Help World-Outlook Win New Subscribers
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Dear reader,
Over the last month, World-Outlook and its sister publication in Spanish Panorama-Mundial have published unique coverage of U.S. and world events.
This includes the three-part interview with Cuban historian and writer Ernesto Limia Díaz, ‘Cuba Is the Moral and Political Compass of the World.’ A related article by Mark Satinoff, World Votes with Cuba to Demand an End to U.S. Blockade, included information on the campaign to send medical aid to Cuba in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa and was shared widely by the Los Angeles Hands Off Cuba Committee and other Cuba solidarity groups.
A number of readers sent their appreciation for Cathleen Gutekanst’s article Chicago Residents Fight ICE Abductions, Deportations, which provided a compelling, eyewitness account of this example of working-class resistance to the Trump administration’s war on undocumented immigrants. Some readers shared it widely on social media platforms.
The news analysis Bigotry, Jew Hatred Take Center Stage in GOP Mainstream also generated interest. It is part of World-Outlook’s consistent analysis of the danger of the rise of incipient fascism that Trumpism has posed for the working class and its allies in the U.S. and the world.
Most recently, another article by Mark Satinoff, ‘From Ceasefire to a Just Peace’ in Israel and Occupied Territories, was promoted by Friends of Standing Together (FOST NY/NJ) on the group’s website. Alon-Lee Green and Sally Abed — the two Standing Together leaders featured at the November 12 event in Brooklyn, New York, that Mark’s article covered — and Israelis for Peace sent their thanks to Mark for his accurate reporting.
This is a small sample of the news coverage and political analysis World-Outlook offers.
We ask you to use this information to try to convince at least one of your acquaintances, colleagues, friends, fellow students, neighbors, or relatives to subscribe to World-Outlook. As you know, the subscription is free of charge. Increasing World-Outlook’s subscription base will widen the site’s reach. It will also provide new impetus to improve our coverage. Comments and reactions from subscribers, or initiatives from readers to cover events in their areas, often result in unexpectedly invaluable articles or opinion columns clarifying important political questions.
Feel free to share this letter, or part of its contents, with those you are asking to subscribe. And keep World-Outlookinformed about the reactions you get from potential new readers.
In solidarity,
World-Outlook editors
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Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) U.S. Military’s Boat Strikes Planning Takes On New Significance
The details could raise questions about who was responsible for a follow-up strike on Sept. 2 — the commander who ordered it or the defense secretary.
By Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt, Published Dec. 3, 2025, Updated Dec. 4, 2025
The reporters have been covering the U.S. military’s operations in the Caribbean.
On orders from President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. military has attacked 21 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 83 people. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Before the Trump administration began attacking people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved contingency plans for what to do if an initial strike left survivors, according to multiple U.S. officials.
The military would attempt to rescue survivors who appeared to be helpless, shipwrecked and out of what the administration considered a fight. But it would try again to kill them if they took what the United States deemed to be a hostile action, like communicating with suspected cartel members, the officials said.
After the smoke cleared from a first strike on Sept. 2, there were two survivors, and one of them radioed for help, the U.S. officials said. Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the operation, ordered a follow-up strike and both were killed.
The military’s contingency plans have taken on new significance as Admiral Bradley and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are set to go to Capitol Hill on Thursday to answer questions about the attack amid an uproar over the killing of the survivors.
The men plan to present a vigorous defense, officials said, of what they will assert was a lawful follow-up strike on the survivors. That moment is just a small part of Mr. Trump’s legally disputed campaign of killing people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea as if they were combatants in a war, but it is now the focus of intense congressional scrutiny.
The details of the contingency planning could raise more questions about who was responsible for the second strike — the commander who ordered it or the defense secretary who approved the overall operation. Many critics, including some lawmakers, have said the follow-up attack could be a war crime.
Defenders of both Mr. Hegseth and Admiral Bradley said that once lawmakers learn more about the planning scenarios and the circumstances of the second strike, they will be exonerated.
President Trump on Wednesday offered his support for both men. The Pentagon did not respond to request for comment on the military’s planning.
On orders from Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth, the U.S. military has attacked 21 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 83 people, as part of a legally disputed policy of summarily executing people suspected of smuggling drugs as if they were combatants on a battlefield.
The alleged radio communications by the initial survivors — including any recordings of intercepts the U.S. may have — may not be the only messages that lawmakers seek to scrutinize as contemporaneous evidence of what happened.
Several U.S. officials told The New York Times that military officials had used a written texting system known as “Strike Bridge” to communicate, both during planning scenarios ahead of the attack and during the operation itself. The written messages, they said, included communications between Admiral Bradley and the SEAL Team 6 operators directing the drone.
Strike Bridge automatically saves those messages, officials said. Several congressional officials said lawmakers had asked to review logs related to the operation, along with written documentation like Mr. Hegseth’s “execute order” and the rules of engagement. It is not clear whether the Pentagon will turn them over.
U.S. officials said the military was also weighing whether it could show the full, unedited video of the Sept. 2 engagement with the boat to the lawmakers. Congressional officials said lawmakers needed to see the entire video recording to conduct proper oversight.
Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that he would release whatever video footage the administration had of the Sept. 2 strike.
Under the plans Mr. Hegseth had approved, Admiral Bradley interpreted the purported communications between the initial survivors and colleagues as meaning that the survivors were still in the fight, rather than shipwrecked and helpless people whom it would be a war crime to target.
The Pentagon’s law of war manual says that “to be considered ‘shipwrecked,’ persons must be in need of assistance and care, and they must refrain from any hostile act.” A U.S. naval commander handbook says combatants “qualify as shipwrecked persons only if they have ceased all active combat activity.”
The Pentagon’s defense of its actions rests heavily on the premise that there was a “fight” in the first place. In defending the campaign of summary killings at sea as lawful, the administration has relied on Mr. Trump’s disputed determination that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that people suspected of smuggling drugs for them are “combatants.”
A still-secret memo by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel accepts Mr. Trump’s claims about the nature of drug cartels and that there is an armed conflict. Based on that premise, it concludes that the boat strikes are lawful.
One of its key related conclusions, according to people who have read it, is that suspected cargos of drugs aboard boats are lawful military targets because cartels could otherwise sell them and use the profits to buy military equipment to sustain their alleged war efforts.
The Pentagon’s emphasis on the purported radio communications appears to rely on that logic. The idea appears to be that without a second strike, another boat could have come to retrieve not only the survivors but also any of the alleged shipment of cocaine that the first blast did not burn up, so calling for help was a hostile act.
A broad range of legal experts reject the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s claim that this is an armed conflict. They say that there is no armed conflict, that crews of boats suspected of smuggling drugs are civilians, not combatants, and that Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have been giving illegal orders to commit murder.
The second strike in the Sept. 2 attack appears to have attracted bipartisan oversight interest in part because Republicans can criticize it without directly challenging Mr. Trump. That is because even if one accepts Mr. Trump’s claim that it is an armed conflict, killing shipwrecked enemies is a war crime.
Mr. Hegseth issued the broad orders that authorized the military to sink the boats, destroy the drugs and kill the people aboard. Those orders, developed ahead of the first strike, have remained largely unchanged throughout the campaign, officials said. Admiral Bradley and his subordinates developed the specific plans and scenarios for the operation based on the broad order issued by Mr. Hegseth.
Mr. Hegseth reviewed those plans and gave approval for the specific strike on Sept. 2 based on the plans, but he turned the running of the operation over to Admiral Bradley.
U.S. officials said Mr. Hegseth fully supported Admiral Bradley’s actions, believing they followed the plans Admiral Bradley had presented to him and other senior Pentagon officials.
Mr. Hegseth was monitoring a live video feed of the strikes, officials said. Mr. Hegseth said on Tuesday that he did not “stick around” to see if there were any survivors or the second strike that killed them.
Dave Philipps contributed reporting.
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2) New York Times Sues Pentagon Over First Amendment Rights
The lawsuit said the Defense Department’s new set of rules for journalists “violates the Constitution’s guarantees of due process, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”
By Erik Wemple, Reporting from Washington,
Dec. 4, 2025
A new set of press restrictions at the Pentagon took effect in October. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
The New York Times accused the Pentagon in a lawsuit on Thursday of infringing on the constitutional rights of journalists by imposing a set of new restrictions on reporting about the military.
In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, The Times argued that the Defense Department’s new policy violated the First Amendment and “seeks to restrict journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done — ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”
The rules, which went into effect in October, are a stark departure from the previous ones, in both length and scope. They require reporters to sign a 21-page form that sets restrictions on journalistic activities, including requests for story tips and inquiries to Pentagon sources. Reporters who don’t comply could lose their press passes, and the Pentagon has accorded itself “unbridled discretion” to enforce the policy as it sees fit, according to the lawsuit.
The suit said that “reporting any information not approved by department officials” could lead to punishment, “regardless of whether such news gathering occurs on or off Pentagon grounds, and regardless of whether the information at issue is classified or unclassified.”
The complaint sought a court order halting enforcement of the rules and a declaration that the provisions “targeting the exercise of First Amendment rights” were unlawful. The Times has retained Theodore J. Boutrous, a First Amendment lawyer who has argued major media access cases in federal court. Julian E. Barnes, a Pentagon reporter for The Times, is listed as a plaintiff alongside the company.
Sean Parnell, the chief spokesman for the Pentagon, said in a statement: “We are aware of The New York Times lawsuit and look forward to addressing these arguments in court.”
The new rules are the latest step in a monthslong effort by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to curtail the access and privileges of the Pentagon press corps.
Mr. Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon in January after a bruising confirmation process that surfaced allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault, which he said were untrue. Early in his tenure, Mr. Hegseth proposed evicting from the Pentagon a veteran reporter at NBC News who had contributed to some of the coverage.
The department later stripped several national news outlets of their workspaces in the Pentagon, offering them mostly to conservative outlets. Mr. Hegseth has also added limits on where reporters can roam in the complex.
A draft of the new restrictions first emerged in September, and was revised after pushback from lawyers representing news organizations. The final rules were released on Oct. 6, and more than a week later, dozens of credentialed journalists — including six from The Times — surrendered their badges instead of signing the document. The departing outlets have continued reporting on the military despite the access limits.
Many major news organizations released statements in October condemning the Pentagon policy as an incursion on the First Amendment. “The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections,” said a statement from ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News Media and NBC News.
In a press briefing on Wednesday, a senior Times lawyer said that there had been discussions with other news organizations about joining the suit but that the newspaper had decided to proceed alone.
The suit took issue with multiple provisions of the new policy, including one that empowered the Pentagon to deem a journalist “a security or safety risk.” Such a determination could hinge on whether the journalist engaged in unauthorized disclosure of classified information or certain unclassified information, among other considerations.
The policy’s wording on “solicitation” has been a particular worry of media lawyers. It asserts that the First Amendment does not protect reporters when they “solicit government employees to violate the law by providing confidential government information” and could apply to “calls for tips” that encourage Defense Department employees to share “nonpublic” agency information.
Providing channels for sources to send information, the suit said, was a “routine” practice for journalists.
Legal clashes between journalists and the government over access to federal buildings have arisen repeatedly across President Trump’s two terms.
During his first administration, the White House pulled the press passes of two White House correspondents. The journalists regained those passes after litigation. This year, The Associated Press sued the government after being excluded from White House press pool events in cramped spaces such as the Oval Office; litigation challenging that move is ongoing.
