Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, November 18, 2023

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BAY AREA

#CEASEFIRE MASS MEETING

Sunday, November 26

10:00 A.M. – 3:00 P.M.

Bay Resistance, Center for Political Education, APTP and AROC invite you to connect with allies and community to move into forceful action to stop the genocide in Gaza.

In this critical moment, we offer this mass meeting space to get clear on messaging and deepen our shared understanding of our organizing strategy. There will be space for political education, training on organizing skills, action planning, and spaces for arts and culture.

This event is open to everyone to get plugged in, including new people who want to learn more about this movement and activists who want to find ways to do more. We’ll have special breakout sessions for families and parents organizing at schools and in their districts.

Stay tuned for an RSVP link coming soon!  Check HERE for updated details:

https://www.facebook.com/events/267145765886103

Take Urgent Action Now!

Call Congress to Demand a Ceasefire Now!

https://act.uscpr.org/a/callforgaza?oa_ext=AROC

Email Congress to demand a Ceasefire Now!

https://act.uscpr.org/a/stop-funding-israels-massacres?oa_ext=AROC

AROC is the only organization in Northern California that builds power for our SWANA people by providing critical legal support and social services while organizing our community around issues of justice and equity.

Our team invites you to be part of the fabric that holds our work together, in the spirit of takkaful, by donating to our organization today:

https://araborganizing.networkforgood.com/projects/100246-main-giving-page

Donate to AROC:

https://araborganizing.networkforgood.com/projects/100246-main-giving-page

Copyright © 2023 Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), All rights reserved.

You are receiving this email because you have expressed interest in AROC news and events.

Our mailing address is:

Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC)

522 Valencia Street

San Francisco, CA 94110

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"The Rock" on top of Bernal Hill overlooking downtown San Francisco re-painted October 26, 2023, after pro-Israeli Zionist's destroyed it. 

Palestinians killed and wounded by Israel:

As of November 18, 2023, the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel is now over 11,470 (at least 5,000 of them children and 3,130 women) with over 27,490 injured in Gaza—and more than 190 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the occupied West Bank in the past month. 

Since October 7, one in every 57 Palestinians living in Gaza has been killed or injured in Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion,

Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told diplomats in Geneva.

Israelis killed and abducted by Hamas: 

A total of 1,200* Israelis killed by Hamas (30 of them children) and 239 abducted on October 7, 2023.

* Israel has revised its official estimated death toll of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, lowering the number to about 1,200 people, down from more than 1,400, a spokesman for the country’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday night.

NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA  PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!

END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!

FOR A DEMOCRATIC, SECULAR PALESTINE!

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Protesters calling for ceasefire in Gaza take over base of the Statue of Liberty

Hundreds of protesters affiliated with the group Jewish Voice for Peace staged a sit-in at the National Park Service site at 1:00 P.M., Monday, November 6, 2023 to call for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/11/06/protesters-statue-liberty-gaza-israel-ceasefire

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Ann Boyer’s Powerful New York Times Resignation Letter

November 17, 2023

Read: The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children, By Raja Abdulrahim, Photographs by Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/world/middleeast/gaza-children-israel.html

According to Literary Hub[1], "[Early on November 16, 2023], the news broke that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist, and poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine, Anne Boyer, has resigned from her post, writing in her resignation letter that 'the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone...'"

 

The letter in full is written below:

 

"I have resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine.

"The Israeli state’s U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.

"The world, the future, our hearts—everything grows smaller and harder from this war. It is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted throughout decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.

"Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.

"I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.

"If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present."

—Anne Boyer

---

[1] https://lithub.com/read-anne-boyers-extraordinary-resignation-letter-from-the-new-york-times/

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Viva Fidel!

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PLEASE SIGN AND FORWARD WIDELY!

 

To endorse the following statement as a trade unionist, please click here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd2tpd2c62Sh5YEVDOr2vmGWTuQArt-6OPQMDwd2wUnfNi_rQ/viewform

 

To endorse as other, please click here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdzWaP1U_KOHlH-ou1R3OD8zsuI5BWW1b9H4gtPoFK_lIQB3g/viewform

 

The list of signers will be updated periodically

Contact: info@laborforpalestine.net

Website: laborforpalestine.net

 

Stand With Palestinian Workers: 

Cease the Genocide Now—Stop Arming Israel!

Labor for Palestine

 

“We need you to take immediate action—wherever you are in the world—to prevent the arming of the Israeli state and the companies involved in the infrastructure of the blockade.” An Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel (October 16, 2023)

 

The undersigned U.S. workers, trade unionists, and anti-apartheid activists join labor around the world in condemning the Israeli siege on Gaza that has killed or maimed thousands of Palestinians—many of them children—and stand with Palestinians’ “right to exist, resist, return, and self-determination.”

 

The latest Israeli attacks reflect more than a century of ongoing Zionist settler-colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, racism, genocide, and apartheid—including Israel’s establishment through the uprooting and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba. Indeed, eighty percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza are refugees from other parts of historic Palestine.

 

Israel’s crimes are only possible because of more than $3.8 billion a year (or $10+ million per day) in bipartisan US military aid that gives Israel the guns, bullets, tanks, ships, jet fighters, missiles, helicopters, white phosphorus and other weapons to kill and maim the Palestinian people. This is the same system of racist state violence that, through shared surveillance technology and police exchange programs, brutalizes BIPOC and working class people in the United States and around the world.

 

In response, we demand an immediate end to the genocide, and embrace the recent Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel:

 

1.     To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel. To refuse to transport weapons to Israel. 

 

2.     To pass motions in their trade union to this effect. 

 

3.     To take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, especially if they have contracts with your institution. 

 

4.     Pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and in the case of the U.S., funding to it.

 

We further reaffirm the call on labor bodies to respect previous Palestinian trade union appeals for solidarity by adopting this statement, and/or the model resolution below to divest from Israel Bonds, sever all ties with the Israel’s racist labor federation, the Histadrut, and its US mouthpiece, the Jewish Labor Committee, and respect the Palestinian picket line for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). 

 

Initial Signers on behalf of Labor for Palestine

(organizational affiliations listed for identification only)

Suzanne Adely, Labor for Palestine, US Palestinian Community Network, Arab Workers Resource Center; Food Chain Workers Alliance (staff); President, National Lawyers Guild; Monadel Herzallah, Arab American Union Members Council; Ruth Jennison, Department Rep., Massachusetts Society of Professors, MTA, NEA; Co-Chair, Labor Standing Committee River Valley DSA; Delegate to Western Mass Area Labor Federation; Lara Kiswani, Executive Director, Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC); Block the Boat; Michael Letwin, Former President, Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325; Jews for Palestinian Right of Return; Corinna Mullin, PSC-CUNY International Committee; CUNY for Palestine; Clarence Thomas, Co-Chair, Million Worker March; Executive Board, ILWU Local 10 (retired.)

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Join us for an exciting Cuba solidarity event coming up on Sunday, November 12th, 4 pm at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley. Liz Oliva Fernández, a Cuban journalist and filmmaker with the Belly of the Beast media organization, is coming to the Bay Area as part of a national tour. She will be showing two new short documentary films exposing what's behind Biden's Cuba policy. This is an important chance for the Bay Area community to learn about current U.S. policy and show support for Cuba. 

Cuba has been outspoken about its solidarity with Palestine/Gaza during the current crisis.

Liz Oliva Fernández

Liz Oliva Fernández is a 29-year old journalist and on-camera television presenter from Havana, Cuba.  She is the award-winning presenter of the acclaimed documentary series The War on Cuba,  produced by Belly of the Beast and executive-produced by Oliver Stone and Danny Glover.  In addition to her journalism and filmmaking, Fernández is a dedicated anti-racist and feminist activist who co-founded Chicas Poderosas Cuba (Powerful Cuban Girls), an initiative that promotes change by inspiring female leadership and gender equality in Cuban society. 

Liz writes: “As a Cuban Black woman, I feel that the reality in which I grew up and still live is reflected in the stories we have told at Belly of the Beast. We challenge clichés – positive and negative – about Cuba and its people. And we are taking on issues that have been ignored or misrepresented by major media outlets both in Cuba and outside.”

Sponsored by Bay Area Cuba Solidarity Network

Venceremos Brigade, Bay Area and 

Richmond, CA - Regla, Cuba Friendship Committee

More info: bayareacubasolidarity@gmail.com

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Jewish Doctor Speaks Out on Israel and Palestine

Dr. Gabor Maté, Hungarian-Canadian physician and author describes his own life experience and expresses his view on the situation in Israel and Palestine.

“I’m personally a Holocaust survivor as an infant, I barely survived. My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and most of my extended family were killed. I became a Zionist; this dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland and the barbed wire of Auschwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful army…and then I found out that it wasn’t exactly like that, that in order to make this Jewish dream a reality we had to visit a nightmare on the local population.

“There’s no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population. Jewish Israeli historians have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of Palestinians was persistent, pervasive, cruel, murderous and with deliberate intent—that’s what’s called the ‘Nakba’ in Arabic; the ‘disaster’ or the ‘catastrophe.’ There’s a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust, but in Israel you’re not allowed to mention the Nakba, even though it’s at the very basis of the foundation of Israel.

“I visited the Occupied Territories (West Bank) during the first intifada. I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw; the brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it, the cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations...and this went on, and now it’s much worse than it was then.

“It’s the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st century. I could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, who was born in Jerusalem, can’t even visit!

“So, then you have these miserable people packed into this, horrible…people call it an ‘outdoor prison,’ which is what it is. You don’t have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights, that’s a complete falsity. You think the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.

“And ‘anybody who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite’ is simply an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews who are willing to stand up for what is true.”

—Independent Catholic News, October 16, 2023

https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/48251

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TERRORISM IN THE EYES OF THE IMPERIAL BEHOLDER - a poem

 

the French word

for rabies

is

la rage -

rage or outrage

 

and 

the French have a saying -

a man who wants to get rid of his dog

accuses it of spreading rabies

 

the people of Gaza

treated as inhuman animals

worse than dogs

are charged

with terrorism

 

come to think of it

what an honor !

 

world war two's resistance

against nazi extermination

was designated

as terrorism

by the Axis allies

 

what an honor !

 

Mandela

was monitored

as a terrorist

by the CIA

 

What an honor !

 

Tortuguita

peacefully meditating

near Israeli-funded cop city

was executed

in cold blood

on suspicion

of domestic terrorism 

 

What an honor !

