Mumia Abu Jamal Webinar:
The Path to Freedom
August 6, 2024, 3:00-4:30 P.M., Pacific Time
Peace and Power,
Please start Black August off by joining the Abolitionist Law Center on August 6th for a webinar "Overcoming Death By Incarceration: The Path to Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal." Register at this Link
This webinar will present important information on the path to freedom for one of our longest serving political prisoners. Topics to be discussed include legal strategies and updates in Mumia's case, commutation, International Advocacy and compassionate release.
The panel includes Saleem Holbrook, ALC Exec. Director; Bret Grote, ALC Legal Director; Ghani Kempis Songster, former Juvenile Lifer and organizer; Journalist & Professor Linn Washington, Jr. and Dr. Jennifer Black co-editor with Mumia Abu-Jamal of the recently released Beneath the Mountain (City Lights 2024). Plus a special message from Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Please circulate to your network. Flyer below.
In Solidarity
Robert Saleem Holbrook
Executive Director
Abolitionist Law Center
(267)-229-7678
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Please consider amplifying the new AFT4Palestine divestment campaign's launch tweet:
https://x.com/Aft4Palestine/status/1813973522995396761 (and follow us on social media too!)
We are already getting hit by the right-wing press and AFT leadership is getting thousands of emails (we have been told) so we need some grassroots help getting our campaign message out going into the AFT convention next week!
And if by any chance any of you will be at the AFT convention next week in Houston, please get in touch! We need volunteers to help with the floor campaign and we will also have a AFT4Palestine-ers meet up.
https://www.aft4palestine.org/take-action
Tell AFT: Divest from Genocide, Apartheid, & Scholasticide
The AFT currently holds only one bond of a foreign government in the form of an Israel Bond. Through its investment in Israel Bonds, our union is lending unrestricted funds to the Israeli government that can be used to fund any and all violence and human rights violations–with no guardrails. With resolution #34, we are asking AFT to support justice in Palestine by divesting from its Israel Bond.
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Casualties
· 39,363 + killed* and at least 90,923 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 28,903 Palestinians have been fully identified, and around 10,000 more are estimated to be under the rubble.*
· 592+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank including eastern Jerusalem. These include 138 children.**
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,140.
· 690 Israeli soldiers have been recognized as killed, and 4096 as wounded by the Israeli army since October 7.***
* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on July 29, 2024. Some rights groups estimate the death toll to be much higher when accounting for those presumed dead.
** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health on July 27, this is the latest figure.
*** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000 including at least 8,000 permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7, as of June 18.
Source: mondoweiss.net
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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.
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/
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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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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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) U.K.’s Policy on Israel, Long Aligned With America’s, Veers Away
Britain’s new government is likely to withdraw objections to the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s pursuit of a warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, two people told The Times.
By Mark Landler and Stephen Castle, Reporting from London, July 25, 2024
Prime Ministers Rishi Sunak of Britain and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in London. The new British government is more likely to put pressure on Israel over its military response to the Oct. 7 attacks. Credit...Stefan Rousseau/Press Association, via Associated Press
For 10 months, Britain’s Conservative government had moved almost in lock step with the United States in its response to Israel’s war in Gaza. Now, under its new Labour government, Britain is edging away from its closest ally on the conflict.
By the end of this week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is expected to drop the previous government’s objections to the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s pursuit of an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, two people briefed on the government’s deliberations said. The two people spoke on the condition of anonymity given the political sensitivities of the issue.
Last week, Britain said it would restart funding for the main United Nations’ agency that aids Palestinians, UNRWA, having concluded that the agency had taken steps to ensure that it meets “the highest standards of neutrality.” The Israeli government had accused a dozen of the agency’s employees of playing a role in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel or their aftermath.
Taken together, these steps show a government that is willing to pile more pressure on Mr. Netanyahu for Israel’s harsh military response in Gaza. It also shows that Mr. Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, is paying more heed to international legal institutions than the United States.
In May, President Biden condemned as “outrageous” the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s effort to obtain arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Although the warrants would be largely symbolic measures, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted to pass legislation imposing sanctions on court officials.
Analysts noted that Britain’s new government had not imposed concrete measures like halting weapons shipments to Israel. Officials have said they are awaiting the results of a legal review of whether Israel is violating human rights laws.
These early moves suggest that the prime minister, who is the author of a book on European human rights law, is charting his own course on a conflict that has vexed Western leaders, including Mr. Biden, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany. Britain’s close alignment with the United States had caused the Labour Party headaches with many of its own supporters, who agitated for a swifter British call for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.
“Starmer can say, ‘Judge me by what I’m doing. These are the two early decisions I made. How can you criticize those?’” said Daniel Levy, who runs the U.S./Middle East Project, a research organization based in London and New York.
Mr. Starmer has appointed Richard Hermer, a prominent human rights lawyer and close former colleague, as attorney general. Mr. Hermer will be highly influential in advising the prime minister on Israel, signing off on any legal intervention submitted to the International Criminal Court.
Born into a Jewish family and a supporter of Jewish causes, Mr. Hermer advised the Labour Party to oppose the previous government’s effort to pass a law banning local authorities in Britain from boycotting Israeli-affiliated entities. He argued that it would infringe on their free speech.
“He’s an acknowledged expert of huge standing and reputation in human rights law,” said Colm O’Cinneide, professor of constitutional and human rights law at University College London.
While the government has not said how it plans to respond to the International Criminal Court, Mr. Starmer said in May: “The court should be able to come to its decision in due course. I support the court and I support international law.” Rishi Sunak, his predecessor, called the pursuit of arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant “deeply unhelpful.”
While few analysts expect the new government to stick to the line of the previous one, some believe that, instead of dropping its objection entirely, Britain might choose to submit a more nuanced text to the court.
But Zaki Sarraf, a legal officer for the International Center of Justice for Palestinians, a group that supports the rights of Palestinians, called on the government to take a clear position.
“There can’t be a pick-and-choose approach to this sort of thing,” Mr. Sarraf said in a statement, noting that Mr. Starmer praised the court when it sought an arrest warrant for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “International law must be applied without fear or favor, and he must support these arrest warrants, too.”
The war in Gaza has put Mr. Starmer and the Labour Party into a tricky political position from the start. Mr. Starmer did not want to show daylight with the Conservative government on a major national security issue before the general election. He had also successfully cleansed Labour of a reputation for antisemitism in parts of its rank-and-file membership under the previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who was purged from the party over the issue.
Mr. Starmer initially backed the government’s staunch support of Israel, along with a call for increased humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza. He later called for an immediate cease-fire, as did the government, but not soon enough to satisfy people on his party’s left or many Muslim Labour supporters.
Labour’s careful balancing act did not spare the party a backlash at the polls, even in an election in which it won a landslide victory. Jonathan Ashworth, a Labour figure who would probably have been named to a cabinet post, unexpectedly lost his seat to a pro-Palestinian activist.
Mr. Starmer himself won a reduced share of the vote in his North London seat compared with the 2019 election, in part because of a challenge by an independent who voiced anger with Labour’s stance on Israel.
In a biography of Mr. Starmer, the journalist Tom Baldwin wrote that the Labour leader had “publicly backed the Israeli prime minister’s political opponents, branded his rejection of a two-state solution as ‘unacceptable’ and warned any breaches of international law will mean ‘there are going to be consequences for him when this is over.’”
Britain’s shift comes as the United States itself enters a period of heightened political uncertainty on Israel. The withdrawal of Mr. Biden from the 2024 campaign and the emergence of Vice President Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee have raised questions about whether the United States will change its calculus on Israel and the war in Gaza.
“She’s far more frustrated and angrier with Netanyahu than Biden is,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But Mr. Miller noted that any change in American policy would most likely take the form of greater pressure on Mr. Netanyahu, who addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, to make a cease-fire deal with Hamas.
The White House, he said, would not resume funding to UNRWA or drop opposition to the International Criminal Court because, he said, those steps would provoke a needless election-year fight with Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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2) Newsom Will Order California Officials to Remove Homeless Encampments
The directive from Gov. Gavin Newsom is the nation’s most sweeping response to a Supreme Court decision last month that gave local leaders greater authority to remove homeless campers.
By Shawn Hubler, Reporting from Sacramento, July 25, 2024
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is widely viewed as having presidential aspirations, has channeled $24 billion into homelessness since he took office in 2019. Credit...Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated Press
Gov. Gavin Newsom will order California state officials on Thursday to begin dismantling thousands of homeless encampments, according to members of his administration, calling on government leaders to act on a recent Supreme Court decision “with urgency and dignity.”
The executive order, which is expected to affect tens of thousands of people, represents the nation’s most sweeping response to a June ruling that gave governments greater authority to remove homeless people from their streets.
Homeless encampments have vexed California, where housing costs are among the nation’s highest, more than any other state. An estimated 180,000 people were homeless last year in California, the most in the nation, and about 123,000 homeless people on any given night were unsheltered, according to the most recent count. Unlike New York City, most jurisdictions in California do not guarantee a right to housing.
Governor Newsom will advise California cities and counties on how best to ramp up enforcement on a signature issue of his administration, but he cannot force them to take action. He also will mandate that state agencies not simply move campers along, but also work with local governments to house people and provide services into which the state has pumped billions of dollars.
“The state has been hard at work to address this crisis on our streets,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement.
“There are simply no more excuses,” he added. “It’s time for everyone to do their part.”
Mr. Newsom, who is widely viewed as having presidential aspirations, has channeled about $24 billion into homelessness since he took office in 2019. His administration says it helped move more than 165,000 homeless people into temporary or permanent housing two fiscal years ago, the most recent period for which data is available.
The governor’s directive this week follows a Supreme Court decision on June 28 that upheld an Oregon city’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors. The Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit had found in earlier opinions that it was unconstitutional to punish people for sleeping in public spaces when they had no other legal place to spend the night.
Encampments spread as the Ninth Circuit, which covers nine Western states, limited the ability of cities to tackle homelessness with arrests and citations. Many politicians from both parties blamed the rulings, even as cities spent heavily on homeless services and affordable housing to address a suddenly visible problem. Mr. Newsom was among a host of leaders who begged the court to intervene.
The justices granted their request, taking the case that originated in Grants Pass, Ore., and subsequently ruled 6 to 3 along ideological lines that the city had not violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment by ticketing homeless campers. Advocates for homeless people denounced the decision as cruel and predicted that it would incite a “race to the bottom” as cities cracked down.
Some local leaders, including Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, have echoed that opinion. But others have welcomed the decision.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, said last week that city officials planned to become “very aggressive and assertive in moving encampments” starting next month and might start citing homeless people who refused offers of shelter. The Republican mayor of Lancaster, Calif., said after the ruling that his community was eager to get moving. “I’m warming up the bulldozer,” Mayor R. Rex Parris said.
Most local governments, however, have been torn since the decision over whether to aggressively enforce laws against homelessness. The Supreme Court ruling left many civil protections intact, including prohibitions on excessive fines and violations of due process, and civil liberties groups have warned local governments that they would sue over mistreatment of vulnerable people living on the street.
Research also indicates that clearing encampments may be of limited value. One recent study, by the RAND Corporation, found that dismantling them had little or no long-term effect on a city’s homeless population. Another survey, conducted last year by the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, found that 75 percent of homeless adults in California were local residents who had become homeless in the county where they had last been housed.
Administration officials, who spoke on background because the executive order had not yet been issued, said it had been drawn up as a regulatory template for government entities that still must deal with encampments, which continue to sprawl across sidewalks, peek from rural wild lands and crop up nightly along beaches and waterways.
So many people have sought shelter near freeways, for example, that the California Department of Transportation has developed its own protocol and dedicated employees for clearing encampments. From one-person pup tents pitched near offramps to large encampments sheltering dozens of people beneath overpasses, Caltrans, as the department is known, has cleared more than 11,000 campsites since 2021, removing more than 248,000 cubic yards of debris, Newsom administration officials said.
The governor’s directive will order other state agencies — including California State Parks and the Department of Fish and Wildlife, both of which oversee immense tracts of land — to adopt versions of the approach being used at Caltrans. Under that approach, the departments will first target encampments that pose a health and safety risk. The state will provide 48 to 72 hours of advance notice, and state officials will work with local service providers to connect homeless campers with services and housing. Personal property collected at each site will be bagged, tagged and stored for at least 60 days.
