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"The Art of Movement"
An evening of reading, and discussion on the life of Leonard Peltier
Tuesday, February 6, 2024, 7:30 P.M., in person and virtual
Bound Together Books
1360 Haight Street
San Francisco, CA
https://www.facebook.com/events/s/art-of-movement-and-evening-of/370445182255203/?mibextid=RQdjqZ
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Gaza Strip Access Restrictions.pdf since 2007
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We are all Palestinian
Listen and view this beautiful, powerful, song by Mistahi Corkill on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQwuhbLczgI
Greetings,
Here is my new song and music video, We are all Palestinian, linked below. If you find it inspiring, please feel free to share with others. All the best!
Mistahi
We are all Palestinian
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Labor for Palestine
Thousands of labor representatives marched Saturday, December 16, in Oakland, California. —Photo by Leon Kunstenaar
Video of December 16th Labor rally for Palestine.
Bay Area Unions and Workers Rally and March For Palestine In Oakland
https://youtu.be/L9k79honqIA
For More Information:
bayarealabor4palestine@gmail.com
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
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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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Leonard Peltier Update - Not One More Year
Coleman 1 has gone on permanent lockdown.
The inmates are supposed to be allowed out two hours a day. I have not heard from Leonard since the 18th.
The last time I talked to Leonard, he asked where his supporters were. He asked me if anyone cared about these lockdowns.
Leonard lives in a filthy, cold cell 22 to 24 hours a day. He has not seen a dentist in ten years. I asked him, “On a scale of 1 to 10, is your pain level at 13?” He said, “Something like that.” Leonard is a relentless truth-teller. He does not like it when I say things that do not make sense mathematically.
That is why Leonard remains imprisoned. He will not lie. He will not beg, grovel, or denounce his beliefs.
Please raise your voice. Ask your representatives why they have abdicated their responsibility to oversee the Bureau of Prisons and ensure they adhere to Constitutional law.
Uhuru, The African People’s Socialist Party, has stepped up for Leonard. NOT ONE MORE YEAR.
Fight for Free Speech – YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM8GDeGv90E
Leonard should not have spent a day in prison. Click “LEARN” on our website to find out what really happened on that reservation:
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.
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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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
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
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) A Collective ‘No’: Anti-Putin Russians Embrace an Unlikely Challenger
Long lines have popped up in Russia and beyond to get Boris B. Nadezhdin, an antiwar candidate, onto the ballot for Russia’s presidential election in March.
By Paul Sonne, Alina Lobzina and Ivan Nechepurenko, Jan. 27, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/world/europe/russia-putin-election-boris-nadezhdin.html
Boris B. Nadezhdin is trying to gather enough signatures to be on the ballot for Russia’s presidential election — if the authorities let him. Credit...Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press
His surname comes from the Russian word for hope — and for hundreds of thousands of antiwar Russians, that is, improbably enough, what he has become.
Boris B. Nadezhdin is the only candidate running on an antiwar platform with a chance of getting on the ballot to oppose President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia’s presidential election in March. Russians who are against the war have rushed to sign his official petition inside and outside the country, hoping to supply enough signatures by a Jan. 31 deadline for him to succeed in joining the race.
They have braved subzero temperatures in the Siberian city of Yakutsk. They have snaked down the block in Yekaterinburg. They have jumped in place to stay warm in St. Petersburg and flocked to outposts in Berlin, Istanbul and Tbilisi, Georgia.
They know that election officials might bar Mr. Nadezhdin from the ballot, and if he is allowed to run, they know he will never win. They don’t care.
“Boris Nadezhdin is our collective ‘No,’” said Lyosha Popov, a 25-year-old who has been collecting signatures for Mr. Nadezhdin in Yakutsk, south of the Arctic Circle. “This is simply our protest, our form of protest, so we can somehow show we are against all this.”
The grass-roots mobilization in an authoritarian country, where national elections have long been a Potemkin affair, has injected energy into a Russian opposition movement that has been all but obliterated: Its most promising leaders have been exiled, jailed or killed in a sweeping crackdown on dissent that has escalated with the war.
With protests essentially banned in Russia and criticism of the military outlawed, the long lines to support Mr. Nadezhdin’s candidacy have offered antiwar Russians a rare public communion with kindred spirits whose voices have been drowned out in a wave of jingoism and state brutality for nearly two years.
Many of them don’t particularly know about or care for Mr. Nadezhdin, a 60-year-old physicist who was a member of Russia’s Parliament from 1999 to 2003, and who openly acknowledges lacking the charisma of anti-Kremlin crusaders like Aleksei A. Navalny, the jailed opposition leader.
But with a draconian censorship law stifling criticism of the war, Mr. Nadezhdin’s supporters see backing him as the only legal way left in Russia to demonstrate their opposition to Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And they like what the candidate is saying — about the conflict driving Russia off a cliff; about the need to free political prisoners, bring the troops home and make peace with Ukraine; about Russia’s anti-gay laws being “idiotic.”
“The purpose of my participation is to oppose Putin’s approach, which is leading the country to a dead end, into a rut of authoritarianism, militarization and isolation,” Mr. Nadezhdin said in a written response to questions from The New York Times.
“The more votes that a candidate against Putin’s approach and the ‘special military operation’ receives, the greater the chances are for peace and change in Russia,” he added, using the Kremlin’s term for the war to avoid running afoul of Russian law.
He has dismissed questions about his safety, noting in a YouTube appearance this past week that, in any case, the “tastiest and sweetest years of my life are already in the past.”
The Kremlin tightly controls the election process to ensure Mr. Putin’s inevitability as the victor, but allows nonthreatening opponents to run — to provide a veneer of legitimacy, drive turnout at the polls and give Russians opposed to his rule an outlet for venting their dissatisfaction. So far, 11 people, including Mr. Nadezhdin and Mr. Putin, have been allowed to register as potential candidates and are collecting signatures.
Many of Mr. Nadezhdin’s newfound supporters accept that he might have initially been viewed as just a useful tool for the Kremlin — a 1990s-era liberal with a folksy grandpa vibe who is willing to play the state’s game.
Of particular suspicion is his work in the 1990s as an aide to Sergei V. Kiriyenko, a prime minister under President Boris N. Yeltsin who is now the top Kremlin official responsible for overseeing domestic politics.
Skeptics also point to Mr. Nadezhdin’s presence on state television, where he has contributed to an illusion of open debate by serving as a token liberal voice, there to be shouted down by pro-Putin propagandists. Opposition figures the Kremlin considers a real threat, such as Mr. Navalny, have long been barred from appearing, let alone running for president.
Mr. Nadezhdin has countered that if he were a Kremlin marionette, he would not be scrambling for signatures and money, nor would the main state television channel have excluded his name from its list of presidential candidates.
His supporters are pressing ahead regardless.
“He may well turn out to be a decorative candidate, but if so, there’s a sense that everything hasn’t gone according to plan,” said Tatyana Semyonova, a 32-year-old programmer who showed up at a crowded courtyard in Berlin to sign her name.
She said she didn’t have any particular affinity for Mr. Nadezhdin but was signing as an act of protest.
Pavel Laptev, a 37-year-old designer standing next to Ms. Semyonova in line, said that even the smallest chance to change something should not be wasted. “Even if he is a decorative candidate, once he has all this power, maybe he will decide he’s not so decorative,” he said.
The unexpected groundswell of support for Mr. Nadezhdin has presented the Kremlin’s political maestros with a thorny question in the first presidential vote since Mr. Putin launched his invasion: Will they allow an antiwar candidate of any stripe to stand for election?
“I will be surprised, surprised but delighted, if I see you on the electoral ballot,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist based in Berlin, told Mr. Nadezhdin this past week during a YouTube show. “I’m not convinced that our political management at this stage in its development, of its evolution, can afford to take such risks.”
Mr. Nadezhdin’s campaign says it has far surpassed the 100,000 total signatures required, but a candidate is allowed to submit only a maximum of 2,500 from any single Russian region. On Friday, his campaign said it was on track to gather enough signatures from regions inside Russia and would not need any from abroad.
But even if Mr. Nadezhdin amasses enough signatures, the Russian authorities could find a way to disqualify him. The long, visible lines of support, he has said, will make that harder to do.
