https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOENrSbths

On October 7, Hamas terrorists turned a peaceful music festival into a scene of unimaginable horror. Over 400 lives were taken, including Gili Adar, a 24-year-old who tried to escape but was hunted down like many others. Her mother, Orna, now shares Gili’s story so the world remembers. It’s up to us to spread awareness and ensure the world never forgets the atrocities committed that day.

Photo credits: Adele Raemer/TPS, Courtesy

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One of the UK’s largest asset managers has called on the government to allow savers to access their pension early if the money is used for a deposit on a home. 

Schroders and the Pensions Management Institute, an industry group, have proposed a “national lifetime savings plan”, enabling early access to retirement savings for first-time buyers as part of an overhaul of the way people build and use their wealth. 

The move comes as the new Labour government launched a review into pensions adequacy, with plans to explore ways to improve retirement outcomes. 

“Even when you take pensions freedoms into account, the UK’s long-term savings system is unusually inflexible,” said Schroders in a report published on Tuesday. The report pointed to Singapore, the US and Australia as examples of countries which allowed early access to pensions for housing and financial hardship.

In the US, 40 per cent of members of 401(k)s, the popular workplace pension plans, typically take out a loan against their pensions at some point, according to Schroders’ research. Meanwhile, in Australia, members can take up to $15,000 out of the First Home Super Saver scheme each year up to a lifetime limit of $50,000.

Currently, savers with defined contribution pension pots must wait until age 55 to access their savings, with this threshold rising to 57 from April 2028. Pension cash taken before the normal access age faces punitive tax charges.

The UK offers a Lifetime Isa to help savers aged between 18 and 40 with home deposits. But Lisa contributions are limited to £4,000 per year. The government applies a 25 per cent bonus instead of tax relief and the funds must be used for a property worth up to £450,000 or a 25 per cent withdrawal charge applies.

Schroders’ report argues that while long-term savings should be encouraged, allowing people to access some of their pension early if it goes towards a house deposit or pays off bad debt can make them better off in the longer term.

“The number of people renting in retirement will triple over the next 20 years . . . the financial impact is enormous,” said James Barham, executive chair at Schroders Solutions.  

For a renter to achieve the same standard of living in retirement as a homeowner, the Pensions Management Institute estimates that they would need to save an extra 9 per cent per year into their pensions over their working life.

“If you have all your savings in a pension but don’t buy a house, you have no hope of a good retirement,” said Sir Steve Webb, a former pensions minister who is now a partner at actuarial adviser Lane, Clark & Peacock. 

Schroders’ proposal for early pensions access for housing and to pay off bad debt comes as part of a wider plan for savings, which includes calling on employers to provide a facility for employees to contribute to a “rainy day” savings product, perhaps within an individual savings account, if the employee agrees.

Experts said that if people knew they could access their pensions for money to pay for a home deposit, they might be more comfortable increasing their pension contributions.

“This proposal accelerates and evolves the use of the UK’s automatic enrolment [pension] framework to meet the needs of modern society whilst also addressing the lifetime savings challenge,” said Ruston Smith, chair of the Pensions Management Institute.

Schroders’ intervention comes as the UK continues to face a pension saving crisis.

According to research from Phoenix Group, a pension provider, 17mn adults in the UK aren’t saving enough for the retirement they expect.

Against this backdrop, some experts believe allowing pensions to be accessed early for home deposits could muddy the waters. “Pensions are designed to provide a retirement fund first and foremost and there are other schemes designed to help you buy a house,” said Jason Hollands, managing director at wealth manager Evelyn Partners.

The 2024 Nobel Prize announcements began on Oct. 7, recognizing groundbreaking contributions to humanity. 

The first prize, in the category of physiology or medicine, went to a pair of American scientists for their work in discovering microRNAs. Recipients of the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and economic sciences will be announced over the coming week. Winners are given a medal, a personal diploma, and a cash award of about $1.1 million. Established by Alfred Nobel in 1901, past laureates have included Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Below is a list of all of this year’s winners as they are announced.

Physiology or medicine

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of microRNAs, a class of small molecules essential for gene regulation. Their research has uncovered how these microRNAs influence cellular behavior and contribute to various health challenges, including cancer and heart disease. As the understanding of these tiny regulators expands, so does the potential for innovative therapeutic approaches to complex medical conditions.

