May 25th
TO MARK THE 5th ANNIVERSARY OF GEORGE FLOYD'S MURDER & OPPOSE TRUMP'S ANTI-GEORGE FLOYD ACT EXECUTIVE ORDER
On April 28th, 2025, Donald Trump signed the so-called “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens” Executive Order (EO) into law, signifying a continued push towards the expansion of the police and prison state. This EO is the Trump administration’s attempt to undo any and all restraints put on police departments after the George Floyd rebellion. It is the Anti-George Floyd Policing Act. The EO gives police carte blanche to double down on their crimes against the people along with expanding prisons. We knew Trump’s return to office would embolden racist and repressive policing. This EO makes it plain.
George Floyd was murdered by racist killer cop Derek Chauvin on May 25th, 2020. Following his murder, the Minneapolis community, including our National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR) branch, the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice, quickly mobilized and sparked a fire that led to millions hitting the streets worldwide to fight for justice for George Floyd and all victims of police terror. NAARPR played a conscious role in all cities where we have branches and affiliate organizations present in advancing the struggle on the streets. Five years later, we have experienced the failures of the previous presidential administration in passing any substantial police accountability measures. Now under Trump and his new EO, we see the forces of police terror seeking to advance their agenda at the expense of the voice of the people.
We call on all NAARPR branches, affiliate organizations to take action and unite with as many forces as possible on the 5 year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder to fight back against Trump’s anti-George Floyd executive order. We call on all strains of the people’s movement to unite and fight against Trump’s police and prison state agenda along with the local struggles with the families of police crime victims. Only through uniting with all who can be united, can we build a united front to win community control of the police and make advancements towards ending police terror.
All out for May 25th!
Justice for George Floyd and all victims of police terror!
Rescind Trump’s police and prison state Executive Order!
Pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act!
Community Control of the police now!
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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) Israel just launched its offensive to permanently ‘conquer’ Gaza as Trump’s Arab Gulf tour wraps up
Israel announced the initial phase of “Gideon’s chariots,” the expanded ground invasion to permanently “conquer” Gaza, amid reports that Trump reneged on his deal with Hamas to lift the blockade, and will reportedly expel 1 million Gazans to Libya.
BY Qassam Muaddi and Tareq S. Hajjaj, May 17, 2025
Smoke rises over residential buildings following an Israeli airstrike on the Tuffah neighborhood in the eastern part of Gaza City, May 9, 2025. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)
Massive explosions shook the Gaza Strip in the first hours of Saturday morning as Israeli warplanes launched intensive airstrikes on north, south, and central Gaza, in what the Israeli army called “preparations to expand operations” in the Strip.
Israeli airstrikes hit Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah, several parts of Gaza City, and Jabalia. A resident of the Shati’ refugee camp in Gaza City told Mondoweiss that “the occupation army had issued orders to evacuate Shati’ camp, but they called off the orders — and then they called for an evacuation again, keeping residents in constant anxiety.”
“Then, yesterday night, they began bombing all over Gaza, including Shati’ camp,” the Shati’ resident added. “It lasted all night.”
The airstrikes were accompanied by incursions of remote-controlled Israeli explosive vehicles in north Gaza, with local journalists reporting that the vehicle exploded in the Tal al-Zaatar neighborhood east of Jabalia between inhabited buildings. The pieces of shrapnel reached the Indonesian Hospital in the neighboring town of Beit Lahia, causing damage to the building, local journalists reported. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip have already killed 250 Palestinians in the past two days alone.
The renewed wave of bombings comes a few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged last week to “enter Gaza with full force” in implementation of a new expanded ground offensive approved by the Israeli war cabinet nearly a month ago, dubbed “Gideon’s Chariots.”
The Israeli assault would see the army “conquer” Gaza and permanently occupy it, according to Israeli officials. Shortly before the invasion commenced on Saturday, the Israeli army dropped leaflets over Gaza, depicting a Biblical scene of the sea parting and engulfing destroyed buildings in the Strip, with a Star of David insignia in the corner below the words “righteous conquest.”
‘Is all this horror for us?’: North Gaza residents flee bombardment
According to Mahmoud Basal, the Civil Defense spokesperson in Gaza, the Israeli assault has resulted in the deaths of over 100 people in less than 12 hours. “It is a bloody and difficult day for the northern Gaza Strip,” he stated on Telegram. According to the Ministry of Health’s daily report, “153 martyrs and 459 injuries have arrived at hospitals in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours.” The Ministry clarified that the death toll had risen to 53,272 since the beginning of the war.
Hundreds of thousands of displaced families from eastern Gaza City, having evacuated their homes over a month ago due to the Israeli invasion of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, have crammed into the city’s western areas. They have established new displacement centers in Gaza City’s parks, stadiums, and universities, including the Yarmouk Stadium and the Islamic University.
During the past week, the Israeli army has threatened to evacuate these displacement centers as well, highlighting areas such as the Islamic University and other schools-turned-shelters as slated for evacuation.
On May 16, large numbers of people were displaced from areas in north Gaza, where the escalating ground invasion has intensified, prompting some residents to leave their homes for Gaza City.
Despite the Israeli army’s incursion into several areas in the central Gaza Strip and east of Khan Younis in the al-Qarara area, residents describe the situation in the north as the most dire.
Sulaiman Abu Sultan, 41, originally from Beit Lahia, says that the intensity of the bombardment in north Gaza forced him to leave his home. He tells Mondoweiss that the Israeli army is firing deadly missiles into crowded neighborhoods without warning or evacuation notice. “Deadly missiles are the warning,” Abu Sultan clarifies.
“The time for warnings through messages and phone calls is over. Now, they are killing hundreds to warn those who remain,” he adds. “They are sending deadly missiles that tear our bodies apart.”
Abu Sultan decided to take his family of five to Gaza City to stay with relatives in the Tal al-Hawa area, but he says that the situation there was not any better.
“We couldn’t bear it in Beit Lahia. The sounds were terrifying, and the bombing was random. The rubble was flying over our heads while we were in our destroyed homes,” Abu Sultan explains. “We thought Gaza City would be less terrifying, but we found the same situation: terrifying sounds and planes flying over us.”
“Is all this horror for us?” Abu Sultan muses. “It’s hard to believe that all this firepower in the sky is reserved for civilian families whose only concern is to save their children from bombardment and feed them so they don’t die of hunger.”
Israel plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza with active U.S. support
The all-out Israeli assault was preceded by over a week of intensified bombardment of the Strip following Hamas’s release of Israeli-American captive soldier Edan Alexander as a “goodwill gesture” to Donald Trump, who was due to arrive in the Middle East on his planned tour of Arab Gulf countries. The Israeli army heavily bombarded the European Hospital and Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis throughout the week, allegedly targeting top Hamas leaders in a “command-and-control” complex underneath the European Hospital, even though Haaretz reported that Israel provided no evidence to back up its claims.
According to a Drop Site News interview with Hamas official Basem Naim, Alexander’s release was part of a deal Hamas struck with U.S. envoy to the region, Steve Witkoff, who was supposed to compel Israel to lift the blockade on Gaza and let humanitarian aid into the Strip. Naim also said that Witkoff “personally committed” to ending the blockade and that Trump was supposed to publicly call for a ceasefire.
But according to the senior Hamas leader, the U.S. “threw the deal in the trash.”
Naim told Drop Site that there was “zero” progress in talks for a ceasefire, while Witkoff reportedly told Arab mediators that the U.S. would not be pressuring Israel to end the war on Gaza.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu appears as unmovable as ever, speaking to Israeli daily Maariv last week about how the Israeli army is “destroying more and more houses [in Gaza], and they [the Palestinians] have nowhere to return to,” adding that “the logical result will be the desire of Gaza residents to leave.” Netanyahu also remarked that half of Gazans already want to leave, and that “the difficulty is in finding countries that would accept to receive them.”
As part of Israel’s plan to occupy Gaza indefinitely, Israel intends to handle the distribution of aid to the civilian population in a dystopian new plan that would see the vetting of families eligible for aid with the participation of U.S. military contractors. The plan would reportedly have Gazans corralled in a concentration camp in what remains of Rafah, which has been flattened and cleared by the Israeli army, and Israel would later gradually expel Gaza’s population from the Strip under the rubric of so-called “voluntary migration.” In essence, this would entail the flattening and extermination of the rest of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of its population.
In line with this Israeli plan, NBC reported on Friday that the Trump administration was working on a plan to permanently relocate one million Palestinians to Libya in exchange for lifting sanctions imposed on the Arab country over a decade ago. NBC spoke to five unnamed sources “with knowledge of the effort.”
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 1 million children in Gaza are at risk of starvation, including 70,000 facing “serious degrees of malnutrition” due to the blockade. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the UN-affiliated famine monitoring body, 96 percent of Gazans face “high levels of acute food insecurity,” with 22 percent facing “catastrophic levels.”
Moreover, the Health Ministry announced that the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza has exceeded 52,000 dead, in addition to at least 10,000 people missing under the rubble.
Those who survived so far now brace for the next episode of the U.S.-backed Israeli genocidal assault.
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2) Amid Cease-Fire Talks, Israel Says It Has Expanded Ground Operations in Gaza
Israel aims to press Hamas into releasing hostages and ultimately to destroy the group, but says it will now also allow some aid to enter the enclave.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 18, 2025
The Israeli military announced on Sunday that its forces had begun “extensive ground operations” throughout the northern and southern Gaza Strip, advancing its plan to move farther into the enclave and seize more land in an intensified campaign aimed at pressuring Hamas amid negotiations for a cease-fire.
At the same time, the Israeli government said it would allow “a basic quantity of food” to enter Gaza. The announcement comes 11 weeks after it halted the entry of all goods and humanitarian assistance in an attempt to force Hamas into accepting a temporary extension of an earlier cease-fire deal that had expired.
President Trump has been clear about the need to avert a looming famine in Gaza and some Israeli military officials had privately concluded that Palestinians there faced widespread starvation unless aid deliveries were restored soon.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office explained the abrupt reversal in Israeli policy as an “operational need to enable the expansion of the military operation to defeat Hamas,” adding in a statement that the military had recommended the step.
The statement did not say exactly when the resumption of aid would begin, or how or where it would be distributed. Plans for a new American-backed system for distributing aid meant to bypass Hamas have not yet been put into action.
Details about the renewed offensive were also scarce, and it was not immediately clear how far the Israeli forces would go at this stage, or which areas of Gaza would be most affected.
As of Sunday night, troops had not yet reached the center of major cities like Gaza City and Khan Younis as they did at the height of the initial ground offensive in the fall of 2023 and early 2024. There are also fewer forces in Gaza now than there have been at other times, according to experts, though the military said on Sunday that five army divisions were involved in the offensive, amounting to tens of thousands of soldiers.
Israeli government and military officials have vowed to press ahead with this new stage in the 19-month war until Hamas releases the hostages it is still holding or until the group has been destroyed or forced to surrender.
Israeli warplanes pounded Gaza in recent days to prepare the way for the expansion of ground operations, the military said, adding that the wave of strikes had hit what it described as more than 670 “Hamas terror targets.”
So far, the military said, it has killed “dozens” of Hamas operatives and has destroyed military infrastructure used by the group both above and below ground. But many civilians, including children, have also been killed, according to Palestinian officials and residents of Gaza.
The expansion of military operations comes even as Israel and Hamas are engaged in indirect talks for a cease-fire in Doha, the capital of Qatar.
The military has been issuing threats for days about a broader invasion, without much change visible on the ground. Israeli officials have said that the new campaign would be carried out gradually, in stages, and could be stopped should a deal be reached with Hamas.
The Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin, said on Sunday that the idea was to dissect Gaza into separate areas. He said that the population would be told to evacuate areas where the military was operating, and that the military was being intentionally ambiguous about its movements to protect its forces.
More than 53,000 Gazans have been killed so far in the war, according to health officials in the enclave, whose death tolls do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The health ministry in Gaza said on Sunday that the preliminary number of those killed since dawn stood at more than 90.
Suzanne Abu Daqqa, who lives in Abasan, near the southern city of Khan Younis, said residents were living through near-constant bombardment over the past few days, rattling her home with terrifying blasts.
But she said she was even more afraid that a renewed ground invasion could again force her to flee her house — where her family still had some electricity from solar panels, as well as a modest stockpile of rice and flour — for sweltering tent camps near the coast.
