GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Hamas warned Israel on Sunday that a ground offensive in Rafah, crowded with displaced Gazans, would imperil future hostage releases, while US President Joe Biden urged the protection of civilians in the besieged territory.
Foreign governments, including Israel’s key ally the United States, and aid groups have voiced deep concern over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow to extend operations into the far-southern Gaza city.
Rafah, on the border with Egypt, has remained the last refuge for Palestinians fleeing Israel’s relentless bombardment elsewhere in the Gaza Strip in its four-month war against Hamas, triggered by the group’s October 7 attack.
“Any attack by the occupation army on the city of Rafah would torpedo the exchange negotiations,” a Hamas leader told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Netanyahu has told troops to prepare to enter the city which now hosts more than half of Gaza’s total population, spurring concern about the impact on displaced civilians.
Biden spoke to Netanyahu on the phone Sunday and told him the Gaza advance should not go ahead in the absence of a “credible” plan to ensure “the safety” of people sheltering there, the White House said.
Some 1.4 million Palestinians have crowded into Rafah, with many living in tents while food, water and medicine are becoming increasingly scarce.
Netanyahu had told US broadcaster ABC News the Rafah operation would go ahead until Hamas is eliminated, adding he would provide “safe passage” to civilians wishing to leave.
When pressed about where they could go, Netanyahu said: “You know, the areas that we’ve cleared north of Rafah, plenty of areas there. But, we are working out a detailed plan.”
Mediators held new talks in Cairo for a pause in the fighting and the release of some of the 132 hostages Israel says are still in Gaza, including 29 thought to be dead.
Hamas seized some 250 hostages on October 7, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures. Dozens were released during a one-week truce in November.
Hamas’s military wing on Sunday said two hostages had been killed and eight others seriously wounded in Israeli bombardment in recent days, a claim AFP is unable to independently verify.
Netanyahu has faced calls for early elections and mounting protests over his administration’s failure to bring home the hostages.
Israeli strikes have long hit targets in Rafah, and combat on Sunday seemed intense several kilometers (miles) to the north in Khan Yunis city. AFP correspondents heard repeated explosions and saw plumes of black smoke.
Israel’s military said troops were conducting “targeted raids” in the west of Khan Yunis, southern Gaza’s main city, while Hamas reported violent clashes and said air strikes also hit Rafah.
Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Israel has responded with a relentless offensive in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip that the territory’s health ministry says has killed at least 28,176 people, mostly women and children.
Hamas said dozens of bodies had been found in Gaza City, in the coastal strip’s north, after Israeli ground troops withdrew from the area.
Most of them “were martyred by bullets of snipers,” the group said in a statement.
Hossam Al-Sharqawi of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies told reporters that “every day our ambulance guys (in Gaza) are martyred or injured.”
“This is unacceptable, this madness must stop.”
During a visit to a military base Sunday, Netanyahu said Israel aims for “the demilitarization of Gaza.”
“This requires our security control... over the entire area west of Jordan, including the Gaza Strip,” he said.
The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) were some of the latest to raise the alarm over the plan for Rafah, Gaza’s last major population center that Israeli troops have yet to enter.
“The OIC strongly warned that the continuation and expansion of the Israeli military aggression is part of rejected attempts to forcibly expel the Palestinian people from their land,” the 57-nation Jeddah-based bloc said on social media.
It stressed “that such acts fall under genocide and would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe and collective massacre.”
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates also rejected “forced” displacement of people from Rafah, evoking the trauma of Palestinians’ mass exodus and forced displacement around the time of Israel’s creation in 1948.
Riyadh called for an urgent UN Security Council meeting, while Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron said the priority “must be an immediate pause in the fighting to get aid in and hostages out.”
Denouncing a “genocide” in Gaza, thousands rallied Sunday in Morocco’s capital Rabat and called on their government to undo a 2020 normalization pact with Israel.
Gazans, driven further and further south, have repeatedly said they can find no safe refuge from the fighting and bombing.
Farah Muhammad, 39, a mother of five displaced to Rafah from northern Gaza, said she felt helpless.
“There is no place to escape.”
Hamas warns Israeli invasion of Rafah will ‘torpedo’ hostage talks
https://arab.news/g8nbc
Hamas warns Israeli invasion of Rafah will ‘torpedo’ hostage talks