In each of those cases, the government targeted one journalist or outlet for punishment. The Pentagon restrictions, on the other hand, seek to bind an entire press corps. And those restrictions, the suit argued, would suppress the work of news organizations “with perceived viewpoints the department disfavors.”
After the departure of the legacy press corps, the Pentagon announced that a new group of outlets had agreed to the restrictions and would work from the press space in the building. The new arrivals feature an array of pro-Trump outlets that have echoed administration talking points and show little inclination to investigate its actions.
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3) ‘This Is Illegal,’ He Said, Spreading His Arms. ‘This Is Illegal.’
By M. Gessen, Dec. 4, 2025
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Israel and the West Bank
“The United States, in other words, continues to support Israel not only financially and militarily but also, in effect, legally, by helping ensure its continued impunity. … B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, published reports that used the word ‘genocide’ in their titles. The B’Tselem report was called ‘Our Genocide.’ ‘Genocide is not crime committed by a small group,’ Yuli Novak, the executive director of B’Tselem, told me. ‘The whole society is recruited to it. Ours is a genocidal society.’ She recounted the staff meeting in which, during a briefing from researchers working on the ground in Gaza, the scale of the catastrophe became clear to everyone present. It was also clear to them that the mass killings of civilians were not simply collateral and that starvation was not a side effect of the war. These acts were intentional. The intent was genocidal. They decided that the most important thing they could do was to tell the story of what they now felt was their genocide.”
Samar Hazboun for The New York Times
We are living in an upside-down world. Here is an example. When the U.N. Security Council endorsed President Trump’s so-called peace plan for Gaza, including what looks like indefinite U.S.-backed Israeli control in the territory, it contradicted decades of the U.N.’s own resolutions and the rulings of the International Court of Justice. The Palestinian human rights activist Shawan Jabarin wrote to the body, pleading for it to respect international law.
“To seek, as a matter of supposed political compromise, to sideline international law would be to render the U.N. complicit in Israel’s violations, to fundamentally break the promise of the U.N. Charter and to fuel only ever intensifying human carnage,” he wrote.
Jabarin got his start in activism 44 years ago as a member of a student group affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist, Soviet-backed militant group. In the 1980s and ’90s, he spent about eight years in Israeli prisons. At the same time, he made the long transition to leading Al-Haq, the oldest and probably most authoritative human rights organization in the occupied territories and one of the oldest in the Arab world.
But in 2021, Israel designated Al-Haq and five other Palestinian civil society organizations as terrorist groups. In September the U.S. State Department imposed sanctions on Al-Haq and two other Palestinian groups, explicitly for their work with the International Criminal Court, which has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant in connection with accusations of war crimes in Gaza.
On the day the U.N. Security Council put its seal of approval on Trump’s plan, Israel was launching airstrikes on Gaza. The next day, Gaza health officials said 76 Palestinians had been killed. Altogether, since the U.S.-brokered deal went into effect, Gaza health officials say, more than 350 Palestinians have died, most of them at the hands of Israeli forces. Israeli authorities continue to restrict the movement of humanitarian aid, so that only a small fraction has been getting in. And yet world leaders and Western media refer to what is happening in Gaza as a cease-fire, and the activists — who are peacefully opposing the carnage — are facing sanctions. This is the upside-down state of our world.
For the second installment in my series on the state of international justice, I traveled to Israel and the occupied West Bank to talk to the activists who are documenting human rights violations committed in Gaza and the West Bank. (I could not visit the few researchers who continue to work in Gaza, which has been effectively closed to international journalists for more than two years.) I wanted to see how, having been designated as terrorists, placed under sanctions, harassed and threatened with prosecution, they are continuing their work. What I found is that they have expanded their idea of what that work is.
I visited Jabarin in his office in Ramallah in the West Bank. “One American organization was told by their lawyer that if they give us a cup of tea, that’s like giving a cup of tea to bin Laden,” Jabarin told me. We were having coffee and dates. Al-Haq’s headquarters, in a small office building set back from a busy commercial street, looks and sounds like an NGO office anywhere in the world: generic furniture, phones ringing dissonantly, a lot of sunlight and not quite enough air. But what’s outside the building is not like any other place I’ve been.
Over the past couple of years, many more people have become aware of the violent practices of the Israeli occupation — the continuing displacement of Palestinian villagers, the beatings and robberies committed by settlers, some of which take place under the direct protection of the military, and the detentions, torture and killings carried out by Israeli troops. The violence was frequent before Oct. 7, 2023, and has become a daily occurrence since.
But it’s the administrative, quotidian, usually nonviolent enforcement of the occupation that strikes me whenever I visit Ramallah. One day, as I was leaving my hotel for an interview, Israeli soldiers blocked off the street just outside. This had nothing to do with me, but what should have been a 10-minute drive took me two hours. “And this,” I thought in between attempting mostly useless side-street maneuvers, “is how the occupation works.”
Under the 1995 Oslo Accords, Ramallah is designated as Area A, which is fully governed by the Palestinian Authority. (Area B is, hypothetically, under Palestinian civil control but policed jointly with Israel, and Area C is governed entirely by Israel.) Nonetheless, Israeli troops can — and do — bring the city to a standstill anytime they want. The currency is Israeli. Residents use Israeli phone numbers, for which they pay Israeli companies, and consume food and other products made in Israel.
The day I was trying to drive in gridlock happened to be Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish religious calendar, when Hebrew-language television and radio in Israel go off the air. The radio in my rental car produced nothing but static, even though in this majority-Muslim, minority-Christian city it was — or should have been — an ordinary Thursday. Most residents of Ramallah cannot enter Israel; many of them have never been there, and yet they are at all times aware of the customs of the occupying power and the whims of its armed services.
In the West Bank outside Ramallah, Israel has long exercised near-total control of the two most important resources: water and roads. The dwindling number of Palestinian farmers who still have access to their land often can’t get enough water to farm. As for roads, the new ones, built by Israel for the convenience of settlers, are almost completely off limits to Palestinians. Many of the roads on which Palestinians were once able to travel have been closed off by the Israeli authorities over the past two years. Palestinian villages have metal gates at the entrance, erected and operated by Israeli troops, and many of these gates stay shuttered for days, weeks or months.
Before Oct. 7, 2023, getting around the West Bank was hard and unpredictable: You never knew where a checkpoint might pop up or a gate might be shut. Now it’s quite predictable: You really can’t get from most places to most other places. Jabarin’s mother lives in a village outside Hebron. It used to take him an hour and a half to get there. Now it can take eight hours.
“This is illegal,” Jabarin said, spreading his arms as though to encompass all of his life and his people’s lives. “This is illegal. The occupation is illegal.” The International Court of Justice agrees, as has the United Nations, according to numerous resolutions passed starting in 1967. And yet now the Security Council has effectively given Israel’s occupation of Gaza the force of international law.
U.S. sanctions have caused Al-Haq to lose access to its bank accounts. All 45 Al-Haq employees now work without pay. “That’s 45 families,” Jabarin said.
Still, Al-Haq continues its work: documenting the genocide in Gaza and the constant violence in the West Bank, working with the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice and filing complaints in the courts of countries whose nationals are suspected of committing war crimes while serving in the Israeli Army. At this point Al-Haq has little left to lose. Some other Palestinian organizations, though, have become more cautious.
Defense for Children International-Palestine is another prominent human rights group. Its general director, Khaled Quzmar, also leads Defense for Children International, a Geneva-based coalition of dozens of groups worldwide. In 2023 the Palestinian organization sued the Biden administration in federal court, arguing that the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide obliges the United States to stop supporting Israel. The judge in that case concluded that he did not have the authority to rule on foreign policy matters.
This year, Quzmar told me, he decided against joining another lawsuit, in part because he did not want to invite U.S. sanctions. After being designated a terrorist organization by Israel in 2021, Defense for Children International-Palestine lost much of its European and American funding, but at least it still has access to its bank accounts and can continue its core work: documenting the effects of the genocide and the occupation on children and providing services to children and families. According to the organization, more than 350 Palestinian children are in Israeli custody; more than 50 have been killed in the West Bank this year.
But the threat of U.S. sanctions, which has loomed particularly large in the past few months, has made the group step away from some of the work Israel least wants it to do. The United States, in other words, continues to support Israel not only financially and militarily but also, in effect, legally, by helping ensure its continued impunity.
In Israel a bill pending in the Knesset — the Parliament — would make it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison to cooperate with the International Criminal Court, including supplying the court with information about allegations of war crimes. Even though this legislation is not yet law, almost every human rights defender I interviewed mentioned it.
One activist told me that he was limiting his work to putting all available information on the genocide and allegations of war crimes online. If someone then wants to take that information to The Hague — he trailed off so I could fill in the blank. A lawyer told me, with a similar figurative wink, that he was pursuing cases only in the domestic judicial system. If, by going all the way to the highest court, he happened to fulfill the international courts’ requirement that all domestic remedies be exhausted first, well ….
In most places I’ve reported from, the work that prepares the ground for pursuing international justice is the work of documenting — collecting testimony, organizing data, analyzing visual information. Israeli human rights defenders are certainly doing this kind of work, despite their government’s attempts at intimidating them, but their primary focus has been on something else: on naming the crime. In July two leading organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, published reports that used the word “genocide” in their titles. The B’Tselem report was called “Our Genocide.”
“Genocide is not crime committed by a small group,” Yuli Novak, the executive director of B’Tselem, told me. “The whole society is recruited to it. Ours is a genocidal society.” She recounted the staff meeting in which, during a briefing from researchers working on the ground in Gaza, the scale of the catastrophe became clear to everyone present. It was also clear to them that the mass killings of civilians were not simply collateral and that starvation was not a side effect of the war. These acts were intentional. The intent was genocidal. They decided that the most important thing they could do was to tell the story of what they now felt was their genocide.
The 88-page report contains testimonies and statistics — more than 58,000 killed, almost a third of them children — but its focus is on the narrative. The report examines ideology and language as well as structures of the occupation, the displacement, violence and imprisonment that made the genocide possible. It doesn’t argue that the genocide was preordained but aims to show that by Oct. 7, 2023, the conditions that made it possible were in place and the Hamas attack became the “triggering event.”
This story about the genocide is also intended to serve as a warning. The B’Tselem report suggests that the practices documented in Gaza may spread to areas under direct Israeli control — not only the West Bank but also Israel, where about one in five residents is Palestinian.
Years before preparing the report, Novak spent two months in Rwanda because she “wanted to understand the moment before,” she said. “It’s very similar. The fact that there are weapons in the streets and they are in the hands of men and all of this is connected to one person,” in this case the former national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whom the report identifies as a force behind spreading genocidal speech. Since Oct. 7, his office has been distributing guns to Israeli settlers. More recently, it armed self-appointed militias that harass antigovernment demonstrators in Tel Aviv.
We were talking in a quirky little house in Jaffa, which Novak shares with her partner, Yael Harari, and their 2-year-old son. A few weeks after the B’Tselem report was released, Harari graduated from medical school. What should have been a triumphant occasion felt unbearable. Harari couldn’t face the ceremony — the giant Israeli flags, the self-congratulatory speeches, all while people were starving and being killed in Gaza. In the end, she, too, decided to act by naming the genocide. She attended the ceremony. When her name was called, before walking across the stage, she opened her graduation gown to expose a white T-shirt with the words of an amended Hippocratic oath: “First do no harm,” with “harm” struck out and replaced by “genocide.” In a video of the graduation, you can hear the crowd go silent as she starts walking.
