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‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 279:
Casualties
Source: mondoweiss.net
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U.S. Parole Commission Denies Leonard Peltier’s Request for Freedom; President Biden Should Grant Clemency
In response to the U.S. Parole Commission denying Leonard Peltier’s request for parole after a hearing on June 10, Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, made the following statement:
“Continuing to keep Leonard Peltier locked behind bars is a human rights travesty. President Biden should grant him clemency and release him immediately. Not only are there ongoing, unresolved concerns about the fairness of his trial, he has spent nearly 50 years in prison, is approaching 80 years old, and suffers from several chronic health problems.
“Leonard Peltier has been incarcerated for far too long. The parole commission should have granted him the freedom to spend his remaining years in his community and surrounded by loved ones.
“No one should be imprisoned after a trial riddled with uncertainty about its fairness. We are now calling on President Biden, once again, to grant Leonard Peltier clemency on humanitarian grounds and as a matter of mercy and justice.”
Background
· Leonard Peltier, Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), was convicted of the murders of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. He has always maintained his innocence. Amnesty International joins Tribal Nations, Tribal Leaders, Members of Congress, former FBI agents, Nobel Peace Prize winners and former U.S. Attorney James Reynolds, whose office handled Peltier’s prosecution and appeal, in urging his release.
· Parole was also rejected at Peltier’s last hearing in 2009. Due to his age, this was likely the last opportunity for parole.
· A clemency request is pending before President Joe Biden. President Biden has committed opens in a new tab to grant clemency/commutation of sentences on a rolling basis rather than at the end of his term, following a review of requests by the White House Counsel’s Office and the Department of Justice.
Amnesty International has examined Peltier’s case extensively for many years, sent observers to his trial in 1977, and long campaigned on his behalf. Most recently, Amnesty International USA sent a letter to the U.S. Parole Commission urging the commission to grant him parole.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/u-s-parole-commission-denies-leonard-peltiers-request-for-freedom-president-biden-should-grant-clemency/
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Leonard Peltier’s Bail Denied July 2, 2024
Leonard Peltier June 26, 2024 statement on pending bail decision
Greetings my Friends, Family, Loved Ones, and Supporters,
Hope is a hard thing here. But I always hold hope in you, My People. Pay attention. The parole decision on July 11th may show you what justice truly means to this nation and to whom it is meant for.
Living in lockdown, time has twisted into something that has nothing to do with minutes, hours, or years. They have taken what little freedom I have outside this box. Art—gone. Ceremony—gone.
Yet they will never take the Spirit of a Sundancer. I have never given them my integrity. I remain undestroyed.
I will not pretend my body is sound. The lockdowns have been tough on all of us, in ways I cannot begin to explain and those on the outside cannot begin to imagine.
I am counting on you if this decision does not go my way. I always need your prayers. I need you to demand that this country finally commit one act of Justice.
My attorney assures me the battle is not over until it is over—she will not back down. I am counting on you not to back down. My time is running out here, with no medical care. I do not fear death, returning to Mother Earth’s womb, but I do not want to die in lockdown.
In my solitude, my mind often returns to Raymond Yellow Thunder. The profound tragedy of Raymond’s murder sparked change in our people and showed them who the American Indian Movement is.
Raymond was a hard-working man. When he came into town to give money to his sisters, it was not enough for the Raye brothers to humiliate Raymond, strip him, and parade him around an American Legion Dance.
Raymond was shoved into the trunk of a car and died the next day. The Raye brothers were charged with 2nd- degree manslaughter and released with no bail.
Raymond’s sisters were distraught that even that small charge may not stick. The authorities would not release the autopsy report. They would not allow Raymand’s sisters to see his body. The sisters sought help from the BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs), the Tribal government, and private attorneys. In desperation, they turned to the American Indian Movement.
AIM members are Spirit Warriors, not merciless savages. We organized 200 carloads of people and demanded justice.
With dignity, we demanded justice.
Sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, and FBI agents agreed that serious charges should be filed against the Hares and that the local police chief should be dismissed.
Indigenous people started holding their heads up after that victory. They started speaking out against abuses by the BIA and Tribal government, and white ranchers profiting off their land.
We must not allow Raymond’s fate to befall others. My mother used to ask with dismay, “Why is it so bad to be Indian?” I find myself wondering why they hate us so.
We will triumph over the misguided hate of others. Never, ever, forget who you are. We are the First People. Mother Earth herself fires the blood that runs through our veins.
Protect each other, protect Mother Earth for future generations, and stand with oppressed peoples everywhere.
Remember that true strength does not reside in holding power over others. Strength comes from living out of a place of humility and integrity, inspiring others to find their unique strengths.
Oppression is rising, running like black mold through every facet of society. We must stand together and let society know that Indigenous lives are not cheap. The lives of our oppressed brothers and sisters are not cheap. All people are worthy of basic human dignity.
Colonialism has all but destroyed us. We must do nothing less than transform society into a place where human beings are not disposable.
Do not weep if I am not granted parole. Cry freedom. Coalesce yourselves, galvanize your relationships, establish alliances. In the power of our people, we find strength. Hold your head up high. It is not over, until it is over.
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. Doksha,
Leonard Peltier
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Beneath The Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024) is a collection of revolutionary essays, written by those who have been detained inside prison walls. Composed by the most structurally dispossessed people on earth, the prisoner class, these words illuminate the steps towards freedom.
Beneath the Mountain documents the struggle — beginning with slavery, genocide, and colonization up to our present day — and imagines a collective, anti-carceral future. These essays were handwritten first on scraps of paper, magazine covers, envelopes, toilet paper, or pages of bibles, scratched down with contraband pencils or the stubby cartridge of a ball-point pen; kites, careworn, copied and shared across tiers and now preserved in this collection for this and future generations. If they were dropped in the prison-controlled mail they were cloaked in prayers, navigating censorship and dustbins. They were very often smuggled out. These words mark resistance, fierce clarity, and speak to the hope of building the world we all deserve to live in.
"Beneath the Mountain reminds us that ancestors and rebels have resisted conquest and enslavement, building marronage against colonialism and genocide."
—Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency
Who stands beneath the mountain but prisoners of war? Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black have assembled a book of fire, each voice a flame in captivity...Whether writing from a place of fugivity, the prison camp, the city jail, the modern gulag or death row, these are our revolutionary thinkers, our critics and dreamers, our people. The people who move mountains. —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people’s understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography
These are the words each writer dreamed as they sought freedom and they need to be studied by people inside and read in every control unit/hole in every prison in America. We can send this book for you to anyone who you know who is currently living, struggling, and fighting
Who better to tell these stories than those who have lived them? Don’t be surprised with what you find within these pages: hope, solidarity, full faith towards the future, and most importantly, love.
Excerpt from the book:
"Revolutionary love speaks to the ways we protect, respect, and empower each other while standing up to state terror. Its presence is affirmed through these texts as a necessary component to help chase away fear and to encourage the solidarity and unity essential for organizing in dangerous times and places. Its absence portends tragedy. Revolutionary love does not stop the state from wanting to kill us, nor is it effective without strategy and tactics, but it is the might that fuels us to stand shoulder to shoulder with others regardless. Perhaps it can move mountains." —Jennifer Black & Mumia Abu-Jamal from the introduction to Beneath The Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader
Get the book at:
https://www.prisonradiostore.com/shop-2/beneath-the-mountain-an-anti-prison-reader-edited-by-mumia-abu-jamal-jennifer-black-city-lights-2024
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Boris Kagarlitsky is in Prison!
On February 13, the court overturned the previous decision on release and sent Boris Kagarlitsky to prison for five years.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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*Major Announcement*
Claudia De la Cruz wins
Peace and Freedom Party primary in California!
We have an exciting announcement. The votes are still being counted in California, but the Claudia-Karina “Vote Socialist” campaign has achieved a clear and irreversible lead in the Peace and Freedom Party primary. Based on the current count, Claudia has 46% of the vote compared to 40% for Cornel West. A significant majority of PFP’s newly elected Central Committee, which will formally choose the nominee at its August convention, have also pledged their support to the Claudia-Karina campaign.
We are excited to campaign in California now and expect Claudia De la Cruz to be the candidate on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party in November.
We achieved another big accomplishment this week - we’re officially on the ballot in Hawai’i! This comes after also petitioning to successfully gain ballot access in Utah. We are already petitioning in many other states. Each of these achievements is powered by the tremendous effort of our volunteers and grassroots organizers across the country. When we’re organized, people power can move mountains!
We need your help to keep the momentum going. Building a campaign like this takes time, energy, and money. We know that our class enemies — the billionaires, bankers, and CEO’s — put huge sums toward loyal politicians and other henchmen who defend their interests. They will use all the money and power at their disposal to stop movements like ours. As an independent, socialist party, our campaign is relying on contributions from the working class and people like you.
We call on each and every one of our supporters to set up a monthly or one-time donation to support this campaign to help it keep growing and reaching more people. A new socialist movement, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, is being built but it will only happen when we all pitch in.
The Claudia-Karina campaign calls to end all U.S. aid to Israel. End this government’s endless wars. We want jobs for all, with union representation and wages that let us live with dignity. Housing, healthcare, and education for all - without the lifelong debt. End the ruthless attacks on women, Black people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. These are just some of the demands that are resonating across the country. Help us take the next step:
Volunteer: https://votesocialist2024.com/volunteer
Donate: https://votesocialist2024.com/donate
See you in the streets,
Claudia & Karina
Don't Forget! Join our telegram channel for regular updates: https://t.me/+KtYBAKgX51JhNjMx
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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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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Daniel Hale UPDATE:
In February Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale was transferred from the oppressive maximum-security prison in Marion, Illinois to house confinement. We celebrate his release from Marion. He is laying low right now, recovering from nearly 3 years in prison. Thank goodness he is now being held under much more humane conditions and expected to complete his sentence in July of this year. www.StandWithDaniel Hale.org
More Info about Daniel:
“Drone Whistleblower Subjected To Harsh Confinement Finally Released From Prison”
https://thedissenter.org/drone-whistleblower-cmu-finally-released-from-prison/
“I was punished under the Espionage Act. Why wasn’t Joe Biden?” by Daniel Hale
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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) France’s Far-Left Firebrand: Ready to Govern?
Jean-Luc Mélenchon led his coalition to a narrow victory in elections. But even some of his allies bristle at the thought of the combative former Trotskyist becoming prime minister.
By Adam Nossiter, Reporting from Paris, July 9, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/world/europe/france-election-left-melenchon.html
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, right, after the second round of French legislative elections on Sunday. His tone and hard-line stance have given him a devoted, youthful following. Credit...Thomas Padilla/Associated Press
Emphatic, pugnacious and demanding: The style met the moment in the far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s speech to a fired-up crowd of thousands celebrating victory in Sunday’s French legislative elections.
Standing before supporters in the working-class 20th arrondissement of Paris, Mr. Mélenchon addressed himself to President Emmanuel Macron, and not politely. “The president should either resign or name one of us prime minister,” he declared.
Other leftist leaders have said that there should be “discussions” about the future of the country. Not this one. The crowd on Sunday roared.
Mr. Mélenchon’s tone and hard-line stance have given him a devoted, youthful following — the only leftist leader with one — and made him both adored and hated, marginalized and central in French politics. More French have a negative opinion of him, 73 percent, than they do of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally. But he also attracts large crowds who hang on his every word, as they did on Sunday.
Now he is necessarily at the center of the discussion of what might lie ahead for France: his brand of leftism or the milder form represented by his critics within the winning leftist coalition, the New Popular Front. His party, France Unbowed, won the most seats in Parliament, 75, in the coalition.
He has said the person chosen to lead the government should be himself. Unlike the other leaders on the left, he has come close to the presidency, nearly making it to the runoff two years ago. He told France 5 television on June 22 that “very obviously” he was ready to be prime minister. “I intend to govern this country,” he said.
It is a prospect that even members of Mr. Mélenchon’s own coalition, wary of what is viewed as his intermittent extremism, have vowed will never happen. “If he really wants to help the New Popular Front, he should put himself off to the side,” said François Hollande, the mild-mannered former president, a Socialist and now newly elected deputy, two weeks ago. “He should just shut up.”
He is not going to, and that is both a source of his support and his major problem with the others in the leftist coalition that almost immediately threatens to fracture despite its narrow victory on Sunday.
“The problem they will have, when the president looks for a new government, the others don’t want Mélenchon,” said Gérard Grunberg, a political scientist and research director emeritus at the National Center for Scientific Research. “He makes a real union of the left impossible. He’s very provocative. The left is totally disunited.”
For now, France is without a government, and it is not clear how it will get one. No party or alliance won a majority in the elections. Despite that fact, Mr. Mélenchon said on Sunday, “We’re not going to cancel a page or a comma of our program.”
That program is a redistributionist, egalitarian, hostile-to-capitalism economic vision that was inspired in large part from Mr. Mélenchon’s 2022 presidential platform.
On Sunday, he spoke of the coalition’s economic plans as if he owned them: raising the monthly after-tax minimum wage to 1,600 euros, from 1,398 euros (or about $1,700 from about $1,500) — “We’ll decree it,” Mr. Mélenchon said; freezing prices on food, energy and fuel; $162 billion in taxes on the rich. Other elements include payments to households for costs associated with their children’s education. The right, and Mr. Macron, have criticized it as adding an unbearable fiscal burden to an already deeply indebted country.