“So many have died for nothing,” Ms. Abu Daqqa said. “People want the war to end by all means.”
International efforts have so far failed to broker an end to the war that began with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. That attack killed about 1,200 people, and the Palestinian assailants took about 250 hostages back to Gaza.
At least 21 living hostages are still being held, according to the Israeli government, along with the remains of more than 30 others who have died in captivity.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel signaled for the first time on Sunday that his negotiating team in Qatar was authorized to discuss terms for a broad deal that could end the war in Gaza.
Previously, the Israeli prime minister’s office had said that the negotiations would be limited to discussing an initial deal in which Hamas would release about 10 of the living hostages and the two sides would enter a cease-fire lasting about six weeks.
But even as he spoke of the possibility of a broader deal on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu reiterated his firm conditions for ending the war: the release of all the hostages, the expulsion from Gaza of Hamas leaders and fighters and the demilitarization of the Palestinian coastal enclave. Hamas has steadfastly rejected the idea of disarming.
Omer Dostri, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu, said his statement represented “nothing new and no drama” since Hamas was not ready at this point to surrender.
A Hamas official said over the weekend that Israel had withdrawn its insistence that truce talks be based on the earlier proposal for an initial deal and that everything was now up for negotiation.
It was not clear if Mr. Netanyahu’s statement was meant to lay the ground for an unexpected diplomatic move or was chiefly aimed at deflecting domestic criticism that he had not done enough to bring back the hostages.
Analysts noted that Mr. Netanyahu and Hamas also faced pressure from the Trump administration, and that Israel’s military pressure on Hamas might be working.
Kobi Michael, an analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said all of the above could be true at the same time.
“A significant military dynamic has been created,” Mr. Michael said, adding that the killing of many Hamas operatives had brought the group back to the negotiating table.
Aaron Boxerman and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.
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93The Website Where Lawyers Mock ‘Yellow-Bellied’ Firms Bowing to Trump
Above the Law, a legal industry website with a long history of skewering the nation’s most elite firms, has found a moment and plenty of inside tipsters.
By Elizabeth Williamson, Reporting from Washington and New York, Published May 18, 2025, Updated May 19, 2025
David Lat, right, founded Above the Law in 2006. Joe Patrice, left, is one of the site’s four full-time writers; all are lawyers. Credit...OK McCausland for The New York Times
The decision by nine of America’s biggest law firms to “bend the knee” to President Trump drew condemnation among lawyers across the political spectrum, including from attorneys inside the firms who quit or launched resistance campaigns. Others have chosen a less career-limiting form of rebellion.
That would be offering leaks to Above the Law, a pugnacious legal industry website best known for scoops about law firm annual bonuses, snarky coverage of legal news and salacious stories of barristers behaving badly. But since March, when Mr. Trump began targeting for retribution top law firms whose clients and past work he does not like, Above the Law has become a rage read for lawyers incensed at the firms that accommodated him.
Fueled by a stream of inside-the-conference-room exclusives, Above the Law delivers a daily public spanking to what it calls “The Yellow-Bellied Nine.” Those are the elite firms who pledged a collective $1 billion in free legal work to Mr. Trump after he signed executive orders threatening to bar their lawyers from federal buildings, suspend their security clearances and cancel their government contracts.
In the words of Above the Law, the firms “folded like a damp cocktail napkin” to the president’s demands for “pro bono payola.”
“For demoralized people stuck inside these firms, I think this is catharsis,” said Kevin Carroll, a Washington lawyer who once worked at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. (Quinn Emanuel has not been threatened by Mr. Trump, although its comanaging partner, William A. Burck, was fired as an outside ethics counsel for the Trump Organization by Mr. Trump’s sons in April. Mr. Burck’s offense was signing up to also represent Harvard, one of Mr. Trump’s prime targets in his crackdown on the nation’s top colleges.)
For Mr. Carroll, the site’s skewering of mostly left-leaning legal titans stirs schadenfreude.
“I’ve always wondered,” he said, “when pressed, would rich liberal lawyers choose to stay rich or liberal? Now we know.”
A few recent headlines from the site:
“Money v. Morals: Which Will Law Students Choose When It Comes to Job Offers From Biglaw Firms That Made Deals With Trump?”
“Biglaw’s Cowards Play Dumb About Pro-Bono Payola”
“This Law Firm Had to Delete A LOT to Purge Its Diversity and Pro Bono Work”
“Biglaw Firms in League With Donald Trump Now Have to Defend Cops That Kill Black and Brown People”
Unlike most other legal industry outlets, access to Above the Law is free for anyone who supplies an email address and basic job information for use by its advertisers, who pay the bills. The site urges readers to “send us your leads, gossip, leaked documents, embarrassing photos or anything else juicy.”
Partners running billion-dollar firms have long eyed its morning newsletter like an elephant does a mouse. One partner at a top-tier firm told The New York Times that lawyers there have a rule: “Don’t do anything that could wind up in Above the Law.” The partner requested anonymity for fear of violating the rule.
“One of the comments I most appreciated,” said David Lat, the lawyer hired by the site’s creators, Breaking Media, as its founding editor in 2006, “was from an administrative assistant who told me, ‘The partners are nicer to us because they don’t want to show up on the site as ‘The Screamer.’”
Mr. Lat is the author of the now-defunct but once widely read blog among the federal judiciary, the dishy Underneath Their Robes, which featured critiques of “superhottie” judges and courtroom celebrity sightings. Mr. Lat left Above the Law in 2019 and remains a minor investor in Breaking Media.
The law firms have defended their deals with Mr. Trump by arguing that they simply committed to representing clients no matter their political beliefs and doing pro bono legal work on causes like helping veterans and fighting antisemitism. The site occasionally points out, however, that Mr. Trump has since suggested that the firms might be drafted into negotiating his trade deals, or defending police accused of misconduct.
Joe Patrice, one of Above the Law’s four full-time writers (all are lawyers) said that every so often, someone pings the tipster line with a demand that the site be “nicer, more bipartisan” in covering the current crisis. Mr. Patrice acknowledged that this gives him pause.
“When squeaky wheels are all you ever hear from, you wonder, are we being unfair?” he said.
To answer his own question, he wrote an article exploring whether that might be the case. He began by researching how Mr. Trump had been “bench-slapped” — a favorite term at Above the Law — by some of conservatism’s most prominent judges.
Among them is J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge, who said last month on MSNBC that Mr. Trump had “declared war on the federal judiciary, on the rule of law and on the nation’s legal profession.” Paul Clement, a solicitor general under President George W. Bush and once on Mr. Trump’s short list for a Supreme Court appointment, sued the administration on behalf of WilmerHale, and won a restraining order from a Republican-appointed judge.
“The real intellectual leaders of the conservative legal movement are more incensed than we are,” Mr. Patrice concluded.
None of the nine firms that accommodated Mr. Trump responded to requests for comment. Brad Karp, Paul Weiss’s longtime chairman, previously said in an email to colleagues that the firm’s agreement “will have no effect on our work and our shared culture and values.”
While a few lawyers interviewed by The Times found Above the Law a bit lowbrow, or “more interesting for associates than partners,” none were allowed by their firms to say so on the record, because, as one said, “I guess it might antagonize them or something.”
The outlet has scooped heftier competitors on stories, such as one on a summer associate at a New York firm who stripped down and dove into the Hudson during a charity gala. On the weightier side, there were the former editor Elie Mystal’s articles flagging allegations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh before his Supreme Court confirmation battle.
Even before Mr. Trump began issuing executive orders, Above the Law’s tipsters flagged firms that were quietly stripping pronouns from email signatures and halting diversity initiatives in hope of escaping the president’s wrath. Above the Law covered discontent at the firm A&O Shearman before it reached a deal with Mr. Trump, and chronicled leaked tales of internal revolt at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom after it became one of the first firms to accommodate Mr. Trump.
Above the Law also posted emails exposing Skadden’s efforts to disable mass distribution lists on its internal email system to, as the outlet put it, “head off anyone who might want to express their opinion about the firm becoming a cowardly laughingstock.”
Another tipster offered news of Skadden’s search for a public relations specialist, which Above the Law posted under the Onion-esque headline “Skadden Posts Dream Job for Anyone Who Hates Themselves.”
Above the Law is based in the garret-like top floor of the Cable Building, at the corner of Broadway and Houston in Manhattan. One recent rainy afternoon, the same day several more firms neared agreements with Mr. Trump, Kathryn Rubino, a writer and editor, was updating the “Biglaw Spine Index.” The index charts the nation’s top 200 law firms and, as the site says, “what they’re doing — or not — in the face of Trump’s attack.”
Firms that cut a deal with Mr. Trump are highlighted in red and include Kirkland & Ellis; Latham & Watkins; Skadden; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Milbank; Willkie Farr & Gallagher; A&O Shearman; and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. Sullivan & Cromwell, which helped broker the Paul Weiss deal with Mr. Trump, is also in red.
Those that sued the White House are in green and include WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, Susman Godfrey and Jenner & Block. More than a dozen firms representing or supporting them in court are also in green. The rest of the top 200 firms were deemed as remaining silent and highlighted in yellow.
Despite its outlets’ humble quarters, Breaking Media is backed by well-heeled investors, including Justin Smith, a co-founder of the news website Semafor, and S. Carter Burden III, son of the late New York councilman, media magnate and philanthropist.
Coverage of the law firms’ capitulation has increased traffic to the site, which draws about 1.5 million readers in a normal month, said John Lerner, Breaking Media’s chief executive, who declined to say exactly how big that spike is. “It’s clear that a lot of lawyers want to push back against these executive orders,” he said.
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4) What Is the Future of George Floyd Square?
When you see the weathered statues of raised fists, you’ll know you’re there.
The corner where a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd nearly five years ago is to this day a protest site and a memorial.
But how it will live in history remains unsettled.
By Ernesto Londoño Photographs and Video by Joshua Rashaad McFadden, May 18, 2025
"Last year, at least 1,260 people were killed by police officers in the United States, more than in any other year in the past decade."
The intersection of 38th Street East and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis was forever altered the day a police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck five years ago, killing him.
The killing led to a national reckoning over police misconduct and racism, and here, it spawned a site of protest, art, grief and remembrance that feels to some in this community like an open wound.
Wooden sculptures in the shape of raised brown fists mark either end of the street. Arresting murals nearby have been defaced and touched up repeatedly.
Residents and city officials have debated for years what should be done with the site, and how the man whose killing fueled the Black Lives Matter movement should be memorialized.
The space’s unresolved state in many ways reflects how stuck the country remains on matters of race, justice and reparations.
On this there is little debate: George Floyd Square gave rise to a movement that changed the United States. But what will its legacy and future be?
The sidewalk where Mr. Floyd took his final breath after repeatedly protesting, “I can’t breathe,” has become a pilgrimage site with an ever-shifting memorial. It is packed with bleached stuffed animals, old T-shirts, photos, flowers, rosaries and other totems people dropping by to pay their respects have left behind over the years.
In the days after Mr. Floyd’s murder, residents barricaded the streets leading to 38th and Chicago. Neighbors brought food to share. People provided first aid to those injured in demonstrations. And civilians set up checkpoints on the streets leading to the crossroads.
“You knew that something special was taking place,” said Jeanelle Austin, a longtime resident who became a caretaker of the memorial. “It became a home base for the protests during the uprising, and people in the middle of the night were holding circles for healing.”
The city has tried to turn the page on George Floyd Square as a rough-hewn protest site by putting forward a plan to revamp the streets and sidewalks and setting aside the lot of a shuttered gas station to build a memorial or community center.
But residents are divided over whether the intersection should become a pedestrian plaza or remain open to traffic.
Ms. Austin, for one, does not want to see the fists come down or the makeshift shrine replaced by something more polished.
“People have been more focused on aesthetics than becoming,” she said. “The reason this place is still disrupted is because we haven’t become who we need to be. If we can get to where we are a nation where we are not taking lives for the sake of taking lives, then we can start talking about aesthetics.”
Attorney General Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who prosecuted Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering Mr. Floyd, said this place for him was hallowed ground.
Mr. Ellison, the first Black person elected to statewide office in Minnesota, confronts conflicting feelings here — hope about the power of protest vies with deep grief and alarm.