Something similar happened with the “Our Genocide” report. When B’Tselem released it, Novak and her staff braced for the reaction. They had been vilified before. Novak had been doxxed, threatened and at least twice forced to temporarily leave the country. But this time, there was no such reaction. Mainstream Israeli news outlets largely ignored the report in much the same way as they have been ignoring almost everything happening in Gaza. Since October 2023, their coverage has focused almost exclusively on the Hamas attack, the Israeli hostages, Israeli soldiers who have died in uniform and the outside world, which they say has been unfairly criticizing Israel.
Haaretz, a left-wing newspaper with a small audience, covered the report, but “when something happens only in Haaretz, it’s as if it hasn’t happened at all,” Novak said.
The work related to international justice, war crimes and, of course, genocide, refers to the Nuremberg trials, which began almost exactly 80 years ago. Defendants in those trials — German generals, judges, industrialists and others — often claimed not to have known about the nature of the crimes or the extent of the crimes committed by their compatriots. The B’Tselem report explicitly aims to prevent this justification. The title alone does the job.
Over the years of interviewing Israeli dissidents, I’ve noticed that the origin stories of their activism usually date to one or another of Israel’s wars or crises. It is as though these explosions of violence open the opportunity for seeing — or foreclose, for some, the opportunity to not see. Ruchama Marton, the founder of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, told me her story when I visited her in Tel Aviv. She is 88, five feet tall and has just published a memoir whose title can be translated as “A Tough Woman” or “A Difficult Woman.”
With her cat lying on the dark wood dining table between us, Marton told me that in 1987, when the first intifada began, she knew that Israeli television was lying to her. She didn’t know what specifically it was lying about, but she is, she told me, “very sensitive to lies.” She gathered 11 colleagues, as many as would fit in a van, and they went on a fact-finding mission to Gaza.
Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin had acknowledged that the Israeli forces’ strategy for suppressing the uprising was to beat the protesters. Even so, what she saw at Al-Shifa Hospital shocked her. “Every bed — these were young people with broken limbs, many of them unconscious because of being hit with clubs to the head. They were intubated.”
After leaving Gaza, the doctors pulled over at a gas station, discussed what they had seen and decided to form an organization. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel provides medical services in the occupied territories, and in Israel it has published many meticulously documented reports on such topics as access to health care, torture in Israeli prisons and, now, genocide.
In July the group issued a 65-page report to coincide with B’Tselem’s. It’s called “Destruction of Conditions of Life: A Health Analysis of the Gaza Genocide.” Marton told me she started using the term two years ago. Having done this work for more than 35 years, she had witnessed the long, systematic creation of “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” as the Genocide Convention puts it.
On Oct. 7, 2023, the Hebrew University historian Lee Mordechai was in the United States, in the second month of an academic year he was spending at Princeton working on a book about the year 536. Like many Israelis abroad, he struggled to locate his role and his relationship to what was happening in Israel and Gaza. He was watching and reading all he could, in Hebrew and English. “If this is being done in my name, then I need to know what it is,” he recalled thinking. The more media he consumed, the more he noticed a gap between information readily available to Israelis and to people outside Israel.
In December 2023, when South Africa filed a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, Mordechai read the documents. The case, he realized, was an attempt to organize all available verifiable information into a coherent narrative. He could do this, too, he thought. And he could add more recent information.
Mordechai started assembling publicly available facts about what was happening in Gaza into a report, which he saved as a PDF file and posted on X and on Academia.edu. He kept publishing revised and updated versions. He studied the relevant law and classified the actions of Israeli forces as crimes against humanity. After a few months, he started using the term “genocide.” “I read the Genocide Convention, and what I could see fit the definition,” he told me. “I am not a legal expert, but I know how to read, and this is what I do in my day job.”
Few seemed to notice Mordechai’s report until one day, in March 2024, his 28-post thread on X went viral. Overnight, the audience for that version of the report went from a couple of hundred to five million.
Mordechai returned to Jerusalem in August 2024. His project now involves over 100 volunteers — Jews and Palestinians, many of them academics. They maintain an online archive that includes media and expert reports, published testimonies and witnesses’ accounts posted on social media. He continues to update the main report, which is now more than 200 pages long and cites about 4,000 sources. Plans include an encyclopedia, a collection of statements made by Israeli officials that appear to show intent to commit crimes against humanity or genocide, and content that “an interested person can take as a PowerPoint to their family.”
Each of these activists — Jabarin and Novak, who are professional human rights defenders; Marton, whose primary work was in psychiatry but who accumulated decades of human rights experience; and Mordechai, with his volunteer researchers — is working to preserve the record and to name the crime that Israel is committing.
One way to think about this work is as a bare minimum. Israeli activists are reluctant to talk about international justice not only because their government may criminalize such talk but also because the possibility of such justice for Gaza seems so remote.
Another way to think about it is as work for the future. The International Criminal Court may yet succeed in prosecuting cases related to Gaza. The International Court of Justice, where the South African case against Israel is pending, will perhaps eventually consider it. Novak, who spent years learning from South African anti-apartheid activists, told me that she hopes a reckoning with “our genocide” will become the foundation for a society in which Palestinians and Jews live together as equals. Mordechai, too, envisions truth and reconciliation commissions and a museum of the Gaza genocide — “like Yad Vashem,” the Jerusalem complex dedicated to the history of the Holocaust. Someday, when the world has a chance to turn right side up again.
M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.
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4) How Israel’s Settlement Surge in the West Bank Is Displacing Palestinians
The Israeli government authorized 22 settlements in May, the largest expansion in decades, and Palestinian families are now being forced from their homes.
By Natan Odenheimer and Fatima AbdulKarim, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak, Dec. 4, 2025
The reporters visited an area near Ramallah in the West Bank where a new settlement is being built and nearby Palestinian homes are now empty.
Mr. Abdulrahman’s home, foreground, and the new settler outpost about 200 yards away in the background.
The reporters visited an area near Ramallah in the West Bank where a new settlement is being built and nearby Palestinian homes are now empty.
For two decades, Muhammad Abdulrahman, 58, lived with his wife and his beehives on a remote hillside in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
But in May, Israeli settlers set up camp about 200 yards away and took control of the road leading to Mr. Abdulrahman’s home, blocking him from returning, he said. Israeli soldiers then evicted him and his wife, Suha Abdulrahman, the couple said.
The Israeli military said that Mr. Abdulrahman left voluntarily, but he said that he has still been unable to return home. Last month, a video shared by an Israeli lawmaker on social media showed his house had been turned into a space for religious study by the settlers.
“All my memories are in that home,” Mr. Abdulrahman said by phone last month from his brother’s house in the nearby town of Betunia, where he is now staying. “They are not only stealing our land but also trying to cut the roots that connect us to it.”
The Abdulrahmans were among the first Palestinians affected by an Israeli government decision in May to redraw the map of the West Bank by turning more Palestinian areas into Jewish settlements.
In the most extensive expansion in decades, the government approved 22 villages and neighborhoods for settlements across the territory, including one called Beit Horon North, near where Mr. Abdulrahman and his wife lived, west of the Palestinian city of Ramallah. It was part of a broader and decades-long push by Israel to entrench its control over the West Bank.
That process has become more aggressive since 2022, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office, and the outbreak of the war in Gaza, which was ignited by the Hamas-led attacks on Israel in October 2023. There has been a surge of settler violence in the West Bank, which Israeli police have largely failed to address. Israel has also conducted extensive military operations, which it has said were aimed at combating militants, that have uprooted entire neighborhoods in Palestinian cities. Historians and researchers say that has led to the largest wave of Palestinian displacement in the West Bank in a half-century.
Most of the international community sees the creation of a Palestinian state that includes the West Bank as key to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since capturing the territory in 1967, however, Israel has expanded its presence there through settlement building, even in densely populated Palestinian areas.
The government intended to accelerate that process with its decision in May to expand the settlements, according to Israel Ganz, a head of a local settler council who helped promote the plan. The Palestinian Authority, which administers large parts of the West Bank, is also racing to claim territory before Israel does.
“Say there are 500 acres of land the state of Israel doesn’t want to lose — it puts a village there,” Mr. Ganz said. “That doesn’t mean a 500-acre city will be built, but once you’re there, no one else can be.”
The United Nations and the International Court of Justice say that all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank area violate international law. Israel rejects that.
Some of the 22 settlements approved in May already existed but they had been deemed illegal under Israeli law. The recent decision meant that these were authorized retroactively. Others are planned for the northern edge of the West Bank, in a region where no officially recognized settlements have existed since Israel dismantled them in 2005.
In August, the Israeli government approved a major settlement project, known as E1, that would effectively split the West Bank in two, making it harder for Palestinians to establish a contiguous state there.
In recent months, members of the Israeli government have also repeatedly threatened to annex parts of the West Bank.
‘This is our land, and I make the rules here’
Over the past year, settlers have built a record number of outposts — small encampments often made of prefabricated homes — according to an Israeli military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive information.
More than 40 were built in the past six months alone, according to Hagit Ofran who monitors the West Bank for Settlement Watch, a project run by the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now.
The government’s plan for the 22 settlements “aims to curb Palestinian urban growth and link Israeli-populated areas,” according to Mr. Ganz, who helped select some of the sites. “Beit Horon North, for instance, will stop Ramallah from spreading,” he added.
When we visited Beit Horon North in July, Israeli settlers appeared to be in control of the area.
“This is our land, and I make the rules here,” said Elkana Shahar, a young settler who was wearing a sleeveless shirt with a peace sign. He and a few other boys had been left on a hot morning to watch over a scattering of belongings in the shade of an awning — a worn sofa, a refrigerator, a fan and bookshelves. The settlers had also poured concrete in preparation for permanent construction.
When we approached, one of the settlers drew what appeared to be a handgun that they later said was a pepper-spray pistol.
“Did you get approval to be here?” Mr. Shahar asked. He demanded that we leave, saying that it was private property.
On the same road, two other young Israeli settlers were seen breaking into a recently built Palestinian home that had been abandoned. The gate to the yard was broken, and the back window had been shattered.
Many settlements grow out of such outposts. A spokesman for the Israeli Civil Administration, a military unit that manages civilian affairs in the West Bank, said that building the Beit Horon North settlement required further legal and planning procedures. The outpost that we visited there was not part of the government-authorized settlement, and was illegal, they said, but that taking any action against it was “subject to the approval of the political echelon.”
Under the Oslo Accords, signed in the 1990s, both Israelis and Palestinians committed to not take any steps that would change the status of the West Bank. But successive Israeli governments largely ignored dozens of unauthorized Jewish outposts in the region — and the military has often discretely provided their security — ushering in a period of large-scale settlement expansion.
Some remote areas, like the one where Mr. Abdulrahman lived, were not part of that expansion until this year.
“We thought no one paid attention to our patch of land,” said Mr. Adulrahman. He and his wife lived in an old two-room house built from large, uneven stones, surrounded by pine trees and an olive grove. No other homes were within earshot.
Mr. Abdulrahman said he was ready to fight for his home, and he had filed a complaint with the Israeli police and the Israeli Civil Administration. The police did not respond to a request for comment.
It was not the time for emotions, Mr. Abdulrahman said. “It’s time to put Israel’s claim that it’s a rule of law country to the test.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Haifa, Israel, and Sanjana Varghese from London.