Mr. Mélenchon didn’t even have to bring up another signature element in the left’s platform: “Retirement at 60!” the youthful crowd began chanting spontaneously.
It is hard to imagine Mr. Macron appointing Mr. Mélenchon prime minister. They are not fans of each other. Mr. Macron has compared the leftist’s political movement to the far right National Rally. Mr. Mélenchon is happy to return the compliment.
“Under his baton, France has become a global example of police violence and government abuse of power, in a regime that is supposed to be democratic,” Mr. Mélenchon wrote of the president in his 2023 book, “We Can Do Better! Toward a Citizens’ Revolution,” which was not translated.
“Emmanuel Macron is dawdling, deliberately dragging his feet,” Mr. Mélenchon said Tuesday after arriving at the National Assembly. “He’s holding things up to hang on to power as long as he can.”
Mr. Mélenchon fights with the media, targeting individual reporters, professes hate for the United States and love for leftist Latin American dictators whose prolixity he shares. He has offered praise for authoritarian regimes in China, Cuba and Venezuela. “The Yankees represent everything I detest,” he told Le Monde in 2011. “A pretentious and arrogant empire, made up of ignoramuses, of pitiful leaders.”
A former Trotskyist, longtime senator from the Paris exurbs and onetime government minister under the pragmatic Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, Mr. Mélenchon is a reader of Faulkner who left the Socialists in 2008 to found his own party, moving further and further left.
He has refused to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization, has fought publicly with the leaders of Jewish organizations in France and is regularly accused of antisemitism, which he denies. He sometimes traffics insinuations that are stereotypes, once saying, for instance, that a Jewish former economy minister, Pierre Moscovici, didn’t “think French” but thought “international finance.”
“There is at least an ambiguity there that favors antisemitism,” Mr. Grunberg said.
Patrick Weil, another political scientist, agreed: “There’s a limit to Mélenchon. He’s considered by a big part of the population as dangerous and antisemitic.”
When Mr. Mélenchon said on Sunday that a top priority would be to “recognize as quickly as possible the state of Palestine,” the crowd erupted in roars of “Free Palestine.” As at other Mélenchon rallies, kaffiyehs and Palestinian flags were much in evidence.
One of his longtime heroes is Maximilien Robespierre, the most bloodstained of the French revolutionaries, and during the campaign he showed his own authoritarian side, purging five members of his France Unbowed party who had often disagreed with him. “Our democracy deserves better than you,” François Ruffin, an independent-minded deputy and party member who was not one of those purged, posted on social media.
Yet he has a formula — populist economics to appeal to hard-up youths, fierce hostility toward Israel to appeal to working-class French Muslims in the suburbs, anti-American and anti-Europe rhetoric, and a pro-immigrant stance — that proved to be a winner in this election. Many in the crowd on Sunday cheering him on were of Arab and African origin. “The French people are not a religion, not a skin color,” Mr. Mélenchon said.
He is the rare French politician who speaks approvingly of immigration, employing the term “creolization” to describe his country, as he did Sunday. “That is very positive,” Mr. Weil said. “He integrates into citizenship young people of North African and African origin. He says France has become a melting pot. It’s super important.”
It is one of the many things that has earned him supporters. In a pre-emptive move on Monday, one of France Unbowed’s leaders, Mathilde Panot, told the RTL radio station that Mr. Mélenchon was “absolutely not disqualified” to be prime minister.
There were echoes of his hero Robespierre, who presided over the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, in his rhetoric Sunday night.
“The government of the New Popular Front will have no other authority than what the people give it,” he said — a line that could have been written 230 years ago by Robespierre, a man who ceaselessly proclaimed that “the people” were the only source of government authority.
“It’s not the politics of the past that will continue,” Mr. Mélenchon said, “it’s the people who have surged up from all the working-class neighborhoods.”
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2) A departing Israeli military leader denounces Jewish settler violence in the West Bank.
By Ephrat Livni, July 9, 2024
"Israel seized control of the West Bank from Jordan in 1967 during a war with three Arab states, and Israeli civilians have since settled there with both the tacit and explicit approval of the government, living under Israeli civil law while their Palestinian neighbors are subject to Israeli military law."
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/07/09/world/israel-gaza-war-hamas
Evyatar, in the northern West Bank, is one of five settler outposts that Israel recently decided to give legal status. Settlements in the territory are widely considered to be illegal under international law. Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Amid rising tensions between Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and new moves by the Israeli government to expand its hold on the territory, an Israeli general on Monday issued a harsh rebuke of the government’s policies there and condemned rising “nationalist crime” by Jewish settlers.
Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuks, the outgoing chief of Israel’s Central Command, which is responsible for the country’s military forces in the West Bank, said at a departure ceremony that a “strong and functioning” Palestinian Authority was in Israel’s security interest.
The general’s statement appeared to be a swipe at Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who is himself a settler and who has been crippling the authority by withholding tax funds that Israel collects on its behalf in the roughly 40 percent of the West Bank that the authority administers.
General Fuks also expressed dismay over an increase in settler violence in the West Bank, which is home to about 2.7 million Palestinians and a Jewish settler population that has grown to well over 500,000. An extremist minority of violent settlers, he said, had been undermining Israel’s reputation internationally and sowing fear among Palestinians. “That, to me, is not Judaism,” he said. “At least not what I was raised on in my father’s and mother’s home. That is not the way of the Torah.”
Israel seized control of the West Bank from Jordan in 1967 during a war with three Arab states, and Israeli civilians have since settled there with both the tacit and explicit approval of the government, living under Israeli civil law while their Palestinian neighbors are subject to Israeli military law.
The international community largely views Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal, and many of them are illegal under Israeli law but are tolerated by the government. Many outposts that began as illegal under Israeli law have subsequently been legitimized by the government, and Palestinians have long argued that they are a creeping annexation that turns land needed for any independent Palestinian state into an unmanageable patchwork.
Last year, the United Nations reported that attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank had surged in the weeks following the Oct. 7 attacks that set off the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, with at least 115 killed, more than 2,000 injured and nearly 1,000 others forcibly displaced from their homes, citing violence and intimidation by Israeli forces and settlers.
General Fuks argued that terrifying the Palestinians living alongside Jews was “a dangerous mistake” and that the actions of violent Jewish settlers threatened Israel’s security.
But Mr. Smotrich has been vocal about wanting Israel to claim all of the West Bank. Last month, he struck a deal with ministers to release some money withheld from the Palestinian Authority in exchange for the legalization of five more Jewish outposts, and last week, the finance ministry released about $136 million.
Mr. Smotrich said in a post on social media that day that he was working with planning authorities on approving more than 5,000 additional housing units in the West Bank. “We’re building the good country and thwarting the creation of a Palestinian state,” he said.
Last month an Israeli ministry approved the largest seizure of West Bank land since the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians, claiming about five square miles in the Jordan Valley, according to Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settler activity. Israel has seized roughly nine square miles of the territory this year, making 2024 by far the peak year for appropriations, Peace Now said.
While settlers and ministers are defiant, their activities are a source of tension for Israel with other nations, including its ally the United States, at a time when it is increasingly isolated in the world over its conduct of the war in Gaza.
“Settlements continue to be counterproductive to a two-state solution,” John Kirby, the national security spokesman for the White House, said in a briefing with reporters on Monday. “We don’t support that.”
Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.
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3) Residents Flee as Israeli Troops Push Deeper Into Gaza City
By Hiba Yazbek and Iyad Abuheweila reporting from Jerusalem and Istanbul, July 9, 2024
A Palestinian family with their belongings in Gaza City on Monday. Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When the Israeli military started scaling back its campaign in Gaza City early this year, the city’s residents thought the worst was over, and some soon moved back to its shattered blocks from other parts of Gaza.
Now, a new Israeli ground offensive is expanding into large areas of the city and people are fleeing once again, with even fewer options for refuge than before.
The Israeli military reported Tuesday that it was pressing on for a second day into neighborhoods in the center and west of the city, targeting areas where it says Hamas militants have re-established themselves in the months since it turned its focus to other parts of Gaza.
The pattern has repeated itself across the territory, as critics say Israel has done little to fill the power vacuum left behind when its troops move on. The latest raid was coupled with evacuation orders for several neighborhoods in the city and areas west of it, and crowds of people were scrambling to get out.
Zainab al-Khaldi, a lawyer and researcher with UNICEF who was working at a school-turned-shelter in Al-Daraj, one of the areas that the Israeli military moved into on Monday, described a frantic effort to figure out which way to go after the shelter where she was staying came under artillery fire with no warning on Monday evening.
“People went crazy and started running in all directions,” she said in a phone interview. Ms. al-Khaldi said she saw more than 20 people who were wounded by the shelling, “and no one could reach them to help.”
The military was already conducting a separate operation in the city, in the Shajaiye neighborhood in the east, which entered its 12 day on Tuesday. The Israeli military said it was “engaged in close-quarters combat” above and below ground with Palestinian militants. It said it had killed more than 150 militants in Shajaiye and “located tunnel shafts and significant tunnel routes.” The United Nations office of humanitarian affairs said 60,000 to 80,000 people were displaced on the first night of that raid.
About 20 minutes after the shelter in Al-Daraj was hit, Ms. al-Khaldi said she and others there started getting text messages and automated phone calls from the Israeli military instructing them to evacuate to the west. People started to do so, but many felt trapped as fighting raged in several areas nearby.
“If we wanted to go east to Shajaiye, there’s bombing,” she said. “If we wanted to go toward Al-Ahli Hospital there’s bombing,” describing a facility where people have been sheltering in central Gaza City.
“There was danger in all places,” she said.
Ms. al-Khaldi and a crowd of others headed west “under an insane amount of fire from quadcopters,” she said, before she was able to find shelter in the home of some she knows.
“This was not our first displacement and it will not be our last,” she said.
Humanitarian groups have condemned the new Israeli incursions and evacuation orders. The U.N. Human Rights Office said in a statement on Monday that it was “appalled” by the orders issued to Gaza City residents, “many of whom have been forcibly displaced multiple times.” It said the orders were confusing and often told people to move to combat areas.
The main U.N. agency that assists Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, said in a post on X that the displacements meant that “people have to move back to destroyed areas despite the threat of unexploded ordnance.”
Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, reported that dozens of Palestinians were killed and wounded in the neighborhoods of Al-Daraj, Al-Tuffah and the Old City amid intense Israeli bombardment. The agency added that Israeli attacks had also targeted Deir al Balah, an area in central Gaza where many of those fleeing had headed.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said in a statement that all of its smaller clinics and emergency rooms in Gaza City were “out of service” because they were located in the evacuation zones.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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4) Why Weeds Are Worth Reconsidering
We’re told we should get rid of them. But one person’s menace can be another person’s medicine.
By Jennifer Kabat, July 9, 2024
"...in Britain property can be unsaleable if knotweed is found nearby. Lenders can refuse to back a mortgage. This weed, a relic of Europe’s collecting and conquest, now challenges the smooth functioning of capitalism."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/09/magazine/weeds-gardening.html
I love weeds because I am a bad gardener, and I am a bad gardener because I cannot weed. The work seems violent. What might I kill or cut off? I also cannot mow. Haphazard paths crisscross my yard, enough to avoid ticks, and the vegetable beds are full of plants most people would call weeds: docks, dandelions, broadleaf plantain and mallow.
Just how a plant is designated a weed and not an herb or a flower involves complex histories of medicine, food, language and migration. I realized that if I learned about these unwanted plants, I wouldn’t have to battle them. I began to study websites like the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (N.C.B.I.) for studies on weeds’ chemical and medicinal properties, or the Global Biodiversity Information Facility’s database of occurrences to see how and when plants have traveled. Take Achillea millefolium, yarrow, its name a hint; Achilles supposedly carried the herb to stanch his soldiers’ wounds. Its lacy-leaved stalks are linked by runners spreading among my patio’s paving stones. Broadleaf plantain, with its thick, veined leaves, hugs the ground as if to avoid attention. It too has been used on wounds and followed white settlers across North America and came to be called white man’s foot.
In the weeds I find a palimpsest of capitalism and colonialism, a living history of globalization. In the 1840s, a Bavarian doctor working for the Dutch East India Company shipped Japanese knotweed back to Europe. Soon after, he sent samples to Kew Gardens, and later the bush was described as “handsome in rough places.” It was eventually deployed to stabilize banks and ditches.
Knotweed grows down the street from me. In spring, the heart-shaped leaves don’t just line the roadside but pierce the road itself, puncturing the tarmac. The doctor who first shipped it back noted the roots’ use in Japanese and Chinese medicine, and now they’re being investigated as a possible cure for Lyme disease. The tender shoots taste of rhubarb and asparagus. I feel a perverse glee eating them. Termed an “escaped ornamental,” knotweed, I think, defies the orientalism of its original export. Today, even when so much wealth is held in real estate, in Britain property can be unsaleable if knotweed is found nearby. Lenders can refuse to back a mortgage. This weed, a relic of Europe’s collecting and conquest, now challenges the smooth functioning of capitalism.
A Mohawk artist and language educator wrote to me about these weeds I love, “In spite of having potential medicinal properties, they have destroyed our ability to access our medicinal plants, to practice our ceremonies, to practice our material culture.” The plants, she went on, have as much impact “as any human invasion.” She’s right — many were brought here by settlers to make the land more familiar or arrived hidden among grains used in farming. One such plant, the one I struggle with, is garlic mustard.
