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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
Over 1,000 trade unionists from around Northern California rallied and marched in Oakland to oppose the genocide in Gaza. It was announced during the rally that despite bureaucratic obstacles SEIU 1021 which has over 50,000 members had endorsed the rally and resolution. Unions formally endorsed included AFSCME 3299, OEA, UESF, SEIU 1021, ILWU Local 10, Inlandboatmen’s Union SF Region-ILWU, UNITE HERE Local 2, IFPTE Local 21, SF Public Defenders (workers, not union or unit), Stanford Graduate Workers, Trader Joes United (Rockridge), IWW Bay Area, IWW 460-650 - Ecology Center
National or statewide unions or units (with Bay Area members) that have called for a ceasefire: UAW (international), UAW Local 2865 (statewide), UAW Local 2320, APWU, Starbucks Workers United, California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, CIR/SEIU (national) SEIU-USWW (statewide), Staff Union of CIR/SEIU (unit of CWA local 1032).
The rally was sponsored by Bay Area Labor For Palestine and there was also another Labor For Palestine Rally in New York.
For More Information:
bayarealabor4palestine@gmail.com
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
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Stand With Palestinian Workers: Cease the Genocide Now—Stop Arming Israel!
“We need you to take immediate action—wherever you are in the world—to prevent the arming of the Israeli state and the companies involved in the infrastructure of the blockade.” —An Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel (October 16, 2023)
The undersigned U.S. workers, trade unionists, and anti-apartheid activists join labor around the world in condemning the Israeli siege on Gaza that has killed or maimed thousands of Palestinians—many of them children—and stand with Palestinians’ “right to exist, resist, return, and self-determination.”
The latest Israeli attacks reflect more than a century of ongoing Zionist settler-colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, racism, genocide, and apartheid—including Israel’s establishment through the uprooting and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba. Indeed, eighty percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza are refugees from other parts of historic Palestine.
Israel’s crimes are only possible because of more than $3.8 billion a year (or $10-plus million per day) in bipartisan U.S. military aid that gives Israel the guns, bullets, tanks, ships, jet fighters, missiles, helicopters, white phosphorus, and other weapons to kill and maim the Palestinian people. This is the same system of racist state violence that, through shared surveillance technology and police exchange programs, brutalizes Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) and working-class people in the United States and around the world.
In response, we demand an immediate end to the genocide, and embrace the recent urgent call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel:
1. To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel. To refuse to transport weapons to Israel.
2. To pass motions in their trade union to this effect.
3. To take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, especially if they have contracts with your institution.
4. Pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and in the case of the U.S., funding to it.
We further reaffirm the call on labor bodies to respect previous Palestinian trade union appeals for solidarity by adopting this statement, and/or the model resolution below to divest from Israel Bonds, sever all ties with the Israel’s racist labor federation, the Histadrut, and its US mouthpiece, the Jewish Labor Committee, and respect the Palestinian picket line for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).
Please sign and forward widely!
To endorse the following statement as a trade unionist, please click here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd2tpd2c62Sh5YEVDOr2vmGWTuQArt-6OPQMDwd2wUnfNi_rQ/viewform
To endorse as other, please click here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdzWaP1U_KOHlH-ou1R3OD8zsuI5BWW1b9H4gtPoFK_lIQB3g/viewform
Initial Signers on behalf of Labor for Palestine
(Organizational affiliations listed for identification only)
Suzanne Adely, Labor for Palestine, US Palestinian Community Network, Arab Workers Resource Center; Food Chain Workers Alliance (staff); President, National Lawyers Guild; Monadel Herzallah, Arab American Union Members Council; Ruth Jennison, Department Rep., Massachusetts Society of Professors, MTA, NEA; Co-Chair, Labor Standing Committee River Valley DSA; Delegate to Western Mass Area Labor Federation; Lara Kiswani, Executive Director, Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC); Block the Boat; Michael Letwin, Former President, Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325; Jews for Palestinian Right of Return; Corinna Mullin, PSC-CUNY International Committee; CUNY for Palestine; Clarence Thomas, Co-Chair, Million Worker March; Executive Board, ILWU Local 10 (retired.)
The list of signers will be updated periodically.
info@laborforpalestine.net
laborforpalestine.net
The Labor for Palestine model resolution can be found at:
https://laborforpalestine.net
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Jewish Doctor Speaks Out on Israel and Palestine
Dr. Gabor Maté, Hungarian-Canadian physician and author describes his own life experience and expresses his view on the situation in Israel and Palestine.
“I’m personally a Holocaust survivor as an infant, I barely survived. My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and most of my extended family were killed. I became a Zionist; this dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland and the barbed wire of Auschwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful army…and then I found out that it wasn’t exactly like that, that in order to make this Jewish dream a reality we had to visit a nightmare on the local population.
“There’s no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population. Jewish Israeli historians have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of Palestinians was persistent, pervasive, cruel, murderous and with deliberate intent—that’s what’s called the ‘Nakba’ in Arabic; the ‘disaster’ or the ‘catastrophe.’ There’s a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust, but in Israel you’re not allowed to mention the Nakba, even though it’s at the very basis of the foundation of Israel.
“I visited the Occupied Territories (West Bank) during the first intifada. I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw; the brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it, the cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations...and this went on, and now it’s much worse than it was then.
“It’s the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st century. I could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, who was born in Jerusalem, can’t even visit!
“So, then you have these miserable people packed into this, horrible…people call it an ‘outdoor prison,’ which is what it is. You don’t have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights, that’s a complete falsity. You think the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.
“And ‘anybody who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite’ is simply an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews who are willing to stand up for what is true.”
—Independent Catholic News, October 16, 2023
https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/48251
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TERRORISM IN THE EYES OF THE IMPERIAL BEHOLDER - a poem
the French word
for rabies
is
la rage -
rage or outrage
and
the French have a saying -
a man who wants to get rid of his dog
accuses it of spreading rabies
the people of Gaza
treated as inhuman animals
worse than dogs
are charged
with terrorism
come to think of it
what an honor !
world war two's resistance
against nazi extermination
was designated
as terrorism
by the Axis allies
what an honor !
Mandela
was monitored
as a terrorist
by the CIA
What an honor !
Tortuguita
peacefully meditating
near Israeli-funded cop city
was executed
in cold blood
on suspicion
of domestic terrorism
What an honor !
in the spirit of Mandela
in the spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising
in the spirit of Tortuguita
in the spirit of Attica
may the anti colonial outrage
of the People of Palestine
contaminate us all -
the only epidemic
worth dying for
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The ongoing Zionist theft of Palestinian land from 1946 to now.
77 years of brutal oppression must end!
End all U.S. aid to Israel now!
For a democratic, secular Palestine!
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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
Poetic Petition to Genocide Joe Before He Eats His Turkey
Mr Genocide Joe
you have helped broker
a Thanksgiving truce
in Gaza
where your zionist partners
in war crimes
say they will stop
slaughtering "human animals"
for four days
but
Mr Genocide Joe
closer to home
you have your own hostages
taken in the cointelpro wars
who still languish
in cages
treated worse than animals
inhumanely
so
as you pardon
two turkeys
in the White House today
as you get ready to eat your military turkey
and have it too
it would at last be time
to unchain
at least two of your own "human animals" -
Mumia Abu-Jamal
and
Leonard Peltier
(c) Julia Wright. November 25, 2023. All Rights Reserved to Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier.
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Leonard Peltier’s Letter Delivered to Supporters on September 12, 2023, in Front of the Whitehouse
Dear friends, relatives, supporters, loved ones:
Seventy-nine years old. Mother Earth has taken us on another journey around Grandfather Sun. Babies have taken their first breath. People have lived, loved, and died. Seeds have been planted and sent their roots deep below red earth and their breath to the Stars and our Ancestors.
I am still here.
Time has twisted one more year out of me. A year that has been a moment. A year that has been a lifetime. For almost five decades I’ve existed in a cage of concrete and steel. With the “good time” calculations of the system, I’ve actually served over 60 years.
Year after year, I have encouraged you to live as spirit warriors. Even while in here, I can envision what is real and far beyond these walls. I’ve seen a reawakening of an ancient Native pride that does my heart good.
I may leave this place in a box. That is a cold truth. But I have put my heart and soul into making our world a better place and there is a lot of work left to do – I would like to get out and do it with you.
I know that the spirit warriors coming up behind me have the heart and soul to fight racism and oppression, and to fight the greed that is poisoning our lands, waters, and people.
We are still here.
Remember who you are, even if they come for your land, your water, your family. We are children of Mother Earth and we owe her and her other children our care.
I long to turn my face to the sky. In this cage, I am denied that simple pleasure. I am in prison, but in my mind, I remain as I was born: a free Native spirit.
That is what allows me to laugh, keeps me laughing. These walls cannot contain my laughter – or my hope.
I know there are those who stand with me, who work around the clock for my freedom. I have been blessed to have such friends.
We are still here and you give me hope.
I hope to breathe free air before I die. Hope is a hard thing to hold, but no one is strong enough to take it from me.
I love you. I hope for you. I pray for you.
And prayer is more than a cry to the Creator that runs through your head. Prayer is an action.
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
DOKSHA,
LEONARD PELTIER
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
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
March 23, 2023
Dear Friends and Comrades,
This is Kevin Cooper writing and sending this update to you in 'Peace & Solidarity'. First and foremost I am well and healthy, and over the ill effect(s) that I went through after that biased report from MoFo, and their pro prosecution and law enforcement experts. I am back working with my legal team from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP.
