Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 321:
Ceasefire negotiations set to continue in Cairo despite low expectations
By Qassam Muaddi, August 22, 2024
Casualties
· 40,256 + killed* and at least 93,144 wounded in the Gaza Strip. The identities of 32,280 of the slain have been identified, including 10,627 children and 5,956 women, representing 60% of the casualties, and 2,770 elderly, as of August 6, 2024. Some 10,000 more are estimated to be under the rubble*
· 632+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes 140 children.**
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,140.
· 693 Israeli soldiers and officers 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 August 15, 2024. Rights groups and public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.
** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. This is the latest figure according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health as of August 15.
*** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been 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 and 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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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
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) Israel Says It Recovered Bodies of 6 Hostages in Gaza
The bodies were retrieved in an overnight operation in southern Gaza, the Israeli military said. Five of the hostages were already known to have died in captivity.
By Isabel Kershner, reporting from Jerusalem, Aug. 20, 2024
Protesters calling for the release of hostages, in Tel Aviv on Monday. Credit...Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israeli forces recovered the bodies of six Israeli hostages from southern Gaza in an overnight operation, the Israeli military said on Tuesday, highlighting the plight of the scores of captives remaining in the Palestinian enclave. Five of the six were previously known to have lost their lives.
Of the roughly 250 people Israeli authorities say were taken hostage during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack, Israeli forces have so far rescued only seven hostages alive. Scores of others, mostly women and children, were returned to Israel during a weeklong cease-fire last November. More than 100 captives still remain in Gaza, at least 30 of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said that the six bodies had been retrieved from Hamas tunnels beneath the city of Khan Younis in a “complex operation,” and the military released their names.
Avraham Munder, 79, was the only hostage among the six whose deaths had not already been established. He was abducted from Nir Oz, a kibbutz, or communal village, near the Gaza border, along with three of the others: Haim Peri, 80; Yoram Metzger, 80; and Alexander Dancyg, 75. The remaining two, Nadav Popplewell, 51; and Yagev Buchshtab, 35, were taken from another border community, Nirim.
The exact circumstances of their deaths were not immediately clear. Abu Ubaida, a spokesman for Hamas’s military wing, said in March that Mr. Metzger and Mr. Peri were among seven hostages who had been killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. Hamas then said in May that Mr. Popplewell had died from injuries sustained in an Israeli airstrike more than a month before.
Weeks later, the Israeli military said that it was examining the possibility that the three hostages had been killed while Israeli forces were operating in the Khan Younis area.
The retrieval of the bodies came as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken continued a diplomatic push in the region for a cease-fire deal that would see hostages released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. Frustration has grown in Israel over the months of halting negotiations, and family members of the hostages still in Gaza have led regular protests demanding a deal to secure their freedom.
Mati Dancyg, Alexander Dancyg’s son, said he believed there had been opportunities to get him out of Gaza alive. He accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of prioritizing political considerations over the hostages’ return under pressure from key members of his governing coalition who oppose a cease-fire deal, considering it a surrender to Hamas.
“It is absolutely clear to me that it was possible to bring him back home,” Mati Dancyg said Tuesday on Israel’s public radio network, Kan, adding, “Netanyahu chose to sacrifice the hostages.’’
Mr. Netanyahu has blamed Hamas for obstructing a deal. His critics in Israel, as well as Hamas officials, say that Mr. Netanyahu recently added new conditions to a proposal outlined by President Biden in late May, adding to the difficulty of finalizing a deal.
“Our hearts grieve over the terrible loss,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement on Tuesday following the military’s announcement about the retrieval of the bodies. “The State of Israel will continue to make every effort to return all of our hostages — the living and the deceased.”
The Hostages Families Forum, an organization that represents many of the hostages’ relatives, said in a statement on Tuesday that “Israel has a moral and ethical obligation to return all the murdered for dignified burial and to bring all living hostages home for rehabilitation.”
“The immediate return of the remaining 109 hostages,” it added, “can only be achieved through a negotiated deal.”
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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2) Israeli and Hamas Officials See Little Chance for Cease-Fire Breakthrough
By Ronen BergmanAdam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman reporting from Jerusalem, August 20, 2024
Searching through rubble at the location of a strike in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, on Tuesday. Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Biden administration is again putting its diplomatic heft behind an effort to dislodge months of stalled negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the 10-month-long war in Gaza, and voicing optimism over the potential for a breakthrough.
Israeli and Hamas officials are striking a far different tone. Both sides have poured cold water on the idea that a deal could be imminent, saying that mediators’ efforts — and the latest American proposal aimed at bridging gaps between the two sides — have failed to resolve some of the most substantive disputes in the talks.
On Monday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, making his ninth visit to Israel since the war began, emerged from a three-hour-long meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and announced that the Israeli leader had assented to the new U.S. “bridging proposal,” introduced at talks in Qatar last week.
But Israeli and Hamas officials familiar with the talks said the U.S. plan left major disagreements mostly unresolved. Hamas quickly dismissed the American-led framework as conforming to Mr. Netanyahu’s conditions, which he has stiffened in recent weeks. And on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu showed little sign of being ready to compromise, repeating his message that Israel would do everything to “preserve our strategic security assets” and “will continue to fight until total victory is achieved over Hamas.”
On Tuesday, as Mr. Blinken traveled to Egypt and Qatar to continue pushing for an agreement, Hamas issued a statement criticizing “misleading claims” by the Biden administration about the talks. It said the latest American proposal amounted to “a reversal” of a framework that Hamas had presented in early July and that U.S. officials repeatedly called a breakthrough.
The negotiations have taken on renewed urgency following the assassinations of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran and Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander, in Beirut in late July. Diplomats hoped that a cease-fire in Gaza, or even the prospect of one, might persuade Iran and Hezbollah to hold off or blunt their reprisals.
Under the new U.S. proposal, Israeli troops would be able to continue to patrol part of the Gazan border with Egypt, albeit in reduced numbers — one of Mr. Netanyahu’s core demands, according to four officials familiar with the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
That is likely a non-starter for Hamas, which has consistently called for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Egypt has also voiced staunch objections to a long-term Israeli presence in that area, known as the Philadelphi Corridor.
Cairo has maintained that it will not accept Israeli troops remaining in the Philadelphi Corridor, which Egyptian officials say would pose national security concerns and would likely anger the Egyptian public.