Many antiwar Russians initially coalesced around Ekaterina S. Duntsova, a little-known former television journalist and local politician who launched a campaign in November and quickly rose to prominence. But the Central Electoral Commission rejected her application to become a candidate because of what she called trivial mistakes in her paperwork.
She has since backed Mr. Nadezhdin.
Members of Mr. Navalny’s team, including his wife, have also publicly backed the former lawmaker. So have one of Russia’s most famous rock stars, Yuri Shevchuk, and another influential exiled opposition activist, Maxim Katz.
In Yakutsk, a frigid city in eastern Siberia, it was minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit when Mr. Popov, the head of the campaign there, started collecting signatures. Eventually, the weather warmed up and the crowd increased.
Few places downtown would allow Mr. Popov to set up a stand in support of an anti-Putin candidate. But he persuaded a shopping mall to give the operation a spot in a corridor, where people can sign their names at a school desk and folding table.
“If people don’t know Boris Nadezhdin, I can tell them who he is,” Mr. Popov said. But he emphasizes that he is not there because of Mr. Nadezhdin. “I am here collecting signatures against Putin,” he tells people. “We’re collecting signatures against Putin, yes, against military action.”
Those signing must give their full names and passport details — in effect a ready-made list of Russians who oppose the war — spurring fears of reprisal.
But that has not deterred Karen Danielyan, a 20-year-old from Tver, about 100 miles northwest of Moscow, whose entire adult life so far has been spent with Russia at war. “The fear that this will continue further is much stronger and heavier than the fear that they will do something to me for working as a signature collector,” he said.
Mr. Nadezhdin portrays himself as an unremarkable politician who decided to run as an “act of despair” and found himself accidentally at the forefront of a movement.
“But, comrades, I do have one quality — I endlessly love my family and my country,” he said this past week in a YouTube appearance alongside Ms. Schulmann, the political analyst. “I endlessly believe that Russia isn’t worse than any other country and can achieve, with the help of democracy, elections and the will of the people, tremendous results.”
Ms. Schulmann told him he would be judged by what happens to the people who have signed his petition.
“I won’t betray anyone,” he said. “I will fight.”
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2) Where Is Hamas Getting Its Weapons? Increasingly, From Israel.
The very weapons that Israeli forces have used to enforce a blockade of Gaza are now being used against them.
By Maria Abi-Habib and Sheera Frenkel, Jan. 28, 2024
Explosives engineers in 2021 removing an unexploded Israeli missile in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip. Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Israeli military and intelligence officials have concluded that a significant number of weapons used by Hamas in the Oct. 7 attacks and in the war in Gaza came from an unlikely source: the Israeli military itself.
For years, analysts have pointed to underground smuggling routes to explain how Hamas stayed so heavily armed despite an Israeli military blockade of the Gaza Strip. But recent intelligence has shown the extent to which Hamas has been able to build many of its rockets and anti-tank weaponry out of the thousands of munitions that failed to detonate when Israel lobbed them into Gaza, according to weapons experts and Israeli and Western intelligence officials. Hamas is also arming its fighters with weapons stolen from Israeli military bases.
Intelligence gathered during months of fighting revealed that, just as the Israeli authorities misjudged Hamas’s intentions before Oct. 7, they also underestimated its ability to obtain arms.
What is clear now is that the very weapons that Israeli forces have used to enforce a blockade of Gaza over the past 17 years are now being used against them. Israeli and American military explosives have enabled Hamas to shower Israel with rockets and, for the first time, penetrate Israeli towns from Gaza.
“Unexploded ordnance is a main source of explosives for Hamas,” said Michael Cardash, the former deputy head of the Israeli National Police Bomb Disposal Division and an Israeli police consultant. “They are cutting open bombs from Israel, artillery bombs from Israel, and a lot of them are being used, of course, and repurposed for their explosives and rockets.”
Weapons experts say that roughly 10 percent of munitions typically fail to detonate, but in Israel’s case, the figure could be higher. Israel’s arsenal includes Vietnam-era missiles, long discontinued by the United States and other military powers. The failure rate on some of those missiles could be as high as 15 percent, said one Israeli intelligence officer who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
By either count, years of sporadic bombing and the recent bombardment of Gaza have littered the area with thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance just waiting to be reused. One 750-pound bomb that fails to detonate can become hundreds of missiles or rockets.
Hamas did not respond to messages seeking comment. The Israeli military said in a statement that it was committed to dismantling Hamas but did not answer specific questions about the group’s weapons.
Israeli officials knew before the October attacks that Hamas could salvage some Israeli-made weapons, but the scope has startled weapons experts and diplomats alike.
Israeli authorities also knew that their armories were vulnerable to theft. A military report from early last year noted that thousands of bullets and hundreds of guns and grenades had been stolen from poorly guarded bases.
From there, the report said, some made their way to the West Bank, and others to Gaza by way of Sinai. But the report focused on military security. The consequences were treated almost as an afterthought: “We are fueling our enemies with our own weapons,” read one line of the report, which was viewed by The New York Times.
The consequences became apparent on Oct. 7. Hours after Hamas breached the border, four Israeli soldiers discovered the body of a Hamas gunman who was killed outside the Re’im military base. Hebrew writing was visible on a grenade on his belt, said one of the soldiers, who recognized it as a bulletproof Israeli grenade, a recent model. Other Hamas fighters overran the base, and Israeli military officials say some weapons were looted and returned to Gaza.
A few miles away, members of an Israeli forensic team collected one of the 5,000 rockets fired by Hamas that day. Examining the rocket, they discovered that its military-grade explosives had most likely come from an unexploded Israeli missile fired into Gaza during a previous war, according to an Israeli intelligence officer.
The Oct. 7 attacks showcased the patchwork arsenal that Hamas had stitched together. It included Iranian-made attack drones and North Korean-made rocket launchers, the types of weapons that Hamas is known to smuggle into Gaza through tunnels. Iran remains a major source of Hamas’s money and weapons.
But other weapons, like anti-tank explosives, RPG warheads, thermobaric grenades and improvised devices were repurposed Israeli arms, according to Hamas videos and remnants uncovered by Israel.
Rockets and missiles require huge quantities of explosive material, which officials say is the most difficult item to smuggle into Gaza.
Yet Hamas fired so many rockets and missiles on Oct. 7 that Israel’s Iron Dome air-defense system could not keep up. Rockets struck towns, cities and military bases, giving cover to the militants who stormed into Israel. One rocket hit a military base believed to house part of Israel’s nuclear missile program.
Hamas once relied on material like fertilizer and powdered sugar — which, pound for pound, are not as powerful as military-grade explosives — to build rockets. But since 2007, Israel has enforced a strict blockade, restricting the import of goods, including electronics and computer equipment, that could be used to make weapons.
That blockade and a crackdown on smuggling tunnels leading into and out of Gaza forced Hamas to get creative.
Its manufacturing abilities are now sophisticated enough to saw into the warheads of bombs weighing up to 2,000 pounds, to harvest the explosives and to repurpose them.
“They have a military industry in Gaza. Some of it is above ground, some of it is below ground, and they are able to manufacture a lot of what they need,” said Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser and head of its National Security Council before stepping down early last year.
One Western military official said that most of the explosives that Hamas is using in its war with Israel appear to have been manufactured using unexploded Israeli-launched munitions. One example, the official said, was an explosive booby trap that killed 10 Israeli soldiers in December.
The military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, has flaunted its manufacturing abilities for years. After a war in 2014 with Israel, it established engineering teams to collect unexploded munitions like howitzer rounds and American-made MK-84 bombs.
These teams work with the police’s explosive ordnance-disposal units, allowing people to safely return to their homes. They also help Hamas gear up for the next war.
“Our strategy aimed to repurpose these pieces, turning this crisis into an opportunity,” a Qassam Brigades commander told Al Jazeera in 2020.
Qassam’s media arm has released videos in recent years showing exactly what they were doing: sawing into warheads, scooping out explosive material — usually a powder — and melting it down to reuse.
In 2019, Qassam commandos discovered hundreds of munitions on two World War I-era British military vessels that had sunk off the coast of Gaza a century earlier. The discovery, Qassam boasted, allowed it to make hundreds of new rockets.
