Table of Contents:
1) Events and Appeals
2) Current News
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1) Events and Appeals
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Help World-Outlook Win New Subscribers
(the subscription is free of charge)
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 DÃaz, ‘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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2) Current News
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1) Land Grab: Israel’s Escalating Campaign for Control of the West Bank
By Michael D. Shear, Daniel Berehulak, Leanne Abraham and Fatima AbdulKarim, Dec. 20, 2025
Every Saturday, sheep owned by Jewish settlers march through the olive groves that Rezeq Abu Naim and his family have tended for generations, crushing tree limbs and damaging roots. The extremist settlers, armed and sometimes masked, lead their herds to drink from the family’s scant water supplies while Mr. Abu Naim watches from the ramshackle tents of Al Mughayir, where he lives above the valley.
“I beg you, I beg you. God, just let us be,’” Mr. Abu Naim recalled telling settlers during a recent confrontation. “Just go away. We don’t want any problems.”
Vast stretches of his family’s farm and wheat have been seized by Israeli settlers who have set up outposts, illegal encampments that can eventually grow to become large settlements, on the nearby hills.
New roads cut through the land on which his own flock of sheep graze — and settlers routinely steal the animals, he said. Six months ago, a masked settler armed with a gun broke into his family home at 3 a.m., he recalled. He described raiders tearing through his son’s nearby home at night last December, slashing tents and stealing solar panels.
The family takes turns at night guarding their sheep against attacks from settlers. On a recent day, we found Mr. Abu Naim resting on pillows, a portable radio pressed to his ear listening for regional news.
Go away. Go away from here. Leave, Mr. Abu Naim said the settlers have told him repeatedly.
“I’m 70 years old, and I’ve been here all my life,” he replies. “But you came yesterday, and you want me now to leave, to go home.”
“This is my home.”
The fate of a farmer trying to wrest a livelihood out of a landscape dotted since biblical times by sheep and gnarled olive trees may seem distant from a modern world of clashing superpowers.
But these remote hilltops and hamlets sit at the leading edge of an intractable geopolitical conflict.
Even as the war in Gaza commanded the world’s attention over the past two years, the facts on the ground were shifting in the West Bank, intensifying the battle for control of the lands of Bethlehem and Jericho, Ramallah and Hebron.
For many Palestinians, they are the foundation of a future state of their own — and a future peace. But for many Jews, they are a rightful homeland.
Extremist Jewish settlers and Palestinian farmers are the foot soldiers in this endless conflict, an extension of the war in 1948 that accompanied the establishment of Israel. And since the Oct. 7., 2023, attack on Israel by Palestinian militants from Gaza, Israel’s far-right government has embraced a playbook of expanding settlements across the West Bank, transforming the region, piece by piece, from a patchwork of connected Palestinian villages into a collection of Israeli neighborhoods.
The unrelenting violent campaign by these settlers, that critics say is largely tolerated by the Israeli military, consists of brutal harassment, beatings, even killings, as well as high-impact roadblocks and village closures. These are coupled with a drastic increase in land seizures by the state and the demolition of villages to force Palestinians to abandon their land.
Many of the settlers are young extremists whose views go beyond even the far-right ideology of the government. They are not generally operating on direct orders from Israel’s military leadership. But they know the military frequently looks the other way and facilitates their actions.
In many cases, it is the military that forces Palestinians to evacuate or orders the destruction of their homes once settlers drive them to flee.
We attempted to speak to settlers near two of the West Bank villages that have been the targets of such pressure. None were willing to speak with us.
In a statement, the Israeli military said that its “security forces are committed to maintaining order and security for all residents of the area and act decisively against any manifestations of violence within their area of responsibility.”
The far-right Israeli government has been transparent about its mission: to sabotage what diplomats call the two-state solution and its goal of an Israeli and a Palestinian nation living side by side. “Every town, every neighborhood, every housing unit,” Bezalel Smotrich, the ultra-right-wing finance minister, said recently, “is another nail in the coffin of this dangerous idea.”
For years, the United Nations, the United States and much of the Western world have warned that the continuous expansion of Israeli settlements would eventually make the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.
Across the West Bank, there is desperation among Palestinian villagers and farmers as they watch the takeover of their lands at a pace never seen before. And there is fear that the changes are already becoming irreversible.
We spent more than two months in a dozen villages in the West Bank, meeting with Palestinian families, local officials, Bedouin farmers and young human rights activists, often visiting from abroad. We watched as groups of young Israeli settlers showed up in Palestinian villages to harass or intimidate them.
We met a family in Tulkarm whose 21-year-old daughter, Rahaf al-Ashqar, was killed in February by an explosion set off by Israeli soldiers who raided their home, claiming they were looking for terrorists.
We saw a 16-foot fence covered with razor wire that was built this year in the town of Sinjil that now separates Walid Naim from his family’s orchards.
We watched settlers block the road and try to stop Palestinian farmers from leaving their land after harvesting their olive trees in October.
In October, after settlers and soldiers stormed the gate of Masher Hamdan’s farm in the village of Turmus Aya, he decided to evacuate his sheep, goats, lambs and poultry to save his livelihood.
The New York Times studied mapping data and court orders that document the expansion of claims by the Israeli government to land that had long been in Palestinian hands. We photographed the construction of Israeli roadblocks designed to limit Palestinian movements and saw the installation of fences that cut off farmers from their land.
The Israeli onslaught has all but vanquished a free Palestinian existence in the West Bank. While the Palestinian Authority governs part of the West Bank, the Israeli military remains the occupying power of the whole territory, and military law supersedes the authority’s rule.
There is little due process and villagers live at the mercy of vigilante settlers and members of military platoons who exert almost total power over them. Settlers, who are subject to Israeli civil and criminal law rather than the military’s jurisdiction, are rarely detained or arrested for extremist or violent actions, while the military routinely rounds up Palestinians with little explanation or justification.
In late November, the Israeli military launched what it called a counterterrorism operation in the West Bank city of Tubas, arresting 22 Palestinians. On Dec. 10, Israeli officials approved construction of 764 homes in three West Bank settlements. The day before, the military uprooted about 20 acres of olive trees in a village south of Nablus.
How to Empty a Village
The campaign to isolate Palestinians and drive them off their land is evident in Al Mughayir, about 20 miles north of Jerusalem. What used to be a thriving Palestinian village has been surrounded by Jewish settlements, and villagers like Mr. Abu Naim have been squeezed into increasingly smaller areas, cut off from their land and their livelihoods.
Al Mughayir is one of several small Palestinian villages clustered roughly in the center of the West Bank, all of which have been relentlessly targeted in recent months by settlers and the Israeli government.
This is the pattern that has played out across the West Bank, transforming the entire territory.
A Jewish outpost, not authorized under Israeli law, pops up — a small trailer, perhaps, or a large tent housing just a few young men. Settler attacks soon follow. Then come the military orders demanding evacuations of Palestinian communities and the installation of large, iron roadblocks cutting off Palestinian villagers from the rest of the West Bank.
Over weeks and months, the outposts grow and are often eventually authorized by the Israeli government. Settlers build homes, businesses, schools and roads to accommodate hundreds and eventually thousands of Jewish families. In the Palestinian villages, the opposite happens. Schools are shuttered, farmers are cut off from their lands, and homes are destroyed.
The campaign started in earnest after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office in 2022 and accelerated after the war began. In 2024 and 2025, Israelis built about 130 new outposts, more than the number built in the previous two decades, according to Peace Now, an Israeli activist group that tracks settlement expansion.
Erasure
The flip side of the construction is destruction.
Across the West Bank, settlers and the military razed more than 1,500 Palestinian structures in 2025 — double the annual average in the decade before the war.
The dismantling of one long-established Palestinian community, East Muarrajat, began not long after a settler attack. On July 3, settlers, aided by members of the Israeli military, went house to house through the village where Bedouin families had lived for several generations in the white sand hills of the Jordan Valley, just north of Jericho.
The residents, who had already suffered years of harassment, decided that night to abandon their homes in the middle of the night when dozens of masked settlers, many of whom appeared to be drunk, showed up on four-wheeled ATVs. Some brandished guns as they raced through the village on the vehicles and circled crying women and children.
The settlers rammed the vehicles into people’s homes, then ransacked them, tearing down furnishings and throwing belongings outside while screaming obscenities.
“It was like the whole village was a compound of people screaming and yelling,” recalled one villager, Mohammed Mlehat. “We were afraid of things that are unspeakable, because they were dozens of young men who seemed to be drugged or drunk.”
A statement by the Israeli military said soldiers arrived in East Muarrajat that night after receiving reports of “friction” between Palestinians and settlers but “no violent incidents were identified.”
Fearful of more attacks, the villagers left that night, Mr. Mlehat said, and the destruction of the homes happened in the days and weeks that followed. His family now lives in tents without access to drinking water or electricity, just a few miles from where the village, now reduced to mostly rubble, once stood.
Among the few buildings still standing in East Muarrajat is an abandoned school that began operating in 1964. Through broken classroom windows, there are SpongeBob curtains still visible and school supplies scattered on the ground. A playground is littered with discarded hula hoops and backpacks strewn about.
Mr. Mlehat’s nephew, Jamal Mlehat, said the attacks showed the hypocrisy of settlers who seek sympathy, saying they want only to establish homes for themselves. He cited a Bedouin proverb: “You attack with the wolf and you cry with the sheep.”
“This is what they did with us,” he said.
Unending Harassment
The episodes of intimidation rarely let up.
The number of attacks by extremist settlers in the West Bank has skyrocketed in the last two years. In October, there were an average of eight incidents per day, the highest since the United Nations began keeping records two decades ago.
That coincided with the start of the olive harvest in the West Bank, when many Palestinian farmers have just four weeks to secure their livelihoods from the ancient trees that cover the region’s valleys and hills.
We saw Yousef Fandi and his brother, Abed Alnasser Fandi, being attacked in a field of olive trees in the village of Huwara on the morning of Oct. 9. They told us later that day that they had been tending the family olive grove when they were surrounded by settlers.