 

in the spirit of Mandela

in the spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising

in the spirit of Tortuguita

in the spirit of Attica

may the anti colonial outrage

of the People of Palestine

contaminate us all -

the only epidemic

worth dying for

 

 (c) Julia Wright. October 17 2023. All Rights Reserved To The family of Wadea Al- Fayoume.

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Ruchell Cinque Magee Joins the Ancestors 

                                                         1939-2023

 

Ruchell Cinque Magee joined the ancestors October 17, 2023, after recently being released after 67 years of being caged!

 

Ruchell Magee was 84 years old and spent most of his life behind bars. Throughout his sixty-seven years of unjust captivity, Ruchell was one of the first and most consistent prisoners linking mass incarceration and the U.S. prison system to slavery. Ruchell Magee took the name Cinque from the enslaved African Sengbe Pieh who led an 1839 rebellion to commandeer the slave ship La Amistad, arguing that Africans have the right to resist “unlawful” slavery. Ruchell maintained that Black people in the US have the right to resist this new form of slavery which is part of the colonial control of Black people in this country:

 

“Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today. It’s the same but with a new name.”

 

“My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery…This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.”

 

“You have to deal on your own tactics. You have a right to take up arms to oppose any usurped government, particularly the type of corruption that we have today.” – Ruchell Magee

 

Ruchell’s life commitment, political stance and writings point to the need for a prison abolitionist movement to seriously address the historical legacy of slavery, and slave rebellions in order to truly be in solidarity with the millions of people incarcerated in the US. 

 

May Ruchell Cinque Magee rest in power!

 

Ruchell Cinque Magee joined the ancestors last night after recently being released after 67 years of being caged!

 

Ruchell Magee was 84 years old and spent most of his life behind bars. Throughout his sixty-seven years of unjust captivity, Ruchell was one of the first and most consistent prisoners linking mass incarceration and the U.S. prison system to slavery. Ruchell Magee took the name Cinque from the enslaved African Sengbe Pieh who led an 1839 rebellion to commandeer the slave ship La Amistad, arguing that Africans have the right to resist “unlawful” slavery. Ruchell maintained that Black people in the US have the right to resist this new form of slavery which is part of the colonial control of Black people in this country:

 

“Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today. It’s the same but with a new name.”

 

“My fight is to expose the entire system, judicial and prison system, a system of slavery…This will cause benefit not just to myself but to all those who at this time are being criminally oppressed or enslaved by this system.”

 

“You have to deal on your own tactics. You have a right to take up arms to oppose any usurped government, particularly the type of corruption that we have today.” – Ruchell Magee

 

Ruchell’s life commitment, political stance and writings point to the need for a prison abolitionist movement to seriously address the historical legacy of slavery, and slave rebellions in order to truly be in solidarity with the millions of people incarcerated in the US. 

 

May Ruchell Cinque Magee rest in power!

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The ongoing Zionist theft of Palestinian land from 1946 to now.

77 years of brutal oppression must end!

End all U.S. aid to Israel now!

For a democratic, secular Palestine!

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Leonard Peltier’s Letter Delivered to Supporters on September 12, 2023, in Front of the Whitehouse

 

Dear friends, relatives, supporters, loved ones:

 

Seventy-nine years old. Mother Earth has taken us on another journey around Grandfather Sun.  Babies have taken their first breath. People have lived, loved, and died. Seeds have been planted and sent their roots deep below red earth and their breath to the Stars and our Ancestors.

 

I am still here.

 

Time has twisted one more year out of me. A year that has been a moment.  A year that has been a lifetime. For almost five decades I’ve existed in a cage of concrete and steel.  With the “good time” calculations of the system, I’ve actually served over 60 years.

 

Year after year, I have encouraged you to live as spirit warriors. Even while in here, I can envision what is real and far beyond these walls.  I’ve seen a reawakening of an ancient Native pride that does my heart good.

 

I may leave this place in a box. That is a cold truth. But I have put my heart and soul into making our world a better place and there is a lot of work left to do – I would like to get out and do it with you.

 

I know that the spirit warriors coming up behind me have the heart and soul to fight racism and oppression, and to fight the greed that is poisoning our lands, waters, and people. 

 

We are still here.

 

Remember who you are, even if they come for your land, your water, your family. We are children of Mother Earth and we owe her and her other children our care.

 

I long to turn my face to the sky. In this cage, I am denied that simple pleasure. I am in prison, but in my mind, I remain as I was born: a free Native spirit.

 

That is what allows me to laugh, keeps me laughing. These walls cannot contain my laughter – or my hope.

 

I know there are those who stand with me, who work around the clock for my freedom. I have been blessed to have such friends.

 

We are still here and you give me hope. 

 

I hope to breathe free air before I die. Hope is a hard thing to hold, but no one is strong enough to take it from me. 

 

I love you. I hope for you. I pray for you. 

 

And prayer is more than a cry to the Creator that runs through your head.  Prayer is an action.

 

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

DOKSHA, 

LEONARD PELTIER

Write to:

Leonard Peltier 89637-132

USP Coleman 1

P.O. Box 1033

Coleman, FL 33521

Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.

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Free Julian Assange

Immediate Repeated Action Needed to Free Assange

 

Please call your Congressional Representatives, the White House, and the DOJ. Calls are tallied—they do count.  We are to believe we are represented in this country.  This is a political case, so our efforts can change things politically as well.  Please take this action as often as you can:

 

Find your representatives:

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

 

Leave each of your representatives a message individually to: 

·      Drop the charges against Julian Assange

·      Speak out publicly against the indictment and

·      Sign on to Rashida Tlaib's letter to the DOJ to drop the charges: 

           202-224-3121—Capitol Main Switchboard 

 

Leave a message on the White House comment line to 

Demand Julian Assange be pardoned: 

             202-456-1111

             Tuesday–Thursday, 11:00 A.M.–3:00 P.M. EST

 

Call the DOJ and demand they drop the charges against Julian Assange:

             202-353-1555—DOJ Comment Line

             202-514-2000 Main Switchboard 

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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

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Updates From Kevin Cooper 

March 23, 2023 

Dear Friends and Comrades, 

This is Kevin Cooper writing and sending this update to you in 'Peace & Solidarity'. First and foremost I am well and healthy, and over the ill effect(s) that I went through after that biased report from MoFo, and their pro prosecution and law enforcement experts. I am back working with my legal team from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP.

'We' have made great progress in refuting all that those experts from MoFo came up with by twisting the truth to fit their narrative, or omitting things, ignoring, things, and using all the other tactics that they did to reach their conclusions. Orrick has hired four(4) real experts who have no questionable backgrounds. One is a DNA attorney, like Barry Scheck of the innocence project in New York is for example. A DNA expert, a expect to refute what they say Jousha Ryen said when he was a child, and his memory. A expect on the credibility of MoFo's experts, and the attorney's at Orrick are dealing with the legal issues.

This all is taking a little longer than we first expected it to take, and that in part is because 'we' have to make sure everything is correct in what we have in our reply. We cannot put ourselves in a situation where we can be refuted... Second, some of our experts had other things planned, like court cases and such before they got the phone call from Rene, the now lead attorney of the Orrick team. With that being said, I can say that our experts, and legal team have shown, and will show to the power(s) that be that MoFo's DNA expert could not have come to the conclusion(s) that he came to, without having used 'junk science'! They, and by they I mean my entire legal team, including our experts, have done what we have done ever since Orrick took my case on in 2004, shown that all that is being said by MoFo's experts is not true, and we are once again having to show what the truth really is.

Will this work with the Governor? Who knows... 'but' we are going to try! One of our comrades, Rebecca D.   said to me, 'You and Mumia'...meaning that my case and the case of Mumia Abu Jamal are cases in which no matter what evidence comes out supporting our innocence, or prosecution misconduct, we cannot get a break. That the forces in the so called justice system won't let us go. 'Yes' she is correct about that sad to say...

Our reply will be out hopefully in the not too distant future, and that's because the people in Sacramento have been put on notice that it is coming, and why. Every one of you will receive our draft copy of the reply according to Rene because he wants feedback on it. Carole and others will send it out once they receive it. 'We' were on the verge of getting me out, and those people knew it, so they sabotaged what the Governor ordered them to do, look at all the evidence as well as the DNA evidence. They did not do that, they made this a DNA case, by doing what they did, and twisted the facts on the other issues that they dealt with.   'more later'...

In Struggle & Solidarity,

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:

Mr. Kevin Cooper

C-65304. 4-EB-82

San Quentin State Prison

San Quentin, CA 94974

 

 

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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The writers' organization PEN America is circulating this petition on behalf of Jason Renard Walker, a Texas prisoner whose life is being threatened because of his exposés of the Texas prison system. 

See his book, Reports from within the Belly of the Beast; available on Amazon at:

https://www.amazon.com/Reports-Within-Belly-Beast-Department-ebook/dp/B084656JDZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-whistleblowers-in-carceral-settings

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Sign the petition:

https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/

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Tell Congress to Help #FreeDanielHale

 

I’m pleased to announce that last week our client, Daniel Hale, was awarded the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. The “Corner-Brightener Candlestick” was presented to Daniel’s friend Noor Mir. You can watch the online ceremony here. As it happens, this week is also the 20th anniversary of the first drone assassination in Yemen. From the beginning, the drone assassination program has been deeply shrouded in secrecy, allowing U.S. officials to hide significant violations of international law, and the American Constitution. In addition to the lives directly impacted by these strikes, the program has significantly eroded respect for international law and thereby puts civilians around the world in danger. Daniel Hale’s revelations threw a beam of light into a very dark corner, allowing journalists to definitively show that the government's official narrative was a lie. It is thanks to the great personal sacrifice of drone whistleblowers like Hale that public understanding has finally begun to catch up to reality. As the Sam Adams Associates note:  “Mr. Hale was well aware of the cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment to which other courageous officials have been subjected — and that he would likely suffer the same. And yet — in the manner of his famous ancestor Nathan Hale — he put his country first, knowing what awaited him at the hands of those who serve what has become a repressive Perpetual War State wreaking havoc upon much of the world.” We hope you’ll join the growing call to pardon or commute Hale’s sentence. U.S. citizens can contact your representatives here.

Happy new year, and thank you for your support! Jesselyn Radack Director Whistleblower & Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) ExposeFacts Twitter: @JesselynRadack

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Laws are created to be followed

by the poor.

Laws are made by the rich

to bring some order to exploitation.

The poor are the only law abiders in history.

When the poor make laws

the rich will be no more.

 

—Roque Dalton Presente!