'We' have made great progress in refuting all that those experts from MoFo came up with by twisting the truth to fit their narrative, or omitting things, ignoring, things, and using all the other tactics that they did to reach their conclusions. Orrick has hired four(4) real experts who have no questionable backgrounds. One is a DNA attorney, like Barry Scheck of the innocence project in New York is for example. A DNA expert, a expect to refute what they say Jousha Ryen said when he was a child, and his memory. A expect on the credibility of MoFo's experts, and the attorney's at Orrick are dealing with the legal issues.
This all is taking a little longer than we first expected it to take, and that in part is because 'we' have to make sure everything is correct in what we have in our reply. We cannot put ourselves in a situation where we can be refuted... Second, some of our experts had other things planned, like court cases and such before they got the phone call from Rene, the now lead attorney of the Orrick team. With that being said, I can say that our experts, and legal team have shown, and will show to the power(s) that be that MoFo's DNA expert could not have come to the conclusion(s) that he came to, without having used 'junk science'! They, and by they I mean my entire legal team, including our experts, have done what we have done ever since Orrick took my case on in 2004, shown that all that is being said by MoFo's experts is not true, and we are once again having to show what the truth really is.
Will this work with the Governor? Who knows... 'but' we are going to try! One of our comrades, Rebecca D. said to me, 'You and Mumia'...meaning that my case and the case of Mumia Abu Jamal are cases in which no matter what evidence comes out supporting our innocence, or prosecution misconduct, we cannot get a break. That the forces in the so called justice system won't let us go. 'Yes' she is correct about that sad to say...
Our reply will be out hopefully in the not too distant future, and that's because the people in Sacramento have been put on notice that it is coming, and why. Every one of you will receive our draft copy of the reply according to Rene because he wants feedback on it. Carole and others will send it out once they receive it. 'We' were on the verge of getting me out, and those people knew it, so they sabotaged what the Governor ordered them to do, look at all the evidence as well as the DNA evidence. They did not do that, they made this a DNA case, by doing what they did, and twisted the facts on the other issues that they dealt with. 'more later'...
In Struggle & Solidarity,
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Mr. Kevin Cooper
C-65304. 4-EB-82
San Quentin State Prison
San Quentin, CA 94974
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Letter from Kevin “Rashid” Johnson
November 6, 2023
I’m back at Red Onion. I have no lines of communication. They have me in the B-3 torture cellblock again where there is no access to a kiosk and they’re withholding my tablet anyway. Even if I had it, it’s no use with no kiosk to sync it to and send/receive messages.
This was a hit. Came from DOC HQ in response folks complaining about my being thrown in solitary at Sussex and the planted knife thing. Kyle Rosch was in on it. The warden and AW here said he’s having me sent back out of state. In any case I don’t want be in this racist trap.
They cut all my outstanding medical referrals to send here cuz there’s no major medical facility in this remote region. I was pending referral to the cardiac clinic at MCV hospital (Medical College of Virginia), which is on the other side of the state. Also was pending referral to urology there. They were supposed to do testing for congestive heart failure and kidney problems related to my legs, feet, and ankles chronic swelling, and other undiagnosed issues: chronic cough, fluid weight gain, sweats, fatigue, chest pain. They just cut these referrals all of which I have copies of from my medical files.
They’ve been removing documents from my file too. Like the order I had for oversize handcuffs—which I was gassed the morning I was transferred here for asking the transferring pigs to honor. They took the order out of my file to try to cover their asses. I and others have copies of that too. At this point things are hectic. I’m back in old form now. I was somewhat in hiatus, trying to get the medical care I needed and not provoking them to avoid the bs while that was going on. But the bs has found me once again : ). I need all possible help here. At a level a bit more intense than in the past cuz I need that diagnostic care they cut the referrals for and it’s not available in this remote area. They’d have to send me back to Sussex or another prison near MCU in the VDOC’s Central or Eastern Region. I’m in the most remote corner of the Western Region. My health is not good! And they’re using the medical quack staff here to rubber stamp blocking my referrals.
Although that lawyer may have given you a message from me, she is not helping me in any way. So no-one should assume because a lawyer surfaced that she is working on anything to aid me. Just have to emphasize that cuz past experience has shown that folks will take a lawyer’s seeming presence as grounds to believe that means some substantial help is here and their help is not needed. Again, I need all possible help here….My health depends on this call for help in a more immediate sense than the cancer situation. I’m having breathing and mobility problems, possibly cardiac related.
All power to the people!
Rashid
We need to contact these Virginia Department of Corrections personnel to protest::
VADOC~ Central Administration; USPS—P.O. Box 26963; Richmond, VA 23261
David Robinson Phone : 804-887-8078, Email~david.robinson@vadoc.virginia.gov
Virginia DOC ~ Director, Chadwick S Dotson, Phone~ (804) 674-3081 Email~Chadwick.Dotson@.vadoc.virginia.gov
Virginia Department of Corrections Interstate Compact Liaison
Kyle Rosch, Phone: 804-887-8404, Email: kyle.rosch@vadoc.virginia.gov
VADOC ~Central Administration
Rose L. Durbin, Phone~804-887-7921Email~Rose.Durbin@vadoc.virgina.gov
Red Onion~ Warden, Richard E White, USPS—10800 H. Jack Rose Hwy., Pound, VA 24279
Phone: (276) 796-3536;(or 7510) Email~ rick.white@vadoc.virginia.gov
Red Onion State Prison, Assistant Warden
Shannon Fuller Phone: 276-796-7510 Email: shannon.fuller@VADOC.virginia.gov
Write to Rashid:
Kevin “Rashid” Johnson #1007485
Red Onion State Prison
10800 H. Jack Rose Hwy
Pound, VA 24279
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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) Strikes in Southern Gaza Leave Deadly Toll
By Hiba Yazbek reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 4, 2024
Destruction after a strike in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Wednesday. Gazan officials said on Thursday that Israeli strikes in Rafah had killed more than 30 people over the last three days. Credit...Fatima Shbair/Associated Press
Israel’s military pressed on with its bombardment of areas of southern Gaza that it has told civilians to evacuate to amid fierce fighting, Palestine Red Crescent and Gazan officials said Thursday. Palestinian news media reported that a strike had hit a family home and left more than a dozen people dead.
The Gazan government media office said on Thursday that Israeli strikes in six locations in Rafah, near the border with Egypt, had killed more than 30 people over the last three days. The statement said Israel had been bombing areas that it had claimed were safe and where it had been “forcing civilians” to go.
The statement added that attacks on these so-called safe areas had occurred 48 times since the start of the war, underscoring United Nations complaints that Israel’s attacks have left nowhere for residents to seek shelter as the enclave is increasingly plunged into humanitarian disaster.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the specific claims, but it has said that its strikes are part of its efforts to eradicate Hamas and that it does not deliberately target civilians. On Thursday, it described fierce fighting and strikes that killed Hamas fighters across Gaza, including around the southern city of Khan Younis, where intense urban fighting has been raging for weeks.
A strike on Thursday on a family home housing displaced people west of Khan Younis killed at least 14 people and injured several others, including women and children, according to Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency.
Yazan Abu Azzum, who is sheltering in Al-Mawasi — a small seaside village in southern Gaza where Israel has said civilians can find safety — said intense bombardment in the area over the last two days has sent shrapnel flying into the shelter where he is staying.
“Shrapnel and bombs were flying all around us,” he said in a series of voice messages on Thursday from a tent he shares with more than 30 members of his family.
“We are staying in a safe area, as they call it,” said Mr. Abu Azzum, a senior in high school, referring to the Israeli military. “But the sound of airstrikes is very close by. We are not safe at all.”
The Palestine Red Crescent Society said on Thursday that “intense” Israeli shelling had continued around its headquarters in Khan Younis and the Al-Amal hospital next door, causing significant damage to its facilities and “hindering the movement of ambulance crews.” It added that the fifth floor of its headquarters was directly attacked, killing one and injuring several others.
Footage posted by the agency on social media showed a plume of smoke rising from a building near its headquarters after a strike there caused “a state of panic and fear among the displaced.” Another video showed smoke coming from the headquarters after what the Red Crescent described as an Israeli strike that it said directly hit the building and injured seven displaced people. The videos could not immediately be verified.
On Tuesday the Red Crescent accused Israel of attacking its headquarters in two consecutive strikes and killing at least five people, including a 5-day-old baby. The World Health Organization’s chief condemned the strikes and said United Nations staff members had witnessed extensive damage.
The Israeli military said in a statement that it was looking into the incident. It said Thursday that it had been striking Hamas infrastructure around Khan Younis both above and below ground and had dismantled a tunnel shaft in the area.
Israel has long said that Hamas, which led an incursion into Israel on Oct. 7 that killed more than 1,200 people, uses hospitals and other civilian facilities to hide fighters and weapons. Hamas uses a vast network of underground tunnels and facilities to move freely and plan attacks.
Ameera Harouda contributed reporting from Doha, Qatar.
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2) In Overnight Sweep, Police in Berkeley Clear Protesters From People’s Park
The University of California, Berkeley, has been trying for years, against determined opposition, to build new student housing on part of the iconic property.