Last year, at least 1,260 people were killed by police officers in the United States, more than in any other year in the past decade. In an executive order signed last month, President Trump laid out his administration’s plans to “aggressively police communities,” including by rethinking the Department of Justice’s recent agreements with Minneapolis and other cities aimed at reining in abusive and discriminatory policing.
“Five years after the death of George Floyd, we may be in a state of backlash,” Mr. Ellison said. “The federal government has abandoned the idea of trying to improve police-and-community relations — they’ve abandoned the idea of making sure people feel equal before the law and are treated equally before the law.”
After Mr. Floyd’s death, the Department of Justice and the Minnesota Department of Human Rights released two damning reports. Minneapolis agreed to substantial changes to its police department, including steps to rein in the use of force, bolster training and address discriminatory practices.
But elected officials remain stuck on what to do about George Floyd Square. In February, the Minneapolis City Council rejected a proposal the mayor’s office put forward after spending more than $2 million on an extensive community-consultation process. The plan envisioned broader sidewalks, more trees and a reinvigorated business district.
“This should be a sacred place for understanding the racial injustices that have been perpetrated for hundreds of years,” said Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis. “And it should also be a place where you can get a sandwich and a cup of coffee, a place that adds value to the surrounding neighborhood.”
Mr. Frey, who is seeking a third term, said the city’s vision for George Floyd Square reflected the wishes of a large portion of residents and business owners in the area.
“It’s time to move forward,” he said. “There’s a difference between moving forward and moving on.”
Nearby, the “Say Their Names” cemetery began as an art installation honoring Black people killed by the police. Five years later, it still stands.
Long before Mr. Floyd’s death, revitalizing this area had preoccupied Councilwoman Andrea Jenkins, whose district includes part of George Floyd Square.
Once a bustling commercial district home to many Black families, the area fell on hard times after the construction of an interstate highway in the 1960s displaced thousands of residents. Here as in cities across the country, this process led to school closures, struggling businesses and crime.
“Many times when I come here I think about Black power and the agency to claim space,” said Ms. Jenkins. “And then, I also think about, Why can’t we make this space more formally beautiful? Because Black people deserve beauty.”
Ms. Jenkins said the pain from Mr. Floyd’s murder continued to have a paralyzing effect. But it’s time for decisive action to build a permanent memorial, improve the area’s infrastructure and attract new businesses, she argued.
“I think the majority of people want free-flowing traffic, they want economic development, they want resources to be committed,” she said.
The gas station across the street — a parcel the city purchased for a yet-to-be-defined purpose — remains abandoned, boarded up, covered in graffiti brimming with indignation, grief and resolve.
Councilman Jason Chavez, whose district includes the sidewalk where Mr. Floyd died, was among those who voted to reject the city’s plan for the square.
The councilman said he, too, wanted to see greater investment and development in the area, but worried that the plan sought to turn the page on the killing, reducing it to a moment in history.
“This city has to reckon with its past and the current racial harm it has caused,” said Mr. Chavez.
The concept Mr. Chavez and allied council members favored included a pedestrian mall closed to traffic. But too often, he said, the conversation about the future of George Floyd Square seems like a debate about zoning and infrastructure — rather than one about justice, reparations and remembrance.
“There’s an opportunity to preserve the area here and make it better for the future without forgetting what happened,” he said.
Angela Harrelson, George Floyd’s aunt, feels more solace than grief these days in George Floyd Square.
Reflecting on the past five years, she is strikingly optimistic. The Trump administration has demonized the diversity and equity initiatives that flourished after Mr. Floyd’s killing, and vowed to “unleash” police officers the president contends were muzzled by liberals. But the legacy of her nephew’s brutal killing remains undimmed, Ms. Harrelson said.
“After he was killed, there was this awareness that I’ve never seen before,” she said. “There was a validation that, Hey, this is not in our heads, that the police are killing Black people. It’s real. It wasn’t like that before. It was more like almost a taboo to talk about racism.”
The reasons for Ms. Harrelson’s hope are reflected in a jarring encounter she once had at the memorial. She had seen an older white man bawling at the intersection, and approached to console him.
Through tears, she recalled, the man told her he had long been a white supremacist, a proud racist. But seeing the video of Mr. Floyd’s murder shattered something within him, eliciting deep shame.
He asked Ms. Harrelson for forgiveness and moved toward her.
“I don’t know why God allowed me to be receptive,” she said. “He hugged me, embraced me. When he walked away, it made me realize that that man needed healing more than I did.”
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5) Times Sq. Sculpture Prompts Racist Backlash. To Some, That’s the Point.
A 12-foot bronze statue of an anonymous Black woman has become a lightning rod in a fraught American debate about race, representation and diversity.
By Andrew Keh, May 18, 2025
Thomas J Price’s sculpture, “Grounded in the Stars,” was installed temporarily in Times Square last month. Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times
The bronze sculpture is intentionally unassuming, depicting an anonymous Black woman, casually dressed, with a neutral expression on her face and her hands on her hips.
But as soon as the 12-foot statue was erected last month in Times Square, it touched off a roiling debate — one that reflects both a long-simmering argument over public monuments, and a very 2025 political dispute about diversity and race in America.
A columnist for Fox News wondered why a statue of an “angry Black lady” had been displayed in the same city where a contentious monument of Theodore Roosevelt had been removed a few years back, while a writer for The Federalist described the work as “leftist cultural warfare.”
“This is what they want us to aspire to be?” Jesse Watters, the Fox News host, recently asked on his show. “If you work hard you can be overweight and anonymous?” He added, “It’s a D.E.I. statue.”
As the conversation has intensified, criticism has emerged from several angles: from those seeking to preserve the country’s historical monuments; from people wondering if the piece employed stereotypical imagery; from critics calling its message and execution ham fisted. But social media has been overrun with commenters, often anonymous, hurling overt racism and sexism.
To the artist and the organizers of the public exhibition, the backlash — however unsavory — effectively justifies the sculpture’s existence at a time when the Trump administration and its allies are targeting all manner of things involving nonwhite people as “D.E.I.”
The piece, “Grounded in the Stars,” was produced in 2023 by Thomas J Price, a London-based sculptor whose work in recent years has directly critiqued the traditions of public monuments and portraiture.
The statue was installed on April 29 by the Times Square Alliance, which periodically invites contemporary artists to exhibit work in the bustling plaza. The piece will remain there through June 17.
A placard displayed alongside the piece declares its intent: The work challenges the conventional wisdom of “who should be immortalized through monuments.” The text points out, too, how the sculpture presents a contrast to the two permanent monuments — “both white, both men” — that stand nearby.
“What has ensued is a fairly impressive amount of debate and exchange and critical dialogue,” said Jean Cooney, the director of the Time Square Alliance’s arts program, “the kind you hope a public artwork will provoke.”
It was a timely provocation. While debates about monuments have bubbled up across the United States essentially since the country’s inception, they have intensified over the past several years amid reinvigorated movements for racial justice and the backlashes to those efforts.
Patricia Eunji Kim, an art historian at New York University, said that monuments inspired widespread emotional investment because they posed questions about how to spend public money, how to shape public spaces and how to project a collective heritage.
“I understand why there is such a backlash, because the stakes are so high in that sense,” Ms. Kim said.
But critics of “Grounded in the Stars” may not have noticed that the piece is not actually a monument, at least not in the conventional sense.
It was first exhibited two years ago in Los Angeles at Hauser & Wirth, an international gallery that is currently hosting an exhibition of related works from Mr. Price at one of its New York locations. The sculptures, according to a release from the gallery, “amplify traditionally marginalized bodies and redress structures of hierarchy, inviting questions about who we choose to celebrate in art.”
With its dark bronze material, towering height and contrapposto figure, the sculpture has read to some as a traditional monument, when it is in fact an artwork about monuments.
“Are there no notable Black women who actually exist to celebrate?” wrote David Marcus, a columnist for Fox News. “How about a giant Condoleezza Rice, or a somewhat more diminutive Simone Biles?”
The hubbub around the statue, for some, also reflected the changing tenor of social discourse in the second term of President Trump.
The term D.E.I. (a reference to the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives of recent years) has become a political lighting rod under Mr. Trump, and the administration’s efforts to eradicate the concept have taken on bizarre forms, such as the temporary deletion of Jackie Robinson’s biography from a Department of Defense website.
Others saw the blast of racism that greeted the sculpture online as further evidence of an increasingly coarsened climate. Last month, a white woman in Minnesota garnered a groundswell of public support, and amassed almost a million dollars in donations, after directing a racial slur at a Black child on a playground.
On platforms like X, comments about Mr. Price’s work have included A.I.-generated racist caricatures of Black women, vicious stereotypes and crude derision.
“We live in a political climate right now where out-loud racism is now excused left and right, in addition to insidious systemic racism, and people feel emboldened to say racist things all the time,” said TK Smith, a curator and cultural historian based in Atlanta.
Evidence of this evolution, for some, has existed right in Times Square.
Just six years ago, the Times Square Alliance temporarily installed a similarly monumental statue by the artist Kehinde Wiley, who rose to stardom for his aristocratic portraits of contemporary Black people. The work, “Rumors of War,” depicted a Black man in a sweatshirt and jeans heroically astride a horse, in the style of a Confederate monument.
“I don’t recall a single negative piece about that artwork,” said Ms. Cooney, who organized that exhibition as well.
But such art is always at risk of being misconstrued. Michele Bogart, a historian of public art in New York City, said a person encountering an artwork in a gallery was often privy to its intent — and likely open to learning more.
“But when its placed in Times Square, nobody is obligated to try to understand,” she said.
Ms. Bogart also bemoaned what she perceived as the disappearance of arts education and a general oversimplification of ideas about representation among the general public as contributing to the toxic tone of this discourse.
“People are not attuned to aesthetics,” she said.
Vocal online critics of the sculpture have also included Black people, who have knocked Mr. Price for presenting what they see as a disrespectful image of Black women, or for leaning into stereotypes about them.
But Elma Blint, a jewelry designer from Brooklyn, who visited the work on Friday, offered an opposing view, saying the figure looked “like every Black woman in my family” and suggesting its detractors were uncomfortable with the idea of a Black woman taking up space.
Mr. Price, who declined to comment for this article, addressed this debate by posting a comic strip to his Instagram account. The first panel shows two Black women gazing up at the sculpture.
“I love this,” one says.
“Wow, I hate this,” the other responds.
In a 2020 essay for Time magazine, Mr. Price wrote that his work aimed to show “that if you’re a Black person being represented in sculpture, you don’t have to be an athlete, or strike a pose, or fulfill an expectation.”
Within the art world, this kind of conceptualization might risk being discounted as an almost banal insight, and some in the industry have viewed the broad palatability of Mr. Price’s work as a factor in his commercial success.
But out on the street, as the discourse has shown, his point is not so smoothly digested.
“He definitely struck a vein,” Mr. Smith said. “We are dealing with wounds that are not healed. And we can’t heal them if they’re not spoken about.”
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6) A Scientist Fighting Nuclear Armageddon Hid a 50-Year Secret
Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured from the public, even his family, as he advised presidents and devoted his life to undoing the danger he created.
By William J. Broad, May 19, 2025
William J. Broad interviewed Richard L. Garwin in January for the last time after speaking with him many times over decades for articles on nuclear weapons, nonproliferation and other subjects.
Richard L. Garwin, second right, with, from left, Peter A. Clausen, a disarmament expert, and the physicists Hans Bethe and Kurt Gottfried, during a news conference on missile defense hosted by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1984. James J. MacKenzie
Enrico Fermi’s battle with cancer was nearing its end in late 1954 when he received a visitor.
Fermi, a Nobel laureate in physics, had fled fascism in Europe and become a founder of the nuclear age, helping bring the world’s first reactor and first atom bomb to life.
The visitor, Richard L. Garwin, had been Fermi’s student at the University of Chicago, the laureate calling him “the only true genius I have ever met.” Now, he had done something known at the time only by Fermi and a handful of other experts. Not even his family knew. Three years earlier, the boy wonder, then 23, had designed the world’s first hydrogen bomb, which brought the fury of the stars to Earth.
In a test, it had exploded with a force nearly 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima, its power greater than all the explosives used in World War II.
To his reverential student, Fermi confided a regret. He felt his life had involved too little participation in crucial issues of public policy. He died a few weeks later at 53.
fter that visit, Dr. Garwin set out on a new path, seeing nuclear scientists as having a responsibility to speak out. His resolve, he later told a historian, came from a desire to honor the memory of the scientist he had known best and admired most.