- Rafah, on the border with Egypt, has remained the last refuge for Palestinians fleeing Israel’s relentless bombardment elsewhere in the Gaza Strip in its four-month war against Hamas
Qatar rejects Netanyahu’s ‘inflammatory’ Gaza comments: foreign ministry

- Netanyahu's office earlier urged Qatar to stop its "double game" and "decide if it’s on the side of civilization or if it’s on the side of Hamas”
- Qatar ministry spokesman said the statement "fall far short of the most basic standards of political and moral responsibility”
DOHA: Gaza mediator Qatar on Sunday rejected comments from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it needed to “stop playing both sides” in truce negotiations.
A statement released by Netanyahu's office on Saturday said Qatar needs to “decide if it’s on the side of civilization or if it’s on the side of Hamas.”
Qatar “firmly rejects the inflammatory statements... which fall far short of the most basic standards of political and moral responsibility,” foreign ministry spokesman Majed Al-Ansari responded in a post on X.
Despite efforts by Egyptian and Qatari mediators to restore a ceasefire, neither Israel nor Hamas has shown willingness to back down on core demands, with each side blaming the other for the failure to reach a deal.
Israel, which wants the return of 59 hostages still held in Gaza, has insisted Hamas must disarm and be excluded from any role in the future governance of the enclave, a condition that Hamas rejects.
It has insisted on agreeing a lasting end to the fighting and withdrawal of Israeli forces as a condition for a deal that would see a release of the hostages.
Al-Ansari criticized the portrayal of the Gaza conflict as a defense of civilization, likening it to historical regimes that used “false narratives to justify crimes against civilians.”
In his post, Al-Ansari questioned whether the release of 138 hostages was achieved through military operations or mediation efforts, which he said are being unjustly criticized and undermined.
He also cited the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza represented by what he called a suffocating blockade, systematic starvation, denial of medicine and shelter, and the use of humanitarian aid as a tool of political coercion. On Friday, Israel’s security cabinet approved plans for an expanded operation in the Gaza Strip, Israeli media reported on Friday, adding to signs that attempts to stop the fighting and return hostages held by Hamas have made no progress.
Israel’s campaign was triggered by the devastating Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 people in southern Israel and saw 251 taken hostage. It has so far killed more than 50,000 Palestinians and devastated Gaza where aid groups have warned the Israeli blockade risks a humanitarian disaster.
Israel calls up tens of thousands of reservists for Gaza offensive