It’s one of the year’s earliest wild edibles. The flavor is in the name, and it’s easy to guess why it was brought to the United States. Its foliage rises from the leaf litter like a bouquet, a fistful of green-green-green suggesting spring itself. I eat them and hate them, not for the taste (they are tasty) but because they supplant the ephemerals: trilliums that can take nearly a decade to reach maturity, or jack-in-the-pulpit that can change sex in middle age, and the trout lilies whose colonies can survive hundreds of years. Garlic mustard is allelopathic, meaning it can produce an herbicide that stunts the growth of these flowers I adore. Trying to find a way to appreciate the plant, I started picking its blooms. A bouquet of them sits on my desk, the delicate white petals nodding in my direction. I watch, beguiled, as they transform into thrusting green seed heads that look like something Walt Whitman would conjure. I stare at the siliques, as the seedpods are called — the word itself sounds erotic — and turn to them for a different model for how to be in the world.
Whitman writes of weeds in “Leaves of Grass.” They come just after the loafing and the sex. He talks of mullein and pokeweed: “Limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the fields.” He goes on about grasses. “Tenderly will I use you,” he professes to their blades. He uses them as a metaphor for boundlessness, for immensity, for love. Like Whitman, I turn to them for their multiplicity, for how they exist and reproduce. Weeds can be asexual, bisexual, clonal. They thwart notions of binary sexuality. Pigweeds can self-pollinate. Other weeds propagate by extending a leaf, stalk or stolon to spread. They refuse to stay in the boxes we create for them. This is true of all plants, but especially for the ones we call weeds. In them I see intimations of what’s possible and a promiscuity that flouts the strictures that colonialism and capitalism have built.
The first time the G.B.I.F. database identifies garlic mustard in the United States is June 1, 1870, a few blocks from what is now Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I think of Whitman living and writing there, walking in the park 15 years after “Leaves of Grass” was first published. Did he pass the plant? What did he see? I know he was depressed that year. I imagine his pleasure, though, watching the bounding green seed heads, sexy and irrepressible. Now in early June in the park, along the road in the shade, you too might find the siliques waving in the breeze.
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5) Forces on Both Left and Right Battle for Europe’s Political Soul
A coarsening of public discourse and contempt for mainstream parties have politicians on both sides denouncing what they say are extreme positions by their opponents, analysts say.
By Andrew Higgins, July 10, 2024,
Andrew Higgins has reported on politics across Western and Eastern Europe for more than three decades.
Celebrating France’s election results in Paris on Sunday. The leftist coalition won the most seats in the lower chamber of Parliament, but analysts fear political gridlock. Credit...Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times
Primed to celebrate victory but left explaining why his party finished third, the leader of France’s hard-right National Rally blamed Sunday’s surprise election result on the “caricature” of his party as extremist. That “disinformation,” he said, handed victory to “formations of the extreme left.”
The speech to glum supporters on election night by Jordan Bardella, leader of the nationalist party formerly known as the National Front, captured a Europe-wide trend: intense political polarization in which each side denounces the other as “extremist.”
Europe is far from what the British historian Eric Hobsbawm termed the “age of extremes” in the 20th century, when the continent succumbed to the twin extremist ideologies of fascism and communism. There are no violent street battles in Berlin, Paris or Vienna as there were before and sometimes after World War II between rival camps, or urban terror campaigns like those in the 1970s and ’80s by the would-be left-wing revolutionaries of Germany’s Red Army Faction and France’s Direct Action.
Instead, today’s battles are mostly confined to hurling insults across a widening and increasingly poisonous political divide, though an assassination attempt in May against the prime minister of Slovakia showed that the ghosts of past violence were still lurking.
“Don’t underestimate style. It often gives the true message. Substance in democracy is in the style — in the unwritten rules of behavior,” said Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher who describes himself as a “moderately conservative communist.”
The main divide is no longer defined by ideology. Both ends of the political spectrum have much in common in their economic and foreign policy views, including a distrust of NATO and sympathy for Russia, and in their shared contempt for establishment “elites” they see as masters of a self-serving political center.
The most divisive issue is whether nationalism offers salvation from the shocks of an increasingly interconnected world, such as immigration and economic dislocation, or a threat to liberty and even to democracy. In this political world, there are no longer opponents, only enemies to be reviled as extremist.
Mr. Zizek lamented that on both the left and right when he said, “Everyone is calling people they don’t agree with extremist.”
“We are in sad and difficult times and this label is very dangerous,” he went on. “Democracy means being open to difference. It presupposes that we share an understanding of basic values and certain basic manners.”
Whether this polarization amounts to a threat is a matter of debate. Neither the raucous right nor the anti-system strain of the left represented by France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose grouping of parties got the most seats on Sunday, has the support to be a truly disruptive force where institutions are strong. And while the hard right has made more gains in Europe overall, it too has stumbled. But the more political camps dig in, scorning previously accepted norms, the more the center erodes and the more democracy is tested.
Wojciech Przybylski, president of Res Publica Foundation, a research group in Warsaw, said there had been a coarsening of political discourse and a growing contempt on both ends of the spectrum for mainstream forces.
That, he said, reminded him of Poland between the world wars, when the far left and the far right rallied, sometimes violently, against the central government.
Today, he said, both “are united against globalization and claim to be defending the so-called average man against elites.”
A French historian, Jacques Julliard, has described this as the “dangerous ideology of the common man,” a political philosophy promoted by Guglielmo Giannini, a postwar Italian populist whose motto was “Down with everyone!”
Europe’s nationalist parties, which have soared in popularity over the last decade, have had mixed success in recent years converting their rock-the-boat, anti-elitist message into enduring power.
Law and Justice, a conservative Polish party that traffics in conspiracy theories involving Germany and vows to defend what it sees as traditional Christian values, lost power in an October election. But just a month later in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, a provocateur with a history of antipathy toward immigrants and Islam, won the most votes in a general election.
In June elections for the European Parliament, the right-wing Alternative for Germany party won a record number of votes, outperforming each of the three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition.
Perhaps the most vivid example of Europe’s polarization is Slovakia, where Prime Minister Robert Fico, a shape-shifting populist who started on the left before embracing nationalist messaging, returned to power in September after a thin election victory. In May, he narrowly survived an assassination attempt by a gunman whom officials initially called a “lone wolf” but who was later described by Mr. Fico as a “messenger of evil and political hatred” from his left-wing opponents.
The French vote on Sunday was met with relief by Europe’s mainstream politicians, who worried that victory for the National Rally would have bolstered the so far lonely calls by Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary for an end to military aid for Ukraine.
Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, responded on social media to the result: “In Paris enthusiasm, in Moscow disappointment, in Kyiv relief. Enough to be happy in Warsaw.”
Nationalist parties have, to varying degrees, tried to distance themselves from their darker pasts. The party of Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, traces its roots to the postwar wreckage of Italy’s experiment with fascism under Mussolini. Marine le Pen’s National Rally, in its earlier incarnations, embraced Holocaust deniers and reactionary veterans of France’s colonial wars.
They have more recently disavowed connections to extremism and sought, largely successfully, particularly in Ms. Meloni’s case, to present themselves as modern, pragmatic politicians. Individual supporters have been caught on camera voicing openly racist and xenophobic views, but they have been strongly rejected by party leaders.
Before World War II, political division fed off hyperinflation and mass unemployment — one in three Germans was jobless. By comparison, Europeans today are in many ways remarkably comfortable and well cared for.
Their welfare systems are buckling but still provide health care and other services far beyond what the state offers in the United States and other countries. Economic growth is picking up again after several years of stagnation.
Trust in democracy, however, has fallen steadily in recent years in Europe and in other economically advanced parts of the world.
A survey this year by the Pew Research Institute found that people in high-income democracies, including France, have since 2021 become increasingly frustrated with the way the systems work in their countries.
Votes now are often about bucking the establishment, whatever form that takes.
In Britain, the desire for change last week handed the Labour Party, out of power for 14 years, a thumping election victory against a divided and discredited Conservative Party. But Labour’s victory in Britain was paired with a strong electoral showing by the Reform party of Nigel Farage, a driving force behind Britain’s exit from the European Union.
The French left’s triumph on Sunday was in large measure the result of what Mr. Bardella, the National Rally leader, denounced as an “alliance against nature” between Mr. Macron and leftists. And no party won a majority, with seats pretty closely split.
Few analysts see the election results in Britain and France as evidence of a resurgence by the left. Shut out of power for years, leftist parties in most countries have ditched past commitments to socialist economic policies like the nationalization of banks and industry, and differ little from the center-right.
“There is clear polarization, but I see no sign the left is rising again,” said Mr. Przybylski, the researcher in Warsaw.
The National Rally fell short of expectations, but it and many other hard-right European parties, he added, “do better and better with each election. They are far from running the show but they get more and more votes.”
Europe’s political struggles, mostly bereft of debate about concrete policies and dominated by eye-catching stunts, are in many places viewed as a “joke and a circus,” Mr. Zizek, the philosopher, said.
An extreme example of that was the election victory in European Parliament elections last month of a 24-year-old prankster in Cyprus with no political experience or policy proposals. He promoted himself as a “professional mistake maker” and won a seat after a campaign that featured his spending a week in a coffin.
“His point was that politics is a farce,” Mr. Zizek said. “But global mistrust of politics is a tragedy, especially when it reaches the young.”
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6) Deadly Israeli Strike Was 4th in Recent Days to Hit School Buildings in Gaza, U.N. Says
By Raja Abdulrahim reporting from Jerusalem, July 10, 2024
Praying next to the bodies of those killed in an Israeli strike that hit the entrance of a school housing displaced people in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
An Israeli strike that Gazan authorities say killed at least 27 people at a school-turned-shelter was the fourth in four days that hit or damaged a school building in Gaza, the head of the main U.N. agency that helps Palestinians said Wednesday.
The strike, which the Gaza Ministry of Health says wounded more than 50 people, hit the entrance of Al Awda School on the outskirts of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
Since Israel began its punishing military offensive in Gaza more than nine months ago, two-thirds of U.N.-run school facilities in the territory have been hit, with some bombed out and many severely damaged, Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the U.N. agency, UNRWA, wrote on social media Wednesday.
“Schools have gone from safe places of education & hope for children to overcrowded shelters and often ending up a place of death & misery,” he said.
The Israeli military said that the strike had targeted a Hamas member who took part in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that ignited the war. It did not release details on the identity of the Hamas member or whether the person had been killed. The military said it was “looking into reports that civilians were harmed.”
School buildings have become critical shelters for Palestinians in Gaza since Israeli bombardment and ground fighting have forced much of the territory’s 2.2 million residents to flee their homes. The Israeli military has claimed that militants are using such shelters and other civilian infrastructure to hide themselves and their activities.
Hamas has used urban areas in Gaza to conceal its operations, running tunnels under neighborhoods and holding hostages in city centers. The group’s members, who are from Gaza, have long lived among the civilian population. Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, has said that the group tries to keep Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way. Hamas leaders have said that the Israeli military also has headquarters, offices and soldiers in civilian areas.
Most of those injured or killed in the strike on Tuesday were taken to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in ambulances, private vehicles and donkey carts.
“There were 56 wounded and most of them were children and women,” said Dr. Mohammed Saqer, director general of nursing at Nasser, in a phone interview on Wednesday. “And unfortunately nearly 10 cases of amputation among them; hands and feet completely blown off.”
The state of the bodies brought to Nasser made it difficult to determine the number and identities of the dead, he said.
The influx of traumatic injuries came at a time when the few still-functioning hospitals in the Gaza Strip are struggling to keep operating amid Israeli strikes and raids and a lack of medicine, medical equipment and reliable power. “Many of our medical staff have been detained, many have been killed and many have had to leave Gaza,” Dr. Saqer said.
There is a shortage, too, of hospital beds, and most of the airstrike victims were treated on the floors of wards or in the hallways, he said.
Video shared by Al Jazeera and verified by The New York Times showed the moment of the strike: As some boys play soccer in the school courtyard and others watch, a large explosion is heard. A man yells, “Run away, run away, Al Awda has been targeted.”
The person shooting the video runs toward the entrance of the school, and the camera pans across a scene of devastation. Bodies are on the ground amid debris, and there is a cacophony of screams. “Oh God,” someone yells.
Another video shot by Reuters showed a weapon fragment at the site of the strike. Two weapons experts — Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, and Patrick Senft, a weapons expert at the consulting firm Armament Research Services — identified the fragment as a part of a small-diameter bomb, also known as a GBU-39.
The precision-guided bomb, which is U.S.-made, weighs about 250 pounds, and is increasingly the weapon of choice for the Israeli military. Two GBU-39s were used in a deadly strike on a tent camp in Rafah on May 26.
In Gaza, such bombs “are often used to target specific floors in buildings, penetrating through the roof before detonating,” Mr. Ball said.
Although smaller in explosive power than the 2,000-pound bombs that have been used elsewhere in Gaza, the bombs “can still cause significant injury and death, especially when used in areas where there is little to no protection for people from blast and fragmentation effects, such as a street, or area with just tents,” he said.
Malachy Browne, Sanjana Varghese and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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7) Israel tells civilians to leave Gaza City, saying it will remain a ‘dangerous combat zone.’