One was on horseback, armed and masked. Two others walked beside him. A fourth carried an assault rifle.
“What are you doing here?” demanded the man with the gun, leveling the weapon at them, Yousef Fandi recalled.
The settlers took the men’s phones, ordered them to the ground and proceeded to kick them in the ribs and head for about a half-hour, a scene we witnessed ourselves. Blood spotted Mr. Fandi’s shirt as he later recounted the beating to us.
“I thought that they might shoot us,” he said.
Since Oct. 1, the United Nations reports, 151 Palestinians have been injured in more than 178 separate attacks on olive harvesters. About half were tied to settlers and the rest to soldiers, the organization said.
By the time the Israeli soldiers arrived that morning in the village of Huwara, southwest of the city of Nablus, a large group of villagers had gathered, joined by journalists and activists who had heard about the clash.
The soldiers told the settlers to leave — but bore bad news for the Palestinians eager to return to their harvest.
As the villagers pushed to gain access to the fields, one of the soldiers waved a copy of a military order. A map on the document showed the olive orchard in Huwara completely covered in red, indicating that Palestinians were not allowed in the area for the next 30 days.
“The order was signed following an operational situation assessment,” the Israeli military said in a statement in response to questions. “Accordingly, farmers were informed that they would not be permitted to harvest in the area at that time.”
Military orders have become a staple of the Israeli settlement drive in the West Bank, with the government often declaring territory to be “state land” and denying Palestinian claims to family-owned property.
The clash in Huwara that day ended the way many others did during the olive harvest: with the farmers denied access to their fields.
“I have the documents of this land,” Yousef Fandi protested. “This is my land.”
Deadly Confrontations
For Sayfollah Musallet, a 20-year-old Palestinian American, one of the clashes with settlers turned deadly.
One Friday in July, young Israeli settlers cascaded down from their hilltop outpost above Sinjil, armed and masked, instigating a clash with Palestinian farmers whose land the settlers claimed as their own.
A pickup truck driven by the settlers ran into a crowd of Palestinians and activists, breaking one man’s leg before speeding off, according to Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli activist who witnessed the incident. When a Palestinian ambulance arrived, settlers pelted it with rocks and batons, cracking its windshield, Mr. Pollak said.
During the confrontation, Israeli settlers beat Mr. Musallet to death, according to his family members and the Palestinian authorities. Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel and a staunch supporter of the Netanyahu government, called the death a “criminal and terrorist act” and demanded that the Israeli authorities “aggressively investigate” it.
A second Palestinian man, Mohammad Shalabi, 23, was also killed during the clash. His body was found by villagers late that night with a gunshot wound and extensive bruising on his face and neck, according to his uncle.
Both men were buried at a funeral two days later that was attended by hundreds of villagers.
In the past three years alone, there were more than 1,200 Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank, nearly double the number for the decade before that, the United Nations reports.
A statement about the incident in Sinjil from the Israeli military said that “terrorists threw stones at Israeli civilians near the village” and said that the incident was being investigated.
Mr. Pollak, who was helping the Palestinians in Sinjil and was arrested by the Israeli military that day, said the violence by the settlers was part of a clear pattern.
“I want to say it was an inconceivable tragedy, but really, tragedy isn’t the right word,” he said. “You know, a tragedy is a force of nature. A tragedy is being hit by a lightning bolt. This is not what happened here.”
Renewed Attacks
For Mr. Abu Naim, the farmer in Al Mughayir, the threats to his family have not stopped.
On Sunday, Dec. 7, at 1:40 a.m., eight masked settlers armed with clubs attacked the caves and tents where Mr. Abu Naim and his nine children and grandchildren live. Six members of the family were sent to the hospital, including his 13-year-old grandson, who suffered cuts and bruises to his head.
The scene was described to us by activists, several of whom were sleeping at the home and were also injured. One of them, Phoebe Smith, who is from Britain, was wakened by screams, she said. When she went outside, she was attacked, too.
“I was outside of the tent, being beaten by them around the torso, the legs, the head,” Ms. Smith recalled as she recovered in Ramallah. “It was terrifying. Really terrifying.”
The Dec. 7 onslaught lasted about 10 minutes, she said. The attackers turned over furniture, grabbed three phones and used Ms. Smith’s laptop computer to beat several of the family members. They did not enter another tent, where Mr. Abu Naim’s daughter, nearly nine months pregnant, was cowering inside with two children.
Before heading out, the settlers issued a warning: Leave for good within two days, they said, or we will return and burn you in your home.
The Israeli military did not show up on Dec. 7. But three days later, on Dec. 10, settlers did return for another round of intimidation. Then a few hours later, activists said, five military jeeps carrying 20 soldiers and border police officers arrived with an order declaring the family’s compound a closed military zone.
Two activists were detained, and Mr. Abu Naim’s pregnant daughter and several children fled to safety. On Dec. 12, the military returned and extended the closure for 30 days. In a statement, the Israeli military said Palestinians instigated the Dec. 10 clash by throwing stones and rolling burning tires toward Israelis, which the villagers deny.
The statement said the area was declared a military zone on Dec. 12 “to maintain calm in the area following a prolonged period of tension.”
From the rocky edge of a cliff overlooking the valley, Mr. Abu Naim can keep an eye on his sheep. He can see the Jewish outposts that have sprung up in recent months. And he can try to spot any settlers headed toward his home to warn his children and grandchildren.
The war in Gaza, Mr. Abu Naim said, was a turning point.
“We used to come and go, mostly without any problems,” he recalled recently. “If we met the army, they would ask for our IDs. We give them. We went back and forth. We didn’t have the same problems.”
“But,” he added, “these guys are completely different.”
Map data sources
The historical map showing three communities near Ramallah from 1880 was produced by the Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, accessed via the David Rumsey Map Collection.
The map showing the same communities in 2025 uses data updated in March from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) to show roadblocks, checkpoints, gates and earth walls. This map uses data from Peace Now to show the extent of declared state land, Palestinian localities, Israeli settlements and outposts, newly approved settlements, and new settler roads. It uses data from B’Tselem to show settler attacks from 2020 to Oct. 2025, and communities expelled between 2022 to Oct. 2025.
The state land data in this map includes known declarations announced between 1998 and 2025. Settler roads include those built between mid-2023 and mid-2024. Land administered by the Palestinian Authority was provided by The Palestine Ministry of Local Government (GeoMOLG). The extent of the temporary military order outside of Al Mughayir came from an Israeli military order on Aug. 22, 2025. Lands declared firing zones are from UNOCHA.
The chart showing checkpoints includes both partially staffed and continuously staffed checkpoints.
Peace Now data showing settlements and outposts is as of July 2025. Newly approved settlements do not include 19 settlements authorized by Israel’s security cabinet in December 2025.
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2) Trump Takes America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’ to a New Level
In his first year back in the White House, President Trump has greatly expanded executive power while embracing the trappings of royalty in ways not seen in the modern era.
By Peter Baker, Dec. 21, 2025
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, has covered the past six presidencies and wrote a book about President Trump’s first term. He reported from Washington.
New York Times Photographs by Kenny Holston, Eric Lee, and Haiyun Jiang
When President Trump hosted the crown prince of Saudi Arabia last month, he pulled out all the stops. To the traditional pomp of a formal White House visit, he added a few even fancier touches: a stirring military flyover, a procession of black horses and long, regal tables for the lavish dinner in the East Room instead of the typical round tables.
For surprised White House veterans who were paying attention, the unusual flourishes looked a little familiar. Just two months earlier, King Charles III of Britain welcomed Mr. Trump for a state visit that included, yes, a stirring military flyover, a procession of black horses and a long, regal table for the lavish dinner in St. George’s Hall at Windsor Palace.
In his first year back in office, Mr. Trump has unabashedly adopted the trappings of royalty just as he has asserted virtually unbridled power to transform American government and society to his liking. In both pageantry and policy, Mr. Trump has established a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency that goes far beyond even the one associated with Richard M. Nixon, for whom the term was popularized half a century ago.
He no longer holds back, or is held back, as in the first term. Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 unleashed. The gold trim in the Oval Office, the demolition of the East Wing to be replaced by a massive ballroom, the plastering of his name and face on government buildings and now even the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the designation of his own birthday as a free-admission holiday at national parks — it all speaks to a personal aggrandizement and accumulation of power with meager resistance from Congress or the Supreme Court.
Nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch. Mr. Trump takes it upon himself to reinterpret a constitutional amendment and to eviscerate agencies and departments created by Congress. He dictates to private institutions how to run their affairs. He sends troops into American streets and wages an unauthorized war against nonmilitary boats in the Caribbean. He openly uses law enforcement for what his own chief of staff calls “score settling” against his enemies, he dispenses pardons to favored allies and he equates criticism to sedition punishable by death.
Mr. Trump’s reinvention of the presidency has altered the balance of power in Washington in profound ways that may endure long after he departs the scene. Authority once seized by one branch of government is rarely given back willingly. Actions that once shocked the system can eventually become seen as normal. While other presidents pushed the limits, Mr. Trump has blown right through them and dared anyone to stop him.
“His second term in many respects represents not simply a break from presidential norms and expectations,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “It’s also a culmination of 75 years in which presidents have reached for more and more power.”
It is also a culmination of four years of planning between Mr. Trump’s first term and his second. The last time around, he was a political novice who did not understand how government worked and surrounded himself with advisers who tried to restrain his most extreme instincts. This time, he arrived in office with a plan to accomplish what he did not in his first term, and a team of like-minded loyalists intent on remaking the country.
“The president knew exactly what he wanted to do coming into office this time,” said Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser. “Now the president had four years under his belt. He knows exactly how everything works. He knows all the international players. He knows all the national players. He knew what strategies and tactics worked the first go around and what strategies didn’t work.”
