On Saturday, April 5 we will convene an Emergency National March on Washington D.Cto call for an immediate arms embargo on Israel and demand an end to the genocide in Palestine and the deportation campaign against students. The demonstration will be more than an act of protest; it is a pivotal moment to stand against the racist billionaire agenda of the Trump administration that alongside Israel is attempting to fully complete the genocide of the Palestinian people, while wreaking havoc on the people of the US who stand against genocide and the repeal of our civil liberties at home. The time to organize and consolidate a force to struggle against Trump's slew of anti-working class executive orders, the deportation assaults on immigrant students & communities, the reeling back of LGBTQ+ and women's rights, and more is right now! We must stay organized and we must stay in the streets for our rights and for the total liberation of Palestine. See you in DC!
🗓️ April 5 🕐 1 PM
📍 Washington DC
➡️ To buy bus tickets or register a bus transportation hub, visit marchforpalestine.org/bus
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STOP GENOCIDE!
DEFEND STUDENTS!
National Mass Mobilization to Fight Back Against
Trump and Musk
Saturday, April 5, 2025
1:00 P.M. - 3:00 P.M.
Civic Center Plaza
335 McAllister Street
San Francisco
Join INDIVISIBLE SF, our friends at 50501, and many other organizations for a national Mass Mobilization on April 5.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk think this country belongs to them. San Francisco is fighting back!
They're taking everything they can get their hands on—our health care, our data, our jobs, our services—and daring the world to stop them. This is a crisis, and the time to act is now.
On Saturday, April 5th, we're taking to the streets to fight back with a clear message: Hands off!
This mass mobilization day is our message to the world that we do not consent to the destruction of our government and our economy for the benefit of Trump and his billionaire allies. Alongside Americans across the country, we are marching, rallying, and protesting to demand a stop the chaos and build an opposition movement against the looting of our country.
A core principle behind all Hands Off! events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values.
Check out handsoff2025.com for more information.
HandsOff Mobilize link here:
https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff/event/764837/
Indivisible Mobilize link here:
https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/event/764736/
Source:: https://www.mobilize.us/handsoff/event/764837/
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How Trump Got Rich
It had nothing to do with brains!
President Trump’s executive order sent a signal to Republicans that the administration was serious about winding down the Education Department. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesSome excerpts from Wikipedia:
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital in the New York City borough of Queens, the fourth child of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. He is of German and Scottish descent. He grew up with his older siblings, Maryanne, Fred Jr., and Elizabeth, and his younger brother, Robert, in a mansion in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. Fred Trump paid his children each about $20,000 a year, equivalent to $265,000 a year in 2024. Trump was a millionaire at age eight by contemporary standards. Trump attended the private Kew-Forest School through seventh grade.
He was a difficult child and showed an early interest in his father’s business. His father enrolled him in New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, to complete secondary school. Trump considered a show business career but instead in 1964 enrolled at Fordham University. Two years later, he transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics.
He was exempted from the draft during the Vietnam War due to a claim of bone spurs in his heels. …Starting in 1968, Trump was employed at his father’s real estate company, Trump Management, which owned racially segregated middle-class rental housing in New York City’s outer boroughs.
In 1971, his father made him president of the company and he began using the Trump Organization as an umbrella brand. Roy Cohn was Trump’s fixer, lawyer, and mentor for 13 years in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1973, Cohn helped Trump countersue the U.S. government for $100 million (equivalent to $708 million in 2024) over its charges that Trump’s properties had racially discriminatory practices. Trump’s counterclaims were dismissed, and the government’s case was settled with the Trumps signing a consent decree agreeing to desegregate; four years later, Trumps again faced the courts when they were found in contempt of the decree.
Before age thirty, he showed his propensity for litigation, no matter the outcome and cost; even when he lost, he described the case as a win. Helping Trump projects, Cohn was a consigliere whose Mafia connections controlled construction unions. Cohn introduced political consultant Roger Stone to Trump, who enlisted Stone’s services to deal with the federal government.
Between 1991 and 2009, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six of his businesses: the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, the casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts company.
In 1992, Trump, his siblings Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert, and his cousin John W. Walter, each with a 20 percent share, formed All County Building Supply & Maintenance Corp. The company had no offices and is alleged to have been a shell company for paying the vendors providing services and supplies for Trump’s rental units, then billing those services and supplies to Trump Management with markups of 20–50 percent and more.
The owners shared the proceeds generated by the markups. The increased costs were used to get state approval for increasing the rents of his rent-stabilized units. …Trump has said he began his career with “a small loan of a million dollars” from his father and that he had to pay it back with interest.
He borrowed at least $60 million from his father, largely did not repay the loans, and received another $413 million (2018 equivalent, adjusted for inflation) from his father’s company.
Posing as a Trump Organization official named “John Barron,” Trump called journalist Jonathan Greenberg in 1984, trying to get a higher ranking on the Forbes 400 list of wealthy Americans. Trump self-reported his net worth over a wide range: from a low of minus $900 million in 1990, to a high of $10 billion in 2015. In 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.3 billion and ranked him the 1,438th wealthiest person in the world.
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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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 Kagarlitsky
We, 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 Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The 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.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
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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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
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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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Cornell Student Who Faced Deportation Says He Has Left U.S.
Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student who had been suspended by the university after participating in pro-Palestinian protests, said he “took the decision to leave the United States.”
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg, April 1, 2025
Mr. Taal said that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel had come to his home and revoked his visa. Credit...Momodou Taal
A British-Gambian Ph.D. student at Cornell University who had faced possible deportation after participating in pro-Palestinian protests said on Monday that he had left the United States.
The student, Momodou Taal, who had been suspended by the university several times, including for participating in what it said was an unruly protest, is one of at least nine international students that the Trump administration has sought to remove from the country because of activities it calls antisemitic.
Mr. Taal had not been detained, unlike some of the other students, and had filed a suit attempting to block the legal proceedings against him.
In a statement on the social media platform X, Mr. Taal indicated that he had left the country. “I took the decision to leave the United States, free and with my head held high,” Mr. Taal wrote. He said that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel had come to his home and revoked his visa. There was no immediate reply from the agency to a request for comment.
“Given what we have seen across the United States, I have lost faith that a favorable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs,” he said in the statement. He warned that others were also at risk and renewed his support for Palestinians.
Mr. Taal had been one of the leaders of a tent protest on the campus lawn at Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y., in which students urged the university to divest its holdings in companies that they said supported Israel’s military campaign against Hamas militants in Gaza. On Oct. 7, 2023, the day that Hamas attacked Israel and set off the war, he wrote online, “Glory to the Resistance.”
After returning to office in January, President Trump signed an executive order saying that the United States would use “all available and appropriate legal tools” to “remove” aliens who engage in “unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”
Last month, ICE personnel detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student. They have also sought others, including Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident who moved to the United States from South Korea when she was 7.
Officials in the Trump administration have argued in several cases that a “visa is a privilege, not a right.” Civil rights advocates have called the deportation effort one of the biggest assaults on free speech in the United States in decades.