By Aaron Boxerman reporting from Jerusalem, July 10, 2024
Palestinians making their way through a devastated part of the Shajaiye neighborhood in Gaza City on Wednesday. Credit...Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters
The Israeli military called on Palestinians in Gaza City to move south into central Gaza on Wednesday through four “safe corridors,” indicating that its ground operations against what it has described as a renewed Hamas insurgency could escalate after more than nine months of war.
“Gaza City will remain a dangerous combat zone,” the Israeli military said in a statement published on social media.
Israel has already issued orders for Palestinians to leave specific parts of Gaza City and it was not clear if its latest statement amounted to an expansion of those calls. But the notice raised new fears among residents, many of whom have been displaced multiple times.
An Israeli military spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on whether the military was evacuating the entire city. It said in its statement that Palestinians who left Gaza City through the approved routes would get out “quickly and without inspection.”
Israeli troops have re-entered Gaza City in recent days, in the latest instance of Israeli forces returning to fight in places they had secured earlier and then withdrew. The Israeli military has repeatedly returned to areas across the Gaza Strip in an attempt to suppress Hamas fighters, who have fought a dogged guerrilla war. Analysts have said Israel’s unwillingness to install an alternative administration in Gaza has created a power vacuum, allowing Hamas to regroup.
In January, the Israeli military dialed back the intensity of its military campaign in Gaza City and the rest of the north. Since then, Israeli forces have carried out a series of targeted raids in the area, and in March its troops raided Al-Shifa hospital for a second time, killing nearly 200 people it called “terrorists” and leaving devastation behind after extended gun battles with Palestinian militants.
It is not clear how many Hamas fighters remain in Gaza City. Israeli forces launched an operation in the Shajaiye neighborhood late last month, and the fighting has since expanded to encompass other parts of the city: Tel al-Hawa, where Israeli forces stormed a United Nations compound that the military said had taken over by militants, as well as the neighborhoods of Al-Daraj and Tuffah.
In statements on social media, Hamas has said over the past few days that its forces were fighting Israeli troops in Shajaiye and Tel al-Hawa. In Shajaiye alone, Israel claims its troops have eliminated “more than 150 terrorists” over the past week and have destroyed six underground tunnels.
Hamas has used urban areas in Gaza to conceal its operations, running tunnels under neighborhoods and holding hostages in city centers. The group’s members, who are from Gaza, have long lived among the civilian population.
Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, has said that the group tries to keep Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way, but Israeli operations in Gaza have left little room to maneuver.
Israel first ordered hundreds of thousands of Gazans in the northern part of the enclave to move south in mid-October, just days after the Hamas-led attack that killed 1,200 in Israel and saw 250 taken hostage. Hundreds of thousands remained, however, and others joined them after a weeklong truce in November allowed some to return to their homes in the north.
In May, an estimated 200,000 people were still in northern Gaza, according to UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinians. But the new wave of Israeli military operations has forced tens of thousands from their homes, leaving the current tally unclear.
Many have been already been displaced multiple times, seeking shelter in schools and relatives’ homes, only to be forced to flee the fighting yet again.
“People continue to flee and be on the run in search for safety that they never find,” said Juliette Touma, an UNRWA spokeswoman, on Wednesday. “Gaza has become an exodus on repeat.”
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8) ‘We Want Our Real Lives Back’: For Gazans, Egypt Is Safe, but It’s Not Home
Cairo now houses tens of thousands of Palestinians who fled the war in Gaza, with few job prospects, dwindling savings and no way to put their children in the local public schools.
By Vivian Yee, Photographs by Fatma Fahmy, Reporting from Cairo, July 11, 2024
Pictures of Ms. al-Bashti’s destroyed house in Gaza.
In Gaza, they owned olive trees, flower gardens, factories, stores and homes they had built and tended for decades. They had memories bound up in family photos, in knickknacks, in embroidered shawls. They had cars to drive, classes to attend, the beach minutes away.
Now, in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have fled, they find themselves in rented apartments overlooking concrete. They have few job prospects, dwindling savings and no schools for the children — a new world they know is safe, but hardly feels like a future.
Without legal status in Egypt or clarity about when Gaza might again offer a semblance of normal life, most are stuck: unable to build lives, try their luck in a third country or plan on returning home.
Physically, the Palestinians are in Egypt. Mentally, they are holding on to the memory of a Gaza that no longer exists.
“We have this feeling that this is just a temporary period in our lives,” said Nahla al-Bashti, 60, who arrived in Egypt with her family from Gaza in December. Desperate for income, she recently began selling pomegranate molasses and other Palestinian foods from her tiny rented kitchen, missing all the while the fruit trees in her old yard.
“We want our real lives back,” she said. “I feel suffocated.”
But just how temporary this period is remains an open question. For Gazans, Egypt is unstable ground — a country that proclaims support for the Palestinian cause and denounces the war in Gaza, but whose wariness of Hamas has led it, alongside Israel, to blockade the impoverished territory for 17 years.
Though Egypt has been a crucial conduit for humanitarian aid to Gaza during the war, officials adamantly oppose allowing in large numbers of Palestinian refugees, warning that they could threaten national security and that emptying Gaza of its people would torpedo the prospect of a future Palestinian state.
Yet as many as 100,000 Gazans have managed to cross, the Palestinian ambassador in Cairo has said, whether through connections, by paying unofficial brokers, or as one of the badly wounded or severely ill people the Egyptian government has sponsored for treatment.
When she and her family stepped over the border, Shereen Sabbah, 25, a translator from Gaza City, said she felt sick at leaving Gaza. They were about to be homeless, friendless and jobless.
“It’s like being eaten from the inside,” said Ms. Sabbah, whose family paid to escape Gaza using private donations.
The house Ms. Sabbah and her sisters grew up in was destroyed, along with the olive and citrus groves around it. So was her brother-in-law’s business, a car-repair garage, she said. Their savings were nearly gone. Their parents and other siblings were still dodging bombs in Gaza.
“You basically have no future, no past, nothing,” said Ms. Sabbah’s sister, Fatma Shaban, 31.
Everything in Egypt felt strange.
The Palestinians had spent so long without meat, fruit or vegetables, without electricity, without showers. The abundance of Egypt, the safety of it, came as a shock.
But they could not forget that their families in Gaza had none of it.
“We couldn’t comprehend the war we went through, where our only concern was finding food and surviving. And then we were in another world where people were living normal lives,” said Husam al-Batniji, 28, an architect who fled Gaza for Cairo along with his family. “And we asked, why can’t we live a normal life, too?”
The Palestinians’ emotional unmooring is mirrored by their legal limbo in Egypt.
Once the 45-day tourist visa most arrivals receive expires, Palestinians cannot obtain the residency papers to open bank accounts and businesses, apply for visas to other countries or enroll their children in Egyptian public schools.
Nor can they officially register with the United Nations agency that assists refugees in Egypt from Syria, Sudan and elsewhere. Egypt has not given consent for it to take on Palestinians, said Rula Amin, an agency spokeswoman.
The U.N. agency that supports Palestinians lacks a legal mandate to operate in Egypt. Since the current war began, no countries have accepted large numbers of Palestinians for permanent resettlement or refuge.
Arab countries fear Israel will try to turn the Gazans’ exile into a permanent expulsion, generating political and security complications and threatening future Palestinian statehood. For similar reasons, Western countries publicly say Gazans should be able to stay in Gaza and anti-immigrant sentiment at home could also make it difficult to take in large numbers.
In Egypt’s case, the government is nervous that Gazans displaced to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, which borders Gaza and Israel, will become radicalized. The fear is that they could join existing Sinai militant groups that have vexed Egypt for years or launch attacks on Israel from Egyptian soil.
In Cairo, Palestinians say, they feel daunted by the hourslong commutes across the megacity and too big for the rented rooms they cannot stop comparing to their houses. They left those homes thinking they would soon be back. Now they own almost nothing except a little clothing and the phones they check, almost incessantly, to make sure their families back in Gaza are still alive.
Ms. al-Bashti kept scrutinizing photos of her old neighborhood on the news, frantic. Was the water tank still there? Then their house must be OK, she kept telling herself, until relatives sent her a photo of the hill of rubble it had become.
“When I buy something here, I say, ‘Oh, I’ll use it in my garden,’” she said, “and then I remember — we have no more garden.”
The losses swell from there.
Dozens of the al-Batnijis’ relatives have been killed in the war, according to family members. They left behind a jewelry factory and store and multigenerational homes that Mr. al-Batniji’s father had spent a quarter-century building.
In Egypt, his father has no capital to open a factory and no heart to start anew, Mr. al-Batniji said. So they scratch out a living however they can, his brother peddling used clothes, Mr. al-Batniji freelancing online for architecture firms.
Through Egyptian volunteers, Ms. Shaban got an offer from an Egyptian company. But after her first, bewildering 2.5-hour bus commute, she quit: It was too far, and her traumatized children needed her at home, she said.
Another stranger found her work translating videos for a professor’s research, while her sister, Ms. Sabbah, works remotely translating for a Canadian immigration agency. But a third sister, Ola, a photographer, cannot find work.
Ms. Shaban’s 12-year-old and 10-year-old are set to start online classes with a West Bank school. But with the family’s one laptop needed for the adults’ jobs, the children will be catching up on eight months of missed education from their parents’ phones.
Recognizing how anxious parents are about their children’s educations, Egyptian volunteers recently opened a learning center in Cairo for about 350 children who fled Gaza during the war. The center’s founder, Israa Ali, realized early on that they needed to design the classes with trauma in mind, and to keep therapists on hand.
One young girl broke down about her family — mostly dead or missing — while drawing, Ms. Ali said. Other children leap from their seats mid-class, seized by the need to make sure their siblings are safe.
“In one split second, they can get triggered by anything,” Ms. Ali said. “You will never understand that you’re in the same room as a child who got pulled out of the rubble and in that process, lost three of their siblings and their parents.”
Money is too tight, and Ms. Shaban and her husband too occupied with thoughts of Gaza, for them to give the kids the outings they beg for. The one time she took them to the movies, she said, they shot under their seats as soon as the trailers started, blasting them with sound. For a moment, her own breath froze.
The Palestinians in Egypt debate all the time whether to stay or go back. If they do, will there be schools? Or water, sewage, electricity?
Fatma Shaban and Ola Sabbah wanted to seek stability in another country, perhaps in the Gulf, though they have no way of applying for visas. Someday, they still hope to return.
“The problem is not with Gaza — I love Gaza. The problem is with the future of my children,” Ms. Shaban said. “How long will it take to rebuild Gaza? Years, decades, months? You don’t know.”
But for Shereen Sabbah, the answer was clear.
“This place, it’s safe, but it’s not home to me,” she said. “Because home is Gaza to me.”
Emad Mekay contributed reporting.
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9) France Is Busing Homeless Immigrants Out of Paris Before the Olympics
The government promised housing elsewhere. We followed the buses and found a desperate situation.
By Sarah Hurtes and Ségolène Le Stradic, July 11, 2024
Sarah Hurtes and Ségolène Le Stradic visited street camps, abandoned buildings and emergency shelters in Paris and Orléans, France. They spoke to dozens of homeless people, government officials and emergency housing providers.
“President Emmanuel Macron of France has promised that the Olympic Games will showcase the country’s grandeur. But the Olympic Village was built in one of Paris’s poorest suburbs, where thousands of people live in street encampments, shelters or abandoned buildings. Around the city over the past year, the police and courts have evicted roughly 5,000 people, most of them single men, according to Christophe Noël du Payrat, a senior government official in Paris.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/world/europe/france-is-busing-homeless-immigrants-out-of-paris-before-the-olympics.html
The French government has put thousands of homeless immigrants on buses and sent them out of Paris ahead of the Olympics. The immigrants said they were promised housing elsewhere, only to end up living on unfamiliar streets far from home or flagged for deportation.
President Emmanuel Macron of France has promised that the Olympic Games will showcase the country’s grandeur. But the Olympic Village was built in one of Paris’s poorest suburbs, where thousands of people live in street encampments, shelters or abandoned buildings.
Around the city over the past year, the police and courts have evicted roughly 5,000 people, most of them single men, according to Christophe Noël du Payrat, a senior government official in Paris. City officials encourage them to board buses to cities like Lyon or Marseille.
“We were expelled because of the Olympic Games,” said Mohamed Ibrahim, from Chad, who was evicted from an abandoned cement factory near the Olympic Village. He moved to a vacant building south of Paris, from which the police evicted residents in April. A bus drove them two hours southwest to a town outside Orléans.
“They give you a random ticket,” said Oumar Alamine, from the Central African Republic, who was on that bus. “If it’s a ticket to Orléans, you go to Orléans.”
Officials with Mr. Macron’s government declined to comment. But they have said that this is a voluntary program intended to alleviate Paris’s emergency housing shortage.
We followed the trail from Paris, to see how the program works.
Why is Macron busing people?
There is not enough shelter space for the 100,000 homeless people who live in and around Paris — half the total in France — so the government set up 10 temporary shelters across the country last year.
The government denies that the busing is connected to the Olympics. But we obtained an email, which was first reported by the newspaper L’Équipe, in which a government housing official said the goal was to “identify people on the street in sites near Olympic venues” and move them before the Games.
The heart of the Olympics is Seine-Saint-Denis, where roughly one in three people are immigrants — the highest percentage in the country. The government has spent billions redeveloping the area.
How does the program work?
The police increased raids on homeless camps and abandoned buildings last year. Working with city officials, they evicted people and said they would help relocate them.