Early in the current war, a Qassam video showed militants assembling Yassin 105 rockets in a sunless manufacturing facility.
“The most essential way for Hamas to obtain weaponry is through domestic manufacture,” said Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Middle East policy analyst who grew up in Gaza. “It’s just a tweak of chemistry and you can make pretty much whatever you want.”
Israel restricts the mass importation of construction materials that can be used to build rockets and other weapons. But each new round of fighting leaves behind neighborhoods of rubble from which militants can pluck pipes, concrete and other valuable material, Mr. Alkhatib said.
Hamas cannot manufacture everything. Some things are easier to buy from the black market and smuggle into Gaza. Sinai, the largely uninhabited desert region between Israel, Egypt and the Gaza Strip, remains a hub for arms smuggling. Weapons from conflicts in Libya, Eritrea and Afghanistan have been discovered in Sinai, according to Israeli intelligence assessments.
According to two Israeli intelligence officials, at least a dozen small tunnels were still running between Gaza and Egypt before Oct. 7. A spokesman for the Egyptian government said its military had done its part to shut down tunnels on its side of the border. “Many of the weapons currently inside the Gaza Strip are the result of smuggling from within Israel,” the spokesman said in an email.
But the besieged streets of Gaza itself are increasingly a source of weapons.
Israel estimates that it has conducted at least 22,000 strikes on Gaza since Oct. 7. Each often involves multiple rounds, meaning tens of thousands of munitions have likely been dropped or fired — and thousands failed to detonate.
“Artillery, hand grenades, other munitions — tens of thousands of unexploded ordnance will be left after this war,” said Charles Birch, the head of the U.N. Mine Action Service in Gaza. These “are like a free gift to Hamas.”
Vivian Yee contributed reporting from Cairo, and Zakaria Zakaria from Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
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3) Hospitals in Khan Younis struggle amid intense fighting.
By Hiba Yazbek Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 28, 2024
Screenshot of scene inside hospital.
The Israeli military reported intense fighting on Sunday in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, where local officials warned that two hospitals were struggling to operate after seven days of bombardment.
In recent days, Israeli forces have been sweeping through Khan Younis and ordered Gazans sheltering in several densely packed neighborhoods of the city to flee. The fighting has reached the vicinity of at least two hospitals — Nasser, a major medical complex, and Al-Amal, run by the Palestinian Red Crescent — where thousands of Gazans have sought shelter.
The Red Crescent said on Sunday that oxygen supplies at Al-Amal Hospital were depleted “due to the ongoing siege” of the area, leaving medical staff unable to perform surgeries.
The statement came as the Israeli military said that “intensive battles” were underway in Khan Younis. Israel has referred to the city as a Hamas stronghold. The Israeli military has said that intelligence showed Hamas militants were operating from within both Al-Amal and Nasser hospitals.
The Red Crescent has rejected the allegations about Al-Amal, and Gazan health officials have denied Hamas uses hospitals as military assets, disputing accounts presented by the Israeli authorities. Some 7,000 displaced Palestinians are sheltering at Al-Amal Hospital, according to Nebal Farsakh, a spokeswoman for the Red Crescent.
Gaza’s health ministry warned of the impact that fighting was having on Nasser Hospital. It said on Saturday that the hospital’s generators could stop working within four days due to fuel shortages and that shrapnel had damaged the facility’s water tanks, resulting in leaks in the intensive care unit.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, said on Friday that Nasser Hospital was running out of fuel, food and supplies, adding that 350 patients and 5,000 displaced people remained at the hospital.
Nasser Hospital is one of only two referral hospitals that provide advanced surgical and medical emergency services, according to the International Committee for the Red Cross, which said on Thursday that “the world will bear witness to untold thousands of preventable deaths” if the hospital ceases to function.
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4) Black Pastors Pressure Biden to Call for a Cease-Fire in Gaza
Black congregants’ dismay at President Biden’s posture on the war could imperil his re-election bid.
By Maya King, Jan. 28, 2024
“They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people,” said the Rev. Cynthia Hale of the Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Ga. Credit...Alyssa Pointer for The New York Times
As the Israel-Hamas war enters its fourth month, a coalition of Black faith leaders is pressuring the Biden administration to push for a cease-fire — a campaign spurred in part by their parishioners, who are increasingly distressed by the suffering of Palestinians and critical of the president’s response to it.
More than 1,000 Black pastors representing hundreds of thousands of congregants nationwide have issued the demand. In sit-down meetings with White House officials, and through open letters and advertisements, ministers have made a moral case for President Biden and his administration to press Israel to stop its offensive operations in Gaza, which have killed thousands of civilians. They are also calling for the release of hostages held by Hamas and an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
The effort at persuasion also carries a political warning, detailed in interviews with a dozen Black faith leaders and their allies. Many of their parishioners, these pastors said, are so dismayed by the president’s posture toward the war that their support for his re-election bid could be imperiled.
“Black faith leaders are extremely disappointed in the Biden administration on this issue,” said the Rev. Timothy McDonald, the senior pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta, which boasts more than 1,500 members. He was one of the first pastors of more than 200 Black clergy members in Georgia, a key swing state, to sign an open letter calling for a cease-fire. “We are afraid,” Mr. McDonald said. “And we’ve talked about it — it’s going to be very hard to persuade our people to go back to the polls and vote for Biden.”
Any cracks in the ordinarily rock-solid foundation of Black support for Mr. Biden, and for Democrats nationally, could be of enormous significance in November.
The intense feeling on the war in Gaza is among myriad unexpected ways that the war has scrambled U.S. politics. And it comes as Mr. Biden is already facing signs of waning enthusiasm among Black voters, who have for generations been the Democrats’ most loyal voting base.
The coalition of Black clergy pushing Mr. Biden for a cease-fire is diverse, from conservative-leaning Southern Baptists to more progressive nondenominational congregations in the Midwest and Northeast.
“This is not a fringe issue,” said the Rev. Michael McBride, a founder of Black Church PAC and the lead pastor of the Way church in Berkeley, Calif. “There are many of us who feel that this administration has lost its way on this.”
Seeing images of destruction in Gaza, many Black voters whose churches have become involved in the cease-fire movement have voiced increasing disenchantment with Democrats, who they feel have done little to stop the war.
Their pastors said their congregants’ strong reactions to the war were striking.
“Black clergy have seen war, militarism, poverty and racism all connected,” said Barbara Williams-Skinner, co-convener of the National African American Clergy Network, whose members lead roughly 15 million Black churchgoers. She helped coordinate recent meetings between the White House and faith leaders. “But the Israel-Gaza war, unlike Iran and Afghanistan, has evoked the kind of deep-seated angst among Black people that I have not seen since the civil rights movement.”
When Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 Israelis and taking about 240 people hostage, leagues of Black pastors joined their counterparts in interfaith prayer for Israel, whose land they revere as holy.
But since then, the pastors’ Palestinian allies in the United States, Gaza and the West Bank have sought their assistance on behalf of civilians suffering under Israel’s counteroffensive. And the pastors have gotten an earful from their own congregants, especially younger churchgoers, about the conflict and Mr. Biden’s full-throated support for Israel.
That sentiment more broadly reflects a strong sense of solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians that has shaped opinion since the war began.
“We see them as a part of us,” said the Rev. Cynthia Hale, the founder and senior pastor of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Ga. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.”
The Black pastors’ effort has forced the Biden administration to pay attention, as the president readies for what is expected to be an extremely close election against former President Donald J. Trump.
It began in late October, when a delegation of Black faith leaders from across the country descended on Washington, where they called for an end to the fighting in meetings with the White House and members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Hundreds of pastors signed open letters to Democratic leaders and paid for full-page advertisements in national newspapers, including The New York Times, to push for a cease-fire on humanitarian grounds and call for the release of all hostages being held in Gaza.
Since its founding, the Black church has been considered a power center of Black political organizing. In addition to providing spiritual guidance and challenging political leaders on moral grounds, Black religious leaders have galvanized their members to exercise their hard-won voting rights, often with great success.
Mr. Biden, especially, has recognized the importance of the Black church. One of his first campaign events of 2024 took place at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. in Charleston, S.C., on Jan. 8, making him the first sitting president to speak from the church’s storied pulpit. When protesters interrupted his speech with calls for a cease-fire, their cries were drowned out by shouts of “Four more years!”