Administration officials said that Caltrans could immediately accelerate enforcement and that other state agencies should have the new rules in place within a couple of weeks.
The state cannot legally force cities to adopt the Caltrans system. But Mr. Newsom and state lawmakers can pressure local leaders because they control billions of dollars of funding intended to address homelessness.
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3) The U.K. drops its opposition to an International Criminal Court warrant for Netanyahu.
By Stephen Castle Reporting from London, July 26, 2024
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel attending a session in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem, this month. Credit...Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press
Britain on Friday confirmed it was dropping plans to challenge the pursuit of an international warrant against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the International Criminal Court, underscoring a shift in foreign policy under the country’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer.
The decision marks a divergence from U.S. policy on Israel, which the previous Conservative government had followed closely.
Two people briefed on the government’s deliberations told The New York Times earlier this week that Mr. Starmer would drop the previous government’s objections to the pursuit of warrants by the end of this week.
Downing Street said on Friday that Mr. Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, had decided that Britain would not make a submission to the court as Mr. Sunak’s government had planned.
“This was a proposal by the previous government which was not submitted before the election, and which I can confirm the government will not be pursuing, in line with our longstanding position that this is a matter for the court to decide on,” said an official spokeswoman for Mr. Starmer.
“The government believes strongly in the rule of law and separation of powers,” she added.
In May, Karim Khan, the international criminal court prosecutor, announced he had applied for warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and for the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity during Israel’s military operation in Gaza, including the starvation of civilians.
Mr. Khan simultaneously applied for warrants for three Hamas leaders, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Mr. Sunak described the request for warrants against Israeli officials as “deeply unhelpful,” and a senior government minister, Andrew Mitchell, told Parliament: “We do not think that the I.C.C. has jurisdiction in this case.” In early June, the government applied to the international court for the right to submit objections, and was asked to submit its arguments by July 12. That deadline was extended until Friday after Mr. Sunak called a general election.
The decision not to intervene in the international court proceedings marks the second departure by the new British government from U.S. policy on Israel since Britain’s general election earlier this month.
Last week, David Lammy, Britain’s new foreign secretary, said he would restore funding to the main United Nations relief agency that aids the Palestinians, UNRWA.
The government is also reviewing whether to continue sales of weapons to Israel, a decision that will rest on official legal advice on whether Israel has broken international law in Gaza.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry declined to comment.
Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the U.K., welcomed the decision not to intervene in the I.C.C. case, describing it as a “significant step in aligning the U.K. with the rule of law.”
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting
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4) Some airdropped aid packages, intended for Gaza, have fallen far off-target.
By Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, July 26, 2024
Aid packages being airdropped from a U.S. plane into the Gaza Strip in March. Credit...Hussein Malla/Associated Press
Some have landed by mistake in Israeli villages. Others have fallen into the sea. Still more have hit and damaged Palestinians’ private property.
Aid packages dropped by foreign air forces over Gaza were intended to alleviate food shortages in the territory, amid widespread hunger and obstacles to distributing food by land. Instead, many packages have missed their targets, damaged cars and homes, caused riots among people fighting over their contents, and even landed outside Gaza — embodying, rather than solving, the problems with aid distribution.
Since March, countries including the United States, Egypt and Jordan have parachuted 9,667 food packages intended for Gaza in 118 airdrops, COGAT, the Israeli military unit responsible for coordinating aid delivery, said last week. The aim has been to stave off famine in the area after the destruction of roads, a breakdown in law and order, Israeli airstrikes and Israeli restrictions on aid workers have made it harder to move food around the enclave.
But at least three packages have landed in Netiv Ha’Asara, an Israeli village at the northern border with the Gaza Strip that was raided by Hamas at the start of the war.
Twelve Palestinians drowned in March while trying to reach aid from an airdrop that fell into the Mediterranean off Gaza’s coast, according to the Gazan authorities. Another package hit one of Gaza’s few remaining functional farms, damaging a greenhouse that was growing vegetables, a video showed.
“What can I say, they need to be directed more accurately,” said Aviran Farin, a spokesman for the regional authority that oversees Netiv Ha’Asara. Mr. Farin described finding dates, rice, canned food and snacks that had been intended for Gaza but ended up in the village.
Another airdrop made it to northern Gaza but hit the home and car of Wajdy Mousa, a software engineer. The package wrecked the vehicle and attracted crowds of desperate Gazans, who surged into Mr. Mousa’s backyard looking for food, Mr. Mousa said in a phone interview. Some were armed with knives to rip open the packages, prompting Mr. Mousa and his family of 12 to huddle inside their locked home for safety.
“I am against these airdrops without any hesitation,” Mr. Mousa said. “They endanger people’s safety and provide no real benefit.”
Some Palestinians disagree, arguing that airdrops, although they are imperfect and insufficient to meet Gazans’ needs in a situation that humanitarian groups still describe as dire, are better than nothing.
“There is no ideal way to deliver aid in a war zone,” said Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian-American analyst who grew up in Gaza and has written for U.S. and Israeli news media about the merits of airdrops.
There have been “issues, mistakes, and horrors,” Mr. Alkhatib said, but the alternative is worse.
“Risking some lives to feed tens of thousands of people or waiting for a resolution to the entrenched security and logistical problems at the border crossings?” he asked. “Not doing anything allows the problem to get out of hand.”
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5) Israeli forces press forward in Khan Younis. At least 30 people are reported killed in 24 hours.
By Anjana Sankar, July 26, 2024
Palestinian children received aid at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Credit...Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At least 30 people were killed and dozens more injured over a 24-hour period on Wednesday and Thursday in the Gaza Strip, local health officials said, as the Israeli military pushed deeper into parts of Khan Younis that it had previously designated as humanitarian zones for civilians fleeing the fighting.
The Israeli military, which began a renewed offensive in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis earlier this week, said it was targeting Hamas forces whom it accused of embedding fighters among civilians.
Many of the victims were taken to the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, where photos taken by a photographer for Agence France-Presse showed bloodied children being rushed in for care.
Mohammad Saqer, the director of nursing at Nasser Hospital, said he had treated three children for severe blast wounds, which he said were most likely from bombardment. Dr. Saqer, who has worked at the medical center for 18 years, said few shipments of medicine and fuel were arriving at the hospital, making treatment difficult.
“So many dead, so many wounded, not enough beds,” Dr. Saqer said. “The situation’s disastrous. We’re rationing electricity, turning off air conditioning, trying to save what we can.”
Patients at the facility have been forced to share beds, and the hospital was “under enormous strain as the killing, wounding and maiming of people continues relentlessly in southern Gaza,” the aid group Doctors Without Borders wrote on social media earlier in the week.
The United Nations said that 150,000 people fled Khan Younis on Monday alone, the day the renewed Israeli offensive began, and that “large-scale displacement” from the area was ongoing.
In Al-Mawasi, the coastal town where the Israeli military ordered Khan Younis residents to go, there is “no space for even a single tent due to the overwhelming number of people desperate for safety,” the Palestinian Red Crescent said. The group said that one of its ambulances came under fire on Thursday as medics were trying assisting injured civilians.
Fighting in recent days has centered around three towns near the city of Khan Younis — Bani Suaila, Al Zanna and Al Qarara. On Wednesday, the Israeli military discovered the bodies of five Israelis in Al Qarara who had been killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. The bodies were found in a tunnel used by militants.
“Hamas exploited the humanitarian area and used it to hold our hostages captive,” the military said in a statement on social media. Hamas did not issue a response on its social media channels.
Israeli officials say 115 hostages remain in Gaza, including roughly 40 who are presumed dead.
The military said on Thursday that Hamas had launched several rockets toward Israel from the humanitarian area in Khan Younis earlier in the day. But the strike did not reach Israel and at least one rocket hit a U.N.-run school in Al Qarara, killing two people and injuring several others, the military said.
Schools have not been operating during the war and most of them have become shelters for displaced people. UNRWA, the United Nations’ main relief group for Palestinians that runs schools, did not confirm the attack.
The Israeli military said its forces operating in Khan Younis had killed dozens of Hamas militants over the past day and struck more than 60 terror targets.
Gaza’s health ministry said Israeli military strikes on areas in eastern Khan Younis killed at least 14 people early Thursday, with airstrikes reported in southern Gaza and tanks advancing in central Rafah.
Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defense, said Israeli forces had killed at least 17 people on Thursday in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, and in Khan Younis, Israeli snipers shot and killed at least one person while he was moving down Salah al-Din Street, Gaza’s main north-south route, he said. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the incident.
Anushka Patil and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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6) Away From the War in Gaza, Another Palestinian Economy Is Wrecked
With the closure of checkpoints, Israeli Arabs cannot come to Jenin and Tulkarm to shop, and West Bank Palestinians cannot leave to work in Israel, cutting incomes and building militancy.
By Steven Erlanger, Photographs by Sergey Ponomarev, July 27, 2024, Steven Erlanger reported from the cities and refugee camps of Jenin and Tulkarm in the northern West Bank.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/27/world/middleeast/west-bank-economy.html
Large parts of Jenin, especially near its extensive refugee camp, have been ravaged by Israeli troops.
Less than three years ago, Wassif Frahat spent $3 million to open a lavish, two-story restaurant, the Ali Baba. With an impressive, pillared entryway, polished stone floors, glittering chandeliers and colorful frescoes on the high ceilings, the restaurant was his commitment to a better future.
The Ali Baba, in Jenin, is just a few minutes’ drive from the Jalameh checkpoint, which in normal times allows Israeli Arab citizens entry to the West Bank. The atmosphere is Palestinian, and the shops, restaurants and services are significantly cheaper than in Israel. The crossing also allows Palestinians with valid entry permits to go to jobs in Israel.
But after Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, the checkpoint was closed. Israel withheld most tax revenue from the authorities in the West Bank, in an effort to weaken them and clamp down more broadly on Palestinians. The economy in the territory’s north collapsed, and the better future that Mr. Frahat expected now seems farther away than ever.
The war that followed the invasion is devastating Gaza, but it is also impoverishing the West Bank, which has become a kind of second front in Israel’s battle against Palestinian militancy.
The Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank but does not run Gaza, has been paying only about 50 percent of the salaries it owes its estimated 140,000 employees. In the West Bank as a whole, which has a population of about three million, 144,000 jobs have disappeared since October, and 148,000 Palestinians who were working in Israel have lost their jobs, according to the World Bank. Before Oct. 7, unemployment in the West Bank was about 13 percent, compared to 45 percent in Gaza.
Mr. Frahat, 51, once had 53 employees at his restaurant and an older one in the city center. “Now I only have 18 because business is down by 90 percent,” he said.
Israeli Arabs are not his only lost customers; local Palestinians have stopped coming, too. They lack money, he said, and fear continued incursions by Israel’s military. Its forces are trying to tamp down increasing militancy among young armed Palestinians who largely run the sprawling refugee camps in Jenin and the cities of Tulkarm and Nablus.
The Israeli army killed seven people in a raid in Jenin on July 5, after a larger operation in late May that killed 12.
“People are afraid to leave their homes,” Mr. Frahat said.
In large parts of Jenin, and especially near its refugee camp, Israeli troops using tanks and armored bulldozers have ripped up roads, cut water and sewage pipes, broken power lines and smashed many storefronts and U.N. offices, including a recently renovated medical clinic. The scene is similar in Tulkarm, with its two refugee camps.
Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli brigadier general and senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, said that the army was engaged in “preventive actions” to head off a new wave of suicide bombings carried out by “armed groups producing explosives.”
Jenin and some of the camps are bastions of armed resistance to the occupation. Israel has conducted frequent raids over the years, but they have become more common since Oct. 7. Israeli officials say the raids are part of counterterrorism operations against Hamas and an extension of the war. Hundreds of Palestinians have been detained.
The raids have piled only more misery on a failing economy. Amar Abu Beker, 49, the chairman of the Jenin Chamber of Commerce, which represents 5,000 businesses, said that 70 percent of them were struggling to stay afloat.
The chamber is working to repair the key roads that Israeli forces have wrecked because the Palestinian Authority has little money for such work, Mr. Abu Beker said. In addition to the damage done by the checkpoint closure, the economy had been constricted by monthslong general strikes in 2022 and 2023 in sympathy with Palestinians killed in Israeli raids.
“The Palestinian Authority is holding on by its fingernails,” Mr. Abu Beker said. “Without money, you can’t operate.”
