22.

How we handle corrections

— Aaron Boxerman

Latest Images from Israel and Gaza

• A woman looking at damage at a school-turned-shelter in Nuseirat, in central Gaza. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
• Tent cities line the coast of Deir al Balah, a city in central Gaza. By World Food Program Via Reuters
• People gathering in the plaza known as Hostages Square in Tel Aviv on Friday. Oded Balilty/Associated Press
• A passersby observing photos of hostages on the walls of Hostages Square in Tel Aviv. Oded Balilty/Associated Press
• Smoke rising after a strike in the Gaza Strip. Tsafrir Abayov/Associated Press
• Heavily damaged buildings in Khan Younis. By World Food Program Via Reuters
• A woman receiving medical care at a hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
• Many Gazans fled Rafah as Israeli military operations ramped up in the area. By World Food Program Via Reuters
• Women mourning during a funeral in the West Bank. Alaa Badarneh/EPA, via Shutterstock
• A plane dropping humanitarian aid over Khan Younis. Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock

Key Developments

Diplomats call on Israel to take ‘urgent action’ to protect Gazans, and other news.

The top diplomats of 13 countries — including every member of the Group of 7 industrialized democracies except the United States — said in a joint letter that Israel must take “urgent action” to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The letter addressed to Israel’s foreign minister, a copy of which was seen by The New York Times, calls on the Israeli authorities to expand the amount of aid entering the territory, take “concrete action” to protect civilians and work toward a “sustainable cease-fire.”

The main United Nations agency that aids Palestinians said that the number of Gazans who have fled from the southern city of Rafah since Israel began its military offensive in the area on May 6 has risen to more than 630,000. Many have been displaced to the central city of Deir al Balah, which the agency, known as UNRWA, said on social media was now “unbearably overcrowded with dire conditions.”

Dozens of Israelis attacked and burned a truck they incorrectly believed was ferrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, wounding the driver, according to an Israeli military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional repercussions. It was the latest violent act by right-wing Israeli protesters opposed to sending any aid to the Palestinian enclave. Israeli troops arrived to disperse the rioters, who then attacked them, wounding three soldiers, the military said in a statement.

Israeli forces appear to be pushing closer to the center of Rafah, according to satellite imagery , which shows military vehicles and widespread destruction of neighborhoods more than two and a half miles inside Gaza. The imagery also shows Palestinians having fled even from outside areas of Rafah that the Israeli military has said to evacuate.

FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, on Friday postponed a decision to temporarily suspend Israel over its actions during the conflict in Gaza, and in the West Bank, saying it needed to solicit legal advice before taking up a motion submitted by the Palestinian Football Association. The motion calling for Israel’s suspension referred to “international law violations committed by the Israeli occupation in Palestine, particularly in Gaza,” and cited violations of FIFA’s human rights and discrimination statutes.

American medical volunteers leave Gaza after being trapped by the Rafah incursion.

A group of American medical volunteers who had become trapped in the Gaza Strip were evacuated from the enclave on Friday, according to the State Department and humanitarian medical groups. It had been nearly a week since Israel began its offensive in the southern Gazan city of Rafah, preventing the medical workers from leaving.

A physician, Dr. Ammar Ghanem, who had been volunteering for more than two weeks, described the uncertainty as he made his way out of Gaza after days of not knowing what would happen. He had arrived as part of an international group of 18 doctors, nurses and pharmacists at the beginning of May. They had intended to leave together on Monday, but the escalating violence in Gaza and the border closing made that impossible.

By Friday afternoon, 17 American medical workers were met at the Kerem Shalom border crossing by a team from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, according to an American official familiar with the events. Among them were Dr. Ghanem and four of his colleagues who were volunteering with the Palestinian American Medical Association at the European General Hospital in Khan Younis. The others were there with F.A.J.R. Scientific, a U.S.-based nonprofit.

Three American doctors with the Palestinian American Medical Association stayed behind to keep working, according to Dr. Mustafa Musleh, president of the group. Other volunteers with the organization remained because only those with American citizenship had been granted permission to leave.

“We are happy for the volunteers who made it back,” Dr. Musleh said, but he expressed frustration with the process and with the fact that new volunteers had not been allowed in, adding that a team of 11 doctors was waiting in Cairo for permission to enter. “The emergency is not only to get the volunteers out, but to help the people who are suffering.”

Last week, Israeli forces launched an attack on Rafah, where more than a million displaced people had been sheltering.They closed the Rafah crossing with Egypt, a vital entry point for humanitarian aid.

Additionally, Israel shut down the Kerem Shalom crossing but reopened it on Wednesday .