(May 14, 1935 – Assassinated May 10, 1975)[1]

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[1] Roque Dalton was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist, political activist, and intellectual. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets.

Poems: 

http://cordite.org.au/translations/el-salvador-tragic/

About: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_Dalton

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A Plea for the Compassionate Release of 

Leonard Peltier

Self Portrait by Leonard Peltier

Video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWdJdODKO6M&feature=youtu.be

Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier.

 

https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition

 

Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info

Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603

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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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Articles

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1) How international law views military action at a hospital.

By Amanda Taub, Nov. 16, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/16/world/israel-hamas-gaza-war-news

The Al-Shifa Hospital compound last week. Credit...Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Israeli military has seized the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa. Israel says it needed to capture the hospital, in Gaza City, to destroy a Hamas command center and underground facilities that it says are there. Hamas and doctors at Al-Shifa deny Israeli allegations of Hamas fighters using the hospital as a base.

 

Here is what the Geneva Conventions and international criminal law say about hospitals and what protections they have, based on a series of interviews with experts on the laws of war and a reading of the major treaties that set out those laws.

 

Hospitals have special protections under international humanitarian law. It is illegal in nearly all circumstances to attack hospitals, ambulances or other medical facilities, or to interfere with their ability to provide care to the wounded and sick. That is true even if some of their patients are wounded fighters as well as civilians.

 

Attacking a protected hospital is a war crime that can be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court. Using civilians, like those in a hospital, as human shields for combatants is also prohibited.

 

But there is an exception under which hospitals lose that protection: A hospital or medical facility can lose its special legal status if it is used for a military purpose that is “harmful to the enemy,” rather than just for medical care. For example, if an armed group uses a hospital building as a headquarters, it cannot use the special hospital protection as a shield for that military operation.

 

The exception is supposed to be read narrowly, according to the Red Cross, which is considered a leading authority on the interpretation of humanitarian law. If there is doubt about whether a hospital is being used for military purposes, it should be presumed not to be, the Red Cross says.

 

Even if the exception applies, an attacking force has to give civilians a chance to evacuate. The Geneva Conventions state that before attacking a military target inside a hospital, the attacking force has to warn the doctors and patients inside that the hospital is going to be a target, and then give them a reasonable amount of time to escape.

 

Israel has issued frequent warnings to hospitals in northern Gaza that they should evacuate. However, doctors have said that some patients are too fragile to be moved, or that there is no safe or practical evacuation route, raising questions about what could be considered reasonable warning.

 

Even if the exception applies, there are still strict rules that limit how force can be used. Doctors, patients, and other civilians who remain in the hospital after a warning to evacuate are still protected civilians. International humanitarian law says that civilians cannot ever be targeted directly.

 

The exception applies only under “very narrow conditions,” said Tom Dannenbaum, an associate professor of international law at Tufts University.

 

Proportionality requirements are especially strict when medical care is on the line: Even if a hospital loses its special protection and becomes a military target, the civilians inside are still protected by the rule of proportionality: If the civilian harm caused by an attack is disproportionate to the military advantage it confers, then it’s illegal.

 

That is a balancing test that depends on the specific facts of the situation. However, the proportionality test is much harder to satisfy when the target is a medical facility, because the likely harm includes the loss of medical care for the civilian community as well as any immediate casualties of the attack itself, Professor Dannenbaum said.

 

Ephrat Livni and Gaya Gupta contributed reporting.

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2) The U.N. human rights chief calls for an investigation into wartime atrocities.

By Nick Cumming-Bruce reporting from Geneva, Nov. 16, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/16/world/israel-hamas-gaza-war-news

People mourning their relatives outside the morgue at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza Strip, on Saturday after they were killed in an Israeli airstrike a day earlier. Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times

The United Nations’ human rights chief called on Thursday for an international investigation of what he described as serious violations of international law in the war in Gaza, and said that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories must end.

 

Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel, including many children, in its attacks on Oct. 7, according to Israeli authorities. Since then, one in every 57 Palestinians living in Gaza has been killed or injured in Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion, Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told diplomats in Geneva.

 

More than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s assault, according to the health ministry in Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. Those killed include 4,600 children and 102 employees of the U.N. agency that aids Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, Mr. Türk said.

 

Minutes after his briefing, while speaking to reporters, Mr. Türk paused his comments to say he had just received news that the number of U.N. employees killed had risen to 103.

 

“It is apparent that on both sides, some view the killing of civilians as either acceptable collateral damage, or a deliberate and useful weapon of war,” he said. “This is a humanitarian and human rights catastrophe. The killing of so many civilians cannot be dismissed as collateral damage.”

 

Mr. Türk has accused both Hamas and Israeli forces of war crimes. The extremely serious allegations demand rigorous investigation and full accountability, he said on Thursday, adding that “where national authorities prove unwilling or unable to carry out such investigations, and where there are contested narratives on particularly significant incidents, international investigation is called for.”

 

Diplomats from Israel and the Palestinian territories pushed back strongly against Mr. Türk’s comments.

 

Israel’s ambassador in Geneva, Meirav Eilon Shahar, said that Israel was operating against Hamas, not civilians in Gaza, and strictly according to international law. If a state could not defend itself in line with international law, she added, “inevitably terrorist organizations will become more and more emboldened and continue to deploy these methods, confident in international support.”

 

The ambassador representing the Palestinian territories, Ibrahim Khraishi, replied sharply: “You are not fighting Hamas; you are fighting civilians. This is a massacre, this is genocide and we see it on TV.”

 

Mr. Türk said he was “ringing the loudest possible alarm bell” about the situation in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he said that at least 190 Palestinians had been killed in clashes with Israeli security forces and extremist Israeli settlers in the past month.

 

“It is clear that Israeli occupation must end,” he said. “Israelis’ freedom is inextricably bound up with Palestinians’ freedom. Palestinians and Israelis are each others’ only hope for peace.”

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3) Dozens of Labour lawmakers in Britain break with their party’s leader to call for a cease-fire.

By Stephen Castle reporting from London, Nov. 16, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/16/world/israel-hamas-gaza-war-news#uk-labour-party-ceasefire-vote-gaza

Pro-Palestinian protesters outside Parliament in London on Wednesday, demanding that lawmakers vote for a cease-fire in Gaza. Credit...Henry Nicholls/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Britain’s main opposition Labour Party has suffered a significant rebellion in Parliament over its policy on Gaza, in a sign of the hardening of opinion in Western Europe against Israel’s military action in the enclave.

 

Defying their leader, Keir Starmer, 56 Labour lawmakers — more than a quarter of the party’s total — voted late Wednesday in favor of a motion calling for an immediate cease-fire, going beyond their party’s official position of working to achieve longer humanitarian pauses in the conflict.

 

Although none of Mr. Starmer’s top team rebelled, eight lawmakers who held less senior leadership positions did, and either resigned or were fired from those posts.

 

The vote has no practical impact but was closely watched, because Labour is well ahead in opinion polls, putting it in a strong position to win a general election that is expected next fall.

 

The rebellion illustrates growing concerns in Western Europe over the number of civilians killed and wounded in Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip, and the rising pressure on lawmakers over the issue from those they represent. A series of protest marches in Britain have demanded a cease-fire in recent weeks, and one in London last Saturday drew an estimated 300,000 people.

 

The best known of the Labour rebels, Jess Phillips, who resigned from her position speaking for the party on domestic-violence issues, said she was voting with “my constituents, my head and my heart, which has felt as if it were breaking over the last four weeks.” She added that she could see “no route where the current military action does anything but put at risk the hope of peace and security for anyone in the region now and in the future.”

 

Middle East policy is politically sensitive within the Labour Party, whose leadership has stuck close to the British and United States government positions on Gaza recently and has not supported calls for a cease-fire. Mr. Starmer expressed firm support for Israel in the aftermath of the bloody incursions into Israeli territory by Hamas fighters in October.

 

The rebellion in Parliament is the first significant setback in months for Mr. Starmer. Late Wednesday, he said he regretted that some of his colleagues had felt the need to support the motion calling for a cease-fire, which was proposed by the Scottish National Party.

 

But while the vote represents a challenge to Mr. Starmer’s authority and displayed internal divisions, the Labour leader appears to have calculated that he would rather risk a rebellion than soften his position.

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4) They Trudge From Russia Into Ukraine, Fleeing Life Under Occupation

About 100 Ukrainians a day travel back into Ukraine at an unofficial border crossing, bringing tales of repression and fear about life in Russian-controlled territories.

By Andrew E. Kramer, Maria Varenikova and Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Photographs by Tyler Hicks, Nov. 16, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-border-crossing.html

Ukrainians who crossed into northern Ukraine after traveling from Russian-controlled land are provided a place to sleep overnight and eat before taking a train to Kyiv.

Ukrainians who crossed into northern Ukraine after traveling from Russian-controlled land are provided a place to sleep overnight and eat before taking a train to Kyiv

 

The Russian soldiers turned up at her home close to midnight with an ominous message.

 

“They said, ‘If in two weeks you don’t have a Russian passport, we will talk to you in a different way,’” recalled Evelina, a social worker who until this month lived under Russian occupation in southeastern Ukraine.

 

She didn’t wait to have that conversation. Instead, she bundled a few possessions into a suitcase and left with her teenage daughter, heading for territory controlled by Ukraine.

 

In the Russian-governed lands, she said, it has become so tense that “you are afraid to look out your own window.”

 

The military deadlock that has settled in across southeastern Ukraine poses a looming security threat to the rest of the country, and menaces Europe with a long period of instability. But for the estimated 4 million to 6 million Ukrainians living in Russian-held areas, as Evelina was, the stalemate means something more dispiriting: an occupation with no end in sight.

 

Emptied of about half of its population and under the thumb of a harsh military rule, the swath of Russian-occupied territory, an area the size of the Netherlands, is stuck in a distressing state of limbo: run by Russia but recognized by most of the rest of the world as Ukrainian.

 

Demographics in these regions are changing as working-age people flee, leaving an older and poorer population.

 

Russian soldiers quarter in abandoned houses and crime has risen. Russian businessmen are strong-arming local business owners into selling stores and farms, and Central Asian migrants have shown up to trade in markets and work as laborers.

 

Searches are commonplace. Serhiy, 41, who left the city of Enerhodar this month, said his apartment was searched by three soldiers. “One stays in the stairwell with a gun and the other two come inside and go through all your stuff,” he said.

 

Repression, including torture in makeshift detention sites in basements, targets those who reveal pro-Ukrainian views, altering the political makeup of the area in Russia’s favor but also shifting the cultural landscape away from Ukrainian language and identity.