In a recent report, the World Bank said that the authority’s financial health “has dramatically worsened in the last three months, significantly raising the risk of a fiscal collapse.” It cited the “drastic reduction” in tax transfers from Israel and “a massive drop in economic activity.”
The measures to starve the Palestinian Authority of funds, pushed by far-right members of the Israeli government who want to annex the West Bank and resettle Gaza, have alarmed the Biden administration. U.S. officials want the authority to play a role in running postwar Gaza and worry that an economic crash in the West Bank could lead to more violence.
U.S. officials have pressured the Israeli government to release withheld taxes, which make up about 70 percent of the authority’s income. On July 3, Israel agreed to release $116 million, but the Palestinian Authority said it was owed nearly $1.6 billion.
Anas Jaber, 27, is among the Palestinians who have lost their jobs in Israel. He had been making up to 7,000 shekels a month, or about $1,870, as a housekeeper at a Tel Aviv hotel.
“Now I sit at home and live off savings,” he said. “I’m not married, thank God.” His job has been filled by Filipinos and Indians, and he has applied to move to Canada. “Inshallah,” he said. “I’m sick of checkpoints, and I want to sleep at night.”
There has been no water for a week, he said. Near his mother’s house, where he is staying, is graffiti in Hebrew and Arabic on a bullet-pocked wall that says, “Alleyways of death.”
Um Ibrahim, 60, said she used to get 750 shekels every three months from the Palestinian Authority for medicine to treat her diabetes and high blood pressure.
“For the past nine months, nothing,” she said. “The authority is having an economic crisis, so I’m scared I won’t get any help.” And if it collapses? She laughed bitterly. “OK, then, bye-bye.”
The governor of Jenin, Kamal Abu al-Rub, 58, admitted that with checkpoints closed, first during the Covid pandemic and now after Oct. 7, the city is struggling.
“The veins that let us live are Palestinians from Israel, our lifeblood,” he said, sitting in his large office as an American armored personnel carrier guarded the entrance. The city’s Arab American University is mostly shut now, with only a third of its regular 6,000 students, who in normal times pay rent and shop in stores.
Israel did allow the Jalameh checkpoint to open in late May, but only on Friday mornings, when the shops are closed and most people are at mosques, and on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
A large photograph of Mr. Abu al-Rub’s son Shamekh hangs in his office. A doctor who trained in Jordan, Shamekh, then 25, was shot and killed by Israeli troops in November, in nearby Qabatiya, when trying to reach his brother, Muhammad, who had been shot in the leg, Mr. Abu al-Rub said. “They shot my two sons in front of my house,” he said.
He praises the Palestinian security forces, two of whose commanders were in the room monitoring the interview, for keeping law and order on badly reduced salaries. But he acknowledges that the security forces do not maintain a presence in the refugee camps, where Israel says the militants have established control, and he blames Israel for all the trouble.
Asked why young fighters from the camp, known as shabab, sometimes fire on his headquarters, Mr. Abu al-Rub said, “It is Israel that is giving the shabab weapons to fire at the P.A.”
Israeli officials deny such charges but would not comment on individual raids or deaths.
At the entrance to the camp, in the hot sun, Mahmoud Jalmaneh, 56, described how his life had changed as he tried to sell cheap tobacco from a dusty glass cabinet on wheels — 20 cigarettes for 4 shekels, about a dollar, compared to more than $8 for Marlboros, which he does not sell.
Born and raised here, he has seven children, and last July, Israeli troops were caught in a firefight in front of his house and blew it up, he said. “I was a homeowner and now I’m renting, and I have no more money to pay when the landlord comes,” he said.
“The checkpoints are closed; we can’t work in Israel or leave the country,” Mr. Jalmaneh said. “There’s no money, no salaries.”
“We are lonely. We are a people isolated and under occupation. We are fighting the whole world.”
Rami Nazzal contributed reporting from Tulkarm and Jenin, and Natan Odenheimer from Jerusalem.
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7) New Israeli Evacuation Order in Gaza Displaces Palestinians Again
The order affected part of southern Gaza, while farther north, the Israeli military struck the grounds of a school it said was being used by Hamas, killing more than 30 people, Gaza officials said.
By Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 27, 2024
Injured Palestinians being taken to a hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, on Saturday. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
The Israeli army ordered the evacuation of several neighborhoods in southern Gaza on Saturday, the latest in a series of such directives recently that have forced tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians to relocate yet again.
The decision affects an area around the city of Khan Younis that Israel had previously designated a “humanitarian zone” for Palestinian civilians, who are weary from nearly a year of unrelenting war and a daily struggle to avoid disease and find enough food and clean water to survive.
“People aren’t being regarded as people,” said Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, the main United Nations agency providing aid to Palestinians in Gaza. “They’re being treated as pinballs and chess pieces.”
The Israeli military said its recent evacuations and operations in Khan Younis have targeted a renewed Hamas insurgency and accused Hamas of installing weapons infrastructure in the area under the latest evacuation order on Saturday.
Over the past week, amid new evacuation orders, more than 190,000 people have fled the places where they were sheltering in southern and central Gaza, the United Nations said on Friday.
Dozens of people have been killed in fighting in the area, according to both Israel and Palestinian health officials. The Israeli military said on Friday that its forces had killed more than 100 militants in Khan Younis in recent days, while Palestinian health officials have said that at least some casualties arriving at local hospitals with severe blast wounds have been women and children.
There was also a new Israeli strike in central Gaza on Saturday, in an area some miles north of the zone under the latest evacuation order. Palestinian health officials reported that the Israeli military struck a school-turned-shelter that the Al-Aqsa hospital in the town of Deir al-Balah was using to provide medical services to Palestinians.
More than 30 people were killed in the Israeli attack and scores more wounded, according to Khalil al-Daqran, a spokesman for the Al-Aqsa hospital.
The Israeli military said its forces had struck a Hamas command and control center within the school grounds, which it claimed had been used to wage attacks against the Israeli military and store weapons.
Tariq Abutaha, 30, said in an interview on Saturday that he had fled his home in the Khan Younis suburb of Qizan al-Najjar — inside the zone under the new evacuation order — on Friday as rumors of an impending Israeli operation swirled. He last left there in December, expecting to return a week or two later. But he returned after five months of fighting in the city to find his home partially ruined.
On Friday evening, Mr. Abutaha said he paid $400 for a small truck to ferry 20 family members and whatever belongings they could load to the coastal area of Al Mawasi, which Israel has called a “safer zone” since the early days of the war. As they drove, he watched one scene after another of people fleeing on foot or camping out amid the rubble in the streets.
“We want to get back to our lives. By God, we’re exhausted,” said Mr. Abutaha, as he settled in, once again, in a crowded tent on Gaza’s coast.
Hassan Shehada, 61, a displaced person in Qizan al-Najjar, said he and 25 family members had failed to find a place to go and would remain in the evacuation area, at least until Sunday morning, despite Israel’s orders.
“We have no idea what to do. This is a real problem. We’re tired of moving over and over,” he said, likening life in Gaza to going through “a slow death.”
In any case, fleeing to comply with Israeli evacuation orders provides little guarantee of safety for Palestinian civilians.
The Israeli military has said it will target Hamas anywhere the armed group operates, contending it has used schools, hospitals, and the Israeli-designated “safer zone” for military purposes.
Israeli ground forces invaded Khan Younis in December, beginning a four-month battle that devastated the city. After the troops withdrew in April, some residents returned to their homes, began clearing streets, and sought to rebuild their lives as much as possible.
Then came another wave of Israeli evacuation orders in early July, followed by at least two more sets of instructions for Palestinians to flee their neighborhoods. For many, it was far from their first time fleeing their homes.
Kamal al-Madhoun, 66, said he saw hundreds of displaced people arriving in western Khan Younis on Saturday, carrying heavy bags and looks of desperation on their faces.
Watching the people trying to find a place to set up makeshift shelters worried Mr. al-Madhoun, who wondered whether he might find himself in the same situation next.
“Absolutely nothing is permanent,” he said. “We’re always full of fear that we’ll have to go through that miserable experience again.”
The Israeli military said another reason for the wide-scale operations in this area recently was an attempt to recover the bodies of Israeli hostages.
Israeli forces worked for almost 30 hours on Wednesday to extract the bodies of five hostages from a tunnel shaft nearly 200 meters long and 20 meters underground, the military said.
“We were right next to those bodies in the past” without knowing it, lamented Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military chief of staff. “We didn’t know how to reach them.”
The operation in Khan Younis was escalating again just days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel met with President Biden in Washington, where they discussed efforts to reach a cease-fire in Gaza that would also free the roughly 115 living and dead hostages there.
The negotiations appear to have ground to a halt in recent weeks, despite some renewed optimism. Israel has yet to formally issue its response to Hamas’s latest counterproposal, which the Palestinian group handed to Qatari and Egyptian mediators in early July.
Relatives of several American-Israeli hostages met with Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday. After the discussions, they expressed hope that an agreement could yet go forward; in November, roughly 105 of the 250 hostages were freed in a weeklong truce.
“We feel probably more optimistic than we have since the first round of releases in late November,” Jonathan Dekel-Chen, whose son Sagui was abducted during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack, told reporters at a news conference.
Ronen Bergman contributed reporting to this article.
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8) Bats Already Had Problems. Now, Add Taxidermy Listings on Etsy and eBay.
Online sales appear to be compounding threats from climate change and habitat loss, according to new research.
By Rachel Nuwer, Published July 25, 2024, Updated July 26, 2024
A listing this month on Etsy, one of three e-commerce sites that researchers monitored for bat specimens.
Some of the bright orange bats were framed in shadow boxes, their boldly striped wings spread wide. Others were mounted in miniature coffins with shiny fittings. A few were promoted as Halloween or Christmas gifts.
Bigger, more charismatic species like elephants and tigers usually come to mind when the illicit animal trade is mentioned. But a study published this month has revealed a flourishing black market in stuffed and mounted bats that, until now, has gone largely unnoticed. In the United States, especially, bats are openly sold, intact or as skeletons, on e-commerce sites like Etsy, eBay and Amazon.
“If people aren’t discerning, they might think they’re buying products that are sustainably sourced, but they’re not,” said Nistara Randhawa, an epidemiologist and data scientist at the University of California, Davis, and a co-author of the study, which appeared in The European Journal of Wildlife Research. “Instead, they could be inadvertently supporting the population decline of this bat species in the wild.”
Other researchers first noticed a worrisome number of bats for sale on eBay in 2014. Dr. Randhawa and her colleagues followed up on that observation with a more systematic study. From October to December 2022, they regularly searched for listings on eBay, Etsy and Amazon. Many types of bats appeared in the results, but they focused primarily on Kerivoula picta, a species from Asia known as the painted woolly bat or fire bat, because its distinctive orange fur and striped wings make it easy to identify.
In 2020, conservationists declared K. picta “near threatened” after determining that the overall population had very likely declined by up to 25 percent over the past 15 years. They cited online demand for specimens and skulls as one of the primary threats driving that decline.
In the search, the group found a total of 856 bats listed for sale online, a quarter of which were K. picta. Etsy accounted for half of the listings, eBay for 45 percent and Amazon for 5 percent.
Most sellers were in the United States, and some indicated that specimens had been imported from Indonesia. Many claimed that their bats were sustainably sourced or bred in captivity. One Etsy seller even stated that purchasing from them helps to “prevent extinction and support the fight against deforestation and habitat destruction worldwide.”
Such claims are “rubbish,” said Chris Shepherd, a co-author of the study and executive director of Monitor, a wildlife trade research group that focuses on lesser-known species. “It’s a frivolous and purely luxury trade,” he added.
K. picta, like the vast majority of other bat species, has yet to be evaluated for inclusion in international wildlife trade regulations. But the species is illegal to hunt or sell in most, if not all, of the respective countries where it occurs, including Indonesia, said Joanna Coleman, an ecologist and conservation biologist at Queens College, part of the City University of New York. She was also a co-author of the findings.
This would make K. picta illegal to trade in the United States under the Lacey Act, which prohibits the importing and sale of wildlife that was unlawfully obtained in its home country. “We’re talking about a fundamentally illegal activity,” Dr. Coleman said. “It’s also very unlikely to be sustainable.”
Amazon declined a request for comment about the study’s findings and what, if anything, the company does to limit illegal wildlife trade on its platform. Scott Overland, an eBay spokesman, said that the site prohibited the sale of all bats, “whether live, dead or taxidermy.”