In a sign of Egypt’s frustrations, state-controlled media outlets, which serve as government mouthpieces, have escalated their language against Israel in recent days, accusing it of trying to pick a fight with Egypt over the corridor to delay progress on a cease-fire in Gaza.
“Netanyahu doesn’t want a cease-fire. So he is creating an artificial problem with Egypt,” a former general, Samir Farag, said on one talk show that aired Monday night.
During the cease-fire talks that ended last Friday, U.S. officials also asked to delay in-depth conversations over Israel’s demand to screen displaced Palestinians returning to northern Gaza for weapons, another key stumbling block, according to two officials familiar with the talks.
Over the past several months, U.S. officials have repeatedly sought to drum up momentum in the negotiations mediated by Egypt and Qatar. In May, President Biden endorsed an Israeli-backed cease-fire proposal, saying both sides had reached a “decisive moment.” The talks crept along for months until the Hamas counterproposal in July, and then stalled.
The talks now appear to be at risk of reaching yet another dead end.
The United States, alongside Egypt and Qatar, have called for another summit in Cairo before the end of the week. Two Israeli officials, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said that a date for the meeting had yet to be set and that it was unclear where it might be held. Hamas did not participate in the last round of talks, and it has not said whether it will agree to join this time.
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Vivian Yee and Emad Mekay from Cairo.
KEY DEVELOPMENTS
Israel strikes a school building in Gaza City, and other news.
· Israel’s military struck a school building in Gaza City on Tuesday, targeting what it said was a Hamas command and control center. The Palestinian Civil Defense emergency services said that 12 people, including women and children, had been killed in the attack, which hit the Mustafa Khaft school. The Israeli military did not say whether the strike had caused casualties. In recent weeks, Israel has launched dozens of strikes at school buildings, which are being used as shelters by tens of thousands of displaced in Gaza, drawing sharp criticism from the United Nations and others. The Israeli military says that Hamas has “cynically exploited” schools, hospitals and shelters as bases and civilians as human shields.
· The Gazan Health Ministry said Tuesday that it was still waiting to receive polio vaccines as the risk of an outbreak grows in the territory. After Gaza recorded its first polio case in years, aid groups made plans to vaccinate over 600,000 children in Gaza. The World Health Organization and UNICEF have called for a cease-fire of at least seven days so they can carry out a mass vaccination campaign. It was not immediately clear when the vaccines would arrive. On Sunday, COGAT, the Israeli agency that supervises aid deliveries to Gaza, had said that vaccines to inoculate more than a million children would arrive “in the coming weeks.”
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3) Greenpeace Tries a Novel Tactic in Lawsuit Over Dakota Access Pipeline
The environmental group, which is being sued by the pipeline company in North Dakota, threatened to use new European rules to try to limit potential damages.
By Karen Zraick, Aug. 20, 2024
The pipeline company is suing Greenpeace for millions of dollars in a case that Greenpeace claims is designed to put it out of business. Credit...Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times
Greenpeace recently unveiled a new strategy for fighting a costly lawsuit by an energy company that the group contends is designed to silence critics of the oil industry.
The suit, first filed in federal court in 2017, alleged that Greenpeace had incited the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016 and 2017, and it sought $300 million in damages.
Greenpeace disputes the claims. It says the lawsuit is designed to essentially force the environmental group to go out of business with an expensive legal fight.
Its new tactic, led by Greenpeace International in Amsterdam, would use the European legal system to try to minimize the financial consequences of a potential loss in United States courts. In a letter to the company last month, lawyers for the group cited a new European Union directive aimed at curbing SLAPP suits, or Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. Those are defined as meritless suits that seek to shut down civil society groups.
The letter called on the company suing it, Dallas-based Energy Transfer, to drop its suit against Greenpeace International, and to pay damages for its legal costs, or risk a countersuit under the new European rules.
The Background
After the Dakota Access Pipeline was approved in 2016, it became the target of high-profile protests by Native American tribes and environmental groups. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe argued that the pipeline encroached on reservation land and endangered the water supply. Thousands of its supporters joined a nearly eight-month protest encampment near the reservation, and tribal leaders mounted their own legal challenge to the project.
The protesters clashed with the police and private security at times, and the camp was razed after an evacuation order by the North Dakota governor. The state and federal governments are still wrangling over who should pay for $38 million in associated costs, including the response by law enforcement.
The pipeline was paused under the Obama administration, but began operating in 2017 after President Donald J. Trump gave it the green light in an executive order. While the pipeline remains in operation, it is still awaiting final federal approval, which is expected early next year.
The lawsuit by Energy Transfer, the company behind the 1,170-mile crude oil pipeline, names two U.S.-based Greenpeace entities, as well as Greenpeace International, which is based in the Netherlands and coordinates other Greenpeace groups around the world.
After being kicked back to a state court, the suit is scheduled to go before a jury in Morton County, N.D., early next year.
The Claims
Energy Transfer, which is led by a close ally of Mr. Trump, Kelcy Warren, alleged that Greenpeace and other activists incited the protests, spread misinformation and vandalized the project, leading to delays that cost the company millions of dollars.
Energy Transfer initially sued in North Dakota federal court, where it argued that the activists had violated Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, laws. A judge dismissed that claim and found that others were out of its jurisdiction, allowing the case to continue in state court.
Greenpeace says the protests were directed by Native American leaders, not the environmental organization. The group said that it supported the protests but never engaged in property destruction or violence, and that the suit seeks to impose “collective liability” for anything that might happen at a demonstration. Greenpeace International says that its branches operate independently, and that its only involvement was to sign an open letter in 2016 along with 500 other organizations.
Energy Transfer said in a statement that the lawsuit “is not about free speech as they are trying to claim,” referring to Greenpeace. “We support the rights of all Americans to express their opinions and lawfully protest,” the statement said. “However, when it is not done in accordance with our laws, we have a legal system to deal with that. Beyond that we will let our case speak for itself in February.”
Why It Matters
The new legal strategy in Europe is an early test of the anti-SLAPP rules there. The directive that took effect this year was spurred by a long campaign by journalism and civil-society groups that said powerful interests were trying to clobber them with long, costly legal battles.
The directive instructs national governments to not recognize judgments in foreign SLAPP suits, and to allow countersuits. It leaves it to national governments to decide what constitutes a SLAPP suit.
