When World War II broke out, 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands.. Only 35,000 of the total survived the terrible war and Nazi persecution.. 102,000 of the 107,000 who were deported to extermination camps were murdered; 57,000 died at Auschwitz.

All of them are remembered by the Holocaust Names Memorial in Amsterdam, which was inaugurated on September 19, 2021.. It is the memorial to all Dutch victims of Nazi terror.. It shows the names of those 102,000 victims of the Holocaust in what was an initiative of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee.

Now the country has learned that, after the Second World War, the country's own Government spied for years on the Dutch Jews who survived the extermination camps and returned to their homes.. The authorities considered the members of that committee extremists and a danger to democracy, and for this reason they were spied on by the secret service.

Spied on until the 1980s

The revelation was made on Saturday by the local newspaper Parool. For information, its journalists have relied on documentation from the archives of the BVD, precursor of the AIVD (the country's current security service), to which they had access through the National Archives.

After analyzing 71,000 declassified files, the newspaper said that many Dutch Holocaust survivors were spied on until the 1980s.. The secret service reported on the commemorative ceremonies and took note of those attending.

“It challenges any idea of civilization. “It cannot be justified, not even with time.”

The Dutch Auschwitz Committee, founded in 1956 by survivors, was also considered an extremist and monitored organization, according to Parool.. The BVD even had a mole within the organization, who informed them of everything that was happening.

Dutch journalists have asked the AIVD (the country's current security service) about all this, which has responded by reminding that the facts must be considered in light of the Cold War and the rise of communism at that time.. A letter from 1964 indicates that the Dutch secret service believed that the Dutch Communist Party had a presence in the Dutch Auschwitz Committee.

Espionage impossible to justify

None of the members of that committee are still alive today, but its current president, Jacques Grishaver, considers the now known revelations “shocking.”. “People who returned from concentration camps, destitute, were seen as enemies of the State…. “It's a massive scandal,” Grishaver told radio station NOS.

“People who returned from concentration camps, destitute, were seen as enemies of the State…. “It's a massive scandal.”

Not even, according to Grishaver, the communist track justifies massive espionage. “It could be that people were members of the PCN, but it was a respected party within a democracy.. That is no reason to consider the committee an extremist organization,” declared the president of the Dutch Auschwitz Committee.

“Those were different times, but the fact that you are going to do a report on the commemorations of Auschwitz, on the people who went there to remember their family who had been massacred, to embed the BVD there? It challenges any idea of civilization. It can't be justified, even over time,” said Grishaver, chairman of the Committee for the past 25 years.

Dutch mistreatment of surviving Jews

In reality, the news of espionage is raining on rain, about a problem that the Netherlands had with the surviving Jews and that weighs on the conscience of Dutch society today.. Jews who returned to their country in 1945 were not treated well and even “their property and possessions were stolen or lost,” Dutchnews reports.

Many town councils were not very hospitable to Jewish citizens who returned to claim their homes after the Second World War.. They were even required to pay taxes corresponding to the years in which they had been hiding or living poorly as prisoners in a Nazi camp.

There was the case of town councils (about 25) that participated in the purchase of properties from the Germans themselves and then hindered the owners' attempts to recover their properties.

Almost three months after Hamas attacked Israel, the fighting does not stop. This Tuesday, the Israeli authorities took stock of the situation and assured that they are fighting a “war on multiple fronts”, as confirmed by Yoav Gallant, the Israeli Minister of Defense.

“Israel is being attacked from seven fronts: Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria (Israeli term for the West Bank), Iraq, Yemen and Iran. We have already responded and taken action in six of them,” he said before the Knesset, the chamber that holds legislative power, as reported by The Guardian citing Reuters.

The Israeli president's statements came after attacks have been carried out in the last 24 hours against “more than a hundred terrorist targets” of Hamas that have caused the death of dozens of people in various parts of the Strip.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), for its part, have attacked a house in the city of Khan Younis, in the south of the enclave, where there have been at least five dead, several injured and people missing, according to the agency. Palestinian news outlet Maan News, linked to Hamas.

It is worth mentioning that, with this balance, the number of fatalities in this city in the last 24 hours has reached fifty. Of these, the majority were located in the vicinity of the European Hospital. In this way, this conflict has already become one of the most destructive of this 21st century.

According to estimates, more than 20,600 people have died in the conflict in which another 55,000 have been injured.. As a result, 85% of the 2.3 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip have been forced to leave their homes.

Israel announced this Tuesday that it will stop automatically granting visas to United Nations employees, considering that the organization is being a “complicit partner” of Hamas by not condemning the tactics that the Palestinian militia is allegedly using during the conflict.

Spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister's office, Eylon Levy, has accused the UN of covering up Hamas' tactics by failing to condemn attacks it is allegedly directing from hospitals, or the theft of humanitarian aid.

“By not condemning Hamas for hijacking aid, by not condemning it for waging war from hospitals, they have been complicit partners in Hamas' human shield strategy,” Levy said in a video posted on his X account.