On Monday, after The Times sent eBay links to two listings of K. picta being advertised by a seller in Indonesia, the posts were removed. By Tuesday, one of the posts had reappeared, along with 36 other listings for bat specimens of different species from the same seller. After the Times pointed this out, the seller’s account disappeared.
“Users found attempting to list prohibited items may face consequences up to, and including, a permanent suspension,” Mr. Overland said.
An Etsy spokesperson, who declined to be identified by name or quoted directly, said that taxidermy was allowed on the site but that sellers had to comply with the company’s policy of prohibiting the sale of endangered or threatened wildlife. When asked whether Etsy planned to take any action against the sellers offering bats on the platform, the spokesperson said that it was the responsibility of sellers to know and follow the law.
The Times contacted several sellers with current listings for K. picta on Etsy and Amazon. One of the most active was listed as Charles Limmer. A Long Island resident with the same name has previously been indicted on charges of wildlife trafficking. Mr. Limmer did not respond to a request for comment. The Etsy spokesperson later said that Mr. Limmer’s account had been flagged for review.
NaturalByJim, an Etsy seller in Akron, Ohio, was the only one who responded. “These specimens were legally imported over 20 yrs ago,” he wrote. “They have been stored in a freezer.” Dr. Coleman noted that the Lacey Act was passed in 1900. The Times was unable to verify the seller’s claim or to determine from where those bats had been imported.
Vincent Nijman, a wildlife trade researcher at Oxford Brookes University in England who was not involved in the research, noted that Etsy sellers in Oregon, Ohio, New York and Britain all advertised K. picta specimens with virtually the same packaging and mounting, even down to the pattern of staples used. This suggests that “they all come from the same supplier, which seems to be based in East Java,” Dr. Nijman said.
Given the limited scope of the study, the findings were almost certainly an underestimate of the true extent of the bat trade, Dr. Coleman said. She said she had spotted K. picta specimens for sale on dozens of other websites and at curio shops.
For now, the findings highlight the fact that “just about any animal that can be traded will be traded, if money can be made,” Dr. Nijman said. As with many other types of wildlife commerce, he added, there is “no evidence and no data to suggest it is sustainable or ethical.”
Bat populations around the world already face myriad threats from climate change, habitat loss, persecution, wildlife disease, collisions with wind turbines and more, said Liam McGuire, an ecologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who was not involved in the research. “To see bat populations further threatened purely for decorative and aesthetic purposes is very concerning.”
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9) Fears of Escalation After Rocket From Lebanon Hits Soccer Field
Diplomats were scrambling to prevent a surge in fighting, officials said, after Israel struck Lebanon overnight in response to a rocket attack that killed at least 12 civilians in an Israeli-controlled town.
By Patrick KingsleyEuan Ward and Isabel Kershner, Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem, Euan Ward from Beirut, Lebanon, and Isabel Kershner from the Golan Heights, July 28, 2024
“The Golan Heights is a territory once held by Syria that was captured by Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Israel annexed the territory in 1981, a move that was not recognized by most of the world. Decades later, President Donald J. Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty there, but most countries consider it occupied territory.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/28/world/middleeast/israel-lebanon-strike.html
Mourners on Sunday surrounded coffins of those killed in a rocket strike from Lebanon a day earlier in the town of Majdal Shams, in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Credit...Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Western diplomats were scrambling on Sunday to prevent a surge of fighting along the Israel-Lebanon border, officials said, after a rocket from Lebanon on Saturday killed at least 12 people in an Israeli-controlled town, most of them children. The rocket prompted Israel to retaliate early Sunday with strikes across Lebanon.
The initial Israeli response appeared to stop short of a major escalation, but there were still fears that the fallout from the rocket launch would lead to all-out war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, facing domestic pressure to mount a fiercer response, was set to meet with senior government ministers on Sunday afternoon to discuss further steps, after flying back early from a trip to the United States.
Israel blamed Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Lebanese group that has been attacking Israel in solidarity with Hamas, for the deadly rocket attack on Saturday on the Druse Arab town of Majdal Shams. Hezbollah has denied it was responsible.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said at a news conference on Sunday in Tokyo that there was “every indication” that the rocket was fired by Hezbollah.
U.S. diplomats were working on Sunday to contain the hostilities and asked Lebanon’s government to relay a message to Hezbollah to show restraint in the face of a further Israeli response, according to Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib.
“We are trying to restrain Hezbollah now from retaliating to whatever the Israelis do next,” Mr. Bou Habib said in a call with The New York Times. It was not immediately possible to confirm that with U.S. officials.
French officials also passed messages back and forth between Israel and Hezbollah, according to a Western official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. France still has some influence in Lebanon owing to its former status as a French protectorate after World War I.
The Israeli military said its overnight strikes had chiefly targeted places in Lebanon that it had often hit in the past, mostly close to the border with Israel or surrounding the southern port of Tyre. It reported one strike in the Bekaa Valley, roughly 60 miles north of the Israel-Lebanon border, where it has been striking less frequently since February.
Lebanon’s state-run news agency reported extensive damage and some casualties resulting from the overnight Israeli strikes that began shortly after midnight and lasted until dawn. It was not immediately clear if the casualties were civilians or militants.
The rocket strike on Saturday, which hit children at a soccer field, was the deadliest assault on Israeli-controlled territory since Israel and Hezbollah began exchanging missile and rocket fire in October.
Some Israelis want Mr. Netanyahu to authorize a full-scale ground invasion of southern Lebanon in order to deter similar attacks. But others fear that such a move would prompt a far more devastating response from Hezbollah, whose arsenal of weapons is considered larger and most sophisticated than almost any other nonstate actor in the region.
Israeli commanders are also wary of opening up a second major war while the war in Gaza is still raging. After nine months of fighting with Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel’s munitions stockpiles have dwindled, raising questions about how intense a battle it could fight in Lebanon.
For now, Israeli officials say that they are still open to a diplomatic resolution to the conflict with Hezbollah. Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Oren Marmorstein, said in a statement on Sunday that a full-scale war could still be averted through the enforcement of a never-implemented United Nations resolution from 2006 that would create a demilitarized zone in southern Lebanon.
Still, there were strong expectations on Sunday morning that Israel might mount a bigger response. That, analysts fear, could tip the low-level hostilities between Israel and militias led by Hezbollah into more intense conflict.
Roughly 100,000 people in Lebanon and 60,000 in Israel have been displaced, with scores of schools and health centers shuttered in both countries.
More than 460 people in Lebanon have been killed, most of them militants. More than 100 were civilians, including 12 children and 21 health workers, according to the United Nations and Lebanon’s Health Ministry. The fighting has killed 22 Israeli soldiers and 24 civilians, according to the Israeli government.
But unlike in Gaza, both sides have largely avoided attacks that cause overwhelming loss of life, which would in turn prompt their opponent to respond with overwhelming force.
The scale of the bloodshed on Saturday night has provided one of the strongest tests to that calculus since October.
“Hezbollah will pay a heavy price, which it has not paid up to now,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in an overnight statement.
U.N. officials urged Israel and Hezbollah to “exercise maximum restraint,” warning that “it could ignite a wider conflagration that would engulf the entire region in a catastrophe beyond belief,” according to a joint statement by the U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, and the chief of U.N. peacekeeping forces in Lebanon, Lt. Gen. Aroldo Lázaro.
The attack on Saturday set off widespread grief in the Golan Heights, where thousands of Druse Arabs observed a day of mourning on Sunday, shutting shops and other workplaces. Thousands went by bus to Majdal Shams to attend the funerals of those slain.
“The worst thing that has happened to the Druse in my memory,” said Diab Shams, 21, a Druse electrical engineering student who was traveling by bus to the town. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said, with tears in his eyes.
As the bus passed a Jewish Israeli town, scores of Jewish residents could be seen gathered beside the road waving both Israeli and Druse flags in a gesture of solidarity with the Druse community.
The Golan Heights is a territory once held by Syria that was captured by Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Israel annexed the territory in 1981, a move that was not recognized by most of the world. Decades later, President Donald J. Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty there, but most countries consider it occupied territory.
Roughly 20,000 Druse Arabs live in the Golan Heights, including in the town hit by the rocket; some still consider themselves Syrian, refusing Israeli passports, while a minority have taken Israeli citizenship. Jewish Israelis began settling the territory after 1967, and more than 20,000 now live in the area.
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10) This Dirty Industry Is Better Off Operating in America
By Stephen Lezak, Dr. Lezak is a researcher at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford who studies the politics of climate change, July 23, 2024
“The decline of domestic mining means that Americans are outsourcing the environmental and social costs of our inexpensive consumer goods to lower-income nations. More than 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, sometimes called the blood diamond of electric vehicle batteries, comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where child labor and sexual violence are rampant in mines. About half of the world’s nickel, another key ingredient in electric vehicle batteries, comes from mines in Indonesia, some of which have wiped out almost 200,000 acres of rainforest amid allegations of operating illegally on Indigenous land. In the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, where I’ve studied the environmental impacts of mining, I met fluorite miners who lamented the destruction of their landscapes and the poisoning of their groundwater.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/opinion/lithium-copper-minerals-mining.html
The SQM lithium mine at the Atacama salt flat in the Antofagasta region of Chile last year. Credit...Ivan Alvarado/Reuters
Seventy years ago, the United States was the world’s leading producer of fluorite, a brilliantly multicolored mineral essential to industries such as steel. But the last American fluorite mine closed nearly 30 years ago, unable to compete with cheaper operations in places like Mongolia.
Although America has abundant deposits of many of the critical minerals that go into our vehicles, electronics and buildings, these materials are mostly mined abroad in poorer nations where labor is cheap (or worse, workers are enslaved) and environmental laws are more permissive, rarely enforced or easily sidestepped with bribes.
The decline of domestic mining means that Americans are outsourcing the environmental and social costs of our inexpensive consumer goods to lower-income nations. More than 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, sometimes called the blood diamond of electric vehicle batteries, comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where child labor and sexual violence are rampant in mines. About half of the world’s nickel, another key ingredient in electric vehicle batteries, comes from mines in Indonesia, some of which have wiped out almost 200,000 acres of rainforest amid allegations of operating illegally on Indigenous land. In the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, where I’ve studied the environmental impacts of mining, I met fluorite miners who lamented the destruction of their landscapes and the poisoning of their groundwater.
Demand for these minerals is only growing as we make the transition away from fossil fuels, and leaving them in the ground will jeopardize climate progress. A United Nations study found that meeting international climate goals by 2030 could require building as many as 80 copper mines, 70 lithium mines and 70 nickel mines to supply the materials for electric vehicles, solar panels and a host of other low-carbon technologies.
The ethical and strategic way to handle this situation is for the federal government and environmentalists to encourage this industry to return to the United States and to hold it to the highest sustainability standards. Because safe and ethical mines are more expensive to run, consumers will have to pay a small premium for products with minerals sourced from these operations. Many of us are already paying more for responsibly sourced goods, such as chocolate and coffee. We should demand the same for our smartphones and batteries.
Reinventing the American mining industry might be more broadly appealing than it seems. On the right, conservatives are looking to shore up the jobs and tax revenue in rural communities generated by the fossil fuel industry, which is likely to decline as the energy transition gains momentum. Meanwhile, defense hawks are looking to outmaneuver China, which has a near monopoly on the supply chains of several critical minerals.
On the left, the Biden administration is looking to deliver on its made-in-America industrial policy, including the Inflation Reduction Act, which created tax incentives and $250 million in grants for domestic critical mineral production. Many of the law’s provisions, like a generous credit for electric vehicles, require manufacturers to source at least half of the critical minerals in batteries from the United States or nations with which we have free trade agreements.
Several experts have proposed further reforms to advance critical minerals mining in the United States. The Bipartisan Policy Center has suggested creating time limits for federal environmental reviews and funding work force development. But reinventing a domestic industry faces two simple issues. The first is cost.
Paying fair wages, safely storing toxic waste and setting aside money for cleanup is expensive, and some mining companies prefer to try to make larger profits by operating in countries with cheaper labor and laxer regulations. A coordinated effort by purchasers of these minerals — companies such as Apple and General Motors — could change that calculus. By committing to purchasing ethically sourced materials, these companies could spur miners and investors to chase higher profits by selling the materials at a higher price in the same way organic farmers do with organic food. Federal and state governments can also commit to purchasing only vehicles with materials sourced from mines certified by groups like the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance.