- Israel resumed major operations across Gaza on March 18 amid deadlock over how to proceed with a 2-month ceasefire
- Security cabinet scheduled to meet on Sunday to approve the expansion of the military offensive, says public broadcaster
JERUSALEM: Israel was issuing orders to call up tens of thousands of reservists ahead of an expanded offensive in Gaza, Israeli media reported Saturday.
Several news outlets reported the military had begun sending the orders for reservists to replace conscripts and active-duty soldiers in Israel and the occupied West Bank so they can be redeployed to Gaza.
A military spokesperson neither confirmed nor denied the reports, but relatives of AFP journalists were among those who received mobilization orders.
According to Israel’s public broadcaster, the security cabinet is scheduled to meet on Sunday to approve the expansion of the military offensive in Gaza.
Israel resumed major operations across Gaza on March 18 amid deadlock over how to proceed with a two-month ceasefire that had largely halted the war sparked by Hamas’s October 2023 attack.
The Israeli prime minister, under pressure from his far-right supporters, without whom he would lose his governing coalition, has been increasingly vocal in his calls to continue the war since the restart of the Gaza offensive.
“Israel will win this just war with just means,” he added.
Israel has also blocked all aid deliveries to Gaza since March 2, prompting warnings from UN agencies of impending humanitarian disaster.
Hamas on Saturday released footage of an apparently wounded Israeli-Russian hostage held in Gaza as 11 Palestinians, including three infants, were killed in a strike on the territory, its civil defense agency said.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said at least 2,396 people had been killed since Israel resumed its campaign in Gaza, bringing the overall death toll from the war to 52,495.
Gaza militants still hold 58 hostages, 34 of whom the army says are dead. Hamas is also holding the remains of an Israeli soldier killed in a previous war in Gaza in 2014.
The militant group’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, released a video on Saturday showing a hostage AFP and Israeli media identified as Russian-Israeli Maxim Herkin.
In the undated four-minute video, Herkin, who turns 37 this month, was shown wearing bandages on his head and left arm.
Speaking in Hebrew in the video, which his family urged media to disseminate, he implied he had been wounded in a recent Israeli bombardment.
AFP was unable to determine the health of Herkin, who gave a similar message to other hostages shown in videos released by Hamas, urging pressure on the Israeli government to free the remaining captives.
Several thousand Israelis demonstrated outside the defense ministry in Tel Aviv on Saturday, demanding action from the government to secure the hostages’ release.
“We’re here because we want the hostages home. We’re here because we don’t believe that the war in Gaza today, currently, is justified at all,” Arona Maskil, a 64-year-old demonstrator, told AFP.
The government says its renewed offensive is aimed at forcing Hamas to free its remaining captives, although critics charge that it puts them in mortal danger.
A statement from the Hostages and Missing Families Forum argued that “any escalation in the fighting will put the hostages... in immediate danger.”
In Gaza, the civil defense agency said on Saturday that an overnight Israeli strike on the Khan Yunis refugee camp killed at least 11 people, including three infants.
Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal say they were killed in the “bombardment of the Al-Bayram family home in Khan Yunis camp” at around 3:00 am (0000 GMT).
Bassal told AFP that eight of the dead had been identified and were all from the same extended family, including a boy and girl, both one, and a month-old baby.
An Israeli military spokesperson confirmed the strike, saying it targeted a “Hamas member.”
Rescue workers and residents combed the rubble for survivors with their bare hands, under the light of hand-held torches, an AFP journalist reported.
Neighbour Fayka Abu Hatab said she “saw a bright light, then there was an explosion, and dust covered the entire area.”
“We couldn’t see anything, it all went dark,” she said.
Hunger and malnutrition are rising across Gaza as Israel’s blockade leaves mothers with few options