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5) Deadly Attacks in Gaza Test Cease-Fire as Body of Another Captive Is Returned
Israel launched a military strike after it said Hamas militants attacked its soldiers, the latest clashes in the two months since a truce was signed.
By Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Dec. 4, 2025
The Israeli military launched a deadly strike on Gaza on Wednesday after saying Hamas had attacked its soldiers, the latest spate of violence to test the cease-fire agreed to almost two months ago.
The Israeli military said it killed a militant in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, in retaliation for a Hamas attack in nearby Rafah that it said had injured five soldiers. Suhaib al-Hamss, the director of the Kuwait Specialty Field Hospital in Khan Younis, said the Israeli strike killed at least six people, including a man, two women and three children, and wounded many others in an encampment for displaced people.
The cease-fire was agreed to in October, and there have been frequent flare-ups of violence, including Israeli military strikes on Gaza. The Israeli military has said it has targeted Hamas, but Palestinian health officials have said many civilians have been killed in the strikes, including children.
But key parts of the agreement have been fulfilled, including the return of all the living hostages. Roughly 250 Israelis and foreign nationals were taken hostage in the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, that ignited the war in Gaza.
On Wednesday, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the second-largest militant group in Gaza, handed over the remains of a Thai farmworker. The body of the last captive, an Israeli police officer, has not been returned.
It is unclear if there has been any progress on efforts to demilitarize Gaza, which Israeli and American officials believe would cement a long-term cease-fire.
In Rafah, a Hamas militant opened fire on an Israeli armored personnel carrier, which had been brought in after a suspicious person was identified in a building in the area, according to an Israeli military spokeswoman. One soldier was wounded seriously, she added.
Video of the Israeli strike on Wednesday evening showed a cluster of tents engulfed in flames as people hurled water at the fire.
Dr. al-Hamss said in a phone interview that a flood of dead and wounded people arrived at the field hospital and that medical staff provided basic treatment before the patients were transferred to a larger hospital with more resources. Many of the patients had shrapnel wounds, he said.
“It was utter chaos,” he said, “a totally catastrophic situation.”
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6) Militant Leader Backed by Israel Is Killed in Gaza, Official Says
Yasser Abu Shabab, a Bedouin man in his 30s, was at the center of an Israeli project in Gaza to build up anti-Hamas militias.
By Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Tel Aviv, Dec. 4, 2025
Destruction in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, where Yasser Abu Shabab was reported killed on Thursday. Credit...Jehad Alshrafi/Associated Press
Yasser Abu Shabab, the leader of a Palestinian militia backed by Israel, was killed on Thursday in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, according to an Israeli security official.
The official, who shared sensitive details on the condition of anonymity, said he was killed in a clash in eastern Rafah. The exact circumstances of his death remain unclear.
Mr. Abu Shabab, a Bedouin man in his 30s, was at the center of an Israeli project in Gaza to build up militias that could undermine Hamas.
Israeli officials said Israel had provided arms to the Popular Forces, Mr. Abu Shabab’s militia, but the group refuted that.
In June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said that the Israeli government “activated” clans in Gaza opposed to Hamas at the advice of security officials. “What’s bad about it?” he said. “It’s only good, and it only saves the lives of Israel Defense Force soldiers.”
Allegations that Mr. Abu Shabab stole scores of aid trucks earned him a notorious reputation among Palestinians.
In late 2024, Gazan transportation company owners, truck drivers and international humanitarian officials accused Mr. Abu Shabab of running a sophisticated looting operation.
Georgios Petropoulos, a senior United Nations official who was based in Gaza at the time, called him “the self-styled power broker of east Rafah.”
In an interview in November 2024, Mr. Abu Shabab, thin and lightly bearded, denied he had looted a large number of aid trucks. But conceded that his men — armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles — had raided half a dozen or so aid trucks since the start of the war.
“We are taking trucks so we can eat, not so we can sell,” he said, asserting that he was feeding his family and neighbors. “Every hungry person is taking aid.” He accused Hamas of being primarily responsible for stealing the aid, an accusation that Hamas has denied.
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7) Panel Votes to End Recommendation for Hepatitis B Shots for All Newborns
In a step toward Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s goal of upending vaccine policy, the committee decided to limit at-birth hepatitis B shots to babies whose mothers are infected with the virus.
By Apoorva Mandavilli, Dec. 5, 2025
Demonstrators outside the C.D.C. on Thursday. Credit...Alyssa Pointer/Reuters
After contentious debates and three failed attempts at a vote, a federal vaccine committee decided on Friday to end the decades-long recommendation that all newborns be immunized at birth against hepatitis B, a highly infectious virus that leads to chronic liver disease in most infected children.
The vote was a victory for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has sought for decades to overhaul the childhood vaccine schedule. But the divisiveness and dysfunction of the committee in making the decision raises questions about the reliability of the process and left at least one critic “very concerned about the future” of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The panel, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, voted 8-3 that women who test negative for the virus should consult with their health care provider and “decide when or if their child will” be vaccinated against the virus at birth. The committee did not change the recommendation that newborns of mothers known to be infected or whose status is unknown be immunized. The shift is not expected to affect insurance coverage of the shots.
More changes to vaccine policy are likely follow in the next months, as the committee goes on to review all childhood immunizations. The meeting’s presenters and at least some of the panelists are known for their anti-vaccine views and are close associates of Mr. Kennedy.
For many public health experts, the vote also marked the end of trust in the C.D.C. and its vaccine advisers.
“Today is a defining moment for our country,” Michael Osterholm, a public health expert at the University of Minnesota, said. “We can no longer trust federal health authorities when it comes to vaccines.”
In a statement, Dr. Richard Besser, president and chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting director of the agency, said “policymakers, physicians, and families must turn to reputable medical and public health groups for guidance, and health insurers should do the same for informing what vaccines they will cover.”
The votes on hepatitis B were originally scheduled for the September meeting but deferred twice because some members said there was insufficient data to make a decision. The committee attempted the vote again on Thursday, but postponed it after some panelists questioned whether a change was warranted.
Some panelists noted that the practice had helped to nearly eliminate cases among newborns in the United States, and that there was no evidence of harm from the shots at any age.
“We know it’s safe, and we know it’s very effective,” Dr. Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, said on Friday, and he warned that if the vote passed, “we will see more children and adolescents and adults infected with hepatitis B.”
Mr. Kennedy and his associates have argued that hepatitis B is primarily a sexually transmitted disease and that babies do not need the protection unless their mothers are infected.
The risk of “infection throughout your early stage of life, and probably throughout most of your childhood, is extremely low,” Retsef Levi, a panelist and a professor of operations management at Massachusetts of Technology.
“To quantify how low it is, it’s probably one in several millions,” he said.
But supporters of the vaccine note that the virus can be spread by household objects like toothbrushes, razors or combs that are used by an infected person. Only about half of cases before 1991 were a result of transmission from an infected mother.
The C.D.C. has recommended since 1991 that doctors administer the first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine within 12 hours of birth to infants whose mother is known to be infected, and within 24 hours for all other newborns. The first dose is given on its own, but two later doses are often administered as combination products containing vaccines for other diseases, like diphtheria, tetanus and polio.
The panelists recommended that for infants born to mothers who test negative for the virus, parents decide whether and when to immunize their babies in consultation with their health care providers.
Parents and their providers should “consider vaccine benefits, vaccine risks, and infection risks” and administer the shot “no earlier than 2 months of age.”
The committee also voted 6 to 4 to recommend that parents seek out antibody tests to evaluate the effectiveness of the vaccine.The vaccine panel does not typically make recommendations about testing. One panelist abstained.
Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, a panelist and neuroscientist formerly at the National Institutes of Health, strongly objected to the language of the vote, which he noted was in the fourth iteration in 96 hours. The committee had not heard any data on why two months had been chosen or on the feasibility or need for an antibody test, he said, adding, “This is unconscionable.”
Dr. Meissner also raised objections, saying the recommendation for an antibody test is “kind of making things up, adding, “I mean, it’s like Never Never Land.”
Some outside experts were dismayed by the outcome, noting that unvaccinated infants would be at risk of being exposed to the virus at home or in other places they may share with infected people. As many as 70 percent of the roughly two million Americans with hepatitis B are unaware of their diagnosis.
Dr. Noele Nelson, a hepatitis expert at Cornell Public Health and a senior author on the C.D.C.’s previous guidelines for the vaccine, said the advisers did not “follow the scientific evidence, and risk undoing decades of progress in hepatitis B prevention, eroding vaccine confidence, and causing confusion among parents and health care providers.”
Mr. Kennedy fired all 17 previous members of the vaccine panel in June, replacing them with people who largely share his skepticism about vaccines. Meetings of the new members, most of whom have no experience in vaccine research or clinical practice, have been marred by disorganization and intense disagreements, sometimes devolving into shouting matches.
At the meeting on Thursday, Cynthia Nevison, a climate researcher at the University of Colorado, and Mark Blaxill, a well-known vaccine activist, presented data on disease rates and safety concerns about the vaccine.
Dr. Nevison and Mr. Blaxill were co-authors on a 2021 paper in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders that purported to estimate the financial burden of rising autism cases. The journal later retracted the paper because of “misrepresentation of the incidence of autism,” problems with the way the study was conducted, and the authors’s undisclosed conflicts of interest.
The paper’s third author, Toby Rogers, delivered a public comment at the meeting on Thursday arguing that two widely used hepatitis B vaccines “should never should have been licensed” by the Food and Drug Administration. He did not disclose his close affiliation with Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization that Mr. Kennedy founded.
Aaron Siri, a lawyer who for years joined with Mr. Kennedy in court battles over vaccines, is scheduled to present later on Friday about the childhood vaccination schedule.
Dr. Robert Malone, the panel’s vice chair, who ran the meeting, said that the committee had invited Dr. Paul Offit and Dr. Peter Hotez, two prominent vaccine experts, to present at the meeting, but that both had declined.
Dr. Offit, a pediatrician at the University of Pennsylvania, said the panel was offering misleading information to parents.
“This is a political group, not a scientific group,” he said in a message. “I don’t want any part of that.”
Dr. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, echoed that sentiment. “I declined because A.C.I.P. seems to have shifted its mission away from science and evidence-based medicine,” he said in a message, referring to the vaccine committee. “I’m always happy to discuss the science of vaccines with individuals or groups who are committed to truth and genuine intellectual inquiry.”
A majority of the public may be inclined to agree. If the C.D.C. and the American Medical Association were to offer conflicting advice, according to a survey released on Monday by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, more than twice as many Americans would trust the medical organization over the nation’s premier public health agency.
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8) What Trump Is Really Doing With His Boat Strikes
By Phil Klay, Dec. 5, 2025
Mr. Klay is a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war.
Illustration by Alvaro Dominguez/The New York Times
When Trump administration officials post snuff films of alleged drug boats blowing up, of a weeping migrant handcuffed by immigration officers or of themselves in front of inmates at a brutal El Salvadoran prison, I often think of a story St. Augustine told in his “Confessions.”
In the fourth century A.D., a young man named Alypius arrived in Rome to study law. He was a decent sort. He knew the people at the center of the empire delighted in cruel gladiatorial games, and he promised himself he would not go. Eventually, though, his fellow students dragged him to a match. At first, the crowd appalled Alypius. “The entire place seethed with the most monstrous delight in the cruelty,” Augustine wrote, and Alypius kept his eyes shut, refusing to look at the evil around him.