Mr. Taal, who holds joint British and Gambian citizenship, was in the United States on a student visa. He had been working toward a Ph.D. in Africana studies.
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2) Israel’s Military Strikes Near Beirut, Killing at Least 4
The attack on the outskirts of Lebanon’s capital was the second in less than a week, raising fears that a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah could unravel.
By Euan Ward and Yan Zhuang, Published March 31, 2025, Updated April 1, 2025
Euan Ward reported from Beirut, Lebanon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/world/middleeast/israel-strike-lebanon-beirut.html
Israel launched airstrikes on the southern outskirts of Beirut on Tuesday for the second time in less than a week, killing at least four people and prompting fears that a fragile cease-fire could be unraveling.
The Israeli military said the strike, in the Dahiya area just south of Beirut, had targeted Hassan Ali Mahmoud Bdeir, a member of Hezbollah and Iran’s elite Quds Force, who had directed and assisted Hamas in planning a “significant and imminent” attack against Israel. It did not provide further details. Hezbollah made no immediate comment on the overnight strike.
The airstrikes, which came without an evacuation warning, killed at least four people and wounded several others, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, said the attack was a “clear breach” of a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hezbollah that was agreed to in November. The truce halted Lebanon’s deadliest war in decades, but a recent uptick in violence and tension has stoked concerns of a creeping escalation.
Despite the truce, Israel has repeatedly attacked purported Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, while the militant group has so far refrained from responding. Experts say that Hezbollah, battered by the 14-month war with Israel, has little impetus to risk sparking another conflict while it struggles to recover.
But Palestinian armed groups like Hamas — a key ally of Hezbollah — also maintain a sizable presence in Lebanon, operating mostly from decades-old refugee camps. During the war in Gaza, these groups intermittently launched rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel.
“We expect the Lebanese government to act against the terrorist elements that operate from their territory,” Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, said at a briefing on Tuesday. “We see cooperation between Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah on Lebanese soil.”
On Friday, the Israeli military also launched airstrikes in the Dahiya after telling residents in a densely populated neighborhood there to evacuate. It was the first time since the cease-fire that the Lebanese capital had been targeted. The attack came hours after rockets were fired at northern Israel from Lebanese territory.
Hezbollah denied any involvement in that attack on Israel and said that it remained committed to the cease-fire. The Israeli military said it had targeted a site that stored Hezbollah’s drones; it also attacked targets in southern Lebanon in response to the rocket fire, killing three people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry.
Hezbollah began firing rockets and drones at Israeli positions in solidarity with Hamas after that group led an attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. After nearly a year of low-level fighting, the violence escalated into full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah, killing nearly 4,000 people and leaving swaths of Lebanon in ruins.
It was Lebanon’s deadliest and most destructive conflict since the country’s 15-year civil war ended in 1990.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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3) U.N. Accuses Israel of Killing 15 Rescue Workers in Gaza
The United Nations said Israeli forces killed the people as they were trying to aid injured civilians, then buried them in a mass grave. Israel said nine of the 15 dead were Palestinian militants.
By Vivian Yee and Farnaz Fassihi, April 1, 2025
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo, and Farnaz Fassihi from the United Nations.
The funeral for people who were killed in Gaza last month, marked by the logo of the Palestinian Red Crescent aid group in Khan Younis, on Monday. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
As Israeli forces advanced on the southern Gaza city of Rafah before dawn last Sunday, an ambulance crew set out to evacuate civilians wounded by Israeli shelling. But the ambulance and its crew were hit on the way.
Several more ambulances and a fire truck headed to the scene over the next few hours to rescue them, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, as did a U.N. vehicle, the United Nations said. Seventeen people were dispatched in total.
Then they all went silent.
It took five days for the United Nations and Red Crescent to negotiate with the Israeli military for safe passage to search for the missing people. After receiving clearance, U.N. officials said, the retrieval team found 15 dead, most of their bodies dumped in a mass grave.
On Sunday, the United Nations said Israel had killed them — a rare accusation by the organization, which is typically cautious about assigning clear blame.
“They were killed by Israeli forces while trying to save lives,” the U.N. humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, said on X. “We demand answers & justice.”
The Red Crescent, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations said all of those killed were humanitarian workers who should never have come under attack. The Red Crescent called the killings a war crime and demanded accountability.
An Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said on X on Monday that nine of those killed were Palestinian militants. He said Israeli forces “did not randomly attack” an ambulance, but that several vehicles “were identified advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals toward Israeli troops, prompting them to shoot.
U.N. officials said the vehicles were clearly marked as rescue vehicles.
Colonel Shoshani said that during the attack, Israeli forces killed a Hamas military operative, Mohammad Amin Ibrahim Shubaki, who participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel that sparked the war in Gaza.
He said Israeli forces had also killed eight other operatives from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group. He accused militants of “once again exploiting medical facilities and equipment for their activities.”
He did not directly say whether the militants were in the emergency vehicles or address the identities of the other six people killed.
After firing on the vehicles, U.N. officials said, Israeli forces bulldozed and crushed the ambulances, a fire truck and the U.N. vehicle.
The Red Crescent said one medic was still missing. The lone survivor, a Red Crescent worker, was detained, beaten and released by Israeli forces the same day, according to the aid group. He told colleagues that Israeli forces had killed both of the other crew members in his ambulance, the Red Crescent and U.N. officials said.
Of the 17 people involved, 10 were Red Crescent workers, six were emergency responders from Gaza’s civil defense and one was a U.N. worker, U.N. officials said.
The top U.N. humanitarian official in Gaza, Jonathan Whittall, joined the retrieval team and posted photos on X showing the crumpled vehicles — husks of mangled metal jutting from the sand. The large navy-blue “N” on the U.N. vehicle was still visible on it.
“One by one, they were hit, they were struck. Their bodies were gathered and buried in this mass grave,” he said in a video message shared by the United Nations.
Days after they went missing, the U.N. team looking for them witnessed new scenes of chaos and violence in Rafah, including “hundreds of civilians fleeing under gunfire,” Mr. Whittall said on X. One woman was shot in the back of the head, he said.
He posted a video showing what he said came next: Two men walked toward the road, apparently to retrieve the woman’s body. Then one of them was shot, too. Mr. Whittall did not say who fired the shots.
On Thursday, the U.N. convoy found the crumpled vehicles, U.N. officials said. Hours of digging yielded one body, a civil defense worker buried beneath his firetruck, Mr. Whittall said. They returned for the remaining bodies on Sunday.
Mr. Whittall narrated the search for the bodies in the video message.
“We’re digging them out in their uniforms, with their gloves on,” he said. “They were here to save lives. Instead, they ended up in a mass grave.”
The grave, he said, was marked with the emergency light from one of the destroyed ambulances.
Colonel Shoshani, the Israeli military spokesman, said the vehicles, unlike others along the same route earlier that day, had not received permission from Israeli forces to be there.