By Shawn Hubler, Jan. 4, 2024
The People’s Park in Berkeley, Calif., has been the site of protests and demonstrations for generations. The University of California, Berkeley, which owns the property, wants to build student housing on part of it. Credit...Eric Risberg/Associated Press
A fraught battle to build long-sought student housing at the storied People’s Park in Berkeley, Calif., took an extraordinary turn early on Thursday when hundreds of law enforcement officers surrounded the site and removed several dozen activists and homeless campers in preparation for the construction of a wall of shipping containers around the perimeter of the park.
The midnight operation, conducted while most students at the nearby University of California, Berkeley, were still away for the winter break, was the latest effort to proceed with a $312 million construction project that was originally scheduled to break ground in 2022. It underscored the mounting tensions surrounding California’s acute housing shortage, particularly in college towns.
Law enforcement officers far outnumbered activists at the site who had been tipped off about the operation and who greeted the show of force from trees and tents pitched in the darkness.
“We’re trying to let people leave, but if they refuse, they’re being arrested,” Dan Mogulof, a university spokesman, said by phone from inside the police perimeter at about 2 a.m. “Everyone was offered shelter. A few took us up on it. But some of the activists are still on the site. I’m looking at a couple perched on the roof of the park bathroom and a couple in a tree fort right now.”
About two hours later, the authorities said the site had been cleared, and construction crews prepared to double-stack about 160 empty shipping containers to wall off the park site.
By dawn, seven activists had been arrested on misdemeanor charges of trespassing and failure to disperse, and had been cited and released, the university said.
Of the eight homeless people who were in the park when the authorities arrived, Mr. Mogulof said, three accepted offers of transitional housing and the rest left voluntarily.
The university provides housing for only 23 percent of its students, by far the lowest percentage in the 10-campus University of California system. A plan to build 1,100 new units of student housing and 125 units of supportive housing for homeless people on part of the park site, which is owned by the university, has been repeatedly delayed since last summer.
A small contingent of Berkeley residents and activists has pushed aggressively to preserve the entire park, which was the center of bloody counterculture protests in the 1960s. In late February last year, a state appeals court in San Francisco sided with the development plan’s opponents, who claimed that the university had failed to conduct environmental reviews required by state law. An appeal to the California Supreme Court is pending.
The university has struggled to cordon off the property, which is strewed with litter and graffiti, and to deter encampments. In August 2022, when the university tried to fence the site, large protests erupted and the crowd tore the fence down.
Since then, Mr. Mogulof said, the city and university have spent more than $6 million to lease motel space and move homeless people occupying the park into shelter and supportive housing, including an initiative in November when most of the roughly two dozen people who were still camped on the site were moved into a local motel.
University officials acknowledged that construction could not begin until the environmental review question was settled by the courts, but they said that the site’s legal status as a closed construction zone had been “repeatedly affirmed,” and that fencing the park was vital to preventing a resurgence of crime and new encampments on the property.
“Given that the existing legal issues will inevitably be resolved, we decided to take this necessary step now, in order to minimize disruption for the public and our students when we are eventually cleared to resume construction,” the chancellor of U.C. Berkeley, Carol Christ, said in a prepared statement.
“Unfortunately, our planning and actions must take into account that some of the project’s opponents have previously resorted to violence and vandalism,” she said, “despite strong support for the project on the part of students, community members, advocates for unhoused people, the elected leadership of the City of Berkeley, as well as the legislature and governor of the state of California.”
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3) Splits Over ‘Day After’ War Divide Netanyahu’s Government
By Roni Caryn Rabin reporting from Tel Aviv, Jan. 6, 2024
Israeli military vehicles in the Gaza Strip on Friday. Credit...Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
As Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken headed back to the Middle East on Friday in the latest U.S. effort to ease regional tensions, a new postwar plan floated by Israel’s defense minister has laid bare the divisions in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over “the day after” fighting in Gaza ends.
The proposal by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a moderate member of Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, was widely seen as a trial balloon, but it showed the pressure the prime minister was facing as Washington and others press for a shift to a less intense phase of the war.
The Biden administration wants Israel to plan for “the day after,” meaning how Gaza will be governed when fighting ends, though analysts say that to keep his far-right allies from leaving his governing coalition, Mr. Netanyahu has delayed any serious domestic discussion or diplomatic effort around such a plan.
Mr. Gallant’s proposal shared on Thursday at a meeting of the Israeli security cabinet is predicated on the military defeat of Hamas. It calls for maintaining Israel’s military control of Gaza’s borders, while a “multinational task force” oversees reconstruction and economic development in the territory.
Under his plan, Gazan Palestinians who do not have ties to Hamas, which the United States and European countries have designated as a terror organization, would administer civilian affairs in the Gaza Strip, according to details of the cabinet meeting leaked to Israeli media. But there would be no role for the Palestinian Authority that runs the occupied West Bank, and there would be no resettlement of Israelis in Gaza.
Mr. Gallant’s proposal appeared to be an effort to stake out middle ground. It rules out involvement of the Palestinian Authority, which exercises authority in parts of the West Bank, in administering Gaza after the war. The Biden administration has called for the authority to play a postwar role in the territory, viewing it as a path toward a two-state solution that would create a Palestinian state consisting of both Gaza and the West Bank, which many politicians on the Israeli right oppose.
But the Gallant plan also rules out resettling Gaza with Israelis, an idea that far-right Israelis espouse.
In recent days, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, have advanced the idea of encouraging Gazans to voluntarily emigrate to countries willing to grant them entry. The State Department sharply rebuked the comments, issuing a statement that criticized both by name and called their comments “inflammatory and irresponsible.”
In a Facebook post, Mr. Smotrich criticized the plan floated by Mr. Gallant, suggesting that it risked a repeat of the Hamas attacks, and reiterating his call for “voluntary emigration” of Gazans.
The Israeli news media described the meeting of the Israeli security cabinet on Thursday as stormy and said it had ended in a blowup after several ministers assailed the military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzl Halevi, for forming a committee of inquiry to investigate the failures that led to the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7.
General Halevi said a limited investigation would yield lessons that would be helpful in the current conflict.
On Friday, Benny Gantz, a centrist who crossed party lines to join Mr. Netanyahu’s war cabinet after Oct. 7, sharply criticized the ministers who attacked General Halevi, calling their attacks politically motivated.
“We are in the most difficult war of our history, on several fronts, and we need to form a single united fist against them,” he said. But he went on to blame Mr. Netanyahu for avoiding a serious discussion about the war’s strategy and aftermath, saying: “He has the responsibility to fix this, and to make a choice — between national unity and security, and politics.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition holds only a fragile majority, with 64 seats in the 120-seat Parliament. Mr. Gantz and other centrist rivals who joined him to form the broader emergency government have not signed onto any coalition agreements, and have indicated they would leave the government when they see fit.
With his popularity at a new low, in large part because of the security failures of Oct. 7, Mr. Netanyahu is loath to face elections anytime soon and must keep his governing coalition together in order to stay in office.
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4) Unauthorized settler activity surges in the occupied West Bank, a watchdog says.
By Isabel Kershner reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 6, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/05/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news
Damaged roads after Israeli raids in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, last month. Credit...Maja Hitij/Getty Images
Under the cover of the war in Gaza, Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank have carried out a “surge” of unauthorized moves to expand their footprint in the territory, according to a report by Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group that opposes settlements and tracks their progress.
Peace Now’s settlement watch team said it had recorded the establishment of nine new so-called wildcat settlement outposts, not authorized by the Israeli government, which appear to be mostly made up of temporary structures. The team also said it documented the creation of more than a dozen new dirt paths and roads.
In addition, the report found, settlers have been fencing off open areas in the part of the West Bank that is under complete Israeli control in order to block access to Palestinian herders. Several of the outposts and roads are on privately owned Palestinian land, the report said, in violation of Israeli law.
The activities add fuel to what are already unusually high tensions in the West Bank, where violence and Israeli military raids have spiraled over the past year. Palestinian militias have carried out shooting attacks against Israelis; frequent raids by the Israeli military have produced thousands of arrests and have often turned deadly; and extremist Jewish settlers have rampaged through Palestinian villages, setting fire to property.
While the settler actions documented by Peace Now are not approved by Israel, the far-right coalition that took power in December 2022 supports settlement expansion, and includes extremist settlers who want to annex some or all of the West Bank. Israel has in the past retroactively authorized settlements it had previously seen as illegal.
Most countries view all settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to be a violation of international law. Israel captured those areas from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians see that land as part of a future independent state, made steadily less viable by settler expansion.
“The three months of war in Gaza are being exploited by settlers to establish facts on the ground,” Peace Now said in a statement, citing what it described as a “permissive military and political environment” that allowed land seizure to go “almost unchecked, with minimal adherence to the law.”
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5) Israel carries out multiple raids in the West Bank, making more arrests.
By Gaya Gupta, Jan. 6, 2024
Damaged buildings in Nur Shams, an area near the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem on Thursday. Credit...Zain Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Amid clashes in several neighborhoods in the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces arrested at least 20 Palestinians and killed one person on Thursday, according to local news media outlets and a prominent Palestinian human rights group.
The Palestinian Prisoners Club, a nongovernmental rights group, said in a statement that Israeli forces made the arrests in Nur Shams, a neighborhood near the city of Tulkarem. It said that Israeli forces had transferred more than 100 Palestinians to another area, and interrogated an estimated 500 people, including women and children.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said the operation in Nur Shams lasted more than 40 hours and “destroyed many explosives and detained dozens of terror suspects.”