Read More: What to Know About MicroRNA, the Nobel-Prizewinning Discovery

Ambros and Ruvkun’s work began in the 1990s when they studied roundworms, uncovering the intricate relationship between specific genes and the regulatory role of microRNAs. This discovery revealed that microRNAs can bind to messenger RNA, influencing the production of proteins critical for cellular functions. Their findings, published in Cell in 1993, opened new avenues for understanding genetic communication within cells. Thomas Perlmann, secretary general of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, called their work “truly fundamental for all physiology.”

Physics

The recipient will be announced on Tuesday.

Chemistry

The recipient will be announced on Wednesday.

Literature

The recipient will be announced on Thursday.

Peace

The recipient will be announced on Friday.

Economic sciences

The recipient will be announced on Oct. 14.

This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on Oct. 7, 2024. It is shared here with permission.

We spent years inventing new ways of surviving under an Israeli blockade that had lasted for nearly a generation. We always nurtured the feeling that after long years of sacrifice and continuous struggle to achieve our freedom, we would be greeted by a light at the end of the tunnel. The Palestinian people were destined to end the occupation and wrest the right to live on their land and return to the lands of their ancestors.

But even after 76 years since the first Nakba experienced by our ancestors, those same ancestors who left Yaffa, Askalan, and dozens of cities and villages destroyed by Israel in 1948 before they resettled in Gaza, are now reliving the same fate. The massacres they have witnessed, if not similar to the ones they survived 76 years ago, are more criminal and bloody. But what is worse is that the same events they experienced during the Nakba is now being lived by their grandchildren. 

There will always be those who will relive the Nakba or experience it for the first time as long as the Israeli occupation of Palestine remains.

I was born in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City. My father lived and worked there like every other father in Gaza who wanted to secure a future for his children. He died while resting assured that his youngest son’s future was secured. 

The youngest among my brothers, I started a family of my own and furnished a house. A year later, I had a child who filled our home with joy. I was preparing for the future, already living my dream of starting a family, living in our homeland in a house surrounded by olive and lemon trees, with all my siblings and their families living in the same building or right next door. I already had good neighbors, a life full of memories, the scent of jasmine at the entrance of the house, and almond blossoms that freely entered our home in the spring. My mother used to sit in her house and watch the sunset, with almond blossoms at her feet, their bright colors like stars.

But my home became a bag I carried on my back after the Israeli army destroyed the neighborhood where I was born and raised. The city whose streets I walked, whose trees I memorized, was now no more. I lived through several wars in that city already, somehow managing to survive like everyone else and move on with my life. But I did not survive this war. I learned too late that the bag that carried everything I owned might end up being everything I will ever possess of my homeland.

Forms of displacement

I could not risk staying in Gaza City, with a family that included my one-year-old child, my wife, and my elderly mother. Every time the Israeli army ordered us to evacuate one place or another, we would do so immediately. We spent months moving under fire.

In the first week of the war, we moved around different parts of Gaza City. Due to the power and internet outage, I would go every day to a cafe next to al-Shifa Hospital to work and return home. I would take the same route, and when I returned home, I would find that the route I took in the morning had changed in the evening due to heavy shelling and bombing.

My home was a short distance away, but I couldn’t go there. The only time I went home was to get some clothes and belongings, as I thought our displacement would be protracted; when I got home, several airstrikes fell nearby, and the house filled up with smoke. I left home without locking the doors. They remained unlocked until we learned that it had been bombed and razed to the ground by the Israeli army.

Everything I knew and lived with my entire life, all my childhood memories and my memories with my parents, the pictures hanging on the walls, and the steps leading to my home, all of it had turned to ash.

When the first warning to evacuate Gaza City was issued, I took my family and went to Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. We spent over two months in the city, until Khan Younis was ordered to evacuate as well. We were displaced once again toward Rafah. I remained without my extended family, who were scattered across different displacement centers. Eventually, I was able to leave Gaza entirely.

I’ve experienced internal displacement within my country and forced exile abroad. I can now say with unflinching certainty that displacement within my country is much easier than leaving, despite the continuous bombing, massacres, hunger, and lack of basic life necessities. I learned the hard way that one’s homeland is irreplaceable.