Strong and Weak
The presidency is a living organism, shaped by the person inhabiting it, whether it be self-styled men of action like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, father figures like Dwight D. Eisenhower, legislative wizards like Lyndon B. Johnson or captivating communicators like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. More than the sum of the clauses of the Constitution’s Article II, it is an evolving construct, one that has adapted to the ever-changing challenges of a complex and fast-moving world.
Mr. Trump wears it like a cloak. Power is the leitmotif of his second term. For the record, he disclaims royal aspirations. “I’m not a king,” he said after millions of Americans took to the streets in “No Kings” demonstrations in October. But at the same time, he embraces the comparison, at least in part to troll his critics but also, it seems, because he enjoys the notion.
He and his staff have posted images of him in monarchical regalia, including an A.I.-generated illustration of him wearing a crown and flying a fighter jet labeled “KING TRUMP” that dumps excrement on protesters. He delighted when the South Koreans gave him a replica of an ancient golden crown. “LONG LIVE THE KING!” he wrote about himself on social media.
To his supporters, Mr. Trump’s assertion of vast power is invigorating, not disturbing. In a country they see in decline, a strong hand is the only way to dislodge a liberal, “woke” deep state that in their view has suffocated everyday Americans to the advantage of unwelcome immigrants, street criminals, globalist tycoons, underqualified minorities and out-of-touch elites. Voters struggling to maintain their standards of living or make sense of a society changing rapidly around them have twice given Mr. Trump a chance to make good on his promise to blow up politics as usual and address their concerns.
To his critics, Mr. Trump is narcissistic, uncouth, corrupt and a danger to American democracy. He has used the office to enrich himself and his family, sullied the image of the United States around the world, sought to erase the true history of Black Americans and pursued policies that harm the very people he purports to represent.
What everyone agrees on is that Mr. Trump dominates the political landscape like none of his predecessors going back generations, single-handedly setting the agenda and forcing his will on the rest of the system. At the same time, he is the most consistently unpopular president since the advent of polling. He has never had the support of a majority of Americans, not in any of his three presidential elections and not for a single day of either term in Gallup surveys.
His current 36 percent approval rating in Gallup is lower than that of every elected modern president at the end of their first year, lower even than it was in his first term (39 percent) and seven percentage points below the next-lowest (Joseph R. Biden Jr., at 43 percent). If compared against presidents who served two terms consecutively, Mr. Trump is still below each of them at the end of their fifth year, except Mr. Nixon, who had plummeted to 29 percent in the throes of Watergate.
Some critics predict that Mr. Trump’s unpopularity will begin to erode his power. “It’s been striking that Republicans in Congress have stuck behind him,” said former Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona who broke with Mr. Trump in the first term. “But I do think that is changing. Some of it’s not exactly a profile in courage, but it’s looking at the electoral wins and realizing the midterms are going to be very difficult.”
Mr. Trump’s allies dismiss that as wishful thinking by the president’s critics. Mr. Miller called current polling a “temporary blip” that will reverse as tax cuts passed earlier this year take effect in the first couple of quarters of 2026. “Once the economy rockets to where everyone’s predicting it to be for Q1 and Q2,” he said, “that will all snap back.”
Bypassing Limits
Presidents have been pushing the boundaries of power going back to the early days of the republic, most aggressively during wartime. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus even beyond the battlefield and emancipated enslaved people in rebel areas. Woodrow Wilson prosecuted critics of World War I and effectively censored some newspapers. Franklin D. Roosevelt interned more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens. In most cases, the pendulum swung back to a degree after the wars were over and security restored.
In the modern era, the notion of an imperial presidency was made prominent by the book of that name published in 1973 by the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who had worked in John F. Kennedy’s White House. Mr. Schlesinger argued that under Mr. Nixon, who refused to spend certain money appropriated by Congress, secretly bombed Cambodia, wiretapped opponents and used government to pursue his enemies, the presidency “has got out of control and badly needs new definition and restraint.”
The system of checks and balances eventually did reassert itself during Watergate. The Supreme Court unanimously ordered Mr. Nixon to release incriminating tapes and a bipartisan coalition in Congress moved to impeach the president, prompting him to resign. Starting late in Mr. Nixon’s tenure, Congress passed new laws meant to restrain the executive on war powers, impoundment, eavesdropping and government ethics.
Some argued that the post-Watergate reforms went too far in emasculating the presidency after the voter-abbreviated tenures of Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter. Mr. Reagan and George W. Bush in different ways worked to empower the office again, particularly in foreign policy and national security. Mr. Obama pushed further by exempting from deportation many immigrants who had arrived illegally as children and Mr. Biden unilaterally tried to forgive $400 billion in student loan debt. But all four encountered pushback from the courts and Congress and none went as far as Mr. Trump has.
“Some of the stuff that people were upset at Nixon for doing was kind of quaint compared to just the totally out-of-control stuff” that Mr. Trump has been doing, said Robert Schlesinger, a son of Arthur Schlesinger and himself a longtime journalist and historian of the White House.
“Even Nixon was a guy who got that there were limits that he had to tread carefully around even as he was trying to push them,” Mr. Schlesinger added. “Whereas Trump, he’s not interested in limits. And whether it’s through a conscious strategy or just unconscious cunning, by being so open about it, it normalizes it to some extent.”
Learning Curve
That may stem from Mr. Trump’s distinctive ability to overcome obstacles and scandals that would hobble any other politician. He was impeached twice, indicted four times, convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual abuse and found liable for business fraud while his firm was convicted of criminal tax evasion. Yet he won a stunning, against-the-odds comeback election victory. The Supreme Court even granted him and his successors broad immunity that it had never bestowed on any previous president.
And so Mr. Trump evidently sees little reason to restrain himself. He has pursued an everything-everywhere-all-at-once strategy of pushing policies, even knowing that some of them may be rejected — a gamble that paid off, from his vantage point. As it turned out, not only has Congress acquiesced to vast intrusions on its traditional spheres of authority, most notably spending, but even the courts have been more of a speed bump than a stop sign.
That owes a lot to the team Mr. Trump has built around him, one that cheers him on rather than holds him back. Mr. Trump got off to “a fast start,” said Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who tracks administration turnover. “They were rolling in the beginning. So, clearly, there’s been a learning curve and a recognition that staff chaos is not helpful to the cause.”
But as she pointed out, that does not mean there has not been staff turmoil. It’s just that Mr. Trump does not advertise it as much by firing people on social media, as he did the last time around, and Americans have become used to it. Without much notice, Mr. Trump withdrew 52 nominations in his first 10 months in office, four times as many as Mr. Biden did in the same period, according to figures compiled by Chris Piper, a Brookings colleague.
Working off a Project 2025 blueprint devised by allies during his four years out of power, Mr. Trump came back to office with a raft of executive orders that have allowed the instant-gratification president to dispense with the slow grind of congressional negotiations. So far this year, Mr. Trump has issued about 225 executive orders, nearly three times as many as any other first-year president in three-quarters of a century.
Mr. Miller credits a more cohesive team. “There are a lot less hangers-on or superfluous characters floating around,” he said. “That White House is about getting things done.”
But some Republicans said the lack of contrary voices in the West Wing has a cost. While Mr. Trump has successfully sealed the border as he promised and brokered a fragile cease-fire in Gaza, he looks out of touch on affordability and was rolled by the bipartisan coalition demanding the release of files related to the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
“You live in a bubble if that’s the situation and sometimes you get blindsided by reality,” said Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, one of the few incumbent Republicans who has been critical at times. “I don’t know that he’s hearing that kind of feedback. His first administration he had people who would say, ‘Mr. President, I know what you’re saying, this is what I’m thinking.’” By contrast, Mr. Bacon said, “this time, you’ve got pretty much yes men.”
Imperial or Imperiled?
The lack of checks on Mr. Trump has given him latitude that his predecessors did not enjoy, not just in policymaking but also in profit-making. While other presidential families have cashed in on the White House, none has been as successful or brazen as Mr. Trump and his clan. In the 11 months since he reclaimed the White House, the president’s family has made billions of dollars, at least on paper, through business deals around the world and cryptocurrency investments from people with a vested interest in American policy.
At the same time, Mr. Trump has systematically dismantled many instruments of accountability. He installed loyal partisans at the F.B.I. and Justice Department, fired inspectors general and the special counsel, purged prosecutors and agents who participated in past investigations into his dealings and gutted the public integrity section that probes political corruption. Congressional Republicans who eagerly looked into Hunter Biden’s business ties have no interest in scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s.
The question is how much of this change will be sustained. Is the presidency rewired for the long run or will it cycle back down the road?
As the year ends, there have been signs of resistance to unchecked power. A judge threw out the Trump administration’s indictments against two of the president’s adversaries, Letitia James and James B. Comey, and two grand juries refused to re-indict Ms. James. In addition to legislating release of the Epstein files, Congress passed a measure slashing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel budget by 25 percent if he does not turn over video of a second strike on a boat of supposed drug traffickers.
If Democrats win the midterm elections next year, they will surely use their newfound power to push back further against Mr. Trump. Some, like Mr. Flake, predict that even some Republicans will begin to speak out after filing deadlines for possible primary challengers have passed. And legal analysts expect the Supreme Court to clip Mr. Trump’s wings on tariffs, and possibly on birthright citizenship.
Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, acknowledged the nation’s long history of expanding presidential authority. But, he added, “we have an equally robust history of cramming the presidency back into its constitutional box once war or economic crisis has passed.”
That history “strongly suggests that what we are seeing today will not, in fact, endure.” Is that a guarantee? “I’m not smart enough to know the answer to that.”
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3) ‘It’s Just Us’: The Firefighter, His Son and a Treacherous Choice
For two decades, Luis Martinez has fought wildfires for the U.S. government. Now he’s facing down cancer, debt and the threat of separation from his 11-year-old.
By Hannah Dreier, Photographs by Loren Elliott, Dec. 21, 2025
For this story, Hannah interviewed more than 100 immigrant firefighters, spoke to U.S. Forest Service supervisors in 14 states and created a database tracking deployments of immigrant crews.