Mr. Biden’s campaign did not comment on the record for this article.
Some leaders say Mr. Biden still has time to change the trajectory of the conflict abroad and, in turn, recover any love lost between his administration and Black voters.
“As long as Blacks feel that the president is being genuine, I think he will continue to have our support,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who presides over more than 500 African Methodist Episcopal churches in Georgia. He, too, signed the letter calling for a cease-fire and the return of hostages. “I think he’s demonstrating his authenticity by the friction that you can tell is between him and Netanyahu as relates to what’s going on in the Middle East,” he said, referring to Israel’s prime minister.
Still, six Black faith leaders who spoke with The New York Times said they or their colleagues had considered rescinding invitations to Democratic politicians hoping to speak during their Sunday services, or withholding public support for Mr. Biden’s re-election until his administration committed to a cease-fire.
“What they are witnessing from the administration in Gaza is a glaring contradiction to what we thought the president and the administration was about,” said the Rev. Frederick D. Haynes, the senior pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas and the president and chief executive of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the civil rights organization founded by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson. His church has more than 12,000 members. “So when you hear a president say the term, ‘redeem the soul of America,’ well, this is a stain, a scar on the soul of America. There’s something about this that becomes hypocritical.”
Black faith leaders are nonetheless conscious of the risks in pushing Mr. Biden on a cease-fire with Mr. Trump looming as the likely Republican presidential nominee. Even pastors most critical of Mr. Biden on the war in Gaza agreed that a Trump re-election would be a worst-case scenario for their largely Black and working-class congregations.
They also suggested that Mr. Trump, who has said he would bar refugees from Gaza from entering the United States, would most likely have less sympathy than Mr. Biden for the plight of Gaza’s civilians.
But the difference between grudging and enthusiastic support could be significant. Asked whether the war in the Middle East could threaten Mr. Biden’s chances in November, the Rev. Jamal Bryant, the senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Ga., said, “I think Biden threatens his own success.”
Democrats, Mr. Bryant observed, have seemed to be “almost on cruise control and feel like: Oh, the Black people will come around. They’ll be forgiving, and they’ll go along with us.” But, he added, as the war drags on, “I really think that the ante is going to really elevate itself.”
The cease-fire calls have strained some relationships between Black pastors and Jewish leaders.
Rabbi Peter S. Berg, the senior rabbi of the Temple in Atlanta, described in an email his “extraordinary relationship” with Black pastors and recalled a service at the nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend in which Christians and Jews prayed together for peace and the safe return of the hostages.
He added, though, that he felt the demand for a cease-fire, from some pastors whom he has long considered friends, did not fully consider the feelings of Jews with ties to Israel.
“While we all want peace and for this war to end, I was disappointed to see that some faith leaders call for a cease-fire without focusing on bringing the hostages home and holding Hamas accountable for the atrocities they have committed,” Rabbi Berg said, adding, “This is the time to double down on our strong relationships and to be open and honest with each other.”
Black pastors said they had sought to reassure Jewish leaders who took issue with their cease-fire push, underlining that their demand was not rooted in antisemitism and that they were also calling for the release of Israeli hostages and for Israel to be safe from attack.
“Our call for a cease-fire ought not be read as a call for the killing or terror of Jewish individuals and families,” said Mr. McBride, who took part in the meetings in Washington. “We’re against all of these wicked expressions of dehumanization and terror, wherever they show up.”
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5) The U.N.’s lead agency in Gaza fears its funding will soon collapse.
By Patrick Kingsley reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 29, 2024
A worker distributing aid at an UNRWA center in Rafah, in southern Gaza, on Sunday. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The main United Nations relief agency in Gaza warned on Monday that its funding could dry up by the end of February if more than a dozen countries do not reverse their decisions to suspend their support following Israeli accusations against some of the agency’s workers.
The decisions by several donor countries to withhold funding for the agency known as UNRWA threaten the organization’s relief efforts in Gaza at a time when they are needed most. With more than 80 percent of Gaza’s 2.2 million people displaced by Israel’s military campaign, the agency says it is providing shelter to most of the people in the territory.
On Friday, UNRWA announced that Israel had accused 12 employees of the agency of participating in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel or in its aftermath. Those claims prompted several countries — including the United States, UNRWA’s largest donor — to freeze funding pending investigations.
Donor countries release funding in tranches throughout the year. While the United States’ next payment is not due until June, some of the other countries that have suspended funding were scheduled to issue their next tranche of donations in February, Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s director of communications, said in a phone interview.
Because UNRWA used up most of its financial reserves during a previous funding freeze ordered by President Donald J. Trump, the agency depends on a stable flow of donations to stay afloat, Ms. Touma said. If even a few donors fail to restore their funding by the end of February, Ms. Touma said, UNRWA will stop being able to pay the salaries of its 30,000 employees across the Middle East.
There are roughly 13,000 UNRWA employees in Gaza, but the agency also works in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Donors pledged more than $1.1 billion to the agency in 2022, according to its own figures, with nearly half of that coming from the United States and Germany, which has also said it will pause funding while the investigation goes on.
If UNRWA’s funding dries up, it was not clear whether any other agency could immediately fill the gap.
UNRWA, which stands for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, says it is hosting roughly 1.2 million people in its 150 schools and centers in Gaza. It is the main agency that coordinates the distribution of the relatively little aid that is entering the enclave through the borders with Egypt and Israel.
Israel’s invasion has prompted a deep humanitarian crisis in Gaza: the health system has collapsed, aid groups are warning of a looming famine and most people have been forced from their homes.
In a ruling last week, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza and to let in more humanitarian aid.
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6) ‘The water went everywhere’: Rain and cold add to Gazans’ misery.
By Hiba Yazbek reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 29, 2024
Palestinians leaving Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, toward Rafah, on Monday. Credit...Mohammed Salem/Reuters
Torrential rains and falling temperatures have worsened the already dire humanitarian crisis facing tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians who are sheltering in flimsy makeshift tents amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment of the Gaza Strip.
The United Nations’ humanitarian office said on Monday that tents and supplies to make more of them were badly needed “to allow the displaced communities to protect themselves and their children during the current harsh weather conditions.”
Some tents housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah — Gaza’s southernmost district, where U.N. estimates say that more than 1.3 million people are seeking shelter — had flooded as temperatures dipped into the low 50s over the weekend.
“Thousands of families sleeping on the floor are now freezing and unable to keep dry,” the U.N. office said, adding that people who had fled to Rafah in recent days were resorting to living in streets where sewage is running.
Khalil el-Halabi, 70, said he been struggling with a cold for a week when rain flooded his tent in Rafah. “The heavy downpour was disastrous,” Mr. el-Halabi, originally from Gaza City, said. “The water went everywhere.”
When the rainfall subsided, he and his family tried to dry out and shore up parts of the tent where water had entered — but the water just found its way back inside when it rained again the next day.
Photos and videos coming out of Gaza in recent days show large puddles of water forming around leaking tents and badly muddied roads. Israeli forces, which launched a ground invasion in late October, have bulldozed roads and damaged vital infrastructure including sewage and drainage systems, according to the United Nations.
The Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza, which administers emergency service, said on Friday that sewage water had been seeping into homes and shelters and that it had received more than 1,000 reports of flooding. It said that Israeli restrictions on the entry of fuel into Gaza had limited sewage pumping, posing a “significant flood threat to many low-lying areas and tents.”
“The cold and the winter were making things worse for people,” said Akram Al-Satri, 47, who fled last week from the southern city of Khan Younis to Al-Mawasi, a coastal zone Israel has designated for displaced people. The rain, he added, “was just adding insult to injury.”
In Al-Mawasi, where thousands of Gazans have arrived, he said he saw displaced families “trying to collect whatever wood they could for the sake of just constructing a tent.”
People were building shelters using scraps of wood and sheets of plastic or nylon, he said, which were no match for the harsh weather. Gazans were “struggling with the cold, with the lack of infrastructure, with the lack of safety, and wishing that this would all come to an end,” he added.