Everything I see outside Gaza, I say to myself, Gaza deserves this — the roads and trees, the airports, the organized and illuminated streets, the freedom of movement. I have cried for a long time for people who continue to live their lives in displacement as a reward for escaping the Israeli killing machine.

All that remains of my homeland is the bag that I carry, the images of destruction on the news, and tears that do not stop.

Journalism in war

Being a journalist in Palestine without international protection and respect for your life is like working with the barrel of a loaded gun always against your head.

I lived amid the genocide for six consecutive months. I was honestly not afraid of death, even when my colleagues at Mondoweiss gave me the choice between ceasing to write at a time when Israel was deliberately targeting outspoken journalists, I chose to write and continue my work. My life was not more precious to me than the truth. But my greatest fear was being killed in the field and leaving my one-year-old child alone in a world that knows no mercy. 

I had to live with these feelings of anxiety every time I went out to work on a story, or take a picture, or gather testimonies. It was the fear that my child would wait for me to return, staring at the door and using the word he had just learned — “Baba” — but that I would not open the door.

I watched as dozens of my colleagues were martyred. Had the war not separated us, I would have likely been with them in the field still, like my friends Rushdi Sarraj, Mahmoud al-Naouq, Hassouna Salim, and many other martyred journalists who were killed by Israel either while they were working or in their homes with their families. 

Going out on a work mission was like going out into the unknown. I had to hide to avoid detection by Israeli drones that fired indiscriminately on civilians. They might drop a bomb on anyone and kill them, as happened with the journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, whose head was severed from his body by a missile. When it was necessary to go out in a journalistic uniform, I saw two different reactions from people. Some came to tell their bitter story, hoping their voice would reach someone and help them, and others stayed away from me for fear of being targeted. I did not blame anyone because I knew what I was doing was dangerous.

The road to diaspora

Now that I have lived through my own Nakba, I understand the reasons that drove thousands of Palestinians to flee their homes in 1948. I left my country to save my family’s lives. After watching my mother suffering from war day after day, eventually dying from a lack of medical treatment, and after searching the markets for days to find formula for my child, I made the most difficult decision of my life.

Even when I decided to leave Gaza, getting out was not easy or affordable. Palestinians had to pay vast sums of money to pass through the Rafah crossing, which the Hamas government in Gaza and the Egyptian authorities ran. With the help of friends, I was able to gather the required amount for my family’s travel, waiting 40 days after paying the money for my name to be added to the list of travelers. After that, my body left Gaza, but my soul and heart never left.

In the diaspora, I can’t own anything, neither house nor land. Not a picture to hang on a wall, or a sea that I can feel like I did in Gaza, my most important companion in times of anxiety that brought me peace. 

In the diaspora, the refugee only owns his sorrows, which grow in abundance with every day spent away from home. In the diaspora, it pains me greatly that my son will grow up alone without his cousins who loved to play with him, without his aunts and uncles who looked forward to witnessing his first steps and say his first words. Everyone doted on him because he was the youngest child in the family. Today, it’s difficult to find a child his age to play with.

Should I blame the Palestinian resistance for the October 7 attack? Many international media platforms certainly do. They began their coverage of the war by blaming the Palestinian resistance. For them, the resistance was the instigator of the genocide, completely forgetting Israel’s long and continued history of meting out death and displacement since 1948 in defiance of all international laws and norms. For them, those same international laws that allow a people under occupation to engage in all forms of resistance to liberate their lands do not apply. The world’s double standards tried to portray Palestinians struggling for freedom as criminals who brought this upon themselves.

These are the same media organizations and countries that give unconditional aid to Ukraine and do not begrudge the Ukrainians their right to defend themselves. Yet they accuse the Palestinians, whose cause is far more just and who are attempting to reclaim their occupied homeland, of terrorism.

My house was bombed, my family was displaced multiple times, my mother died because Israel prevented medicine and aid from reaching Gaza, and my entire homeland is now lost to me for an indefinite period of time. But I do not blame the resistance, because without resisting the occupation, the Israelis will continue to shed our blood and carry out their genocide against us. Without resistance, there will be no one to stand in their way.

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