Luis Martinez, a wildfire fighter in Washington State, and his 11-year-old son, Rooney. Loren Elliott for The New York Times
Luis Martinez was still trying to figure out how to tell his 11-year-old son that his cancer might be back when his phone rang. He squinted to make out the name of his son’s soccer coach.
The coach wanted to know if Luis could drive his son, Rooney, to a tournament in Seattle, three hours away. A last-minute dropout meant their team suddenly had a chance to compete against the best players in the state.
Rooney was in the next room running his nightly footwork drills, the ball thudding against the wall. Luis figured he would want to go. He closed his eyes. He used to feel he knew exactly how to keep his son safe, but lately he wasn’t sure.
The coach had called instead of texting because Luis struggled to read messages. His eyes had been damaged two years earlier, when he was 38 and had nearly died of a cancer linked to the job he’d done his whole adult life: fighting wildfires for the federal government.
The coach waited. To have a shot at winning, the team needed its best players, and Rooney was one of them.
He offered to cover the entry fees, then asked again, could they make the drive?
Luis hesitated. His doctor had said she didn’t like the look of his most recent blood work and had scheduled more tests. She had warned him to pay attention to his fatigue. A long drive was probably more than his body could handle.
When Luis called Rooney over to ask if he wanted to make the trip, he instantly said yes. For weeks, he had sensed that something was wrong with his father. Luis was moving more slowly and going to the clinic more often. So Rooney was trying to stay close and work harder at making him proud. They ran soccer drills every afternoon until the light faded, and found local games most weekends. A road trip would mean more time together after Luis had spent months away on wildfires.
In their small, secluded town, nearly everyone was connected to the private companies that the government hired to fight fires. Smoke-related sicknesses were a shared fact of life. So were periodic immigration crackdowns. Lately, the road to Seattle was becoming a corridor for ICE enforcement.
Families were staying home, waiting until the danger eased. But Luis didn’t feel he had that kind of time. He told the coach they would try to make it. He had a week to decide.
Luis was about Rooney’s age when his father pulled him out of school to work in the fields in Mexico. At 18, he crossed the desert and made his way to Mattawa, a town of 3,500 people in Washington’s Columbia River basin. Almost entirely Latino and surrounded by miles of orchards, the town had been bypassed by highways and chain stores. Most of Luis’s neighbors had arrived the same way, crossing illegally and taking whatever work was available.
Luis immediately fell into a rhythm of pruning fruit trees in the winter and fighting fires in the summer.
He worked for a private firefighting company, but in the field, everyone took orders from U.S. Forest Service supervisors. He was usually assigned “mop-up,” one of the smokiest parts of the job. After flames had died down, he would get on his hands and knees to feel for spots that were still smoldering. When he found lingering embers, he smothered them with dirt.
By the end of the day, ash and grit would fill his nose and mouth. He might do this for weeks on end, cloaked in poisonous smoke that the Forest Service has known for years can damage hearts and lungs and cause fatal cancers.
Over time, he noticed how inconsistent the directives were. One day, his crew might be told to clean up everything 10 feet into a burned area; another day, 100. Sometimes the supervisors sent them back to the same patch again and again, stirring up more ash. “It was like, ‘We’ve been here five times — there’s nothing left,’” he said.
He figured these were at least safer assignments, farther from flames. In fact, mop-up is among the most carcinogenic work on a fire.
The Forest Service’s own researchers warned in 2016 that supervisors were assigning mop-up more often than needed, endangering firefighters’ health. The agency’s policy is to limit mop-up to only what is strictly necessary. In practice, though, that work is still frequently being done — it has just fallen to immigrants.
Dozens of the firefighting companies that the government relies on are built on immigrant labor. Worker advocates and the Forest Service’s internal watchdog have estimated that as many as 70 percent of these firefighters are undocumented.
By his 30s, Luis had watched many co-workers his age collapse into illness: heart failure, incurable cancer, lung problems that put them out of work. His company offered no health insurance. When someone got sick, Luis would spend days cooking carnitas to sell in town to raise money.
He had thought he would eventually return to Mexico, but then Rooney was born. Named for Wayne Rooney, the Manchester United star considered one of England’s best players, Rooney mostly lived with Luis. They had always been inseparable, the boy’s mother said. She lived nearby and took Rooney when his father was fighting fires.
When Rooney turned 7, Luis bought him a soccer ball and started taking him to tournaments. Soon, he was invited to join a travel team, and Luis began dreaming of a college scholarship. He kept Rooney’s homework folders on the table and lined his soccer trophies and certificates for perfect attendance along the kitchen wall. When he was away for fire season, he called his son every night.
It felt like a stable life. Then one day in 2023, Luis’s vision suddenly dimmed, as if cobwebs were covering his eyes. After a trip to the emergency room, he was quickly diagnosed with a rare leukemia that often causes life-threatening hemorrhages. In Luis’s case, the bleeding had started in his eyes.
When Rooney got to his father’s hospital room, Luis could recognize him only by his voice. The boy was just a shadow in a hazy door frame.
Rooney began visiting most days after school. He changed his father’s socks and ate his Jell-O cups. At night, he crawled into the hospital bed and asked to stay over.
The Forest Service recognizes that wildfire smoke is linked to leukemia and other cancers. When firefighters who work directly for the federal government fall sick with these illnesses, they’re entitled to workers’ compensation coverage, which pays for medical care. But these benefits do not extend to contract workers like Luis.
After a month in the hospital, he received a bill for $133,000. He had been earning $20 an hour fighting fires, a number that shrank after taxes and deductions for Medicare, Social Security and other benefits that, as an undocumented immigrant, he was not allowed to use. “There are lots of people who prefer to die in Mexico,” he said. “But my place is here with Rooney.” Luis asked the hospital to set him up on a payment plan.
When the hospital sent him home, he still saw the world in shadows and needed regular injections in his eyes. At night, while making dinner, he sometimes cut his fingertips.
He wanted to shield Rooney as much as possible, so he continued to get dressed every day and go to the orchards, where he sat in the sun while his friends worked. They raised money for him, as he had for others. Luis kept a list of every person who helped — more than a hundred names — folded in the closet beside his son’s clothes.
After 11 months of chemotherapy, Luis went into remission last year, though his doctors explained that he was not cured. His vision had improved enough to drive and manage daily tasks. They told him to find lighter work, maybe in a store. But in Mattawa, there were only two kinds of jobs: the orchards or the fires. And fires paid better. So in April, he asked to be put back on a crew.
For years, Luis had pitied the sick men who kept going back to fires. He also thought they were reckless, choosing money over safety and endangering their crewmates.
Now, though, he felt he had to go, even when Rooney asked him not to. “I told him, here everyone has to work so they can eat,” Luis said.
Soon, he was able to start paying bills. But it felt like the job was getting more dangerous.
In August, a firefighter who had grown up near Luis had a heart attack and died on a Montana fire. Days later, immigration agents appeared at a Washington wildfire and pulled aside a crew for questioning. One firefighter was deported. Another, who had lived in the country since he was 4, was sent to detention.
After the raid, some of Luis’s colleagues started turning down deployments. Those who kept going tried to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
During a large fire in October, The Times watched as a team from Luis’s company was sent alongside two government crews to a hillside that had partly burned. When the supervisor asked them to check for smoldering ash, the two government crew leaders said the smoke exposure wasn’t worth it: The fire would likely tear through the area again anyway.
But the immigrant firefighters got directly to work. They hiked up the charred hill and called out warnings in Spanish as smoke enveloped them. They poked into holes, finding smoldering roots and stirring up embers. They kept at it until dark.
The next day, the whole hillside burned.
Forest Service supervisors told The Times they feel pressure to assign mop-up even when it may not be strictly necessary. Residents grow alarmed when smoke lingers. Supervisors also fear being blamed if a fire reignites, a worry sharpened by the Palisades fire in Los Angeles, which may have begun with a leftover ember. They often give mop-up to contractors. (The Forest Service said “mop-up is where we lock in the hard-fought gains in suppressing a fire” and supervisors are trained to weigh risks against potential gains.)
By the time the fire season ended, Luis was exhausted. His muscles ached, his legs were going numb and he couldn’t keep up with Rooney during their daily soccer drills. He told himself maybe it was his age, 40 now. But at the end of October, he went in for blood tests. The doctors said things he couldn’t quite understand and gave him an injection. “They told me my results were very bad and I was backsliding,” he said.
Luis had kept the news to himself, and the coach’s call had come as he was trying to figure out how he could rest with bills piling up and a sixth-grader counting on him. Now he sat beside Rooney at Mass, debating whether to make the trip.
So many people wanted to pray lately that their church, Our Lady of the Desert, had moved its services into a warehouse. Mass was held in Spanish, and nearly every pew held firefighters and their families. As incense filled the room, some started coughing.
In the back, Luis knelt and prayed for protection. Rooney leaned his head on Luis’s shoulder, repeating the wish he’d made every day since his father went back to firefighting: Please let him not get sick again.
After Mass, they drove to do soccer drills next to an orchard. They usually ran a few warm-up laps around the field together. But today, Luis let Rooney run ahead while he struggled to walk one lap.
“I know I’m sick again,” he said in a low voice. “I can feel it.” He stood to catch his breath and watched Rooney run toward him.
The day before the tournament, they were training again.
“Are you going to take him?” another father asked. They were standing at the edge of the field, hands jammed into their pockets against the cold, watching their sons practice. “Won’t there be ICE there?”
Luis didn’t know. Mattawa still felt safely isolated, but firefighters who worked for his company were being picked up in the cities closer to Seattle. He told the other father he hoped ICE would not raid a children’s soccer tournament. “That would be too cruel,” he said.
Rooney sprinted by, cheeks flushed. Luis waved him back into position and reset the cones. Most of the other children on the team, which was based in a larger town an hour away, trained with soccer academies. Luis and Rooney had learned the drills by watching videos on Luis’s phone.
When they drove home, Luis stayed 10 miles under the speed limit and waited at stop signs until the road was empty in all directions. His eyesight had improved, but he still drove only in daylight, when the weather was clear.