“I modeled myself to whatever extent I could after Fermi,” he said.
Dr. Garwin, the designer of the world’s deadliest weapon, died last Tuesday at age 97, leaving behind a legacy of nuclear horrors he devoted his life to countering. But he also left a strange puzzle.
Why for a half-century did he hide what Fermi and a dozen presidents knew? It was a topic I discussed with him this January in an interview, the last of many.
The riddle is especially odd because his central role in creating the H-bomb became the motivating force that drove him forward, that helped him turn Fermi’s regrets into a life of political and social activism, that made him an inconspicuous giant of nuclear arms control.
“If I could wave a wand” to make the H-bomb vanish, he once told me, “I would.”
In a blinding flash, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay killed at least 70,000 people. Deadly like no earlier weapon, it was still quite limited in contrast with Dr. Garwin’s superweapon. One proposed version had the force of more than 600,000 Hiroshimas. The mind boggles at such numbers. Even so, Cold War analysts coolly judged that it could reduce a region the size of France to ashes. His weapon was a planet shaker. It could end civilization.
That bomb wasn’t the only feat driven by Dr. Garwin’s prodigious intellect. He made basic discoveries about the structure of the universe, laid the groundwork for wonders of health care and computers, and won many awards. He pushed back frontiers in astronomy, physics, superconductors, orbital reconnaissance and a multitude of other topics he investigated, often at the U.S. government’s behest.
But what drove him, what made him eager to advise presidents, was not his gift for coming up with marvels of discovery and innovation but, courtesy of Fermi, a personal crusade to save the world from his own creation.
Henry A. Kissinger advised at least 12 American presidents in some capacity. Dr. Garwin never officially joined any president’s cabinet, as Kissinger had. But in our last interview, the physicist looked over a list of presidents and one by one identified the commanders-in-chief he had counseled. There were 13.
While eager to counter his brainchild, Dr. Garwin took no personal or moral responsibility for bringing the H-bomb into existence. Its birth, he argued, was inevitable.
“Maybe I sped up its development by a year or two,” he said in 2021. “That’s all.” Historians of the age tend to agree. The Soviet Union quickly followed his pioneering lead, then a half-dozen other nations. Today, hydrogen bombs have replaced atom bombs in most arsenals, creating a world of uneasy standoffs among nuclear foes.
By all accounts, Dr. Garwin believed that he — and sometimes he alone — could peer into the chaos of the universe and discern its underlying order. Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, who during World War II led the making of the first atomic bomb, he could also be cruel and intolerant of those he saw as less gifted.
Even so, Dr. Garwin showed a knack for teamwork and generosity with peers he respected. Over decades, the physicist worked hard to advance the hunt for gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted. He supported the construction of costly detectors, which, in 2015, successfully observed the ripples, opening a new window on the universe. Dr. Garwin beamed with pride when the finding won a Nobel Prize.
So too, Dr. Garwin managed to walk a tricky path through the nation’s military-industrial complex, which crushed Oppenheimer and coddled Edward Teller, an early proponent of hydrogen bomb research. For decades, he criticized the complex from within, promoting some ideas and undermining others, using his intellect and standing as a knowledgeable insider to shake things up — often anonymously.
“The most influential scientist you’ve never heard of” is how his biographer cast him. The physicist told newcomers to the federal apparatus that they could get something done or get credit, but not both. He was, in some respects, the antithesis of Kissinger, who carefully tended his public image.
The left loved Dr. Garwin’s attacks on the American military establishment, but his own compass seemed to align less with politics than pragmatism. He received awards from President George W. Bush, a Republican, as well as President Barack Obama, a Democrat.
“He’s never met a problem he didn’t want to solve,” Mr. Obama said in 2016 when he presented Dr. Garwin with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The two-term president described the physicist as advising White House occupants “rather bluntly.”
Overall, Dr. Garwin’s life can be seen as a tale of genius in which key manifestations were obscured by a wall of silence. Why, for instance, did he wait so long to tell his family about his H-bomb role? Was he trying to protect his loved ones from criticism and hateful bluster?
No. It turned out that, as can happen in lives of government service, he felt that sensitive issues of national security loomed over him.
In our last interview, Dr. Garwin said he worried that talkative family members might inadvertently bring him to the attention of foreign intelligence agencies eager to learn H-bomb secrets. That concern, he added, haunted him even after his role became known publicly.
“I still worry about that,” he said at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y., on a cloudy winter day. He glanced out the window.
“They could be listening now.”
ADVISING THE ADVISERS
The Birth of the Hydrogen Bomb
Richard Lawrence Garwin was born in Cleveland on April 19, 1928. His father taught electronics at a technical high school.
As a child, Richard, called Dick, impressed adults with his language and math abilities. He loved to take apart and reassemble things, including a vacuum cleaner.
Despite his obvious talents and his early entry into high school, an English teacher there told his parents that Dick would never get into college. He defied that prediction, studying physics at the Case School of Applied Science, in Cleveland. The teen lived at home, took the bus to school and worked nights.
He graduated at 19 and Standard Oil offered him a full ride for graduate study at the University of Chicago, which had one of the nation’s top physics departments.
Fermi became the young man’s adviser. Two years later, in 1949, Dr. Garwin graduated from Chicago with a doctorate in physics and became an instructor at the school.
The 21-year-old had been too young to play a role in the Manhattan Project, but now found himself deeply involved in what followed.
Like many Americans, Dr. Garwin grew concerned when Moscow that summer detonated its first atom bomb. How would Washington respond? In early 1950, President Harry S. Truman announced that the nation would seek to make “the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.”
Fermi invited Dr. Garwin to join him at Los Alamos, the base set amid the tall pines and deep canyons of New Mexico’s backcountry where Oppenheimer’s bomb was born. Now on the agenda for the sprawling lab: trying to make good on Truman’s threat.
Deep inside every star, extraordinarily high heats and pressures fuse hydrogen atoms into helium, releasing bursts of energy. The Los Alamos idea was to mimic that fusion process. The experts called it thermonuclear — in part to distinguish its high-temperature reactions from those of atomic bombs, which start at room temperature.
The general plan was that an exploding atom bomb would act as a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. The question was how. Early ideas had atomic and hydrogen fuels layered in alternating bands, similar to the insides of a baseball.
The breakthrough came in early 1951. Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, a Los Alamos colleague, envisioned two distinct stages set next to each other inside a cylindrical casing.
Moving at the speed of light, radiation from the exploding atom bomb would hit the casing’s inner wall and, in a rebound, flood the interior with a colossal burst of rays that would compress and ignite the hydrogen fuel.
The new idea gave the bomb unlimited power. Because the hydrogen fuel was separate from the initial mayhem of atomic debris and shock waves, it could, in theory, be infinitely large.
Teller asked Dr. Garwin to draw up a detailed plan. He warned that it would have to address “every conceivable doubt” of top scientists. “Garwin’s paper was criticized up and down,” Teller wrote in his memoirs, but the young man’s plan “remained unchanged.”
The prodigy turned the rough idea into a four-page plan that’s still classified top secret. He attached a large schematic diagram.
On a coral atoll in the Western Pacific, the device grew slowly. Dr. Garwin never visited the test site where his finished creation stood two stories high and weighed 82 tons.
The test blast, code-named Ivy Mike, took place on Nov. 1, 1952. It vaporized a Pacific isle and produced a mushroom cloud 100 miles wide.
Dr. Garwin, then 24, kept his head down. No news accounts cited his name. No one condemned or praised him. He was an assistant professor of physics at the University of Chicago, not a high government official or a scientific celebrity.
A month after the blast, he joined the International Business Machines Corporation, which allowed him to hold a physics post at Columbia University. In the decades to come, he was granted 47 patents for his IBM work.
The unusual arrangement also gave him the freedom to repeatedly change the course of history. Dr. Garwin did so mainly by offering scientific counsel to presidents and their advisers — a continuum of White House consulting that ran from Eisenhower to Trump.
ADVISING KENNEDY
The Abolition of an H-bomb Threat
President John F. Kennedy used the nation’s scientific and military feats to spook Moscow and showcase the West’s technological edge. It was his top Cold War strategy.
Then disaster struck.
In a case of bad things having good outcomes, the repercussions of the disaster helped give birth to the first successful instance of nuclear arms control.
The crisis began on July 9, 1962, when the American military, seeking ways to destroy incoming Soviet warheads, detonated an H-bomb some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. The record height for a thermonuclear blast produced surprises both on the ground and in space. Streetlights in Hawaii went out. Satellites in orbit failed.
It turned out the blast had pumped up the radiation belts around Earth, making the doughnut-like rings of energetic particles more dangerous. The military was planning an even higher-altitude detonation that summer — more than 800 miles up.
Kennedy wanted to quickly assess the risks. Pressed by the Pentagon, he had already approved preparations for that extremely high blast, code-named Urraca. The president’s urgent question was whether the detonation of U.S. nuclear arms in outer space could produce enough radiation to poison humans and ruin his announced plan to land astronauts on the moon.
On July 25, 1962, he sent Dr. Garwin a telegram, inviting him to join his White House science advisory team.
Weeks later, Kennedy met with Dr. Garwin and senior advisers in the Oval Office to discuss the radiation dangers. The physicist recalled the president fearing that the recent blast “had killed the Apollo program,” which was working to put Americans on the moon. How long would the enhanced radiation last?
“A long time,” Dr. Garwin replied, adding that exactly how long was impossible to say. After some discussion of the risks and uncertainties, Dr. Garwin suggested that the danger zone might persist anywhere from two to 20 years.
That Oval Office meeting was, in all likelihood, a turning point.
On Sept. 5, 1962, Kennedy asked his national security and science advisers if the radiation hazard could “make a lunar journey prohibitive.” They discussed the risks, the lineup of impending American nuclear tests and whether the military could live without the 800-mile-high Urraca detonation.
At a National Security Council meeting two days later, the high-altitude test was canceled.
The next year, Kennedy signed a treaty with the Soviet Union that banned nuclear tests in outer space, in the atmosphere and under water. The weapons could be tested only deep underground. Slowly, the heightened radiation levels in the planetary belts declined through the natural process of nuclear decay.
From 1968 through 1972, NASA sent two dozen Apollo astronauts hurtling through the danger zones. Afterward, experts studying the crews’ exposures found that their doses were less than those of workers who held industrial jobs involving radiation. The astronauts suffered no debilitating health effects.
ADVISING NIXON
A Leap in H-bomb Surveillance
President Richard M. Nixon wanted Moscow and Washington to sign a historic pact to limit their nuclear arms.
Formal talks began in 1969, the year he took office. In parallel, the president and his advisers sought ways to better assess the size of the Soviet arsenal and thus verify compliance with any accord. The overall aim was to make the balance of nuclear terror — the threat of mutually assured destruction — more stable, and a stronger deterrent to war.
A new generation of spy satellites would be a central tool. High above the Earth, they would open a new lens on the secretive movements of Soviet bombers, submarines and missiles capable of hurling thermonuclear arms at the United States. Dr. Garwin, already one of President Nixon’s science advisers, threw himself into the satellite effort.
The nation’s early spy satellites, which relied on photographic film, were slow, clumsy and wasteful. It could take weeks for exposed film to get to photo analysts. And the costly orbiters, once out of film, went into the celestial junkyard.
Dr. Garwin led a team of experts who foresaw a more advanced type of spacecraft that would replace film with microelectronics and radio transmitters. Fresh images would flash to Earth. The team also called for powerful new telescopes. In effect, the spy craft were to be precursors to the Hubble Space Telescope, but aimed at the Earth.
Even by the usual standards of federal secrecy, the satellite project was extremely hush-hush. In July 1971, Dr. Garwin had drafts of the final report delivered by a special class of courier to members of his team. They were required to read them, return them and keep no copies.
The next month, Dr. Garwin and a colleague briefed Kissinger, who backed the new electrooptical approach. Remarkably, the innovation was decades ahead of the shift in consumer cameras from film to digital.
That September, President Nixon approved a plan to develop the new spy satellite, which became the archetype for all that followed. For East-West relations, the technology was seen as raising predictability and lessening surprise, thus lowering tensions between the superpowers.
The next year, Nixon met in Moscow with the Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev to sign an accord that, for the first time, limited their nuclear arsenals.