But then a man fell in combat, a great roar came from the crowd and curiosity forced open Alypius’s eyes. He was “struck in the soul by a wound graver than the gladiator in his body.” He saw the blood, and he drank in savagery. Riveted, “he imbibed madness.” Soon, Augustine said, he became “a fit companion for those who had brought him.”
There are many reasons to object to the policies that the Trump administration’s videos and memes showcase. Yet the images themselves also inflict wounds, of the kind that Alypius suffered when he raised his eyelids. The president inhabits a position of moral leadership. When the president and his officials sell their policies, they’re selling a version of what it means to be an American — what should evoke our love and our hate, our disgust and our delight. If all governments rest on opinion, as James Madison thought, then it is this moral shaping of the electorate that gives the president his freedom of action, and that we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.
Amid the swirl of horrors, scandals and accusations, then, it’s worth considering what President Trump and his administration are doing to the soul of the nation — what sort of “fit companions” they’d like to make us. Their behavior during the controversy around a Sept. 2 U.S. military strike on a boat off the coast of Trinidad offers some clarity.
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The Washington Post reported last week that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued an order to kill everyone on that boat, which the administration says was ferrying drugs. When an initial missile disabled the vehicle but left two survivors clinging to it, the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, ordered another strike that killed the helpless men. The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said, “This entire narrative was false,” then Mr. Trump said he “wouldn’t have wanted” a second strike but “Pete said that didn’t happen.” The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed that actually, yes, there was a second strike ordered by Admiral Bradley, but it was fine because the admiral was “well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.” Mr. Hegseth posted a cartoon in the style of a children’s book depicting a turtle in a helicopter shooting a rocket-propelled grenade at a boat carrying drugs and “narcoterrorists.”
A legal discussion ensued. Was the “double tap” strike a war crime? The Geneva Conventions say shipwrecked persons must be “respected and protected.” The Department of Defense Law of War Manual states that helpless, shipwrecked survivors are not lawful targets, while The Hague regulations forbid orders declaring that no quarter will be given.
Or was the strike simply a crime? Under the War Powers Resolution, the president must give Congress notice within 48 hours of U.S. forces entering hostilities, and hostilities that last more than 60 days are impermissible without congressional authorization. Since the president’s boat strike campaign has continued well past 60 days, the strikes support no war, and the entire campaign is unauthorized. Adil Haque, an executive editor at Just Security and an international law professor at Rutgers University, put it on X: “There is no armed conflict, so there are no legitimate targets. Not the people. Not the boats. Not the drugs. It’s murder whether Bradley was aiming at the people or aiming at the drugs knowing the people would die.”
This discussion misses the bigger effort the Trump administration seems to be engaged in. In lieu of careful analysis of the campaign’s legality, detailed rationales for the boat strikes and explanations of why they couldn’t be done with more traditional methods, we get Mr. Hegseth posting an image of himself with laser eyes and video after video of alleged drug traffickers being killed. The cartoon turtle is just one example in an avalanche of juvenile public messaging about those we kill. I suspect the question the administration cares about is not “is this legal,” “is this a war crime,” “is this murder” or even “is this good for America,” but rather, “isn’t this violence delightful?”
The president’s supporters seem to grasp this. Fox News’s Jesse Watters responded with utter incredulity that the United States would offer quarter to an enemy. “We’re blowing up terrorists in the Caribbean,” he said on Monday, “but we’re supposed to rescue them from drowning if they survive?” Others went further. “I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water,” Megyn Kelly, the conservative podcaster, said, “but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”
An Associated Press investigation suggests that the men Ms. Kelly would like to watch slowly die are often poor laborers: a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver, a bus driver, living in cinder-block homes with spotty water and power service, making at least $500 per trip ferrying cocaine, a crime Americans normally judge worthy of a prison sentence rather than a torturous death.
The Trump administration’s celebration of death brings us far from discussions of the law of armed conflict, the constitutionality of the strikes or even the Christian morality that would eventually push Augustine to formulate an early version of just-war theory. We’re in the Colosseum, one brought to us digitally so that we need not leave our homes to hear the cheers of the crowd, to watch the killing done for our entertainment and suffer the same harm that injured Alypius more than 1,600 years ago.
This wounding of the national soul is hard for me to watch. Twenty years ago, I joined the Marine Corps because I thought military service would be an honorable profession. Its honor derives from fighting prowess and adherence to a code of conduct. Military training is about character formation, with virtues taught alongside tactics. But barbaric behavior tarnishes all who wear, or once wore, the uniform, and lust for cruelty turns a noble vocation into mere thuggery. “The real evils in war,” Augustine said, “are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power.” Such lusts, he thought, drove the pagan world’s wars. We’d be fools not to suspect that such lusts drive some of us today.
In “The City of God,” Augustine distinguishes between a people bound by common loves and those ruled by a lust for domination. A president who wants to lead a nation bound by common loves might offer up something like Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which sorrows over war, indulges in no bombast, accepts that both sides in a conflict have sinned and declares that we must fight “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” For a nation devoted to the lust for domination, a president needs to foster a citizenry that thrills in displays of dominance and cruelty. Hence this administration’s braggadocio about death, its officials’ memes about suffering, their promises to inflict pain on America’s enemies followed by scant rationales for their own policies.
We are far from the Christian nation Lincoln thought he was addressing, and tried to shape, when he gave his Second Inaugural Address. But we must still ask ourselves a fundamental, private question that, at scale, has broad political implications: Given that we are all, every day, imbibing madness, how do we guard our souls?
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9) Her Roof Was About to Be Fixed. Then Immigration Agents Showed Up.
The Trump administration’s deportation agenda is reverberating beyond immigrant communities as agents begin fanning out around New Orleans.
By Eduardo Medina, Reporting from Kenner, La.
After Hurricane Francine damaged Althea Vallotton’s house in suburban New Orleans last year, puddles formed on her floors whenever it rained. But she saved up money and lived in a mobile home on her front lawn for months, until she finally obtained a loan to pay for a stronger, metallic covering.
The cost? About $49,000.
On Wednesday, several workers — hired by a “legitimate contractor,” she said — arrived around 7 a.m. and got to work on the roof. She, in turn, drove to her job at a nearby school, relieved that her home repair odyssey was ending. It was a one-day job, after all.
Then her phone buzzed. Friends and relatives were asking if she had seen the videos online of federal immigration agents in Kenner, La., ordering the roof repairers to get down. Some sent screenshots of a masked agent pointing a weapon at the workers.
They were at her house.
Ms. Vallotton was stunned. She found the principal. “I got to go now — ICE is at my house,” she told her.
By the time Ms. Vallotton got home, the action was over, but she pieced together what had happened: The largely Hispanic construction crew on her roof had become the latest target of a federal immigration crackdown that had arrived in New Orleans that morning.
Episodes like this one are now playing out all over the country, revealing the ways that the Trump administration’s deportation agenda is reverberating far beyond the immigrants whose lives are being upended.
According to videos taken by neighbors, the agents, including several from the Border Patrol, had shown up and tried to detain the men, but they refused to get down from the roof. An hourslong standoff ensued. At one point, video shows, agents climbed onto the garage roof, and one of the workers appeared to point a rodlike item at them. A man is heard telling the worker in Spanish, “You can’t do that, and I’m going to shoot.” Several agents aimed weapons at the worker, who eventually dropped the item and shuffled toward the edge of the roof.
Agents detained at least one worker who was not on the roof, neighbors said. After the agents left, the other workers climbed down, hopped into a vehicle and drove away.
Ms. Vallotton was bewildered by it all, especially after an immigration lawyer at the scene told her that many of the workers had work visas.
“Why the agents didn’t let them stay and finish the freaking job, I don’t know,” Ms. Vallotton said in an interview, complaining about “the mess they’ve left on my property” and adding that she had no insurance on the house.
She looked at the leftover construction supplies, including a blue tarp and a ladder propped up against her garage. “Now you’re hurting the economy,” she said. “Now these people are afraid to come back even though they’re here on a work visa.”
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on Thursday that agents arrested one undocumented immigrant at the house, and that the other workers, whom the agency described as “suspected” undocumented immigrants, had “refused to comply with agent commands to come down off the roof.”
As Ms. Vallotton spoke with people on the phone, pacing the sidewalk with a hand over her head, her neighbors looked on with surprise. For some, the episode highlighted the recklessness with which the Trump administration was trying to clamp down on illegal immigration. For others, it was a front-row seat to a crackdown that they fully endorsed, even if it was surprising to see it right across their lawns.
“If they’re illegal, they got to get out,” said Mac Dunn, 87, who has lived in the neighborhood, called University City, for more than six decades and supports President Trump’s immigration enforcement in the city.
“You got to do it right,” he said, referring to immigration. “You got here illegally, well, that’s a crime.”
Nearby, the Morales family, who are Honduran American, were startled.
“This is too close to home,” said Lastenia Morales, the matriarch of the family and a nurse who was returning home from a shift on Wednesday. She cried as she pulled up to her driveway and discreetly snapped photos of the agents, and said she was stunned by the tepid reaction from some of her neighbors.
“I don’t know which neighbor to trust or not,” she said. “It was really hard for me to talk to them when they came outside to watch. This lady over here said, ‘Oh, they have to be illegals.’ I thought, ‘Maybe she’s on their side.’ So I just watch what I say around them.”
Ms. Vallotton’s white house sits on a corner lot on Marquette Drive, in a racially diverse neighborhood that is home to a mix of longtime white residents, new Honduran homeowners and young families. It is reflective of just how much the suburb of Kenner, home to 66,000 people, has been transformed by immigrants in the decades since Hurricane Katrina, when many Hispanic people moved to the area and helped it rebuild.
But while New Orleans is led by Democrats, the city is surrounded by conservative strongholds, and the Republican governor has welcomed the assistance from federal law enforcement agencies. That has made this Border Patrol operation feel different from the ones that have come to Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte, N.C., all led by Gregory Bovino, a senior agency official.
As Mr. Bovino and his agents strolled the streets of downtown New Orleans on Wednesday, the friendlier atmosphere was noticeable. In the French Quarter, the city’s boozy artery, several people thanked them for their work, though there was still an occasional insult.
Ms. Vallotton didn’t quite the see the issue through a political lens. She does not identify with either major political party, she said, and she did not vote in last year’s presidential election.
But she does see the operation, which the Department of Homeland Security has nicknamed Catahoula Crunch, as unfocused and potentially causing more harm than good.
“If you’ve got illegals in the country, then yes, they should be deported back to their country because we don’t need more crime,” said Ms. Vallotton, who lives with her husband and teenage son. “But you’ve got people who have been here for decades. These guys are working for a living. They weren’t out doing crime. They’re spending money in our economy. They’re buying groceries.”
“Why are we actively looking for people who are not actively committing crimes at the moment?” she asked.
The Border Patrol has said that it is targeting immigrants with criminal histories, but data from past operations shows that most of the people arrested do not have serious criminal records.
Ms. Vallotton did not want to share her exact job title at the school where she works, nor the name of the construction company she hired. But she said the presence of Border Patrol agents had already prompted many students to skip school this week.
On Wednesday afternoon, she was still scrambling to find someone who could cover the roof. Inside the mobile home on her lawn, she could hear her cat, Humphrey, yowling. Then she looked up at a darkening sky.
The forecast for Thursday showed a high chance of rain.