- Residents and humanitarians warn that acute malnutrition among children is spiraling
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip: The little boy is in tears and, understandably, irritable. Diarrhea has plagued him for half of his brief life. He is dehydrated and so weak. Attached to his tiny left hand is a yellow tube that carries liquid food to his frail little system.
At 9 months old, Khaled is barely 11 pounds (5 kilos) — half of what a healthy baby his age should be. And in Gaza’s main pediatric hospital ward, as doctors try to save her son, Wedad Abdelaal can only watch.
After back-to-back emergency visits, the doctors decided to admit Khaled last weekend. For nearly a week, he was tube-fed and then given supplements and bottled milk, which is distributed every three hours or more. His mother, nervous and helpless, says that’s not enough.
“I wish they would give it to us every hour. He waits for it impatiently ... but they too are short on supplies,” Abdelaal says. ” This border closure is destroying us.”
The longer they stay in the hospital, the better Khaled will get. But Abdelaal is agonizing over her other children, back in their tent, with empty pots and nothing to eat as Israel’s blockade of Gaza enters its third month, the longest since the war started.
Locked, sealed and devastated by Israeli bombings, Gaza is facing starvation. Thousands of children have already been treated for malnutrition. Exhausted, displaced and surviving on basics for over a year and half of war, parents like Abdelaal watch their children waste away and find there is little they can do.
They are out of options.
Acute malnutrition among children is spiking
Hospitals are hanging by a thread, dealing with mass casualty attacks that prioritize deadly emergencies. Food stocks at UN warehouses have run out. Markets are emptying. What is still available is sold at exorbitant prices, unaffordable for most in Gaza where more than 80 percent are reliant on aid, according to the United Nations.
Community kitchens distributing meals for thousands are shuttering. Farmland is mostly inaccessible. Bakeries have closed. Water distribution is grinding to a halt, largely because of lack of fuel. In desperate scenes, thousands, many of them kids, crowd outside community kitchens, fighting over food. Warehouses with few supplies have been looted.
The longest blockade on Gaza has sparked a growing international outcry, but it has failed to persuade Israel to break open the borders. More groups accuse Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. Residents and humanitarians warn that acute malnutrition among children is spiraling.
“We are breaking the bodies and minds of the children of Gaza,” Michael Ryan, executive director of emergencies at the World Health Organization, told reporters in Geneva. “Because if we don’t do something about it, we are complicit in what is happening before our very eyes. ... The children should not have to pay the price.”
Israel imposed the blockade March 2, then ended a two-month ceasefire by resuming military operations on March 18, saying both steps were necessary to pressure Hamas into releasing the hostages. Before the ceasefire collapsed, Israel believed 59 hostages were still inside Gaza, 24 of them alive and still in captivity.
It hasn’t responded to accusations that it uses starvation as a war tactic. But Israeli officials have previously said Gaza had enough aid after a surge in distribution during the ceasefire, and accused Hamas of diverting aid for its purposes. Humanitarian workers deny there is significant diversion, saying the UN monitors distribution strictly.
A mother wants to help her son — but can’t
Khaled has suffered from malnutrition since he was 2 months old. His mother managed it through outpatient visits and supplements distributed at feeding centers. But for the past seven months, Abdelaal, 31, has been watching him slowly shrivel. She, too, is malnourished and has had hardly any protein in recent months.
After an exhausting pregnancy and two days of labor, Khaled was born — a low-weight baby at 4 1/2 pounds (2 kilos) but otherwise healthy. Abdelaal began nursing him. But because of lack of calcium, she is losing her teeth — and producing too little milk.
“Breastfeeding needs food, and I am not able to give him enough,” she says.
Khaled has four other siblings, aged between 9 and 4. The family has been displaced from Rafah and now lives in a tent further north in Mawasi Khan Younis.
As food ran out under the blockade, the family grew dependent on community kitchens that serve rice, pasta and cooked beans. Cooking in the tent is a struggle: There is no gas, and finding wood or plastic to burn is exhausting and risky.
Ahmed, 7 and Maria, 4, are already showing signs of malnutrition. Ahmed, 7, weighs 17 pounds (8 kilos); his bones are piercing his skin. He gets no supplements at feeding centers, which serve only kids under 6. Maria, 4, has also lost weight, but there is no scale to weigh her.
“My kids have become so frail,” Abdelaal laments. “They are like chicks.”
Nutrition centers around Gaza are shutting down
Since March 2, UN agencies have documented a rise in acute malnutrition among children. They are finding low immunity, frequent illness, weight and muscle mass loss, protruding bones or bellies, and brittle hair. Since the start of the year, more than 9,000 children have been admitted or treated for acute malnutrition, UNICEF said.
The increase was dramatic in March, with 3,600 cases or an 80 percent increase compared to the 2,000 children treated in February.
Since then, conditions have only worsened. Supplies used to prevent malnutrition, such as supplements and biscuits, have been depleted, according to UNICEF. Therapeutic food used to treat acute malnutrition is running out.
Parents and caregivers are sharing malnutrition treatments to make up for shortages, which undermines treatment. Nearly half of the 200 nutrition centers around Gaza shut down because of displacement and bombardment.
Meanwhile, supplies are languishing at the borders, prevented by Israel from entering Gaza.
“It is absolutely clear that we are going to have more cases of wasting, which is the most dangerous form of malnutrition. It is also clear we are going to have more children dying from these preventable causes,” UNICEF spokesperson Jonathan Crickx says.
Suad Obaid, a nutritionist in Gaza, says parents are frequenting feeding centers more because they have nothing to feed their children. “No one can rely on canned food and emergency feeding for nearly two years.”
At Nasser Hospital, four critical cases were receiving treatment last week for acute malnutrition, including Khaled. Only critical cases are admitted — and only for short periods so more children can be treated.
“If we admit all those who have acute malnutrition, we will need hundreds of beds,” says Dr. Yasser Abu Ghaly, acknowledging: “We can’t help many, anyway ... There is nothing in our hands.”
The system for managing diseases has buckled
Before the war, hundreds of families in Gaza were registered and treated for congenital defects, genetic or autoimmune disorders, a system that has broken down mostly because food, formulasor tablets that helped manage the diseases quickly ran out.
Dr. Ahmed Al-Farrah, head of the pediatrics and obstetrics ward at Nasser Hospital, says hundreds of children with genetic disorders could suffer cognitive disorders as well, if not worse.
“They are sentenced to death,” he says.
Osama Al-Raqqab’s cystic fibrosis has worsened since the start of the war. Lack of meat, fish and enzyme tablets to help him digest food meant repeated hospital visits and long bouts of chest infections and acute diarrhea, says his mother, Mona. His bones poke through his skin. Osama, 5, weighs 20 pounds (9 kilos) and can hardly move or speak. Canned food offers him no nutrition.
“With starvation in Gaza, we only eat canned lentils,” his mother says. “If the borders remain closed, we will lose that too.”
Rahma Al-Qadi’s baby was born with Down syndrome seven months ago. Since then, Sama gained little more than half a pound (300 grams) and was hospitalized multiple times with fever. Her mother, also malnourished and still suffering from infection to her wound after birth, continues to breastfeed her. Again, it is not enough.
Sama is restless, doesn’t sleep and is always demanding more food. Doctors ask her mother to eat better to produce more milk.
Lifting Sama’s scrawny legs up, her mother says: “I can’t believe this is the leg of a 7-month-old.”
A father’s lament: ‘Waiting for death’
Abdelaal’s kids fetch water and wait in line at soup kitchens because she cannot. To get there, they must climb a small hill. When she can, she waits for them at the bottom, fearing they may fall or drop the food.
When they do bring back food, the family divides it over several meals and days. When they get nothing, they share beans out of a can. Abdelaal often surrenders her share. “My kids,” she says, “are more deserving.”
Her husband, Ammar, has a heart condition that limits his movement, so he cannot help either. “Because of lack of healthy food, even as adults, we have no energy to move or exert any effort,” Ammar says. “We are sitting in our tents, waiting for death.”
The kids plead for fried tomatoes or cooked potatoes. But produce is unavailable or too expensive. A kilo of each would cost her $21. A bar of biscuits costs $2. Canned sardines cost nearly $10 — a fortune.
“In two years, my child won’t be able to walk because of lack of food,” Abdelaal says.
Smiling through her helplessness, Abdelaal brought Khaled out of the hospital for a few hours to visit his family on Friday. They gathered around a can of cold beans. She wishes Khaled’s doctors could give her the treatment to take back to the tent, so she could be with her family.
“I am exhausted before birth and after birth from lack of food,” she says. “We are not able to live.”
Israel urged to give media ‘unrestricted’ Gaza access

