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Jewish Poet Hails Palestine’s Tamimi, Compares her to Anne Frank

Palestinian teenager Ahed al-Tamimi appears before an Israeli court. (Reuters)
Palestinian teenager Ahed al-Tamimi appears before an Israeli court. (Reuters)
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Jewish Poet Hails Palestine’s Tamimi, Compares her to Anne Frank

Palestinian teenager Ahed al-Tamimi appears before an Israeli court. (Reuters)
Palestinian teenager Ahed al-Tamimi appears before an Israeli court. (Reuters)

Prominent Israeli writer and poet Jonathan Geffen praised Palestinian teenager Ahed al-Tamimi’s courage against Israeli soldiers, comparing her to Jewish girl Anne Frank, who was killed in the Holocaust.

His post on Instagram drew the ire of Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who on Tuesday instructed army radio to censor Geffen.

Tamimi, 16, was arrested in December for slapping two Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank, in an incident caught on video.

She has been charged with 12 counts including assault and ordered kept in custody until the end of the legal proceedings.

Hailed as a hero by Palestinians who see her as bravely standing up to Israel's occupation, Tamimi has also caught the attention of the Israeli left.

"A pretty 17-year-old girl did a terrible thing, and when a proud Israeli officer once again raided her home, she slapped him," Geffen wrote on Monday.

"She was born into that, and in that slap there were 50 years of occupation and humiliation," he wrote.

"On the day the story of this struggle is told, you, Ahed Tamimi, red-haired like David who slapped Goliath, will be on the same page as Joan of Arc, Hannah Szenes and Anne Frank," Geffen said on Instagram.

In posts on his own social media accounts, the outspoken Lieberman lashed out at the writer, whose songs -- for adults and children -- are very popular in Israel.

"I've instructed the commander of army radio to stop playing or interviewing Jonathan Geffen in all the station's broadcasts, and I call on all media in Israel to do the same," the defense minister said.

"The State of Israel won't give a platform to a drunkard comparing a child (Frank) who was killed in the Holocaust and a hero warrior (Szenes) who fought the Nazi regime to Ahed Tamimi, the brat who attacked a soldier," he said.

"Geffen's pursuit of headlines is sickening and infuriating," Lieberman continued, say the Lebanese ‘Hezbollah's’ al-Manar television channel would be a more suitable venue for Geffen's "nonsense".

Other right-wing politicians condemned Geffen, with Minister of Culture and Sport Miriam Regev saying that it was “disgusting” for him to compare Tamimi to Szenes, Frank and King David.

“She is not innocent, but a criminal who supports terrorism and she is now in jail,” she added.

Israel's military radio station is under the command of the army chief and ultimately the defense minister -- but not on matters relating to content of what is broadcast.

The justice ministry issued a statement reiterating that Lieberman "has no legal authority to intervene in the content of the station's broadcasts".

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Varieties

Air Pollution to Rise over Europe in Coming Days

This picture taken on December 9, 2025, shows buildings engulfed in dense smog due to severe air pollution in Islamabad. (Photo by Aamir QURESHI / AFP)
This picture taken on December 9, 2025, shows buildings engulfed in dense smog due to severe air pollution in Islamabad. (Photo by Aamir QURESHI / AFP)
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Air Pollution to Rise over Europe in Coming Days

This picture taken on December 9, 2025, shows buildings engulfed in dense smog due to severe air pollution in Islamabad. (Photo by Aamir QURESHI / AFP)
This picture taken on December 9, 2025, shows buildings engulfed in dense smog due to severe air pollution in Islamabad. (Photo by Aamir QURESHI / AFP)

Air quality is expected to deteriorate across parts of Europe in the coming days, driven by an increase in microscopic polluting particles, the EU's earth observation program said on Thursday.

The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) forecast a spike in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK and Ireland, among other countries in the region.

Spring is when farmers spread fertilizer, releasing ammonia emissions that react with nitrogen oxides from sources like traffic to form tiny floating aerosols.

This degrades air quality, a situation made worse by colder weather, warmer afternoons and little wind, conditions that mean that instead of dispersing, these fine particles stay close to the ground.

Expected rises in airborne pollen from birch and alder trees is tipped to make matters worse, CAMS said in a briefing note on the developing situation.

"Whilst this situation is not unusual in spring, it is notable and can be intensified by stable and mild meteorological conditions and atmospheric inversions," said CAMS director Laurence Rouil in a statement.

Other contributors to background pollution include the burning of fossil fuels, CAMS said, particularly across parts of eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Long-term exposure to fine airborne particulate matter causes cardiovascular and respiratory disease, cancers and other major health problems.