Dr. Garwin received two awards for this work, one from the C.I.A. in 1996, and another in 2000 from the National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the satellite fleets.
That office’s citation said the physicist had helped Kissinger “understand the critical role” the spy technology would come to play in national security — in stabilizing the uneasy standoff between foes armed with the deadliest of weapons.
ADVISING CLINTON
The Push to End H-bomb Testing
Simplicity made the Hiroshima bomb a sure thing. It had no test explosion. H-bombs were tricker. By definition, they needed multiple tests to uncover flaws and optimize results.
For decades, Dr. Garwin’s push for a comprehensive ban on test detonations rested primarily on that fact — no testing, no H-bomb. Though he saw Kennedy’s space ban as a good start, he wanted to head off not only new arms races, but also new states aspiring to the world’s most destructive weapons.
The end of the Cold War seemed like the moment. In 1993, President Bill Clinton announced plans for a treaty in which all nations would forgo all nuclear blasts, as Washington was doing unilaterally. This meant banning tests even underground, the last permissible zone.
In 1993, Dr. Garwin became chair of the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board in the State Department, which guided senior federal officials, including in the White House. It also helped build public support for a test-ban agreement.
Crucially, in August 1995, Dr. Garwin helped resolve a technical dispute that was threatening to become a deal-breaker in the treaty negotiations. It centered on whether a ban should allow minuscule blasts. He addressed it as a longtime member of the Jasons, a secretive group of independent federal science advisers. In a lengthy report, the group backed the comprehensive ban, saying the United States could sign a treaty even if it ruled out minute tests.
Days later, Mr. Clinton echoed that finding in announcing that he would seek what experts called a zero-yield treaty. “I hope,” he said, “it will lead to an early consensus” at the negotiating table.
Instead, the talks dragged on. And France and China rushed to do last-minute detonations before any ban took effect.
Finally, in September 1996, a solemn procession of world government representatives, including Mr. Clinton, signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Then things fell apart.
Mr. Clinton won re-election that November but now faced Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate.
Worse, the president’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, an intern, came to light in early 1998, fueling a political firestorm that crippled the White House.
As Senate Republicans raced for a quick treaty vote, Dr. Garwin testified before the Foreign Relations Committee.
“We are better off,” he argued, “with a test ban than without it.”
Six days later, on Oct. 13, 1999, the Senate rejected the treaty. Though eventually signed by 187 nations, the treaty never entered into force because the United States and a handful of other key players failed to ratify it.
Still, Dr. Garwin and his colleagues had created a new global norm. The long, hard process of hammering out a global consensus on the merits of a ban, embraced by thermonuclear states, led to a more stable new era. Gone were the shock waves that had radiated from underground test sites and ricocheted around the globe. Since then, the United States and other main nuclear powers have tested no weapons. Now there’s a new kind of silence.
“You do these things,” Dr. Garwin told me shortly after the Senate rejected the treaty. “And if you keep at it for a long time, sometimes you win.”
ADVISING HIMSELF
The Public Debut of the H-Bomb Designer
In 1979, Edward Teller suffered a heart attack and so discovered, as he told a friend, “that I am not immortal.” While recovering, he shared his recollections on the making of the hydrogen bomb with that friend, who had brought along a tape recorder.
“So that first design,” Teller said, “was made by Dick Garwin.” He repeated the tribute to avoid any misunderstanding.
For 22 years, that recording was lost to history. By chance, it also fit nicely with Dr. Garwin’s own determination to hide his H-bomb role.
Myths spread. In 1995, “Dark Sun,” a 700-page account of the hydrogen bomb’s making, attributed its design to a committee of elder scientists. It made no mention of the Cleveland upstart.
That changed in April 2001. George A. Keyworth II, Teller’s friend, who later served as President Ronald Reagan’s science adviser, gave me a transcript of the tape recording and I wrote about it for The New York Times. It was noticed, including by Dr. Garwin and his family.
Though Teller had previously acknowledged the young physicist’s role, those mentions were buried in specialist writings and meetings. Now, suddenly — a half-century after the fact — Dr. Garwin gained wide public recognition as the H-bomb’s designer.
“That was when people really knew,” Lois, his wife, told a historian. “And people who knew Dick very, very well, and had known him for a very long time, expressed real surprise.”
After that, as much as ever, he raced ahead. The polymath lectured and wrote papers on space weapons, land mines, terrorism, pandemics, submarines, science advising, food aid programs, automatic teller machines, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the nation’s electrical grid, the disposal of radioactive waste, catastrophic risks and nuclear disarmament. The last entry in his comprehensive archive is dated early this year.
Around that time, I decided that the elder statesman of nuclear arms control, like Teller, was probably not going to live forever. He was 96. I had some questions.
During that interview, to my surprise, Dr. Garwin said Fermi had emphasized the wrong danger in once calling the H-bomb “an evil thing” because of its unlimited destructiveness.
“That’s not the threat,” he said. The great danger, he added, is “so many nuclear weapons,” which raise the risk of theft, missteps, accidents, unauthorized use — and the world falling from mutual deterrence into a thermonuclear abyss.
To me, that last visit with Dr. Garwin was another glimpse of a bygone era in which he struggled inconspicuously to counter an existential threat to humankind.
I asked if he had ever considered a memoir.
“I tried,” said the man known for his blunt honesty. “It’s an impossible job.”
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7) Why Mahmoud Khalil Remains in Detention as Other Protesters Are Freed
The judge in the case, Michael E. Farbiarz, has yet to weigh in fully on the issues of free speech and due process as Mr. Khalil passes the weeks in Jena, La.
By Jonah E. Bromwich, May 20, 2025
The judge in Mahmoud Khalil’s case has moved methodically, as the justice system struggles to keep pace with the Trump administration. Credit...Adam Gray for The New York Times
Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, was released after 58 days.
Rumeyza Ozturk, a Tufts doctoral student, was released after 45 days.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia undergraduate, was released after 16 days.
But 72 days after his arrest on March 9, Mahmoud Khalil — the country’s most prominent pro-Palestinian-protester-turned-prisoner — is still detained in Jena, La., waiting for a New Jersey federal judge to decide whether he can go free while his immigration case proceeds.
The Trump administration has invoked a rarely cited law to argue that Mr. Khalil’s presence in the country threatens its foreign-policy goal of halting antisemitism. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have argued that the government is retaliating against their client, a legal permanent resident, for participating in protests that shook Columbia University’s campus and that he should have his liberty while his immigration case is assessed.
The New Jersey judge, Michael E. Farbiarz, has been thoroughly engaged. But he has yet to weigh in fully on the issues of free speech and due process that have attracted enormous attention to Mr. Khalil’s case.
His meticulous approach has made the case an exemplar of Trump-era justice, in which the White House frequently moves with a speed that courts are not used to matching.
Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have repeatedly asked the judge to decide whether to release their client on bail, like the other students, before ruling on the issues at the heart of the case. The judge has responded that he must deal with the procedural basics first.
Judge Farbiarz has issued numerous orders and written two lengthy rulings: a 67-page determination that he had the right to preside over the case and a 108-page opinion asserting that his control over the case had not been stripped.
In the second ruling, he acknowledged that the law’s response to cases like Mr. Khalil’s “has been the same across the board: no unnecessary delay.”
That opinion was issued on April 29.
“Mahmoud is understandably frustrated that he was the first to be detained and nine weeks later is still in detention,” said Baher Azmy, one of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers. “But we remain optimistic that the court will see through the patent unconstitutionality of the government’s actions here and order him released soon.”
Legal experts acknowledged that Judge Farbiarz, 51, has proceeded more slowly than other judges. But they emphasized that each judge was different and said they believed it made sense, particularly for an early-career jurist like Judge Farbiarz, to be as thorough as possible.
“In a case that has gotten this much notoriety, I think there’s every reason if you’re the judge to make sure you have all of your ducks in a row,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University. “Judge Farbiarz knows that there is a national spotlight, not just on him but on the ability of the federal courts to handle cases like these.”
Judge Farbiarz has a reputation for thorough, methodical preparation that borders on the obsessive. Before he ascended to the bench in 2023, he was a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, where he headed the office’s terrorism and international narcotics unit.
As a prosecutor, he led a case against one of Osama Bin Laden’s sons-in-law, and another against the first Guantánamo Bay detainee to be tried in civilian court. He also prosecuted a Swedish citizen, Oussama Kassir, who was accused of plotting to set up a training camp for terrorists at an Oregon ranch.
Mark S. DeMarco, a defense lawyer based in the Bronx, represented Mr. Kassir. He was struck by the future Judge Farbiarz’s sense of fair play, and his thoroughness.
“All his bases were covered. There was no stone left unturned,” Mr. DeMarco remembered, adding, “He was probably one of the most prepared prosecutors I’ve gone up against as an adversary.”
After leaving the Manhattan office, the ex-prosecutor became a senior fellow at New York University’s law school, and worked on academic papers that focused on jurisdiction and due process issues involving defendants outside the United States — issues similar to those he has pondered at length in Mr. Khalil’s case.
“What’s really marked about those articles is they do not read as somebody straight out of the prosecutorial trenches,” said Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University who is friendly with the judge. “They read as written by somebody who stepped back from his own practice and really tried to get it right in terms of the legal doctrine.”
People caught up in the legal system often find that judges do not rule quickly enough to account for rapidly unfolding events. The disjuncture has been particularly notable during the second Trump administration, during which courts have struggled to keep up.
“A lot of us on the outside expect federal courts to move with the same dispatch that the executive branch can move. That’s not practicable and it’s not wise,” Mr. Vladeck said. “What separates judicial power from political power is principled legal rationale. Sometimes it takes a little time to make sure that you’ve got the right principles to inform your position.”
In Mr. Khalil’s case, the administration moved with characteristic speed, both in initially detaining him and in rationalizing his arrest.
A spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department quickly claimed he had led activities “aligned to Hamas.” And Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, accused him of “siding with terrorists,” and of participating in protests in which “pro-Hamas” fliers were handed out.
But in the weeks since, those allegations have not been substantiated. Evidence submitted in Mr. Khalil’s immigration case revealed no secretive support for Hamas. And his lawyers have pointed to comments he made on CNN saying that “antisemitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement.”
His case continues to play out in two separate courts. Judge Farbiarz has the power to free him and to determine the constitutionality of the administration’s attempts to deport him.
An immigration court judge, Jamee Comans, is overseeing his immigration proceedings, which determine more narrowly whether the United States has met the legal burden for deporting him. Mr. Khalil’s next immigration court hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
Over the weekend, friends and supporters of Mr. Khalil held a “people’s graduation” event in Manhattan, acknowledging that if he were free, he would have walked in a Columbia University commencement this week.
Mr. Khalil’s wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, was there with the couple’s infant son, Deen, who was born on April 21. Speaking through tears, Dr. Abdalla said she had looked forward to her husband getting to experience his commencement ceremony.
“Like witnessing the birth of our son, Deen, and the first precious month of his life, this moment was stolen from him,” she said.
Eryn Davis contributed reporting.
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8) Rep. McIver Charged With Assault Over Clash Outside Newark ICE Center
The Department of Justice also announced it was dropping a trespass charge against the city’s mayor stemming from the same episode.
By Luis Ferré-SadurnÃ, Published May 19, 2025, Updated May 20, 2025
The Justice Department charged a New Jersey congresswoman with assaulting federal agents during a clash outside a Newark immigration detention center and dropped a trespass charge against the city’s mayor that arose from the same episode, the department said Monday.
Alina Habba, the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey, disclosed the move in a post on X, saying that the congresswoman, LaMonica McIver, had been charged “for assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” when she visited the detention center with two other Democratic members of Congress from New Jersey on May 9.
“No one is above the law — politicians or otherwise,” Ms. Habba said in a statement. “It is the job of this office to uphold justice impartially, regardless of who you are. Now we will let the justice system work.”
She added that she had sought a resolution without bringing criminal charges, but that Ms. McIver had declined.
In a statement on Monday, Ms. McIver blamed federal law enforcement for instigating the clash, saying that “ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation.”
“The charges against me are purely political — they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight,” she said.
Ms. Habba also announced that she had dismissed a misdemeanor charge for trespass against Ras J. Baraka, the Democratic mayor of Newark, whose arrest had precipitated the flare-up with federal agents after he sought to join the lawmakers on their tour of the detention center but was denied entry.
She said she had dismissed the charge “for the sake of moving forward.”