 

Russia now controls about 17 percent of Ukrainian land, a half-moon-shaped expanse of farmland, villages and cities in the southeast. The region is off-limits to rights groups and most independent reporters, but accounts by people who have left the occupied areas offer a window into this portion of Ukraine.

 

Evelina took an unusual but increasingly popular route back into Ukrainian-controlled territory: traveling into Russia and heading north and west, then back into Ukraine through an unofficial border crossing near the northern city of Sumy.

 

That path is taken by about 100 Ukrainians daily. They hire drivers or take public transportation in Russia to get to the border. From there, they stagger into Ukraine, a thin stream of exhausted families walking two miles on a rutted rural road between the two armies, an unlikely corridor of peace between two nations fighting a violent war.

 

The armies use the crossing to trade bodies and prisoners, and have negotiated an informal truce that has mostly held, border guards working in the area said. Civilians got word of the site and those with a Ukrainian passport have been piggybacking on the informal cease-fire to escape occupation.

 

As they arrive, they rest for a time at a school used for interrogations by Ukraine’s intelligence agency, known as a filtration site. In interviews, they described Russian repression and brutality but also functioning local governments and welfare systems, as Russia solidifies control.

 

For Evelina, fear of arrest and the growing anxiety of her daughter motivated her to leave.

 

Over the summer, it had seemed her hometown might soon change hands. It lies just 25 miles from the point where a Ukrainian counteroffensive began in June and was intended to push Russia from southern Ukraine. But the attack stalled after about 10 miles.

 

By the time she left this month, Evelina said, about half the population was accepting of the occupation, having received Russian passports and pension or welfare payments. She declined to identify the town, and like others interviewed for this article, asked that her last name be withheld for security reasons.

 

They lived, she said, alongside hundreds of Russian soldiers quartered in abandoned houses and newly arrived ethnic Azerbaijanis who sold goods at the local market.

 

The soldiers’ late-night visit to her home, and their threat — a policing practice other displaced people said is commonplace — terrified her 16-year-old daughter. “She cried, didn’t talk and covered her face with a blanket,” Evelina said.

 

Typically, the local occupation authorities install a collaborator as a figurehead leader for a local or regional government while a Russian military commandant exerts de facto control over a community.

 

For economic aid and expertise in municipal and local government, Russia has set up a sister city arrangement where Russian cities pair with those under occupation in Ukraine. The St. Petersburg city government, for example, has contributed some financing to redevelopment in Mariupol, the Azov Sea port city largely flattened in a siege last year. (The city government has said it is helping the Mariupol theater that was bombed last year.)

 

Occupation administrators have been offered jobs in Russia if they perform well, setting up a career path that encourages capable Russians and collaborators to hold positions in occupied Ukraine. A deputy head of the occupied Donetsk region, for example, became governor of the Siberian region of Omsk in Russia.

 

Those career opportunities arise for collaborators even if they subject the local population to seemingly underqualified leadership.

 

A man who had run a business providing Santa Claus actors for holiday parties, for example, became the head of the Donetsk region in 2014, when the Russian army and proxy fighters seized parts of Eastern Ukraine. Last year his wife became deputy head of the Kherson region.

 

Russia’s occupation policies have also provided economic incentives for collaborators and Russians that blend politics, business and organized crime, according to a study published this fall by David Lewis, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based research institute.

 

“There was a bewildering array of business interests, criminal groups, private military companies and ‘volunteer’ battalions, many of which mixed ideology, warfare and business seamlessly,” Mr. Lewis wrote.

 

A legal process allows property abandoned by fleeing Ukrainians to be assigned for management to others, typically Russian businessmen.

 

But Russians manage the occupation principally through repression, leaving behind evidence of detention, torture and killing wherever they have retreated. Volunteers at the crossing point near Sumy say Ukrainians arrive with harrowing accounts of war crimes several times a week.

 

A woman named Olha described how soldiers had entered her home and beaten her husband with a frying pan, accusing him of belonging to the Ukrainian underground. As they hit him, she said, they yelled, “‘Who are you helping!’”

 

A devious interrogation technique followed, she said.

 

The soldiers separated the couple. Olha said they then told her that her husband had confessed to being a spy, encouraging her to also blame him. The husband was arrested and his body later found in a forest outside the town, she said.

 

More typically, Ukrainians recounted everyday pressure to obtain Russian passports, and told of people being detained if they were overheard speaking ill of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

 

The Ukrainian authorities say they do not object to Ukrainians obtaining Russian passports to avoid arrest or allow travel.

 

“Living without a Russian passport in the temporarily occupied territories is very hard and dangerous,” said Ivan Fedorov, the mayor of Melitopol, who fled to Ukrainian-controlled territory in the months after his city was seized by Russian forces.

 

Tetyana Korobkova, a psychologist who councils those who cross the border in a distraught state, said older people are most often upset about the homes or farms they have left behind, feeling that a lifetime of work has been lost with seemingly little chance now that it will be recovered through Ukrainian military advances.

 

Young women crossing over have described rapes, Ms. Korobkova said. And parents worry that their children will inadvertently reveal the family’s anti-Russian views while attending school. “They ask children sly questions” in schools, she said. “If the child answers wrong, they will visit the parents.”

 

Many displaced people find themselves in a kind of emotional limbo, unable fully to commit to new lives in new surroundings, and perhaps hoping they will someday return to their home.

 

Mykola, 64, fled from Enerhodar, a city on the Dnipro River with a prewar population of about 50,000. About 8,000 people remained, he estimated.

 

He does not regret leaving. The city and much of occupied Ukraine, he said, is “like the Chernobyl zone,” the area of eerie, empty towns abandoned after the 1986 nuclear disaster.

 

Billboards in the city, he said, proclaim: “Enerhodar is forever with Russia.”

 

Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.

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5) The Israeli Army escorts Times journalists to Al-Shifa, a focus of its invasion.

By Philip P. Pan and Patrick Kingsley, Nov. 17, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/17/world/israel-hamas-gaza-war-news

A stone and concrete shaft on the grounds of the Al-Shifa hospital, on Thursday. Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

Almost 48 hours after entering Gaza’s largest medical complex, the Israeli military escorted journalists from The New York Times through a landscape of wartime destruction Thursday night to a stone-and-concrete shaft on its grounds with a staircase descending into the earth — evidence, it said, of a Hamas military facility under the hospital.

 

But Col. Elad Tsury, commander of Israel’s Seventh Brigade, said Israeli forces, fearing booby traps, had not ventured down the shaft at the hospital, Al-Shifa. He said it had been discovered earlier in the day under a pile of sand on the northern perimeter of the complex.

 

In the darkness, it was unclear where the shaft led or how deep it went, although the military said it had sent a drone down at least several meters. Electrical wiring was visible inside, along with a metal staircase.

 

The controlled visit will not settle the question of whether Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that rules Gaza, has been using Al-Shifa Hospital to hide weapons and command centers, as Israel has said.

 

The claim is central to Israel’s defense of the death toll caused by its military campaign in Gaza, which has killed more than 11,000 people, according to Gazan health officials. Israeli officials say that the extreme loss of life has been caused in part by Hamas’s decision to hide its military fortifications and command centers inside civilian infrastructure like Al-Shifa.

 

Hamas denies the accusation and says Israel is committing war crimes by targeting civilian facilities such as hospitals.

 

The Israeli military has said that Hamas used a vast maze of tunnels underneath the hospital as a secret base, but since announcing early Wednesday that its troops had entered the grounds, the military has yet to present public documentation of such an extensive network. As the international community increasingly demands protections for civilians in Gaza, Israel is under pressure to demonstrate that the hospital — and the tunnel network it said it concealed — were important enough military targets to justify the immense cost in Palestinian lives.

 

Colonel Tsury acknowledged the pressure on Israel to show evidence of Hamas activity at the hospital, but said it might be days before troops descended the shaft. He added that soldiers were methodically searching the complex and had discovered weapons, explosives and computers, as well as the body of an Israeli hostage in a nearby building. (The military announced on Friday that soldiers had found a second hostage’s body in a building near Al-Shifa.)

 

Another military official said Israeli troops had captured and interrogated a Hamas operative at the hospital but offered no further detail.

 

In order to enter Gaza, two reporters and a photographer for The Times were obliged to remain with Israeli troops for the duration of the visit. They agreed not to photograph most soldiers’ faces, landmarks, maps and certain details of weapons. The Times did not allow the Israeli military to screen its coverage before publication.

 

The Times journalists were allowed to see only a portion of the sprawling Al-Shifa complex. The military refused to let the journalists explore the hospital, or see or interview patients and medical staff who remain in the facility, saying it had not been fully secured and that Hamas combatants might still be there.

 

Before Israel’s raid on Al-Shifa, the World Health Organization said that it had ceased to be a functional hospital. Officials described desperate conditions: Food, medicine and anesthetics had all but run out, and generators and lifesaving equipment had been shut down because of a lack of fuel. Some three dozen premature babies were at particular risk, they said.

 

Colonel Tsury said the military had provided food, supplies and medical equipment to patients and doctors, an assertion that could not be immediately verified.

 

The extent of the damage to the hospital was not entirely clear. But its main emergency building appeared intact, with electricity, after a dayslong siege that health officials say had resulted in increasingly dire conditions.

 

Gunfire rattled nearby throughout The Times’s visit, giving the impression of ongoing gun battles in nearby streets. To enter the hospital grounds, special forces officers escorted journalists through the bombed-out remains of a building on the outskirts of the site; they said it was too dangerous to pass through the main gate.

 

Away from the hospital, the scale of the destruction had rendered parts of Gaza unrecognizable. Sections of the city’s seafront promenade had been razed to the ground, apartment blocks had been hollowed out by shelling and others flattened by airstrikes. Constant tank traffic had also churned the main coastal road into a bumpy dirt track.

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6) The U.N. warns that all 2.2 million people in Gaza are at risk of starvation.

By Farnaz Fassihi, Nov. 17, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/17/world/israel-hamas-gaza-war-news#gazans-are-at-risk-of-starvation-as-israel-prevents-flow-of-fuel-and-sufficient-aid-un-says

A Palestinian family cooking over a fire in Khan Younis, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. The United Nations said the entire population of Gaza was now at risk of starvation. Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times

The entire population of Gaza — 2.2 million, with about half of them being children — is in need of food assistance and at risk of starvation because of a collapsed food supply chain and insufficient aid delivery, the United Nations World Food Program said Thursday.