Wafa Awwad, a journalist for the official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, was among those arrested, his outlet and The Palestinian Prisoners Club said. Palestinian news media reported raids in Ramallah, Hebron, Bethlehem, Nablus and Jenin, among other locations in the occupied West Bank.
The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Health reported that Asid Jawad Bani Odeh, 29, was shot in the chest and killed during a raid by Israeli forces in Tamun, a village in the northern West Bank.
Photos from Nur Shams and Sir, a village near Jenin, showed residents in both sites assessing the damage from clashes on Thursday. They inspected scorched and crumbling buildings, and windows and walls punctuated by bullets.
Though the war between Israel and Hamas has been concentrated in the Gaza Strip since it began almost three months ago, violence has also surged in the West Bank. The Israeli military has carried out frequent raids across the West Bank, some of them deadly, and has made thousands of arrests. Violence between Palestinians and Israeli civilians in the area has escalated.
During a visit to the West Bank on Thursday, Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet, said that the Israeli military would fight against terrorism wherever it encounters it.
“We are keeping our focus on removing the threat posed by Hamas, but we’re not forgetting that our goal is to remove terror threats from all of our borders,” he said, according to Israel’s N12 news channel.
He added that protecting Israeli settlements was a “central issue,” and that Israeli military forces have expanded their presence in the area.
Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 war, are considered illegal by the United States and many other countries around the world. The United Nations and many Palestinians view the territory as part of a future Palestinian state, which the settlements have made steadily less tenable.
After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government came into power a year ago, it approved permits for 13,000 new housing units and has pushed to expand settlements in the West Bank.
Settler violence against Palestinians was on the rise before the war and has escalated sharply since Oct. 7, when Hamas launched its attack on Israel. The Palestinian Health Ministry has said that 313 Palestinians have been killed across the West Bank since Oct. 7 in clashes with Israeli troops and armed extremist settlers.
On Wednesday, Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister, condemned attacks on the West Bank on social media and warned that “everyone will pay the price” for failing to curb extremism.
“Igniting the West Bank and Lebanon is the goal of the extremist agenda in the Israeli government, which continues to destroy Gaza to prolong its political leadership and drag the West into a regional war,” he said.
The Palestinian Prisoners Club has said that arrests made in the West Bank have driven the number of Palestinians in Israel jails to a 14-year high. Many of those detained are being held without a charge or trial.
Talya Minsberg and Abu Bakr Bashir contributed translation.
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6) America Must Face Up to Israel’s Extremism
By Michelle Goldberg, Jan. 5, 2024
The remains of a bombarded building in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Two far-right members of Israel’s cabinet — the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich — caused an international uproar this week with their calls to depopulate Gaza. “If in Gaza there will be 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs and not two million the entire conversation on ‘the day after’ will look different,” said Smotrich, who called for most Gazan civilians to be resettled in other countries. The war, said Ben-Gvir, presents an “opportunity to concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza,” facilitating Israeli settlement in the region.
The Biden administration has joined countries all over the world in condemning these naked endorsements of ethnic cleansing. But in doing so, it acted as if Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s provocations are fundamentally at odds with the worldview of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to whom America continues to give unconditional backing. In a statement denouncing the ministers’ words as “inflammatory and irresponsible,” the State Department said, “We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the government of Israel, including by the prime minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government.”
Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat who has called for a cease-fire, thanked the State Department in a social media post, saying, “It must be clear that America will not write a blank check for mass displacement.”
But it’s not clear, because we’re writing a blank check to a government whose leader is only a bit more coy than Ben-Gvir and Smotrich about his intentions for Gaza. As Israeli news outlets have reported, Netanyahu said this week that the government is considering a “scenario of surrender and deportation” of residents of the Gaza Strip. According to a Times of Israel article, “The ‘voluntary’ resettlement of Palestinians from Gaza is slowly becoming a key official policy of the government, with a senior official saying that Israel has held talks with several countries for their potential absorption.”
Some in Israel’s government have denied this, mostly on grounds of impracticality. “It’s a baseless illusion, in my opinion: No country will absorb two million people, or one million, or 100,000, or 5,000,” one official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Israeli journalists. And on Thursday, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, released a plan for the day after the war that said that, contrary to the dreams of the ultranationalists, there would be no Israeli settlement in Gaza.
But with its widespread destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including roughly 70 percent of its housing, Israel is making most of Gaza uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. Disease is rampant in Gaza, hunger almost universal, and the United Nations reports that much of the enclave is at risk of famine. Amid all this horror, members of Netanyahu’s Likud party — such as Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, and Gila Gamliel, Israel’s intelligence minister — are pushing emigration as a humanitarian solution.
“Instead of funneling money to rebuild Gaza or to the failed U.N.R.W.A.,” the United Nations agency that works with Palestinian refugees, “the international community can assist in the costs of resettlement, helping the people of Gaza build new lives in their new host countries,” wrote Gamliel in The Jerusalem Post.
Right now, this is a grotesque fantasy. But as Gaza’s suffering ratchets up, some sort of evacuation might come to appear to be a necessary last resort. At least, that’s what some prominent Israeli officials seem to be counting on.
After Hamas’s sadistic attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Israel was justified in retaliating; any country would have. But there is a difference between the war Israel’s liberal supporters want to pretend that the country is fighting in Gaza, and the war Israel is actually waging.
Pro-Israel Democrats want to back a war to remove Hamas from Gaza. But increasingly, it looks as if America is underwriting a war to remove Gazans from Gaza. Experts in international law can debate whether the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza can be classified as genocidal, as South Africa is claiming at the International Court of Justice, or as some lesser type of war crime. But whatever you want to call attempts to “thin out” Gaza’s population — as the Hebrew newspaper Israel Hayom described an alleged Netanyahu proposal — the United States is implicated in them.
By acting as if Ben-Gvir and Smotrich can be hived off from the government in which they serve, U.S. policymakers are fostering denial about the character of Netanyahu’s rule. Joe Biden often speaks of his 1973 meeting with Golda Meir, then the prime minister, and like many American Zionists, his view of Israel sometimes seems stuck in that era.
If you grew up in a liberal Zionist household, as I did, you’ve probably heard this (possibly apocryphal) Meir quote: “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” There’s much to criticize in this sentiment — its self-regard, the way it positions Israel as the victim even when it’s doing the killing; still, it at least suggests a tortured ambivalence about meting out violence. But this attitude, which Israelis sometimes call “shooting and crying,” is now as obsolete as Meir’s Zionist socialism, at least among Israel’s leaders.
Among both American and European politicians, said my friend Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians who now heads the U.S./Middle East Project, there’s a “willful refusal to take seriously just how extreme this government is — whether before Oct. 7 or subsequently.” I’m tempted to say that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich said the quiet part out loud, but in truth they just said the loud part louder.
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7) Starbucks Faces New Pressure Over Union Campaign
Amid a dissident bid for board seats and boycotts by activists, the company has sent mixed signals about its willingness to engage with labor groups.
By Noam Scheiber, Jan. 5, 2024
Starbucks workers and their supporters during a walkout in Seattle in November. Credit...Grant Hindsley for The New York Times
More than two years into a campaign that has unionized more than 350 Starbucks stores, the company is facing mounting pressure from union officials and activists who say it has illegally retaliated against workers and resisted contract negotiations.
Starbucks, which denies violating labor laws, has responded with mixed signals about its willingness to engage with the union. The company announced early last month that it was seeking to restart negotiations at unionized stores, only one of which has held bargaining sessions over the past six months. Yet the company continues to resist a union demand that some workers be allowed to take part in bargaining sessions remotely to enable more to participate.
Starbucks has taken steps to address workers’ complaints about being overstretched in stores. But it and the union have sued each other in a dispute arising from social media postings about the war in Gaza.
A report on Starbucks’ labor practices, prompted by a shareholder vote and released last month, criticized the company for falling short on commitments it made to respect union activity, though it found “no evidence of an ‘anti-union playbook.’”
“There are green shoots of promising behavior right now,” said Jonas Kron, chief advocacy officer of Trillium Asset Management, which makes investments to further environmental, social and governance goals and had a roughly $31 million stake in Starbucks as of September. But, he added, there is also “ongoing concerning behavior.”
The persistence of the organizing effort is one source of pressure on the company. The union campaign flagged in the second half of 2022, as election filings dropped to about 12 a month on average from more than 50 a month in the first half of the year. The monthly filings ticked up last year and averaged roughly 20 from October to December.
Other challenges are more recent. In late November, a coalition of unions that includes the parent of Workers United, which represents Starbucks workers, nominated three candidates for seats on the company’s board.
The coalition, known as the Strategic Organizing Center, is an investor in the company and cited “potentially irreversible damage” to Starbucks’ brand resulting from anti-union actions. It noted that the National Labor Relations Board had issued dozens of complaints against the company tied to hundreds of accusations of illegal behavior, including a failure to bargain in good faith.
Starbucks denies the accusations, noting that it has proposed more than 500 bargaining sessions with the union, and the cases are still being litigated. The company has said it will review the proposed board nominees and is “committed to constructive dialogue.”
Experts in board fights said the campaign appeared serious. All three candidates were senior government officials, largely under Democratic presidents, and the coalition has retained prominent firms to aid in the fight.
“This is not a publicity stunt, I think,” said Kai Liekefett, a partner at Sidley Austin who specializes in defending boards against shareholder campaigns. “They’ve hired very sophisticated advisers.”
Mr. Liekefett said a vote at Starbucks’ last shareholder meeting, in which investors backed a resolution that prompted the company to commission the assessment of its respect for labor rights, suggested that investors could be open to a board challenge tied to labor issues.