Shannon Sims contributed reporting.
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10) Second Strike Scrutiny Obscures Larger Question About Trump’s Boat Attacks
Congress is focusing on two deaths in one strike. But nine other people died in that same attack, and the United States has killed 87 in all. Were any of those killings legal?
By Charlie Savage and Julian E. Barnes, Reporting from Washington, Published Dec. 4, 2025, Updated Dec. 5, 2025
Adm. Frank M. Bradley attended a classified meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
As Congress parses the details of a follow-on strike that killed shipwrecked survivors of President Trump’s first boat attack on Sept. 2, a much larger issue risks getting lost: whether Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have caused the military to commit crimes in a score of attacks.
Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the Sept. 2 operation, on Thursday showed lawmakers a video of the attack. The briefing was part of a congressional effort to understand his decision to order a second strike and determine whether the survivors of the first one remained “in the fight” or were technically shipwrecked, making it a war crime to kill them.
There have been shifting narratives emerging from the Pentagon, each resetting the analysis. But all of the scenarios consist of analogizing the actions of suspected drug runners to traditional combat activities. The comparisons are strained at best, legal experts say, because the laws of war were not written for and do not fit a drug smuggling situation.
“Debate over when a shipwrecked crew member loses protection from attack misses the point,” said Geoffrey S. Corn, who was formerly the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues. “The real problem here is the dubious and legally overbroad assertion that the United States is justified in using wartime authority against a criminal problem.”
As a matter of plain reality, an unarmed speedboat, even if it is carrying cocaine, is not a warship. And none of the 11 people aboard — not merely the two initial survivors, but also the nine people the U.S. military killed in its first strike — were fighting anyone.
The Sept. 2 boat attack was the first in Mr. Trump’s policy of directing the military to summarily kill people who are suspected of smuggling drugs at sea as if they are enemy soldiers on a battlefield. The military has gone on to attack 21 more such boats, killing 87 people in all, according to the administration.
The conversation about whether that campaign amounts to murder has largely taken place among experts in laws governing the use of armed force.
The United States has long handled the problem of maritime drug smuggling by using the Coast Guard to intercept boats and to arrest people. That echoes how it works on land: Police officers who believe people are dealing drugs arrest them, and if they are convicted, they serve time in prison. They are not executed.
It would be a crime if officers instead simply gunned down suspected drug dealers in the street. Similarly, a military force is not allowed to target civilians, and being a suspected criminal does not make someone lose civilian status. In peacetime, targeting a civilian is murder. In an armed conflict, targeting a civilian is a war crime.
To justify the killings, Mr. Trump has declared that the United States is in a formal armed conflict against drug cartels, and that smuggling boat crews are “combatants” — all because he has “determined” so.
While Congress has not authorized an armed conflict, a memo by the president’s appointees at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel accepts his claim that there is one. Based on that premise, it says the drugs suspected of being aboard the boats are lawful military targets because cartels could use the profits to finance their purported war efforts, according to people who have seen the memo.
It is difficult to find people knowledgeable about the relevant body of law and not working for Mr. Trump who think the United States is really in an armed conflict. The essential problem is that trafficking illegal drugs, while a serious crime, is different from an armed attack.
And to the extent the administration has tried to offer substantive justifications for Mr. Trump’s purported determination, they appear to collapse under scrutiny.
The White House has highlighted the deaths of tens of thousands of American drug users a year from overdoses. But even if those deaths somehow amounted to an armed attack, the surge in overdoses over the past decade was mostly caused by fentanyl that comes from labs in Mexico, which use Chinese chemicals. The dramatic increase has not been fueled by cocaine that comes on boats from South America.
The Trump administration has also suggested that it can use armed force against suspected drug runners as a matter of the collective self-defense of other countries whose security forces sometimes clash with well-armed cartel goons, such as Colombia and Mexico. But the presidents of both of those countries have condemned the boat attacks.
Against that backdrop, a broad range of experts in the laws governing the use of lethal force have called the administration’s armed conflict theory nonsensical. Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth, they argue, have been giving illegal orders to the troops under their command to commit crimes.
With the notable exception of Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, most lawmakers who have been arguing that the boat attacks are murders have been Democrats, who do not control Congress.
Until recently, however, most of Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans have shied away from exercising oversight. A Nov. 28 Washington Post article that renewed attention to the Sept. 2 attack — focused on the follow-up strike — has made some Republicans in Congress willing to ask harder questions.
The focus on the second strike and the nuances of the law of armed conflict could end up being a favor to the Trump administration. The idea that something was bad about that particular strike implicitly suggests the first one on that boat — and all the other attacks on other boats — was fine. And its premise reinforces the idea that the situation should be thought about through the lens of an armed conflict.
The larger question now is whether the belated bipartisan interest in that particular strike will generate momentum for a broader look at the entire killing spree that Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have led the U.S. military to perform, said Rebecca Ingber, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law and a former State Department expert in the law of war.
“There is a risk that the focus on the second strike and specifically the talk of ‘war crimes’ feeds into the administration’s false wartime framing and veils the fact that the entire boat-strikes campaign is murder, full stop,” she said.
She added: “The administration’s evolving justification for the second strike only lays bare the absurdity of their legal claims for the campaign as a whole — that transporting drugs is somehow the equivalent of wartime hostilities.”
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11) This Is the Kind of Bigotry We Rejected Decades Ago
By Amanda Frost, Dec. 5, 2025
Ms. Frost is a law professor at the University of Virginia who specializes in immigration law.
Will Matsuda for The New York Times
Sixty years ago, the United States abolished immigration restrictions based on nationality alone. By 1965, such discrimination had become an embarrassment. In an emotional ceremony by the Statue of Liberty, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the legislation he was signing “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong” and makes Americans “truer to ourselves both as a country and as a people.”
Now the Trump administration is reviving nationality-based discrimination. After an Afghan refugee allegedly shot two National Guard members on Nov. 26, the Trump administration “indefinitely” stopped processing immigration-related applications for all Afghans — even those who have lived legally in the United States for years. The administration extended that same suspension to immigrants from 18 other countries, including those on the verge of receiving green cards or citizenship. President Trump declared that Somalis are “garbage” on Tuesday, adding that they should “go back to where they came from,” and has threatened to denaturalize citizens. Meanwhile, his administration claims it can classify undocumented 14-year-old Venezuelans as “alien enemies” and deport them without judicial review.
Starting in 1875 and for most of the century that followed, country-specific immigration bans were the norm, not the exception. To be born in a disfavored country was considered to be inherently unfit to immigrate to the United States.
Nativism escalated gradually. In 1875, a law barred prostitutes from “China, Japan, or any Oriental country” from entering the United States. Although people from all backgrounds practiced the world’s oldest profession, Congress perceived women from these countries as a particular threat. “Virtue is an exception” among Chinese women, one lawmaker had claimed years earlier. Another had warned that these women “spread disease and moral death among our white population.” The law succeeded in shutting down immigration for almost all Asian women, prostitutes or not.
Seven years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act went further, barring all laborers from China. Once again, Congress relied on sweeping generalizations about the Chinese. “Alien in manners, servile in labor, pagan in religion, they are fundamentally un-American,” said one congressman, referring to hundreds of millions of people.
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Once the nation started thinking this way, it was hard to stop. When a Jewish factory manager was accused of murder in 1913, his conviction fueled antisemitic xenophobia. Likewise, the 1921 murder conviction of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, helped incite the Red Scare and the restrictive immigration laws that followed. At the heart of these crackdowns were not only assumptions of collective national guilt, but beliefs in a collective national character.
Nativist fervor culminated in 1924 with the Immigration Act. Aimed at slowing immigration from undesirable countries, the law capped immigration to 2 percent of a nationality’s U.S. population as of 1890, over 30 years earlier. It proved impossible to unwind Americans’ tangled ancestry, but no matter. The law was used to justify giving the majority of visas to Northern and Western Europeans, while strictly limiting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe — a change celebrated by the Ku Klux Klan for keeping out Catholics and Jews. The door remained almost entirely closed to people from Asia and Africa.
Why would lawmakers choose to reject a promising scientist from Asia while welcoming an illiterate farmer from Germany? Because they conflated race, nation and culture into a set of immutable traits attached to entire countries. The national character was in their “alien blood,” lawmakers said, rendering some nationalities inherently unfit for membership in the United States.
If the Trump administration has its way, these assumptions will once again govern U.S. immigration policy. Last week, Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trump’s immigration policy, defended collectively punishing Afghans for the shooting that killed one National Guard member and injured another. “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies,” he wrote. “Migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Mr. Miller would have felt right at home in the 1924 Congress.
Mr. Miller and others in the Trump administration do not appear to know that those 1924 immigration restrictions are no longer on the books. Abolishing national origin discrimination was a sea change in law that stands alongside the Voting Rights Act as one of our most important pieces of civil rights legislation. That 1965 law allocated visas based primarily on family reunification and an applicant’s ability to contribute to the labor market. Every immigrant is individually vetted, and immigration is capped worldwide, but no longer are any nationalities automatically restricted.
America is stronger for it. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children — and many came from countries that were heavily restricted before 1965. Immigrants generally commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans, and Afghans are no exception.
The recent shooting was horrific, and the perpetrator should be punished to the full extent of the law. But collective punishment is just the sort of bigotry that the nation rejected decades ago.
It’s also likely to be illegal. As the Supreme Court explained when upholding Mr. Trump’s first travel ban back in 2018, the president has statutory authority to suspend entry into the United States based on national origin, at least for some period of time. But that does not permit him to deny visas, cancel green cards or denaturalize immigrants based on nothing more than their country of origin.
Without question, today’s antiquated immigration system is in need of a major overhaul. But we should never go back to a system that made collective judgments about the worthiness of specific nationalities to immigrate to the United States — particularly not based on an incident involving a single person.
At his 1964 State of the Union address, Johnson told the nation that it should ask prospective immigrants, “What can you do for our country?” not “In what country were you born?” Johnson was right, whatever the Trump administration would like to believe.
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12) Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy
President Trump’s new National Security Strategy describes a country that is focused on doing business and reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians.
By Anton Troianovski, Reporting from Washington, Dec. 5, 2025
President Trump at the White House last month. The National Security Strategy his administration released describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in his first term — had portrayed them. Tom Brenner for The New York Times
Latin American countries must grant no-bid contracts to U.S. companies. Taiwan’s significance boils down to semiconductors and shipping lanes. Washington’s “hectoring” of the wealthy Gulf monarchies needs to stop.
The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.
President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.
The document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.
“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world,” it says, “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
The National Security Strategy of Mr. Trump’s first term, by contrast, cast the world as a contest “between those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies.”
The National Security Strategy has no binding force, and some analysts cautioned against reading too much into it as a guide to future actions given Mr. Trump’s mercurial nature.
But the release of the strategy, which recent presidents have generally updated just once in every term, did carry significance as a snapshot in time. Amid the debates swirling among Republicans over American policy toward the Middle East, Russia, China and elsewhere, the document showed how the administration has appeared to coalesce around a commitment to avoid military entanglements and promote commerce.
In an interview, Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who argues in favor of American military restraint, hailed the new strategy as a “true break from the failed bipartisan post-Cold War foreign policy consensus.”
“For too long, delusion undergirded our foreign policy — delusion about America’s role in the world, delusion about our interests and delusion about what we can achieve through military force,” Mr. Caldwell said. “This is a reality-based document in that regard.”