Nebal Farsakh, a Palestine Red Crescent Society spokeswoman, said that when the ambulances set out around 3:30 a.m. on March 23, Israeli forces had not yet closed off the area as a “red zone,” where ambulances must clear their movements with Israel.
Israel did not immediately address the accusations of burying people in mass graves or crushing their vehicles.
In all, the Red Crescent said, 27 of its medics have been killed since the war began.
A cease-fire paused fighting in Gaza from January until March 18, when Israel broke it.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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4) Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.
By M. Gessen, Opinion Columnist, April 2, 2025
Mike Osborne for The New York Times
“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.
“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.
Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”
It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.
It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment.
It’s the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of judges and lawyers. A federal judge ordered flights carrying the Venezuelan men to be turned around and demanded information about the abductees. Another federal judge forbade the government to deport, without notice, Rasha Alawieh, the Brown University medical school professor who was detained on return from a trip to Lebanon. Another judge prohibited moving Rumeysa Ozturk from Massachusetts without notice. The executive branch apparently ignored these rulings.
It’s the chilling stories that come by word of mouth. ICE is checking documents on the subway. ICE is outside New York public libraries that hold English-as-a-second-language classes. ICE agents handcuffed a U.S. citizen who tried to intervene in a detention in Harlem. ICE vehicles are parked outside Columbia. ICE is coming to your workplace, your street, your building. ICE agents are wearing brown uniforms that resemble those of UPS — don’t open the door for deliveries. Don’t leave the house. The streets in the New York neighborhoods with the highest immigrant populations have emptied out.
It’s the invisible hand of the authorities. The media outlet Zeteo reports that Homeland Security employees are revoking foreign students’ status in the database that’s usually maintained by universities. (Normally, once a person has entered the country on a valid academic visa, they have the right to stay as long as they remain in the program for which the visa was granted — this is what university administrators track.) These changes have reportedly been made with no notification and in the absence of any transparent process. Of course, the Department of Homeland Security, when it was created in the wake of 9/11, was meant to function in opaque ways and with broad authority; it was designed to be a secret-police force. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has bragged to reporters about revoking the legal status of upward of 300 people and promised there would be more: “We’re looking every day for these lunatics.”
It’s the shifting goal posts. They are taking not only people who are in the United States without legal status but also those who are here on a visitor’s visa and then also legal permanent residents. They are targeting not only people who have criminal convictions but also those whom they say they suspect of belonging to a gang and also those who participated in or supported campus protests and then also someone, like Ozturk, who merely wrote, with three other people, an opinion essay in a student newspaper.
And then there was a German green card holder at Boston’s Logan Airport who was allegedly stripped and deprived of sleep and his medications by Customs and Border Protection — actions that could fit the legal definition of torture. (The agency has denied the allegations.) And a Canadian with a job offer who was detained at the southern border and held for 12 days. And another German, a tourist, who was detained at the southern border and held for more than six weeks. And a Russian biomedical researcher at Harvard who was detained coming back from France and has been in the infamous detention facility in Louisiana for over a month.
It’s the way we dig down for the details of these stories to reassure ourselves that this won’t happen to us, or that there is some logic to these arrests. The German man had a misdemeanor charge a decade ago. The Canadian was possibly using a crossing not meant for people submitting work visa applications. The other German, a tattoo artist, was carrying her equipment and customs agents might have suspected that she was planning to work illegally. The Russian scientist was bringing in frog embryos that the Department of Homeland Security says she did not declare properly. When the range of factors that can get a person arrested stretches from political speech to a paperwork error, we are in territory described by the Russian saying, “Give us a person and we’ll find the infraction.”
And, as the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, if due process is routinely denied to noncitizens, it will be denied to citizens too, simply because it is often impossible for people to prove that they are citizens. This has happened before, when an unknown number of U.S. citizens were caught up in the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans in the late 1920s and 1930s.
It’s the lists. More than anything else, in fact, it’s the lists. A private company has launched an app called ICERAID, billed as a “protocol that delegates intelligence-gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies.” The app promises rewards for “capturing and uploading images of criminal illegal alien activity” and possibly even bigger rewards for self-reporting — for adding oneself to the ICERAID registry if one is “an honest, hard-working undocumented immigrant with no criminal history.” The app, in other words, combines two time-tested secret-police techniques: incentivizing some people to denounce their neighbors and inducing others to add themselves to registries.
It’s the denunciations by concerned citizens. Before there was ICERAID, there were several groups compiling lists of people they consider antisemitic, especially university students and faculty. These organizations include Mothers Against College Antisemitism, a Facebook group with more than 60,000 members; Betar U.S., a Zionist organization so extreme-right that the Anti-Defamation League has denounced it; and several other groups that, since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, have been reporting people to government authorities and cheering when they are detained, deported or fired. When Rubio was asked if the State Department is using lists fed to it by these private groups, he said, “We’re not going to talk about the process by which we’re identifying it because obviously we’re looking for more people.”
The state appears to have outsourced surveillance. A Columbia professor shared an Instagram story by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei that showed Elon Musk’s “X” symbol rotating and morphing into a swastika. The professor did it on personal time, from a personal residence, to a personal account. An Instagram story lives only for 24 hours; someone was watching. It was reported to the university; three months passed before the professor was cleared. Then the professor’s name and picture, along with a new inventory of ostensible offenses, popped up on one of those lists of supposedly antisemitic faculty members. There was, of course, nothing antisemitic about the Instagram story or the rest of it. The professor, like so many of the people on these lists, is Jewish.
Last Friday, mere minutes after Columbia announced the name of its new interim president, Claire Shipman, an entity that calls itself Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus addressed Shipman on X: “We have identified faculty members” who, the group believes, should be purged. The self-appointed enforcers are vigilant. This, too, is a hallmark of a secret-police state.
The citizens of such a state live with a feeling of being constantly watched. They live with a sense of random danger. Anyone — a passer-by, the man behind you in line at the deli, the woman who lives down the hall, your building’s super, your own student, your child’s teacher — can be a plainclothes agent or a self-appointed enforcer. People live in growing isolation and with the feeling of low-level dread, and these are the defining conditions of living in a secret-police state. People lose the ability to plan for the future, because they feel that they have no control over their lives, and they try to make themselves invisible. They move through the world without looking, for fear of seeing too much.
But while we are still capable of looking, we have to say what we see: The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before.
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5) Israel Is Expanding Gaza Offensive, Defense Minister Says, Squeezing Hamas
Israel Katz warned that “large areas” of the enclave would be seized and added to military-controlled security zones, suggesting that the country intended to hold on to more territory.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 2, 2025
The site of a strike in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Wednesday. Credit...Hatem Khaled/Reuters
Israel’s defense minister announced on Wednesday an expansion of its military offensive in Gaza, including plans to seize “large areas” of the enclave, an apparent attempt to pile more pressure on Hamas as efforts to restore a shattered cease-fire falter.
The remarks, which echoed a similar threat by the minister, Israel Katz, last month, suggest that Israel intends to hold captured territory, at least temporarily, in a shift from earlier tactics. In the 15-month military campaign that preceded the January truce, Israeli forces stormed Gazan cities before withdrawing, leaving behind vast destruction but allowing Palestinian militants to regroup in the rubble.