In a statement, Mr. Baraka welcomed the dropping of the charges but said he would “continue to advocate for the humane treatment of detainees” at the detention center, known as Delaney Hall, and ensure it complies with city code and regulations.
Ms. McIver and the two other lawmakers — Representatives Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rob Menendez — have pushed back against the Trump administration’s contention that the legislators stormed into the detention center. The federal government’s narrative has also been contradicted by video footage and by witnesses who were at the scene.
The lawmakers visited the detention center on May 9 to conduct an oversight visit. They said that they were allowed inside to tour the 1,000-bed facility, which opened this month amid resistance from local officials who are opposed to President Trump’s deportation efforts.
Ms. McIver and the other lawmakers, as well as the mayor’s supporters, formed a physical circle around Mr. Baraka, video shows, leading to jostling and a confusing scrum that the Trump administration has sought to cast as a violent mob attack on federal officers. Federal officials arrested Mr. Baraka and charged him with trespassing, a misdemeanor; Mr. Baraka had said he was being selectively prosecuted.
Both sides have pointed to videos from the chaotic scuffle — from recordings by protesters to footage from body cameras released by the Department of Homeland Security — to accuse each other of instigating the altercation, which did not appear to lead to any injuries.
Footage from a body-worn camera shared by Fox News shows the lawmakers and a group of officers outside the facility’s fence. At one point, Ms. McIver appears to make contact with a law enforcement officer wearing fatigues and a face mask as she is finding her way to the gate.
A second video captured a verbal disagreement between Ms. McIver and several officers. The lawmaker, who is standing with her back against a car and is surrounded by officers in tactical gear, can be heard screaming at officers and saying, “Ma’am, he just assaulted me.”
After the incident, Ms. McIver said she had been shoved by officers from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
In a joint statement on Monday, the Democratic leadership of the House called the charges against Ms. McIver “morally bankrupt” and said they lacked “any basis in law or fact.”
Paul J. Fishman, a lawyer for Ms. McIver, called the decision to charge the congresswoman “spectacularly inappropriate.”
“As a member of Congress, she has the right and responsibility to see how ICE is treating detainees,” said Mr. Fishman, who previously served as U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. “Rather than facilitating that inspection, ICE agents chose to escalate what should have been a peaceful situation into chaos.”
After Mr. Baraka was taken into custody, the three lawmakers entered Delaney Hall and took the tour they had been waiting for.
Republicans have seized on the episode to portray Democrats as more interested in protecting the immigrants with criminal records they said are being held inside the facility than U.S. citizens.
In television interviews and on social media, Department of Homeland Security officials have for days accused the lawmakers of “storming” into the facility, suggesting last week that assault charges were looming. The agency shared a video on X that it says shows Ms. McIver assaulting an ICE agent.
Representative Buddy Carter, a Republican from Georgia, introduced a resolution seeking to strip the lawmakers of their committee assignments in the House of Representatives this week. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, called for Ms. McIver to be expelled from Congress.
For weeks, Democratic officials in New Jersey have protested the opening of Delaney Hall, which is expected to significantly expand the federal government’s detention capacity as it ramps up immigration arrests across the country.
In February, ICE entered into a $1 billion contract with GEO Group, one of the country’s largest private prison companies, to convert the building into a detention center. But Mr. Baraka, who is running for governor of New Jersey, galvanized opposition against the detention center, arguing that it had opened without the proper city permits or inspections.
The controversy engulfing the facility drew the attention of the New Jersey lawmakers, who visited the facility on May 9 to inspect the conditions. The mayor tried to join the congressional delegation but was not allowed to do so.
He was initially allowed past the fence, according to video he released last week that he said showed him being invited past the gates before he was arrested, seemingly contradicting accusations that he had barged into the facility without permission. He was then asked to leave multiple times and exited voluntarily, according to video footage and the mayor’s aides.
However, federal agents wearing face coverings and military fatigues appeared outside the gates to arrest the mayor, video shows, leading to a chaotic scene.
In one video, Ms. McIver and Ms. Watson Coleman walk a few paces away before Ms. McIver stops and turns to face the officers. “You can’t talk to a congresswoman like that,” she says. “You will pay.”
Ms. Watson Coleman said earlier this month, “The notion that I or any of my colleagues ‘body slammed’ armed federal officers is absurd.”
“D.H.S. is lying because they know their agents were out of line,” she said.
On Thursday, after a court appearance, Mr. Baraka said he had been targeted by the Trump administration, which he said had fabricated his arrest to humiliate him.
On Monday, Ms. Habba — a lawyer for Mr. Trump whom the president appointed to lead the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey — shifted gears. She said that the federal government had decided to dismiss the charge against Mr. Baraka after “extensive consideration.”
“In the spirit of public interest, I have invited the mayor to tour Delaney Hall,” she said. “The government has nothing to hide at this facility, and I will personally accompany the mayor so he can see that firsthand.”
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9) Israel’s Allies Denounce Its New Gaza Offensive
Britain, France and Canada, all powerful supporters of Israel, called plans for an escalation of the Gaza war “disproportionate” and “egregious.”
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 20, 2025
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening an Israeli takeover of Gaza and the forced relocation of Palestinian civilians into designated areas. Credit...Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Britain, France, and Canada issued a rare public reprimand of Israel, demanding that it cease its renewed military offensive in Gaza — a call that laid bare growing rifts between Israel and traditional Western allies, prompting a furious Israeli response on Tuesday.
“We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism,” a joint statement by the three powerful allies said late on Monday, adding: “But this escalation is wholly disproportionate.”
They condemned the expanded Israeli campaign against Hamas in Gaza and monthslong restrictions on humanitarian aid as “egregious actions” — some of the sharpest rhetoric yet seen by major Western countries long supportive of Israel.
“If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response,” the statement said.
International discontent with Israel is reaching new heights more than 19 months after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack ignited the Israeli war in Gaza. While governments worldwide rushed to back Israel after the assault, diplomatic support faded as the Israeli campaign led to a skyrocketing death toll in Gaza.
Mr. Netanyahu denounced the latest criticism early on Tuesday, saying the three countries had handed a “huge prize” to Hamas. He claimed they were tacitly encouraging a repeat of the Oct. 7 attacks, which saw some 1,200 killed in Israel and 250 taken hostage.
“This is a war of civilization over barbarism,” Mr. Netanyahu said on social media. “Israel will continue to defend itself by just means until total victory is achieved.”
European officials had been privately expressing “increasing frustration and even anger with Israeli actions in Gaza,” said Hugh Lovatt, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
It was not immediately what further actions Britain, France and Canada intended to take if Israel did not heed their warning. But the public statement by three major Israeli allies on Monday night was “a significant change in tone and message,” said Mr. Lovatt.
In March, Israel ended a two-month cease-fire with Hamas that would have freed the hostages in exchange for an end to the war and a full Israeli withdrawal. Mr. Netanyahu has said Israel could not accept anything less than for Hamas to disarm and for its leaders to leave Gaza and go into exile.
Mr. Netanyahu is now threatening an Israeli takeover of Gaza and the forced relocation of Palestinian civilians into designated areas. Israel has already barred humanitarian aid from Gaza for more than two months, leading the United Nations to warn of possible famine.
Critics say the pending military operation would have an even more devastating impact on Palestinian civilians. More than 53,000 people have already been killed in Israel’s military campaign against Hamas, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
And it is far from clear whether an even more intense Israeli assault would defeat Hamas. Israeli forces have already reduced much of Gaza to rubble, while Hamas has fought a stubborn insurgency and recruited thousands of new fighters to its ranks.
The United States, Israel’s most powerful patron and staunchest supporter, has not publicly criticized the renewed Israeli offensive. But President Trump has increasingly bypassed Mr. Netanyahu, cutting a separate deal with Hamas to free the last living American hostage and skipping Israel on his trip to Middle East.
Much of the international criticism has centered around the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, a direct consequence of a two-month Israeli blockade that barred food, medicine and other essential relief from entering the Palestinian enclave.
Aid organizations suspended their operations as food stockpiles dwindled. Doctors reported malnutrition among children, and the United Nations recently said that people across the enclave were at risk of famine.
Over the weekend, Israel finally said it would begin allowing some humanitarian aid into Gaza. But authorities let only five trucks in on Monday, barely a trickle in the face of enormous needs. Even those trucks had yet to be collected by Tuesday morning by U.N. officials, who require Israeli permission to reach the area near Gaza’s border with Israel.
European officials met in Brussels on Tuesday, in part to discuss a Dutch request to examine whether Israel had violated its association agreement with the European Union over grave human rights violations against the Palestinians.
On Tuesday, Jean-Noël Barrot, the French foreign minister, said the European Union could ultimately decide to suspend its agreement with Israel unless the Gaza offensive were halted. That would put Israel in the same category as Syria, Liberia and Zimbabwe, among others.
“The blind violence and the humanitarian blockade by the Israeli government have made Gaza into a deathtrap,” Mr. Barrot said in a radio interview.
Nick Cumming-Bruce, Gabby Sobelman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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10) Suddenly Trump Is No Longer Buying What Bibi Has Been Selling
By Mairav Zonszein, May 21, 2025
Ms. Zonszein is a contributing Opinion writer and a senior Israel analyst with the International Crisis Group. She wrote from Tel Aviv.
"Indeed, in Gaza the United States has mostly left the Netanyahu coalition to its own devices. When the prime minister sat down with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in February, after a cease-fire in Gaza was imposed on Mr. Netanyahu, he and his far-right coalition received the gift of Mr. Trump’s Gaza Riviera idea — which lent legitimacy to the idea of mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. The Trump administration has since provided further support and weapons to Israel, including the 2,000-pound bombs that President Joe Biden had restricted, and reportedly floated the idea of transferring one million Palestinians to Libya."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/opinion/trump-netanyahu-israel.html
Eric Lee/The New York Times
On May 12 an American-Israeli dual citizen and Israeli soldier, Edan Alexander, was released from Hamas captivity in Gaza after direct U.S.-Hamas negotiations that sidestepped Israel. The images that accompanied his release looked like an American operation that just happened to take place in Israel. It was a U.S. hostage negotiator, Adam Boehler — who conducted direct talks with Hamas in March — who accompanied Mr. Alexander’s mother on the flight from her home in America to Israel, and it was a U.S. envoy, Steve Witkoff, who handed her a phone to speak with her son at the moment of his release. Headlines highlighted President Trump’s phone call with Mr. Alexander. The message was clear: It was Mr. Trump, not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who got Israel’s soldier out of Gaza.
This is not the Trump administration that Mr. Netanyahu had so eagerly anticipated. On almost every significant strategic and geopolitical issue that matters to Israel — from seeking a new nuclear deal with Iran to a cease-fire with the Houthis, from embracing the new Syrian regime to negotiating directly with Hamas on hostage release — Mr. Trump is not only bypassing Israel but also moving in a very different direction from what Mr. Netanyahu would have chosen. The U.S. administration has sidelined Israel again and again. In so doing, Mr. Trump and his team have managed to expose Israel’s policy of destruction and the failings of Israel’s leader, whose lone success has been staying in power through pursuing constant war.
That doesn’t mean that there is an open crisis between Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu or that Israel has lost the United States as its most powerful ally or even that Mr. Trump will force Israel to stop the war in Gaza. Indeed, in Gaza the United States has mostly left the Netanyahu coalition to its own devices. When the prime minister sat down with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in February, after a cease-fire in Gaza was imposed on Mr. Netanyahu, he and his far-right coalition received the gift of Mr. Trump’s Gaza Riviera idea — which lent legitimacy to the idea of mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. The Trump administration has since provided further support and weapons to Israel, including the 2,000-pound bombs that President Joe Biden had restricted, and reportedly floated the idea of transferring one million Palestinians to Libya.
But Mr. Trump talks about putting “an end to this very brutal war,” while Mr. Netanyahu is now openly promising to “take control of all parts of Gaza” and “complete victory.” Since Israel broke the cease-fire in March, more than 3,000 Gazans have been killed, many of them civilians. Israel’s policy has starved the remaining two million people of Gaza, which Mr. Trump acknowledged as he departed the Persian Gulf region on May 16, even as he did not prevent it from happening. And Israel is not any closer to victory. On May 18, after more than two months of freezing all aid into Gaza on the allegation that Hamas has been profiting from it, Mr. Netanyahu grudgingly approved the immediate entry of nominal aid after the United States and the Israeli military warned that the strip is on the brink of mass starvation. Now Britain, France and Canada have issued a statement threatening punitive action, including sanctions on Israel, if it does not stop its renewed military offensive and immediately let more aid in.