- The FPA, which has filed an appeal with the Israeli Supreme Court challenging the ban, said its members “salute our Palestinian colleagues who continue to report the story at great personal risk”
JERUSALEM: The Foreign Press Association Saturday called on Israel to allow news media “unrestricted” access to Gaza, off-limits to outside journalists operating independently since the war there began in October 2023.
“We call on Israel to stop the never-ending delays, uphold the fundamental principles of press freedom and allow unrestricted entry for journalists to Gaza,” the Jerusalem-based association wrote in a statement to mark World Press Freedom Day.
The FPA has more than 350 members working for foreign media outlets in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
An AFP journalist sits on its board of directors.
The association criticized Israel for an “unprecedented ban preventing foreign journalists from entering Gaza,” calling the decision a “mark of shame for a country that claims to be a beacon of democracy.”
The FPA, which has filed an appeal with the Israeli Supreme Court challenging the ban, said its members “salute our Palestinian colleagues who continue to report the story at great personal risk.”
“Nonetheless, the Israeli restrictions have severely hindered independent reporting and robbed the world of a full picture of the situation in Gaza,” the association added.
The war that continues to devastate Gaza was triggered by an unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
With the exception of a journalist for US outlet CNN who entered a field hospital in Rafah operated by the United Arab Emirates in 2023, the only outside journalists allowed into Gaza, which is under Israeli blockade, did so with Israeli forces.
Their reports were subject to military censorship.
The UN Human Rights office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory said it “sombrely marks World Press Freedom Day as Palestinian journalists continue to be killed or injured at an alarming rate with impunity.”
The office said it had independently verified the killing of 211 journalists in the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023, including 28 women.
Israel’s military has accused many of the journalists killed in its strikes of being “terrorists,” members of the Palestinian militant groups Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
Hamas’s attack on Israel which sparked the war resulted in the deaths of 1,218 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
According to health ministry figures in Hamas-run Gaza, the overall death toll in the territory since the war broke out is more than 52,400.
How Napoleon’s Egypt campaign sparked a printing revolution in the Arab world