Mr. Katz said newly captured territory would be “added to the security zones” that the military currently maintains in Gaza, which include a buffer along the enclave’s borders with Egypt and Israel, and much of a key road in the center of the enclave.
He added that the expanding operation involved “wide-scale evacuations of Gaza’s population from combat zones.”
He did not elaborate as to how much territory he hoped to capture or for how long. Since the cease-fire collapsed in late March, Israeli forces have been advancing deeper into the Gaza Strip, including in the southern city of Rafah, though they have not been sweeping through Palestinian cities as they did before the truce. Both sides have been speaking to mediators about a potential deal to restore the truce — so far without success.
It is far from clear whether either side could force the other to accept its terms for an agreement through military means. Hamas is demanding an end to the war and a full Israeli withdrawal in exchange for the release of all hostages.
This week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel laid out what appeared to be his demands for postwar Gaza — all of which are likely to be nonstarters for Hamas. They include Hamas’s laying down its arms, comprehensive Israeli security control in Gaza and the implementation of President Trump’s proposal that Gazans leave en masse.
“That’s the plan,” Mr. Netanyahu said in remarks distributed by his office on Sunday. “We aren’t hiding this. We’re ready to talk about it at any time.”
The Israeli military resumed its attacks against Hamas in Gaza on March 18 after Israel and Hamas failed to reach an agreement to extend a cease-fire that started in January. More than 1,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the truce’s collapse, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Israeli leaders have said that they could not allow the cease-fire to continue as long as Hamas does not release more of the dozens of remaining hostages held in Gaza. Hamas accused Israel of breaking the January truce.
Mediators — including envoys from the Trump administration — have so far failed to broker a new cease-fire. Many Gazans fear the war will continue indefinitely given the entrenched disagreements between Hamas and Israel over the shape of a potential future truce.
The Israeli military has issued sweeping evacuation orders for parts of Gaza. More than 140,000 people in the enclave have been displaced since the cease-fire broke down, according to the United Nations. Many were just beginning to resettle into their old neighborhoods across the Gaza Strip before being forced to flee again.
Gaza health officials say that more than 50,000 people have been killed in the enclave since the war began after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. That attack killed 1,200 people and saw 250 taken hostage to Gaza. At least 59 hostages remain in the enclave, although about 35 of those are presumed dead, according to the Israeli government.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel.
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6) ‘I’m Here! Can You Hear Me?’: One Family’s Story of Death in Gaza
The Abu Teirs thought the Israel-Hamas cease-fire might mean they could start to rebuild their lives. But a new round of Israeli airstrikes dashed those dreams.
By Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair, April 2, 2025
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo, and Bilal Shbair from the European Gaza Hospital in southern Gaza, where he interviewed airstrike survivors and relatives of the dead.
There were times, before Israeli airstrikes on Gaza shattered the two-month-old cease-fire on March 18, when Huda Abu Teir and her family could almost believe things might go back to normal.
After fleeing from their home to a shelter for displaced people, and then to a tent, another shelter and on to another encampment during 15 months of war — six or seven displacements in all — they had returned to their house in Abasan al-Kabira, in southeastern Gaza, where they lived with Huda’s grandparents and uncles.
Back at home a few weeks ago, Huda, 19, threw a pizza party for her cousins, said one cousin, Fatma al-Shawwaf, 20. The other girls teased Huda: Shouldn’t you be studying? Huda, who was set on becoming a nurse, always seemed to be studying. But Huda laughingly retorted that she liked having fun, too.
The day before Israeli airstrikes resumed, Huda asked her Uncle Nour, who taught technology, if he could help her go over the material for her high school exams. He promised her a study session the next evening, he said.
But around midnight, Huda’s brother Abdullah, 15, heard an explosion. “What was that?” he screamed to his father, who had no time to answer before the next blast, this time over their heads and under their feet all at once.
Abdullah was sent flying onto a neighbor’s roof, he said. Pieces of the house he had grown up in smoldered around him. He felt a sharp pain in his right eye and couldn’t see much. He could only scream: “I’m here! Can you hear me?”
Startled awake by the explosions and the screaming, a cousin who lived nearby, Qasim, 35, sprinted down the street through the dark. The four-story house that Huda and Abdullah’s grandparents had built nearly three decades ago had all but collapsed, he said, the upper floors sandwiched flat atop the lower ones.
Using his phone as a flashlight, Qasim stepped inside and saw Huda’s grandmother, Shawqia, 63, lying in the rubble, bleeding. She was not moving.
Others who lived there had been flung outside by the force of the blast, Qasim said. Everywhere, people were bleeding from their noses or ears.
Huda was one of the eight killed, along with her parents: Asmaa, 35, who had taken care of all the Abu Teirs whenever Shawqia went to Egypt for thyroid cancer treatment, and Mohammed, 42, who worked as a security officer at the Rafah border crossing for the Hamas-led government, relatives said.
Huda’s cousin Anas, 13, was breathing when they found him. But an ambulance didn’t arrive for nearly an hour, Qasim said.
Anas died waiting. His two younger sisters, Jana, 11, and Leen, 6, and his mother, Fulla Abu Teir, 29, were also killed.
Shawqia was dead, too. Her husband, Suleiman, had died early in the war, relatives said, when his heart condition flared up after a nearby airstrike.
“We never thought such massive attacks would happen again,” Qasim said two days later at the European Gaza Hospital near Khan Younis. “We thought the fighting had exhausted both sides, and that war wouldn’t start again.”
The Israeli military said that it had targeted a Hamas operative who “stayed inside a building” on March 18, but did not identify the person or specify whether it meant the Abu Teirs’ home. Family members said there was no reason they would have been targeted.
Gaza has resumed counting its daily dead. The Israeli airstrikes that night killed more than 400 people, and barrages since then have killed about 600 more, the Gaza health ministry said. The ministry’s figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, though Hamas publicly announced the deaths of several senior officials in last month’s initial attacks.
Israel said it had renewed airstrikes on Hamas sites and operatives to force the group to release more Israeli hostages after Hamas rejected new Israeli demands.
A New York Times investigation found that the Israeli military has loosened its rules around how many civilians it can endanger with each airstrike in pursuit of Hamas fighters, who Israel says are embedded among civilians.
On Wednesday, the Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, announced it would expand its military offensive in Gaza, adding to the threats looming over the population there.
In all, Gaza health officials say, more than 50,000 people have been killed since the war began in October 2023, after a Hamas-led attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people and took about 250 more captive. Israel’s response has crushed entire families, whole neighborhoods, Gaza’s health care system, its educational institutions, its infrastructure and most of its economy.
Abdullah, Huda’s 15-year-old brother, knew little of what happened that night two weeks ago. After the airstrike, he managed to push aside the broken water tank and heating panel he was trapped under before blacking out, he said two days later. He woke up in the hospital, pain singeing both eyes, his vision still blurry.