The Rafah attack has also prevented dozens of wounded and ill Palestinians from reaching Egypt to receive medical treatment, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

On Friday morning at the European General Hospital, the group of volunteers met in front of the emergency room for an emotional goodbye before the Americans left for Kerem Shalom, Dr. Ghanem said.

He had arrived with the team in Gaza on May 1, expecting to stay until May 13. Another team was scheduled to replace them two days later.

But about a week into his time in Gaza, as Israel ordered evacuations in parts of Rafah, he began to worry. Their group leaders convened the team to discuss the possibility of evacuation and began drawing up a list of which doctors should leave first based on family or work obligations.

Meanwhile, it sounded like the explosions were getting closer, Dr. Ghanem said. The borders remained closed, and two days after they were supposed to leave, there had been no new confirmation that anyone could leave, he said.

On Thursday, the group leaders told the team that they had heard from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem that only Americans would be allowed to evacuate.

Deciding to leave was difficult, Dr. Ghanem said, complicated by the fact that colleagues from countries including Saudi Arabia, Australia and Jordan were not allowed to.

“We felt that we had to evacuate because we need to go back home,” he said. “We need to take care of our broken families and support them.”

The journey from the European General Hospital, near Khan Younis, to the Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel was coordinated by COGAT, the Israeli agency that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories and works with international organizations, and the American Embassy, said Dr. Musleh, of the Palestinian American Medical Association.

The 12-mile trip took almost five hours, Dr. Ghanem said, because the roads that they had been told to take for safety reasons had been damaged by bombardment. They also had car trouble.

After crossing into Israel, the U.S. Embassy team that met them drove them to Jerusalem. After a few hours’ sleep, Dr. Ghanem started the even longer journey back to Michigan, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Edward Wong contributed reporting.

— Gaya Gupta

Trucks of aid began entering Gaza through a U.S.-built pier, but officials say it is not enough.

Trucks of humanitarian aid began moving ashore into Gaza early Friday through a temporary pier built by the U.S. military , the first supplies of aid to be sent into the enclave by sea in two months, but well short of what humanitarian groups said was needed to meet the staggering levels of hunger and deprivation in Gaza.

A day earlier, the U.S. military said it had anchored the floating pier and causeway to the beach in Gaza, a key step in completing a maritime aid corridor that the Pentagon announced in March . But U.S. officials and international aid groups have said sea shipments can only supplement deliveries through land crossings, not replace them.

No U.S. troops entered Gaza on Friday, the U.S. military said, emphasizing that it was providing only logistical support for delivery of the supplies, which were donated by a number of countries and organizations.

The territory of 2.2 million civilians is more reliant than ever on humanitarian aid. The devastation after seven months of Israeli bombardment, strict Israeli inspections and restrictions on crossing points had already severely limited what could enter. And over the past week and a half, the flow of aid through the main land crossings in southern Gaza has been reduced nearly to a trickle since Israel began a military assault around the city of Rafah.

Israel has come under pressure from the Biden administration and other allies to do more to ease the entry of aid, with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken warning this week that recent improvements in relief delivery were being undercut by the fighting in southern Gaza.

The supplies included in the initial deliveries were a fraction of the need in Gaza: food bars for 11,000 people, therapeutic food for 7,200 malnourished children and hygiene kits for 30,000 people, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The British government said it had sent 8,400 temporary shelters made up of plastic sheeting.

“More aid will follow in the coming weeks, but we know the maritime route is not the only answer,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain said in a statement .

It was not immediately clear where in the enclave the aid would be delivered or when. The U.N. World Food Program said in a statement that it would handle logistics in Gaza for aid coming through the pier, including coordinating trucks, overseeing the loading of supplies, dispatching them to warehouses and handing them over to “humanitarian partners.”

Pentagon officials said they were initially aiming to deliver about 90 trucks of aid each day, increasing that to about 150 trucks when the operation reached capacity. Some 500 trucks of commercial goods and aid arrived in Gaza each day before the war began last October.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III spoke about the maritime corridor in a call with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, on Thursday, according to the Pentagon. Mr. Austin stressed the need to “surge” humanitarian assistance to Gaza, through land border crossings in addition to the pier, according to the department.

Israel’s military said it had been working with the U.S. military to support the project as a “top priority.”

How the U.S. Humanitarian Pier in Gaza Will Work

A pier operation being assembled by U.S. service members will involve an elaborate process to provide Gazans with just a portion of the aid they need.

Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, deputy commander of the Central Command, said the pier would only complement the flow of aid through land crossings, which he emphasized were “the most efficient and effective pathway to move the necessary volume of assistance.”