Adam Rasgon contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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7) A conference on resettling Gaza sparks a backlash against far-right Israelis.
By Natan Odenheimer, Jan. 29, 2024
An Israeli soldier at a guard post at Tapuah Junction in the West Bank. The poster calls for settlers to return to Gaza. Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
More than 3,500 Israeli settler-activists and over a dozen lawmakers and ministers, including from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, gathered on Sunday to try to advance the idea of Jewish resettlement in Gaza.
With international concern growing over the destruction and humanitarian crisis that Israel’s invasion of Gaza has caused, Mr. Netanyahu has said that Israel would not permanently occupy the territory after the war. But some far-right Israelis believe it should, and Sunday’s “Victory of Israel” conference in Jerusalem was an attempt to sway public opinion toward the idea that resettling Gaza would help ensure Israel’s security.
In 2005, Israel dismantled Jewish towns in Gaza and withdrew from the territory. The settler movement — a powerful and well organized lobby in Israel that includes prominent lawmakers — see this as a mistake that the current war could remedy.
“Renewing Jewish settlement in Gaza will correct a historic wrong,” Yizhak Goldknopf, the minister of construction and housing and the most senior ultra-Orthodox minister in the government, told the packed International Convention Center in Jerusalem, where speakers presented a map of Gaza with proposed Jewish settlements.
Haim Katz, the tourism minister and a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, said that there was an opportunity to “expand the land of Israel” while the audience chanted “death to terrorists” with Itamar Ben Gvir, the far-right minister of national security. One group held a sign reading, “Only transfer will bring peace,” meaning that Israel should evict all of Gaza’s people.
The event drew an immediate backlash. Gadi Eisenkot, a former top Israeli military commander who is now part of Mr. Netanyahu’s emergency war cabinet, wrote on social media that the conference was “divisive” and “increases distrust in the government.” Yair Lapid, a leading opposition politician, criticized the participation of Likud ministers, branding it “a disgrace on Netanyahu’s head” and warned that it “hampers a possible deal” with Hamas and could threaten Israeli soldiers.
Soon after Israel responded to Hamas’s deadly attack on Oct. 7 by invading Gaza, far-right figures in Israel began to propose plans for building Jewish towns in the territory after the war. In recent months, some settlers have begun organizing in groups, with hopes of forming the first communities to move there.
Polling suggests that most Israelis remain wary of reintroducing settlements to Gaza, where protecting Jewish towns would be costly in both military and economic terms. Mr. Netanyahu has said he is against building Jewish towns in Gaza and has called the plans to move there “unrealistic.”
Much of the world considered the Israeli settlements that were dismantled in Gaza — like those in the occupied West Bank — illegal under international law.
But the settler movement’s designs on Gaza are driven by security concerns as well as religious zeal. Members of the settler movement say that Gaza was part of the land given to Jews by God and that an Israeli presence in Gaza, backed by military force, would have prevented the Oct. 7 attacks, which Israel says killed about 1,200 people.
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8) Today’s Teenagers: Anxious About Their Futures and Disillusioned by Politicians
More than previous generations, they are concerned about their mental health and educational prospects, new surveys show.
By Claire Cain Miller, Jan. 29, 2024
Teenagers tend to be issue oriented, but say in surveys that politicians do not represent their needs. A protest against the overturning of Roe v. Wade in Boise, Idaho, in 2022. Credit...Angie Smith for The New York Times
Although it has never been easy to be a teenager, the current generation of young Americans feels particularly apprehensive, new polling shows — anxious about their lives, disillusioned about the direction of the country and pessimistic about their futures.
Just one-third of respondents ages 12 to 17 said things were going well for children and teenagers today, in a survey published Monday by Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy group. Less than half said they thought they would be better off than their parents when they grew up — a downbeat view shared among teenagers in many rich countries, other data shows.
It’s not just about teenage angst. A different survey, by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation, the latest installment of which was also released Monday, has asked questions of young people over time and looked at how their answers have changed. Members of Gen Z, ages 12 to 27, are significantly less likely to rate their current and future lives highly than millennials were when they were the same age, it found.
Among those 18 to 26, just 15 percent said their mental health was excellent. That is a large decline from both 2013 and 2003, when just over half said so.
Together, the surveys offer an unusually detailed look at the perspectives of teenagers, who are rarely surveyed in high-quality polls.
“The data is pretty stark: Our kids are not all right,” said James P. Steyer, founder and chief executive of Common Sense Media.
These impressions among young people could be contributing to a challenge for the presidential campaigns with the country’s newest eligible voters: Youth turnout and engagement, which helped President Biden in particular in 2020, appear to be down.
“For young people, the options that have been available to you your entire lifetime have been either Trump or Biden,” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a founding partner of Echelon Insights, a Republican polling firm, and one of the pollsters who conducted the Common Sense Media survey. “You may be looking at that and saying, ‘No thanks.’”
It’s not that soon-to-be voters are apathetic about public policy — this generation tends to be passionate about issues including climate change, abortion and the war in the Middle East, pollsters said.
But in the Common Sense Media survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents 12 to 17 said politicians and elected officials did not reflect the needs and experiences of young people. Boys and white respondents were slightly more likely to say so. Only 7 percent of teenagers said politicians represented young people very well.
“Young voters, while they’re very issue oriented, they’re not specifically tied to either party and they think the entire political system is failing,” said Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners, a Democratic polling firm, and another pollster behind the new survey.
An issue of prime importance to teenagers across surveys is education. Asked an open-ended question by Common Sense about the most important thing that could be done to improve the lives of children, a plurality, one in five, said improving or reforming the education system.
More than half of teenagers said public K-12 schools were doing a fair or poor job. Just 8 percent said they were doing an excellent job.
Sixty percent said pandemic learning loss was a problem. Margaret Spellings, the chief executive of the Bipartisan Policy Center and a secretary of education under President George W. Bush, said teenagers are “absolutely right.”
“We have to get these kids caught up or they’re going to have a world of hurt in their lives, and consequently in our country,” she said.
When Gallup asked teenagers for the three words that best described how they felt in school, the most common answers were bored, tired and pressured.
Just a quarter said they were very confident their current school was doing a good job preparing them for the future. They said they wanted more instruction focused on hands-on learning that prepared them for careers, said Romy Drucker, director of the education program at the Walton Family Foundation.
“What we hear is that high school just feels outdated to many students,” she said.
A related issue was mental health. In the Common Sense survey, 65 percent said the mental health of children and teenagers in their community was poor or fair. Girls were more likely than boys to say so. The responses were largely consistent across race.
Young people have more awareness of mental health issues today, and face less stigma in talking about it. Their concern is reflected in increasing hospitalization and suicide rates.
Other measures of well-being and ambition have declined slightly. Compared with millennials when they were that age, children 13 to 17 are a bit less likely to say that they have a friend they can confide in, that they exercise regularly or that they plan to attend college, Gallup found.
A major driver of the mental health crisis, said Dr. Matthew Biel, the chief of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at Georgetown University Hospital, is “the digitization of our lives, and social media in particular.”
Teenagers agree. Asked for the main cause of mental health issues in the Common Sense survey, the largest share said the negative impact of social media and the internet, and the next largest said bullying, including online.
“Mental health in and of itself is a public health concern, and I think it’s also a signal of an overall sense of distress, uncertainty, dislocation,” Dr. Biel said.
Adults shared many of the teenagers’ concerns. In a companion survey of 1,000 likely voters by Common Sense, a majority said things were not going well for families.
Eight in 10 said they were concerned about children’s future economic opportunities, consistently across race, gender and party.
Together, Ms. Lake said, the surveys suggest that the causes of teenagers’ pessimism — their concerns about politics, education, mental health, social media and their financial futures — are interrelated, a message she said she wants the politicians she serves to understand.
“Right now, if I said to clients that investing in kids is the No. 1 issue, they would say, ‘No, the economy is No. 1,’” she said. “And what we would say to them is: You are missing what people want in this economy. Investment in children is central to the economy, both to young people and to adults.”
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9) Domicide: The Mass Destruction of Homes Should Be a Crime Against Humanity
By Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Jan. 29, 2024
Photos and accompanying text by Yaqeen Baker
Dr. Rajagopal is the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing. Ms. Baker’s home was destroyed in the war in Gaza.
