Terrified, grieving and angry, Gazans braced for another sleepless night of horror.
The overcrowded and impoverished Palestinian territory resembled a ghost town, witnesses said. Apart from the noise.
Israeli Apache attack helicopters and F-16 fighter jets throbbed and screeched overhead. The wail of ambulances was constant along with the boom of earth-shuddering explosions. And there was screaming from bereaved families as they took the bodies of loved ones to the cemetery for burial.
"There's no protection and nowhere to hide. Everyone accepts that they could be killed at any minute," said Ewa Jasiewicz, a rights activist in Gaza City. "Gaza is an open prison and the attacks are indiscriminate."
Palestinians had known an Israeli military onslaught was coming - they had been warned bluntly - but none had expected its ferocity. Saturday was said to be the bloodiest day for Palestinians in Gaza since Israel occupied the coastal enclave in 1967.
"The intensity and concentration of the military fire is off the scale. People here have never experienced anything like this before," Ms Jasiewicz, a 30-year-old Briton who has dual Polish nationality, said in an interview.
"Gaza is a ghost town today. There are very few cars on the street and there's an acrid smell of burning everywhere. You hear the sound of Apache helicopters and F-16s and you brace yourself for the impact" of their bombs, she said. "People are very tense and subdued."
Ms Jasiewicz is the project co-ordinator in the Palestinian territory for the Free Gaza Movement, a US-based international human rights organisation that in recent months has successfully broken Israel's siege of Gaza several times with protest boats sailing from Cyprus. She spent Saturday night with the family of a Palestinian doctor, huddled in a corridor of their home away from windows. The house was "badly damaged" by burning shrapnel.
"You can't have so-called precision bombing in a place as densely populated as Gaza," she said. Flying shrapnel puts many at risk and slabs of masonry blown off buildings targeted as Hamas military facilities could smash into neighbouring buildings housing civilian families, she added.
Sharon Lock, another Free Gaza Movement activist, said a few brave souls had dared venture on to the streets to the area of Gaza City where she has been living with a Palestinian family. They were clearing away rubble to allow ambulances and cars to ferry casualties to desperately under-equipped hospitals.
"The hospitals were already short of supplies because of the long siege on Gaza before this bombing even started," said Ms Lock, 35, an Australian-British dual national. "Now they're having to deal with emergency amputations.
"Everyone's dreading tonight because Israel said more [attacks] were coming. But it's hard to know what's left for them to attack. Everyone's house has been damaged."
Ms Lock spent Saturday night in a basement with her Palestinian hosts who had been cast into sudden mourning. "The grandmother had insisted on going out to search for bread ? and was killed in a missile strike. The family was devastated."
Helping to calm and comfort the family's young children, Ms Lock had no time to think of the danger she was facing. "When you're next to a terrified one-year-old, you don't think of yourself," she said.
Eyad Sarraj, the president of the Gaza Community Mental Health Centre, 65, said: "Today is worse than yesterday. The carnage is continuous. Gaza is like a ghost town. No one dares go out."
He added: "We're short of everything in Gaza - food, fuel, medicine, and doctors can't cope."
Dr Sarraj is one of nine brothers and sisters, but he is the only one still in Gaza.
"All left in the last eight years. Only I am here with my wife and three children, aged 14, 10 and three," he said.
"There's a mood of real fear in my house. Most of the time we're huddled in the corridor because of the incessant sound of bombing. We haven't slept since it started on Saturday."
Haider Eid, a professor of social and cultural studies at Al Aqsa University in Gaza, has a commanding view of the unfolding scene from his 10th floor apartment.
"The streets are mostly empty, and I can see no fishermen at all out at sea," he said.
"The mood is extremely sad and extremely angry. People feel they have been abandoned by the international community. They have completely lost hope in the European Union, the United Nations - and in the Arab world ? In less than 15 minutes 270 people [were killed] and we've also been under a terrible siege for two years."
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
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The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