A growing number of American states also have some sort of anti-SLAPP laws, though North Dakota is not one of them. On the federal level, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, cited the oil and gas industry’s use of lawsuits against opponents when he introduced an anti-SLAPP bill in 2022.
Deepa Padmanabha, acting co-executive director of Greenpeace USA, said she saw the case as particularly concerning given a rise in anti-protest laws in many states since 2017. “How this case is fought is going to impact the future of advocacy and peaceful protest,” she said. “Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are what this case is about.”
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4) Israel and Hezbollah Exchange Strikes Amid Fears of Escalation
By Gabby Sobelman and Euan Ward reporting from Rehovot, Israel, and Beirut, Lebanon, August 21, 2024
A destroyed home in Katzrin, in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, on Wednesday. Credit...Ariel Schalit/Associated Press
The Israeli military and Hezbollah traded cross-border strikes on Wednesday, leaving at least one person dead deep inside eastern Lebanon, as tensions between the adversaries continued to fuel concerns about a wider regional conflagration.
Israel said that it had struck weapons storage facilities used by Hezbollah, the powerful Iranian-backed militia, in eastern Lebanon for the second time this week. The overnight airstrikes, in an area close to the Syrian border, killed at least one person and injured 30 others, including children, Lebanon’s Health Ministry said in a statement.
In response, Hezbollah said it had targeted an Israeli military base in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Israel’s military said that two houses had been damaged in the village of Katzrin on Wednesday and that at least one person had been injured when dozens of projectiles crossed into the area from Lebanon.
An Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, posted on social media a photo of what he said was a house damaged in Katzrin and said, “There was no other target in the area other than a civilian neighborhood and kids on their summer vacation.”
He added: “Attacks against our civilians will not go unanswered.”
The tit-for-tat strikes, and the Israeli official’s threat of further retaliation, highlighted how months of diplomatic efforts have failed to ease hostilities along the Israel-Lebanon border. And they came as the Biden administration has intensified its push for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza in hopes of averting a broader Middle East war, although Israeli and Hamas officials have been cool to the latest U.S. proposal.
The sites of the most recent Israeli strikes, in a range of about 40 to 60 miles north of the Israel-Lebanon border in the Bekaa Valley, are deeper inside Lebanon than many of the near-daily attacks the two countries have exchanged since the war in Gaza began. Hezbollah, like other groups in the region backed by Iran, has been attacking Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, leading to the cross-border fire from both countries. Hamas is also backed by Iran.
The military said in a statement that it had detected secondary explosions after its strikes on Wednesday, which it said indicated that there were large amounts of weapons at the sites. At least three areas were targeted, including the town of Nabi Chit, according to Lebanon’s state-run news agency. There was no immediate comment from Lebanese officials on exactly what was hit.
On Monday, the Israeli military also said it had targeted a number of Hezbollah’s weapons storage facilities in the Bekaa Valley. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said those strikes injured nearly a dozen people, including two children.
Tensions have escalated sharply in the region in recent weeks since the killings of Fuad Shukr, a senior commander in Hezbollah, and Ismail Haniyeh, a top leader of Hamas. Israel has claimed responsibility for Mr. Shukr’s death and is widely believed to be responsible for Mr. Haniyeh’s. Hezbollah and Iran have vowed to retaliate more forcefully than before against Israel.
In a separate strike on Wednesday, the Israeli military said it had killed a commander in the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group associated with the Palestinian Fatah faction that has fought alongside Hezbollah. The commander, Khalil al-Miqdah, who was killed in the strike in the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon, worked closely with Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards, the Israeli military said in a statement. That claim could not be independently verified, though the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades confirmed Mr. al-Miqdah’s death in a statement.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken toured the region this week to push for a cease-fire in Gaza, but there appeared to be no breakthroughs in talks. Officials familiar with the latest U.S.-backed proposal said it left major disagreements between Hamas and Israel unresolved.
On Tuesday, a senior Iranian military official, Gen. Ali Mohammad Naeini, the spokesman for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, suggested that an attack on Israel might have been placed on hold.
KEY DEVELOPMENTS
Protesters tell Netanyahu to make a hostage deal, and other news.
· Protesters marched in front of the Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv on Tuesday to demand that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accept a deal to end the war and free the remaining hostages. Among the protesters was Zahiro Shahar Mor, whose uncle, Avraham Munder, 79, was confirmed dead by the Israeli military earlier on Tuesday when it announced that it had recovered his body and those of five other hostages in southern Gaza. A group representing some of the hostage families said in a statement that the blood of the hostages was on the hands of Mr. Netanyahu and every member of his government.
· An Israeli strike near a crowded area in Deir al Balah, in central Gaza, killed at least nine people on Tuesday, the Palestinian Civil Defense said. The Palestinian Red Crescent said it had transported at least 14 others who were injured. Many victims of the strike were children, according to a reporter for Al Jazeera who was on the scene. Photos taken by a photographer for the Reuters news agency showed medics treating several bloodied children on the floor of nearby Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. All told, at least 43 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli attacks across Gaza by Tuesday evening, according to Mahmoud Basal, a Civil Defense spokesman.
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5) Biden Approved Secret Nuclear Strategy Refocusing on Chinese Threat
In a classified document approved in March, the president ordered U.S. forces to prepare for possible coordinated nuclear confrontations with Russia, China and North Korea.
By David E. Sanger, Aug. 20, 2024
David E. Sanger has written about American nuclear strategy for The New York Times for nearly four decades.
A soldier stands before vehicles carrying China’s DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Credit...Thomas Peter/Reuters
President Biden approved in March a highly classified nuclear strategic plan for the United States that, for the first time, reorients America’s deterrent strategy to focus on China’s rapid expansion in its nuclear arsenal.
The shift comes as the Pentagon believes China’s stockpiles will rival the size and diversity of the United States’ and Russia’s over the next decade.
The White House never announced that Mr. Biden had approved the revised strategy, called the “Nuclear Employment Guidance,” which also newly seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from China, Russia and North Korea. The document, updated every four years or so, is so highly classified that there are no electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.
But in recent speeches, two senior administration officials were allowed to allude to the change — in carefully constrained, single sentences — ahead of a more detailed, unclassified notification to Congress expected before Mr. Biden leaves office.