Nobody had told him yet that Huda was dead, or his parents, or that his brother Maher was in intensive care.
Abdullah was the third of five. His father had fallen for his mother, a cousin, when they were still teenagers. In a society where most marriages are arranged, relatives remarked on Mohammed and Asmaa’s visible tenderness toward each other, Qasim, a cousin, said.
Family was everything. Mohammed always threw big birthday parties for the children. And when one of Mohammed’s sisters, also called Huda, was recovering from a C-section, Asmaa bathed and cooked for her as if she were her own sister, the sister recalled.
Qasim remembered Mohammed bursting with pride when his eldest daughter, Bayan, got married. He jokingly asked Huda if she wanted to get married next, even before graduating, as some Gaza girls did.
Huda flew into a rage, her sister Amira remembered. She was the kind of kid who doodled “Nurse Huda in the future” in her notebooks. She loved weddings, and shopping, too — for skin care, for stylish dresses. But marriage could wait.
Their grandmother was more traditional. Shawqia was the backbone of the family, dispensing home-cooked food and help whenever anyone needed it and relying on her faith for strength, her family said.
Before the war, the family looked forward every year to the day before Ramadan, when Shawqia would invite everyone over for a giant meal in the garden before they began their daily fasts for the holy month. Maftoul, a Palestinian couscous dish, was her specialty, her family recalled: No one else was allowed to make it or fiddle with the spices she put in it.
When the Abu Teirs were sheltering in the southern city of Rafah early last year, Shawqia made a daily habit of visiting every son and daughter’s family in their respective tents to check in, her daughter Huda said. She sat and helped her grandchildren memorize verses of the Quran, feeding them dates and cookies.
At one point during the war, the Abu Teirs took refuge with another family in central Gaza. Grateful, Shawqia’s husband, Suleiman, promised to repay them when peace returned, their son Nour said.
Suleiman died shortly after. But Shawqia remembered their promise.
Earlier this month, she made several batches of maftoul and asked one of her sons to deliver them to the family who had hosted them. She was killed a week later.
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7) Columbia Campus Occupation Could Have Ended Without Police, Report Says
A university senate review concludes that some demonstrators who occupied Hamilton Hall were willing to leave voluntarily.
By Sharon Otterman and Stephanie Saul, Published April 1, 2025, Updated April 2, 2025
Police officers in riot gear entered Hamilton Hall at Columbia University last spring. Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times
Columbia University’s move to use police force to clear demonstrators from a campus building last spring could potentially have been avoided, as some students were urgently asking if they could leave voluntarily, according to a report released Tuesday by the university’s senate.
The students, who early that morning had entered Hamilton Hall and barricaded the doors, told faculty intermediaries that they had enlisted the help of a Harlem pastor to help them depart safely. But university administrators, saying time had run out, allowed hundreds of police officers to come onto the campus to remove protesters from the building.
The new details of the final hours of the occupation of Hamilton Hall on April 30 were among the key revelations of the 335-page report, which was written by a group within the senate, a Columbia policymaking body that includes faculty members, students and administrators, with faculty in the majority. The senate is independent from the administration and has been critical of its protest response.
Called the “The Sundial Report,” it provides a play-by-play chronology of the events surrounding the protests on campus related to the war in Gaza beginning in October 2023.
The demonstrations and Columbia’s response put the school at the center of a national debate over how to protect students from harassment by demonstrators while also protecting the free speech and rights of protesters.
The events of last spring resulted in significant disruption on the university’s Morningside Heights campus, and some critics of Columbia’s response said administrators waited too long to take action. The unrest culminated on April 30, when a smaller group of protesters — including some who were unaffiliated with Columbia — broke off from a tent encampment and took over Hamilton Hall.
The report released Tuesday represents the latest volley in the yearlong debate about the demonstrations and Columbia’s handling of them. While many faculty members and students stood by the right to protest peacefully, some groups felt the demonstrations were tinged with antisemitism and threatening to Jewish students.
The report argues that the university made significant missteps.
“The primary purpose of this report is to understand how instability was introduced into the daily life of the university and what can be done to set things right,” the report said.
It arrives as Columbia contends with the move by the Trump administration to cut about $400 million in federal research money over allegations that Columbia has not done enough to combat antisemitism, and as the university pledges to take additional steps to rein in protests. Amid the turmoil, the school is on its third president in less than a year.
A university spokeswoman said that officials had not seen the report before its release Tuesday evening and were reviewing it. Columbia leaders have repeatedly defended their decisions regarding the protests over the past year and a half, including their decision to ask the New York Police Department to remove demonstrators from campus on the night of the takeover. During the ensuing arrests, a police officer accidentally discharged his gun, though no one was hurt.
“Students and outside activists breaking Hamilton Hall doors, mistreating our public safety officers and maintenance staff, and damaging property are acts of destruction, not political speech,” Columbia’s former president, Nemat Shafik, said in a statement to the community on May 1.
The report did not disclose who among the 111-member senate participated in its creation, although the senate website states that the effort was led by Jeanine D’Armiento, a professor of medicine who is chair of the executive committee of the senate.
“There were concerns over the doxxing that had occurred, and it was voted on the executive committee that names not be given,” Dr. D’Armiento said in an interview. Additional faculty members outside the senate were consulted as well, she said.
Dr. D’Armiento herself emerges in the report’s chronology as a key intermediary during negotiations between demonstrators and administrators. “The report was written by people involved in the senate who were trying to bring the protests to a peaceful resolution,” said James Applegate, a Columbia astronomer and a member of the senate’s executive committee.
The report concluded that the university administration had repeatedly failed to address the concerns of pro-Palestinian demonstrators and, instead, treated them with suspicion.
It also said that police actions on Columbia’s campus last spring upended a proud tradition of student-led political protest in the half-century before. In 1968, Columbia protests spurred largely by opposition to the Vietnam War led to an aggressive police response. A panel known as the Cox Commission, led by Archibald Cox, a Harvard professor and later the Watergate special prosecutor, critiqued the school’s response, leading to the expansion of faculty power at the university.
“Not once in the five-and-a-half decades from 1968 to 2024 were pressures so great and the integrity of the university so weakened that the university administration called close to 600 heavily armed police officers onto campus to quell an unarmed student protest,” the report said.
The university senate said it had envisioned a collaborative investigation led by an independent external figure, similar to Mr. Cox. Despite an initial agreement to assist with the report, the university declined to participate.
The report said that the only senior leader who agreed to respond to their questions was Dr. Shafik, who resigned in August after confidence in her leadership was severely undermined.
The administration’s decision to call in police against the advice of the senate’s executive committee drew particular criticism in the report.
“The guardrails protecting these crucial university functions have been battered and in some cases breached,” the report said. “The result has been disorientation and alienation.”
It also accuses the school of hiring private investigators to monitor students and observe faculty, and of trying to interrogate students in their apartments without due process, fueling a “growing atmosphere of intimidation.”
Cas Holloway, Columbia’s chief operating officer, confirmed that the university had enlisted an outside security firm, the report said.