“The ferocity of the attacks is unprecedented: Israel is reported to have already dropped the explosive equivalent of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima almost twice over.”
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/29/opinion/destruction-of-homes-crime-domicide.html
Ms. Baker's home destroyed in Gaza.
The widespread or systematic destruction of homes has long been a feature of modern warfare. But what is often lost in the images of rubble and statistics of destroyed buildings is the profound effect of this loss at a human level.
For a home is so much more than a structure: It is a repository of past experience and future dreams, of memories of births, deaths, marriages and intimate moments with our loved ones, amid neighbors and a familiar landscape. The idea of home brings comfort and gives meaning to our lives. Its destruction is the denial of a person’s dignity and humanity.
It is for this reason that the systematic and indiscriminate leveling of entire neighborhoods through explosive weapons — as happened in Aleppo, and Mariupol, and Grozny, and towns in Myanmar, or most acutely these days, in Gaza — should be considered a crime against humanity. A growing number of legal and other types of scholars agree.
It’s called domicide.
Scholars have used the concept of domicide in the context of dam projects that displaced people in Canada and warfare in Syria, and it has been used to call attention to the systematic demolition of Palestinians’ homes and the denial of permits to build new ones in the West Bank by Israel.
As an independent expert tasked by the United Nations with promoting and protecting the right to adequate housing, I believe the crime of domicide should be enshrined in international humanitarian and criminal law so that governments and armed groups can be held to account. In an increasingly urbanized world, where densely populated cities are becoming common battlegrounds, the need for such action is all the more urgent.
We all understand that killing can be a murder, a war crime, a crime against humanity or an act of genocide, depending on the gravity and intention of the act. The same should apply for the destruction of homes.
In Gaza, we are witnessing destruction that is overwhelming in terms of its scale and impact, and far worse than what we saw in Dresden and Rotterdam during World War II, where about 25,000 homes were destroyed in each city. In Gaza, more than 70,000 housing units have been destroyed and more than 290,000 partially damaged. Recent conflicts are all proving to be equally destructive: In parts of Aleppo, up to 65 percent of structures were damaged or destroyed in five years of conflict, while in Mariupol, approximately 32 percent of the structures were damaged or destroyed in a year over 2021 and 2022. In about three months of conflict, a shocking 60 percent to 70 percent of structures in Gaza, and up to 84 percent of structures in parts of northern Gaza, have been damaged or destroyed.
The ferocity of the attacks is unprecedented: Israel is reported to have already dropped the explosive equivalent of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima almost twice over. Much of the infrastructure in Gaza that makes it possible and worthwhile to live in homes there — water and sanitation, education, electricity and health systems, and cultural infrastructure like mosques, churches, and public and historic buildings — have been damaged or destroyed. This crushing of Gaza as a place erases the past, present and future of many Palestinians.
Indeed, what has happened to homes and lives in Gaza is a stand-alone crime: domicide. It may not be an exaggeration to say that much of Gaza has been made uninhabitable, as South Africa’s complaint accusing Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice alleges and which Israel denies. The court, in a preliminary ruling on Friday, called on Israel to take action to prevent genocide in Gaza and avoid the infliction of conditions that result in physical destruction in whole or in part.
I drew the same conclusion about domicide following the Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities in my report to the U.N. General Assembly in 2022. But right now, the accusation of domicide is largely a moral judgment. The preciousness of home, unlike the preciousness of life, has little recognition under international humanitarian or criminal law.
Some may ask whether the destruction by Hamas militants of Israeli towns and kibbutzim on Oct. 7 also amounts to domicide. While such attacks may constitute human rights violations and war crimes, the destruction of homes was not systematic or widespread enough to be comparable to the examples cited here.
Though attacks on individual homes, schools and hospitals can be crimes under humanitarian law, which applies to all international armed conflicts under the Geneva Conventions, the widespread or systematic destruction of homes is not by itself considered a crime in either international or noninternational armed conflicts. It is not mentioned in the Geneva Conventions or in the definition of crimes against humanity according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court or in the U.N. draft articles on the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity.
We should act to update these treaties to include domicide.
There is precedent for updating what we legally define as international crimes. The Rome Statute proscribed starvation as a weapon of war, and under a 2019 amendment, the proscription was extended to cover crimes in noninternational armed conflicts.
Accountability for domicide in Gaza cannot stop with potential criminal prosecutions or declaratory judgments by courts someday in the future. The enormous cost of rebuilding Gaza and the rest of the Palestinian territories, where homes have been destroyed for decades during occupation, should be borne by Israel and the countries that contributed to this destruction, including the United States, through its supply of weapons and political support.
That rebuilding will be hard work. The restoration of destroyed cities after World War II, such as Rotterdam, took more than two decades and cost billions of dollars, funded by the Marshall Plan. Ukraine’s recovery needs after just one year of conflict were estimated at $411 billion, with housing contributing to 37 percent of the cost. Mariupol’s reconstruction alone is expected to cost more than $14 billion and take up to 10 years.
And even if Gaza is physically rebuilt, the trauma of losing homes — the shattered lives, erased landscape and obliterated memories — will last for decades. Enshrining domicide in law may make countries think twice about inflicting such trauma in the future.
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10) French Farmers Lay ‘Siege’ to Paris in Growing Standoff
The authorities warned residents to brace for extreme disruptions as farmers converged on the capital to press a wide range of grievances.
By Aurelien Breeden and Catherine Porter, Jan. 29, 2024
Tractors heading for roadblocks on the A6 highway near Ormoy, south of Paris, on Monday. Unions planned to barricade a number of roads into the capital. Credit...Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Irate farmers deployed tractors to block the main roads in and out of Paris on Monday in an intensifying standoff that has left the capital girding for disruptions and become the first major test for France’s newly appointed prime minister, Gabriel Attal.
Last week Mr. Attal rushed to farming regions in the south of France and offered a series of rapid concessions as he tried to head off widening demonstrations on roadways from food producers nationwide. But the steps failed to appease many farmers.
Their grievances are so varied that the protests present an increasingly precarious moment for the government that defies easy solutions. Many farmers say foreign competition is unfair, wages are too low, and regulation from both the government and the European Union has become suffocating.
“I am determined to move forward,” Mr. Attal said on Sunday after visiting farmers in the Indre-et-Loire area of central France. But he also warned that “there are things that cannot change overnight.”
On Monday hundreds of farmers from the Paris region and from elsewhere in France converged on the French capital for what they termed a “siege” of undetermined length announced by the country’s main farmer unions. The action was a major escalation after a week of protests and highway roadblocks already that have steadily gripped the country.
The main farmer unions said that they had no intention of storming Paris or of completely blockading the capital but that they had decided to block eight major roads within five to 25 miles around the capital, with similar barricades and traffic slowdowns expected elsewhere, including cities like Lyon.
“Our goal isn’t to bother the French or ruin their life,” Arnaud Rousseau, the head of the FNSEA, France’s largest farmers union, told RTL radio. “Our goal is to put pressure on the government.”
The unions hope to organize an operation of “military” precision, with security measures to avoid deadly accidents like one that killed two people last week, and with rolling shifts of farmers to staff barricades for days.
“We are increasing the pressure because we know that when it’s far from Paris, the message isn’t heard,” Mr. Rousseau said.
The authorities warned residents to brace for extremely disrupted traffic and have deployed 15,000 police officers and gendarmes across France to secure the protests. President Emmanuel Macron’s government has tread carefully so far in its response to the movement, which enjoys support from over 80 percent of the public, according to opinion polls.
“We’re not here for a test of strength,” Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, said on Sunday.
Mr. Darmanin said security forces would adopt a “defensive position” to prevent farmers from crossing “red lines,” like entering large cities, blocking airports or disrupting Rungis, the world’s largest wholesale food market, just south of Paris.
After meeting with farmers last week, Mr. Attal promised to simplify bureaucratic regulations, deliver emergency aid more rapidly, and enforce laws meant to guarantee a living wage for farmers in price negotiations with retailers and distributors. He also said the government was scrapping plans to reduce state subsidies on the diesel fuel used in trucks and other machinery.