“They promised us housing and social help,” said Yussuf Ahmed, from Sudan, who cleans airplanes at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Many did not know that they were entering a government program to screen them for potential asylum — and potentially deport them. The program has existed for years but the evictions have brought in thousands of new people, many of whom are ineligible for asylum.
Mr. Ahmed, for instance, has refugee status and could not benefit from the program. But several people told us they thought they had no choice but to get on the bus.
“Police officers came,” Mr. Alamine said. “They surrounded us.”
Where do people end up?
After arriving in their new cities, homeless people live in shelters for up to three weeks and are screened for asylum eligibility.
Those who are eligible can receive long-term housing while they apply for asylum. But about 60 percent of people in the temporary shelters do not get long-term housing.
Several have been given deportation orders, which is why some lawyers urge people not to get on the buses and take their chances on the streets. “It’s an antechamber to deportation,” said Emmanuel Pereira, a lawyer working near Paris.
The remaining immigrants are typically evicted once more. Emergency housing is in short supply, so most people soon end up homeless again in a new city.
City officials outside Paris told us that they had not been consulted about the program.
“There’s no money to find places for the homeless in Marseille, but there is money to bring homeless people from Paris?” said Audrey Garino, deputy mayor of Marseille.
What happens next?
We headed a few hours southwest of Paris to find out.
The Orléans shelter is outside that city in a gray three-story hotel. When we arrived, we found no staff members or social workers. Rooms are small, with two single beds side by side.
The men we met had left their jobs in Paris and boarded a bus hoping for long-term housing and social services.
“We arrived and there was nothing,” Mr. Ahmed said. “They lied to get us on the bus.”
After a few weeks, they were told to leave: No local shelter could house them.
Mr. Ahmed, desperate to keep his airport job, returned to Paris. The building where he had once lived was now off limits, protected by security guards. He has found another abandoned building, for now.
Mr. Alamine and Mr. Ibrahim decided to stay. Most days, they make the hourlong walk to Orléans in search of work.
The keys to their room in the shelter no longer work so they broke in through the windows.
They are squatters once again.
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10) Many in Gaza City Ignore Israel’s Calls to Leave
By Raja Abdulrahim reporting from Jerusalem, July 11, 2024
Destroyed buildings in the neighborhood of Shajaiye, in Gaza City, on Thursday. Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Through more than nine months of war in Gaza, Ahmed Sidu and his family have chosen to stay in Gaza City, their hometown, despite the Israeli military’s repeated orders to leave, and the bombardment and ground combat that have devastated large swaths of the city.
So when the military dropped new leaflets on Wednesday instructing people to evacuate, the family’s decision was already made.
“We’re not leaving,” said Mr. Sidu, 31, in a phone interview on Thursday.
The fliers, dropped over parts of the city by Israeli warplanes and posted on social media, did not directly call on people to leave their homes and shelters, but laid out four “safe corridors” for them to flee south to central Gaza “quickly and without inspection.”
“Gaza City will remain a dangerous combat zone,” the fliers warned.
But few appeared to be heeding the warning. In interviews, people in the city said they had decided to stay in their homes or in places where they have been sheltering — including relatives’ homes, hospitals and schools — fearing the potential dangers from Israeli forces on the evacuation routes, and knowing there is no safety in the south.
The United Nations has said repeatedly that the Israeli offensive in Gaza has left nowhere safe. Palestinians there have been forced to flee multiple times amid shifting orders and flare-ups in fighting.
“People have been steadfast now for nearly 270 days, and they won’t be displaced,” even if Israel occupies all of Gaza, Mr. Sidu said. “In my family we agreed that no one will be displaced, and this is how families are in Gaza, despite the lack of water, food and all life’s necessities.”
“The fact is people are being killed wherever we are, either in the north or in the south,” he added.
The United Nations estimates that there are now some 300,000 people in northern Gaza, which includes Gaza City. Since last month, Israeli forces have launched offensives on several parts of the city, saying they were returning to fight remnants of Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups. Israeli forces have been going back to parts of Gaza that they had previously left, especially in the north, which they invaded in October, as Hamas regroups. Their return has sparked new exoduses from those areas.
“People are on the run everywhere,” said Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, the United Nations agency that helps Palestinians. “It’s probably one of the toughest decisions in life that one can make to leave everything behind.”
Israel first ordered hundreds of thousands of Gazans in the northern part of the territory to flee south in mid-October, a week after the Hamas-led attack on Israel.
Naheel Mehanna, a 41-year-old writer from Gaza City, saw the new leaflets on social media but not in her neighborhood. The Israeli military also calls people multiple times a day with a recorded message warning them to flee south, she said.
“I know this is a message of fear; they want to terrify us to leave,” Ms. Mehanna said. “This is why they continue to call people over the phone, because no one is listening to them, no one is leaving.”
Ms. Mehanna said her friends who fled to the south earlier in the war continue to warn her against leaving Gaza City. “They say it is not safe there at all,” she said.
Gazans also don’t trust assurances by the Israeli military that the evacuation routes are safe. Israeli forces have detained thousands of Gazans, including men of all ages, women and children. Many were stopped as they fled their neighborhoods with their families after the military ordered them to leave.
“There is no opportunity for people to flee south,” said Amani Zanin, 30, who is staying with her parents and numerous aunts and uncles in Gaza City. “The road is not safe.”
The extended family has already been displaced multiple times in northern Gaza and is now sheltering in a school building.
The trip south has to be made on foot, as the Israeli military doesn’t allow vehicles on part of the route. That could take up to four hours, and all that walking in the summer heat would be too much for some of her older relatives.
“It is difficult for us to go south,” Ms. Zanin said. “We heard about leaving, but we haven’t seen anyone who has left.”
Abu Bakr Bashir and Ameera Harouda contributed reporting.
Other News:
· Doctors Without Borders closes its last facility in north Gaza, and other news. Doctors Without Borders temporarily closed its last health facility in north Gaza after the Israeli military issued an evacuation order for parts of Gaza City and the area came under heavy fire, the organization said on Wednesday evening. It said the evacuation orders and destruction of health facilities had left people in northern Gaza with very few options for health care. The Israeli military on Wednesday urged Palestinians across Gaza City to evacuate to the south, saying the city would “remain a dangerous combat zone.”
· Israel has urged the U.N. agency in charge of aid for Palestinians to fire 100 of its workers whom Israeli officials accuse of being affiliated with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the request in a July 4 letter to Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the agency, known as UNRWA. The letter listed the names and identification numbers of the workers and said the list might be expanded soon. UNRWA employs 13,000 people in Gaza and runs schools, clinics and social services offices.
· The top White House official for Middle East affairs met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in Israel on Wednesday. In a statement, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said he and the official, Brett McGurk, held discussions about negotiations on a cease-fire and hostage release deal, during which the Israeli leader said he was committed to the process “as long as Israel’s red lines are preserved.” Mr. Netanyahu has long insisted that the war in Gaza must continue until Israel has destroyed Hamas’s military and governing abilities. Mr. Gallant said that in his meeting with Mr. McGurk he had stressed the need for security guarantees along the border between Gaza and Egypt that would cut off Hamas’s ability to rearm itself through smuggling.
· Houthi forces in Yemen appear to have resumed attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea after pausing strikes for more than a week, according to United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, a British military agency. On Wednesday, the agency said it had received a report of an explosion close to a vessel about 45 miles south of the coast of Yemen, the second attack in two days. Before that, the last reported attack in the region had been on June 27. The Houthis, an Iran-backed militia, have been attacking ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden since November to support Hamas in its war against Israel. The group did not immediately claim responsibility for the recent incidents. The U.S. Central Command said on social media on Wednesday that its forces had destroyed two Houthi aerial drones and a drone boat that “presented an imminent threat to U.S., coalition forces, and merchant vessels in the region.”
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11) US Peace Advocates 'Utterly Condemn' Biden Decision to Send Israel 1,700 500lb Bombs
"The Biden administration is fully culpable for the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, and should be held accountable for its role in aiding and abetting Israel's shocking war crimes."
By Jake Johnson, July 12, 2024
Palestinian rescue workers search the rubble of a house destroyed by an Israeli airstrike on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza on July 6, 2024. (Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The Biden administration's decision this week to lift a pause on the transfer of 500-pound bombs to the Israeli military drew outrage from U.S. peace advocates who warned the weapons would be used to commit additional war crimes in the Gaza Strip, which has been pulverized by nine months of relentless Israeli attacks.
Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of Win Without War, said in a statement Thursday that "we utterly condemn" the administration's decision to release a shipment of 1,700 500-pound bombs to Israel's military, which has killed more than 38,000 people in Gaza since the Hamas-led October 7 attack. The shipment was paused in May as Israel prepared to launch its deadly assault on Rafah.
"We are dismayed because these bombs will almost certainly be used to kill more innocents in Gaza, where indiscriminate bombing continues and where a starvation crisis only worsens," said Haghdoosti. "And if they are not used there, they risk being used to terrible effect in Lebanon, where civilians would again bear the brunt of a disastrous possible war between Hezbollah and the Israeli government."
"We are perplexed because the White House is, yet again, using arms transfers to directly undermine its stated policy aims—both to secure a cease-fire and protect civilians in Gaza, and to avoid a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah that would devastate the region," Haghdoosti continued. "Releasing this transfer signals to the Israeli government that, if cease-fire talks again stall, the war in Gaza can continue and that a massive conflict with Hezbollah can begin, with no real U.S. pushback."
President Joe Biden "must reverse this decision, which makes no sense as politics or policy," she added.
Biden, who is facing mounting calls to drop his reelection campaign, was not asked about the reversal during his closely watched press conference at the conclusion of NATO's 2024 summit in Washington, D.C. late Thursday.
The administration's decision to lift the pause came following what The Washington Postdescribed as "a pressure campaign by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and pro-Israel lobbyists in the United States, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, demanding the resumption of all weapons shipments regardless of their lethality."
Last month, Netanyahu—who is facing a possible arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC)—released a video complaining that the administration was "withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel."
The U.S. is Israel's top arms supplier and has sent Israel billions of dollars worth of weapons and other military equipment since October 7—weaponry that Israel has repeatedly used to commit atrocities in Gaza.
An unnamed administration official told the Post that the U.S. was mostly concerned about the 2,000-pound bombs that were part of the initially planned shipment, rather than the 500-pound bombs. The 2,000-pound bombs will remain on hold, the official said.
Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) joined Win Without War in demanding that the Biden administration walk back its decision to lift the pause on the 500-pound bombs, warning that "providing such massive, explosive weapons with wide-area effects despite Israel's systematic and deliberate deployment of such bombs in built-up civilian areas throughout Gaza further exposes U.S. officials to liability for war crimes prosecution."
"This week alone, Israel used U.S. weapons to strike a school during a soccer game killing scores of children, and ordered the forced evacuation of hundreds of thousands of desperate civilians from Gaza City," said DAWN senior adviser Josh Paul, who resigned from the U.S. State Department last year over the Biden administration's continued arming of Israel.
"Lifting a suspension on the delivery of 500lb bombs meant to prevent the invasion of Rafah, only to then send Israel those bombs to enable the further destruction of Gaza City, is not only an act of perversity but a lawless one as well," Paul said.
Raed Jarrar, DAWN's advocacy director, called on the ICC to "investigate U.S. officials for their complicity in the genocidal atrocities in Gaza, insisting on providing Israel with some of the most lethal weapons in the world despite full knowledge that Israel is using them unlawfully against Palestinian civilians."
"The Biden administration is fully culpable for the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, and should be held accountable for its role in aiding and abetting Israel's shocking war crimes and crimes against humanity," Jarrar added.
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12) Rescued Hostage Describes Months of Uncertainty and Terror in Gaza
Andrey Kozlov was kept for six months in a family’s apartment by a Hamas operative who moonlighted as a journalist. Then Israeli commandos stormed in.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Ramat Gan, Israel, July 12, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/world/middleeast/israel-hostage-gaza-koslov-hamas.html
Andrey Kozlov, 27, a Russian Israeli who was held hostage in Gaza and rescued in an audacious and deadly commando raid last month. Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Idling away the hours in a darkened room in Gaza with two other hostages, Andrey Kozlov sometimes heard one of his captors on the other side of the door typing away on a laptop.
The man was a constant presence in the apartment, while other guards worked shifts and went out to the market, Mr. Kozlov said in an interview, from a hotel room in a Tel Aviv suburb a month after his rescue from captivity.
The guards were unmasked, but they were careful not to reveal their names, telling the hostages to call them all Muhammad.
To differentiate between them, Mr. Kozlov said the hostages gave them nicknames like Big Muhammad and Little Muhammad. Their main jailer had a rounded face, so they called him “Muhammad H’dudim,” Hebrew slang for “Muhammad Chubby Cheeks.”
Mr. Kozlov, 27, a Russian Israeli, provided an exceptionally detailed account of his total of eight months in captivity, together with Almog Meir Jan, 22, and Shlomi Ziv, 41.
He described being held in six locations in the first two months, finally moving to the apartment in mid-December. In some places, he and the other hostages had only a pail for a toilet and food was scarce. Mr. Kozlov said he lost about 20 pounds.
They were rescued from the apartment, a low-rise concrete residence like the ones where many Gazan families live, on June 8 during an audacious and deadly Israeli commando operation.