At the same time, grass-roots actions by union supporters have sought to exact a price on board members and the company over its posture toward unions.
Students at Georgetown University, Boston University and the University of California, Los Angeles, have waged campaigns to remove Starbucks stores from their campuses. Union supporters interrupted a forum at U.C.L.A. featuring Andrew Campion, a Starbucks board member, to heckle him for “condoning the injustices that Starbucks workers face.”
After a plea from union members in November, a nonprofit group rescinded an award naming Mellody Hobson, the Starbucks chairwoman, one of its “25 Mentors of the Year.”
The nonprofit group, Step Up, which focuses on mentoring teenage girls and young women, said that Ms. Hobson’s accomplishments identified her as a strong mentor but that “the union’s outreach letter to Step Up shed a light on other concerns.” Ms. Hobson declined to comment. Starbucks declined to comment on the campus campaigns and the targeting of board members.
Starbucks recently announced a change that union members had long pressed for: making it easier for workers to temporarily block orders placed through mobile phones when they face operational challenges, like understaffing. The union elevated the issue during a recent strike at dozens of stores.
The company told workers two weeks after the strike that shift supervisors, who are union members, and managers would soon be able to pause mobile orders using an iPad app. Starbucks said that it hadn’t altered its policy on pausing mobile orders, a significant source of revenue, and that shift supervisors continued to need manager approval to do so. The company said that it was simply adding technology to help stores pause orders more efficiently, and that the change had been in the works for months.
At other times, the company has been more confrontational toward the union. Shortly after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, the union’s official account on X featured a message expressing “Solidarity with Palestine!” above a photo that appeared to show a bulldozer that had forced open a fence between Israel and Gaza.
Starbucks criticized the union for “advocating for violence in the Middle East” and later sued the union for trademark infringement, arguing that union statements harmed Starbucks because many people confuse the union with the company. The company said the lawsuit was prompted by a desire to ensure the safety of its employees, who were threatened by angry members of the public.
The union sued for defamation, saying that the “solidarity” post was unauthorized, that it had been quickly deleted and that no reasonable person could conclude from it that the union supported terrorism.
Laxman Narasimhan, who became chief executive in March, has yet to chart a clear course on union matters, although he is more inclined to be conciliatory than his predecessor, Howard Schultz, according to two former Starbucks corporate employees familiar with the men’s thinking. Mr. Schultz appeared to regard the union as a personal affront, the former employees said, and worked to defuse support for it.
Starbucks declined to comment on any differences in approach between the current and former chief executives. Mr. Schultz, who left the Starbucks board in September, did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.
In recent weeks, Mr. Narasimhan appears to have wearied of the controversies that followed the union’s post and the company’s lawsuit, as groups and activists sympathetic to Israelis and Palestinians alike have announced boycotts of Starbucks.
In a letter to employees dated Dec. 19, the chief executive expressed concern about “escalating protests” tied to global conflicts and noted that many stores had suffered acts of vandalism.
“We see protesters influenced by misrepresentation on social media of what we stand for,” he said, adding: “Our stance is clear. We stand for humanity.”
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8) As Gaza Losses Mount Under Strikes, Dignified Burials Are Another Casualty
“The lucky are those who have someone to bury them when they die,” Dr. Mohammad Abu Moussa, a radiologist at one Gaza hospital, said of those killed by Israeli airstrikes.
By Raja Abdulrahim, Photographs by Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud, Jan. 6, 2024
Bodies on the ground in October outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
For four days, Kareem Sabawi’s body lay wrapped in a blanket in a cold, empty apartment as his family sheltered nearby. He was killed during intense Israeli bombardment near his family home, his father and mother said, and in the days that followed, it was too dangerous to step outside and lay their 10-year-old child to rest.
His family called the Palestine Red Crescent for help. But it was the early days of Israel’s ground invasion in northern Gaza, and forces were blocking streets with tanks and gunfire, preventing rescue workers from reaching those killed by Israeli airstrikes. Each day, the father, Hazem Sabawi, suffered a double torment — mourning his son and unable to afford him the final dignity of a proper burial.
“After the fourth day, I said that’s it. Either I will be buried with him, or I won’t bury him at all,” he said, recounting how he laid his son under a guava tree behind a neighbor’s apartment building.
“Every human has the right to be buried,” Mr. Sabawi said.
It has been 13 weeks since Israel’s war in Gaza began after the attack on Israel by Hamas, which killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials. Since then, the living in Gaza have been forced to inter their dead hurriedly and without ceremony or last rites, lest they risk the same fate as their loved ones.
More than 22,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since Oct. 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Civilians are being killed at a pace with few precedents in this century. The conflict has turned Gaza into a “graveyard for thousands of children,” the United Nations said.
“The situation has gotten to the point where we say: The lucky are those who have someone to bury them when they die,” said Dr. Mohammad Abu Moussa, a radiologist at Al-Nasr Hospital in southern Gaza.
Traditionally, Palestinians honor their dead with public funeral processions and mourning tents erected on streets for three days to receive those who want to offer condolences. But the war has made those traditions impossible to uphold.
Instead, the dead have been buried in mass graves, hospital courtyards and backyard gardens, often without headstones, their names scrawled on white burial shrouds or body bags. Funeral prayers are said quickly — if at all — in hospital hallways or outside morgues.
Nebal Farsakh, a spokeswoman for the Palestine Red Crescent, said the violence often made it impossible for rescuers to reach attack sites or recover bodies. Some families have been trapped inside their homes for days with the corpses of their loved ones, she said.
Gaza health officials estimate that about 7,000 people in Gaza are missing, most presumed dead under the enormous destruction from Israel’s onslaught. On some homes, people have spray painted the names of those believed to be buried under the rubble.
As nearly two million civilians have been displaced and made dangerous treks on foot to southern Gaza — passing Israeli forces with guns trained on them — some have described seeing dozens of bodies along the way, bloated and decomposing. They have told The New York Times that Israeli soldiers would not allow them to even cover, much less bury, the dead.
The Israeli military said it had prevented people from approaching bodies “for operational reasons” and also to determine whether any of the dead might be Israeli hostages taken by Hamas to Gaza on Oct. 7.
For Mr. Sabawi, burying Kareem was the least he could do for a son he felt he was unable to protect.
He and his wife said an Israeli airstrike hit near their home in early November when their family was preparing lunch with what little flour and rations they had. Mr. Sabawi was thrown in the air, and when he hit the floor, the kitchen door fell on him. When he got up, he saw Kareem bleeding profusely from his head.
Mr. Sabawi said he scooped him up, even though his arm was injured, and the family ran to a neighbor’s apartment. Kareem was still breathing as his panicked father administered CPR.
It was too late.
Neighbors took the family in and brought a blanket to wrap Kareem’s body, Mr. Sabawi said. He waited four days, fearing they might be killed by an airstrike or Israeli soldier if they went outside to bury him. On the fifth day, Mr. Sabawi and a neighbor said the Muslim proclamation of faith before leaving the apartment.
In the garden behind the building, they dug a shallow grave and laid Kareem in it, covering him with dirt, and rushed back inside.
“The next day, I went back down to put more dirt over the grave,” Mr. Sabawi said. On the tree, he hung a makeshift headstone and placed a brick at the top. “Every time there was an opportunity, I went down to put more dirt so it would become a proper grave.”
His wife, Suha Sabawi, 32, said she knew that not all parents in Gaza got the opportunity for such bittersweet closure.
“Lots of people said to me, ‘Thank God you were able to bury your son,’ because lots of people can’t bury their children,” she said.
Ahmed Alhattab, a father of four, said a rocket struck his apartment building on the night of Nov. 7 in Gaza City. There were 32 family members inside, 19 of them children. Palestinian news media reported the strike at the time, putting the initial death toll at 10.
Mr. Alhattab and three of his sons escaped from the rubble, but one had a skull fracture and was bleeding, he said. Mr. Alhattab handed his two uninjured sons — aged 5 and 9 — to neighbors and carried his wounded 7-year-old, Yahya, until he found an ambulance to take him to a hospital.
The next morning, he said, he returned with neighbors and relatives, and they dug out four dead family members with their hands, among them his 32-day-old nephew.
They buried them in a single grave in a private cemetery that belonged to another family because it was too dangerous to get to the public cemeteries farther away. Some public cemeteries have also been razed by Israeli forces.
The rest of his family, 24 relatives, he said, remained under too much rubble to recover.
For three days, Mr. Alhattab said, he stayed at the hospital as his son underwent surgery. The hospital was nearing collapse as airstrikes and clashes raged nearby.
He was told his son was unlikely to survive.
As relatives prepared to flee, he said, he made the heart-wrenching decision to leave Yahya behind to take his other sons south, where he hoped they would be safer.
Four days later, he heard from a friend that his son had died in the hospital, where he was buried along with other patients who died.
“The burial was temporary,” Mr. Alhattab said, “and I don’t know what happened with his body.”
Medical workers have told The Times they have sometimes had to dig graves in hospital courtyards. When staff members were forced by the Israeli military to evacuate, they said, they had to leave many bodies behind.
Now in southern Gaza, Mr. Alhattab says he wants to go home to recover his family’s bodies.
“When we bury the dead, we honor them,” he said. “And it calms one’s heart a little bit. You know where they are buried.”