“The president recently issued updated nuclear-weapons employment guidance to account for multiple nuclear-armed adversaries,” Vipin Narang, an M.I.T. nuclear strategist who served in the Pentagon, said earlier this month before returning to academia. “And in particular,” he added, the weapons guidance accounted for “the significant increase in the size and diversity” of China’s nuclear arsenal.
In June, the National Security Council’s senior director for arms control and nonproliferation, Pranay Vaddi, also referred to the document, the first to examine in detail whether the United States is prepared to respond to nuclear crises that break out simultaneously or sequentially, with a combination of nuclear and nonnuclear weapons.
The new strategy, Mr. Vaddi said, emphasizes “the need to deter Russia, the PRC and North Korea simultaneously,” using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
In the past, the likelihood that American adversaries could coordinate nuclear threats to outmaneuver the American nuclear arsenal seemed remote. But the emerging partnership between Russia and China, and the conventional arms North Korea and Iran are providing to Russia for the war in Ukraine have fundamentally changed Washington’s thinking.
Already, Russia and China are conducting military exercises together. Intelligence agencies are trying to determine whether Russia is aiding the North Korean and Iranian missile programs in return.
The new document is a stark reminder that whoever is sworn in next Jan. 20 will confront a changed and far more volatile nuclear landscape than the one that existed just three years ago. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine, including during a crisis in October 2022, when Mr. Biden and his aides, looking at intercepts of conversations between senior Russian commanders, feared the likelihood of nuclear use might rise to 50 percent or even higher.
Mr. Biden, along with leaders of Germany and Britain, got China and India to make public statements that there was no role for the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and the crisis abated, at least temporarily.
“It was an important moment,” Richard N. Haass, a former senior State Department and National Security Council official for several Republican presidents, and the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in an interview. “We are dealing with a Russia that is radicalized; the idea that nukes wouldn’t be used in a conventional conflict is not longer a safe assumption.”
The second big change arises from China’s nuclear ambitions. The country’s nuclear expansion is running at an even faster pace than American intelligence officials anticipated two years ago, driven by President Xi Jinping’s determination to scrap the decades-long strategy of maintaining a “minimum deterrent” to reach or exceed the size of Washington’s and Moscow’s arsenals. China’s nuclear complex is now the fastest growing in the world.
Although former President Donald J. Trump confidently predicted that Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, would surrender his nuclear weapons after their three in-person meetings, the opposite happened. Mr. Kim has doubled down, and now has more than 60 weapons, officials estimate, and the fuel for many more.
That expansion has changed the nature of the North Korean challenge: When the country possessed just a handful of weapons, it could be deterred by missile defenses. But its expanded arsenal is fast approaching the size of Pakistan’s and Israel’s, and it is large enough that it could, in theory, coordinate threats with Moscow and Beijing.
It was only a matter of time before a fundamentally different nuclear environment began to alter American war plans and strategy, officials say.
“It is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or wished it would be,” Mr. Narang said as he was leaving the Pentagon. “It is possible that we will one day look back and see the quarter-century after the Cold War as nuclear intermission.”
The new challenge is “the real possibility of collaboration and even collusion between our nuclear-armed adversaries,” he said.
So far in the presidential campaign, the new challenges to American nuclear strategy have not been a topic of debate. Mr. Biden, who spent much of his political career as an advocate of nuclear nonproliferation, has never publicly talked in any detail about how he is responding to the challenges of deterring China’s and North Korea’s expanded forces. Nor has Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic Party’s nominee.
At his last news conference in July, just days before he announced he would no longer seek the Democratic nomination for a second term, Mr. Biden acknowledged that he had adopted a policy of seeking ways to interfere in the broader China-Russia partnership.
“Yes, I do, but I’m not prepared to talk about the detail of it in public,” Mr. Biden said. He made no reference to — and was not asked about — how that partnership was altering American nuclear strategy.
Since Harry Truman’s presidency, that strategy has been overwhelmingly focused on the Kremlin’s arsenal. Mr. Biden’s new guidance suggests how quickly that is shifting.
China was mentioned in the last nuclear guidance, issued at the end of the Trump administration, according to an unclassified account provided to Congress in 2020. But that was before the scope of Mr. Xi’s ambitions was understood.
The Biden strategy sharpens that focus to reflect the Pentagon’s estimates that China’s nuclear force would expand to 1,000 by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035, roughly the numbers that the United States and Russia now deploy. In fact, Beijing now appears ahead of that schedule, officials say, and has begun loading nuclear missiles into new silo fields that were spotted by commercial satellites three years ago.
There is another concern about Beijing: It has now halted a short-lived conversation with the United States about improving nuclear safety and security — for example, by agreeing to warn each other of impending missile tests, or setting up hotlines or other means of communication to assure that incidents or accidents do not escalate into nuclear encounters.
One discussion between the two countries took place late last fall, just before Mr. Biden and Mr. Xi met in California, where they sought to repair relations between the two countries. They referred to those talks in a joint statement, but by that time the Chinese had already hinted they were not interested in further discussions, and earlier this summer said the conversations were over. They cited American arms sales to Taiwan, which were underway long before the nuclear safety conversations began.
Mallory Stewart, the assistant secretary for arms control, deterrence and stability at the State Department, said in an interview that the Chinese government was “actively preventing us from having conversations about the risks.”
Instead, she said, Beijing “seems to be taking a page out of Russia’s playbook that, until we address tensions and challenges in our bilateral relationship, they will choose not to continue our arms control, risk reduction and nonproliferation conversations.”
It was in China’s interest, she argued, “to prevent these risks of miscalculation and misunderstanding.”
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6) The War in Gaza Is Making Thousands of Orphans
Extended families, hospital staff and volunteers are stepping in to care for Gaza’s many newly orphaned children, some of whom are injured, traumatized and haunted by memories of their parents.
By Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair, Reporting from Cairo and Khan Younis, Gaza, Aug. 22, 2024
Palestinian children attending a recreational summer camp for orphaned children last month in the northern Gaza Strip. Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Abdullah Akeila, left, and his brother Ahmed, right, in Gaza. Credit...Bilal Shbair for The New York Times
The boys are aching to see their parents again. They are convinced it will happen as soon as they can go back to Gaza City, where they were growing up before the war bulldozed that life.
“Baba and mama will be waiting for us there,” they say to their aunt Samar, who is taking care of the four of them, Mohammed, Mahmoud, Ahmed and Abdullah Akeila. They say this even though they were told their parents are dead, have been dead for months, ever since the airstrike that hit next to where the family was sheltering.