One of Gaza’s two main crossings for aid, in Rafah on the border with Egypt, has been closed since Israel began its military operation against Hamas fighters there. Israel shut down the second major crossing, at Kerem Shalom, after a Hamas rocket attack nearby killed four Israeli soldiers last week. That crossing has since reopened, Israel says, but little aid has passed through in recent days.

An aid group, World Central Kitchen, built a makeshift jetty in mid-March to deliver aid by sea to Gaza for the first time in nearly two decades. But those efforts came to an abrupt stop in early April after seven of the group’s workers were killed in an Israeli strike .

Raja Abdulrahim and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

— Victoria Kim

Israel defends its Rafah operation at a U.N. court.

Israeli officials heckled during a u.n. court hearing, during a hearing at the international court of justice, lawyers representing israel were called “liars” by a person in the audience while defending the military operation in rafah..

“South Africa presents the court, yet again, for the fourth time within the scope of less than five months, with a picture that is completely divorced from the facts and circumstances. We do not wish harm to these civilians as Hamas does. That is precisely why Israel is taking steps to try and contend with the massive complexity that such a situation presents. That is why there has not been a large-scale assault on Rafah, but rather specific, limited and localized operations prefaced with evacuation efforts and support for humanitarian activities.” “The State of Israel requests the court to reject the request for the modification and indication of provisional measures submitted by the Republic of South Africa.” Protesters: “Liars liars.”

Lawyers representing Israel on Friday defended the military operation in Rafah as “limited and localized,” arguing at the United Nations’ top court that the judges should not seek to restrict Israel’s actions in Gaza.

At a hearing at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Israel responded to a South African petition for the court to order an immediate halt to its ground assault in Rafah.

Israeli forces have advanced into the outskirts of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, over the past week and a half, ordering mass evacuations and intensifying their bombardment ahead of a long-anticipated invasion of the city. More than 630,000 people have fled the area, many of them already displaced from elsewhere in Gaza, according to the United Nations.

The hearings are part of South Africa’s case accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, which it filed in December . In late January, the court ordered Israel to do more to prevent acts of genocide, but is not expected to hear the main case over whether genocide is being committed until next year.

Last week, South Africa asked the judges to issue an emergency order aiming to prevent wide-scale civilian harm in Rafah. Lawyers for South Africa argued at the court on Thursday that Israel’s Rafah operation was “the last step in the destruction of Gaza and its Palestinian people.”

The court has no means of enforcing its orders, but the South Africa case has contributed to the international pressure on Israel to rein in its campaign in Gaza. It was not clear when the court would issue a decision on South Africa’s request for an emergency order.

On Friday, Gilad Noam, the Israeli deputy attorney general for international law, repeated Israel’s fierce rejection that it was committing genocide in Gaza. He said the Israeli authorities were working to facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid and to protect civilians amid fierce combat across the enclave, including in Rafah.

“Israel is taking steps to try and contend with the massive complexity that such a situation presents,” Mr. Noam told the judges. “That is why there has not been a large-scale assault on Rafah, but rather specific limited and localized operations prefaced with evacuation efforts and support for humanitarian activities.”

Israeli leaders have said that invading Rafah is necessary to topple Hamas’s rule in Gaza. Four battalions of Hamas fighters are in the city, according to the Israeli military, as well as at least some of the over 130 living and dead hostages still held by Palestinian armed groups since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza.

But the prospect of a major ground invasion of Rafah amid hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians has provoked sharp criticism internationally, including from the Biden administration. After Israel began its advance into the area, President Biden said Washington would withhold some weapons if Israel launched a full-fledged assault into densely populated areas.

Mr. Noam argued that the court ran the risk of engaging in “micromanagement of operational aspects of an armed conflict.” He said that demanding a cease-fire would only tie Israel’s hands because Hamas — an armed group rather than a state — was not subject to the court’s jurisdiction.

South Africa on Thursday also asked the court to order Israel to ensure greater access for aid workers, investigators and journalists in Gaza. Mr. Noam said that Israel’s justice system was working to crack down on alleged wartime misconduct, and that military prosecutors had opened 55 criminal investigations into possible violations by Israeli forces since the beginning of the war.

Human rights groups argue the Israeli military cannot credibly investigate itself and that soldiers who kill Palestinians under contested circumstances rarely face substantial penalties. B’Tselem, a leading Israeli human rights monitor, has dismissed previous inquiries by the Israeli authorities into potential violations of the laws of war as a whitewash.

Israeli officials have accused South Africa, by filing the case, of acting as a “legal arm” of Hamas, which led the deadly Oct. 7 attack. Last week, Hamas said that a delegation of its officials had attended a conference in Johannesburg. Hamas posted a photo of Basem Naim, a group spokesman, speaking with Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s foreign minister, on social media.

— Aaron Boxerman reporting from Jerusalem

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