Air pollution is estimated to cause millions of deaths worldwide every year and a burden of disease on par with smoking and unhealthy diets, the World Health Organization says.

Varieties

AlUla Ready for Eid Al-Fitr with Three Days of Cultural and Festive Events

Photo by SPA
Photo by SPA
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AlUla Ready for Eid Al-Fitr with Three Days of Cultural and Festive Events

Photo by SPA
Photo by SPA

The Royal Commission for AlUla has finalized preparations for a three-day Eid Al-Fitr celebration, featuring a comprehensive range of services and events across the governorate’s key heritage and leisure sites, SPA reported.

Dedicated areas for Eid prayers are also fully prepared to welcome residents and visitors, ensuring a festive environment that reflects the region's cultural traditions and enhances the quality of life during the holiday.

Varieties

More Than 150,000 Uncounted COVID-19 Deaths Occurred Early in the Pandemic, Study Finds

People wait in long lines outside a center in San Diego, California, USA, for coronavirus testing during the outbreak, January 10, 2022. (Reuters)
People wait in long lines outside a center in San Diego, California, USA, for coronavirus testing during the outbreak, January 10, 2022. (Reuters)
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More Than 150,000 Uncounted COVID-19 Deaths Occurred Early in the Pandemic, Study Finds

People wait in long lines outside a center in San Diego, California, USA, for coronavirus testing during the outbreak, January 10, 2022. (Reuters)
People wait in long lines outside a center in San Diego, California, USA, for coronavirus testing during the outbreak, January 10, 2022. (Reuters)

The COVID-19 pandemic's early death toll was much higher than the official US count, according to a new study that spotlights dramatic disparities in the uncounted deaths.

About 840,000 COVID-19 deaths were reported on death certificates in 2020 and 2021. But a group of researchers — using a form of artificial intelligence — estimate that as many as 155,000 unrecognized additional deaths likely occurred in that time outside of hospitals. That would mean about 16% of COVID-19 deaths went uncounted in those years.

The overall findings, published Wednesday by the journal Science Advances, were close to estimates from other studies of pandemic deaths during that time. But the authors of the new study tried to determine exactly which deaths were more likely to be missing from the official tallies.

The answer: The undiagnosed dead were more likely to be Hispanic people and other people of color, who had died in the first few months of the pandemic, and who had been in certain states in the South and Southwest — including Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina.

Six years after the coronavirus swept through the US, barriers remain for many of the same people, said Steven Woolf, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher not involved in the study.

“People on the margins continue to die at disproportionate rates because they can’t access care,” he said in an email.

Access to care wasn't the only challenge

While hospital patients were routinely tested for COVID-19, many who grew sick and died outside of hospitals were not tested — often because at-home testing was not readily available early in the pandemic, said one of the study's authors, the University of Minnesota's Elizabeth Wrigley-Field.

In some parts of the country, death investigations are handled by elected coroners who don't necessarily have the specialized training that medical examiners do. Some research has suggested partisan opinions could affect whether a sick person or their family members sought COVID-19 testing, and whether coroners pursued postmortem coronavirus testing. Indeed, some coroners said families had pressed them not to list COVID-19 as a cause of death.

“Our antiquated death investigation system is one key reason why we fell short of accurate counts, particularly outside of big metropolitan areas,” said Andrew Stokes of Boston University, the senior author on the paper.

Death counts were swept up in COVID politics

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data count more than 1.2 million COVID-19 deaths since the pandemic erupted in early 2020. More than two-thirds of those reported deaths occurred in 2020 and 2021.

The count has long been debated, as false claims on social media said the number of COVID-19 deaths was inflated. Adding to the rancor was President Donald Trump, who in August 2020 retweeted a post claiming only 6% of reported deaths were actually from COVID-19 — a post Twitter later removed.

To be sure, there were other kinds of pandemic deaths. For example, uninfected people died from other medical conditions because they could not get care at hospitals overloaded with COVID-19 patients. People with drug addictions died of overdoses as a result of social isolation and losing access to treatment. Other studies that have estimated the actual number of pandemic deaths have taken those deaths into account.

But Stokes and his collaborators wanted to focus on the deaths of people infected by the coronavirus. They used machine learning to sift through the death certificates of infected patients who died in hospitals and then used patterns observed in those records to evaluate death certificates of people who died outside hospitals and whose deaths were attributed to things like pneumonia or diabetes.

Scientists' understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of machine learning-reliant research is still evolving, but Woolf called this team's use of it “intriguing.”