When Fatima Alrayess, 35 and living in Austria, last spoke to her two younger brothers on Nov. 8, they told her they were headed back to their family home in Gaza City.
The brothers — Muhammad, 31, and Muayid, 25 — told her that a civil defense crew was on its way to the seven-story building, which had been felled by an Israeli airstrike three days earlier, she said. They said the attack had killed eight family members, including her parents.
“He wanted to bury them,” she said of Muayid.
But an Israeli siege of Gaza from the early days of the war had created dire shortages of fuel, among other essential goods, severely hampering the work of civil defense crews.
That day, the civil defense workers recovered the bodies of their mother, father and a 12-year-old nephew before it got too dark, Ms. Alrayess and another relative, Lubna Alrayess, learned from the brothers.
The next day, the brothers buried the bodies of the three family members in a cemetery and met civil defense workers at the demolished building in hopes of recovering more bodies, Fatima Alrayess said. Two sisters — one a dentist and the other a banker — a brother and two nephews were still missing.
As the rescuers began combing through the rubble, another Israeli airstrike hit, killing both Muayid and Muhammad, as well as several civil defense workers, according to Ms. Alrayess, her relative and Palestinian news reports.
The immediate aftermath of the strike was captured on video by a local photographer, who lamented that the brothers had followed their parents in death.
“My parents were buried in the afternoon,” Ms. Alrayess said. “Muayid and Muhammad were buried later that night in the same cemetery.”
Five members of the family remain under the rubble.
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9) American Unions Long Backed Israel. Now, Some Are Protesting It.
The shift reflects a broader generational change, and has exposed philosophical rifts in the labor movement about what the purpose of a union ought to be.
By Emma Goldberg and Santul Nerkar, Jan. 7, 2024
In December, United Automobile Workers members joined a march in Manhattan in favor of a cease-fire in Gaza. Credit...Andres Kudacki for The New York Times
“Why are we here?” said Brandon Mancilla, a leader with the United Automobile Workers. Mr. Mancilla faced a crowd of hundreds of union members gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library’s Fifth Avenue branch, huddling against the cold as they rallied for a cease-fire in Gaza.
“Cease-fire now, solidarity forever!” Mr. Mancilla, 29, said as the crowd cheered, waving union banners and Palestinian flags. “Let’s get more and more unions behind us.”
On display in that Dec. 21 protest — which came shortly after the 350,000 member U.A.W. voted to support a cease-fire — was a shift in the American labor movement’s relationship with Israel.
For decades, the most prominent American unions were largely supportive of Israel. Today, though, amid a resurgence of the American labor movement, some activists are urging their unions to call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and succeeding — a change that reflects a broader generational shift.
But many unions are divided over what stance to take or whether to take any stance at all.
Some American labor leaders have remained supportive of Israel’s war against Hamas, and moved swiftly to condemn Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7. They are dismayed by the views of a younger generation of organizers who in some cases oppose Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
“There has been a shift in society, and that’s reflected in the labor movement as it is every place else,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Jewish Labor Committee and head of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
Union Support for Israel
The American labor movement’s traditionally close relationship with Israel stems from decades of Jewish labor leaders staunchly backing the state, even before its founding. In 1917, the American Federation of Labor passed a resolution supporting the Balfour Declaration, which called for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, and throughout the 1920s and ’30s unions donated millions to Histadrut, Israel’s national labor union.
After Israel’s founding in 1948, American unions started investing in the country’s bond program, using money from strike and pension funds. Some also donated money to build stadiums and children’s homes in Israel. By 1994, $1 billion had been invested in those bonds by around 1,700 American trade unions, according to archival research from Jeff Schuhrke, a labor historian at Empire State University.
“In many ways, you can argue that U.S. unions helped construct the state of Israel,” Mr. Schuhrke said.
In 1980, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Lane Kirkland, declared that a Palestinian state would be “a terrorist state” and “an unmixed disaster to the United States” before hundreds of labor lawyers and union officials. In 1982, the union took out an advertisement in The New York Times declaring support for Israel in its war against Lebanon: “The A.F.L.-C.I.O. is not neutral.”
Union support for Israel sometimes bred internal tensions, with some of the union rank-and-file membership protesting the relationship. In 1949, the same year the International Ladies Garment Worker Union made a $1 million Israeli bond purchase, a group of its members asked the union to support Palestinian refugees. In 1973, thousands of Arab American auto workers in Detroit briefly walked off the job to protest the U.A.W.’s financial support of Israel. In 2002, after John J. Sweeney, then the A.F.L.-C.I.O. president, spoke at the National Rally for Israel, a group of union members circulated a petition condemning his support for the country.
Professional Consequences
Since the Israel-Gaza war broke out, debates over the fighting have exposed deeper rifts over how unions should represent their diverse membership, and how to balance political advocacy with professional ramifications.
The Writers Guild faced an outpouring of frustration from more than 300 members when the union didn’t immediately condemn Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7. Starbucks and its union, Starbucks Workers United, are suing each other over the union’s use of company imagery in a pro-Palestinian social media post. Chris Smalls, head of the Amazon Labor Union, drew backlash for a pro-Palestinian post that included the phrase “from the river to the sea,” — a decades-old Palestinian nationalist slogan that many see as a call for Israel’s annihilation — echoing an outcry The New Yorker’s union faced in 2021 when it posted the phrase on social media.
When a proposed statement calling for a cease-fire circulated in early November at the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, a U.A.W. sub-union of more than 3,000 public defenders and legal workers, a heated internal debate broke out. Those who opposed it said they didn’t understand why the union had to weigh in on the issue, which had little direct connection to their work.
One legal aid lawyer, Isaac Altman, said in an interview that he found the union’s proposed resolution to be one-sided. He said he couldn’t understand why the resolution did not shine a greater spotlight on the violence of Hamas militants. But he was also concerned that the statement would anger the legal establishment in Nassau County, potentially posing a harm to the clients he represents.
So he, along with three other legal aid lawyers, sued to stop the union from voting on a cease-fire resolution. A court issued a temporary injunction.
“I felt there was a real concern that judges would look negatively at this resolution and take it out on our clients,” said Mr. Altman, 27, who is Jewish.
Mr. Altman’s organization, the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County, gets its funding from contracts with the Republican-controlled county. He and his colleagues worried about how the proposed resolution might affect their funding.
“We have a higher duty or obligation to our clients that I think trumps people’s right to speak,” said Ilana Kopmar, another plaintiff in the suit and a legal aid lawyer for 31 years. Ms. Kopmar said she was also worried about the impact such a statement could have on Jewish and Israeli clients.
The injunction was dissolved on Dec. 15 by a federal judge in the Eastern District of New York, and a few days later, the cease-fire statement passed, by a vote of 1,067 to 570.
The president of the Neighborhood Defender Service union, which is also part of the legal aid lawyers union, resigned on Nov. 6 over concerns that his organization’s funding would be at risk if it released a statement on the war. The Bronx Defenders, another public defense organization in New York, faced calls to be defunded across the city after its union released a statement in support of Palestinians.
“We have a higher duty or obligation to our clients that I think trumps people’s right to speak,” said Ilana Kopmar, another plaintiff in the suit and a legal aid lawyer for 31 years. Ms. Kopmar said she was also worried about the impact such a statement could have on Jewish and Israeli clients.
The injunction was dissolved on Dec. 15 by a federal judge in the Eastern District of New York, and a few days later, the cease-fire statement passed, by a vote of 1,067 to 570.
The president of the Neighborhood Defender Service union, which is also part of the legal aid lawyers union, resigned on Nov. 6 over concerns that his organization’s funding would be at risk if it released a statement on the war. The Bronx Defenders, another public defense organization in New York, faced calls to be defunded across the city after its union released a statement in support of Palestinians.
“We want the Guild leadership to avoid public positions that compromise the journalistic independence required of many members and could undermine our work,” said Megan Twohey, a leader in the caucus.
The union, which represents workers outside the media industry too, has not taken a position on the war. It has made statements about journalists killed in the conflict.
Within some newer unions, there’s been a reticence to weigh in on a cease-fire. The Alphabet Workers Union, for example, at Google’s parent company Alphabet, which has about 1,400 members, hasn’t voted on whether to call for a cease-fire, partly because the union is nascent and worried about alienating potential members, particularly tech workers in Israel. The issue has come up for discussion at membership meetings and on the messaging app Discord.
A Generational Shift
Changes in union attitudes toward Israel are coming at a moment of wider revival for the American labor movement. After strikes in Hollywood and at auto plants, public approval of unions stood at 67 percent last year, up from 54 percent a decade ago, according to Gallup.
“For a few decades, coinciding with the labor movement’s decline, its vision became much more narrow,” said Mr. Mancilla, the U.A.W. leader. “It was on the defensive.”
Now, many activists are eager to see their unions seize on the momentum of this period by taking bold stances on progressive issues, which they see as part of a history of American labor’s involvement in national and international politics. (Labor unions helped organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which tied demands for fair wages and civil rights.)
“People who have become very engaged in their unions want their unions to be the full expression of their politics,” said Rebecca Givan, an associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers. “There’s always a risk that can alienate some people, and it is likely to energize others.”
And some union organizers feel that if they’re taking on political fights at home, they should be taking on battles abroad as well.
Peter Lyngso, 30, a part-time package handler at United Parcel Service and a Chicago union activist, drew a parallel between younger union members’ push for a new contract and their urge to speak out on the conflict. “What you’re seeing is this new activist layer saying these are one and the same fight.”