For this reason, Levy has announced that Israel will analyze each of the visa applications that arrive from the United Nations on a case-by-case basis, a decision that further erodes a relationship that began to sour when Secretary General António Guterres toughened his message in the face of the increase. of those killed in Gaza.

“Israel will stop working with those who cooperate with the Hamas terror regime's propaganda machine and urges its partners to act in the same way,” the Israeli spokesperson concluded.

This month, Israel canceled the visa of the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lynn Hastings, arguing that she had not sufficiently condemned Hamas.

A mistake made by the American low-cost airline Spirit Airlines has caused a 6-year-old boy to become Macaulay Culkin (Home Alone) for a few hours.. According to the New York Post, the company put an unaccompanied minor under 6 years old on the wrong plane. The boy was supposed to land in Fort Mayers (Florida) to spend Christmas with his grandmother, but he landed in Orlando, 350 kilometers from his initial destination.

The grandmother, María Ramos, apparently concerned when she saw that her grandson did not arrive, asked about Casper and that was when they told her that he was not traveling on the plane.. The grandmother panicked and confronted the flight attendants who assured her that no child had traveled with them, although the child's suitcase did arrive at the expected airport.

After a few minutes of chaos, Spirit Airlines workers located Casper at the Orlando airport, a four-hour drive from Fort Mayers.. The little boy's grandmother and parents have expressed their indignation to the American network Wink-TV, saying that they do not understand “how something like this could have happened” if they filled out all the documentation and followed all the necessary steps.

“I don't understand how this could have happened and how my grandson ended up in Orlando. Did they take him off the plane to Fort Mayers? Did the flight attendant leave you alone after receiving the documentation? Did he get on the wrong plane or did they put him on?” the grandmother asked.

On the other hand, the airline has indicated in a statement on its website that they are carrying out “an internal investigation” to discover “what happened.” In addition, he has apologized to the family for that “terrible experience.”

The former president of the United States, Donald Trump, has defended before a federal appeals court the filing of the accusations against him for an alleged crime of subversion after the 2020 elections, in which he denounced fraud, alleging that at that time he enjoyed “immunity absolute” and that he had always acted within the powers conferred on him by the presidential office.

This is what Trump has stated in a new appeal with which he hopes that a second court determines that it is inviolable in the investigation launched by special prosecutor Jack Smith, after a lower court determined that there were no reasons to paralyze the process.

In a brief presented this Saturday, the magnate's lawyers have stressed that Trump acted as president to “guarantee the integrity of the elections.”. “Before a prosecutor can ask a court to judge the conduct of a president on his own, Congress must try and convict him,” they alleged, according to the letter reported by CNN.

The appeals court plans to host the hearing on January 9 for each of the parties to present these arguments, after the Supreme Court refused to rule ahead of time on the degree of immunity that Trump had when he allegedly committed the crimes that are now being committed. they attribute. The trial is scheduled for March 4.

Christmas does not stop the war in Gaza; Despite the messages of peace, the deaths and injuries increase every day in the Palestinian Strip, whose population no longer knows where to flee, while the Israeli Army also added casualties in one of the days with the most victims since the war began.

At least 166 Gazans died in the coastal enclave in the last 24 hours and 384 were injured by intense Israeli bombing, bringing the total toll to 20,424 dead and 54,036 injured since the start of the armed conflict, according to the Ministry of Health. of Gaza, controlled by the Islamist group Hamas.

Israel has ordered the evacuation of eight towns in the center of the Strip so that residents can move to the city of Deir al Balah, where five massacres were committed in the last 48 hours.

“There is nowhere to run”

“There is nowhere to go in Gaza,” lament many of those displaced by the Israeli offensive, since not even continuing to flee is safe for those who have been doing so for more than two and a half months of war.

“There is no safe zone in the Gaza Strip,” Sabri Abdelrahim told EFE in the Bureij refugee camp, which Israel ordered more than 150,000 people to leave.

Many do not want to leave, but the bombings make them think about it and finally the majority decide to flee, repeating the images of cars and trucks full of people, others in donkey carts with everything they have left.

Children, the elderly, women, along with mattresses, blankets, kitchen utensils and canned food, while Israeli planes fly over. Among the Israeli ranks, fourteen soldiers died in the last 48 hours, among the deadliest days in their Army since the ground offensive in the enclave began.

In total, 153 Israeli soldiers have died in combat since the start of the ground offensive on October 27, surpassing the 119 who died in the 2006 Lebanon war, according to official Army figures.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lamented: “The war is taking a very high toll on us, but we have no choice but to continue fighting” until the “destruction of Hamas,” because “it is the only way to recover our kidnapped people.” “, although “it will take time” and “it has a very high price.”

The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, which triggered the war, left more than 1,200 dead and about 240 kidnapped who were taken to Gaza.

The Israeli Army reported that it attacked more than 200 Hamas “terrorist targets” in the last 24 hours and killed numerous militants in joint operations with Shin Bet, the country's internal intelligence service.

In addition to having detained more than 200 “terrorists”, both from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in the last week, almost 800 since the start of the war, many of them taken to Israel for interrogation.