But the steps have failed so far to quell the farmers’ fury, which is deep and varied. Winegrowers, cattle breeders, grain farmers and other producers have voiced broad complaints over low wages, complex administrative hassles, environmental regulations, unfair foreign competition, as well as skyrocketing energy and fertilizer prices caused by the war in Ukraine.
Other problems are more specific — ranging from water access to cattle epidemics — and farmers have issued a long, patchwork list of demands to the government, though some can only be addressed at the European Union level.
In Agen, a town in southwestern France where the protests have been particularly intense, farmers leaving for a lumbering 370-mile trip to Paris said they didn’t trust Mr. Attal, who last week rushed to the area and vowed to put agriculture above everything else.
“It’s only words,” said Théophane de Flaujac, 28, who joined the protest from his family’s vegetable and cereal farm, which he says has come under increasing pressure as distributors opt for cheaper imports from Spain and elsewhere without the same strict environmental rules as France. Last week, some protesters emptied trucks carrying foreign produce.
“Before, he said he would put education at the center of everything,” Mr. de Flaujac said of Mr. Attal. “Now, he says it’s farming. After he will say it’s transportation, then health care.”
The few dozen farmers leaving Agen on tractors adorned with protest signs and French flags were members of Rural Coordination, a radical, right-wing and anti-E.U. group that split off from the FNSEA in 1991.
Last week, those farmers laid siege to Agen, dumping debris before symbolic buildings like the train station and banks and social service offices that cater to farmers. The farmers also barricaded the gate of the graceful prefecture building with giant tractor tires, wooden pallets and hay bales, and sprayed it liberally with liquid manure.
Now they have set their sights on Paris, which they expected to reach on Tuesday.
“We did everything we could here,” said Karine Duc, 38, an organic grape grower and the co-president of Rural Coordination’s local branch. “We are going to Paris because we need responses and real measures.”
“This is our last battle,” she added, wearing her union’s mustard yellow hat. “Farmers feel if we don’t succeed in this, we will be crushed.”
It is unclear how long the unions can maintain a united front for the protests, which were started by a handful of farmers who rebelled against a local chapter of the FNSEA.
Rural Coordination wants to disrupt Rungis, the wholesale food market that Paris depends on for much of its food, while FNSEA and other more mainstream unions have ruled that out. Taking no chances, the authorities have already stationed armored police vehicles at the market.
Édouard Lynch, a French historian who specializes in agriculture, said the protests were influenced by union jockeying ahead of Chamber of Agriculture elections, which are critical in rural areas because they offer training and distribute farming subsidies. The rivalry itself was adding an unpredictable spur to the protests.
“Clearly, you can see them competing now,” said Mr. Lynch, a professor of contemporary French history at Lyon 2 University. “Rural Coordination has been very effective, which is why the FNSEA needs to keep pushing.”
Farmers were also turning up the heat ahead of a European Union summit in Brussels starting Thursday that Mr. Macron is scheduled to attend.
Some of their ire has been directed specifically at the E.U.’s Green Deal, which aims to ensure the bloc meets its climate goals but has left farmers around Europe feeling unfairly targeted by new environmental obligations.
Marc Fesneau, France’s agriculture minister, told France 2 television that he would push to preserve an exemption from an E.U. obligation for larger farms to leave 4 percent of arable land fallow or devoted to other “nonproductive” features, like groves — to preserve biodiversity — if they want to receive crucial farming subsidies.
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11) Hamas’s political chief says the group is studying a new truce proposal.
By Adam Rasgon, Hwaida Saad and Anushka Patil, Jan. 30, 2024
Israeli soldiers in central Gaza this month, during an escorted tour by the military. Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
The political chief of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, announced on Tuesday that the militant group had received a proposal to pause the fighting in Gaza, after representatives from four nations agreed to present the group with a framework that would begin with a six-week cease-fire to allow for the release of more hostages.
Mr. Haniyeh said in a statement that Hamas was studying the proposal that had emerged from talks over the weekend in Paris, which included officials from the United States, Israel, Qatar and Egypt. Mr. Haniyeh added that Hamas had received an invitation to Cairo to discuss “the framework agreement from the Paris meeting.”
While Mr. Haniyeh’s statement indicated that Hamas was considering the proposal, and thanked Qatar and Egypt for their efforts, he emphasized the group’s longstanding demand for a permanent cease-fire and the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
“The priority is ending the unjust aggression on Gaza and the complete withdrawal of the occupation’s forces,” Mr. Haniyeh said.
Although Israel was involved in drafting the proposal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged at the time that there were still “significant gaps.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu appeared to push back at Mr. Haniyeh’s statements, saying that Israel would not withdraw its military from Gaza or free thousands of Palestinian prisoners.
“We will not compromise on anything less than total victory,” he said in a speech in the West Bank on Tuesday, according to an Israeli statement.
It was unclear whether the two men’s comments were attempts to stake out negotiating positions.
After talks in Paris on Sunday, representatives from the four nations agreed to have Qatar present a framework to Hamas that proposes a six-week pause in the war, during which Hamas would exchange some hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, officials said. In the proposed framework, Hamas would release older hostages, women and children, if any are still being held and are alive, during the initial six-week pause, according to the officials, who said that would be the first of three potential phases of swaps.
The officials, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive diplomacy, cautioned that the talks are at an early stage, and many details would need to be worked out if Hamas agrees to start building on the framework. The group’s political leaders, including Mr. Haniyeh, would need to convey the proposal to its military leaders — a process that could take days or longer because the military leaders are believed to be in hiding in tunnels deep beneath Gaza.
Mr. Haniyeh suggested in his statement that Hamas was willing to work with the framework, if it helps achieve its demands. In addition to a permanent cease-fire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces, he said Hamas was seeking the reconstruction of Gaza, the lifting of a yearslong Israeli blockade on the territory and the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
The four-nation meeting in Paris appeared to offer the most hopeful sign in months for a diplomatic agreement to ease the war.
The meeting in Paris — which included the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns; Israeli security officials; and the prime minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani — came as Israel’s government has faced increased pressure over its handling of the war, which began on Oct. 7. That day, Hamas led sweeping attacks into Israel that Israeli officials said killed about 1,200 people and took about 240 more hostage, making it the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history.
More than 100 hostages were released during a weeklong pause in the fighting in November, along with 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees held by Israel. But efforts toward another deal have so far been elusive.
Family members of those still being held in Gaza have called for an urgent deal and the International Court of Justice in The Hague last week ordered the delivery of more humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, where health officials say more than 26,000 people have died since Israel’s military campaign began.
Sheikh Mohammed, the Qatari prime minister, said on Monday that “good progress” had been made in the negotiations. Speaking at an event hosted by the Washington-based Atlantic Council, he said that talks were the only viable path toward de-escalation, adding that the rising death toll from Israel’s campaign in Gaza was “not getting any results to get the hostages back.”
Earlier on Monday, Sheikh Mohammed had met with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who said at an afternoon news conference that the proposal on the table is “a compelling one” and that “there is some real hope going forward.” But Mr. Blinken added: “Hamas will have to make its own decisions.”
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12) Israeli forces assassinate a Hamas commander inside a West Bank hospital.
By Aaron Boxerman reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 30, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/30/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news
A health-care worker in a room at Ibn Sina hospital in Jenin in the West Bank on Tuesday, after Israeli soldiers killed three suspected militants. Credit...Alaa Badarneh/EPA, via Shutterstock
Israeli forces stormed a Palestinian hospital in the occupied West Bank early Tuesday morning, killing three militants, including a commander in Hamas, according to the Israeli military and Palestinian officials.
The top Palestinian health official in Jenin, Wisam Sbeihat, said that Israeli forces had entered Ibn Sina Specialized Hospital in the northern West Bank city of Jenin dressed in civilian clothes and carrying weapons. They then went to the room where the Hamas commander, Mohammad Jalamneh, 27, was staying with two friends, and shot all three dead, Mr. Sbeihat said.
Surveillance video released by the Palestinian Authority Health Ministry on Tuesday shows several gunmen in apparent civilian garb — including one dressed in a white medical coat and another in blue scrubs — walking through the hospital halls, brandishing weapons.
“They assassinated these three people, including a patient,” Dr. Sbeihat said in a phone interview, adding that the Israeli forces also arrested two Palestinian medical workers.
