17 January 2024
Al-Jazeera’s veteran bureau chief in Gaza, who lost his wife, three of his children and a grandchild in Israel’s carpet bombing, has left Gaza for medical treatment, reports AP.
The head of Egypt’s journalist syndicate, Khaled al-Balshy, says Wael Dahdouh will travel to Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based, for medical treatment. Dahdouh, 53, crossed into Egypt earlier.
He has reported continuously on the fighting between Israel and Hamas even as it has taken a devastating toll on his own family and was wounded in an Israeli airstrike last month that killed a cameraman working with him.
Early Qur’anic manuscript to go on sale in March
A rare early manuscript from a copy of the Qur’an is set to go on sale later this year in the Netherlands, Arab News reported on January 17. It will appear at the TEFAF Maastricht fine art fair in March.
The seller, Shapero Rare Books, said the folio’s Hijazi script, used before the standardization of Arabic, places the manuscript in the 7th century C.E., around 50 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, and means it was written in the Hijaz region, which includes the cities of Makkah and Madinah.