 

Food stocks are rapidly running out, markets and bakeries have closed, and fresh food is not available because of a lack of refrigeration and a halt to farming and fishing, a situation that the W.F.P. called “catastrophic.” The organization also said just 10 percent of what it characterized as the necessary amount of food aid was being delivered into Gaza.

 

“We are already starting to see cases of dehydration and malnutrition, which is increasing rapidly,” Abeer Etefa, a W.F.P. spokeswoman, told reporters at the U.N. “People are facing immediate possibility of starvation.”

 

Gazans are barely able to have one meal per day, which typically consists of canned food and raw vegetables, because there is no gas or fuel to cook, the group said. The last bakery in Gaza closed, the food supply system in Gaza has collapsed and shops have run out of supplies, the group said.

 

Itay Milner, spokesman for the Israeli consulate in New York, said that Israel has been working to facilitate the distribution of aid to civilians in Gaza, and urged people to relocate to what he called safer areas, such as near the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, where Israel has allowed foreign assistance to enter the strip.

 

Since Israel agreed in October to allow the first humanitarian convoys into Gaza, trucks with water, food, medicine and other basic human necessities have delivered some relief, but far short of the amount the United Nations has said is necessary.

 

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is growing more desperate as the war rages. Israel has prevented the delivery of commercial goods, fuel and electricity for more than a month, and the lack of fuel has hindered the ability of the U.N. and humanitarian agencies to receive and distribute aid. Israel said it banned fuel delivery to Gaza to prevent Hamas militants from seizing it.

 

Bombed roads and the safety of aid workers also present challenges, the U.N. said.

 

The trickle of aid entering Gaza cannot compensate for the halt of commercial goods, Ms. Etefa said. A hotline for Gazans has received more than 40,000 calls from people saying they have nothing to eat, she said. Shelters are overcrowded, and 70 percent of the population has no access to clean water, the U.N. said.

 

“Children in the shelters are begging for a sip of water and a piece of bread,” said Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, a U.N. agency overseeing humanitarian aid efforts in Gaza. She added: “The people of Gaza are trapped in an enclave with no way out.”

 

Even before the war, Gazans struggled with poverty and unemployment, and nearly 1.1 million people needed food assistance. But Israel’s siege of Gaza has imperiled food security there, the U.N. said.

 

Ms. Touma said fuel, food and water were being used “as a weapon of war,” calling Israel’s refusal to allow adequate aid delivery “a deliberate attempt to strangle our operations.”

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7) Israeli and Palestinian Activists Ask Americans to Take Side of Peace

Sally Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and Alon-Lee Green, a Jewish Israeli, found polarization in America over the war in Gaza. They also found longing for a new approach.

By Talya Minsberg, Nov. 17, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/17/world/middleeast/israel-palestinians-standing-together.html

Sally Abed, 32, and Alon-Lee Green, 35, leaders of Standing Together, an organization that works for peace between Israel and Palestine, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

When Sally Abed and Alon-Lee Green flew from Israel to New York last week, they found a version of the United States they’d never seen before: split by the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, with fractures tearing at the worlds of art, business, books, academia and even food.

 

Ms. Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, said the situation felt so toxic that they feared their 10-day trip to talk about the ways Palestinians and Jews can work together would only lead to attacks from all sides.

 

Instead, in New York, Washington and Boston, they found packed auditoriums and eager audiences in community centers, synagogues, libraries and the offices of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Their days have started at 6 a.m. and ended after midnight.

 

Their quest can be lonely, standing in the face of intense grief and anger — over Hamas’s attacks against Israelis on Oct. 7, and Israel’s retaliatory campaign in the Gaza Strip — and factions that have spent decades staking out positions against each other.

 

But the staff of their organization, Standing Together, are trying to teach Americans — anyone who will listen, really — about their lived reality and the only path they see moving forward. They describe that path as one that cannot be boiled down to a hashtag: one in which millions of Israelis and Palestinians would remain on the land they each call home, and one that would require enough popular political will to demand peace.

 

“We’re trying to play a different game in Israel and Palestine,” Mr. Green said on Nov. 9 to a group of people organized by a group in Brooklyn, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. “And this game is very simple. It says that both Jewish people and Palestinians are going to stay on this land. No one is going anywhere.”

 

“We need to start working from this point,” he said, receiving a wave of nods.

 

It’s a message that has not been prominently heard or seen in many American protests and rallies. Most events have taken place under an Israeli or Palestinian flag, focusing on one people’s pain, struggle or victimhood.

 

That type of narrow approach can erase everything around it, said Cara Raich, a conflict adviser based in New York.

 

“As with most conflicts one feels deeply and personally, a binary choice often offers the simple comfort of pro and con, or right and wrong,” she said. “The magnetic power of false binaries sucks everything that it touches into that paradigm.”

 

For that reason, the conversations Mr. Green and Ms. Abed came to have with Americans have, at least for their audiences they draw, been something of a spiritual salve. In dozens of talks up and down the East Coast, the two activists have described a desperate need for new Israeli and Palestinian leadership, including leaders willing to work together.

 

They have called Hamas, the group that controls the Gaza Strip, both “the enemy of the Palestinian people” and a “fertilizer for radical Jewish extremism.” And they have voiced a frustration over what they see as a war for the moral high ground, happening outside of Israel and mostly over social media, that denies their experiences.

 

Libby Lenkinski, a vice president at the New Israel Fund, an organization that funds and supports Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, has had a front-row seat as a moderator. She said she has seen a “palpable sense of relief” among attendees who audibly exhale or place hands over their hearts. The message is so resonant, she said, because of it offers a different kind of simplicity than choosing one of two sides.

 

“This isn’t, ‘Kumbaya, let’s all hold hands and love each other,’” Ms. Lenkinski said. “It’s: ‘There’s actually no way that one side is going to win. Our futures are intertwined and the only way that we can keep ourselves alive is by keeping each other alive.’”

 

On Sunday, a group of Israeli peace activists in New York City organized a vigil with that sentiment in mind. The demonstration called for both a cease-fire in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the release of more than 200 hostages held by Palestinian militants. All were welcome, flags and signs were not.

 

Some 200 attendees gathered to mourn and read testimonies and texts from people in Israel and Gaza.

 

Tamar Glezerman, one of the organizers, said she had protested in support of a cease-fire before, and does not “find myself in protests that don’t include the demand for an urgent stop to the bloodshed.”

 

“But at the same time,” she said, “I feel that, on a very personal level, I am being demanded to omit the humanity of my loved ones, those who have died on Oct. 7 and those who have friends and families among the kidnapped, in order to attend most of the protests demanding a cease-fire.”

 

She said that those demonstrations “have by and large completely omitted these civilians, for either ideological or strategic reasons, as if empathy for brutalized civilians was ever a zero-sum game. As if one war crime could ever justify another. As if acknowledgment means historical symmetry.”

 

Ms. Abed and Mr. Green were in Washington during that vigil, meeting with a range of Democratic politicians. They said that, sometimes, they struggled to get to the car for their next meeting because people swarmed to ask what more they could do to help.

 

Friendship has helped carry the pair on, they said, even as exhaustion has weighed them down.

 

They did not sleep much back home, and they have not slept much since arriving in the states. Mr. Green said he’s afraid to stop working. Ms. Abed worries that he’s not giving himself the space to fall apart, at least a little bit.

 

Midsentence, Mr. Green gasped. “A goose!” he screamed — Ms. Abed echoed, “a goose!” They laughed and gawked, getting closer to the bird. There are not many geese in Israel.

 

But it was not quite a wild-goose chase. They were summoned on to their next meeting, one with students and faculty at M.I.T. “So many people tell us ‘You are our only hope,’” Ms. Abed said. “It’s like, we’re your only hope?”

 

Mr. Green said that, despite the loneliness they often felt, they had no choice but to keep trying.

 

“We have only one home,” he said. “She’s Palestinian and I’m Jewish, but the only home we both have is the same home.”

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8) Is Israel’s Military Strategy to Eradicate Hamas Working?

Israel is making progress in ground control of Gaza, but it has not vanquished Hamas or freed most of the hostages. And international condemnation of civilian casualties is growing.

By Eric Schmitt, Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-gaza-war-strategy.html

Bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes in the yard of Al-Shifa Hospital on Sunday. Credit...Ahmed El Mokhallalati, via Reuters

The ruins of buildings targeted by Israeli airstrikes in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza this month. Credit...Abed Khaled/Associated Press

The Israeli military’s seizure of Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex, is central to the military strategy at the heart of the ground invasion: Eradicate Hamas and free roughly 240 hostages taken during the Oct. 7 surprise attack.

 

That strategy has unfolded over the past three weeks as more than 40,000 Israeli soldiers encircled Gaza City, where Israeli officials say Hamas commanders were concentrated. The soldiers then attacked fighters and bunkers, all while targeting a vast tunnel network that Israeli officials say enables Hamas forces to hide and carry out operations. Israeli officials also assessed that striking so deeply in the heart of Gaza City would pressure Hamas to reach a deal on hostage releases.

 

Israel has long accused Hamas of using civilians as human shields in the densely populated Gaza Strip, and says the terrorist group positioned underground military facilities near homes, schools, mosques and hospitals throughout Gaza. Al-Shifa became Exhibit A in this narrative, as the Israeli military claimed Hamas used a vast maze of tunnels underneath the hospital as a base.

 

So far it is not clear that the Israeli strategy is working.

 

U.S. military officials said their Israeli counterparts tell them to expect more weeks of clearing operations in the north before Israel prepares a separate initiative in southern Gaza, widening the offensive.

 

The Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said late Friday that its troops would continue their offensive “in every place that Hamas is, and it is in the south of the strip.”

 

And although the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said in a video statement on Monday that Israel had “accelerated our activities against the tunnels” and that Hamas militants had lost control in the north and were fleeing south, military analysts said Mr. Gallant’s statements raised many questions.

 

How will Hamas be eliminated if its fighters blend into the rest of the population as they head south? How long can Israel, which lost about 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 atrocities, sustain growing international pressure for a cease-fire as civilian casualties in Gaza mount? Most immediately, was Al-Shifa an important enough military target to raid?

 

Israel blames the civilian deaths — 11,000, according to the Gaza health ministry — in part on Hamas’s decision to hide its military fortifications and command centers in residential neighborhoods and hospitals like Al-Shifa.

 

But U.S. officials said Israel’s rapid decision to launch ground operations in the enclave left Israeli commanders little time for extensive planning to mitigate risks to civilians and all but guaranteed a high civilian death toll.