Except for Ahmed, the second youngest at 13, none of them saw the bodies. The brothers spend every passing milestone in tears, almost unable to speak — Mother’s Day was hard; so was the Eid holiday — yet still they hold out hope. Every evening when the sundown prayer is said, 9-year-old Abdullah says he can hear his mother’s voice.
Their aunt, Samar al-Jaja, 31, who shares a tent with the children in the Gazan city of Khan Younis, is at a loss. “When they see other parents holding their kids close and talking to them,” she said, “how do they feel?”
The war in Gaza is taking children from parents and parents from children, undoing the natural order of things, rupturing the basic unit of Gazan life. It is making so many orphans in such chaos that no agency or aid group can count them.
Medical staff say children are left to roam hospital hallways and fend for themselves after being rushed there bloodied and alone — “wounded child, no surviving family,” some hospitals label them. Neonatal units house babies whom no one has come to claim.
In Khan Younis, a volunteer-run camp has sprung up to shelter more than 1,000 children who have lost one or both parents, including the Akeilas. One section is dedicated to “only survivors,” children who have lost their entire families, except perhaps a sibling. There is a long waiting list.
Amid the bombing, the constant pell-mell evacuations from tent to tent and apartment to hospital to shelter, no one can say how many children have lost track of their parents, and how many have lost them for good.
Using a statistical method drawn from analyzing other wars, United Nations experts estimate that at least 19,000 children are now surviving apart from their parents, whether with relatives, with other caretakers or on their own.
But the true figure is probably higher. Those other wars did not involve this much bombing and this much displacement in such a small and crowded place, with a population that includes such a high proportion of children, said Jonathan Crickx, a spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency.
The Israeli military says it takes precautions to limit harm to civilians in its devastating campaign in Gaza to eradicate Hamas over the group’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which left about 1,200 people dead and roughly 250 taken hostage. More than 100 captives still remain in Gaza, at least 30 of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel accuses Hamas of endangering Gazans by operating in their midst. Hamas defends its use of civilian clothes and civilian homes, saying its members have no alternative.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed: many of them children, many parents. In April, 41 percent of families Mr. Crickx’s agency surveyed in Gaza were caring for children not their own.
A few children have been born orphans, after their wounded mothers died during labor, said Dr. Deborah Harrington, a British obstetrician who saw two babies born that way while volunteering in Gaza in December.
Far more often, children and parents are sundered when Israeli forces arrest parents, or after an airstrike, the children rushed to hospitals alone in the confusion.
Doctors say they have treated many newly orphaned children, many of them amputees.
“There was no one there to hold their hand, no one there to give them comfort” during the agonizing operations, said Dr. Irfan Galaria, a plastic surgeon from Virginia who volunteered at a Gaza hospital in February.
Aid workers try to track down parents, if they are alive, or relatives. But government systems that could have helped have collapsed. Communications are spotty. Evacuation orders split up family trees, sending the splinters in all directions.
Some young children are so traumatized that they go mute and cannot give their names, making the search near-impossible, according to SOS Children’s Villages, an aid group that runs a Gaza orphanage.
Then there is Mennat-Allah Salah, 11, who talks constantly about her parents. Orphaned in December, she copies the way her mother laughed, winked, walked. She wears her mother’s sneakers and favorite T-shirt, too big though they are.
“My mom,” she said, “was everything to me,” and tears came, and she could not go on.
Among the premature babies who arrived at the Emirati Hospital in the southern city of Rafah in November was a 3-week-old girl whose family was unknown. Her file said she had been found next to a Gaza City mosque after an airstrike that killed dozens of people, according to Amal Abu Khatleh, a neonatal nurse at the hospital. The staff called her “Majhoul,” Arabic for “unidentified.”
Upset by the starkness of that name, Ms. Abu Khatleh decided to give her a proper one: Malak, or “angel.” She called journalists in northern Gaza to find out which families had lost members in a strike near where Malak was found, then questioned patients with those surnames about a missing baby girl. No luck.
In January, worried about Malak’s development, Ms. Abu Khatleh took her home.
As in other Muslim societies, religious strictures make legal adoption impossible in Gaza, though people can take in and financially sponsor orphans. Yet Ms. Abu Khatleh’s family, friends and colleagues rallied around her, donating clothes, formula and diapers.
Unless she finds Malak’s parents, she said, she plans to keep her, despite the legal hurdles.
“I feel Malak is my real daughter,” she said. “I love her. My friends even say she looks like me now.”
In most instances, aid officials say, Gaza’s close-knit extended families step in as caretakers. So it went with the Akeila brothers.
Their aunt, Ms. al-Jaja, told the story: There were seven of them, the father, a tailor, the mother, who stayed at home, their four sons and their baby daughter, Fatima.
On Oct. 23, they were sheltering at a relative’s house when an airstrike shattered a neighboring building, according to the family. Zahra Akeila, 40, was killed alongside Fatima, their bodies dug out by relatives six hours later.
Ms. al-Jaja wept for her sister, she recalled. But Ahmed, the only child there to see his mother’s body in her coffin, stayed dry-eyed and silent with shock.
His eldest brother, Mohammed, 21, has been developmentally disabled since birth. The family lied to him at first, saying his mother was in surgery. Mahmoud, 19, who was badly injured in his right leg, was sent to another hospital before they could tell him.
Abdullah, the youngest at 9, was still being treated when they buried her. Hours before the strike, he remembered her making them dinner, handing them juice and chips, promising a few shekels’ allowance; he remembered hearing a boom, remembered her ushering them away from the windows.
The next thing he knew, he said, he was waking up in the hospital. When he would not stop asking about his mother, relatives finally told him, “Mama is in heaven now,” Ms. al-Jaja said.
Another few days, and the children’s father, Mohammed Kamel Akeila, 44, who had been hanging on in intensive care, was dead.
Israel’s military said that the building next to the Akeilas’ shelter that it struck had been Hamas “infrastructure,” without giving details.
Ms. al-Jaja soon left her fiancé in another city to live with the boys. Even after she marries, she said, she and the boys’ uncle will help their grandparents raise them.
“These children’s future is nothing without their parents,” she said. But they would try: “Their mother was such a kind person. Now we have to pay back all the good things she did for us.”