He had barely made it inside when there was a knock. It was the recruiter who had sent him to his first wildfire crew at 18, stopping by because he’d heard ICE was patrolling the roads.
A whole Oregon-based crew had been detained, he said. “If they start asking for papers next summer, we’ll go from 15 crews to five.”
Luis looked over to see if Rooney was listening, but he seemed absorbed in a video game.
When he first got sick, Luis borrowed money to apply for a humanitarian relief program that shields immigrants with serious illnesses from being deported. The mayor wrote him a character reference letter. His lawyer said he had a good chance. But this year, under President Trump, his case stalled.
After Rooney fell asleep beside him, Luis scrolled on his phone, the text set to the largest size. He saw real-time ICE alerts, fund-raisers for legal fees, posts on protecting children if parents were deported.
Luis switched to looking at training videos. He watched his son breathing under the heavy blanket.
“It’s just us,” he said. “I have to make sure he stays on a good path.”
Luis closed his eyes. Tomorrow, he decided, they would drive to Seattle.
Before they left, Luis and Rooney bowed their heads before a small altar they kept in the kitchen. Luis prayed to the memory of his parents and to God to protect them on the road. Rooney prayed to play well.
Luis kept his immigration paperwork in the glove compartment. Standing in the sunny driveway, he smoothed and photographed each page.
“That way if they rip it up, I’ll still have it,” he said. He had heard the best thing to do if he was stopped was simply refuse to answer any questions. “I can’t answer that,” he said aloud in Spanish. While he practiced a few more times, Rooney threw his backpack in the back seat and waited.
At a gas station outside town, Rooney jogged up and down the aisles. He picked a corn dog for himself and nothing for Luis. He’d seen a brochure called “Does sugar feed cancer?” in a doctor’s office, and didn’t want to tempt him. “I have to make sure he stays healthy,” Rooney said.
Between fires over the summer, Luis had found work in the orchards and, for the first time, Rooney had gone with him. Rooney said he wanted to help pay for his school clothes. Watching his son come home dusty and exhausted, Luis worried he was passing on the same burden he’d experienced as a child. He told Rooney it was so he would remember why school, soccer and college scholarships mattered.
“But he understands too much already,” Luis said. “He talks like an adult now.”
Back on the highway, Luis scanned the side of the road like he had during mop-up, looking for anything that stood out. The silence between them deepened when they passed a stopped patrol car.
Rooney was too nervous to sleep, and spent the hours until Seattle playing games on his phone.
At the sports complex where Seattle’s professional teams trained, Luis and Rooney stared at the children on the other teams. They were tall, with logos buzzed into their salon haircuts. Their cleats were from the mall, not sent by relatives in Mexico. They wore pressed uniforms stenciled with their names. Rooney’s said “James,” a hand-me-down from the coach.
Rooney’s team, the Cubs, would have to win all their games on this first day to make it to the finals. The coach held Rooney back until the team was down 0-2. When he got in, he scored three goals in the space of a few minutes.
After the third goal, Rooney glanced at his father and saw that he looked proud. “Have fun, Rooney,” Luis shouted.
Luis couldn’t make out the expression on Rooney’s face, just the number on his back. But he knew the drills by heart and felt good seeing them put into action. It was a little like being on the fire line, everyone pulling in the same direction.
The team won every match that day. Luis and Rooney spent the night at a friend’s in Seattle, and Luis cooked for everyone. Restaurants and churches were mostly empty now, the friend said; ICE had been patrolling all week.
At the complex the next morning, Luis watched Rooney warm up. He was glad they had come. “It’s the only thing I have to give him,” he said. “To show him when I’m gone that I loved him and supported him in the things he cared about. He’ll remember this when he’s older and trying to find his way.”
Soon, it would be time to get on the road. Rooney would fall asleep against the car window, a medal resting on his chest.
There would be more tests and appointments waiting for Luis back home. But he wouldn’t tell Rooney. Not just yet.
Julie Tate contributed research.
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4) The Economy Avoided a Recession in 2025, but Many Americans Are Reeling
A feared recession didn’t materialize, but unemployment rose, wage growth slowed and affordability challenges are mounting.
By Ben Casselman and Colby Smith, Dec. 22, 2025
“‘Yes, there are people who are doing great, but I don’t think there’s this sense that the tide is really coming in and lifting all the boats,’ said Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank. For some groups, the cooling labor market has turned downright icy. Recent college graduates are having the hardest time finding jobs since the aftermath of the Great Recession more than a decade ago. The unemployment rate for Black workers jumped to 8.3 percent in November, up from 6.1 percent at the end of last year and double the rate for white workers.”
Ricardo Rey
After a chaotic year filled with trade wars, market gyrations and the longest government shutdown in history, the U.S. economy has, once again, proved more resilient than many forecasters feared.
But “resilient” isn’t quite the same thing as “good.”
Many Americans are entering 2026 worried about their jobs, stressed about their finances and unconvinced that things will improve in the new year.
The flow of official economic data resumed last week after a prolonged delay caused by the government shutdown. The reports were muddled by technical quirks related to the shutdown, but on balance they suggested the economy remained stuck in the same uneasy limbo it was in before the data blackout began.
Job growth was decent in November, but unemployment rose. Retail sales were solid, but wage growth slowed. Inflation cooled, but remains elevated.
That mixed picture is far better than the dire forecasts of last spring, when many economists warned that President Trump’s tariffs would lead to runaway inflation, a recession — or both.
Instead, data this week is expected to show that gross domestic product, which measures overall economic output, grew at a robust pace in the third quarter. Full-year data, when it becomes available early next year, is likely to show that output, adjusted for inflation, grew at about a 1.5 percent pace in 2025, a downshift from 2024 but far from a recession.
A gradual deterioration, though, is still a deterioration. In surveys, Americans overwhelmingly say they are struggling with the cost of living and do not believe the economy is working for them — an impression borne out by data showing that consumer spending is being driven by a relative handful of rich households.
Mr. Trump tried to shift that narrative in a combative — and often misleading — prime-time speech last week in which he blamed his predecessor for economic problems and promised that a “Golden Age” was just around the corner.
Many forecasters do expect a rosier backdrop next year. But the problem for Mr. Trump is that few of the larger economic problems that pushed voters away from the incumbent party in 2024 have improved, and some have gotten worse.
Tariffs haven’t caused a spike in inflation, but they have pushed up prices for some consumer products. Homeownership remains out of reach for many Americans. Child care is still broadly unaffordable, electricity bills are rising and health care premiums are set to rise for millions of families when insurance subsidies expire at the end of the year.
“When individual Americans think about the economy, they are thinking about: ‘Can I afford the things I need and want? Do I have economic opportunities?’” said Heather Boushey, who served as an economic adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
When the answer to those questions is “no,” she said, it is hard to convince people that the economy is strong — a lesson she and her Biden administration colleagues learned the hard way.
“You can’t tell people what their reality is,” Ms. Boushey said.
An Uneven Picture
Despite Mr. Trump’s claim that he “inherited a mess,” the economy when he returned to office was strong by most measures. Unemployment was low. Wages were rising. Inflation, though higher than normal, had fallen significantly from its peak in 2022.
The frenetic early months of the Trump administration threatened to derail that progress. The president’s on-again, off-again tariff threats, combined with Elon Musk’s efforts to eliminate programs and cut the federal work force, led to steep drops in consumer confidence and wild swings in the stock market.
Then on April 2, Mr. Trump announced tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners. Markets plunged, and economists warned of a recession or “stagflation,” the dreaded combination of high inflation and weak growth last seen in the United States in the 1970s.
The worst predictions never came to pass, partly because Mr. Trump reversed course, rolling back some tariffs and delaying others. That gave companies an opportunity to build up inventories and re-engineer supply chains. Companies also proved more reluctant to pass price increases on to consumers than many economists initially expected, perhaps because they doubted that customers would be willing or able to stomach the extra cost.
The U.S. economy also turned out to have unexpected sources of strength that helped offset the drag from the trade war. A surge in construction of data centers for artificial intelligence models helped prop up business investment, while a rising stock market — also tied primarily to optimism around A.I. — encouraged consumer spending.
“If it weren’t for the A.I. spending boom, we would be in a different place,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
But the benefits have not been evenly distributed. Wealthy households have reaped most of the stock market gains, even as the softening labor market has led to slower wage growth, particularly for the lowest earners. As a result, consumer spending has become bifurcated, with high-income households spending and lower-income households increasingly falling behind on financial obligations. Car repossessions and other signs of financial stress have picked up this year.
“Yes, there are people who are doing great, but I don’t think there’s this sense that the tide is really coming in and lifting all the boats,” said Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank.
For some groups, the cooling labor market has turned downright icy. Recent college graduates are having the hardest time finding jobs since the aftermath of the Great Recession more than a decade ago. The unemployment rate for Black workers jumped to 8.3 percent in November, up from 6.1 percent at the end of last year and double the rate for white workers.
“That’s a level that would be considered an economic crisis if they were happening to Americans overall,” said Jessica Fulton, a senior fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank focused on issues affecting Black Americans.
Cuts to the federal government have hit Black workers disproportionately, Ms. Fulton noted. But she warned that the problems affecting Black families today — a weakening labor market, cuts to federal safety net programs, rising electricity prices that are partly a result of the rapid growth of A.I. data centers — may soon be felt more widely.
“People are being squeezed from all sides,” Ms. Fulton said. “We’re seeing that from Black workers now, which I think could foreshadow the same thing for everyone else.”
Cautious Optimism
Despite such concerns, many forecasters expect growth to pick back up next year, and for the labor market to improve rather than deteriorate further.
They point to several potential sources of strength. The tax cuts that Congress passed this year should lead to larger refunds for many Americans, which should provide a lift to consumers early in the year. The law also included provisions to encourage companies to invest.
Lower interest rates — the result of a series of cuts the Federal Reserve made this fall — should also help businesses and consumers. Policymakers are weighing whether to deliver more reductions in the coming year.