 

The hospital has become a particular flashpoint. The military has yet to present public evidence of an extensive tunnel network and command center under Al-Shifa, and Israel is coming under growing international pressure to show that the hospital was a critical military objective.

 

On Friday, Israeli military officials said the search of the hospital would take time because of the risk of encountering Hamas members and booby traps, and that they would have to use dogs and combat engineers. The Israeli forces are advancing slowly and currently control only part of the hospital site, according to three Israeli officers. They also have avoided entering a shaft that was discovered there.

 

But the military claims it already has proof of at least part of an underground tunnel complex under the hospital. A video, which an Israeli official said was filmed by a camera that was lowered into the shaft by troops on Friday, and which was reviewed by The New York Times, indicates that it is a man-made tunnel, with at least one lane wide enough for the passage of people. The tunnel appears to be 50 feet or more in length, and at the end of it is a door that the official said is fortified to withstand explosives. The video shows that the door has a small porthole that, according to the Israeli official, allows one-way shooting from the other side of the door into the tunnel.

 

Targeting Al-Shifa Hospital was “not the result of a strategy,” said Giora Eiland, a retired major general in the Israel Defense Forces and former head of the Israeli National Security Council. “It is more an important tactical maneuver” in Israel’s attempt to control the narrative about Hamas, he said.

 

While Hamas commanders might have been under Al-Shifa at the start of the war, Mr. Eiland said, most of them have evacuated to the south. As a result, he said, Israel will have to evacuate civilians and target Hamas brigades there in the coming weeks and months. Mr. Eiland predicted that this might be complicated by an international community losing patience with Israel.

 

Yagil Levy, an expert on the Israeli military, said that attacking Al-Shifa was “a show of power and might rather than part of a clear strategy.” In doing so, Dr. Levy said, Israel might have jeopardized the hostages’ lives.

 

“The army didn’t take into real consideration the future or the safety of the hostages by going into Al-Shifa,” Dr. Levy said. The recovery of two corpses near Al-Shifa Hospital was a clear sign, he said, that “we are losing hostages by delaying the exchange of prisoners.”

 

Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., a retired head of the U.S. military’s Central Command, said the Israeli military had achieved some of its objectives, such as suppressing Hamas rocket fire into Israel and reducing risks to its own troops. More than 55 Israeli soldiers have died in the ground operation, an indication that the Israeli army is moving cautiously on the ground while warplanes and artillery pound targets.

 

But General McKenzie said it was still unclear how many top Hamas leaders the Israeli military had killed. And so far, Israel’s decision to reduce parts of Gaza to rubble and kill more than 1,000 Hamas fighters has not secured a major deal to release the roughly 240 hostages, many in the vast tunnel network.

 

Israel began its ground invasion after Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad gunmen rampaged through southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing women, children, babies and the elderly. Israeli authorities are investigating claims of rape and other brutality.

 

Hamas fighters used video cameras to gleefully publicize the atrocities, taking a page out of the playbook of the Islamic State, which used beheading videos to shock the world and distributed violent propaganda as a recruiting tool.

 

The Pentagon has rushed a steady stream of arms and ammunition to Israel in recent weeks. U.S. Special Operations forces are flying unarmed MQ-9 surveillance drones over the Gaza Strip to aid in hostage recovery efforts, but are not supporting Israeli military operations on the ground, Defense Department officials say.

 

Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, the head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, arrived in Israel on Friday for briefings on the ground operation in Gaza and the military plans going forward, a U.S. military official said. It is General Kurilla’s second trip to Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks. The general and his senior staff are in daily contact with members of the planning department at the Israel General Staff and other senior Israeli military officials.

 

In the meantime, the longer the war drags on, the more the strain on Israel’s economy grows, with 360,000 military reservists pulled away from their civilian jobs to fight.

 

“Time is not on Israel’s side internationally or domestically,” General McKenzie said.

 

That is putting pressure on the Israeli military to inflict as much damage on Hamas as quickly as possible, officials and analyst said.

 

“They may not need an endgame because it’ll be imposed on them,” said Jeremy Binnie, a Middle East defense specialist for Janes, a defense and open-source intelligence firm in London. “They’ll make it look like they’ve done the best military operation in the time available.”

 

Adam Sella contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.

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9) Patients, workers and displaced Gazans leave Al-Shifa Hospital after an Israeli raid.

By Ameera Harouda and Aaron Boxerman, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/18/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Medics and patients at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City earlier this month. Credit...Khader Al Zanoun/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Wounded patients, health workers and hundreds of displaced Palestinians left Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital complex on Saturday, a witness and a hospital doctor said, after Israeli troops gradually encircled and raided the compound in search of a Hamas command center.

 

There was confusion about what led to the departures from the hospital, Gaza’s largest, with witnesses saying the Israeli military had declared an evacuation and the military saying it had agreed to a request from Al-Shifa’s director to help civilians safely leave the complex.

 

According to the witness, who was interviewed by telephone, Israeli troops announced an evacuation by megaphone. He said most of the departing Palestinians had left the complex on foot.

 

“There were no ambulances, nothing,” said the witness, Mahmoud Abu Harbed, a resident of northern Gaza who spent more than a month at Al-Shifa. The roads from the hospital, he said, were heavily damaged by bombing.

 

The Israeli military said it had not ordered an evacuation, but had agreed to a request made by the hospital’s director to enable patients and medical workers who wished to leave the hospital to do so safely.

 

“Medical personnel will remain in the hospital to support patients who are unable to evacuate,” the Israeli military said in a statement, adding that it had provided “additional food, water and humanitarian assistance” to Al-Shifa overnight.

 

It was not immediately clear how many patients, staff members or Israeli soldiers remained inside the complex. Munir al-Bursh, an official with the Gaza health ministry, said in a statement that at least 120 patients and five doctors remained inside.

 

Israeli soldiers have advanced into the hospital complex over the past three days, saying that it hosts an underground Hamas military command center. Both the Palestinian armed group and Al-Shifa officials have denied the accusations.

 

Israeli troops searching the complex say they have found weapons caches inside and, near the hospital, the bodies of two Israeli hostages captured by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack. The army has yet to provide conclusive proof of a subterranean military base.

 

On Thursday, the Israeli military escorted journalists from The New York Times on a visit to Al-Shifa. There, they were shown a stone-and-concrete shaft with a staircase descending into the earth — evidence, the military said, of a Hamas presence there.

 

Since Nov. 11, at least 40 patients, including four premature babies, have died in Al-Shifa because of power outages, the United Nations said on Saturday, citing hospital officials.

 

Adnan al-Bursh, a doctor at Al-Shifa, said in a televised interview that Israeli troops had ordered those remaining in the hospital to leave from the compound’s eastern side. They marched out past tanks, he said, with some fleeing toward southern Gaza on Israeli orders and others heading elsewhere in Gaza’s embattled north.

 

“We walked alongside the wounded and the elderly,” Dr. al-Bursh told Al Jazeera. “It was a terrifying sight, God help us.”

 

Israel launched its military operation in Gaza last month after Hamas killed 1,200 people in attacks in southern Israel and took about 240 people hostage, according to the Israeli authorities. Since the war began, over 11,000 people have been killed in the enclave, according to according to Gazan health officials.

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10) Arab countries won’t send postwar peacekeeping troops to Gaza, a Jordanian official says.

By Vivian Nereim reporting from Manama, Bahrain, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/18/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, right, and Brett McGurk, one of the White House’s top Middle East officials, at a regional security conference in Manama, Bahrain, on Saturday. Credit...Mazen Mahdi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Arab countries will not participate in any postwar plan that involves sending international troops to secure Gaza, Jordan’s foreign minister said on Saturday, characterizing such an idea as akin to asking others to clean up Israel’s mess.

 

The minister, Ayman Safadi, also argued that agreeing to participate in a post-conflict peacekeeping force would essentially give the Israeli military permission to destroy Gaza.

 

“There will be no Arab troops going to Gaza — none,” Mr. Safadi said at a regional security conference in Bahrain. “We are not going to be seen as the enemy.”

 

Since the Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel by Hamas — the armed group that runs Gaza and, according to the Israeli authorities, killed about 1,200 people — Israel has cut off most electricity, food and water for more than two million Palestinians who live in the territory. Israel’s military has also carried out a steady barrage of airstrikes and launched a ground invasion, battling for control of Gaza street by street.

 

“People are being killed day in and day out, and then we’re supposed to come and clean the mess after Israel?” Mr. Safadi said. “That’s not going to happen.”

 

Some Western officials have floated the idea that a peacekeeping force involving Arab countries could play a transitional role in Gaza after the war, a military campaign that Israeli officials have vowed must wipe out Hamas. But, at least in public, Arab officials have dismissed the notion that they could discuss any postwar plan before a cease-fire is implemented, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has vowed that Israel will maintain security control over Gaza “for an indefinite period.”

 

The division between the United States and its Arab allies over the war was on full display at the conference in Bahrain, where Arab, American and European officials sparred over the cause of the conflict and how to end it. Arab governments, many of them authoritarian, have faced significant pressure from their publics over the war, which has reinvigorated vocal support for the Palestinian cause and stoked anger not only toward Israel, but also the United States.

 

Sitting onstage alongside Brett McGurk, one of the White House’s top Middle East officials, Mr. Safadi said that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza was “not self-defense” but “blatant aggression.” He also argued that the international community was failing to hold Israel accountable to international law and was sending a message to people across the Arab world that “Israel can do whatever it wants.”

 

Mr. McGurk, in his own speech, said that the United States supported Israel’s defense while also making it clear “that Israel must comply with international humanitarian law.”

 

“We will not tell another country how to grieve or how to protect itself, but as friends and partners we will do our best, and offer our best advice,” he said.

 

Mr. McGurk also said that a pause in fighting and a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza must be conditioned on Hamas releasing the more than 200 hostages it took from Israel in the Oct. 7 attacks.

 

When the floor opened for questions from the audience, Mr. McGurk was mobbed with critical inquiries about American policy in the Middle East.

 

Speaking on a subsequent panel, Anwar Gargash, a senior Emirati official, said he sometimes wondered whether the war was “another Iraq moment,” rising fears about how the conflict was fueling extremism and radicalization across the region.

 

Asked by audience members about their own countries’ policies for Gaza after the war, he and Abdullatif Al Zayani, the foreign minister of Bahrain, did not give clear answers.

 

“We are within an Arab consensus,” Mr. Gargash said, adding that what Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority want is “extremely important to us.”

 

“We can’t really come and sit down and say the next step will be some sort of a de facto administration over Gaza,” he said. “If we are not guided by the Palestinians, whatever we do will not be legitimate.”