The camp provides some meals and cash. As everyone struggles for survival, however, U.N. social workers have seen a few Gazan families prioritize their own children over orphaned relatives, Mr. Crickx said. And orphans are highly vulnerable to exploitation, violence and abuse.
If they make it to peacetime, shelter, clean water and mental and physical health care will be doubtful, to say nothing of their education, job and marriage prospects.
Even for children who still have parents, postwar Gaza will be a difficult place to grow up, said Mahmoud Kalakh, a charity worker who founded the orphans’ camp.
“So what about these children who have no source of income or provider, having lost their fathers or mothers?” he said.
Abu Bakr Bashir and Ameera Harouda contributed reporting.
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7) Officials Try to Salvage Negotiations for a Cease-Fire in Gaza
By Isabel Kershner reporting from Jerusalem, August 22, 2024
Displaced Palestinians who fled the western part of Khan Younis in Gaza on Wednesday following an evacuation order by the Israeli army. Credit...Mohammed Salem/Reuters
Last-ditch efforts to salvage talks on a cease-fire in Gaza continued on Thursday, hours after President Biden emphasized the “urgency” of closing the deal in a phone call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel amid dimming prospects for a breakthrough.
In the call on Wednesday, Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu discussed upcoming talks in Cairo “to remove any remaining obstacles” to the proposed cease-fire and hostage release deal, according to a statement from the White House.
There was no mention of when those talks might take place, although the White House had said a few days ago that senior negotiators hoped to reconvene in Cairo to finalize the agreement before the end of this week. Mr. Netanyahu’s office confirmed that the call had taken place but did not offer details. An Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that Vice President Kamala Harris joined the call.
The Biden administration has been leading the latest push for a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, with Egypt and Qatar acting as mediators, and has presented a “bridging proposal” meant to close, or at least narrow, the gaps between the sides.
But a visit to the region this week by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken ended without any apparent resolution to major sticking points — and in acrimony, with Mr. Netanyahu and Hamas officials trading blame for obstructing progress.
One main focus of disagreement is Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence on maintaining an Israeli military presence along the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow piece of land along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. The Israeli leader has argued that the area has served as a main conduit for weapons smuggling into Gaza, and that abandoning it would allow Hamas to quickly rearm.
Egypt and Hamas strongly object to continued Israeli control of the area, calling for a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and Israeli security officials have suggested that other solutions can be found.
Israeli negotiators were taken aback and, in some cases, angered by Mr. Blinken’s statements this week that Mr. Netanyahu had accepted the American bridging proposal and that it was now up to Hamas, according to people familiar with the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share the thinking within Israel’s top security and decision-making circles.
Those statements — which came after a nearly three-hour meeting on Monday between Mr. Blinken and Mr. Netanyahu — made it appear that the Israeli prime minister and the Biden administration saw eye-to-eye on an issue that Hamas clearly would not accede to, one of the people said, dooming the prospects of an agreement. Instead, they said, Mr. Blinken could have just called more vaguely for flexibility on both sides.
The details of the bridging proposal have not been made public. An Israeli official with knowledge of the talks, who was not authorized to speak about them publicly, cautioned that few people really know what is being said behind closed doors, and said that talks were continuing at various levels as part of a difficult negotiation.
Before departing Qatar, the last stop on his regional tour, Mr. Blinken apparently engaged in some damage control, saying, “The agreement is very clear on the schedule and the locations of I.D.F. withdrawals from Gaza,” referring to the Israeli military. He added: “Israel has agreed to that.”
In a follow-up call on Wednesday with the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, Mr. Blinken underscored that the bridging proposal addressed the remaining gaps “in a manner that allows for swift implementation of the deal,” according to a State Department readout of the call.
Mr. Blinken and the emir “welcomed the next round of talks in Cairo,” the statement added, without specifying a date. A meeting between Mr. Blinken and the emir planned for earlier in the week in Qatar was called off because Mr. Al-Thani was feeling unwell.
The Biden administration, Egypt and Qatar have also pushed for a cease-fire in hopes that it will calm tensions between Israel and Iran, which has pledged to retaliate for the killings last month of senior leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, two of its proxy forces in the region. Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, the Qatari prime minister, will travel to Iran in the coming days for talks with senior officials, Iran’s semiofficial Tasnim news agency reported on Thursday.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
KEY DEVELOPMENTS
A deadly Israeli airstrike hits the West Bank, and other news.
· An Israeli airstrike hit the West Bank town of Tulkarm, the Israeli military and Palestinian news media reported on Thursday. Three Palestinians were killed in the Thursday morning strike, which hit a home in Tulkarm, according to Wafa, the official news agency of the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited control in parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. A spokesman for the Israeli military, Avichay Adraee, said that an Air Force unit had targeted “armed terrorists.” Nearly 600 Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank from the start of the war in Gaza in October through Aug. 12, according to the United Nations.
· Israeli warplanes attacked more than 10 Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon overnight, the Israeli military said in a statement on Thursday. Israeli forces have conducted at least two similar rounds of strikes against the powerful Iranian-backed militia this week. The two sides have traded cross-border strikes for months.
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8) Sugar Industry Faces Pressure Over Coerced Hysterectomies and Labor Abuses
After an investigation that ran in The New York Times, the industry is edging toward change. But companies in western India are reluctant to abandon an abusive labor system.
By Megha Rajagopalan, Megha Rajagopalan spent months with the sugar cane harvesters of Maharashtra, India, to investigate labor abuses. She reported this article from London, Aug. 22, 2024
Workers said that they made the equivalent of $5 a day. Mill owners said that changing labor practices would jeopardize their businesses by making it easier for employees to leave. Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
The sugar industry is facing pressure to clean up its supply chains and improve oversight after revelations that women in India, the world’s second-largest sugar producer, work in debt bondage and are coerced into getting hysterectomies.
In the wake of the report, a group of labor leaders in India went on a three-day hunger strike recently to demand better working conditions. One of the companies that buys sugar in Maharashtra, Coca-Cola, quietly met with Indian government leaders and sugar suppliers last month to discuss responsible harvesting. And Bonsucro, a sugar industry body that sets standards, said that it would create a human rights task force.
The investigation into the sugar industry, by The New York Times and The Fuller Project, revealed a range of labor abuses, including that female sugar cane cutters in the western India state of Maharashtra were pushed into illegal child marriages so that they could work alongside their husbands. Locked into debt to their employers, the women are forced to return to the fields season after season, the report found.