The document codifies Mr. Trump’s well-established aversion to Europe’s liberal governments and his readiness to overlook human rights abuses, as with his “things happen” remark last month about the murder and dismemberment of a Saudi Washington Post columnist in 2018. Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said it “discards decades of values-based U.S. leadership in favor of a craven, unprincipled worldview.”
The strategy depicts Europe as facing “civilizational erasure” at the hands of immigrants and its mainstream leaders. It says the United States will cultivate “resistance” to Europe’s mainstream leaders, and asserts that many of their governments “trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.”
That stance provoked an outcry from European politicians, echoing the shock when Vice President JD Vance castigated German officials in February for trying to blunt the rise of the country’s far-right party. Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, posted on social media that the National Security Strategy “places itself to the right of the extreme right in Europe.”
Outside Europe, departing from decades of precedent in U.S. foreign policy, the 33-page document does not characterize democracy as a value to be defended. Israel and Taiwan — two democracies whose security the United States has long sought to support — are described in the context of their regions’ economic significance, not their connection to American values.
The Middle East, it says, is “a source and destination of international investment.” The document calls for “dropping America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations — especially the Gulf monarchies — into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government.”
In Latin America, the document says, the United States will “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Along the way, American diplomats are to hunt for “major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts.”
“The terms of our agreements, especially with those countries that depend on us most and therefore over which we have the most leverage, must be sole-source contracts for our companies,” the document says.
The strategy offers little insight into the Trump administration’s deliberations about a possible attack on Venezuela. While it says the United States should have a “predisposition to non-interventionism,” it also says that American military force is to be redeployed to Latin America from elsewhere “to address urgent threats in our hemisphere.”
Mr. Caldwell, the former adviser to Mr. Hegseth, said that many in Mr. Trump’s “America First” movement “have concerns about a regime change war in Venezuela.”
“But that said, what happens in Venezuela and our own hemisphere deserves more focus than who controls the Donbas,” he added, referring to the region of eastern Ukraine that Russia is demanding in peace talks.
The National Security Strategy takes a far more restrained view of geopolitical competition than prior administrations did. Gone is any reference to the worldview laid out in Mr. Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy: “China and Russia want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.”
Without describing Russia as an adversary, the new document says that “an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine” is a “core interest of the United States.” The goal of such a peace deal, it says, would be both to “re-establish strategic stability with Russia” and to enable Ukraine’s “survival as a viable state.”
China is cast as a competitor, but mainly in the familiar commercial terms often repeated by Mr. Trump. The document says a war over Taiwan needs to be deterred because of what would be its “major implications for the U.S. economy.” It calls for “a genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing,” echoing the conciliation of the trade truce that Mr. Trump and Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, announced in October.
Jonathan Czin, a director for China on the National Security Council under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said the new strategy carried “a happier message for Beijing” than the versions published under Mr. Biden or in Mr. Trump’s first term. Among other things, he said, the document’s focus on Latin America should be welcome news for China.
“I think it would be viewed with some relief,” said Mr. Czin, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Megan Mineiro contributed reporting from Washington.
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13) One Step From Citizenship, Some Find It Eludes Their Grasp
Sweeping immigration changes by the Trump administration have resulted in the cancellation of naturalization ceremonies, the last step in the process of becoming a citizen.
By Jazmine Ulloa and Orlando Mayorquín, Dec. 6, 2025
“The Supreme Court on Friday announced that it would take up a landmark dispute over the constitutionality of President Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship, guaranteed in the 14th Amendment that American citizenship should be extended to anyone born in the United States. Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican in Ohio who emigrated with his family as a child from their native Colombia, this week introduced legislation that would end dual citizenship in the United States.”
Jazmine Ulloa reported from New York, and Orlando Mayorquín from Los Angeles.
Raouf Vafaei with his mother, Ferdous Taheri, outside their home in Tucson, Ariz. Credit...Rebecca Noble for The New York Times
Raouf Vafaei followed all the rules.
He obtained his green card, passed his civics test and his naturalization interview, and underwent multiple background checks.
After eight years in the United States, Mr. Vafaei, an Iranian-born mental health worker who emigrated from Austria, was just days away from becoming an American citizen when he learned in a four-sentence email that his naturalization ceremony scheduled for Friday had been canceled.
“I was so excited,” Mr. Vafaei, 41, said in an interview this week, referring to the honor of officially calling himself an American. His mother had even bought a new dress for the occasion. “This is one wish that many people have all over the world.”
That honor is now paused, indefinitely.
After an Afghan refugee was charged in last month’s shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, the Trump administration has made sweeping changes to limit legal immigration, including halting the entire process for people from 19 countries that the White House put under a travel ban earlier this year.
From Massachusetts to California, people seeking citizenship and their lawyers say, federal immigration officials are canceling naturalization interviews and oath ceremonies for immigrants from Iran, Sudan, Eritrea, Haiti, Somalia and other countries restricted by Mr. Trump in June. Those almost-new citizens have been left in uncertainty about their futures in the United States, with some making sure they carry their documents in case they are questioned by immigration authorities as they go about their daily lives.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees the immigration system, has not released data on the number of people affected, but the new wave of actions is likely to affect thousands from some of the poorest and most unstable nations in the world. Mr. Trump and his administration officials have argued their ban against these targeted nations is necessary to secure the country from “foreign terrorists” and those who overstay U.S. visas.
“There is no time frame — nobody knows how long this is going to be,” said Teresa Coles-Davila, an immigration lawyer in San Antonio who has struggled to obtain answers from federal immigration officials as she has sought to advise an Iranian client whose ceremony this month was canceled. “Literally, no one knows what is happening.”
The policy changes narrowing the legal path to citizenship have been unfolding more slowly and less publicly than the dramatic scenes that have played out on the streets as masked agents have raided homes, workplaces and courthouses searching for people to deport. The changes are among the many attempts on multiple fronts to tighten who can call themselves an American in the United States.
The Supreme Court on Friday announced that it would take up a landmark dispute over the constitutionality of President Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship, guaranteed in the 14th Amendment that American citizenship should be extended to anyone born in the United States. Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican in Ohio who emigrated with his family as a child from their native Colombia, this week introduced legislation that would end dual citizenship in the United States.
This year, the Trump administration reinstated a more difficult civics test and ramped up social media vetting for people seeking to become naturalized citizens. Immigration officers have also been directed to check for more “positive attributes,” like family caregiving and stable employment.
Officials with Citizenship and Immigration Services on Friday did not respond to requests for comment or questions on how many citizenship ceremonies had been canceled or why. Officials also did not respond to claims from lawyers that their clients had been left in limbo.
Administration officials in the past have said that the requirements for acquiring citizenship have become stricter because the process had been too lax. In fiscal year 2024, 818,500 people became new citizens in naturalization ceremonies held in the United States and around the world, according to the agency.
Lawyers said their clients had already been vetted multiple times as they passed through a series of legal hoops before even applying for citizenship, including establishing lawful permanent residency and obtaining work authorization. The process to apply for citizenship itself has long been cumbersome and can take months, sometimes years. The final, required step is taking the oath of allegiance and receiving a certificate of naturalization at a ceremony.
Mr. Vafaei, who left Iran when he was in his early 20s, had lived in Austria for 14 years before he immigrated to the United States in 2017 to help out his mother after the death of his father. He married an American citizen and obtained his green card. He is now in the middle of a divorce, but as he started his naturalization process in April, he passed his interview and background check and was approved for citizenship, he and his lawyer said.
The notice that his ceremony had been called off came in a short email this week with no explanation about when it would be rescheduled or what steps he should take next.
“I am so upset, but I can’t do anything about it,” he said. “All I can do is wait.”
Rosanna, a physician associate student in Texas, had shared the good news with her hospital colleagues after her citizenship was approved months ago. She had been looking forward to the email she expected to list her ceremony date. Instead, when the email came this week during a shift in the emergency room, it simply said that her ceremony was canceled.
Rosanna, who asked to be identified by only her first name for fear of repercussions from immigration officials, said she texted her lawyer after receiving the email. The best guess, she said, was the decision was most likely based on the fact that Rosanna, a Canadian citizen, had been born in Libya, where she holds no citizenship and had not lived since she was a child.
“It’s definitely disappointing — having come from a third world country — it’s just never-ending disappointment,” she said. “I definitely feel unwelcome here.” She said she had been looking forward to vote in next year’s midterm elections.
Other citizen petitioners have been turned away after arriving at their court ceremonies or interviews with little information as to why or how to proceed, their lawyers said.
Lawyers and staff members at the Boston office of Project Citizenship, a nonprofit providing free legal services to immigrants across Massachusetts and New England, typically see clients return to their office to show off their naturalization certificates and take cheerful photos with the people who helped them through the arduous citizenship process. But this month they have had 21 clients notified that their oath ceremonies had been canceled.
One of those clients, a Haitian woman who lives in Boston and has had her green card for more than 20 years, arrived for her ceremony, where she found Citizenship and Immigration Service officers asking people where they were from and telling those from countries affected by the travel ban, like herself, that they could not participate in the ceremony, said Gail Breslow, the group’s executive director.
“We have been hearing a lot of anxiety, fear,” she said. “We’ve been needing to reassure people that this isn’t their fault.”
For some lawyers, it was only the latest round of cancellations and confusion.
In late September and early October, dozens of immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras who had obtained asylum had their naturalization interviews canceled “on the spot” in the New York area, said Benjamin Remy, a senior coordinating attorney with the New York Legal Assistance Group, a social services organization. He and lawyers with other local nonprofits eventually pieced together that it had been over a little-noticed overnight policy change that had put their cases under review after several Latin American criminal organizations were designated terror groups.
Still, there are people who get through the process, which often culminates in a joyous oath ceremony capped with a sheet cake, light refreshments and dozens of participants waving miniature American flags.
In a Manhattan courtroom on Friday, the feelings of stress over the national immigration climate mingled with those of relief and excitement as 149 immigrants lined up before federal officials to complete the final step in their citizenship process. Friends and relatives pumped their fists in the air to cheer on one petitioner. The family member of another waited with a bouquet of red, white and blue roses.
A couple of hours later, no one had been turned away, and a judge took the bench to lead the participants in the oath of allegiance, sharing bits of her grandparents’ own immigrant background and quoting soaring rhetoric about the contributions of immigrants from Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.
Maureen Lissade, 51, originally from Germany, attended her ceremony alone because her husband was at work and her children at school. Nevertheless, she was excited and relieved. She had married a U.S. citizen 10 years ago and had soon obtained her green card. They had two American-born children, and she spoke English. Still, she felt unease over the hard-line turn of immigration enforcement.
“You hear stories,” she said of why she had applied for her citizenship this year. “I wanted to be more secure, to not have that hanging over my head.”
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14) Israel’s Plan to Back Gaza Militias Proves a Risky Gamble
Officials said Israel helped arm and back Yasser Abu Shabab’s Popular Forces, part of a strategy against Hamas, before a local clan killed him this week.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Dec. 6, 2025
A destroyed area of Rafah, Gaza. Yasser Abu Shabab and his militia group were based near the city. Credit...Hatem Khaled/Reuters
The killing on Thursday of Yasser Abu Shabab, a Gazan militia leader backed by Israel, underscored what analysts had long warned: that Palestinians handpicked by Israel to undermine Hamas would most likely meet a violent end.