Sad Christmas

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, called for an end to the “river of blood” and the “immense sacrifices” of the Palestinian people in a message for Christmas, a celebration that takes on special relevance in Bethlehem, where Christian tradition places the birth of Jesus.

“The hardships and heroic resilience of our people in their land are the path to freedom and dignity,” said the president of the Palestinian National Authority, which governs small areas of the occupied West Bank.

Every December 24, Bethlehem celebrates a traditional parade with marching bands, prior to the arrival of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem on foot to officiate a mass in the Church of Saint Catherine, the Catholic basilica of the Nativity.

But this year, Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa – the Vatican's religious envoy to the Holy Land – arrived in a solemn procession, without music or festive events, mourning the high number of Palestinian deaths in the war.

Neither carols, nor pilgrims, nor anything of a typical Christmas in Bethlehem, since the war in Gaza turned this Christmas Eve into a sad day in the place where the birth of Jesus is venerated. “It is a very sad Christmas,” lamented the patriarch.

In front of the Christmas Basilica, in Manger Square, this year Jesus appears among rubble and barbed wire, like the children who die every day in Gaza

Egypt has proposed this Sunday to the Islamist group Hamas a truce of “two or three weeks” in exchange for the release of 40 Israeli hostages, as part of a three-phase plan to achieve a total cessation of the war in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian sources reported.

According to sources, a Hamas delegation will travel to Qatar, where its political office is located, to evaluate this proposal that Egypt will also present to the Islamic Jihad delegation, headed by its secretary general, Ziad Najalah, who arrived this Sunday in Cairo to address the situation in the Palestinian enclave.

The initiative that Egypt offered to the head of Hamas's political wing, Ismail Haniye, consists of three points: the first establishes a two or three-week truce in exchange for the release of 40 Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

The second point proposes a process of talks between Palestinians that will lead to the formation of a technocratic government in Gaza.

The third and final point proposes to implement a total cessation of the war, achieve a comprehensive agreement on the exchange of prisoners and hostages between both parties and the withdrawal of Israel from Gaza, according to sources.

They detailed that Egypt will present this plan to the secretary general of Islamic Jihad to consolidate the full Palestinian position towards this initiative.

However, this Palestinian movement has previously shown its rejection of any new hostage exchange agreement with Israel until the Israeli military attack on the Palestinian strip stops.

Islamic Jihad is a radical Palestinian organization considered terrorist by Israel, the United States and the European Union, which operates in Gaza, the West Bank and the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

Unlike other Palestinian factions, Islamic Jihad refuses to participate in political peace processes and insists that military victory over Israel is the only viable means to achieve its ultimate goal: the establishment of a state in Israel's territories. West Bank and Gaza.

Five Spaniards were arrested when the Senegalese Navy intercepted a fast motorized boat with 690 kilos of cocaine on the high seas this Friday that was destined for Europe, a military spokesperson confirmed.

“The identity documents of the five people discovered indicate that they are of Spanish nationality. They have been made available to the competent services of the Senegalese Police,” declared Commander Baye, of the Directorate of Information and Public Relations of the Senegalese Armed Forces (DIRPA).

The Navy reported this Saturday on the social network

The Navy indicated that “690 kilograms of cocaine were recovered and returned to Dakar” as well as the boat and “its five crew members”, but then did not provide the nationalities of the detainees, confirmed this Sunday by the aforementioned spokesperson, who did not provide more. details about those arrested.

“The national Navy remains determined to prohibit any passage of drugs into the Senegalese EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone),” the Navy added this Saturday.

The Senegalese naval force seized the drugs after the same patrol vessel intercepted three tons of cocaine on board the ship “NTEN FAYE” on the 16th, south of Senegalese waters and 425 kilometers from the coast.

The Navy estimated the “minimum value” of this seizure at 126 billion CFA francs (about 192 million euros). Both the ship and its seven crew members were taken to the Amiral Faye Gassama naval base in Dakar.

Long considered a transit zone for drugs produced in Latin America, West and Central Africa has become a region of high consumption, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

According to the UNODC, between 2019 and 2022, at least 57 tons of cocaine were seized in West Africa or en route to the region, mainly in Cape Verde, Senegal and Benin.

On Christmas Eve, archaeologists working at the Pompeii sites have found thirteen human-shaped terracotta statuettes that resemble figurines in a nativity scene, although their antiquity seems to go back a long time.

The figures, 15 centimeters high, would belong to a pagan ritual and, based on the first studies, some of them seem to be related to the myth of Cybele and her lover Attis and the life cycle of the seasons and the fertility of the earth. , that is, to the spring equinox, according to the Pompeii archaeologists in a press release.

Along with the figurines that recreate human people, a walnut, an almond, the clay head of a rooster and a glass pineapple have also been found.

At the time of discovery, the statuettes were placed in a vertical position, so they were probably in the hallway of a home, in some kind of showcase or shelf.

Furthermore, the same hallway where they were located was decorated with flowers on the upper part of the walls.

According to researchers, the sculptures emerged from the lava fragments produced by Vesuvius at a height of two meters from the ground.