Mr. Netanyahu is increasingly in a corner. He can no longer blame his inability to defeat Hamas on the Biden administration for restricting him on Gaza. Nor can he blame his defense minister or army chief of staff or those leading the negotiating team — all of whom he recently replaced — or even a top Hamas leader, Muhammad Sinwar, whom Israel is reported to have targeted on May 13.
There is a crisis among reservist soldiers experiencing a combination of fatigue and lack of motivation for an operation they don’t believe will achieve its goals, compounded by ultra-Orthodox coalition partners demanding a law to exempt their constituents from military service. A majority of the Israeli public and a critical mass of former heads of Israel’s security establishment favor a hostage deal to end the war. They have turned directly to lobbying Mr. Trump, hoping he might force Mr. Netanyahu’s hand, as the president did to secure the release of Mr. Alexander.
It appears that the White House finally sees Mr. Netanyahu for what he is: a weak Israeli leader with seemingly little or nothing to offer Mr. Trump, who appears more interested in trade, business and a Nobel Peace Prize than in continuing to fund an endless war.
That is quite a shift. After Mr. Trump won the election, Mr. Netanyahu saw an ally coming into the White House. This was, after all, the same president who recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights and moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in his first term. And it is the same president who, since retaking office, protected Mr. Netanyahu from the International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest by imposing sanctions on the court and overseeing an aggressive campaign to repress free speech and dismantle pro-Palestinian activism in the United States.
Now it is the president who has left Mr. Netanyahu looking more isolated, humiliated and inept than ever before.
A few months ago, Israel appeared to be making historic gains in its decades-long battle for hegemony in the Middle East: It had crushed Hezbollah in Lebanon, left Iran vulnerable and contributed to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. These days, Israel is a shell of itself. The country is left with a military with vast capabilities and resources adept at surveillance and destruction and a leader who has mastered the art of political survival by crushing dissent and manipulating narratives. Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition of far-right settlers and ultra-Orthodox Jews is sticking together because they have nowhere else to go. Whether Mr. Trump will finally compel Mr. Netanyahu to end the war on Gaza is still very much in question, but Israel’s ability to steer the conversation or shape the terms of regional dynamics has been significantly diminished by its dead-end campaign.
What Mr. Netanyahu is selling — a zero-sum victory over Hamas and with no guarantee of returning the remaining hostages — no longer has any buyers. These days he seems trapped. But he is also a master of self-preservation. The question is how he will get himself out of it this time and how many more lives it will cost.
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11)Trump to Press South Africa’s President to Pare Back Racial Equity Laws
In a White House meeting, the U.S. president is expected to point to alleged discrimination against white South Africans, a week after welcoming a group of them as refugees.
By Erica L. Green and John Eligon, Reporting from Washington, May 21, 2025
President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa in Johannesburg in February. Credit...Kim Ludbrook/EPA, via Shutterstock
President Trump plans to press President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa to roll back the country’s racial equity laws and to do more to protect Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority, in a meeting scheduled at the White House on Wednesday, according to a White House official.
The meeting comes a little more than a week after the Trump administration welcomed a group of white South Africans to the United States as refugees after they claimed they were persecuted in their home country. Tensions between the two countries have ratcheted up over racial issues, as Mr. Trump’s administration has sought to make global his crusade to eradicate policies around diversity and redressing historical inequities.
Among the topics Mr. Trump is likely to raise is the alleged discrimination against Afrikaners, according to the official, who spoke about the meeting on the condition of anonymity. Members of the white minority group, descendants of European colonialists who ruled during apartheid, were among those brought to the United States on a U.S.-funded charter plane.
Mr. Trump has steadily dismantled the country’s refugee system that had provided sanctuary for those fleeing war, famine and natural disasters, but made an exception to accommodate the expedited resettlement of the Afrikaners.
In the White House meeting, Mr. Trump may also press for the South African government to condemn an anti-apartheid chant that called for the killing of Afrikaners, which the governing party, the African National Congress, distanced itself from years ago.
Mr. Trump, who has also amplified false claims of a “genocide” of white farmers, is also expected to ask that the government of South Africa classify farm attacks as a priority crime, the official said. He is expected to request that U.S. companies be exempt from a requirement that foreign-owned entities sell equity in their businesses to Black South Africans or others who were locked out of ownership opportunities during apartheid.
That requirement is at the center of much of the criticism leveled against South Africa by Elon Musk, who has called it racist and blamed it for preventing him from bringing his satellite internet company, Starlink, to his native country.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has taken aggressive actions against South Africa, citing allegations of racial discrimination against the country’s white population.
That included cutting off all foreign aid to South Africa for engaging in what he called “race-based discrimination.” Mr. Trump also expelled South Africa’s ambassador after that official accused him of playing into white grievance in America. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he would skip a Group of 20 foreign ministers meeting in South Africa, in part due to its promotion of what he deemed “D.E.I.,” or diversity, equity and inclusion.
Trump administration officials have argued that laws seeking to combat inequity have hurt white South Africans, and that white people in the United States could be similarly disenfranchised by policies aimed at tackling systemic racism.
Mr. Trump is also likely to discuss with Mr. Ramaphosa the countries’ trade imbalance, and the fact that South Africa’s economy has stagnated. Ultimately, the U.S. wants to argue that the country’s laws dealing with race threaten to collapse its economy, the White House official said.
For his part, Mr. Ramaphosa is expected to try to convince Mr. Trump that the United States has a lot to gain from maintaining close ties with South Africa, the largest economy in Africa. He is expected to present a proposal for a trade deal between the two countries that would include ensuring that the United States gets improved access to South Africa’s wealth of critical minerals that are necessary for producing clean energy technology.
The South African president is also expected to seek a reset in his relationship with Mr. Musk, the Trump ally who is one of South Africa’s loudest critics. The United States is South Africa’s second-largest trading partner, but government officials say that many of their policies that upset Mr. Trump are necessary to undo the racial inequality created during apartheid.
Like many other South Africans, Mr. Ramaphosa appeared to be angered by Mr. Trump’s resettlement program. In the days after the white South Africans left for the United States, Mr. Ramaphosa called their migration a “cowardly” act.
Mr. Trump launched his attacks on South Africa this year after Mr. Ramaphosa signed into law a measure that gives the government the ability to take private property without paying compensation. Although legal experts say uncompensated seizures are subject to strict judicial review and are likely to be rare, Afrikaner community leaders have expressed fears that white farmers will have their land taken from them.
Mr. Trump has been railing against South Africa’s proposed land reforms since 2018. That year, he proclaimed on social media that he had ordered his secretary of state to “closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.”
Days before Mr. Trump issued his executive order halting aid to the country, Mr. Ramaphosa defended the recently adopted Expropriation Act, writing in a post on X that it was “not a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process.” He said he looked forward to explaining the difference to the Trump administration.
Police data doesn’t support claims of targeted killings of white farmers. But Christopher Vandome, a senior research fellow with the Africa program at the think tank Chatham House, noted that such claims spoke to a larger fear among Afrikaners in South Africa.
Mr. Vandome said that much of the friction over the farm deaths and the land bill was part of a “sense of victimhood due to the paranoia of always expecting there to be retribution for what happened in the past.”
The Trump administration, he said, was using “a mix of fact and misinterpretation” in its criticism of South Africa’s laws underpinned by race.
“This is kind of the Trumpian way,” Mr. Vandome said. “You mix these things together, so it makes it very, very hard to engage with.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Edward Wong contributed reporting.
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12) When the U.S. and Israel Bomb the Houthis, Civilians Pay the Highest Price
Military strikes in Yemen and sanctions targeting the Iran-backed militia have compounded a humanitarian crisis in the poorest country in the Middle East, officials say.
By Ismaeel Naar and Saeed Al-Batati, May 21, 2025
Ismaeel Naar reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Saeed Al-Batati from al-Mukalla, Yemen.
A building in Sana, Yemen, damaged by U.S. airstrikes in April. Aid agencies say that the bombing campaigns have caused more harm to civilians than the Houthis. Credit...Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
Mohammed Omar Baghwi was working the evening shift on April 17 at Ras Isa port in Yemen’s northwestern Hudaydah Province when the American military began bombing.
As a manager, Mr. Baghwi, 45, was responsible for a department that filled cooking gas cylinders. He was one of at least 74 people killed during the strike, making it one of the deadliest attacks by the United States on Yemen.
U.S. Central Command said it had attacked the port to “degrade the economic source of power” of the Iran-backed Houthi militant group based in northern Yemen, which controls most of the country. But Mr. Baghwi’s family said he had been just a civilian trying to make ends meet.
“Mohammed and his companions had done nothing wrong,” said Hassan Omar Baghwi, his brother. “They were simply doing their job to earn a living for themselves and their families under extremely difficult living conditions.”
The Houthis have been firing drone and missile strikes at Israel in solidarity with Hamas after it led an attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and to pressure Israel over its campaign in Gaza. The Houthis have also targeted commercial ships in the Red Sea, a vital trade route.
Those attacks have prompted retaliatory strikes from the United States and Israel, which, for the past two months, have regularly bombed Yemen. The American and Israeli governments say the strikes were focused on Houthi leaders and assets, but they have also killed many civilians, destroyed vital infrastructure and deepened uncertainty in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East.
Before President Trump announced this month that the United States had reached a cease-fire with the militia, his administration had said its main goal was to restore navigation in the Red Sea. When he announced the cease-fire, Mr. Trump said the Houthis had “capitulated.”
The Houthis have continued to attack Israel, however, launching missiles that have landed near Ben Gurion Airport, close to Tel Aviv, setting off sirens and sending millions of civilians into bomb shelters. Israel has responded with more strikes, and the two sides show little sign of stopping their tit-for-tat attacks.
Analysts say the strikes will only add to the misery for Yemeni civilians, the vast majority of whom live in Houthi-controlled territory and had already experienced decades of war before the U.S. and Israeli attacks. The Houthis oppose the United States and Israel, and see themselves as part of the Iranian-led “axis of resistance,” alongside Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But despite the months of strikes, some analysts and officials have questioned whether the U.S. and Israeli efforts have degraded the Houthis’ military capability. The Trump administration has launched more than 1,000 strikes costing billions of dollars and destroying Houthi weapons and equipment. But U.S. intelligence agencies have said the group could easily reconstitute.
“The strikes have already triggered a fuel crisis, which will drive up the cost of basic goods and services in a country where most of the population are struggling to afford food,” said Nadwa al-Dawsari, an analyst focused on Yemen at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
“Even if their operations slow temporarily, they’ll regroup, rebuild and return stronger,” she added.
Civilians and aid workers say the bombing campaigns have compounded an already dire humanitarian situation.
In 2014, the Houthis seized on a period of political instability to take over the country’s capital, Sana. A Saudi-led military coalition backed by U.S. assistance and weapons began a bombing campaign in 2015 to try to restore the internationally recognized government. The coalition enforced a de facto naval and air blockade that restricted the flow of food and other goods into Houthi-held territory. The intervention failed, leaving the Houthis in power in the north of the country. The subsequent civil war has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians and caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
In a briefing to the United Nations Security Council last week, humanitarian officials warned that Yemen still faced serious challenges. “Half of Yemen’s children — or 2.3 million — are malnourished, 600,000 of them severely so,” said Tom Fletcher, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief. He added that 2,000 nutrition programs had been forced to shut down.
Israeli airstrikes on Yemeni cities this month, including on the international airport, caused nearly $500 million in damage, according to the airport’s director, and flights were suspended for more than a week. Israel said the attack had been in retaliation for a Houthi missile strike near Ben Gurion Airport.
But the airport in Sana is mainly used for civilian travel and is one of the few ways Yemenis can get access to emergency medical treatment overseas.
Waseem al-Haidari, a 42-year-old government employee in Sana, said past closures of the airport because of airstrikes had caused painful financial and emotional hardship on families like his when emergency medical treatment is needed.
“Our family sold valuable belongings and borrowed additional money to cover my brother’s trip through Aden Airport to Cairo for a cornea transplant,” he said. Critically ill patients in Yemen are left with no choice but to endure a grueling 24-hour road journey to Aden or Seiyun, in the south of Yemen, to seek medical evacuation abroad.