The report provides inside details about one of the most significant moments in the demonstrations, the occupation and clearing of Hamilton Hall. It suggests that the decision to call in the police to remove the demonstrators — which led to officers surrounding campus buildings and climbing through windows — could have been avoided.
That evening at about 7:20, before police arrived, representatives of the demonstrators contacted members of the senate to ask if students could leave the building without the police entering, the report said. Dr. D’Armiento called Dr. Shafik at 7:49 p.m. to relay that information.
“Call them at 8:15 p.m. and tell them they have a half an hour left,” Dr. Shafik responded, according to the report.
With police helicopters circling, Dr. D’Armiento again reached out to Dr. Shafik at 8:03, but got no response, the report said.
Students also said they were promised assistance by a Harlem pastor who was in contact with Mayor Eric Adams’s office and who “would help them come out of Hamilton” without the police, according to the report.
At 8:31 p.m., the report said, Dr. D’Armiento asked Dr. Shafik for 30 more minutes to work with the students. “I know many of the students want the deal and they are trying to get others on board,” she wrote in an email.
Dr. Shafik responded 35 minutes later: “The best is if they left on their own now. Please encourage them to do so for everyone’s sake.” Twenty minutes later, at 9:26 p.m., police officers entered the building and made dozens of arrests.
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8) More Americans Can’t Afford Medical Care, Poll Finds
A new survey found that 11 percent of Americans said they could not pay for medication and medical treatments.
By Reed Abelson, April 2, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/health/health-care-costs-gallup.html
People in Manhattan last week gathered to protest against Elon Musk and the Trump administration’s cuts. Credit...Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
It’s not just the high price of eggs or the rising cost of housing that is contributing to Americans’ unhappiness over the cost of living. Health care remains stubbornly unaffordable for millions of people, according to a new survey released Wednesday that underscores the struggle many people have in paying for a doctor’s visit or a prescription drug — even before any talk of cutting government coverage.
In the survey, 11 percent of people said they could not afford medication and care within the past three months, the highest level in the four years the survey has been conducted. More than a third of those surveyed, representing some 91 million adults, said if they were to need medical care, they would not be able to pay for it.
The survey, conducted from mid-November to late December 2024 by West Health and Gallup, also showed widening disparities for Black and Hispanic adults and for those making the least amount of money. A quarter of those with an annual household income of less than $24,000 said they could not afford or access care within the past three months.
“The extent to which that has broadened and expanded really exposes how vulnerable these classes of individuals are,” Dan Witters, a senior researcher at Gallup, said.
White adults and high earners said they experienced no real change in their ability to pay. Eight percent of white adults reported being unable to afford care, the same share as in 2021, according to the survey.
Higher premiums, the added cost of going to the doctor and the recent rollback in Medicaid coverage have all contributed to making it harder for people to afford care. Health care costs continue to rise, and dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the elimination of tax subsidies that lower the cost of Obamacare plans, as discussed by the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers, will likely exacerbate the problem, according to experts.
“It puts further pressure on a system that already has a financial toxicity that is pervasive, “ said Tim Lash, president of the West Health Policy Center. Many families are already struggling with medical debt, he said. Unlike doing without a new blender, people who forgo care can suffer or die, he said.
While there have been significant improvements in the past 15 years under the Affordable Care Act, which significantly expanded Medicaid, “we’re not a country where health care is affordable,” said Sara R. Collins, a health economist who is vice president for health care coverage and access for the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund. Even when people have insurance, many do not have sufficient coverage to pay their medical bills.
If the hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts go through that Republican lawmakers and the Trump administration are considering, the number of people who will not able to afford care is likely to climb, she said, as millions of people lose their coverage or replace it with less generous plans.
“We’re getting back to levels that existed before the Affordable Care Act,” she said.
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10) Israel Shifts Goal Posts in Gaza War
In pressing forward with its assault on the territory, Israel hopes to squeeze Hamas into releasing the remaining hostages. But other objectives have emerged.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 3, 2025
Israel’s leaders have articulated various goals for the expanding war in Gaza, spreading confusion over how the objectives might be achieved and on what terms the renewed campaign might end.
The primary aim is to squeeze Hamas into releasing the dozens of remaining hostages in Gaza. But other goals have emerged.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had “moved up a gear” in Gaza, capturing more territory, hitting militants and carving up the enclave. He reiterated his ultimate goals of crushing Hamas’s military capabilities and terminating its rule over Gaza, neither of which have been achieved in more than a year of war.
The defense minister, Israel Katz, said a day earlier that the military was seizing more territory to protect its forces and border towns, suggesting the possibility of a longer-term presence.
And over the weekend, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel would enable what he described as the voluntary emigration of Gazans, without clarifying where they would go.
If all of these different objectives have created uncertainty about what is to come, that may be intentional.
The military chief, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, said on Wednesday that Israel would “preserve operational ambiguity and the element of surprise” during a field visit to Gaza. “The only thing that can halt our advance is the release of our hostages!”
Israeli forces appear to be gradually dissecting the enclave into separate districts, in part to encircle and restrict the movement of Hamas fighters who have regrouped in different areas, according to analysts.
But as the military attacks areas of Gaza that it had already conquered multiple times before, as well as some new ones, questions remain about what the forces can do this time that they couldn’t do in more than 15 months of fighting.
“The government has not yet presented a viable diplomatic framework that will translate the military achievements into realizing the war objectives over time and justify the prices paid for them,” said Assaf Orion, a retired Israeli brigadier general who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Israel’s ambiguity about its endgame in Gaza could also serve to satisfy the far-right members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition and buttress his grip on power by leaving open an option of fully occupying the enclave and, eventually, building new Jewish settlements there.
Nor is it clear how the campaign will help the remaining hostages who were taken in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the war. Hamas is insisting on negotiations as the only way to free them, demanding a full Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza and a permanent end to the war.
Israel has conditioned any end of the war on the disarmament of Hamas and its leaders leaving Gaza, terms the group has refused.
Former hostages have testified that their conditions in captivity only worsened as Israeli military pressure increased and that they feared being killed at any moment by their captors or Israeli bombardment.
To a large extent, Mr. Orion said of Israel’s renewed offensive, “it is a development that endangers the lives of the remaining hostages.” On Wednesday, a group representing the families of hostages said they were “horrified” to wake up to Mr. Katz’s announcement about the expansion of military operations in Gaza.
Israel broke a two-month cease-fire with Hamas on March 18 after talks to extend the truce stalled.
In the weeks since, Israeli troops have retaken most of the Netzarim Corridor, a route dividing the northern and southern halves of Gaza. On Wednesday, Mr. Netanyahu said Israeli forces were seizing another east-west corridor in southern Gaza.
The military has recently thickened parts of a buffer zone inside Gaza’s perimeter, and it has expanded ground raids in the northern and southern ends of the enclave along with issuing sweeping evacuation orders.
On Thursday, the military issued more evacuation warnings for residents of neighborhoods in eastern Gaza City ahead of operations there.