- Greatest legacy of the 1798 Napoleonic invasion of Egypt lies not in what the French took, but in what they left behind
- Rare books on display at Abu Dhabi International Book Fair reveal printing roots of Egypt’s modern intellectual awakening
LONDON: On Sunday, July 1, 1798, a vast fleet of ships appeared off the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Aboard the flagship Orient was the French general Napoleon Bonaparte, still six years away from being proclaimed emperor of France but fresh from a series of military victories in Europe and determined to undermine Britain’s influence in Egypt and the Middle East.
With him were 50,000 men, hundreds of horses, numerous artillery pieces and, incongruously, 200 members of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, a group including engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, geographers, writers, artists — and 22 printers.
Back in France, between 1809 and 1829 the survivors of this group of savants would produce the 37-volume Description de l’Egypte, a triumphant catalogue of all things Egyptian, ancient and modern.

Their achievement would not be shared by Napoleon’s army. A month after the landing, virtually all of Napoleon’s ships were destroyed at the Battle of the Nile by a British fleet commanded by Horatio Nelson.
The following year Napoleon and a few men returned to France in secret. The general he left in charge, Jean-Baptiste Kleber, was assassinated a few months later by an Aleppo-born student living in Cairo.
The remains of the French army, decimated by disease and endless conflict, surrendered to British forces in 1801 and, under the terms of an ignominious treaty, were ferried back to France on the enemy’s ships.
IN NUMBERS:
• 50,000 Men who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt.
• £30,000 Price tag of Expedition de Syrie jusqu’a la prise de Jaffa.
• 1820 Year in which Bulaq Press was established in Cairo.
To rub salt into the French wounds, many of the Egyptian antiquities that had been looted by Napoleon’s troops and scholars fell into British hands. Some, including the Rosetta Stone, the ancient granite stele inscribed with a decree in three languages that allowed the cracking of the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs, found their way to the British Museum, where they remain to this day.
But arguably the greatest legacy of the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt lies not in what the French took, but in what they left behind — the art of printing with movable type.
Some of the products of this unintended consequence of Napoleon’s ill-fated Egyptian adventure can be seen this week at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair — an extraordinary collection of rare books and pamphlets that together tell a fascinating story.

“Aware of the printing press’s potential as a tool for governance and propaganda, Napoleon brought with him advanced French printing technology — something entirely new to Egypt,” said Pom Harrington, the owner of London-based Peter Harrington Rare Books.

Just days after landing near Alexandria, Napoleon’s team of printers established the Imprimerie orientale et francaise, under the direction of the linguist and orientalist Jean-Joseph Marcel and the Marc Aurel, the 18-year-old son of a printer and bookseller.
It was, incidentally, Jean-Joseph Marcel who first recognized the third script on the Rosetta stone as Egyptian Demotic, which proved to be the ancient linguistic key to unravelling the mystery of hieroglyphics.
A first-edition copy of one of their first publications, a pamphlet containing seven reports of expeditions against Ottoman forces in Syria, is at the show.


The £30,000 price tag of Expedition de Syrie jusqu’a la prise de Jaffa (Expedition from Syria to the capture of Jaffa) reflects its extreme rarity. No copies of the pamphlet are known to exist in institutional libraries, none has ever appeared at auction and the manuscript is not even listed in Albert Geiss’ exhaustive Histoire de l’Imprimerie en Egypte, published by the Institut Francais d’Archeologie Orientale in Cairo in 1907.
Following the French victory over Ottoman forces at the Battle of the Pyramids on July 21, the press was relocated to Cairo, where it was renamed the Imprimerie nationale du Caire.
Another valuable book on show in Abu Dhabi is an extremely rare first-edition copy of the first Arabic dictionary to be printed in the Arabic world. The Vocabulaire francais-arabe, contenant les mots principaux et d’un usage plus journalier (French-Arabic vocabulary, containing the main words and those of more everyday use) was printed between September 1798 and September 1799.