Longtime labor experts say that the demand for pro-cease-fire statements from American unions is evidence of a generational shift. There’s a new wave of leadership from young activists who grew up after the Oslo Peace process of the 1990s collapsed.
“This is being generated by social-movement young people, Gen Zs, millennials,” said Seth Goldstein, a labor lawyer who has worked with the Amazon Labor Union. “ I don’t think they’re anti-Israel, necessarily. But what they’ve seen in Israel is the Netanyahu government.”
At the same time, some American labor leaders remain adamant about their support for Israel, including Mr. Appelbaum of the Jewish Labor Committee.
Randi Weingarten, 66, president of the American Federation of Teachers, is a longtime supporter of Israel. She went to Israel after the war broke out to meet with civil society groups, pay shiva calls and visit the families of hostages.
On Dec. 18, dozens of protesters outside the Museum of the City of New York demanded that Ms. Weingarten call for a cease-fire. She has since posted that she supports “a bilateral, negotiated ceasefire” that brings the hostages home, provides aid to Gaza and “starts the process of 2 states for 2 peoples.”
Ms. Weingarten said she felt it was important for unions to engage with geopolitical issues, beyond their contract negotiations, even when labor leaders are faced with protest and dissent.
“There will be people within the labor movement that say, ‘Just do the economics, just do collective bargaining,” she said. “Then there are people within the labor movement that say intersectionality is imperative.”
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10) War Brings Tensions, and Assault Rifles, Into an Israeli College
At the University of Haifa, more than 40 percent of students are Arab, some with family in Gaza, and many others have now been called up as soldiers.
By Adam Sella, Jan. 7, 2024
Adam Sella visited the University of Haifa, speaking with dozens of students, faculty and staff.
Student-soldiers are required to keep their weapons on them at all times, bringing to class with them an enormous number of semiautomatic rifles. Credit...Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
In a classroom at the University of Haifa in late December, Yitzhak Cohen, a fourth-year law student, began the shoulder-shrugging, arm-contorting choreography familiar to any student trying to remove a backpack.
But instead of a knapsack, Mr. Cohen, 28, a reservist who had recently returned from fighting in Gaza to attend the university’s orientation, unshouldered his military-issue Tavor assault rifle and took a seat in the back of the class.
Nearly three months after the outbreak of war delayed universities’ start dates, students returned on Dec. 31 to campuses in Israel for an abridged semester. Amid the usual first-day jitters, students and faculty were additionally anxious about resuming classes during a war that had unsettled the country, Jews and Arabs alike.
At the University of Haifa, a uniquely mixed institution where more than 40 percent of students are Arabs, those anxieties are amplified by what is among the school’s proudest achievements — its diversity.
For the first time since the outbreak of the war, Jewish students, some of whom had spent the past months fighting in Gaza or lost friends and family in the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, rubbed shoulders with Arab students. And some of those Arab students had relatives killed in Gaza or had been targeted and silenced on social media because of their views on the war.
While the fighting in Gaza is almost 100 miles away from the university, thoughts of the war are inescapable. About 1,500 military reservists attend the University of Haifa, and as long as they’re called up, the student-soldiers, including Mr. Cohen, are required to keep their weapons on them at all times. As a result, the newly armed students are bringing semiautomatic rifles to class.
“We’re doing everything possible to connect to our students and allay fears that people have,” said Ron Robin, the university’s president. That included focus groups intended to gauge students’ feelings before the start of the semester; Arab and Jewish professors talking with students and each other about the importance of diversity and inclusion; and holding many more meetings via Zoom.
Still, fears persist. More than 50 percent of Jewish and Arab students across the country are afraid of sitting in a classroom with one another, and nearly one in two Arabs have considered not returning to campus at all, according to a November survey by the aChord Center, a nonprofit that focuses on ethnic relations in Israel.
Situated on a hill overlooking the port city of Haifa, the university is dedicated to a mission of encouraging students to embrace a shared society, Mr. Robin said. On a windy December day, two female students wearing army uniforms, M16s slung over their shoulders, carried plastic bags filled with dorm-room supplies, while a first-year student wandered the corridors looking for his classroom. A few women wearing hijabs gathered around a picnic table.
Nicole Rashed, 21, a Christian Arab citizen of Israel, said that a key concern among Arab students returning to campus was whether their freedom of speech would be curtailed. Since the Oct. 7 attack, in which nearly 1,200 people were killed, according to the Israeli authorities, the University of Haifa has temporarily suspended nine students who administrators said had made pro-Hamas posts on social media. Mr. Robin said that the students were still under disciplinary review and that the university was trying to reach a compromise to drop the charges.
In light of the suspensions, some Arab students said they worried that if they made comments condemning the war, it could end their academic careers.
“Arab students think that if I post about a dead baby in Gaza on my story, they will stop my studies,” Ms. Rashed said. She does not believe the university plans to be so draconian, she added, but she is wary of making posts about the war on social media.
Ms. Rashed noted that she strongly condemned Hamas’s atrocities on Oct. 7 and understood Israel’s need to defend itself. But she is equally critical of the mounting death toll in Gaza, where, according to health officials there, more than 22,000 people have been killed.
“Speaking about the conflict is very complicated because you have to speak perfectly,” Ms. Rashed said. But, she added, the perfect sentence does not exist, “so I would rather not say anything.”
What most frustrates Ms. Rashed is the feeling that she always has to go above and beyond to prove that she does not support terrorism just because she is an Arab. “It sucks,” she said.
Asad Ghanem, a political science professor at the university and a Palestinian citizen of Israel, said he felt that, even before the war, the university took few “measures to let Arab students feel at home.” Oct. 7 and its aftermath, he said, have exacerbated those feelings.
He said he worried about being attacked by students who did not agree with his views, which are critical of both Israel and Hamas. In October, he said, several students threatened him with violence.
“I have to be more careful,” Dr. Ghanem said, explaining that he planned to set strict guidelines for his seminar this semester on the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is prepared to cut short debates to ensure heated discussions do not escalate.
The Israeli students have their own fears. Daniel Sakhnovich, 24, a freshman planning to study economics and Asian studies, said he was worried that some of his classmates supported Hamas and believed the wanton nature of the Oct. 7 atrocities was justified.
“You don’t know what’s going on in other people’s minds,” he said.
And like many students starting at the university, he was concerned that tensions on and off campus would make for an especially difficult first year.
“Everyone always says, ‘Oh, I met my best friends in college,’” Mr. Sakhnovich said. “I’m worried I won’t have that.”
Mr. Cohen, the reservist finishing his law degree, said he was aware that maintaining his social and academic life this year would most likely come second to protecting his peers’ actual lives. As the war in Gaza persists and tensions flare up along the Lebanese borders and in the West Bank, he said he felt an added responsibility to protect his classmates should there be an attack on campus.
Even so, “It’s not much fun to come to class with this gun,” Mr. Cohen said about the assault rifle on his lap. “It’s heavy.”
As he sat in the back of a lecture hall surrounded by classmates, the war for a moment felt very far away.
“I think the best treatment for the shock and post-trauma is a return to normal,” he said.
But then, in the middle of the orientation lecture, he received an urgent call from his commander: “Return to base, now.”
Mr. Cohen shouldered his rifle and left campus.
His return to normalcy would have to wait a bit longer.
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11) Eight Palestinians and an Israeli officer are killed in West Bank violence.
By Isabel Kershner reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 7, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/01/07/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news
Mourners carrying the bodies of Palestinians during their funeral in the West Bank city of Jenin on Sunday. Credit...Majdi Mohammed/Associated Press
An uptick in violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank early Sunday left at least eight Palestinians, an Israeli officer and a resident of Jerusalem dead, officials said, adding to tensions in the territory even as fighting continued in Gaza.
An Israeli drone strike killed seven Palestinian men when clashes broke out during a pre-dawn Israeli military incursion into Jenin, a hotbed of Palestinian militancy in the northern West Bank, and an eighth man was killed by Israeli soldiers in the central West Bank, according to Palestinian health officials.
An Israeli border police officer was killed during the Jenin raid when a bomb planted under a road blew up the military vehicle in which she was riding, Israeli officials said. Several other officers were injured.
Later Sunday morning, armed assailants shot and killed a man from East Jerusalem who was driving along a road in the central West Bank. Israeli news media identified him as an Arab resident of a predominantly Palestinian neighborhood of East Jerusalem, and said that a woman was also wounded in the shooting. The gunmen are presumed to have targeted the car because of its Israeli license plates.
A Palestinian-registered car apparently used by the gunmen was found abandoned nearby, according to Israeli officials.
Four of the seven Palestinians killed in the Jenin raid were brothers ranging in age from 22 to 29, according to the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, Wafa. The Israeli military said those killed had been throwing explosive devices at Israeli forces.
Jenin, and particularly its refugee camp, now a crowded neighborhood within the city, has been a focus of Israeli military raids for months, even before the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks from Gaza prompted a surge in West Bank violence.
A two-day Israeli assault in early July was one of the largest military incursions in the West Bank in years. Twelve Palestinians were killed in that raid, which Israeli officials said was aimed at rooting out Palestinian armed groups after a year of escalating violence, including a surge in shooting attacks on Israeli targets and efforts by Palestinian militants to fire crude rockets toward Israel. During the operation, Israeli forces carried out their first airstrikes in the West Bank in nearly two decades.
Israeli military officials said at the time that the Jenin camp had become a refuge for gunmen, as the security forces of the Palestinian Authority, the body that nominally administers parts of the West Bank, rarely set foot there.