That has led to the displacement of more than 140,000 people in Gaza since the cease-fire broke down, according to the United Nations.
More than 1,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the cease-fire collapsed, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
In another tactic aimed at pressuring Hamas, Israel halted the entry of all commercial goods and humanitarian aid into Gaza a month ago, leading to price gouging by local merchants and shortages. The World Food Program, a U.N. agency, said this week it had run out of the flour and fuel needed to keep bakeries in Gaza open.
Gaza health officials say that more than 50,000 people have been killed in the enclave in the war prompted by the Hamas-led attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and in which 250 were taken to Gaza as hostages.
Israel believes up to 24 living hostages are being held in Gaza along with the remains of about 35 others.
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11) Trump’s Fight Against Antisemitism Has Become Fraught for Many Jews
American Jews have watched with both alarm and enthusiasm as strong-arm tactics, including arrests of activists, have been deployed in their name.
By J. David Goodman, Published April 2, 2025, Updated April 3, 2025
Rabbi Sharon Brous was growing increasingly alarmed at the Trump administration’s strong-arm tactics, like its attacks on higher-education funding and bullying of law firms, all in the name of protecting Jews.
So early last month, she delivered an impassioned sermon titled “I Am Not Your Pawn” to her Los Angeles congregation. Hours later, the next shoe dropped. Immigration agents began detaining activists and foreign students who had been involved in pro-Palestinian protests.
“This is not going to protect Jews,” Rabbi Brous said in an interview. “We’re being used.”
Across the country, American Jews have watched with alarm or enthusiasm as an effort to address campus unrest over the war in Gaza has transformed into a campaign to deny elite universities billions of dollars in funding, to press major law firms into pro bono work on “antisemitism” and to deport foreign students even tangentially involved in the protests last spring.
“We have to combat antisemitism as vigorously as we can,” said Matt Brooks, the chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, adding that with President Trump in office, there is “a new sheriff in town.”
The divisions mirror those that have long split Jewish communities and have grown deeper since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the broad campus protests that followed Israel’s devastating response in Gaza.
But where most Jews share concerns about antisemitic speech in some of the protests, many within the community have become convinced that things may have gone too far.
A video of plainclothes immigration agents surprising and arresting a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University on the streets of Somerville, Mass., had particularly disturbing resonance for some in the Jewish community. The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, had co-written an opinion essay for a student newspaper demanding the university take a stand against Israel’s war in Gaza.
For many in a community that has suffered more than its share of unjust arrests, disappearances, deportations and deadly violence over the centuries, the video evoked painful memories from Jewish history. That it was done in the name of defending Jews made it worse. Two pro-Israel groups, Canary Mission and Betar, have even been involved in singling out pro-Palestinian protesters to target.
“I stood up. I was sitting down. I stood up involuntarily,” said Orna Guralnik, an Israeli American clinical psychologist and therapist, describing her reaction to watching the video. “It’s outrage and fear.”
Such arrests have “woken people up to the cynical way that the fight against antisemitism is used,” added Dr. Guralnik, who has gained fame with her television show “Couples Therapy.” “It contrasts everything that a liberal person believes in.”
In her practice, she said her American Jewish patients were “confused and really conflicted.”
Though the federal crackdown has so far targeted critics of Israel, some think the Trump administration’s actions uncomfortably echo previous eras of bigoted nationalism that gave way to overt antisemitism.
“Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression,” wrote the journalist Matt Bai in a Washington Post opinion piece on Tuesday. “You’ll be looking awhile.”
By saying that the harsh actions of the federal government have been in the name of protecting the Jewish community, the Trump administration has, intentionally or not, put a spotlight on Jews that makes many uncomfortable.
“Anytime you put Jews in the middle on an issue, it’s not good for the Jews,” said Jonathan Jacoby of the Nexus Project, a progressive Jewish group that has been searching for a way to combat antisemitism without suppressing political debate. “That’s a classic antisemitic position that antisemites like to put Jews. So they can be scapegoated.”
At the same time, the Trump administration continues to enjoy the backing of many Jewish groups, including those in the mainstream of social and political life.
The Anti-Defamation League, which for more than a century has worked to combat antisemitism, quickly put out a statement in support of the arrest last month of an activist at Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil, saying his detention “serves as a deterrent to others who might consider breaking the law on college campuses or anywhere.” The statement said it assumed Mr. Khalil would be given “due process.”
Mr. Khalil, a legal permanent resident from Syria with a pregnant American wife, has not been charged with a crime. He has been held for nearly three weeks in a facility in Louisiana, where he was taken after his arrest on March 8 in New York.
The Orthodox Union, an umbrella organization representing religious Jews, has been broadly supportive of the Trump administration’s actions. In a statement, its executive vice president, Rabbi Moshe Hauer, called for the fight against the “anarchy, hate, intimidation, and violence that have infected the campuses” to be carried out “the American way, firmly, resolutely, legally.”
A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Brooks, of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said that the answer to antisemitism cannot be doing nothing and called the notion that the federal government’s actions put American Jews in any greater danger “absolutely absurd.”
On the streets of American cities with large and diverse Jewish communities, feelings have been much more ambivalent.
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, who leads a socially progressive but religiously Conservative Jewish synagogue in Manhattan, said he had been stopped days ago on the sidewalk by a congregant who expressed how distressed she was that “people are being disappeared from street corners in the name of fighting antisemitism.”
“My community is very, very skeptical of the genuineness of the administration’s antisemitism rhetoric,” Rabbi Kalmanofsky said.
“I think that the Jewish people are the worse for the wear if the foundations of a constitutional order and civil rights and civil liberties and higher education are diminished,” he said, referring to attacks on the legal system and universities.
Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a pro-democracy group, said she also doubted the motivation behind the push to combat antisemitism because it has involved the selective application of due process rights based on people’s identities and beliefs.
“It’s about exploiting concerns about antisemitism to undermine democracy,” she said.
But saying so publicly has been an occasionally fraught experience.
Rabbi Kalmanofsky posted on Facebook his objection to the treatment of Mr. Khalil, not because he agreed with the activist’s views on Israel, which he said he finds objectionable, but because his arrest represented a potential threat to everyone.
“If this legal resident can be arrested and deported for exercising First Amendment rights, then anyone can,” he wrote, offering “kudos” to the federal judge in the case who blocked the deportation and is also a member of his synagogue.
The at-times heated discussion over his post surprised the rabbi.
“The correct question is does America benefit from him being here,” one commenter replied, speaking of Mr. Khalil. “If the answer is no, then he should be deported.”
In Los Angeles, Rabbi Brous of IKAR, a nondenominational Jewish congregation, lamented that for many people, Jewish or not, it has become difficult to hold two competing ideas at the same time, and far easier to retreat into defined ideological camps.
She said she wanted to be clear that two things were true: “There is a real antisemitism problem in our time and the universities have become very fertile ground” for its normalization. And, she added, this administration’s attacks “do not emerge from a genuine desire to keep Jews safe.”
“What may feel today like a welcomed embrace is actually putting us at even greater danger,” she said in her sermon on March 8.