 

Mr. McGurk said that from Washington’s perspective, the United States must “plan now” for the day after, even as the conflict continues.

 

“The Palestinian people and their voices and aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza,” he said. “It is not simply about cleaning up after the war.”

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11) Palestinians and the U.N. report intense strikes in Gaza’s south.

By Karen Zraick, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/18/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Destruction after an Israeli strike in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday. Credit...Fatima Shbair/Associated Press

Fliers over Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, on Saturday. Credit...Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Parts of southern Gaza were pounded by airstrikes on Saturday, according to the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, even as the Israeli military continued to warn residents to evacuate from north to south.

 

Wafa, the official news agency of the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, reported Saturday both on strikes in Deir Al Balah in central Gaza, as well as Khan Younis and Rafah in the south.  The Israeli military did not immediately confirm the strikes.

 

Israel has declared war on Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, an enclave separate from the West Bank, after an attack that Israeli officials says killed 1,200 people. But there has been growing alarm about the toll of the offensive, which included an unprecedented number of airstrikes on a densely populated area even before Israel began its ground invasion three weeks ago.

 

The Palestinian health authorities say that at least 11,470 people have been killed, including more than 4,700 children and 3,100 women. The statistics do not specify how many of the dead were combatants.

 

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said early Saturday said there had been “intense strikes” by the Israelis in the south as well as “ground clashes” between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups. Those clashes the agency said took place in Khan Younis and near Rafah in southern Gaza, as well as in the north during the previous 24 hours.

 

In Khan Younis — the largest city in southern Gaza — some residents reported seeing fliers said to have been dropped by Israeli planes warning people in outlying villages to evacuate.

 

The fliers, images of which have circulated online for days, were addressed to residents of four agricultural villages north and east of the city, near the border with Israel: Al Qarara, Bani Suheila, Abasan and Khuza’a. The villages are east of Salah al-Din road, the main north-south artery, which people have been using to flee from the north. The origin of the images was not clear and the Israeli military declined to comment on them.

 

The four villages make up a large geographic area in southern Gaza.

 

Maysaa Abu Daqaa, who lives east of the city of Khan Younis, said she had left her home and gone to a hospital.

 

“They told us to leave,” she said of the Israelis. “We can barely sort out our situation.”

 

Photos from Agence France-Presse, the news wire service, showed what it said were fliers being dropped by the Israeli military on Saturday over Rafah, near the border with Egypt. It was not immediately clear what was written on those fliers.

 

Gaza was largely cut off from the outside world this week during a prolonged telecommunications blackout.

 

Abu Bakr Bashir, Ameera Harouda and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

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12) The Israeli military signals its intent to battle Hamas in southern Gaza.

By Ephrat Livni and Victoria Kim, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/18/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Palestinians evacuating a wounded woman after an Israeli airstrike in the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Monday. Credit...Mohammed Dahman/Associated Press

Israel signaled on Friday that it was expanding its offensive in Gaza to include the southern half of the territory, after claiming control of the north and taking over a Gaza City hospital it had identified as a priority in its military operation.

 

The Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said late Friday that its troops would continue their offensive “in every place that Hamas is, and it is in the south of the strip.” His remarks appeared to telegraph a new phase in Israel’s war on Hamas, three weeks into the ground invasion and less than three days after Israeli troops entered the grounds of Gaza’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa, saying the armed group had been using it as a command center.

 

The question of whether Israel had secured conclusive evidence of a Hamas operation at the hospital appeared unsettled as of Friday, when the Israeli military took journalists on a tightly controlled visit to Al-Shifa. The military showed them a tunnel shaft on the perimeter of the hospital grounds but said it had not sent troops down it, for fear of booby traps. Israel’s siege on the hospital has drawn intense international scrutiny and criticism for endangering vulnerable patients and other civilians sheltering there.

 

In an evening news briefing, Admiral Hagari said that the Israeli military was operating with “clear goals” but declined to outline what those were, saying only that Israeli forces would move at a time and in a manner that served their purpose.

 

The possibility that Israel will expand its ground operation in Gaza to the south raises the question of where Palestinian civilians have left to flee to.

 

Gazans have been saying for weeks that no place within their borders is safe. Hundreds of thousands followed Israeli directives to leave northern Gaza and move to the south, only to come under fire from Israeli airstrikes. Only foreign citizens, some international workers and a limited number of severely wounded Palestinians have been allowed to leave through the border with Egypt.

 

Weeks of punishing airstrikes and the orders to move have left more than 11,000 people in the enclave dead, including more than 4,600 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Aid groups say that the figures are probably higher and have not been updated in days because of a communications blackout caused by lack of fuel.

 

The U.N. says that more than two-thirds of the population of 2.2 million people are internally displaced and struggling under increasingly dire conditions, many lacking food, clean water and shelter. Last week, the World Health Organization warned of the risk of rampant disease and starvation.

 

Admiral Hagari did not directly respond to a question about where Gazans should go if the south becomes an active war zone.

 

He noted that the Israeli government had agreed on Friday to allow fuel for aid groups into the territory. He said the fuel would help the humanitarian situation as the Israeli military continued its mission.

 

The United Nations will be able to use the fuel in desalination plants to create clean drinking water, among other uses, Israeli officials said on Friday, after dwindling supplies were threatening to shut down humanitarian operations.

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13) Satellite imagery shows a water plant in Gaza City burned down amid a dire water shortage.

By Christoph Koettl, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/11/18/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

Satellite imagery captured Friday shows the plant was burned to the ground. Credit...Maxar Technologies

Fire has gutted a water treatment plant on the outskirts of Gaza City, satellite images captured on Thursday and Friday show — the latest evidence of damage to water infrastructure amid an increasingly dire shortage of clean water.

 

A satellite picture from Thursday shows an enormous plume of smoke rising from the fire and hanging over a wide swath of the city. The fire burned for at least four hours. An image from Friday shows the entire plant was destroyed.

 

It was not clear what caused the fire, or how recently the plant had been operating.

 

The fire broke out amid a water crisis in Gaza, with UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, warning that 70 percent of people in the Gaza Strip are drinking contaminated water. With critical infrastructure destroyed and relatively few trucks carrying fuel and water permitted to enter Gaza, the water emergency has only spiraled.

 

On Friday, a U.N. expert urged Israel to allow clean water into the territory, along with fuel to run water treatment systems, and called on the country to “stop using water as a weapon of war.”

 

The expert, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the organization’s special rapporteur on human rights and drinking water, told The New York Times that Israel’s bombing campaign has hit wells, water tanks and other water supply infrastructure. With little potable groundwater, Gaza relies heavily on desalination and water delivered from outside.

 

“But above all, by completely cutting off electricity and fuel supplies, desalination plants, and groundwater pumping, the very functioning of the supply network has collapsed,” he said.

 

Wim Zwijnenburg, a conflict and environmental researcher for the Dutch organization PAX, who shared details from an upcoming report on the destruction of water infrastructure, also said Pax “has identified numerous water facilities that have been damaged or destroyed that deprive civilians from access to clean water.”

 

The infrastructure damage caused by the continuing fighting “poses acute and long-term health and environmental risks” to the people of Gaza, he said.

 

A private company, Abdul Salam Yaseen Company, also called Eta Water Company, operated out of the plant that burned this week. Older images show the words “Water Plant” were written in large letters on the building’s roof, clearly visible from the sky.

 

Eta Water could not be reached, likely because of the continuing communication disruptions in Gaza.

 

Both the company’s website and its Facebook page highlight its work with humanitarian organizations in Gaza. Eta’s last social media post, on Nov. 8, showed the company installing water desalination units it said were funded by UNICEF at a crowded refugee site in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. A September post by the company highlighted a project with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

 

Aid agencies did not immediately reply to questions about whether the destruction of Eta’s facility would have an immediate impact on access to clean water. The Times reviewed satellite images showing water trucks lining up at the plant as recently as Oct. 12, before most residents fled northern Gaza for the south and Israel launched a ground invasion that, along with the Israeli bombing campaign, has left large parts of Gaza City in ruins.

 

There have been street battles near the plant, but it is unclear if any occurred in the area on Thursday. The satellite image from Friday does not appear to show the large impact crater typically left by an Israeli airstrike.

 

Israeli ground forces had been operating nearby; sometime in the 24 hours leading up to the fire the Israelis appear to have bulldozed an area 400 feet from the plant, and new tracks from heavy vehicles were visible. Israeli tanks and other military vehicles were stationed less than a mile away.

 

Nader Ibrahim contributed reporting.

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14) The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children

By Raja Abdulrahim, Photographs by Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/world/middleeast/gaza-children-israel.html

Khaled Joudeh, 9, mourning over the body of his baby sister, Misk, last month in Deir al Balah, Gaza.Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

Thousands of children have been killed in the enclave since the Israeli assault began, officials in Gaza say. The Israeli military says it takes “all feasible precautions” to avoid civilian deaths.

 

Barefoot and weeping, Khaled Joudeh, 9, hurried toward the dozens of bodies wrapped in white burial shrouds, blankets and rugs outside the overcrowded morgue.

 

“Where’s my mom?” he cried next to a photographer for The New York Times. “I want to see my mom.”

 

“Where is Khalil?” he continued, barely audible between sobs as he asked for his 12-year-old brother. A morgue worker opened a white shroud, so Khaled could kiss his brother one final time.

 

Then, he bid farewell to his 8-month-old sister. Another shroud was pulled back, revealing the blood-caked face of a baby, her strawberry-red hair matted down. Khaled broke into fresh sobs as he identified her to the hospital staff. Her name was Misk, Arabic for musk.

 

“Mama was so happy when she had you,” he whispered, gently touching her forehead, tears streaming down his face onto hers.

 

She was the joy of his family, relatives later said — after three boys, his parents were desperate for a girl. When she was born, they said, Khaled’s mother delighted in dressing Misk in frilly, colorful dresses, pinning her tiny curls in bright hair clips.

 

Through his tears, Khaled bid farewell to his mother, father, older brother and sister, their bodies lined up around him. Only Khaled and his younger brother, Tamer, 7, survived what relatives and local journalists said was an airstrike on Oct. 22 that toppled two buildings sheltering their extended family.

 

A total of 68 members of the Joudeh family were killed that day as they slept in their beds in Deir al Balah, in central Gaza, three of Khaled’s relatives recounted in separate interviews.