The western port city of Hudaydah, which the Israeli military says is a critical supply route for the Houthis, has borne the brunt of U.S. and Israeli strikes over the past year. Many of its ports and roads, which are lifelines for food and medicine entering the country, are in ruins.
Even residents in southern areas of the country that are run by the internationally recognized Yemeni government say they were being affected, even if they are not in an area that has been regularly bombed.
Saleh Ramadan, 49, lives in a dilapidated home in the southern city of al-Mukalla, where his children sleep in a dimly lit room. There is no furniture, no table for meals, no cupboards to store clothes.
“In the past, we could buy meat and chicken, even celebrate Eid with meat and new clothes,” he said, referring the Islamic festival celebrated at the end of Ramadan. Now, he said, his family often skips meals.
Mr. Ramadan’s eldest son, Mohammed, 20, dropped out of school to help his father deliver cooking gas. When the children get sick, the family relies mostly on herbal remedies because it cannot get medicine, which has become too expensive or is in short supply.
Mr. Trump’s decision to slash overall U.S. aid spending has made matters worse. Aid agencies have had to scale back food distribution, and the United Nations’ World Food Program has warned that without new funding, programs for malnourished children under 5 could stop as early as this month.
The Trump administration’s decision to re-designate the Houthis as a terrorist group has also complicated efforts to deliver humanitarian aid, as international banks fear contravening U.S. sanctions and are hesitant about processing transactions involving Yemen. Donor fatigue and geopolitical tensions have made securing aid even more challenging.
The costs of food and transportation have soared, and the U.N.’s humanitarian office has reported that many families now spend up to 60 percent of their income on food alone.
For Sara Mohammed, a widowed mother of three living in al-Mukalla, the struggle has been relentless. Living in a makeshift home with her mentally ill mother and blind father, she said the family relied on her sister’s income as a domestic worker and their father’s modest pension.
“We can’t afford food,” she said. “My sister dropped out of college to work two shifts. She has heart problems but can’t afford medical treatment. My kids eat boiled rice. We survive on faith.”
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13) Israel Said It Eased Its Blockade, But Gazans Are Still Waiting for Food
Three days after Israel said it would ease its blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, little, if any, of the desperately needed food, fuel and medicine appeared to have reached Palestinians.
By Aaron Boxerman, Bilal Shbair and Iyad Abuheweila, May 21, 2025
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, Bilal Shbair from central Gaza, and Iyad Abuheweila from Istanbul.
For Abdelhalim Awad, who runs a bakery in central Gaza, the hope of food arriving for hungry Gazans has become like the endless reports of an approaching cease-fire: constantly rumored to be just around the corner yet always out of reach.
Three days after Israel announced that it would ease its blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, it appeared on Wednesday that little, if any, of the desperately needed food, fuel and medicine had reached hungry Palestinians.
Dozens of trucks ferrying supplies have crossed into Gaza at the Israeli-controlled border crossing of Kerem Shalom, according to Israel. But the United Nations has so far been unable to move any trucks from Kerem Shalom to warehouses inside Gaza, according to two U.N. officials, who requested anonymity to share sensitive details.
Stephane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, said on Tuesday that U.N. teams had waited for several hours for Israeli permission to head to the crossing. But they were unable to “secure the arrival” of those supplies to aid warehouses, he said at a news conference.
Mr. Awad said he and others had been informed by the United Nations that some shipments of flour might arrive on Wednesday. But even if they did, it would only be a dent the daily hunger that became widespread in Gaza under the Israeli blockade.
“Even if we get some flour today, it seems we won’t have anything close to what’s needed to feed people,” Mr. Awad said.
In the meantime, Palestinians reeling from Israel’s two-month ban on food, fuel and other supplies have been left waiting. The delays suggested that distributing aid across Gaza was likely to take time, even as Israel threatens a major ground offensive that could upend the process.
“Today we will mostly eat lentils, or pasta,” Riyadh al-Housari, a 25-year-old in Gaza City, said in a phone interview. “We eat one meal in the late afternoon. It is one meal and there is no other.”
Israel’s blockade has rendered the situation so dire that Gazans are at “critical risk of famine,” a panel of U.N.-backed experts said this month. They projected that tens of thousands of children could suffer from acute malnutrition if the restrictions continued. Israel argued the report was based on faulty data and assumptions.
The worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza has ignited growing international opprobrium against the Israeli campaign against Hamas. Even Israel’s allies — who offered vigorous support after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks started the war — have voiced frustration and even anger over the conflict and its cost to ordinary Palestinians.
This week Britain, France, and Canada denounced the Israeli blockade and planned ground offensive in unusually stark and harsh terms, labeling them “disproportionate” and “egregious.” On Tuesday, the British government said it was suspending negotiations on expanding the countries’ free-trade agreement in protest.
On Wednesday, the newly anointed pope, Leo XIV, joined the chorus calling for aid to be allowed into the Gaza Strip. He described the situation as “increasingly worrying and painful” and urged “the entry of dignified humanitarian aid and to put an end to the hostilities.”
The Israeli ban on humanitarian aid began in early March, as the initial phase of a two-month cease-fire between Israel and Hamas ended. Both sides were supposed to be negotiating the next steps in the truce. Israeli officials argued the restrictions aimed to pressure Hamas to compromise.
The impact on ordinary Gazans was immense: Aid organizations suspended their operations as food stockpiles dwindled, and the price of food skyrocketed. In late March, Israel ended the truce with a massive bombardment and resumed its offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
By this month relief officials were warning that widespread hunger had become a daily reality. But for weeks, Israel refused to allow aid agencies to resume operations unless they agreed to new Israeli conditions, purportedly to prevent supplies from falling into Hamas’s hands.
Israeli leaders publicly insisted that Gaza still had plentiful stockpiles of food. But behind closed doors, some military officials privately concluded that Palestinians there could face starvation within weeks.
Even the United States — one of Israel’s most stalwart supporters throughout the conflict — began suggesting that the humanitarian crisis was spiraling out of control. Last week, President Trump said that “a lot of people are starving” in the Gaza Strip and that the United States was working to alleviate the situation.
The Israeli authorities relented on Sunday night, announcing that they would begin allowing in small amounts of food.
Without any new aid having actually arrived, many in Gaza are trying to make whatever provisions they have last as long as possible. “We don’t plan meals anymore,” said Sabah ِAbu al-Roos, 63, in the central city of Deir al-Balah. “We just work with whatever we can find.”
Produce like eggplants and tomatoes is often hawked at eye-watering prices, according to several Gazans. Ms. Abu al-Roos said that one vendor in a local street market had been selling a single onion for $8.50.
Iman Jundiyeh, a mother of four in Gaza City, said she could only dream of the regular meals she used to enjoy before the war: fragrant sliced lamb; chicken, potatoes and rice; and maftoul, a kind of Palestinian couscous.
She now relies almost exclusively on soup kitchens run by charities that still manage to stew pots of lentils and other staples for crowds of displaced Palestinians. Everything else is either unavailable or too expensive, she said.
“Just yesterday, my son begged me for watermelon,” said Ms. Jundiyeh. “I started to cry with him.”
Ameera Harouda and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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14) What to Know About Israel’s Expanding Offensive in Gaza
The announcement of an escalation in the war came after a particularly deadly week for Palestinians in Gaza. Some of Israel’s allies denounced the move.
By Aaron Boxerman and Samuel Granados, Published May 19, 2025, Updated May 21, 2025
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem
“The military said it would dissect Gaza into separate zones while ordering Palestinian civilians to leave combat areas.”
Searching for victims after an airstrike in Jabaliya in northern Gaza on Thursday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israel declared this week that it was expanding its ground offensive in Gaza, vowing to seize large areas of the enclave in an effort to force the surrender of Hamas after more than 19 months of war.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Monday that Israeli troops could effectively take control of all of Gaza as part of the offensive, which could take place gradually and in stages.
The threat came during a new and intense round of cease-fire negotiations and as the Trump administration presses both sides to agree to a truce. The Israeli military has said that Hamas could halt the advance by releasing the hostages it holds.
Britain, France, and Canada issued a rare public reprimand of Israel this week, demanding that it cease its widening military offensive in Gaza. That laid bare growing rifts between Israel and its traditional Western allies and prompted a furious Israeli response.
The announcements of new military maneuvers could also be a negotiating ploy to pressure Hamas to make compromises.
The past few days have been especially deadly for Palestinians in Gaza. The enclave has been devastated by the war and a total blockade on aid for more than two months, which has put the population at risk of starvation.
How far have Israeli troops advanced?
For weeks, Mr. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have been threatening a massive escalation in Gaza unless Hamas agreed to Israel’s terms for a truce.
Then on Sunday, Israel announced that its forces had launched “extensive ground operations” throughout the enclave, saying that soldiers from five divisions were participating in the renewed offensive.
The military said it would dissect Gaza into separate zones while ordering Palestinian civilians to leave combat areas.
But details about the renewed offensive and Israeli troop movements were scarce. And despite escalating its rhetoric, the Israeli military on Monday had yet to begin the long-awaited major advance, which could involve thousands of ground troops.
Satellite images taken on May 20 and analyzed by The New York Times show Israeli military activity since a week ago across several locations near Israel’s border with Gaza, including in the northern part of the enclave and near the southern city of Khan Younis.
The military has also been active further south in Rafah, where satellite images show it has destroyed extensive parts of the city since the cease-fire collapsed in mid-March.
Effie Defrin, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said at a news conference on Sunday that the military was being intentionally ambiguous about its movements to protect its forces.
How many people have been killed?
Before announcing the renewed ground offensive, Israel had started ratcheting up its bombardment of Gaza. Israeli strikes have killed more than 400 people since last Thursday, according to figures from the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had struck more than 670 targets across the enclave over the past week. People in Gaza have described near-constant explosions and the howls of fighter jets overhead.
One recent attack hit around the European Hospital near the southern city of Khan Younis. Israeli officials said the strike was an effort to kill Muhammad Sinwar, one of Hamas’s remaining top commanders in Gaza; neither Israel nor Hamas has publicly confirmed his fate.
The Israeli military says it takes measures to avoid harming civilians, such as using “precise munitions” and warning ahead of some strikes.
More than 53,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Hamas set off the conflict with a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 people and saw 250 taken as hostages to Gaza.
Is any aid getting into Gaza?
After barring all humanitarian aid from entering the enclave for more than two months, the Israeli government announced on Sunday night that it would allow “a basic amount of food” into Gaza.
On Monday, Israel allowed at least five aid trucks to enter, according to the Israeli military office that oversees humanitarian affairs. Tom Fletcher, the U.N.’s top aid coordinator, welcomed the move but called it a “drop in the ocean of what is urgently needed.”
The blockade has caused widespread hunger and deprivation among Palestinians in Gaza. Aid organizations suspended their operations as food stockpiles dwindled. Doctors reported malnutrition among children, and the United Nations recently warned that people across the enclave were at risk of famine.
Israeli officials had said the blockade was an attempt to force Hamas to surrender and release the remaining hostages held in Gaza, dozens of whom are presumed dead.
For weeks, Israel publicly insisted that Gaza was well-provisioned. But Israeli officials privately began to assess that unless some aid was allowed into the enclave, Palestinians there could face starvation.
In recent days, the Trump administration — Israel’s main foreign backer — joined a long list of foreign governments to warn of starvation in Gaza.
Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement that the resumption of aid was a response to such criticism and an attempt to sustain foreign backing for Israel’s campaign.
If Gazans were to starve, the international community “won’t support us, and we won’t be able to complete our victory,” he said.
How are Palestinians in Gaza responding?
The vast majority of Gaza’s roughly two million residents have already been forcibly displaced at least once — many of them several times — during the war.
Even before the Israeli military’s announcement on Sunday, Palestinians had started fleeing their homes to seek shelter away from the Israeli lines. On Monday, Israel ordered sweeping evacuation orders in and around the southern city of Khan Younis.
Suzanne Abu Daqqa, who lives in Abasan, outside of Khan Younis, said Sunday that what she feared most of all was being forced to leave her home again for a tent camp along the enclave’s sweltering coastline.
“If they tell us ‘leave' — that will be a great catastrophe,” she said in a phone call.
The following day, Israel’s military warned residents of Abasan to flee or face “an unprecedented attack.”
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.
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