One of her congregants, Shifra Bronznick, watched online from New York, and it resonated deeply with her. She said she told dozens of people about it, telling them: “You must listen to this sermon.”
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12) N.Y.U. Langone Cancels Doctor’s Speech, Citing Anti-Government Tone
Dr. Joanne Liu, an N.Y.U. graduate, said the cancellation of her presentation on humanitarian crises was a sign of the climate of fear at U.S. universities.
By Jenny Gross, April 2, 2025
"Dr. Stanley said in the interview that by cracking down on universities, ostensibly in the name of protecting Jews, the Trump administration was fomenting antisemitism among the public. 'It’s going to create mass popular anger against Jewish people,' he said. 'If universities want to fight antisemitism, they need to stand up and say, ‘No, we are not threats to American Jews. You are threatening American Jews.’”
Dr. Joanne Liu said she was told that her invitation to speak at N.Y.U. Langone was being rescinded because her presentation could be perceived as antigovernment and antisemitic. Credit...Amir Hamja/The New York Times
The night before Dr. Joanne Liu was scheduled to deliver a long-planned speech at N.Y.U. Langone Health, the hospital affiliated with her alma mater, she received a call that stunned her. Her presentation on humanitarian crises was being canceled, the university official on the other end of the line said.
The reason, Dr. Liu said she was told, was that her presentation could be perceived as antigovernment and antisemitic.
To Dr. Liu, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and a pediatric emergency physician at Sainte-Justine hospital, the cancellation underscored the fear among leaders of U.S. universities of upsetting the Trump administration amid its crackdown on higher education.
Dr. Liu had already traveled to New York from Montreal for the speech, scheduled for March 19, when she got the call, she said in an interview on Monday. After she arrived, a university official raised concerns about the presentation’s reference to U.S.A.I.D. cuts and about the inclusion of a chart that detailed the number of aid workers killed around the world, including in Gaza, South Sudan and Sudan, she said.
The official, whom Dr. Liu declined to name, said that the slide “could be perceived as antisemitic” because it mentioned aid worker casualties in Gaza but not in Israel, said Dr. Liu, who was international president of Doctors Without Borders from 2013 to 2019.
Dr. Liu offered to change the three slides that posed concerns, she said. But three hours later, she was told the speech would be canceled.
The incident unfolded against the backdrop of a slew of executive orders and policy dictates from President Trump that have set off self-censoring at institutions fearful of government funding being revoked. The president has targeted universities early in his second term, pushing a vision for higher education that he says defends “the American tradition and Western civilization” and prepares people for the work force while limiting protests and research.
With threats of targeted executive orders and canceled funding, Mr. Trump has extracted concessions from elite universities, as well as law firms and other institutions that he perceives as his enemies.
The Trump administration has, in recent weeks, pulled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. On Monday, the administration said it would review about $9 billion in contracts and multiyear grants at Harvard University, accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students and promoting “divisive ideologies over free inquiry.”
And in late February, lawyers for NYU Langone Health, where Dr. Liu was set to give her speech, proposed eliminating references to “diverse students” and removing the word “marginalized” from websites and policy statements, according to a PowerPoint presentation obtained by The New York Times.
A spokesman for NYU Langone Health, a leading hospital system in Manhattan with an affiliated medical school, did not respond to questions about why Dr. Liu’s speech was canceled last month.
The spokesman, Steve Ritea, said in a statement that guest speakers are given clear guidelines. “Per our policy, we cannot host speakers who don’t comply,” he said. “In this case, we did fully compensate this guest for her travel and time.” He did not provide any details about the guidelines when asked.
Dr. Liu, who said she had been invited to give the speech at N.Y.U. a year ago, described the official who rescinded her invitation to speak as emotional and apologetic. She said the cancellation of her presentation was a reflection of the climate of fear inside U.S. universities.
Dr. Liu said she had sympathy for the struggle of faculty members to maintain their funding, adding, “At the end of the day, that’s their job, their teaching, their life, their research.” She said she was speaking out about what happened to her, including in an essay in Le Devoir, a French-language newspaper in Montreal, to “tell people where we are going.” Universities, she said, should remain sanctuaries of knowledge and places where students go to be exposed to different ways of thinking.
Mr. Trump’s pressure on universities has led at least one professor to leave the country. Jason Stanley, a professor at Yale University, said in an interview with NPR that aired on Tuesday that he was leaving to take a position at the University of Toronto. Dr. Stanley, a philosophy professor, said that the Trump administration was following a classic fascist playbook in targeting intellectuals, and that concessions by elite universities set a dangerous precedent.
Dr. Stanley said in the interview that by cracking down on universities, ostensibly in the name of protecting Jews, the Trump administration was fomenting antisemitism among the public. “It’s going to create mass popular anger against Jewish people,” he said. “If universities want to fight antisemitism, they need to stand up and say, ‘No, we are not threats to American Jews. You are threatening American Jews.’”
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13) Trump Administration Threatens to Withhold Funds From Public Schools
State education officials will be required to verify that they have eliminated all programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion that the administration deems unlawful, according to a new memo.
By Michael C. Bender, Reporting from Washington, April 3, 2025
“State education officials will be required to verify that they have eliminated all programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion that the administration deems unlawful, according to a new memo. …‘Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,’ Craig Trainor, the acting assistant education secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. ‘When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal anti-discrimination requirements.’”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon at the White House last month. Her department has said that an “assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.” Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
The Trump administration threatened on Thursday to withhold federal funding from public schools unless state education officials verified the elimination of all programs that it said unfairly promoted diversity, equity and inclusion.
In a memo sent to top public education officials across the country, the Education Department said that funding for schools with high percentages of low-income students, known as Title I funding, was at risk pending compliance with the administration’s directive.
The memo included a certification letter that state and local school officials must sign and return to the department within 10 days, even as the administration has struggled to define which programs would violate its interpretation of civil rights laws. The move is the latest in a series of Education Department directives aimed at carrying out President Trump’s political agenda in the nation’s schools.
At her confirmation hearing in February, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said schools should be allowed to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But she was more circumspect when asked whether classes that focused on Black history ran afoul of Mr. Trump’s agenda and should be banned.
“I’m not quite certain,” Ms. McMahon said, “and I’d like to look into it further.”
More recently, the Education Department said that an “assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.”
Programs aimed at recognizing historical events and contributions and promoting awareness would not violate the law “so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination,” the department wrote.
“However, schools must consider whether any school programming discourages members of all races from attending, either by excluding or discouraging students of a particular race or races, or by creating hostile environments based on race for students who do participate,” the Education Department said.
It also noted that the Justice Department could sue for breach of contract if it found that federal funds were spent while violating civil rights laws.
The federal government accounts for about 8 percent of local school funding, but the amounts vary widely. In Mississippi, for example, about 23 percent of school funding comes from federal sources, while just 7 percent of school funding in New York comes from Washington, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” Craig Trainor, the acting assistant education secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. “When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal anti-discrimination requirements.”
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