Afterward, the Israeli authorities identified the hostages’ main jailer as Abdallah Aljamal, 36, a Hamas operative who moonlighted as a journalist — or vice versa. It was a rare instance of the Israeli security services publicly identifying a kidnapper.
Mr. Aljamal, the one referred to as “Chubby Cheeks,” was writing regular dispatches for The Palestine Chronicle, a U.S.-based online publication, about the war’s terrible human toll on Gazans, as he was holding three kidnapped Israelis at gunpoint in his family’s apartment.
Mr. Kozlov has since identified Mr. Aljamal and several other captors from their photographs posted online and on social media.
All three men were kidnapped from the Nova music festival during the Hamas-led terrorist assault of Oct. 7 on southern Israel. About 250 people were abducted and taken to the Gaza Strip that day, according to Israeli officials.
“I thought maybe it’s the last day of my life,” Mr. Kozlov said of his first hours in Gaza, as images of being shot to death on video ran through his mind.
The three spent the last six months of their ordeal in Mr. Aljamal’s custody, according to Mr. Kozlov, hidden away in a residential building in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, among the local population.
Mr. Aljamal’s wife, Fatima, 36, their children, Mr. Aljamal’s sister Zainab, 27, and his father, Ahmed, 74, a doctor, all appeared to have been in the apartment when the Israeli commandos stormed it. Citing initial testimony from Nuseirat, Ramy Abdu, of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a group that often advocates for the Palestinians, reported that Mr. Aljamal, his wife, his father and sister were all killed in the raid.
Mr. Kozlov, Mr. Meir Jan and Mr. Ziv were rescued along with a fourth Israeli, Noa Argamani, 26, who was being held in a nearby apartment block in Nuseirat.
Gaza health officials said more than 270 Palestinians were killed in the raid, while the Israeli military initially put the number at less than 100. Neither side broke down the death toll between civilians and combatants.
Mr. Abdu described Abdallah Aljamal as a journalist, and said he also worked “in public service” as the spokesman for the Hamas-run Ministry of Labor in Gaza. The Government Media Office in Gaza said he had worked for a Hamas-affiliated news agency, Palestine Now.
In an article on its website published a day after the raid, The Palestine Chronicle acknowledged that Mr. Aljamal had been a regular contributor “throughout the war,” but only as a freelancer, and was “neither a staff writer nor a contractor.”
Mr. Kozlov emigrated to Israel alone about 18 months before his abduction. He spoke little Hebrew and was working at the overnight Nova festival as an unarmed member of the security team.
The attack started at 6:29 a.m. with heavy salvos of rockets fired from Gaza. As hundreds of gunmen closed in on the festival site, Mr. Kozlov fled and tried to take cover. He joined up with another Israeli civilian — Mr. Ziv — and then a bearded man in a khaki uniform who was armed with an assault rifle appeared and gestured at them to get into a vehicle.
At first Mr. Kozlov said he mistook him for an Israeli special ops officer coming to save them. But then the gunman made Mr. Ziv drive, got in the back seat and barked directions in Arabic. It soon dawned on Mr. Kozlov that they were driving into Gaza.
They were handed over to other armed men and soon joined by Mr. Meir Jan. Mr. Kozlov said they spent the first days with their hands tied behind their backs with rope, being kicked and slapped around.
Mr. Kozlov said one captor used charades-like motions to tell him that the next day he would shoot him and record the execution on video. When the same captor appeared the following day, he went up to Mr. Kozlov and made a heart shape with his hands, a sign of love.
“I thought, OK, thank you, let’s keep going, we have another chance to survive,” Mr. Kozlov said, recounting the uncertainty and psychological terror that lasted eight months.
The three men were taken to six different locations over the next two months, Mr. Kozlov recalled, shackled the entire time at the wrists and ankles with padlocks and chains. They spent two weeks on the second floor of an unfinished building, and then were moved into the kitchen of a kind of bakery or restaurant. The doctor who received the hostages at the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv said they all had wasted muscles, were suffering from severe malnourishment and had been abused, physically and psychologically, in various ways.
In mid-December, the three were moved to the Aljamal apartment. It was spacious and divided into two parts, Mr. Kozlov said, with a blanket blocking a large doorway between them.
The captives were in one room, the curtains always drawn over the window. Their guards sat next door in a small anteroom with a television.
Here, their hands and feet were unbound. They were told if they stepped out of line, they would be tied up again as punishment. Mr. Kozlov said there were several children in the apartment. He would hear them playing in the anteroom with their father, who mostly carried a pistol, while the other guards were armed with Kalashnikovs.
He said the three of them received an adequate breakfast and a decent evening meal, an experience at variance with the accounts of other released captives, some of whom also spent time in Hamas’s tunnels. Israeli security officials told The Times that Mr. Aljamal’s wife and father helped keep the hostages, along with other guards.
Mr. Kozlov appeared relaxed and often joked about his experience during the interview. But the humor was black, and the atmosphere he described was one of unrelenting menace.
They played cards a lot, sometimes with their captors, and were given some board games and books, including one of stories from the Quran, according to Mr. Kozlov. Sometimes they were allowed to watch movies on TV in the anteroom, and their captors would call them in on Saturday nights to watch the weekly protests in Tel Aviv calling for their release.
But Mr. Kozlov said they were also told that they were a problem for Israel, and that the military was trying to kill them in their bombardments of Gaza. And if there was a rescue attempt, they were told, their captors would kill them first.
“There was a bit of dissonance, a paradox,” in feeling under threat from both sides, Mr. Kozlov said.
Mr. Aljamal had extreme mood swings. One day he might be playing cards with the hostages and joking around with them. “Another day he could wake up and say ‘I hate you, I hate you,’” Mr. Kozlov said, imitating his captor in a gruff voice.
Mr. Kozlov focused on surviving by writing and repeating mantras to himself in Russian, such as “You are alive; every day a gift,” and “My family is waiting for me, alive, whole and well.”
The morning of the rescue Mr. Kozlov was reading when he heard explosions. Big Muhammad forgot his Kalashnikov and was shot and killed as he tried to run into the hostages’ room. Mr. Aljamal was lying in a pool of blood near the bathroom, said Mr. Kozlov.
The commandos burst in shouting, “Name, name, name” at the hostages, who identified themselves. Within seconds, surrounded by Israeli forces, they were out on the stairwell.
For Mr. Kozlov, the rescue was “incredible, unbelievable.” Once in the helicopter, as he saw Gaza receding into the distance, “I started to cry,” he said. “Then after a minute I started to laugh.”
Overwhelmed with emotion on meeting the people closest to him, he said, “You don’t have words.”
When his parents arrived from Russia to reunite with him at the hospital, footage showed him falling to his knees, sobbing.
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13) Researchers try to estimate the true toll of the war by counting ‘excess deaths.’
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg, July 12, 2024
Bodies at a morgue in Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Tuesday, July 9, 2024. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
Gazan health officials say that more than 38,000 people have been killed in nine months of fighting between Israel and Hamas, but researchers are also studying how many people have died as an indirect result of the conflict.
Scientists say that this measurement, known as excess deaths, can provide a truer indication of the toll and scale of conflicts and other social upheaval. They say, for example, that if a person dies from a chronic illness because they are unable to get treatment in a medical facility overburdened by war, that death can be attributed to the conflict.
The question of excess deaths in Gaza was raised in a letter published last week in the medical journal The Lancet, in which three researchers attempted to estimate how many people had died or would die because of the war, on top of the deaths reported by the Gaza Health Ministry. The letter immediately generated debate, with other researchers arguing for caution in any such projection.
One reason to be careful, those researchers said, is that any estimate of excess deaths would rely on data from Gaza’s health sector, which has been devastated by the conflict. Another reason, they said, is that it is hard to predict how epidemics and hunger, two threats to human life that can be triggered by war, will evolve. And Israel has not permitted researchers to enter the enclave since the start of the war last October.
The letter in The Lancet, which said that counting indirect deaths in Gaza was “difficult but essential,” based its estimate on looking at previous studies of recent conflicts, which indicated that three to 15 times as many people died indirectly for every person who had died violently. Applying what they called a “conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death,” the authors wrote that it was “not implausible” to estimate that about 186,000 deaths could eventually be attributable to the conflict in Gaza.
The letter, which The Lancet said had not been peer-reviewed, as is the case with other letters it publishes, provoked a significant response. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which represents the Jewish community in Britain, said that the estimate was “little more than conjecture.”
Col. Elad Goren, an official with COGAT, the arm of the Israeli military that implements policy in Gaza, sidestepped a question about excess deaths.
Salim Yusuf, a cardiologist and epidemiologist in Canada who co-wrote the letter, said in an email that the estimate was based on studies of past conflicts and acknowledged that, “inevitably, these are projections.” “The point is that the real numbers of dead will be very large,” he said.
Michael Spagat, a professor of economics at Royal Holloway College at the University of London, who has written about the toll of the war in Gaza, wrote in an analysis that the letter “lacks a solid foundation and is implausible.” He argued that the authors had compared Gaza with a small and unrepresentative sample of other conflicts, and that conditions in Gaza, a small territory under intense international attention, are unique.
In an interview, Mr. Spagat cited other reasons to be cautious when discussing excess deaths in Gaza. He said that fears of major outbreaks of infectious diseases such as cholera have yet to materialize and that, although humanitarian agencies are warning of catastrophic levels of hunger, there is little evidence of widespread deaths because of starvation.
Still, Mr. Spagat said that it was “fair to call attention to the fact that not all of the deaths are going to be direct violent ones.”
The letter in The Lancet is not the first effort to quantify the human toll in Gaza beyond the figures reported by Gazan health authorities.
In February, epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine produced a model showing three different war scenarios affecting overall deaths in Gaza. They projected that if fighting and humanitarian access remained at the same levels, there could be an additional 58,260 deaths in the six months from March through August. Around 9,000 deaths have been directly attributed to the war since then by Gaza’s health ministry.
The health ministry says that more than 38,000 people have died in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas, which controls the territory, led an attack on Israel in which 1,200 people were killed. While the ministry’s tally is broadly accepted, there remain questions about its methodologies and record keeping, as well as contradictions between its statements and underlying data. Most civilian victims, the ministry says, are women and children. But the figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The subject of excess deaths is sensitive because it touches on the collateral cost of Israel’s war against Hamas. On top of the large death toll, the attacks have damaged hospitals and shelters. Aid officials say that Israel has also restricted access to the fuel that medical facilities need to operate. Israeli officials say they do all they can to spare civilians, but blame Hamas for placing its forces in urban centers and civilian facilities. They have also said that aid agencies’ logistical difficulties, rather than Israeli restrictions, are to blame for the limited amount of humanitarian aid that is getting to Gazans.
Before the war, Gaza’s health sector produced reliable data, which helps in modeling excess deaths, but lack of access to Gaza for researchers makes the task more difficult, according to Zeina Jamaluddine, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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14) Israel Targets Top Hamas Commander in Airstrike; Mass Casualties Reported
The commander, Muhammad Deif, is considered an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks. Palestinian authorities said more than 70 people had been killed in southern Gaza.
By Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley, July 13, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/07/13/world/israel-gaza-war-hamas
46 minutes ago
![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/07/13/multimedia/13mideast-crisis-carousel-05-bjft/13mideast-crisis-carousel-05-bjft-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
Palestinians gathering, at a hospital morgue in Deir al Balah, near the bodies of their relatives killed in airstrikes.
Israel attempted to kill a top Hamas military commander believed to be an architect of the Oct. 7 attack in an airstrike Saturday morning, according to seven senior Israeli officials. The Gaza authorities said that more than 70 people had been killed in the strike, which hit an area Israel had designated as a humanitarian zone.
It was not immediately clear whether the commander, Muhammad Deif, the leader of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, survived or was even in the area. A mysterious figure who has long been one of Israel’s most wanted men and has escaped multiple assassination attempts, Mr. Deif is considered the most senior Hamas figure in Gaza after its leader there, Yahya Sinwar.
The Israeli military and the domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, issued a joint statement saying that they had struck “senior Hamas terrorists and additional terrorists,” but did not name them or say whether they had been killed.
Hamas said in a statement that Israel’s “allegations about targeting leaders are false,” and are “merely to cover up the scale of the horrific massacre.”
The strike hit inside a strip of coastal land on the Mediterranean Sea known as Mawasi that is roughly half a mile wide and nine miles long. Israel began urging Gazans to seek safety there early in the war, and thousands of displaced Palestinians live there in tents.
The military statement said that the strike had hit “an open area surrounded by trees, several buildings and sheds,” and it posted an aerial photograph of a plot of land filled with palm trees and a few buildings. Four Israeli officials said the military had targeted Mr. Deif while he was inside a fenced Hamas-run compound that was not used as a camp for displaced people.
Video from the scene of the strike appeared to corroborate parts of the military’s statement but not others.
Footage taken by Mustafa Abutaha, a professor of English, showed a large crater in a tree-lined plot of land near a four-story residential building. A high wall separated part of the plot from the road, suggesting that it was an enclosed compound. But as he filmed the video, Mr. Abutaha said the plot had housed displaced people. Shortly afterward, a second man passed in front of the camera, holding a motionless child.
Two Israeli officials said that Mr. Deif had been targeted while he was above ground, after leaving Hamas’s tunnel network under Gaza. All of the Israeli officials spoke on the condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Here’s what else to know:
The Israeli officials said the strikes had also targeted Rafah Salameh, the top Hamas commander in Khan Younis, who was with Mr. Deif at the time of the attack.