 

Several branches and generations of the Joudehs, a Palestinian family, had been huddling together before the strike, relatives said, including some who had fled northern Gaza, as Israel had ordered residents to do. The Israeli military said it could not address questions about a strike on the family.

 

In the end, members of the family were buried together, side by side in a long grave, relatives said, showing footage of the burial and sharing a picture of Misk before she was killed.

 

Gaza, the United Nations warns, has become “a graveyard for thousands of children.”

 

Determining the precise number of children killed in Gaza — in the midst of a fierce bombing campaign, with hospitals collapsing, children missing, bodies buried under rubble and neighborhoods in ruins — is a Sisyphean task. Health officials in Gaza say that 5,000 Palestinian children have been killed since the Israeli assault began, and possibly hundreds more. Many international officials and experts familiar with the way death tolls are compiled in the territory say the overall numbers are generally reliable.

 

If the figures are even close to accurate, far more children have been killed in Gaza in the past six weeks than the 2,985 children killed in the world’s major conflict zones combined — across two dozen countries — during all of last year, even with the war in Ukraine, according to U.N. tallies of verified deaths in armed conflict.

 

The Israeli military says that, unlike the “murderous assault against women, children, elderly and the disabled” by Hamas on Oct. 7, Israeli forces take “all feasible precautions” to “mitigate harm” to civilians.

 

Hamas, the military said, deliberately caused “the maximum amount of harm and brutality possible to civilians.” During the attack on Israel, parents and their children were gunned down inside their homes, witnesses and officials say, with children taken as hostages.

 

In response, the Israeli military says, it is waging a war “forcefully to dismantle Hamas military and administrative capabilities.” It notes that Israeli forces have told residents to flee to southern Gaza, and says that they issue warnings before airstrikes “when possible.”

 

But the furious pace of the strikes — more than 15,000 to date, according to the Israeli military, including in southern Gaza as well — makes the Israeli bombing campaign on the Palestinian territory one of the most intense of the 21st century. And it is happening in a dense urban enclave under siege with high concentrations of civilians, particularly children, setting off mounting global alarm, even from some of Israel’s closest allies.

 

After initially questioning the death toll reported by health officials in Gaza, the Biden administration now says that “far too many” Palestinians have been killed, conceding that the true figures for civilian casualties may be “even higher than are being cited.”

 

So many children are brought into the morgue at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al Balah that the morgue director, Yassir Abu Amar, says he has to cut his burial shrouds into child-size fragments to handle the influx of corpses.

 

“The children’s bodies come to us broken and in pieces,” he said. “It’s chilling.”

 

“We’ve never seen this number of children killed,” he added. “We cry every day. Every day, we cry while we’re working to prepare the children.”

 

During previous wars, parents in Gaza, a crowded strip with more than two million people, sometimes put their children to bed in different rooms of their homes. If an airstrike damaged one part of the house, the other children might live.

 

Given the scale of the bombardment this time — which many Gazans describe as indiscriminate and without warning — some parents have put much greater distances between their children, splitting them up and sending them to relatives in different parts of the Gaza Strip to try to increase their odds of survival. Others have taken to scrawling names directly onto their children’s skin, in case they are lost, orphaned or killed and need to be identified.

 

In the emergency room of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah said that many children had been brought in alone and in shock, with burns, shrapnel wounds or severe injuries from being crushed by rubble. In many cases, he said, no one knew who they were.

 

“They are given a designation — ‘Unknown Trauma Child’ — until someone recognizes them,” he said. “The crippling thing is that some of them are the sole survivors of their family, so no one ever comes.”

 

“More and more, it seems like a war against children,” said Dr. Abu-Sittah.

 

Two weeks ago, the emergency room at Al-Shifa registered “Unknown Trauma Child 1,500,” Dr. Abu-Sittah said.

 

Then, in recent days, Israeli forces stormed the hospital, where thousands of Gazans had been sheltering, saying that the facility sat above an underground Hamas command center. United Nations officials warned that the raid put Gaza’s most vulnerable in even greater jeopardy.

 

International experts who have worked with health officials in Gaza during this and other wars say that hospitals and morgues in the enclave gather and report the names, ID numbers and other details of people who have been killed in the territory. While the experts urged caution around public statements about the specific number of people killed in a particular strike — especially in the immediate aftermath of a blast — they said the aggregate death tolls reported by health workers in Gaza have typically proven to be accurate.

 

The Israeli military says it “regrets any harm caused to civilians (especially children),” adding that it is examining “all its operations” to ensure that it follows its own rules and adheres to international law.

 

But a growing number of human rights groups and officials contend that Israel has already broken that law.

 

After condemning the “heinous, brutal and shocking” attacks by Hamas as war crimes, Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said this month, “The collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts also to a war crime, as does the unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians.”

 

“The massive bombardments by Israel have killed, maimed and injured in particular women and children,” he added. “All of this has an unbearable toll.”

 

Some international officials warn that children are in danger no matter where they go. “There is nowhere safe for Gaza’s one million children to turn,” said Catherine Russell, the director of UNICEF.

 

On Oct. 15, Dr. Mohammad Abu Moussa said that he was on a 24-hour shift at Al-Nasr Hospital in Khan Younis — south of the evacuation line drawn by Israel — when he heard a loud explosion nearby. He called his wife at home, but when she answered, he said, all he heard were screams.

 

Soon, he said, his wife, 12-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son were brought into the emergency room, bloodied, hysterical and covered in dust from rubble. He tried to comfort them, but panicked when he noticed that his youngest son, 7-year-old Yousef, was not with them.

 

“Where’s Yousef?” he recalled asking.

 

No one would answer.

 

When he pressed again about his son, he said a neighbor simply responded, “May God have mercy on his soul.”

 

Dr. Abu Moussa didn’t want to believe it. Video from journalists at the hospital shows him frantically searching for Yousef. Dr. Abu Moussa recounted how he had asked other departments, including the intensive care unit, whether his son had been rushed there instead.

 

Then, he said, a journalist showed him pictures of their demolished home. Dr. Abu Moussa said he recognized the gray clothing Yousef had been wearing when he kissed him goodbye before leaving the house.

 

With dread, Dr. Abu Moussa walked from the emergency room to the hospital morgue. That’s where he said he finally found Yousef, a jokester with a cheeky smile who stuck out his tongue in photographs. Now, his lifeless body was lying on a gurney.

 

The shock was too much to bear. Dr. Abu Moussa recalled looking away before a colleague embraced him.

 

Multiple relatives said that airstrikes had hit their home without warning, and that Dr. Abu Moussa’s family had been pulled from the rubble. The Israeli military said it could not address questions about a strike on the family.

 

“Yousef was a very loved child,” said his mother, Rawan, a fitness instructor. “He was always smiling. He loved to laugh and make people laugh.”

 

At home, the boy had wanted to eat every meal next to his father, or in his lap, sometimes even sharing the same spoon.

 

“He would emulate me in everything I did,” Dr. Abu Moussa said, adding that his son had wanted to become a doctor as well.

 

Yousef was not the only one killed. Dr. Abu Moussa’s brother, Jasir Abu Moussa, lost both of his sons and his wife, family members said.

 

Dr. Abu Moussa’s nephew Hmaid, 18, had recently graduated from high school with high marks, the family said. He got his love of cars from his father and, from his mother, a love of poetry and art. He had hopes of studying mechanical engineering in Europe, relatives said, and had begun studying German even as he was studying for his high school exams.

 

His younger brother, Abdulrahman, 8, was even smarter, the family said. He was killed, too.

 

“He was a handful,” Jasir Abu Moussa said of his younger son. “But he was also very smart, and delightful.”

 

Death colors the living, as well.

 

Many children are showing clear signs of trauma, including night terrors, said Nida Zaeem, a mental health field officer with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza.

 

“They are waking up shouting, screaming,” Ms. Zaeem said from a Red Cross shelter in Rafah, in the south, where she is staying with her family, including four children. Each night, she added, children in the shelter yell, “We’re going to die, we’re going to die.”

 

“They are shouting, pleading, ‘Please protect me, please, please hide me. I don’t want to die,’” she added.

 

In an encampment sheltering thousands of people around a United Nations center, Hammoud Qadada, 4, tried to focus on a video game inside a tent as the thundering sound of strikes were close enough to shake the ground beneath him.

 

When the soccer players on the screen scored, everyone in the tent — his siblings, cousins and other children from the makeshift encampment — yelled “goooaaal” so loudly that people in nearby tents thought a cease-fire had been announced.

 

Their parents had hooked up a television to a solar panel and, when it seemed safe enough, people played real soccer outside between the tents — trying to distract the children.

 

It wasn’t enough.

 

The next morning, Hammoud’s grandmother said he woke up and said, “I’m going to die.”

 

“I told him no,” said his grandmother Hanaan Jaber, 53. “God willing, you will grow up and you will get married and tell your children what happened with us here, like a story.”

 

Hammoud’s vocabulary has already been shaped by the war. Soon after it started, he asked his parents what “martyrdom” meant. When asked what is happening around him, he answers without hesitation: “Airstrikes. Airstrikes and war.”

 

Gaza, a coastal strip where cabanas and food shacks line the Mediterranean, once had a lively beach culture. Yasser Abou Ishaq, 34, recalled how he used to teach his three young daughters how to swim.

 

“They were always asking me to go to the beach, to the amusement park, to the parks,” he said. “I loved watching them play.”

 

Amal, his oldest, 7, was named after his mother. At school, she was a good student with excellent penmanship, he recalled. At home, she became the teacher who made her younger sister Israa, a 4-year-old who loved chocolate and Kinder toys, play along as the student.

 

When his home was destroyed by what he said was an airstrike, he lost them both, he said. His wife was killed as well, he said.

 

In all, 25 members of his family, 15 of them children, have been killed, he said. Local journalists reported a strike and shared footage of bodies in burial shrouds — members of the Abou Ishaq family, they said — lined up on the ground as relatives cried over them. The Israeli military said it could not address questions about a strike on the family.

 

Mr. Abou Ishaq said that he and his 1-year-old daughter, Habiba, had been wounded and taken to the hospital. Most of his family, including his wife and Amal, were pulled from the rubble the same day and buried by relatives, he said, while he was still being treated. He never got the chance to say goodbye, he said.

 

The next day, Israa’s body was pulled from the rubble, he said. He was able to see her in the hospital’s morgue and hold her one last time.

 

“I hugged and kissed her. I said goodbye and I cried,” he said. “God only knows how much I cried.”

Reporting was contributed by Alan Yuhas, Samar Abu Elouf, Ameera Harouda and Abu Bakr Bashir

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