In my conversations with industry insiders, I frequently hear that supply chains are too long and complex for manufacturers to ensure that responsibly produced minerals wind up in products. But behind this weak excuse is a stubborn reluctance to depart from the status quo. Just last month, the Swedish automaker Volvo announced that one of its new electric vehicle models would have a groundbreaking “battery passport” telling consumers where its battery components were mined and processed. Other companies can no longer pretend to be powerless over their supply chains.
The more persistent obstacle standing in the way of bringing more mining home to the United States is vitriol among mining companies, local communities and environmental groups — vitriol that stalls proposed developments and causes decades-long lead times for new mines. This conflict — usually waged through lawsuits and other administrative maneuvers — stems from a centuries-long history of mining companies’ poisoning rural (and especially tribal) communities and landscapes. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 40 percent of the nation’s rivers and 50 percent of the nation’s lakes have been contaminated in part by abandoned mines. Even today, some companies act unethically and cut corners, for example by declaring bankruptcy to dodge legal requirements to repair environmental damage after a mine closes.
But the mining industry can leave behind this shameful legacy. Recent advances have made it possible to extract minerals with a much smaller environmental footprint, such as by reprocessing old waste materials at once abandoned mines. And some mining companies have shown a willingness to safeguard local communities. One mine in Montana has a binding agreement with regional residents to pay for independent experts to monitor local water quality, going far beyond federal and state requirements. Although mining will never be zero-impact, it has the potential to be fair and responsible.
Achieving safe and ethical mining will require collaboration from environmental groups. Instead of reflexively opposing mining projects, activists should demand that new American mines hew to the highest sustainability standards. They should also push Congress to reform America’s inadequate mining laws, such as by requiring mining companies to sign benefit-sharing agreements with local communities before breaking ground on new mines.
It’s easy to shirk responsibility for the faraway impacts of what we buy and consume, and it’s noble to defend the landscapes we call home. But turning a blind eye to the consequences of our affluence exacts a great cost. It’s time to look squarely at that damage and ask ourselves: What can we do to make mining — and the global energy transition — a fair trade for people and the planet?
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11) Israel’s Security Cabinet Approves Military Response to Rocket Attack From Lebanon
By Isabel Kershner and Euan Ward reporting from Jerusalem and Beirut, July 29,2024
A rocket fired from Lebanon struck a soccer field on Saturday in the Druse Arab village of Majdal Shams. Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Tensions were running high on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border on Monday in anticipation of an escalation in hostilities, after Israel’s security cabinet authorized its leaders to decide on the nature and timing of a military response to a deadly rocket attack from Lebanon over the weekend.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, received the authorization from the cabinet members in a meeting on Sunday night, according to a statement from the prime minister’s office.
Israeli politicians have been vocal about the need for a significant military blow in retaliation for the rocket strike, which killed 12 children and teenagers on Saturday in the Druse Arab village of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. The Iran-backed militia group Hezbollah, which has been sending rockets into Israel for months, denied responsibility for the attack, but Israel and the United States have blamed the group.
Visiting the scene of the strike on Monday, Mr. Netanyahu said of the victims, “These children are our children, the children of all of us. Israel will not and cannot let this pass and carry on as usual. Our response is coming, and it will be severe.”
Israeli analysts said Hezbollah was most likely aiming at a nearby army base on Mount Hermon and did not intentionally target the village. But the group’s use of inaccurate rockets in an area dotted with civilian communities led to the kind of unintended consequence that risks sparking an all-out war, they said.
In striking back, Mr. Netanyahu must now make his own calculations so that any Israeli retaliation does not expand the conflict more broadly than planned.
Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Israel needed to respond to meet the expectations of the minority Druse community and Israeli public opinion in general, and so as not to show weakness to the enemy. (Local residents heckled Mr. Netanyahu in Majdal Shams, telling him they had no security and chanting “Murderer! Murderer!” at him, videos posted on social media showed.)
But both sides appeared to be signaling that they did not want a full-blown conflagration, Mr. Yaari said, with each watching the other’s movements across the border.
The response will likely be carefully focused in the hope of preventing a prolonged escalation, he said, adding, “There are a lot of ways that Israel could act. There are plenty of targets in the bank.”
Since the strike on Majdal Shams on Saturday, there have been continued exchanges across the border, but they have seemed to fall within the bounds of the routine tit-for-tat of the past few months. The Israeli military said overnight that its aerial defense systems successfully intercepted an unmanned aircraft that crossed from Lebanon into northwestern Israel.
On Monday morning a drone strike in southern Lebanon killed two people and injured three others, including a child, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency. The strike targeted a vehicle on the road between two border villages, according to Lebanese media reports.
At least two towns were also hit overnight by Israeli airstrikes, the agency reported. The Israeli military did not immediately comment on those attacks.
Hezbollah began firing across Israel’s northern border nearly 10 months ago in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, though the strikes and Israel’s responses have been mostly small scale. In the wake of the attack on Saturday, Western diplomats have been scrambling to try to prevent any major Israeli retaliation and Hezbollah counter-response from spiraling into an all-out war, even as the fighting between Israel and Hamas continues in the south.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, in a call from Tokyo on Monday with Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, “reaffirmed the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s security against threats from Iranian-backed terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah.” But he also emphasized “the importance of preventing escalation of the conflict and discussed efforts to reach a diplomatic solution” to the hostilities, according to Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman.
Hezbollah has denied responsibility for the rocket attack Saturday that struck a soccer field in Majdal Shams. But the Israeli military said the type of rocket used in the attack is Iranian-made and carries more than 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of explosives. Hezbollah is the only group in Lebanon that possesses such rockets, the military said.
And on Sunday, Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. National Security Council, said in a statement that Hezbollah had organized the attack. “It was their rocket, and launched from an area they control,” the statement said.
Mr. Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, described Hezbollah’s denials as “ridiculous” after a visit to the Israeli military’s northern command headquarters on Sunday. He warned that Hezbollah would pay “a heavy price” for the strike.
After a restless night, many in Lebanon were relieved on Monday to find there had been no major Israeli retaliation overnight. Children made their way to school. Bakeries fired up their ovens and the roads were clogged with traffic as people went about their daily commute.
“It was cool to wake up and find that I was alive,” said Mohamed Awada, 52, a taxi driver and father of two who lives in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
But fears continued to linger in Lebanon as the country awaited the expected Israeli response amid a highly unpredictable time for the Middle East. Embassies in Lebanon reissued warnings against travel to the country, and urged foreign citizens to leave while flights are still available.
Rena Bitter, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for the bureau of consular affairs, described a “complex and quickly changing situation” in a video released by the U.S. Embassy in Beirut on Monday.
Ms. Bitter said that U.S. citizens in Lebanon “should be prepared to shelter in place for long periods of time” if commercial flights were halted. “We recommend that U.S. citizens develop a crisis plan of action and leave before a crisis begins,” Ms. Bitter said.
Some airlines, including the Lufthansa Group, have suspended or adjusted their flight schedules in Lebanon amid the heightened tensions. Middle East Airlines, Lebanon’s national carrier, cited “insurance risks” as a reason for rescheduling overnight flights arriving in Beirut, according to a statement.
Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad in Beirut, Edward Wong in Tokyo and Gabby Sobelmanand Myra Noveck in Jerusalem.
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12) What is the Golan Heights?
By Alissa J. Rubin, July 29, 2024
Firefighters at work after an attack from Lebanon in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights this month. Credit...Gil Eliyahu/Associated Press
The Golan Heights, where a rocket from Lebanon killed 12 children and teenagers on Saturday, is an area bordering Syria that Israel seized during the 1967 Six-Day War. Since then it has been a strategic perch for Israeli forces.
Israel occupied the area and then effectively annexed much of it in 1981. That portion, encompassing nearly 500 square miles, gives Israel a vantage point and proximity to two of Jerusalem’s chief adversaries: Syria and Lebanon. The armed group Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, has forces along the nearby southern and southeastern Lebanese border.
Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights has never been recognized by the United Nations, which condemned it at the time. When President Donald J. Trump was in office, he signed a proclamation recognizing Israel’s authority over the land, but the move was criticized internationally and carried primarily symbolic weight.
Both Hezbollah and armed groups in Syria that are also backed by Iran have used the areas along the Lebanese and Syrian borders with the Golan Heights to fire rockets and missiles at Israel.
The largely desert area now has several Israeli military bases, and elsewhere it is relatively thinly populated, with more people in the southern areas, which are better for farming.
Of the more than 50,000 people who live there, about half are people of Syrian ancestry who are Druse, a religion that originated in a branch of Islam. Many Druse residents of the Golan Heights have resisted obtaining Israeli citizenship and have maintained a strong connection to Syria.
Almost all the rest are Israeli Jews, who have settled in the area with the government’s support, much as they have in the West Bank.
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13) Food as You Know It Is About to Change
By David Wallace-Wells, July 28, 2024
Alma Haser
This essay is part of What to Eat on a Burning Planet, a series exploring bold ideas to secure our food supply. Read more about this project in a note from Eliza Barclay, Opinion’s climate editor.
From the vantage of the American supermarket aisle, the modern food system looks like a kind of miracle. Everything has been carefully cultivated for taste and convenience — even those foods billed as organic or heirloom — and produce regarded as exotic luxuries just a few generations ago now seems more like staples, available on demand: avocados, mangoes, out-of-season blueberries imported from Uruguay.
But the supermarket is also increasingly a diorama of the fragility of a system — disrupted in recent years by the pandemic, conflict and, increasingly, climate change. What comes next? Almost certainly, more disruptions and more hazards, enough to remake the whole future of food.
The world as a whole is already facing what the Cornell agricultural economist Chris Barrett calls a “food polycrisis.” Over the past decade, he says, what had long been reliable global patterns of year-on-year improvements in hunger first stalled and then reversed. Rates of undernourishment have grown 21 percent since 2017. Agricultural yields are still growing, but not as quickly as they used to and not as quickly as demand is booming. Obesity has continued to rise, and the average micronutrient content of dozens of popular vegetables has continued to fall. The food system is contributing to the growing burden of diabetes and heart disease and, through new spillovers of infectious diseases from animals to humans as well.
And then there are prices. Worldwide, wholesale food prices, adjusted for inflation, have grown about 50 percent since 1999, and those prices have also grown considerably more volatile, making not just markets but the whole agricultural Rube Goldberg network less reliable. Overall, American grocery prices have grown by almost 21 percent since President Biden took office, a phenomenon central to the widespread perception that the cost of living has exploded on his watch. Between 2020 and 2023, the wholesale price of olive oil tripled; the price of cocoa delivered to American ports jumped by even more in less than two years. The economist Isabella Weber has proposed maintaining the food equivalent of a strategic petroleum reserve, to buffer against shortages and ease inevitable bursts of market chaos.
Price spikes are like seismographs for the food system, registering much larger drama elsewhere — and sometimes suggesting more tectonic changes underway as well. More than three-quarters of the population of Africa, which has already surpassed one billion, cannot today afford a healthy diet; this is where most of our global population growth is expected to happen this century, and there has been little agricultural productivity growth there for 20 years. Over the same time period, there hasn’t been much growth in the United States either.
Though American agriculture as a whole produces massive profits, Mr. Barrett says, most of the country’s farms actually lose money, and around the world, food scarcity is driving record levels of human displacement and migration. According to the World Food Program, 282 million people in 59 countries went hungry last year, 24 million more than the previous year. And already, Mr. Barrett says, building from research by his Cornell colleague Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, the effects of climate change have reduced the growth of overall global agricultural productivity by between 30 and 35 percent. The climate threats to come loom even larger.
It can be tempting, in an age of apocalyptic imagination, to picture the most dire future climate scenarios: not just yield declines but mass crop failures, not just price spikes but food shortages, not just worsening hunger but mass famine. In a much hotter world, those will indeed become likelier, particularly if agricultural innovation fails to keep pace with climate change; over a 30-year time horizon, the insurer Lloyd’s recently estimated a 50 percent chance of what it called a “major” global food shock.