Mr. Abu Shabab’s group, the Popular Forces, was the strongest of several Gaza militias Israel had worked with to combat Hamas. Israeli officials said they had even helped arm Mr. Abu Shabab’s militia, though he denied that.
Many Palestinians condemned Mr. Abu Shabab as a traitor, and some Israelis were equally skeptical of his intentions and capabilities. But in a rare interview in late October, he told The New York Times that he was unabashed about his ties with Israel.
“There’s coordination on the level of security, and on the operations around us,” he said, and added, “These aim to prevent any terrorist from infiltrating us,” referring to Hamas.
On Thursday, the militia leader was killed during clashes involving a Palestinian clan in southern Gaza, his group said on social media.
Hamas did not immediately appear to have been involved in the killing of Mr. Abu Shabab, who was based near the city of Rafah in an area controlled by the Israeli military. But Gaza’s Hamas-run interior ministry celebrated his death in a statement on Friday, saying it was “the inevitable fate of every traitor,” and urged the remaining members of Palestinian militias close to Israel to hand themselves in, “before it is too late.”
Whether the Popular Forces will outlast his death is unclear.
The militant group shared a video showing that Mr. Abu Shabab’s deputy, Ghassan Duhine, had assumed the leadership of the group. Mr. Duhine, whose affiliations before joining the Popular Forces were unclear, could been seen walking in front of gunmen chanting that their spirits remained high.
Since the early days of the war, Israel has cast about for potential Gazan allies who might help erode Hamas’s control. To that end, it has propped up at least four small bands of Palestinian gunmen, the groups’ commanders said in interviews.
Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire in mid-October, ending more than two years of war in Gaza, but they have yet to settle the question of who will control the Palestinian enclave. For now, each side controls roughly half of Gaza’s territory.
A vast majority of Gaza’s two million people live in the Hamas-dominated zone along the coast. The anti-Hamas Palestinian militias have mostly operated in the Israeli-controlled part.
Analysts considered the Popular Forces to be the largest and best organized of those groups. Mr. Abu Shabab said in October that the area he controlled hosted some 3,000 people, fewer than half of whom were fighters. The other commanders, who include Ashraf al-Mansi in northern Gaza and Housam al-Astal east of the southern city of Khan Younis, said in interviews that they hosted a couple hundred people each in their areas.
Though the Popular Forces was militarily outnumbered by Hamas, it said it had skirmished with Hamas fighters, even saying in late November that it had taken at least one prisoner.
The small militias helped secure parts of Gaza on behalf of the Israeli military, freeing up Israeli troops for other missions, said Shalom Ben Hanan, a retired senior official in Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet.
“They carry out military missions as though they were a military unit,” Mr. Ben Hanan said. “If they weren’t around to do them, our own forces would have to.”
But for most Palestinians, Mr. Abu Shabab’s checkered past and ties with Israel made him an unacceptable candidate for any future leadership role in Gaza.
A Bedouin from southeastern Rafah, Mr. Abu Shabab rose to notoriety in late 2024, when he was accused of raiding scores of aid convoys during a particularly severe hunger crisis at the height of the war.
Mr. Abu Shabab and his gunmen dominated an area close to Gaza’s Kerem Shalom crossing on the border with Israel. In an interview at the time, he conceded that his Kalashnikov-wielding gang had looted a handful of trucks, although he said he had seized the goods only to feed himself, his family and neighbors.
Georgios Petropoulos, a senior U.N. official who was based in Gaza at the time, called him “the self-styled power broker of east Rafah.” Mr. Petropoulos, as well as other U.N. workers trying to get aid into Gaza, accused Israel of ignoring Mr. Abu Shabab’s attacks on aid.
The repeated ransacking drew the ire of Hamas, and at least 20 members of Mr. Abu Shabab’s organization, including his brother, were killed in a shootout with Hamas fighters late last year.
Earlier this year, Mr. Abu Shabab began touting himself as a Palestinian leader on social media, calling his band of gunmen an anti-Hamas “counterterrorism force.” He released footage that appeared to show that, in the corner of Rafah that he ruled, the group provided tents and schools for people sheltering there.
While many Palestinians in Gaza went hungry as Israeli restricted supplies from entering the enclave, Mr. Abu Shabab said in the October interview that his area was relatively well provisioned.
Israel and his forces, aided by Israeli aerial surveillance, he said, worked together to prevent any Hamas fighters from entering their area. He said he also provided the names of his fighters and their families to the Israeli military as part of coordination with Israel.
Despite Israel’s support, neither Mr. Abu Shabab’s group nor the other ragtag bands of gunmen were likely to pose a significant threat to Hamas, said Mr. Ben Hanan, the former Shin Bet officer. There were far too few of them, he argued, and their association with Israel had tainted them in the minds of most Palestinians.
“They will always be considered traitors and collaborators,” Mr. Ben Hanan said. “No one will want to get close to them.”
Many Gazans view the militias as little better than gangs who exploited the chaos of war to accumulate power.
Montaser Bahja, an English teacher in Gaza City, said Palestinians needed new leadership and to engage with Israel if necessary in order to reach a better future. But it could not come from people like Mr. Abu Shabab, he said.
“This man was basically a criminal, and I could not accept for him to represent me,” Mr. Bahja said.
Mr. Abu Shabab said before his death that he hoped to shape a future Gaza without Hamas, but beyond that it was not clear what he stood for. He dismissed accusations that he was a traitor for working with Israel, though he conceded that some Palestinians considered his actions “disreputable.”
He said that if they “had will and courage, they would have been like Yasser Abu Shabab.”
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15) Trump Has Long Disdained Europe’s Elites. Now, It’s Official.
A new White House policy document formalizes President Trump’s long-held contempt for Europe’s leaders. It made clear that the continent now stands at a strategic crossroads.
By Jason Horowitz, Reporting from Madrid, Dec. 6, 2025
A Norwegian soldier during a NATO military exercise this year. European governments have tried to wean themselves off American military might by increasing their own military spending and cooperation. Credit...Davide Monteleone for The New York Times
The Trump administration has not exactly kept its low regard for Europe secret. President Trump has long portrayed European allies as freeloaders that fail to pay enough for their own security and argued that the European Union was “formed to screw the United States.”
Now, that hostility is official White House policy.
The Trump administration issued a national security strategy paper this week that called for European nations to take “primary responsibility” for their own defense, indicating that the United States should no longer guarantee Europe’s security. It accused the European Union of stifling “political liberty,” warned that some NATO members risked becoming “majority non-European,” and said the U.S. should align with “patriotic European parties” — code for Europe’s far-right movements.
The blunt, bracing and official nature of the document added injury to incessant insult, making clear to mainstream European leaders that they stand at a strategic crossroads. On a paper stamped with the president’s seal, the trans-Atlantic alliance was being openly denigrated by the superpower across the ocean that has ensured European security in the 80 years since World War II.
“It’s up there at whitehouse.gov staring the world in the face,” Charles A. Kupchan, who was senior director for European Affairs on the National Security Council in the Obama administration, said of the document. “And that makes it very hard to digest,” added Mr. Kupchan, now professor of international affairs at Georgetown University.
The now explicit prospect of the United States’ withdrawing its protection came days after Russia — whose talking points on European countries, some experts said, were echoed in the strategy document — warned that it was ready for war with Europe. It made more urgent a debate within the continent about whether its long-term interest lay in holding on to America regardless of the humiliations, or in facing a new reality, arming up and going it alone.
“Is this going to be the moment of European awakening?” said Nathalie Tocci, a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, who has worked as an adviser to key European Union officials and wrote one of its strategy reports.
Anticipating a fissure in trans-Atlantic relations, European governments have in recent years tried to wean themselves off American military might by increasing their own defense spending and cross-border military cooperation. Several have introduced or expanded military service, with Germany, one of the countries best placed to defend the continent in a major land conflict, passing legislation on Friday to increase its forces by nearly 50 percent. And the European Union now has a commissioner for defense whose primary job is to boost regional arms production and cooperation.
But the reality remains that Europe — lacking real military integration, key capabilities and ammunition — is hugely reliant on the United States and on an administration that professes to not like it much. A change, some argued, was necessary.
“Till now there was no, let’s say, systemic response,” said Romano Prodi, a former president of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. He said he hoped the bloc would “elaborate a policy” that made it more assertive.
“This does not mean to break the links with the United States,” he said. “This means to have a voice.”
But the lack of strong public outcry from Europe’s leaders about the strategy document indicated that they had gotten used to Mr. Trump’s tantrums — it was, Mr. Prodi said, “Nothing new: dividing Europe and despising Europe” — and had decided the best response was to let him cry it out and then hold him and the alliance close. Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, exemplified that approach on Saturday, saying in response to the document that the U.S. was “still our biggest ally.”
Mr. Kupchan, the professor of international relations, said that Europe’s leaders understood that biting the Trump bullet was the smarter, and perhaps only, long-term play. He said the document made it harder for them to stomach the humiliation and concessions necessary to keep Mr. Trump close to their position on the major issues of the day, from trade policy to Europe’s defense of Ukraine in its war with Russia.
But to keep the trans-Atlantic alliance from going kaput, “flattering Trump and keeping him on their side” was what they had to do, Mr. Kupchan said.
For Europe, analysts said, the challenge was preserving both the process of integration that had made it rich and peaceful, and the American security blanket that had kept it safe. In the 80 years since World War II, European integration, pursued in significant part to limit Germany, was “one of the great accomplishments of modern times,” Mr. Kupchan said.
“Anybody who wants to dismantle Europe should just pick up any history book of the 20th century,” he said, adding “or any history prior to 1945.”
But dismantling seems to be precisely what the Trump administration wants to do, analysts said.
Ms. Tocci, the professor at Johns Hopkins University, said that supporting right-wing parties antagonistic to the European Union would divide and weaken the continent, leaving a “fractured Europe which is easily colonizable” by the globe’s great powers.
The effort to divide Europe is hardly new. Russia has been doing it for more than a decade, boosting euroskeptic and often far-right parties who want to weaken the European Union, strengthening Moscow’s hand. Some experts said they considered the United States national security strategy a facsimile of the Russian playbook.
“It’s striking because that is very similar to language which you’ll find in the analogous Russian national security document,” said Timothy D. Snyder, a prominent scholar of totalitarianism and Russia.
Mr. Snyder added that by suggesting that good foreign policy was about balancing between great powers rather than upholding the rule of law, “the U.S. national security document is now tilting in the basic ideological direction of the Russian one.”
He also said the paper sounded similar to “flat-out Russian propaganda” in its assertions that a majority of Europeans wanted the war in Ukraine to end no matter what, and that it was continued by out-of-touch elites.
Mr. Snyder also echoed other analysts when he said he suspected that the Trump administration’s sub rosa goal in weakening Europe was to free American tech companies from encumbering European regulation, an objective it has previously stated.
Mr. Prodi, the former E.U. Commission president, argued that the Trump administration’s policy prognoses violated the very sovereignty it preached, by “entering in a very inappropriate way into the internal policy of other countries.”
But some of Europe’s sovereigntist right-wing parties welcomed the intrusion and the long-awaited recognition from the White House.
“All these things are our message, our diagnosis, so we’re happy,” said Hermann Tertsch, a member of the European Parliament with Spain’s far-right Vox party, who said that during previous administrations, “we were very afraid” of the United States.
Under Mr. Trump, however, it was a source of comfort, Mr. Tertsch said, adding, “It’s a new era.”
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