Women also described facing pressure to undergo hysterectomies for routine ailments like painful periods, adding that they usually had to borrow from their employers to pay for the surgery. That often ended the women’s periods and kept them in the fields, but such procedures can also have consequences including early menopause.
Sugar producers and buyers have known about this abusive system for years, the investigation revealed. But multinational companies have done little in response. One mill that profited off abuses even received a seal of approval from Bonsucro. (Major brands like Coke, PepsiCo, Unilever and General Mills have used Bonsucro endorsements to bolster the images of their supply chains.)
Since the investigation was published, labor and environmental groups on Bonsucro’s member council have pushed to create a task force to improve inspections and to determine how inspectors missed the abuses. Bonsucro’s chief executive, Danielle Morley, had been aware that coerced hysterectomies were a problem in Maharashtra, the investigation found, but no one told inspectors to look out for it.
Companies were slow to agree to a task force, according to people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss the process, but they ultimately endorsed its creation.
Bonsucro said in an email that the working group had “received widespread support” from members. But Jason Glaser, who sits on the Bonsucro members council and is chief of La Isla Network, a Washington-based research group focusing on workers’ health and safety, said that he would like to see the brands “make more vocal and clear commitments.”
“They shouldn’t outsource the solution completely,” he added, referring to the task force. “They’ve made their money on the way things are, and the way things are is bad.”
Mr. Glaser said that the task force would initially focus on reports of coerced hysterectomies.
At the heart of the abuses is how workers are paid. Instead of wages, migrant workers in Maharashtra receive advances each season. Those function as loans that are repaid through work. With no documentation or rules governing the advances, workers often finish the season in debt and must return.
Workers said that they made the equivalent of $5 a day. Mill owners said that the workers had always been paid that way and that changing the practice would jeopardize their businesses by making it easier for workers to leave.
Maurice van Beers, a representative of the Dutch labor organization CNV Internationaal, said the industry’s focus needed to change. “I’ve been in discussions, sitting in a very luxurious conference room talking about sustainability, but it’s hard to talk about living wages for the poorest workers,” he said.
Coca-Cola and Pepsico have said that they are looking into the problems. Pepsico said that, when compared to Maharashtra’s total production, the company and its partners bought a relatively small amount of the state’s sugar.
After the investigation’s publication, Coca-Cola officials met with farm owners and Indian politicians to start a project called the Coalition for Responsible Sugarcane India.
Coca-Cola did not elaborate on the coalition’s goals, but said that it had expanded programs to work toward “continuous improvement” with suppliers in Maharashtra.
A union of cane harvesters in India said last week that the five labor leaders who had gone on hunger strike had carried out their protest at the sugar commissioner’s office in Pune, a city in Maharashtra.
Mr. Glaser of La Isla Network said that he would like to see a pilot project in which companies invested to improve the supply chain of a single sugar mill. That could cost $2 million to $3.5 million, he said, a tiny fraction of the profits of multinational companies. If successful, that could be a model.
“No one will go bankrupt or lose their competitive edge by making sure women aren’t forced to have hysterectomies,” Mr. Glaser said.
Qadri Inzamam, a reporter with The Fuller Project, contributed reporting.
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9) Farm Workers Union Battles California Grower Owned by Democratic Donors
Wonderful Nurseries, owned by Stewart and Lynda Resnick, has sued the state to overturn a labor organizing law championed by the United Farm Workers.
By Kurtis Lee, Reporting from Los Angeles, Aug. 22, 2024
Members of the United Farm Workers marching in 2022 to urge Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign a bill that they argued would make it easier for farmworkers to organize. Credit...Jessica Christian/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated Press
The allegations ricocheted through the agricultural fields and into a Central Valley courthouse, where one of California’s most powerful companies and an iconic union were trading charges of deception and coercion in a fight over worker representation.
Some farmworkers at Wonderful Nurseries — part of the Wonderful Company, the conglomerate behind famous brands of pomegranate juice and pistachios, as well as Fiji Water — said they had been duped into signing cards to join a union. On the other side, the United Farm Workers, the union formed in the 1960s by labor figures including Cesar Chavez, contends that the influential company, owned by the Los Angeles billionaires and powerhouse Democratic donors Stewart and Lynda Resnick, is trying to thwart the will of workers through intimidation and coercion.
For months, the back and forth has played out before the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which arbitrates labor fights between workers and growers, and in a courthouse not far from Wonderful’s sprawling fields.
In May, the company filed a legal challenge against the state that could overturn a 2022 law that made it easier for farmworkers to take part in unionization votes.
After vetoing a previous version over procedural concerns, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the measure following public pressure from President Biden and Representative Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker. The U.F.W. heralded the bill’s enactment as a critical victory, but several big growers said that it would allow union organizers to unfairly influence the process.
The law paved the way for farmworkers to vote for union representation by signing union authorization cards, a process known simply as card check. Its passage coincided with an era of greater mobilization to unionize workers during the pandemic and a willingness to press demands for better working conditions and respect from employers, said Victor Narro, project director and labor studies professor at the U.C.L.A. Labor Center.
“There is new energy in the fight for a voice in the workplace, which is why there has been a wave of union organizing campaigns since the pandemic,” Mr. Narro said.
Last fall, the U.F.W. secured its first organizing success in six years, unionizing nearly 300 workers at a tomato packing plant in the Central Valley using the card check system.
The union now represents around 7,000 workers, compared with 60,000 in the 1970s. That substantial contraction has been attributed to a variety of factors: strife and attrition within the union’s early nucleus, disillusionment among members, pushback from growers, strategic missteps, and an insufficient emphasis on organizing.
In recent months, the union has focused its organizing and legal efforts on the battle against Wonderful Nurseries, whose owners, the Resnicks, have donated millions to Democratic politicians and philanthropic ventures that have landed their names on facilities at U.C.L.A., the Hammer Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The U.F.W. filed a petition with the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board in February attesting that most of the more than 600 farmworkers at Wonderful Nurseries in the small Central Valley city of Wasco had signed union authorization cards.
But Wonderful quickly pushed back, filing a motion asking the board to halt the process of certifying the workers’ signatures.
The company provided signed declarations from roughly 150 workers claiming that the U.F.W. had made them think that signing the cards was a prerequisite to receive $600 in federal relief funds for farmworkers.