But disruption is only half the story and perhaps much less than that. Adaptation and innovation will transform the global food supply, too. At least to some degree, crops such as avocados or cocoa, which now regularly appear on lists of climate-endangered foodstuffs, will be replaced or redesigned. Diets will shift, and with them the farmland currently producing staple crops — corn, wheat, soy, rice. The pressure on the present food system is not a sign that it will necessarily fail, only that it must change. Even if that progress does come to pass, securing a stable and bountiful future for food on a much warmer planet, what will it all actually look like?
Over the past few years, as the world has begun a belated sprint toward renewable energy sources, we’ve gotten a pretty clear picture of what is often called the energy transition — clean power, primarily from wind and solar, that will be so cheap and abundant that the dirty old sources can’t possibly compete.
It is considerably harder to picture the equivalent for the food system: a proper food transition, delivering better nutrition more equitably and more affordably to more people, all without devastating ecosystems or polluting local environments or pushing the planet further into climate disarray.
Partly this is a matter of sheer scale. More than half of America’s land is used for agricultural production.
Outside the United States, the patterns are similar: More than one-third of the planet’s land is used to produce food, and 70 percent of all fresh water is used to irrigate farmland. Pacing the supermarket aisle, you might think that whatever you’re buying for lunch or dinner is produced out there somewhere on the periphery of modern life. But globally, the equivalent of South America is now used to grow crops, and the equivalent of Africa is used to graze animals. Combined, this is more of the world’s surface than is occupied by forests and more than 10 times as much land as is occupied by all human settlement. And according to the World Resources Institute, we may need to add almost two Indias to the world’s existing farmland to meet food needs in the second half of this century. — but adding that farmland means cutting down forests, which store carbon, in order to graze more animals, which produce carbon.
This all makes it a pretty unwieldy system to reimagine root and branch, and yet some fundamental changes are necessary, given not only climate’s impending impact on food but food’s ongoing impact on climate. One estimate is that food production is directly responsible for nearly a quarter of all global carbon emissions. Add indirect emissions, Project Drawdown’s Jonathan Foley notes, and agriculture is responsible for one-third of the global total of emissions. If food waste were a country, it would be somewhere around the world’s third or fourth biggest emitter of carbon.
A few years ago, it was possible to imagine a suite of solutions that both addressed the problem of emissions from food production and pivoted away from industrial agriculture. In fact, it was somewhat hard to ignore the hype. But a lot of the buzziest approaches have gotten a bit less buzzy with more scrutiny: sequestering carbon in soil looks trickier than advocates expected, and no-till, climate-smart regenerative farming practices now look less like miracle cures, as well. Much-ballyhooed vertical farming has experienced only stunted growth, thanks in part to its astronomical energy demands. And while genetically-modified varietals look perennially promising, they remain unpopular or even illegal in many parts of the world — a Philippines court recently banned nutritionally-enhanced golden rice, a decision that could result in the deaths of many thousands of children from malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies.
We haven’t changed our behavior much, either. Scientists routinely publish eye-popping estimates of the impact of a switch to a plant-based diet, which could significantly cut emissions for individuals and, at the global level, provide half of the emissions reductions needed to keep the planet from warming by more than two degrees. But while many assume that vegetarianism and veganism are growing at least in rich parts of the world, those trend lines have been pretty flat for decades now in the U.S. — with per capita consumption of meat both here and in Europe growing dramatically over the last 50 years (more recently, beef has gotten somewhat less popular). And while some still believe that lab-grown and cultured meat represent the future of “animal” proteins, none of the major producers exactly took over the meat market.
This has all been especially dispiriting given the rapid progress made not just in renewable energy, but also with those pieces of the climate puzzle once known as the hard-to-abate sectors: things like steel making, cement production and various other areas of heavy industry and infrastructure for which there are suddenly green alternatives, even just a few years deep into meaningful spending on research and development.
In agriculture, the state of progress is very different. Farming may look intuitively like a climate-friendly undertaking, but it remains a stubborn carbon problem — and now looks increasingly likely to outlast the other, more obvious parts of the decarbonization challenge. We have long conceptualized climate change as an industrial crisis, to be solved through a new and green industrial revolution. But in a few decades, we may find ourselves having solved the industrial problems of warming, only to be confronted instead by a persistent set of challenges that seem pre-modern by comparison — how to extract more calories from less land and how to do so without bankrupting the earth and its soils along the way.
About three-quarters of all global agricultural land is vulnerable to substantial climate disruptions, NASA’s Jonas Jägermeyr says, “so mostly everywhere you look, things will change in one way or the other.” And that probably means the food you’re eating, too.
“The good news is, we’ve seen this show before — we’ve faced crises before,” says Mr. Barrett. The examples of success he cites are probably familiar: Innovations to solve the challenges of the Dust Bowl in America and later the Green Revolution in Asia allowed hundreds of millions of people to avoid starvation and helped usher in the fastest escape from extreme poverty the world has ever experienced.
Mr. Barrett sees plenty of promise on the horizon now, too: biofortified crops; new techniques to fix nitrogen from the air, limiting the use of fossil-fuel based fertilizer; resilient varieties, like flood-resistant rice, that are already transforming the paddies of South Asia. But there’s no magic-bullet solution, he says: We need a bundle of innovations and interventions.
And innovation at this scale doesn’t just happen at the snap of a finger. The seedlings tend to bloom only after a decade or two of scientific, political, social and economic germination (and often difficulty). Even where politics are relatively stable, market incentives are often perverse, infrastructure often insufficient and support systems lacking for smallholder farmers trying to innovate their way toward greater crop stability and abundance.
In the United States, investment in agricultural research and development has fallen by almost a third in this young century, and “the failure to invest in improving agricultural productivity, especially of healthier foods, basically traces to complacency,” Mr. Barrett says. All told, he believes that agricultural research and development spending needs to at least triple to keep pace with booming demand.
Mr. Jägermeyr of NASA calls it “the challenge of our generation” — how to save the food system from what he calls a “quadruple squeeze.” First, the problem of productivity and hunger. Second, the risk to ecosystems, under threat from fertilizer runoff deforestation and other pollution. Third, the challenge of nutritional deficiency, as those foods we are growing more of are generally getting worse for us over time. And finally climate, which is driving a “fundamental change across most breadbaskets on the planet,” he says. “It’s pretty complicated,” he admits. “And the scary part is that we have to solve them all.”
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14) Riots at Israeli Army Bases Show Growing Divisions Over War in Gaza
By Patrick Kingsley reporting from Jerusalem., July 30, 2024
"At a hearing in Parliament, a lawmaker from Mr. Netanyahu’s party, Hanoch Milwidsky, was asked whether it was acceptable to sexually abuse a detainee. 'Yes,' he replied. 'If he is Nukhba, everything is legitimate to do. Everything.'”
Right-wing Israelis demonstrated at the Sde Teman military base on Monday. Credit...Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli military said on Tuesday that it had sent two battalions to protect an army base where nine soldiers were being held on suspicion of abusing a Palestinian man. The move was a sign of the rising tensions a day after the soldiers’ arrests spurred civilian protesters to storm the base and another military complex.
Scores of right-wing protesters, accompanied by at least three lawmakers from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition, gathered outside the Sde Teiman base on Monday, before some of them surged inside. Others later forced their way into Beit Lid, the base where the soldiers are being held.
Further unrest was expected on Tuesday, when a military court was expected to decide whether to extend the soldiers’ detentions.
The decision to deploy troops inside Israel came as the military leadership questions whether it has enough resources to fight in both Gaza and Lebanon, where cross-border tensions have risen after a deadly rocket attack over the weekend from Lebanon that killed 12 children and teenagers in an Israeli-controlled town.
It reflected the depth of disagreement among Israelis, including within the military, about how to detain, interrogate and punish Palestinians accused of participating in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent ground war in Gaza. It also highlighted a wider battle among Israelis about the future and character of their democracy, in particular over the role of the judiciary and other watchdog institutions.
Since the start of the war, the Israeli military has captured at least 4,000 Gazans, mostly from inside Gaza, and brought them to Sde Teiman, for detention and interrogation. More than 1,000 were later judged to be civilians and returned to Gaza, while others have been held on suspicion of links to Hamas and its Nukhba commando brigade.
Former detainees and some Israeli soldiers have said that guards routinely abuse Gazans held at Sde Teiman; at least 35 detainees have died either at the site or shortly after leaving it.
Amid international scrutiny of Israel’s wartime conduct, some Israelis have pushed for improvements at the base, leading rights groups have petitioned the Supreme Court to close it and military prosecutors have been more proactive about investigating allegations there.
But many Israelis have decried this scrutiny, saying that soldiers should not be punished for how they treat prisoners believed to have committed atrocities during the Oct. 7 attacks that Israel says killed roughly 1,200 people.
This disagreement reached a boiling point on Monday when military police officers detained nine soldiers at Sde Teiman on suspicion of abusing a Palestinian detainee and transferred them to Beit Lid, a second military base.
A military doctor at the field hospital in Sde Teiman, Prof. Yoel Donchin, said in a phone interview that the Palestinian had been brought to the site’s field hospital roughly three weeks ago with signs of abuse across his body.
Professor Donchin said that the doctors there immediately sent the detainee for several days of treatment at a bigger civilian hospital and informed the military police that he might have been mistreated by either guards or fellow prisoners.
The military did not give details of the abuse allegations, but a lawyer representing three of the soldiers, Nati Rom of Honenu, a right-wing legal aid group, said on Monday that they were being questioned on suspicion of severe sexual abuse of a Palestinian prisoner. Several Israeli media outlets reported that the prisoner had been hospitalized with a serious injury to his anus.
Neither the professor nor the Israeli military would confirm that claim.
The unrest set off alarm from some senior politicians, who said the protesters’s actions — and the support for them from parts of the ruling coalition — threatened the rule of law and the country’s cohesion at a time when unity was most needed.
“Do we want a state here, or militias that do whatever they want?” Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, wrote on social media. “Stop pouring fuel on the fire.”
“Prevent the dissolution of the State of Israel,” Mr. Bennett said, adding that the riots were the “greatest gift” to Israel’s enemies.
But several ministers and right-wing lawmakers backed the protesters, and in some cases suggested that the need to punish Hamas superseded the military’s need to hold itself to account.
At a hearing in Parliament, a lawmaker from Mr. Netanyahu’s party, Hanoch Milwidsky, was asked whether it was acceptable to sexually abuse a detainee.
“Yes,” he replied. “If he is Nukhba, everything is legitimate to do. Everything.”
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel.
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15) For many Palestinians, the Olympics are easy to root for but hard to actually watch.
By Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, July 30, 2024
Palestinian athletes taking a selfie on Thursday after arriving in Paris for the Olympics. Credit...Yves Herman/Reuters
Displaced three times by the war in Gaza, Mariam Moeen Awwad recently returned to her family’s home in Jabaliya, where amid the damage and destruction she hoped to cling to a routine for the next two weeks.
Without a television, Ms. Awwad, 23, said she would rely on the small screen of her father’s phone to transmit accounts of the Palestinians competing in the Paris Olympics. She said she wanted to feel connected to them, and to the Games, as much as possible.
But even as she expressed hope that the Palestinian team would do well, she acknowledged it would be hard. “My feelings are numb toward everything because of what we are witnessing and experiencing,” she said.
These wartime Olympics carry a particular resonance for Palestinians, many of whom are enduring their 10th month of death and devastation in Gaza. The eight Palestinian athletes represent not only a homeland but a cause, a means of amplifying their voice and concerns to the world.
For many Gazans, preoccupied with the loss of loved ones, their homes and their livelihoods, the grim state of life eclipses any excitement over the Games. Even if they were interested now in staying current on sports and culture news, a scarcity of electricity has made it nearly impossible to keep up with the outside world.
Yasser Shaaban Abdullah Mhana, a legal adviser at the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Communications, explained that many people in northern Gaza did not have access to television or other media, further limiting their ability to stay informed.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where settler violence against Palestinians and their property has surged, the sentiment toward the Olympics reflected promise and a certain resilience.
“This team proves to the world that we are a people who want life, hope and to live,” said Riham Abuaita, 36, of Ramallah, in the West Bank. “We have capabilities, and we hope the team will present the best image of Palestine and convey the pain we are living through.”
Ms. Abuaita said it was “beautiful” that the Palestinians were fielding an Olympic team and that they needed to be present at such international sporting events.
“What matters is that they will carry the Palestinian flag and represent the nation,” she said. “I hope our presence there will convey a message beyond sports, drawing attention to our cause and the ongoing war and atrocities, especially in Gaza.”