But perhaps the biggest lift could come from reduced uncertainty after a uniquely tumultuous year in which businesses and investors contended with seismic changes related to tariffs, immigration restrictions and government regulation.
“2025 was hampered by all the policy-related uncertainty,” said Stephen Stanley, chief U.S. economist at Santander, a bank. “The policy landscape is going to allow businesses to re-engage, and when they do that, I think you’ll see a pickup in investment.”
Policymakers are similarly optimistic. John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in an interview with CNBC on Friday that he was “feeling actually pretty good” about the economy.
“We got through 2025,” he said. “This has been an uncertain year. A lot has happened, and the economy has come through this.”
But that rosy outlook could be upended if the A.I. boom fades and takes the stock market along with it, or if the calmer year many hope for from Mr. Trump does not come to fruition, either because of new tariffs or other policy changes.
Even without a new shock to the system, there is a risk that the steady deterioration could continue. Veronica Clark, an economist at Citigroup, forecasts that sluggish monthly jobs growth and more muted wage gains will finally start to weigh on consumer spending next year. Higher unemployment will offset the benefits of larger tax refunds and other tailwinds, she predicts.
“If the labor market is really weakening, then those other things almost don’t matter,” Ms. Clark said.
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5) What We Know About U.S. Interceptions of Oil Tankers in Venezuela
A Venezuela-bound vessel fled after rebuffing an attempt by the Coast Guard to seize it, the latest twist in the escalating U.S. pressure campaign against the Maduro government.
By Genevieve Glatsky, Dec. 22, 2025
Genevieve Glatsky reported from Bogotá, Colombia.
“Mr. Trump and his advisers have pointed to another objective: gaining leverage over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest in the world and the backbone of its economy. Venezuela once welcomed American energy companies and Mr. Trump has indicated he wants access to those resources again.”
A frame grab from a video posted on social media by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, showed a helicopter flying over Centuries, another oil tanker, which was intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard on Saturday. Credit...Agence France-Presse, via U.S. Homeland Security Secretary
President Trump’s drive to crack down on vessels moving oil from Venezuela, an escalating part of his pressure campaign against the government of Nicolás Maduro, took an unusual turn over the weekend.
In the Caribbean Sea on Saturday, the U.S. Coast Guard tried to intercept a tanker called the Bella 1, which officials said was not flying a valid national flag, making it a stateless vessel subject to boarding under international law. U.S. officials had obtained a seizure warrant for the Bella 1 based on its prior involvement in the Iranian oil trade, but officials said the ship refused to submit and sailed away.
Here’s what we know about the situation.
The ship fled into the Atlantic Ocean.
Ship-tracking data showed the Bella 1 had been en route to load Venezuelan crude oil and was not carrying cargo. The vessel has been under U.S. sanctions since last year for transporting Iranian oil, which the authorities say was used to finance terrorism.
The Bella 1 had not yet entered Venezuelan waters and was not under naval escort. The cargo it was scheduled to pick up had been purchased by a Panamanian businessman recently put under sanctions by the United States for ties to the Maduro family, according to data from Venezuela’s state oil company.
U.S. forces approached the Bella 1 late on Saturday. But it refused to be boarded, instead turning and creating what one U.S. official described as “an active pursuit.”
By Sunday, the Bella 1 was still fleeing the Caribbean and was broadcasting distress signals to nearby ships, according to radio messages reviewed by The New York Times and first posted online by a maritime blogger. The vessel was traveling northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, more than 300 miles away from Antigua and Barbuda, the messages showed. By Sunday evening, Bella 1 had sent over 75 alerts.
It is not clear what steps the United States is taking to pursue the ship. The White House said Mr. Trump would make an announcement on Monday afternoon with his defense secretary and his navy secretary but provided no indication of the subject.
The tanker was one of two intercepted by the U.S. this weekend.
The Coast Guard on Saturday stopped and boarded the Centuries, a tanker that had recently loaded Venezuelan oil, reportedly for a Chinese trader. The U.S. authorities did not have a seizure warrant for the Panamanian-flagged vessel and said they were verifying the validity of its registration. It was unclear how long the ship would be detained.
On Dec. 10, the United States had seized another tanker, the Skipper, which was transporting Venezuelan crude but had earlier carried Iranian oil. The Skipper has been escorted to Galveston, Texas.
Mr. Maduro has responded by ordering the Venezuelan Navy to escort some tankers, raising the risk of armed confrontation at sea.
U.S. officials say the operations aim to weaken Maduro’s finances.
Trump administration officials have sought to justify the effort to curb tanker traffic in and out of Venezuela by arguing that it is necessary to choke off oil export revenue that funds narco-terrorism, according to officials. Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Maduro of stealing oil from American companies and using petroleum revenues to fund criminal activity, though he has offered no evidence for those claims.
The threat of additional seizures is already influencing tanker routes. Some vessels that appeared to be heading to Venezuela have turned around, according to global shipping monitors. Much of Venezuela’s oil is sold to China, some through Cuba, and some is licensed to the United States.
The actions have fueled uncertainty about the administration’s ultimate aims. Allowing most ships to continue operating would fall short of a true blockade — an act of war — and instead resemble a series of law enforcement operations.
Blocking the tankers is part of a larger anti-Maduro effort by the U.S.
The Trump administration spent the past few months building up a heavy military presence in the Caribbean under the banner of a counternarcotics campaign.
The United States has attacked boats the Trump administration says were smuggling drugs, killing at least 104 people. Mr. Trump has accused Venezuela of flooding the U.S. with fentanyl.
But Venezuela is not a drug producer and has no known role in the fentanyl trade. Most cocaine transiting the country is bound for Europe, and many legal experts say the strikes on the boats are unlawful.
Privately, U.S. officials say the campaign is aimed less at curbing drug trafficking than at removing Mr. Maduro, long accused by successive Democratic and Republican administrations of rigging elections, repressing dissent and committing human rights abuses.
More recently, Mr. Trump and his advisers have pointed to another objective: gaining leverage over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the largest in the world and the backbone of its economy. Venezuela once welcomed American energy companies and Mr. Trump has indicated he wants access to those resources again.
The targeted ships are part of a “ghost fleet.”
Experts estimate up to 20 percent of global tankers move oil from Iran, Venezuela and Russia in violation of U.S. sanctions. These ships often disguise their location and file false paperwork. The Bella 1, for instance, faked its location signal on a previous voyage.
U.S. officials say they have identified other tankers carrying Venezuelan oil whose previous involvement in the Iranian oil trade makes them subject to U.S. sanctions. Mr. Trump said last week that more seizures could follow, announcing a “complete blockade” of “sanctioned oil tankers” traveling to and from Venezuela. But at least one vessel boarded by U.S. forces, the Centuries, does not appear on the Treasury Department’s public sanctions list.
Venezuela’s government has condemned the boarding of the Centuries as theft and hijacking, accusing the United States of forcibly disappearing the crew.
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6) U.S. Housing Discrimination Complaints Rise as Support Network Thins
Accusations are up nearly 20 percent since 2014, according to a nonprofit, which warns that “the infrastructure for enforcing our nation’s fair housing laws is being dismantled.”
By Heather Senison, Dec. 22, 2025
A report by the National Fair Housing Alliance said there were 32,321 housing discrimination complaints in 2024. Jason Henry for The New York Times
Housing discrimination is on the rise in the United States, according to a new report, but fair housing advocates say the figures understate the scope of the problem.
The report, by the National Fair Housing Alliance, a nonprofit, said there were 32,321 complaints in 2024, drawing on data from fair housing organizations and government agencies. Complaints increased by more than 17 percent from 2014 to 2024 before a small drop. The highest number of complaints in recent years was in 2023, with 34,150.
The number of complaints has grown since 2014 for several reasons, including continuous efforts from nonprofits to educate the public about fair housing issues, said Lisa Rice, the alliance’s president and chief executive.
Of the 8,320 complaints from 2024 that were filed with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, along with state and local governments, 471 resulted in findings that discrimination had likely occurred, according to the report. An additional 1,755 complaints resulted in conciliations or settlements before an official finding.
Though 23,957 complaints were filed with fair housing organizations, an alliance representative said the amount that resulted in conciliations or settlements from them is not available. Another 44 complaints were filed with the Department of Justice.
But the number of complaints filed by the public may decline in the coming years, though that wouldn’t necessarily signal improvement, according to the report. Instead, because of funding cuts and policy changes, the number of organizations and federal employees equipped to handle complaints is shrinking.
“America is in the throes of a fair housing and affordable housing crisis and the infrastructure for enforcing our nation’s fair housing laws is being dismantled in a time when we need it most,” Ms. Rice said.
The report accounts for complaints made during the Biden presidency, but changes made under President Trump have prompted fears among housing advocates that people will be discouraged from reporting discrimination, she added.
Since Mr. Trump’s second term began, his administration has, among other changes, removed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s Special Purpose Credit Program, through which lenders offered down payment and closing cost assistance to low-income and minority home buyers.
Perhaps the most detrimental changes to fair housing policy in the last year, Ms. Rice said, are the funding and staffing cuts at the federal level.
Last winter, the Trump administration canceled roughly $30 million in federal grants for nonprofit fair housing organizations, which handled three-quarters of the complaints the National Fair Housing Alliance recorded for 2024.
A Massachusetts judge ordered the Department of Housing and Urban Development to release the grants in March, but some funds have yet to be issued and several nonprofits, including the Fair Housing Center of Nebraska-Iowa and the North Texas Fair Housing Center, remain closed as a result, according to an alliance spokesperson.
Staff at the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center, a nonprofit in Dayton, Ohio, were helping a mother who faced eviction after she was the victim of domestic violence when their grant was canceled, Ms. Rice said.
The nonprofit “was assisting her to make sure she could be safely housed when she returned from the hospital and their funding was cut,” Ms. Rice said. “I don’t think people realize how central housing is to every area and facet of your life.”