In a statement, Hamas mourned Mr. Jalamneh as a leader in the Al-Qassam Brigades, the Palestinian faction’s armed wing. A local militia affiliated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed his companions — Mohammad and Basil Ghazawi — as members.
The Israeli military said all three had been involved in militant activity, including attacks against Israelis. Mr. Jalamneh had also been planning “to carry out a terror attack in the immediate future and used the hospital as a hiding place,” the military said.
One of the men accompanying him, Basil Ghazawi, was being treated in the hospital’s rehabilitation ward, Mr. Sbeihat said. The Israeli military said that he and his brother, Mohammed Ghazawi, had “hid inside the hospital.”
Surging violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where millions of Palestinians live under Israeli military rule, has prompted fears of another front in the Middle East crisis spiraling out of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Since the war in Gaza began, at least 367 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and civilians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the highest toll in years, the United Nations said on Monday.
Israel has escalated its attempts to crack down on Palestinian militant activity in the West Bank since Hamas’s surprise Oct. 7 attack on Israel prompted full-blown war. More than 2,960 Palestinians have been arrested since the beginning of the war in near-daily raids, according to the Israeli military.
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13) The War the World Can’t See
From outside Gaza, the scale of death and destruction is impossible to grasp, shrouded by communications blackouts, restrictions barring international reporters and extreme challenges facing local journalists.
By Vivian Yee, Abu Bakr Bashir and Gaya Gupta, Jan. 30, 2024
The press vest of Saeed al-Taweel, a journalist killed while photographing the bombing of a tower in Gaza City in October. Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
To many people outside Gaza, the war flashes by as a doomscroll of headlines and casualty tolls and photos of screaming children, the bloody shreds of somebody else’s anguish.
But the true scale of death and destruction is impossible to grasp, the details hazy and shrouded by internet and cellphone blackouts that obstruct communication, restrictions barring international journalists and the extreme, often life-threatening challenges of reporting as a local journalist from Gaza.
There are pinholes in the murk, apertures such as the Instagram feeds of Gaza photographers and a small number of testimonies that slip through. With every passing week, however, the light dims as those documenting the war leave, quit or die. Reporting from Gaza has come to seem pointlessly risky to some local journalists, who despair of moving the rest of the world to act.
“I survived death multiple times and put myself in danger” to document the war, Ismail al-Dahdouh, a Gaza reporter, wrote in an Instagram post this month to announce he was quitting journalism. Yet a world “that doesn’t know the meaning of humanity” had not acted to stop it.
At least 76 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas led an attack on Israel and Israel responded by launching an all-out war. The Committee to Protect Journalists says more journalists and media workers — including essential support staff such as translators, drivers and fixers — have been killed in the past 16 weeks than in a whole year of any other conflict since 1992.
“With every journalist killed, we lose our ability to document and understand the war,” said Sherif Mansour, the group’s Middle East program coordinator.
The New York Times and other major international outlets have evacuated Palestinian journalists who were working for them in Gaza, though some Western news agencies still have local teams there.
At the same time, foreign reporters have repeatedly sought to enter and been denied permission by Israel and Egypt, which control Gaza’s borders.
A handful have embedded with the Israeli military on very short visits that offer a limited and curated view of the war. And a CNN correspondent briefly reported from inside Gaza after entering with an Emirati aid group.
Apart from those, only Gazan journalists have been working there since the war began.
Nearly all the journalists who have died in Gaza since Oct. 7 were killed by Israeli airstrikes, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 38 of them at home, in their cars or alongside family members. That has led many Palestinians to accuse Israel of targeting journalists, though CPJ has not echoed that allegation.
“Israel is afraid of the Palestinian narrative and of Palestinian journalists,” said Khawla al-Khalidi, 34, a Gazan TV journalist for Al Arabiya, a well-known regional Arabic-language TV channel. “They’re trying to silence us by cutting the networks.”
An Israeli military spokesman, Nir Dinar, said that Israel “has never and will never deliberately target journalists.” But he cautioned that remaining in active combat zones carried risks. He called the accusation that Israel was deliberately cutting communications networks to hide the war a “blood libel.”
The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, which has members in both Gaza and the West Bank, has counted at least 25 Gaza journalists who it says were wearing protective vests bearing the word “press” when they were killed, said Shuruq Asad, a syndicate spokeswoman. Some journalists have been sleeping away from their families for fear that sheltering with relatives would put them at risk, she added.
Since Oct. 7, Israel has blocked most of Gaza’s electricity and barred all but a slow drip of aid from entering the territory. The war has also damaged or severed communications networks, making it nearly impossible for most Gazans to give interviews to foreign media outlets. Telecommunications have disappeared entirely more than half a dozen times during the conflict.
It falls to Gazan journalists, mostly working for Palestinian or regional Arabic-language outlets such as Al Jazeera, or young freelancers equipped with little more than Instagram, to bring scraps of Gaza’s reality to outsiders. In their instantly recognizable navy-blue “press” vests, many have gained attention on social media for their raw, personal English-language videos and photos of the war.
Every time Amr Tabash, a 26-year-old freelance photojournalist in Gaza, rushes to capture the aftermath of an airstrike, he said he experiences a fear that he might find his family among the victims. Covering one strike, he found out that his uncle and his cousin had been killed.
“I need to be fully focused reporting” on Israel’s attacks, he said. “But I am always worried about my family, and that takes a big part of my focus.”
Others have chosen to leave Gaza altogether.
Motaz Azaiza, a photojournalist who built up a wide following on Instagram with his coverage of the war, evacuated to Qatar last week.
Ms. al-Khalidi, the Al Arabiya journalist, said she had never considered leaving journalism, even as the job got impossibly difficult, far worse than in the previous wars she had covered. But this time, there was no reporting on strikes by day and going home to her family at night, no hot showers, little food. She and her family had to abandon their home for a shelter, she said.
“We’re not just reporting on what is happening. We’re already part of what is happening,” she said.
One journalist who felt duty bound to cover the war was Roshdi Sarraj, 31, who founded a media company at age 18 and also worked as a photographer and fixer for international news outlets.
Before the war, his company, Ain Media, offered production, photography and filmmaking services to local and international clients including Netflix. He and his wife, Shrouq Aila, had worked on a documentary episode for Netflix about bee sting therapy together as they were falling in love, she said.
When the war broke out, they were married with a young daughter and the couple was on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. They were planning to fly on to visit Qatar.
Then Mr. Sarraj learned that a friend and fellow journalist back in Gaza had been killed. Another was missing.
Mr. Sarraj’s brother-in-law, Mahmoud Aila, who was helping Ain Media expand in Qatar, said that when he asked about their travel plans, Mr. Sarraj told him, “‘At a time like this, I can only be in Gaza.’” He canceled the trip.
Mr. Sarraj’s friends said this was typical of his loyalty to his birthplace.
Calm and soft-spoken, Mr. Sarraj was stubbornly principled when it came to the struggle for justice and freedom for Palestinians. He told friends after the war began that he would not leave his hometown, Gaza City, ignoring Israeli evacuation orders, because he believed fleeing was akin to being forced from his home, as many Palestinians had been during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.
It was at his family’s home on Oct. 22, while he was sitting with his wife and daughter, that Ms. Aila said an Israeli airstrike hit. He was wounded so deeply that Ms. Aila could see his brain, she said by phone. They bandaged his head, Ms. Aila telling herself that, at worst, he would be paralyzed.
“Doesn’t matter as long as he’s still here,” she remembered thinking. “I don’t care at all if he was paralyzed. I’d stay beside him for life.”
But at the hospital, she was told his case was hopeless; the operating room was already overwhelmed. He died within half an hour, Ms. Aila said.
She remembered kissing his shoulder in farewell: She could swear he smelled of musk, as if someone had perfumed him at the moment of death.
It reminded her of when they were praying in Mecca, their hands on the holy Kaaba shrine’s black cover, which also smelled of musk. She said she had told her husband to pray that he would live to raise his daughter, Dania, so she would not be an orphan like Ms. Aila, who lost both her parents young.
But he had not seemed sure, she said.
Ms. Aila buried him in a mass grave. Amid the chaos, there was no other option.
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