In all, eight athletes — six men and two women — are competing in six sports. One of the competitors is Omar Yaser Ismail, a taekwondo fighter. His uncle Ashraf Theeb, 46, of Jenin, in the West Bank, said that he had obtained a visa to travel to Paris but that he was uncertain whether he would be able to watch Mr. Ismail in person.
“Our lives are filled with challenges,” Mr. Theeb said. “I am searching for plane tickets and hoping for the best.”
Mr. Theeb still considers himself somewhat fortunate, even if he is unable to fly to Paris. He intended to follow all of the Palestinian athletes, whose mere participation in the Games, he said, constituted a form of resistance.
“We view it as such, and the team will represent us in the best way possible,” Mr. Theeb said. “They are showing the world that we deserve to live.”
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16) Kamala Harris Can’t Escape Gaza Any More Than Joe Biden Can
By Jamelle Bouie, July 30, 2024
Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The last time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke to a joint meeting of Congress was in 2015, at the invitation of the House speaker, John Boehner, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, when they led the Republican Party in Congress. It was meant, explicitly, to undermine the Obama administration’s effort to reach a deal with Iran limiting Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from American and international sanctions.
Democrats were outraged by the spectacle of congressional Republicans working with a foreign government to subvert the president’s foreign policy. Nearly 60 Democrats, including Vice President Joe Biden, skipped the speech. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, called it “an insult to the intelligence of the United States.”
Last week, Netanyahu was back before Congress for the first time since then. It was a bipartisan invitation, organized by Mike Johnson, the House speaker, a Republican, and agreed to by Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and a Democrat.
“President Biden and I have known each other for over 40 years,” the prime minister said. “I want to thank him for half a century of friendship to Israel and for being, as he says, a proud Zionist.” Netanyahu called on Congress to fast-track military aid. “Give us the tools faster, and we’ll finish the job faster.”
If you were to look out at the House chamber during the speech, you would have seen that around 130 House and Senate Democrats were missing — more than twice as many as who skipped in 2015. And the issue was less partisan than it was moral and ethical: the catastrophic impact of the Gaza war on Palestinian civilians.
Health officials in Gaza say that Israel’s war has killed more than 39,000 people, mostly civilians, and driven a large part of the strip’s 2.3 million residents from their homes. Most of the enclave lies in ruins. Just this weekend, an Israeli airstrike hit a girls’ school sheltering thousands of displaced people in central Gaza, killing at least 30.
Biden has, from time to time, expressed concern about civilian casualties. He has also acknowledged the extent to which American bombs have killed Palestinian civilians. But at no point has Biden publicly reconsidered his practically unconditional support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
He may have temporarily halted delivery of 3,500 bombs in an attempt, much-ballyhooed by the White House, to pressure Netanyahu against a ground invasion of the city of Rafah, but this was small potatoes in light of the nearly 30,000 bombs and munitions — including 14,000 of the highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs that Biden has decried — that the United States has delivered to Israel since October of last year.
Biden’s “ironclad” support for Israel means that the Democrats who skipped the speech weren’t just boycotting Netanyahu. They were sending a message to the administration as well. It is not too different from the message sent by the hundreds of thousands of Democratic voters who marked their ballots “uncommitted” during the presidential primaries.
The signal political story of the moment is the changing of the guard in the Democratic Party after Biden declined to continue his bid for a second term over concerns about his age and ability to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House. But the Democratic reaction to Netanyahu’s address to Congress is emblematic of an equally important — and potentially more significant — story: the rapid transformation of the Democratic Party’s attitude toward Israel, driven by deep grass-roots sympathy for the Palestinians.
It’s obviously hard to separate the two stories. Although Biden’s popularity among Democrats was on the decline before the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack that killed nearly 1,200 people, Israel’s subsequent military response in Gaza, and his initial refusal to publicly question the Israeli government’s conduct as the war took shape, revealed a major shift within the Democratic coalition. Young voters led the way, although this should not have come as a surprise. In 2022, the Pew Research Center found that the youngest adults held the warmest views toward Palestinians. Overall, 61 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds held a favorable view of Palestinians and 55 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds felt the same way.
By December, around half of young Democrats disapproved of the Biden administration’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Other Democratic constituencies also mobilized in opposition. A coalition of Black clergy members ran an advertisement in this newspaper calling for a bilateral cease-fire. Labor unions, under pressure from many of their members, began to make similar calls. After Biden became the first sitting president to speak from the pulpit at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., the national leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church called on the president to end U.S. financial aid to Israel, condemning the Israeli government’s campaign in Gaza as a “genocide.” In Michigan, Arab American Democrats warned Biden, and the rest of the party, that the state was at risk of flipping to Trump in the general election if the president didn’t change course.
As protests stepped up, rank-and-file Democrats moved further and further away from the president on this issue. By March, 75 percent of Democrats disapproved of Israel’s military action in Gaza and a plurality of Democrats wanted to provide only humanitarian aid to Israel.
Biden’s stance, as unpopular as it was, did not explain the totality of his problems with young Democrats and other voters. But his unyielding support for the Israeli government in the face of a clear humanitarian crisis in Gaza contributed to an atmosphere of profound discontent with his presidency — bad vibes, you could say.
The vibes have changed, obviously. Biden is out and Kamala Harris, the vice president, is the party’s new standard-bearer. She’s backed by a wind of enthusiasm from across the Democratic coalition that has helped the party recover lost ground in the national presidential race. But she is also implicated in the administration’s policy toward Gaza and will have to deal with the changing politics of Israel within her party.
You can already see that Harris is trying to chart her own course between Biden and the Democratic grass roots. At the same time that she condemned protesters who flew Hamas flags and burned an American flag near the Capitol to protest Netanyahu’s address and affirmed her “unwavering commitment” to Israel, she also told reporters that “Israel has a right to defend itself and how it does so matters,” adding that “what has happened in Gaza over the last nine months is devastating” and that “we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. And I will not be silent.”
It is a real break from the president for Harris to voice this forthright concern for the lives of Palestinian civilians. But it is still unclear what the difference in language means for actual policy. Will a President Harris refrain from making additional weapons shipments? Will she attach humanitarian conditions to future military aid? Will she direct her U.N. ambassador to veto Palestinian requests for full membership in the global body? It is difficult to say. According to CNN, aides and allies who have talked with Harris say that “substantively there is little daylight between her and the president.”
In three weeks, Democrats will almost certainly nominate Harris for the presidency at their national convention in Chicago. It is tempting, here, to make a direct comparison to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, also in Chicago, where Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated after a contentious and chaotic year that began with the Tet offensive and President Lyndon Johnson’s subsequent decision to leave office at the end of his term. In ’68, anti-Vietnam War protests rocked the convention; in ’24, Democrats will face protests against the war in Gaza.
But in our search for analogies and comparisons, we should remember that echoes from the past are still only faint reverberations of sounds once heard. The Vietnam War, largely prosecuted by Johnson, does not occupy the same space in American politics as the Gaza war. We are allies to a combatant, not combatants ourselves. We provide money and munitions, not soldiers. There is no draft, nor is there a steady stream of dead American soldiers and wounded veterans.
In 1968, antiwar Democrats represented a rising tide of youth anger that stood at cross-purposes with establishment Democratic politicians and their constituents among the white working class. Vietnam — among other crises and controversies — produced a deep split within the Democratic coalition, between voters who felt alienated by the movement against the war and activists who felt betrayed by an old guard of sclerotic party elites. All of this came to a head in Chicago, fracturing the Democratic Party for a generation and beyond.
Biden’s support for the Gaza war has alienated and isolated him from the youngest cohorts of the Democratic Party, but it hasn’t split the coalition. Far from standing with the president on this issue, many rank-and-file Democrats are opposed to Israel’s conduct, and many Democratic lawmakers have taken note of the shift in public opinion or helped to lead it. Hence the early pushback, from Senate Democrats, on Biden’s request for additional military aid to Israel in the fall, and the notable absences at Netanyahu’s address, which included two of the most senior Democrats in Congress, Pelosi and James Clyburn, as well as Harris herself.
This clear shift in public opinion is a virtual guarantee Harris will face serious pressure to make a decisive break with Biden on Israel. And even if she doesn’t, there is a strong chance that future Democrats running for president will have to take a meaningfully different tack on Israel than their predecessors.
This is the ultimate upshot of the sea change in attitudes toward Israel, and in support of Palestinians, among Democratic voters. In all likelihood, Joe Biden will be the last Democratic president to express the kind of total and unwavering commitment to the Israeli government that was born of a time when Israel could call itself an underdog in the region. Kamala Harris, if she wins the presidency and intends to run for re-election, will have to keep the views of ordinary Democrats in mind — if she isn’t already aligned with their concerns. And in the next real contest for the Democratic nomination, there will almost certainly be Democrats who take a harder and more critical line toward the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
If this is the future of the politics of Israel in the Democratic Party, then while there may not be a strong analogy to make, overall, between 1968 and 2024, there is a decent one to make between Joe Biden and Lyndon Johnson.
Two old Washington hands who reached the pinnacle of their ambitions and then used their considerable political skills to pass major, and in Johnson’s case, epochal, legislation. Two men who, supremely confident of their ability to guide events, then undermined themselves and their presidencies through stubborn commitments to disastrous conflicts abroad.
When we evaluate Johnson, we evaluate him in the context of Vietnam. We evaluate him in the context, that is, of tens of thousands of dead Americans and millions of dead Vietnamese.
When we evaluate Biden, we will rightfully credit him for his legislative accomplishments as well as the display of genuine statesmanship shown in his decision to step aside for the vice president. But we will also need to weigh what’s praiseworthy in the president’s legacy against his ignominious role as chief supplier for a terrible campaign of relentless destruction and incalculable human suffering.
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17) Killing of Top Hamas Leader in Iran Raises Risk of Wider War
Hamas accused Israel of killing Ismail Haniyeh, who was in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president, though there was no response from Israel.
By Patrick KingsleyFarnaz FassihiAdam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman, July 31, 2024
Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Ismail Haniyeh, one of the most senior Hamas leaders, was assassinated in Iran, the country’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and Hamas said on Wednesday, a severe blow to the Palestinian group that threatens to engulf the region in further conflict.
Both Iran and Hamas accused Israel of killing Mr. Haniyeh, who led the group’s political operations from exile in Qatar. He was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of the newly elected president of Iran, Hamas’s main backer, and it was not clear how the killing was carried out.
Hours before the assassination, Israel said it had struck Fuad Shukr, a senior member of Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia that is also backed by Iran and has been fighting a low-level war with Israel since October. The two strikes have suddenly shifted the calculus in the Middle East, after a month in which Israel and Hamas had appeared to edge closer to a cease-fire in Gaza. Such a deal was expected to lead to a truce between Israel and Hezbollah.
Now, the focus is on how Hamas and Hezbollah will respond to the attacks on their leaders; how Iran will react to a strike on its territory; and whether either reaction leads to the outbreak of a wider regional war. An Israeli strike on Iranian commanders in Syria in April led Iran to fire hundreds of missiles at Israel. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Haniyeh’s assassination would prompt a “harsh punishment.”
Mr. Haniyeh was a key figure in Hamas’s cease-fire negotiations with Israel, and his assassination makes the prospects for a deal even more unclear. The United States was not informed of the strike that killed Mr. Haniyeh ahead of time, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said during a trip to Singapore on Wednesday, adding that the Biden administration was continuing to focus on de-escalating the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Israel’s military has not commented on Mr. Haniyeh’s death and said it does not respond to reports in the foreign news media. In recent years it has carried out a number of high-profile assassinations in Iran, rattling the country’s leaders and prompting a security overhaul including the ouster of a top security official.
Here’s what else to know:
· While Israel rarely comments on its actions in Iran, it is usually more open about its strikes in Lebanon. On Tuesday night, the Israeli military swiftly announced a separate strike in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Mr. Shukr, who it described as a senior commander responsible for a strike on Saturday that killed 12 children and teenagers in an Israeli-controlled town. It is unclear how Hezbollah will respond to a particularly brazen strike on a senior commander in the Lebanese capital.
· Mr. Haniyeh had long played a central role in Hamas, helping lead the group through multiple wars with Israel and through elections, though it is unclear how much control he and other exiled Hamas political leaders exercised over the group’s leaders in Gaza and its military wing, which carried out the Oct. 7 attack. Read the full obituary here.
· Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, takes office facing the major security breach of failing to protect an ally. It raises questions about the safety of Iran’s top leaders who were in close contact with Mr. Haniyeh. The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, met with him on Tuesday.
Gabby Sobelman, Isabel Kershner and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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18) World leaders fear a longer war in Gaza and escalation elsewhere.
By Lynsey Chutel, July 31, 2024
Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, at the swearing-in ceremony for Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, in Tehran on Tuesday. Mr. Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran overnight. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Many world leaders and top diplomats condemned the assassination of the senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Wednesday, expressing concern that his death could lead to further violence in the Middle East. Some feared that the killing of a central figure in the talks to end the fighting in Gaza could undo the modest progress there.
Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, cast doubt on the prospects of future mediation efforts. Qatar has played a key role in brokering talks between Israel and Hamas.
“Political assassinations & continued targeting of civilians in Gaza while talks continue leads us to ask, how can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on other side?” Sheikh Mohammed, who has led Qatar’s mediation efforts, wrote on social media. “Peace needs serious partners.”
Qatar, a Persian Gulf nation, has acted as a bridge between Hamas and Western nations, while also maintaining informal ties with Israel. Mr. Haniyeh had been living in exile in Qatar since 2017, leading Hamas’s political faction from there.
Just days ago, senior officials from Israel, Egypt, Qatar and the United States met in Rome to discuss a cease-fire. Egypt’s foreign ministry said the overnight strike was a “dangerous escalation,” warning in a statement against “fueling conflict in the region.” It said the attack, combined with stalled progress in the cease-fire negotiations, showed that Israel lacked the political will to calm the situation.
China condemned the assassination and warned that it would lead to further instability. “We are deeply concerned that this incident may lead to escalation and turbulence in the region,” said Lin Jian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Beijing hosted talks last week between the two main Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, in a bid to create a united Palestinian government that would rule Gaza once the war ended.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said the assassination aimed to “interrupt the rightful struggle of Palestinians and demoralize them.”
Mr. Erdogan has previously lashed out at Israel and dismissed the categorization of Hamas as a terror organization. In a show of solidarity, Turkey’s Parliament had planned to host Mr. Haniyeh next month, in a direct response to the address to the U.S. Congress by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel last week, said Omer Celik, a governing party spokesman.
The Kremlin, which has also hosted top Hamas leaders, called for restraint as it criticized the assassination.
“There is no doubt that the killing of Ismail Haniyeh will have an extremely negative impact on the progress of mediated contacts between Hamas and Israel,” a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Andrei Nastasyin, said at a news briefing.
Diplomats in Persian Gulf states blamed Israel for the assassination, warning that it could destabilize the region. Hamas has said Israel was behind the killing, but Israel has not discussed it publicly.
Oman, a Gulf sultanate, described the assassination as a “flagrant violation of international law” and called on the international community to “intervene immediately to stop the Israeli aggression and continuing illegitimate occupation of Palestinian lands.”
Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said on social media that Israel’s aggression in Gaza “will drag the region toward more wars and destruction.”
The United States has been Israel’s staunchest ally during the war, and its top diplomat, Antony J. Blinken, did not criticize Israel on Wednesday, saying that the White House was still determined to see through a cease-fire deal.
“All I can tell you right now is nothing takes away from the importance, as I said a moment ago, of getting to the cease-fire,” Mr. Blinken said at a public talk on U.S. foreign policy in Singapore.
“I’m not going to speculate on what impact any one event might have,” he added.
Safak Timur, Anton Troianovski, Vivian Yee, Edward Wong and Vivian Nereim contributed reporting.
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19) Nearly 1,000 Native Children Died at Boarding Schools, Interior Dept. Finds
An investigative report, which also documents widespread sexual and physical abuse in a program of forced assimilation, calls on the federal government to apologize and “chart a road to healing.”
By Aishvarya Kavi, Reporting from Washington, July 30, 2024
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo citizen and the first Native American cabinet secretary, has led the effort in accounting for Native American children who attended federal boarding schools. Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times
Nearly 1,000 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died while attending boarding schools that were set up by the U.S. government for the purpose of erasing their tribal ties and cultural practices, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Interior Department.
“For the first time in the history of the country, the U.S. government is accounting for its role in operating Indian boarding schools to forcibly assimilate Indian children, and working to set us on a path to heal from the wounds inflicted by those schools,” Bryan Newland, the department’s assistant secretary for Indian affairs, wrote this month in a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland that was included in the report.
The report calls on the federal government to apologize and “chart a road to healing.” Its recommendations include creating a national memorial to commemorate the children’s deaths and educate the public; investing in research and helping Native communities heal from intergenerational stress and trauma; and revitalizing Native languages.
From the early 1800s to the late 1960s, the U.S. government removed Native children from their families and homes and sent them to boarding schools, where they were forcibly assimilated.
It spent nearly $25 billion in today’s dollars on the comprehensive effort, according to the investigative report released on Tuesday, including operating 417 schools across 37 states and territories where children were physically and sexually abused. They were also forcibly converted to Christianity and punished for speaking their Native languages.
The report identified by name almost 19,000 children who attended a federal school between 1819 and 1969, though the Interior Department acknowledges there were more.
The accounting of the bodies of Native American children was one of the main goals of a federal initiative begun more than three years ago after Canada discovered the remains of 215 children at the site of a defunct boarding school and announced a similar effort. Ms. Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo citizen and the first Native American cabinet secretary, has led the effort in the United States.
Tuesday’s report, the second and final from the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, found that 973 children died at Indian boarding schools and were buried at 74 sites, 21 of which are unmarked. The Interior Department said it was working with tribes that want the remains repatriated.
Though political support eventually faded for the forced assimilation of children, the effects of the uprooting and abuse are still felt by Native communities, according to the report. Children were left with lasting psychological trauma, and studies funded by the National Institutes of Health have linked poor physical health in Native American adults to their attendance at federally run schools as children.
The department conducted interviews with hundreds of survivors as part of its investigation. Some described widespread sexual abuse at the schools, as well as routine physical abuse. One attendee described newcomers being stripped of their parkas, which were burned in a furnace. Another recalled that many children became “violently ill” from highly processed foods like powdered milk and canned meats, and were then beaten for soiling their bedding or clothing.
“I remember my braids being cut off; washed like we were dirty; talked to us like we were dirty,” one unnamed participant, from South Dakota, said in the report. “We were dressed in uniforms.”
Others described lasting feelings of abandonment and shame from having their family connections severed when they were taken away to attend the schools.
“I think the worst part of it was at night, listening to all the other children crying themselves to sleep, crying for their parents and just wanting to go home,” said another unnamed participant, from Michigan.
A participant from Washington described how her sister, now a grandmother, still could not sleep in the dark and would wake up screaming when the light was turned off because she had been routinely locked in a closet as a young girl.
The report said that aside from experiencing lasting physical and psychological effects, many children learned only agricultural or manual and domestic labor skills, with tribal economies destabilized by their lack of formal education.
The report said that although “a change in our nation’s understanding” had come quickly — with the troubling history of Indian boarding schools now discussed in books, television shows and movies — many communities were far from healed.
“The new report provides critical information that is needed to understand the complete history and impact of the federal Indian boarding school era,” Beth Wright, a lawyer with the Native American Rights Fund who worked on boarding school cases, said in a statement. “The next step is for the Department of Interior to provide resources and funding directly to tribal nations who desire to research, address and tell their own stories of the impact the federal Indian boarding school era has had on their own communities and people.”
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20) Israel assassinates head of Hamas political bureau amid regional escalation
Israel assassinated Hamas politburo head Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran after a series of mounting regional tensions that included unprecedented Israeli attacks on the "Axis of Resistance," including airstrikes on Beirut and Yemen.
By Qassam Muaddi, July 31, 2024
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/07/israel-assassinates-head-of-hamas-political-bureau-amid-regional-escalation/?ml_recipient=128374304538625728&ml_link=128374301766190865&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2024-07-31&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation
Head of the Hamas political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, speaks during a video statement marking the 34th anniversary of the founding of the Hamas movement, Qatar, December 14, 2021. (Photo: Hamas Chief Office/APA Images)
The head of the political bureau of Hamas and former Palestinian Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in an Israeli strike on his residence in the Iranian capital Tehran early on Wednesday. Haniyeh was on a visit to Iran to participate in the inauguration ceremony of the new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian.
Hamas announced in a statement that Haniyeh was killed in an Israeli strike, while the Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, accused Israel of the assassination, adding that it “will be severely punished.” The Iranian Revolutionary Guard also accused Israel in a statement, vowing that “the Zionist regime will face a harsh response from the resistance axis and especially Iran.”
Israel, for its part, did not officially claim responsibility for Haniyeh’s killing, although its heritage minister, Amichai Eliyahu, celebrated the assassination, commenting that “this is the correct way to cleanse the world.” The Israeli public broadcaster also said that the assassination occurred by means of a missile launched from outside of Iranian territory.
Haniyeh is the highest-ranking Hamas figure to be assassinated by Israel since the beginning of the current war. He was also heading the ceasefire negotiations on Hamas’s behalf in recent months.
The assassination came hours after an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern Dahiya suburb, considered to be Hezbollah’s most major stronghold. The strike targeted Hezbollah senior commander Fouad Shukr, described as Hassan Nasrallah’s righthand man. The fate of Shukr remains unknown as of the time of writing, but Hezbollah admitted that Shukr was inside the building targeted by Israel. The Israeli attack on Beirut marks the second major assassination in the Lebanese capital, the first being the killing of Hamas leader Saleh Aruri in January. The attack was also likely a response to the killing of 12 Syrian Druze children in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in an explosion that Israel accused Hezbollah of orchestrating, despite the Lebanese group’s categorical denial of responsibility.
Both incidents also come a week after the bombing of Yemen’s Hodeida seaport, which Israel claimed responsibility for in retaliation for a previous drone attack launched by Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement in Tel Aviv, which led to the death of an Israeli citizen.
These three actions signal a regional escalation as the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza has entered its tenth month. At the same time, the U.S. has continued to scramble to conclude a ceasefire and prisoners’ exchange deal ahead of the November presidential election. But both strikes on Beirut and Tehran followed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the U.S. and his speech before Congress, where he pledged to continue the war “until absolute victory” while making no mention of a ceasefire deal.
The attacks on Beirut and Teheran, in addition to the earlier attack on Hodeida, indicate Netanyahu’s intentions to prolong the war by widening its regional scope in order to sabotage a possible ceasefire deal, especially after reports by Israeli media that Israeli security and military chiefs have been pressuring Netanyahu to show flexibility in negotiations. Although Israel and the U.S. have declared that they don’t want a regional war, Israel’s actions make the possibility of such a war closer than ever. The U.S. also announced that it would defend Israel in the event of a wider confrontation.
According to Mokhimar Abu Saadah, a political science professor at the now-destroyed al-Azhar University in Gaza, “the assassination of Haniyeh will lead to the cessation of ceasefire negotiations. They will remain frozen for a while.”
“I do not think that anyone can talk about a deal or a ceasefire in Gaza at present after this assassination,” Abu Saadah told Mondoweiss Gaza correspondent Tareq Hajjaj. “Talk about this matter will be postponed for several days.”
Abu Saadah noted that “Hamas may launch suicide operations or shoot soldiers in the West Bank, especially since there is a general strike over his assassination and a state of grief. However, he dismissed the possibilities of a Hamas response from Gaza, “because there are no more capabilities in Gaza than what Hamas has done in the past ten months.”
“Iran is not willing to go to war with Israel over this assassination,” Abu Saadah believes. “If it responds, it will be a response to avoid embarrassment, because a war wouldn’t be with Israel but with the U.S., and the Iranians don’t want to go to war with Israel’s allies.”
The U.S. also doesn’t seem to be unwilling to support Israel in a regional war, especially ahead of presidential elections and an uncertain transition in the democratic candidacy. However, the U.S. policy so far has been to avoid pressuring Israel in any practical and significant way,
After ten relentless months of killing civilians en masse in Gaza, and following Israel’s indictment at the ICJ for plausibly committing genocide alongside the looming threat of ICC arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, the endorsement that Netanyahu found in Washington last week only served to encourage his conduct, which has now pushed the entire region closer to the brink of a war everyone has been trying to avoid.
Mondoweiss Gaza Correspondent Tareq Hajjaj contributed to this report.
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