GAZA — The program was perfectly normal: a pair of beloved Mozart chestnuts (“A Little Night Music” and the G minor Symphony), before a lunchtime crowd in a local cultural center.
Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli conductor, leading the orchestra in Gaza on Tuesday for an audience of several hundred.
But the concert could hardly have been more out of the ordinary. Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli conductor, led an orchestra of two dozen elite musicians — volunteers from the Berlin Philharmonic, the Berlin Staatskapelle, the Orchestra of La Scala in Milan, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris — into Gaza on Tuesday. They played, on a makeshift stage, with obvious emotion and exceptionally well, before an invited audience of several hundred that rose to cheer not just afterward but also from the moment the players walked into the hall.
“This is meant to demonstrate European solidarity with Gazan civil society,” Mr. Barenboim said in an interview beforehand, careful to separate the event from the militant Palestinian group Hamas, the ruling authority in Gaza, whose involvement was kept to an absolute minimum. more
Until now, the besieged Gaza Strip has stayed free of the novel coronavirus spreading across the world. As the Gaza Strip has been under a stringent Israeli-led blockade for nearly 13 years, the spread of the coronavirus - officially known as COVID-19 - has become the topic of discussion for many Palestinians, with some joking that the blockade was preventing them from being exposed.But as authorities in the coastal Palestinian enclave gear up to contain any potential outbreak, serious questions have arisen about the risks and implications of such a scenario. But given its already difficult humanitarian situation and high population density, an outbreak in the Gaza Strip could prove to be catastrophic, health officials have warned. "If the virus enters Gaza and spreads, it will get out of hand," Gaza Ministry of Health spokesperson Majdi Thuhair told Middle East Eye, as he explained that a severe shortage of resources and personnel would make it near impossible
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