During the government shutdown this fall, the Trump administration reduced HUD’s staffing through layoffs, particularly to the Fair Housing Initiatives Program, which the department uses to issue grants to fair housing nonprofits. And in September, the administration fired two HUD civil rights lawyers over their participation in a whistle-blower report.
A HUD spokesperson said the agency had “inherited a deeply inefficient case system” and is working to restore fair housing enforcement to its core mission, adding that it completed more than 6,200 fair housing investigations in 2025, up from 5,777 in 2024.
“By managing fair housing discrimination complaints from HUD headquarters, we are addressing the backlog of cases and delivering better results,” the spokesperson said in an email.
Craig Gurian, the executive director of the New York-based Anti-Discrimination Center, said the HUD staffing cuts had weakened a system that was already not operating to its full potential.
“Even in what you think are better times, the fair housing part of the agency, which is a really small percentage of HUD overall, hasn’t been robustly funded and hasn’t had a robust view of what its mission is,” he said.
As in previous years, disability-related complaints in 2024, many involving inadequate accessibility accommodations, made up the largest share, accounting for more than 54 percent of all cases. Complaints based on national origin rose 8 percent year over year, reaching 1,836 last year, according to the report.
Most cases stemmed from the rental market, where there were 27,007 complaints, compared with 659 related to home sales and 220 tied to mortgage lending.
Regionally, the National Fair Housing Alliance found that the largest concentration of complaints was in California, Nevada and Arizona, with 9,386. But the high number in California had more to do with the state’s civil rights department and comprehensive network of fair housing agencies than a higher prevalence of discrimination, said Caroline Peattie, the executive director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, a nonprofit.
“There’s no question that there are more fair housing agencies like us in California, more than in other states, that are doing education and outreach so that people will learn about their fair housing rights and then call us,” Ms. Peattie said.
In New York City, the topic of fair housing often comes up in regards to co-ops, which can deny applications from potential home buyers without saying why. This leads to confusion for prospective buyers like Nitsan Shai who, in early 2020, received a rejection from a co-op in Park Slope, Brooklyn, for no given reason. Mr. Shai, who was 25 and worked at Google at the time, had a good income and no pets, he said. The experience left him questioning if it had to do with his age or race, both of which are federally protected classes.
When asked if he considered filing a complaint to a state agency, lawyer or nonprofit, Mr. Shai said it didn’t seem feasible at the time.
“I don’t know who I would have reported it to,” Mr. Shai said. “I looked it up online and there were dozens of cases that have gone to court and have all ruled in favor of the co-op.”
Amid the dwindling resources at the federal level, people who believe they are facing housing discrimination should first reach out to their local fair housing agency, which can be found on the alliance’s website, or submit a complaint directly to the alliance, Ms. Rice said.
“These organizations have boots on the ground and directly assist consumers facing fair housing and fair lending challenges,” she said.
Filing complaints with state and local governments is also an option, she added.
In New York City, the public advocate, Jumaane Williams, introduced a bill two years ago that would require co-ops to provide written explanations for buyer rejections. The City Council held a hearing on the proposal on Dec. 2, but closed its session on Dec. 18 without voting on it.
Neither Mayor Eric Adams nor his successor, Zohran Mamdani, have publicly backed the bill. Making co-op discrimination easier to identify was also one of the strategies named in an October report on improving fair housing protections in 2025 from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
In the meantime, many cases of housing discrimination are likely to go unreported, Mr. Gurian said.
“If people don’t feel like coming forward is going to do something for them, they tend not to come forward,” he said. “And if people see that it takes forever for cases to be processed, that’s another deterrent.”
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7) Thunberg Arrested at U.K. Protest Supporting Palestine Action Prisoners
The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was arrested after holding a sign that the police said showed support for the group Palestine Action, which Britain banned this year.
By Lizzie Dearden, Reporting from London, Dec. 23, 2025
The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg last month in Rome at a demonstration in solidarity with Gazans. Credit...Remo Casilli/Reuters
The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was arrested on Tuesday under terrorism laws in Britain for holding a placard that the police said showed support for the banned group Palestine Action, her lawyer and organizers of the protest said.
Ms. Thunberg, 22, joined a protest in London’s financial district on Tuesday morning that opposed the treatment of people being held in prisons before trials relating to Palestine Action activities, most for property damage at Israel-linked weapon firms. Several of those being held have gone on hunger strike.
Video released by the protest organizers, a separate group called Prisoners for Palestine, showed Ms. Thunberg sitting on a sidewalk holding a handwritten sign reading, “I support Palestine Action prisoners. I oppose genocide.” The video shows a police officer asking her to stand up and taking the sign. As protesters shout “Free, free Palestine,” a person is heard heckling off camera, saying, “Take the terrorist away.”
In a statement, the City of London Police said that a 22-year-old woman had been arrested “for displaying an item (in this case a placard) in support of a proscribed organization (in this case Palestine Action) contrary to Section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000.” The statement did not name Ms. Thunberg, in accordance with rules barring British police from identifying suspects before they are charged.
In a statement, Raj Chada, a lawyer representing Ms. Thunberg, said: “Our client has been arrested under the U.K.’s farcical terror laws. The U.K.’s global reputation for human rights is in tatters whilst these laws remain in place.”
Ms. Thunberg gained global recognition for her environmental activism as a teenager. This year, she joined a flotilla that tried to deliver aid by sea to Gaza but was intercepted by the Israeli authorities. She has voiced support for Britain’s Prisoners for Palestine group on her Instagram page.
Ms. Thunberg was arrested under a law that has been used to arrest more than 2,000 people since Palestine Action was banned as a terrorist group in July. The law makes it a crime to wear, carry or display items that “arouse reasonable suspicion” of support for banned organizations and can be punished with up to six months in prison. Most of the arrests have been for holding signs with the phrase “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
Palestine Action is the first organization to have been declared a terrorist group under part of Britain’s legal definition of terrorism that covers “serious damage to property” for a political cause, rather than violence against people.
The Palestine Action ban is being challenged by its co-founder at the High Court in London as unlawful and disproportionate.
The group had used property damage, particularly spraying red paint, as a tactic in protests that mainly targeted subsidiaries of the Israeli weapon manufacturer Elbit Systems and other companies that the group accused of links to the Gaza conflict.
Tuesday’s protest was held outside the offices of an insurance company in the City of London, the financial district. Protest organizers said the company had provided services to Elbit Systems U.K.
In a statement, the City of London Police said the demonstration started about 7 a.m. on Tuesday, when protesters used hammers and red paint to damage the building. Aside from Ms. Thunberg, a man and a woman were arrested on suspicion of criminal damage.
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8) Trump’s Seizures of Oil Tankers Challenge Maritime Rules and Customs
Recent U.S. actions against ships near Venezuela may embolden other countries to seize or detain ships, legal experts said.
By Peter Eavis, Dec. 24, 2025
The U.S. government seized the Skipper, an oil tanker, in the Caribbean Sea this month after obtaining a warrant from a federal court. Credit...2025 Planet Labs, via Reuters
President Trump’s recent actions against tankers near Venezuela, the dramatic seizure of a vessel called Skipper and the detention of another called Centuries, appear to bend international maritime laws and customs, legal experts say.
Countries have authority to seize vessels in their territorial waters. But policing international waters can be difficult, which is why large numbers of vessels transport illicit or dubious cargo often with impunity. The United Nations has established rules for shipping under its Convention on the Law of the Sea. While the United States has adopted many of the rules in practice, it has not ratified the convention.
The Trump administration’s actions differ in crucial ways from the approach that other administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first one, took toward ships engaged in trade the government wanted to restrict. By moving so forcefully, legal experts say, the president may embolden other countries to use similar tactics when it suits them. If such seizures and detentions become more common, that could hurt the shipping industry and international trade.
Previously, the United States typically put pressure on foreign shipping companies to direct their vessels to a place where they would give up oil and other products targeted by the U.S. government. In 2020, the Trump administration used this approach to remove Iranian fuel from four Greek-owned tankers destined for Venezuela.
That method avoided the potentially provocative step of using the U.S. military to take over ships in international waters, which are supposed to be neutral.
“That’s what I think is novel about this,” said Francisco RodrÃguez, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning research organization.
Now, some analysts fear that the recent seizure and detention will undermine the rules and customs that have for decades maintained order on the high seas.
Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a research institute that favors restraint in foreign policy, said other countries, particularly China, might conclude that they, too, could take similar steps.
“This would be a precedent that they could fall back on,” she said, “that they were only doing what the United States had indicated was legal.”
Dozens of tankers have been carrying oil and other products in and out of Venezuela, whose main oil company has been placed under sanctions by the Treasury Department. To avoid detection, the vessels sometimes switch off location transmitters. They may also sail under a false flag. And the ships’ owners or operators have been known to take steps to hide their identities and links to the vessels.
China, the biggest importer of Venezuelan oil, has condemned the U.S. actions. On Monday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Beijing opposed any moves that “infringe on the sovereignty and security of other countries, or constitute acts of unilateral bullying.”
White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.
“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” Mr. Trump said this month on Truth Social, his social media platform. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before.”
The United States obtained a warrant from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to seize the Skipper, which is on an American sanctions list. Legal analysts said the boarding may have been legal under international law because the tanker was apparently sailing under a flag that it was not authorized to use, a violation of U.N. maritime rules. The Skipper was using the flag of Guyana, but the Guyanese government said the vessel was not registered in the country.
Even so, some experts on sanctions said the Trump administration’s actions appeared at odds with longstanding maritime practices.
“This differs from past seizures, which generally involved the cooperation of the vessel’s owner or charterer,” said David Tannenbaum, director at Blackstone Compliance Services and a former sanctions compliance officer at the Treasury Department.
The Centuries was flying a Panamanian flag. Panama’s foreign minister later said the vessel had not respected the country’s maritime rules.
The American authorities did not have a warrant to take possession of Centuries, a U.S. official told The New York Times. It was also not on a public list of vessels under U.S. sanctions. But some lawyers said other laws allowed the United States to seize assets that were not on sanctions lists.