The Gazan authorities said that a second, smaller strike hit the center of Khan Younis, a nearby city to the east of Mawasi.
A senior American official said that Israel had told Washington that it targeted Mr. Deif, but the official said that neither Israel nor the United States could yet confirm his status.
On Saturday, relatives of hostages held in Gaza were nearing the end of a four-day march between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The marchers aimed to heighten pressure on the Israeli government to agree to a deal with Hamas that would stop the fighting in Gaza and release their relatives.
Hiba Yazbek, Aaron Boxerman and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
29 minutes ago
By Patrick Kingsley
Louise Wateridge, a U.N. official, spent the afternoon at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, where doctors treated some of the civilians wounded by the strike. Ms. Wateridge said in a phone interview that she saw roughly five wounded children, one of whom was paralyzed from the waist down, according to doctors at the hospital.
Ms. Wateridge said that a shortage of disinfectant in Gaza meant that doctors were cleaning wounds with water alone. A fuel shortage had prevented hospital staff from powering the hospital’s washing machines and air conditioning units, Ms. Wateridge added. As a result, patients lay in the stifling heat on bloodstained mattresses without sheets, she said. “You associate hospitals with hygiene and cleanliness,” she said. “It was very far from that.”
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15) Gaza’s collapsing hospitals struggle to deal with the numbers of wounded in the latest strike.
By Hiba Yazbek and Ameera Harouda, July 13, 2024
A Palestinian man carrying the body of his son, who was killed in a tent camp in the Mawasi area of Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, on Saturday. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said on Saturday that its rescue and emergency crews had evacuated more than 100 wounded people along with 23 bodies from the site of the strikes in Khan Younis. The Gaza health ministry said earlier that in total, more than 70 people were killed in the attacks.
The rescue group said that many of the wounded had been taken to nearby hospitals run by the Red Crescent.
“All the hospitals in the area are full of the wounded,” said Dr. Wahid Qudaih, the medical director of the Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, adding that there were not enough beds to accommodate all of the patients.
“A large number of patients are lying on the floor while staff are dealing with critical cases and all of the medical staff and equipment and field hospitals are exhausted,” Dr. Qudaih said in a telephone interview.
The medical system in Gaza has collapsed under the weight of the war, without enough electricity, fuel or medical supplies to treat the large numbers of wounded people, which mount daily.
“It was an unusual event regarding the number of cases and the nature of injuries,” Dr. Qudaih said of Saturday’s assault. “We have some seriously wounded people who might lose their lives at any moment,” he said, adding that children were among those hurt.
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16) Questions Swirl After Deadly Strike Targeting Hamas Commander
By Isabel Kershner, July 14, 2024
Palestinians inspecting the scene of the strike in the Mawasi area on Saturday. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
The fate of Hamas’s top military commander remained shrouded in uncertainty on Sunday, a day after Israel targeted him in a large airstrike in Gaza, as was the impact of the attack on talks for a tentative cease-fire deal.
At least 90 people were killed in the strike, about half of them women and children, and 300 wounded, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Reports from Gaza described hospitals overwhelmed by injured Palestinians.
But it remained unclear on Sunday if the primary target, Muhammad Deif, the leader of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, was among the dead.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a televised news conference on Saturday night that there was still no “absolute certainty” on whether Mr. Deif or another target, Rafa Salameh, the leader of Hamas forces in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, had been killed.
A Hamas official, Khalil al-Hayya, who lives in exile, said in an interview with Al Jazeera Arabic television that Mr. Deif had not been killed and was listening to Mr. Netanyahu’s words and “mocking” them. Hamas has not offered evidence that Mr. Deif survived.
Mr. Deif is the second most senior Hamas figure in Gaza, after its leader in the territory, Yahya Sinwar. He is considered one of the architects of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which prompted the war in Gaza, now in its tenth month.
After weeks of an impasse over a cease-fire deal, talks had resumed in recent days, via American and Arab mediators, for an agreement that would see the roughly 120 hostages remaining in Gaza, some alive and some dead, exchanged for Palestinian prisoners.
It was not immediately clear how the strike Saturday might affect those talks, which were already fragile and halting.
But in a sign that the negotiations might continue, Izzat Al-Rishq, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, rejected a news report citing an unnamed Hamas official saying the group had decided to halt the talks. Mr. Al-Rishq said in an official statement on Sunday that the report was “not true and baseless.”
In another statement on Sunday, Hamas described the Israeli strike as a “massacre” that targeted an area packed with tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians. But it made no mention of the fate of Mr. Deif and Mr. Salameh.
Scott Anderson, a senior United Nations official in Gaza, said that on Saturday he had visited the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, where more than 100 Palestinians with severe injuries had been admitted, and that “the air was filled with the smell of blood.”
“I witnessed some of the most horrific scenes I have seen in my nine months in Gaza,” Mr. Anderson said in a statement on Sunday.
“With not enough beds, hygiene equipment, sheeting, or scrubs, many patients were treated on the ground without disinfectants,” he added.
Mr. Netanyahu said on Saturday that before he gave the go-ahead for Saturday’s strike, he had been assured by Israeli security officials that there were no indications of any hostages in the vicinity of where they believed Mr. Deif to be.
Israeli analysts said that while some interruption might be expected in the negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage deal, Hamas’s fundamental interest in such a deal would remain, and that it was the growing Israeli military pressure on the group that had brought it to the table in the first place.
“The reasons that prompted Hamas to show flexibility have not changed,” wrote Tamir Hayman, a former military intelligence chief and now director of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, on N12, a Hebrew news site.
Hamas has no option but to go back to the negotiating table, said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University, which is affiliated with Fatah, the main Palestinian political rival of Hamas.
“Hamas is in a very bad position — it has been pushed into a corner militarily, and there is no question that it has been weakened after nine months,” Professor Abusada said from Cairo.
The organization has come under mounting criticism, including from the office of the president of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and from the mediators, for the continued fighting and its devastating toll on civilians in Gaza. More than 38,000 Palestinians have been killed during the war, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and uninvolved civilians.
Professor Abusada said Hamas was aware that if it pulled out of the cease-fire negotiations it would be blamed for the collapse and relieve Mr. Netanyahu of any responsibility for their failure, despite what many Palestinian and Israeli critics view as his obstructionist approach.
Mr. Netanyahu’s critics have accused him of impeding the negotiations, noting that some hard-line partners in his governing coalition have threatened to bring down his government if he agrees to a deal that falls short of achieving a total victory over Hamas in Gaza.
Professor Abusada, like some Israeli analysts, said that a confirmation of the death of Mr. Deif, a potent symbol of Hamas’s militancy in the eyes of many Israelis, could provide Mr. Netanyahu with a much-needed boost to his image and help pave an exit from the war.
KEY DEVELOPMENTS
Israel’s military strikes sites in Syria, and other news.
· Israel struck a Syrian military command center and infrastructure sites overnight after two drones approached southern Israel from the country’s territory, the Israeli military said on Sunday. The drones were intercepted as they approached an area north of Eilat, Israel’s Red Sea resort town, the military said, adding that it held the Syrian regime accountable “for all terror activities” emanating from its territory. There was no immediate comment from the Syrian authorities.
· Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, will be in Washington this week for meetings at the White House, according to a statement from the Israeli prime minister’s office. It said he will be joined by “senior officials from the two countries’ security and diplomatic establishments.” The meeting follows a call on Saturday between Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant. The Pentagon said that the two men discussed Israel’s operations in Gaza and that Mr. Austin “emphasized the importance of taking all necessary steps to minimize civilian harm.”
· Relatives of hostages held in Gaza completed a four-day march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Saturday. The marchers aimed to heighten pressure on the Israeli government to agree to a deal with Hamas that would stop the fighting in Gaza and release their relatives.
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17) What is Mawasi, the ‘humanitarian zone’ where a Hamas commander was targeted?
By Adam Rasgon, July 14, 2024
Destroyed tents and makeshift housing structures after an Israeli strike on the Mawasi “humanitarian zone” on Saturday. Credit...Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli airstrike targeting the commander of Hamas’s military wing on Saturday hit Mawasi, a narrow strip of coastal land in southern Gaza that Israel has designated as a “humanitarian zone.”
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have sought refuge in the area, according to U.N. officials. They have set up tents and makeshift shelters in the hopes of evading airstrikes and street battles between the Israeli military and Hamas fighters. Despite the area’s designation as a “safer zone,” Israel has dropped bombs there and accused Palestinian militants of operating amid the civilian population to fire rockets.
Israeli officials said the military had targeted the commander, Muhammad Deif, while he was inside a fenced Hamas-run compound that was not used as a camp for displaced people.
Israel first designated the area a “humanitarian zone” in October after it began encouraging residents of Gaza City to move southward ahead of its ground invasion into northern Gaza. It initially encompassed an area roughly a half-mile wide and about three miles long, according to a military map.
By December, it had been expanded to an area roughly 1.5 miles wide and five miles long, according to a military map. In May, when Israel launched its invasion into the southern city of Rafah, it expanded the zone to encompass much of central and southern Gaza, up to roughly four miles wide and nine miles long, according to a military map.
Many of the roughly million people who left Rafah as Israel pressed further into the town squeezed into the expanded Mawasi “humanitarian zone.”
Palestinians in the area have described harrowing conditions, including overcrowding, a lack of clean water, long lines for bathrooms, and rivers of sewage. For much of the population, finding food has also been a daily struggle, especially for those who cannot readily afford goods in markets.
“The situation is catastrophic,” said Ali Jebril, 27, a wheelchair-bound basketball player staying in a tent in Mawasi. “We’re living through a nightmare.”
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18) After Homelessness Ruling, Cities Weigh Whether to Clear Encampments
The Supreme Court decided last month that cities could cite homeless campers. Some say ‘clear them all.’ Others are ramping up outreach.
By Shawn Hubler and Mike Baker, July 13, 2024
Shawn Hubler reported from Folsom, Calif., and Mike Baker from Burien, Wash.
K.C. Alvey treads carefully when she and her dog, Stuart, walk the dappled trail behind their apartment in Folsom, Calif. Since the pandemic, her neighbors have included homeless campers along a brook known as Humbug Creek.
There’s the man who periodically emerges from the brush, yelling in fear and tearing at tree limbs. There’s the hoarder who fled last week with his dog as a cleanup crew again cleared his massive campsite — shopping carts, three beds, throw pillows, art, books, mirrors on trees, rugs, torch fuel. Rogue campfires have been frequent.
Until recently, federal appellate courts limited how far cities could go to clear encampments. But late last month, the Supreme Court ruled that they could remove homeless residents sleeping outdoors, a decision that has already begun to reshape how they deal with homelessness.
Three days after the decision, the Folsom police announced they would start citing recalcitrant illegal campers, though they also would team up with nonprofits to provide more homeless outreach.
Ms. Alvey, 57, a marketing manager, is waiting to see what happens. There have been times when the homeless campers “really creep me out,” she said. But she also wants “to be sure they have somewhere they can go where they feel safe.”
In the two weeks since the Supreme Court decided that the city of Grants Pass, Ore., could penalize sleeping and camping in public places, city leaders across the country have responded by revising local ordinances and preparing to take a harder line on homeless encampments. Nowhere has the homelessness crisis been more severe than in Western states, where tent communities have proliferated since the pandemic.
Some cities are particularly eager to get moving.
“I’m warming up the bulldozer,” said Mayor R. Rex Parris, a Republican, of Lancaster, Calif., an exurb 62 miles north of Los Angeles. “I want the tents away from the residential areas and the shopping centers and the freeways.”
Shelter populations increased last year in the Antelope Valley, which includes Lancaster, but unsheltered homelessness rose more, according to the area’s latest point-in-time count, with more than 5,500 people sleeping unhoused in a stretch of high desert prone to extreme cold and heat.
“I get that some of these people have fallen on hard times,” the mayor said, “and we have a state-of-the-art shelter with beds available. But the population we’re talking about doesn’t want a bed.”
That sentiment is not limited to Republican leaders. In San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed has faced a tough fight for re-election, businesses have waged a furious campaign to eliminate homeless encampments even as civil liberties groups have sued the city over enforcement.
“My hope is that we can clear them all,” the staunch Democrat said at a news conference after the ruling. She has said that homeless people who refuse services are partly to blame for the city’s economic struggles downtown.
In the Seattle suburb of Burien, Wash., city leaders are battling with the county sheriff, who runs the police force, over the enforcement of public camping bans. Citing concerns about constitutionality, the sheriff’s department has declined to take action, even after the Supreme Court ruling.
On a recent afternoon, homeless residents were milling around tents and tarps and pallets that comprised about two dozen makeshift structures on a patch of land across the street from the county courthouse. Some said they hoped the city would let them be until they could find more permanent housing.
Mayor Kevin Schilling wanted more immediate action. He said he believes that enforcement, combined with outreach, would nudge those in need of drug treatment, mental health services or temporary shelter to choose those options. “If you don’t have that nudge, at the end of that day, people are not going to choose to do that on their own,” he said.
Some communities, like Grants Pass itself, have hit legal snags as city leaders formulate their next steps. Homeless people in Grants Pass continue to seek refuge in dozens of tents spread across a variety of the city’s parks. A court injunction remains in place there for the time being, although officials in the community of 40,000 people expect it to lift soon.