The final eight pages of common phrases reflect the imperial expectations of those who would use the dictionary to communicate with their temporary Egyptian subjects. Alongside more typical phrases, some of which would be of use to modern travellers today, such as “I am hungry” and “I am going to Cairo,” is the altogether less common instruction “Etrillez mon cheval” — “Brush my horse.”
One of the most fascinating documents produced in Cairo by the French press was an account of the interrogation and trial of Suleiman Al-Halabi, the young man who stabbed to death Jean-Baptiste Kleber, Napoleon’s successor in Egypt as commander of the French army.
Printed in 1800, a year before the end of the French occupation, of the 500 copies that were printed of the Recueil des pieces relatives a la procedure et au jugement de Soleyman El-Hhaleby, assassin du general en chef Kleber (“Collection of documents relating to the procedure and judgement of Soleyman El-Hhaleby, assassin of general Kleber”), only 14 survive.

Suleiman Al-Halabi’s execution on June 17, 1800, the day of his victim’s funeral, was a gruesome affair; after his right forearm was burnt to the bone, he took four hours to die after being impaled on a metal spike.
The Cairo press was shut down after the French withdrew, and the printing presses were sent back to France, “but its impact was lasting,” said Harrington.
“The French conquerors could not have foreseen that the introduction of printing with movable types would lead to a revolution in printing in the Arab world, demonstrating to Egyptian scholars the transformative potential of print.”
The influence of the short-lived French printing house lingered on through individuals including Nicolas Musabiki, whose father Yusuf had been trained during the French occupation.
Nicolas later played a crucial role in the Bulaq Press, established in Cairo in 1820 by Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Ottoman viceroy and the ruler of Egypt from 1805 to 1848.

“Ali Pasha is seen as the founder of modern Egypt and was clearly inspired by Napoleon’s printing presses,” said Harrington.
“In 1815 he sent the Syrian Nicolas Musabiki to Italy to study type-founding and printing, and ordered three presses from Milan, along with paper and ink, also from Italy.
“The establishment of the Bulaq Press meant that he could print manuals for the military, official guidebooks for the administration, and textbooks for new schools.”
Bulaq’s presses “primarily used the Naskh script, valued for its legibility and formality, making the new texts easily readable.”
Among the rare finds featured in the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair is the Alfiyat Ibn Malik, a 13th-century Arabic textbook. (Supplied)In Europe, printing with movable type had begun in the 15th century — the Gutenberg Bible was printed in Germany in 1455.

“The delay in printing in the Arab world was certainly linked to the notion of calligraphy not only as an art form, but also as an expression of spirituality,” said Harrington.
“It wasn’t until the introduction of lithographic techniques that the beauty of Arabic script could be adapted to printing more easily.”
The Bulaq Press printed its first book, an Italian-Arabic dictionary, in 1822. But one of its greatest triumphs is on show at Abu Dhabi: the first complete edition in Arabic of the Thousand and One Nights, printed in 1835.

The first edition of the collection of Arabic folk tales printed anywhere in the Arab world, fewer than a dozen copies are known to exist in libraries. Privately held copies are even rarer; this copy, from the collection of the French historian and orientalist Charles Barbier de Maynard, who died in 1908, is priced at £250,000.
The impact of the Bulaq Press is celebrated by Egypt’s state library, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which in an online history credits it with having played “an essential role in disseminating science and knowledge throughout the country.
“As books and legible material became available, a new class of intellectuals emerged, to later form the basis for a comprehensive modernization of the whole society.
“Other outcomes included an increase in the number of private schools and the emergence of female education. As the class of intellectuals broadened, self-expression and free opinions appeared in the press and daily newspapers.”
The Bulaq Press “was the main force behind this historical transformation that transferred Egypt from the Dark Ages of ignorance and backwardness and into the age of knowledge, freedom and awareness.”
The advantages of modern printing with movable type, demonstrated by the Bulaq Press, were quickly appreciated elsewhere in the Arab world. The first printing press in Makkah was set up in 1882, and the first newspaper — called Hijaz — followed there in 1908.

In 1949, a specialist publishing house was set up in Makkah to produce the first copies of the holy Qur’an to be printed in Saudi Arabia — a task that previously had been left to printers in Egypt.
In 1984, the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur’an opened in Madinah and has since produced hundreds of millions of copies of the holy book in Arabic and in multiple translations.
The Bulaq Press, also known as the Amiria Press, survives to this day. Its operations were paused during the British occupation of Egypt, but in 1956 it was revived by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the then Egyptian president, and has continued publishing books and other materials as part of the country’s ministry of trade and industry.