“The federal terrorism-related seizure statute allows extraterritorial seizures,” said Jeremy Paner, a partner specializing in sanctions law at Hughes Hubbard, a law firm.
While U.S. law authorizes the government to seize property outside American territory, the government has to go to federal court to gain ownership of the seized assets, and may face challenges from the owners of those assets.
Mr. Paner said be believed that Venezuela would challenge the latest American actions in U.S. federal court. “It’ll likely take years to resolve,” he said.
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9) The Truce Is 2 Months Old. So Why Have Hundreds of Gazans Been Killed?
Since the cease-fire took effect, Israel says it has targeted only militants. But death can come for Gazans while on a family outing or sleeping in a tent.
By David M. Halbfinger, Bilal Shbair and Aaron Boxerman, Visuals by Saher Alghorra, Dec. 24, 2025
Bilal Shbair reported from the Gaza Strip. David Halbfinger and Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem.
A Palestinian man carried the body of a child in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza on Oct. 20, after an Israeli strike on an area where displaced people had set up tents.
The cease-fire in Gaza is more than two months old. But the killing of Palestinians has not yet stopped for more than a day or two at a time.
Death can come from straying across the Yellow Line, the poorly demarcated border between eastern Gaza, where the Israeli military has entrenched itself, and the western half, where Hamas is seeking to reestablish control over Gaza’s two million-plus residents.
Dozens of times since the truce went into effect on Oct. 10, Palestinians have been killed for crossing east, knowingly or not.
Palestinians say the continued bloodshed shows that Israel does not respect the cease-fire and is cavalier, at best, about the lives of Gazan civilians. The Israeli military says it has opened fire only in response to violations of the cease-fire, and that its rules of engagement permit targeting only people it perceives as threats.
Death can come from being related to the wrong person, as it did for much of the Abu Dalal family in Nuseirat. When Israel targeted two cousins on Oct. 29 — it said they were both local militant commanders — overnight missile strikes destroyed both their homes. One of the men was killed. So were 18 other members of their extended family, including two 3-year-olds.
For Maysaa al-Attar, 30, a pharmacy student, death came from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was shot in the abdomen as she slept in her parents’ tent in northwest Gaza on the morning of Nov. 14. Three weeks earlier, they’d set up the tent on the ruins of their family home.
For Ali al-Hashash, 32, death came at about 8 a.m. on Nov. 6 while foraging for firewood east of the Yellow Line to help feed his pregnant wife, whose due date was days away, and their 4-year-old son. There was no cooking gas in the Bureij refugee camp where they lived, according to his father, Hasan al-Hashash.
It’s a risk that many people in Gaza are taking as the cold sets in. On Dec. 18, Mr. al-Hashash’s friend, Saeed al-Awawda, 66, was shot while collecting wood in the same area, Mr. al-Hashash said. “He lost his hand,” he said. “I keep thinking, ‘I wish my son had only lost his hand, too, not his life.’”
Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, said the army’s procedures were designed to avoid civilian casualties. When Palestinians who are not clearly armed cross over to the Israeli side of the Yellow Line, he said, soldiers are under orders to warn them to turn around and as a last resort to stop them by firing at their lower legs.
He said that Hamas militants in civilian clothes, sometimes with concealed weapons, were probing across the Yellow Line, making almost anyone approaching Israeli positions appear as a potential threat.
“The majority of cases, the violations are by Hamas,” Colonel Shoshani said. “And in the majority of cases where it’s not Hamas, we’re able to warn people, and they turn around.”
The Israeli military was unable to address the death of Ms. al-Attar, of which it said it was unaware.
Palestinian officials say that 406 people have been killed since the cease-fire, including 157 children. That is nothing like the carnage of the previous two years of war, which began with the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed, and prompted an Israeli invasion of Gaza in which local health officials say 70,000 people have been killed — an average of hundreds each week.
But the mounting body count highlights the fragility of the truce, with a difficult-to-discern border, bitter enemies in proximity and Palestinian militants sometimes emerging from tunnels on the Israeli-held side and opening fire on Israeli soldiers.
The imbalance in the numbers killed on each side also reflects the continuation, despite the cease-fire, of the Israeli military’s harsh wartime practices of hitting back with punishing force and allowing strikes on militants even when they risk killing large numbers of civilians.
A Family Outing With No Return
On Oct. 17, a week into the cease-fire, a dozen members of the Shaban and Abu Shaban families piled into a van in Gaza City for an outing. Trusting in the relative safety of the truce, they set out from the cramped tent encampment where they were living to visit their two homes in Zeitoun, a largely destroyed neighborhood to the southeast. One was perilously close to the as-yet-unmarked Yellow Line.
Othman Shaban, 14, was along for the ride. He said the family arrived at one of its two houses to see what was left. Then, he recalled, “My father said, ‘Let’s go check our other house.’ We were enjoying our time as we left.”
He said he and his father, who was at the wheel, had collected firewood in the area on foot several times recently, so they believed it was safe.
Othman said their van encountered rubble blocking the road. “I got out of the car and moved the stones off the path,” he said.
That saved him. As his father rolled the van forward to pick him up again, he said, “I suddenly heard an explosion.”
Othman suffered neck and leg wounds. Everyone in the van was killed: his parents, three of his siblings — a sister, Nisma, 16, and brothers Anas, 12, and Karam, 10 — Mr. Abu Shaban’s sister, her husband, their daughter Jumana, 9, and their sons Naser, 12, Ibrahim, 6, and Muhammad, 4.
A relative who stayed behind, Mohammed Abu Shaban, said he believed that Othman’s father may have unwittingly driven toward the Yellow Line. The Israeli military later marked it with yellow-painted concrete blocks.
“Gaza is so devastated that it’s easy to lose your way,” Mr. Abu Shaban said.
The Israeli military said in a statement that its forces had fired warning shots at “a suspicious vehicle” which had crossed the unmarked line, but that the vehicle continued toward them “in a way that caused an imminent threat to them” and that the “troops opened fire to remove the threat.”
Colonel Shoshani added that the distance from the Yellow Line to Israeli territory was only “a two-minute drive” in many places.
But Othman said there had been no warning shots, just the explosion that killed his family.
Othman’s description of the location of the attack — on Salah al-Din Road, a major Gaza artery, hundreds of yards west of the Yellow Line — is also at odds with the Israeli military’s. In his telling, the van was not so close to Israeli-held territory that it could have been perceived as threatening to cross it.
The military says there was no attack at the spot that Othman described.
Civil Defense rescuers waited nearly a day to receive Israeli permission to collect the bodies from the burned vehicle, Mr. Abu Shaban said. They found just nine — or “eight and a half,” he said, to be morbidly precise.
Two Targeted, 18 Others Killed
Despite the truce, militants in Gaza have sporadically opened fire on Israeli soldiers. Each time, Israel has responded with overwhelming force against broad sets of targets far from the attack locations.
On Oct. 28, a sniper killed an Israeli soldier in Rafah — the third Israeli soldier killed since the cease-fire, and, to date, the last of the war. That night, Israel attacked in response, killing at least 100 people across Gaza.
It was midnight in Nuseirat, about 16 miles north of Rafah, when missiles struck the first of two homes belonging to the extended Abu Dalal family.
The following day, the Israeli military said it had targeted 25 terrorists in Gaza, including Yahya Abu Dalal and Nazmi Abu Dalal, who it said were commanders in the militant group Islamic Jihad.
The military said nothing about civilian casualties.
Amr Al-Sabakhi, 20, was in his home across the street when he said two missiles hit the home of his aunt Hala, the wife of Yahya Abu Dalal, 50. He rushed outside to try to help and found his cousin Bayan, 15, dead, his body split in two. Yahya and Hala were both dead. Bayan’s three brothers were also dead, including 11-year-old Mostafa, as were other members of the extended family, including twin 3-year-old boys.
Another neighbor, Muhammad Qasem, 41, said his mother suffered a deep scalp wound from the blast. “I always feared that house would be struck,” he said of the Abu Dalal home, nodding to the prospect that Yahya Abu Dalal could be targeted by Israel. But, he added, “I thought at least there would be a prior warning, so the neighbors wouldn’t be harmed.” There was none, he said.
Colonel Shoshani, the Israeli military spokesman, said that planned airstrikes went through a “rigorous process of approval.” While Israel warns civilians before attacking buildings or other infrastructure, it does not when seeking to eliminate specific enemy targets, lest they escape — and “there’s no army in the world that does,” he said.
He did not say whether Israel was unaware of the presence of so many civilians or determined that the targets justified the risk that so many civilians could be killed.
Other members of the Abu Dalal clan came running to try to help after the airstrike, including Nizar Abu Dalal, 48, who lived around the corner.
He returned home a couple of hours later, according to his wife, Iman Abu Dalal.
Their daughter, Dareen, 23, said she and her mother talked about whether to leave but decided they had nowhere safer to go.
A little after 3:30 a.m., Iman Abu Dalal said, “I heard the whistling sound of a missile,” then felt herself being thrown and rolling violently, before blacking out.
Dareen, two of her siblings, and her toddler daughter, Shatha, all survived the strike. Her father Nizar was killed, as was a 24-year-old brother, Majd, who was set to be married in November. Instead, his body was found days after the strike, crushed between slabs of concrete.
The Israeli military defended the strikes on the homes, saying the two targets, Yahya and Nazmi Abu Dalal, “had for years been involved in directing and leading terrorist activities” against Israel.
Upstairs from Nizar’s home, where Nazmi, his brother, lived, the carnage was far worse.
Nazmi, the target of the second airstrike, was wounded but survived. No one in his immediately family did.
His wife was killed, as were their seven children, who ranged in age from 21-year-old Baraa to 8-year-old Zeinab.
Baraa had painted her nails that afternoon, her cousin Dareen said.
When the results of the Tawjihi, the college-eligibility exam for Palestinian high school seniors, were published a few weeks later, one daughter, 18-year-old Duha, had received a score of 96.7 percent.
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.
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