In that raid, military bulldozers churned up roads and alleys in what officials said was an effort to expose bombs and tripwires planted beneath the asphalt. Those types of explosives appeared to be what killed the border police officer on Sunday. The so-called Jenin Battalion of Islamic Jihad, a local armed group, released video footage appearing to show the explosion that killed the Israeli officer. Islamic Jihad sometimes rivals the larger Hamas and sometimes cooperates with it.
Leaders of Hamas have been exhorting its armed supporters in the West Bank to join the larger battle against Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, which Israeli officials say killed about 1,200 people. The attacks touched off a devastating war in Gaza in which more than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gazan health officials.
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12) Two journalists are killed in Gaza, including the son of a well-known Al Jazeera reporter.
By Vivian Yee and Ameera Harouda, Jan. 7, 2024
Wael al-Dahdouh, an Al Jazeera correspondent, holding the hand of his deceased son Hamza during his funeral in Rafah, Gaza, on Sunday.Credit...Hatem Ali/Associated Press
Wael al-Dahdouh, a well-known Palestinian correspondent for Al Jazeera TV who has spent his career covering Gaza, had already lost his wife, a son, a daughter and an infant grandson in an Israeli airstrike in October.
On Sunday, he lost another member of his family to the war: his eldest son, Hamza, was killed in an Israeli airstrike that left two journalists dead and wounded two others, according to the authorities in Gaza.
The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, reported that an Israeli drone strike hit the car Hamza al-Dahdouh was traveling in west of the southern city of Khan Younis. He was killed along with another journalist, Mustafa Thuraya. Two others, Ahmed Al-Burash and Amer Abu Amr, were injured.
Wael al-Dahdouh said his son was working for Al Jazeera at the time of his death. Wafa reported that the two injured men worked for Palestine Today, a TV channel.
Photos from news agencies of the attack’s aftermath showed a burned-out sedan that was missing its windshield and most of its roof and hood. In a video apparently taken shortly after Sunday’s airstrike and shared with journalists on WhatsApp, a crowd gathers around the car. Someone throws a blanket over a body in the driver’s seat, while others carry another person from the passenger side.
“Nothing is harder than the pain of loss. And when you experience this pain time after time, it becomes harder and more severe,” Wael al-Dahdouh told Al Jazeera after his son’s death. He added: “I wish that the blood of my son Hamza will be the last from journalists and the last from people here in Gaza, and for this massacre to stop.”
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Military officials have said it does not target journalists and takes measures to protect them and other civilians.
As of Saturday, at least 70 Palestinian journalists and media workers had been killed in Gaza, some while covering the conflict, some when they were at home or sheltering with their families, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which said it was also investigating “numerous” other reports of journalists being killed.
Their deaths have made it difficult to obtain information about the scale and destructiveness of the fighting, a problem worsened by degraded communications networks and the lack of permission from Israel and Egypt for foreign journalists to enter Gaza.
The government media office in Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, called the killings of Mr. al-Dahdouh and Mr. Thuraya another attempt to “intimidate journalists” and “obscure the truth” in a statement on Sunday.
The family of Wael al-Dahdouh, the Gaza bureau chief for Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language service, had taken shelter at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza in late October after evacuating from their home in Gaza City. That was where they were hit by the Israeli airstrike, Al Jazeera reported at the time. He was reporting live when he found out.
Last month, Wael al-Dahdouh was injured, and the camera operator he was working with was killed, after what Al Jazeera said was a drone strike on a school-turned-shelter in Khan Younis where they were working. Al Jazeera reported that strike, too, was an Israeli attack.
Hamza al-Dahdouh was covering the airstrikes, too. Hours before his death, Hamza, who described himself on Instagram as a photographer, journalist, cameraman and producer, appeared to be behind the camera, posting photos of destroyed buildings in Gaza and of a colleague in a bulletproof vest marked “Press” broadcasting from a rubble-strewn street.
On Saturday, Hamza had posted a photo of his father. “Do not despair of recovery and do not despair of God’s mercy,” he wrote, “and be certain that God will reward you well for being patient.”
His father responded in a post of his own, “May God protect you.”
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13) What Will Happen to Gaza’s People?
By Peter Beinart, Jan. 7, 2024
Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Conventional wisdom has generally held that Israel’s government lacks a strategy for the Gaza Strip beyond toppling Hamas.
“Israel has no plan for Gaza after war ends, experts warn,” the BBC reported in October. In November The Washington Post observed that “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under criticism for not offering a clear plan for what happens in Gaza if Israel succeeds in its goal of deposing Hamas.” A headline in Foreign Affairs in December lamented “Israel’s Muddled Strategy in Gaza.”
But there are signs that some members of the Israeli government do indeed have a strategy, or at least a preference, for what happens next. It’s implicit in the kind of war Israel has waged, which has made Gaza largely unlivable. And a growing number of Israeli officials are saying it out loud: They don’t want to force just Hamas out of Gaza. They want many of Gaza’s people to leave, too.
The calls for population transfers started long before Gaza was reduced to the ruins that it is today. Six days after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, the Intelligence Ministry proposed permanently relocating Gazans to the Sinai region of Egypt. On Nov. 14, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said he supported “the voluntary emigration of Gaza Arabs to countries around the world.” Five days later, Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel endorsed “the voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons, outside of the Strip.”
The Israel Hayom newspaper reported on Nov. 30 that Mr. Netanyahu had asked Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, one of his closest confidants, to develop a plan to “thin” the population in Gaza “to a minimum” by prying open Egypt’s doors and opening up sea routes to other countries. Mr. Netanyahu also reportedly urged President Biden and the leaders of Britain and France to push Egypt to admit hundreds of thousands of Gazan refugees.
At times, Israeli officials have downplayed or denied these reports. Mr. Netanyahu’s office called the Intelligence Ministry’s transfer plan a mere “concept paper” and Israel’s embassy in Washington clarified that the intelligence minister was speaking only for herself. Other influential government ministers — like Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, a Netanyahu rival and former chief of staff of the Israeli military who joined the government after Oct. 7 — oppose moving Gaza’s population outside the Strip, according to Israel Hayom. Mr. Gallant, it emerged last week, has floated a proposal that would have Palestinians unconnected to Hamas or the Palestinian Authority administering the territory, with other countries overseeing reconstruction.
But in recent days the talk of Palestinian departures from Gaza has grown louder. At a meeting of his Likud party on Dec. 25, Mr. Netanyahu was urged by a legislator to put into place a team to facilitate the “voluntary” departure of Palestinians from Gaza. The prime minister reportedly replied that the government was “working on” finding countries willing to take them.
Similar comments from Israel’s national security minister followed, with The Times of Israel asserting on Wednesday that voluntary resettlement from Gaza is gradually becoming “a key official policy of the government.”
Some might dismiss this talk of population transfer as wartime bluster. But on the ground, it is already well underway: Gaza is becoming uninhabitable. According to the United Nations, an estimated 85 percent of Gaza’s people are now displaced. Even if they could return to their homes, many would have little to go back to since, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal, nearly 70 percent of Gaza’s housing is damaged or destroyed.
More than 22,000 Gazans have been killed in the conflict so far, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, and many more are in acute danger. According to the Gaza director of affairs for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, 40 percent of the Strip’s residents are at risk of famine. Given the collapse of Gaza’s sanitation and medical systems, as much as a quarter of Gaza’s people could die within the year, mostly from disease or lack of access to medical care, according to a recent estimate by Prof. Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh.
If the fighting in Gaza ends soon, this cataclysm could ease. But in late December, Mr. Netanyahu suggested that Israel’s war in Gaza would “last for many more months,” albeit with fewer troops. Defense Minister Gallant has said it could take years. And as long as hostilities in Gaza continue, Israel will not allow most of Gaza’s displaced to go back to their homes for safety’s sake, the Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal recently reported. They may not return for “at least a year,” he suggested.
The humanitarian catastrophe, in other words, is likely to persist. And the longer it does, the more pressure Egypt will feel to alleviate it by letting Gaza’s residents in. Israeli officials would most likely continue to depict such a migration as voluntary, despite having created the conditions that precipitated it.
So far, both Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and the Biden administration have said they adamantly oppose relocating Gaza’s people. The U.S. State Department last week said the Israeli government has repeatedly told American officials that resettlement outside Gaza is not its official policy.
But some members of Israel’s government reportedly believe that Egypt — which owes creditors a whopping $28 billion in debt payments next year — is vulnerable to pressure. And U.S. politics could always change: Asked last month what should happen to Gaza’s Palestinians, the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley replied, “They should go to pro-Hamas countries.”
There’s a chilling historical backdrop to all this. Palestinians in Gaza know that if they leave, Israel is unlikely to let them to return. They know this because most of them are descendants of the expulsion and flight that occurred around Israel’s founding in 1948, which Palestinians call the nakba. They live in Gaza because Israel didn’t let their families return to the places that then became part of Israel. Hundreds of thousands more Palestinians were displaced when Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967. It didn’t let many of those refugees return either.
Israel’s leaders rarely express regret for these mass displacements. Sometimes, they even invoke them as precedent. Addressing Palestinians on Facebook after three Israelis were murdered in the West Bank in 2017, Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s current national security adviser, warned, “This is how a ‘nakba’ begins. Just like this. Remember ’48. Remember ’67.”
He ended his post with the words, “You’ve been warned!”
The world has been warned too.
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