Recently, city leaders called a meeting to seek feedback from the community on how to enforce and manage homeless camping, but for some residents, that was insufficient. On Wednesday night, many lined up at a microphone to express outrage that officials were not immediately clearing parks of homeless people.
“Get them out!” one man shouted. “Give us our town back,” a woman told officials.
“I am hoping and praying that we can make the city of Grants Pass a homeless-free zone,” Kim Hector, a resident, said. “You know they have gun-free zones. Well, the citizens of Grants Pass deserve a homeless-free zone.”
The Supreme Court ruling left many civil protections intact, including prohibitions on excessive fines and violations of due process. Local governments can still be sued, civil liberties groups note, and still must grapple with vast numbers of vulnerable, poor and unsheltered people.
In a recent webinar on the ruling, legal advisers in California recommended that municipalities provide ample notice of enforcement, set fines at an affordable level and frame anti-camping laws as a tool to persuade homeless people to accept services.
Eve Garrow, a senior policy analyst and advocate with the A.C.L.U. of Southern California, dismissed the “carrot and stick approach” as “deeply disingenuous” in a state with yearslong waiting lists for subsidized housing.
“A playbook is developing,” she said. “But the clear aim is a race to the bottom where each local government tries to drive unhoused people out.”
In 2018, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that it was unconstitutional to punish people for sleeping outside when they had no other legal option. That decision and subsequent rulings limited the ability of cities throughout the circuit’s nine Western states to address homelessness with arrests and citations. Politicians blamed the courts for an onslaught of highly visible encampments. But governments, forced to confront the crisis with less enforcement, also approved a torrent of spending on homeless services and affordable housing.
Conservative policymakers say that has not worked. Model legislation drawn up by the Cicero Institute, a Texas think tank, has underpinned new laws in Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma and other Republican-led states that cracked down on encampments and reversed a mostly government-funded approach that prioritizes housing individuals.
In Democratic-led areas, however, strategies such as rousting or arresting are viewed as less effective than determining why individuals are homeless and then offering appropriate remedies such as housing, jobs, substance abuse treatment or mental health care.
Los Angeles has struggled to reduce homelessness for years, its Skid Row an often-cited illustration of the problem in California. But under Mayor Karen Bass, the city has made progress in moving people off the streets and into motels and shelters, and the city had its first decline in years in unsheltered individuals. Ms. Bass, a Democrat, swiftly criticized the Supreme Court decision.
“This ruling must not be used as an excuse for cities across the country to attempt to arrest their way out of this problem or hide the homelessness crisis in neighboring cities or in jail,” Ms. Bass said. “The only way to address this crisis is to bring people indoors with housing and supportive services.”
Not everyone in Los Angeles agrees. Traci Park, a City Council member from the affluent Westside, coauthored a motion within hours of the ruling that demanded an examination of the existing anti-camping restrictions, along with a comparison of regulations in Los Angeles County’s 87 other cities.
The balance between enforcement and providing services remains a challenge. In Folsom, a community of about 80,000 known for its hiking trails and its nearby prison, the ruling has revived a debate over compassion and order. The city’s homeless census has leaped from fewer than 20 before the pandemic to more than 130 this year.
Folsom has long had restrictions on camping in public spaces and fire zones, punishable by citations. But since the Ninth Circuit ruling in 2018, the community has largely relied on other ordinances to control encampments, such as public nuisance laws.
A special task force to address tent camps in neighborhoods like Ms. Alvey’s began work this month, just after the Supreme Court decision was released. “We’re here to help,” said Lt. Chris Emery of the Folsom Police Department, who was overseeing the removal of a sprawling camp from a ravine full of tinder-dry foliage on Thursday. “We’re not the hammer of justice and not everyone is a nail.”
As waste removal crews arrived, his team tried to persuade the homeless camp proprietor to speak to an outreach worker. They were unsuccessful, but Jeanne Shuman, founder of Jake’s Journey Home, a local nonprofit, said Folsom’s homeless people have begun to understand that the ruling has narrowed their options.
At the public library during a searing heat wave, Paul Hebbe, 58, said that officers with flashlights awakened him at 3 a.m. on July 4 as he slept in his usual spot just outside the reading room window. Three other homeless men separately offered similar accounts; the police said they had no record of the encounter.
“They said, ‘You can’t be here, there’s a new law,’” Mr. Hebbe said, recounting how he had refused to move to a shelter and instead trundled into the dark with his sheet, sleeping bags and assorted backpacks. He was not cited, he said, but “it’s not right — I’ve had probably 10 hours of sleep in the last four days.”
Rick Hillman, the police chief in Folsom, said the Grants Pass decision gives his department an additional tool, restoring teeth to the city’s camping restrictions. But “the last few years have been a big education,” and only the most egregious repeat offenders will be cited, the chief said. No citations have yet been issued, he added.
“I don’t want to bog down our justice system with tickets for people experiencing homelessness,” he said. “To me, that just puts them in a worse situation. We’re trying to get them to take advantage of services.”
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19) Delta Changes Uniform Policy After Employees Seen With Palestinian Flag Pins
A social media post showing two flight attendants wearing the pins drew criticism and prompted Delta to say that only U.S. flag pins would be permitted.
By Emmett Lindner, July 13, 2024
A previous Delta Air Lines uniform policy allowed pins representing countries and nationalities from around the world. Credit...Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Two Delta Air Lines flight attendants seen in a social media post wearing pins depicting the Palestinian flag caused an online uproar, a rogue response from a Delta employee and a change to the company’s uniform policy.
The image, reposted on Wednesday, showed the flight attendants in a plane aisle with small Palestinian flag pins affixed to their uniforms. The post characterized the pins as “Hamas badges.”
The post prompted a wave of criticism on social media aimed at the airline.
Soon after the images were published, the official Delta account on X responded in solidarity. “I hear you as I’d be terrified as well, personally,” read the comment.
Soon after, Delta’s reply was gone.
“On Wednesday, we removed a reply that was not in line with our values,” Delta said on social media. “We strive for an environment of inclusivity & respect for all, in our communities & our planes. The employee responsible no longer supports Delta’s social channels. We apologize for this hurtful post.”
Delta said that, beginning on Monday, it would change its uniform policies so that only U.S. flag pins would be permitted to be worn on uniforms. Previously, pins representing countries and nationalities from around the world had been allowed.
“The photographed flight attendants were compliant with Delta uniform guidelines and we’ve been in touch with them to offer support,” a Delta spokeswoman said on Saturday.
The spokeswoman went on to address rumors that the airline had taken disciplinary action against the employees. “Contrary to further chatter on social media platforms, neither has been terminated,” she said.
In a letter dated July 11 to Ed Bastian, the company’s chief executive, a steering committee from the Delta Association of Flight Attendants, a union, asked for an apology and a ban on unauthorized photography of crew members.
“Under current rules, Delta management leaves flight attendants vulnerable to harassment,” the letter said.
The letter went on to say that “targeting any individuals on the basis of their nationality violates anti-discrimination laws, is antithetical to Delta’s stated commitment to inclusivity and respect, and encourages a hostile work environment.”
The company spokeswoman did not address the letter, which comes as videos and images of passenger disturbances aboard planes across all airlines circulate online.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, reports of unruly passengers have declined since 2021, when there were nearly 6,000 cases reported, compared with just over 1,000 in 2020.
So far this year, there have been nearly 900 reports of unruly passengers.
Delta’s change in its uniform policy aims to reduce these episodes and protect employee safety, the spokeswoman said, adding that the airline is “taking this step to help ensure a safe, comfortable and welcoming environment for all.”
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20) Something Big Just Happened in Kenya
By Carey Baraka, July 14, 2024
Mr. Baraka is a writer based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Patrick Meinhardt/Getty Images
President William Ruto knows he’s in trouble. A few weeks ago Mr. Ruto was barricaded inside his official compound in Nairobi, Kenya, while thousands of young Kenyans marched on the streets. Since then, nationwide protests that started over a potential tax hike on basic goods and services have evolved into something much bigger: a demand for Mr. Ruto’s ouster — and an end to a culture in which Kenya’s political class enriches itself at the expense of the social and economic needs of its citizens.
From the start, this movement felt different from other protests. Most of the demonstrators were part of the country’s young majority, spreading information about where and when to show up on TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp. No central political figure or unifying political party stood behind the crowds, and no common ideology united them beyond anger at the government’s plan to increase taxes while social services collapsed, public university fees soared and an unemployment crisis deepened. Even as the street action has faded, more Kenyans are now openly following graft cases on social media, circulating excerpts from the constitution and calling and texting legislators.
This marks a seismic shift in a nation where young people have been accused of political apathy. During general elections in 2022, most young Kenyans didn’t even register to vote. Now, for the first time since the country adopted a new constitution in 2010, the country’s youth are a critical part of a movement in which people are risking their lives to fight for the democratic gains they have been promised. It is clear Mr. Ruto senses his tenure is in danger; on Thursday he sacked all but one of his cabinet secretaries, bowing to public pressure.
Mr. Ruto is a protégé of Daniel arap Moi, the dictator who ruled Kenya between 1978 and 2002. From the beginning of his political career, Mr. Ruto appeared to share his mentor’s disregard for democracy. Some of his early political work involved organizing teams of university students to work for Mr. Moi during their school holidays; he later helped disrupt opposition rallies during the 1992 elections, Kenya’s first multiparty voting in decades.
When Mr. Moi left office, Mr. Ruto became a key member of the opposition, slowly building up his reputation for a presidential run. In 2007 he sought his party’s nomination for the presidency but lost in the primaries. Waves of violence erupted in Kenya after those polls, killing more than 1,200 people and displacing 600,000 from their homes. Mr. Ruto was one of six Kenyans indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2011, on charges that he had a role in the violence, which he has denied. He was accused of “murder, deportation or forcible transfer of population and persecution.”
Since then, Mr. Ruto has fought the democratic reforms that millions of Kenyans support. In 2010 he opposed the country’s new constitution, which sought to reform the political structure that enabled Mr. Moi’s dictatorship, give rights to people who had previously been disenfranchised, introduce new laws to prevent graft by government officials and prevent those with criminal convictions from assuming political office.
In 2013 Uhuru Kenyatta, who was also indicted by the I.C.C., added Mr. Ruto to his presidential ticket as his deputy. Together they won, and soon after the I.C.C. charges against them were dropped. Mr. Ruto was elected president in 2022. In both jobs, he has undermined the constitution by blatantly disregarding court orders, ignoring constitutional requirements for appointing people to state office, appointing members of his family to government jobs and using his party’s numerical superiority in Parliament to try to weaken integrity laws for state officials.
He has also failed to deliver on his core 2022 campaign promises: to fight income inequality and create jobs for Kenya’s youth. Instead, he has cut social welfare programs and increased taxes he said were needed to pay Kenya’s debt burden. In this, there is truth: The International Monetary Fund, as part of its conditions in helping alleviate Kenya’s massive debt, has urged the Ruto government to increase revenue collection. But the I.M.F. has also pointed out that a big part of Kenya’s fiscal predicament comes from graft. Last month, when Mr. Ruto announced his plan to boost revenue by introducing new taxes on essential goods like bread, sanitary pads, diapers, vegetable oil and fuel, a significant part of the public’s anger was fueled by their belief that much of the money collected would be used to line the pockets of Mr. Ruto’s allies.
Though he has been at the center of Kenyan politics for decades, in the latest wave of protests Mr. Ruto is confronting something entirely new. During previous periods of unrest over unpopular taxes, the president was accused of bribing opposition members of Parliament and setting up meetings with politicians planning anti-tax rallies in order to cajole them into stopping the action. But the young people on the streets today don’t speak that political language. There is no central leadership to bribe, threaten or push into endless “peace dialogues.”
The state has nevertheless tried its best. Since the protests began on June 18, at least 41 protesters were killed and hundreds more have been injured in clashes with the police. Others have said they were abducted from their houses in the middle of the night or picked off the street by plainclothes police officers and held incommunicado for days without charge. Mr. Ruto, for his part, thanked the police for their work. When confronted with information about the dead protesters, he claimed that they were criminals and that he had no blood on his hands.
The violence has turned anger about the taxes into fury over the killings — and Mr. Ruto’s government in general. At the height of the demonstrations, protesters stormed Parliament and declared their intentions to march to the State House, the president’s official residence. In response, the globe-trotting president took refuge inside it, closing off several roads nearby and issuing statements referring to the young protesters as treasonous criminals. Weeks later, Kenyans continue to demand Mr. Ruto’s resignation. They have also called for an end to corruption in his government, the revocation of unconstitutional offices that he has created and the prosecution of his allies accused of the grand theft of government funds.
Mr. Ruto says he’s listening. In addition to the cabinet overhaul, he has withdrawn the finance bill that included the tax hike. Unusually, he has engaged with critics on social media and encouraged members of his government to do the same, and condemned some of his allies for their arrogant statements toward protesters. Several high-profile politicians have also addressed the protesters’ complaints by offering public disavowals of their own recent salary bumps or demanding public audits of state funds.
This is a profound shift from two years ago, when young Kenyans were written off as indifferent — and unimportant — to the entire political process. The new movement is accomplishing something big in Kenya, and people sense it. Yes, they’re going to the streets to fight for this country’s democracy. But they are also going to see history in the making. When their children and grandchildren someday ask where they were during the Kenyan protests in 2024, they don’t want to say they weren’t there.
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