Some said that union workers had “stalked” them and “tricked” them into signing, according to transcripts.
The labor relations board allowed the certification process to move forward. A regional director of the board acknowledged in a hearing of the panel that it had not addressed the concerns outlined in the declarations, according to transcripts.
Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns for the U.F.W., said the effort to organize at Wonderful is about ensuring fundamental respect and fairness for both subcontracted and direct employees.
“These workers wanted to have a voice on the job where their work is building enormous profits for the company, and they have the right to come together and form their union,” Ms. Strater said.
But some workers who initially signed cards later gathered for an April protest to publicly distance themselves from the unionization effort. They chanted and carried signs that read “No queremos unión!” — “We do not want union!”
“They said clearly — this I do remember — that it was $600 of aid for farmworkers who worked during Covid,” Claudia Chavez, an employee of a labor contractor for Wonderful, told The Los Angeles Times. She said she had not known she was voting for the union.
The U.F.W. filed a complaint with the labor relations board claiming unfair labor practices by Wonderful, arguing that it had used union-busting tactics to coerce workers into filing the declarations.
According to the complaint, workers were pressured by human resources managers and a consultant to assert that they had been misled and did not want to be a part of the union. Inside a conference room and a greenhouse, according to the complaint, the managers and the consultant spoke with workers in Spanish, intimidating and persuading them to revoke their signatures from the cards.
The labor relations board’s general counsel sided with the union and ordered the company to “cease and desist from interrogating agricultural employees regarding their union support.” In response to the ruling, the company said the board “shows once again they are more interested in shamelessly backing the U.F.W. than protecting farmworkers or safeguarding the integrity of a union vote.”
In May, Wonderful sued the board, arguing that the state law allowing unionization through card check deprives employers of due process. The lawsuit came toward the end of a 90-day window for the company and the union to reach a collective bargaining agreement or have one prescribed by the board.
During a June hearing for the lawsuit, dozens of U.F.W. members marched outside the courthouse. Using megaphones and donning bright red T-shirts emblazoned with the union symbol — the Aztec eagle — they castigated Wonderful as a dishonest company that did not care about workers.
Last month, the judge overseeing the case issued a preliminary injunction that halted the bargaining process.
A final ruling is pending, but the judge indicated that Wonderful was “likely to prevail” on its challenge to the 2022 law, adding that compliance “with a process that is likely unconstitutional” would cause irreparable harm.
In a statement, Rob Yraceburu, president of Wonderful Nurseries, said the “company’s history of working with agricultural workers is rooted in mutual trust, collaboration and respect.” (Some company subsidiaries are unionized or have been in the past.)
He said that after hearing from farmworkers that they had “felt misled” into signing the union authorization cards, “we answered these employee questions with full transparency and honesty.”
The company said the Resnicks had declined to comment on the dispute.
Teresa Romero, president of the U.F.W., released a public letter to supporters after the preliminary injunction was granted.
“It’s very clear Wonderful is determined to use its considerable resources to deny farmworkers their rights,” she said. “This is a heavy blow, but these workers are courageous and determined to seek what they deserve: dignity at work and a fair union contract.”
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10) Chrystul Kizer Got 11 Years in Prison for Killing Her Abuser. This Is Justice?
By Rachel Louise Snyder, Aug. 22, 2024
Ms. Snyder is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of the book “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us.”
Illustration by Shoshana Schultz/The New York Times; source photograph by Sean Krajacic/The Kenosha News, via Associated Press
In 2018, a Black teenager named Chrystul Kizer shot and killed a 34-year-old white man named Randall Volar III, who had sexually abused and trafficked her starting when she was 16 years old; she was 17 at the time of the killing. This week, a Wisconsin judge sentenced her to 11 years in prison, with another five under supervision. Rather than serving justice, her case illustrates with searing clarity the sexism and racism that corrupt our criminal justice system.
In a 2019 investigation, The Washington Post detailed Ms. Kizer’s life: Her single mother, who struggled to support her four children. The abusive man and the family’s time in a homeless shelter. Ms. Kizer wanted money for snacks and school notebooks, so she placed an ad in an online forum called backpage.com, which was notorious for sex trafficking. (It has since been shut down.) Mr. Volar was the first one who answered. He showered her with gifts and took her to fancy dinners; she understood there was a price to these extravagances. But before long, she said he was taking her to hotels to have sex with other men. He’d wait outside for her and insist she turn the money over to him. He called himself an “escort trainer.” One night, when he wanted to have sex and she brushed him off, she said she fell to the ground and he jumped on top of her, trying to force off her clothes. She shot him twice in the head, and then, the police said, set his body on fire.
Ms. Kizer’s case has been in the national spotlight since she killed Mr. Volar; a petition to drop her charges garnered more than a million and a half signatures. In what was a major win for her side, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that she could argue that her crime was justified because she was trafficked by Mr. Volar — a groundbreaking ruling for trafficking victims. In order to make that argument, however, she would have to take her chances on a long, difficult, very public trial. Or she could take a plea deal.
Four months before his death, Mr. Volar had been arrested after another young girl called 911 claiming he’d drugged her and was threatening to kill her. The police searched his home and found hundreds of videos of sexual abuse. He had a penchant for Black girls, like Ms. Kizer: Hers was among those young faces found in the videos. Mr. Volar was released without bail the same day, pending an investigation. The police saw girls in the videos that looked as young as 12 and 13, and yet, “In many and most of the cases, we didn’t know the age,” the prosecutor Michael Graveley told The Post. “So we literally did not know whether we had misdemeanors or felony.”
In other words, the girls were young enough to appear young, but apparently not so young that they warranted priority.
Imagine a Black man, aged 34. Imagine him with videos of young white boys who appear to be 12, 13, 14 years old. Imagine those videos contained footage of grown men having sex with young boys. Imagine that 20 of those videos were shot by the suspect himself. Now tell me: In what world does law enforcement let such a person go free without bail? In what world do investigators hold on to those videos for months, seemingly baffled by the task of finding out the ages of the girls? In what world is the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony an excuse for this level of inaction?
In this world, the one we’ve created, courts and prosecutors have long claimed that young girls seduce men, or consent to abuse, or, have ulterior motives, such as, in Ms. Kizer’s case, killing an unsuspecting man for his fancy car. In this world, Black girls, especially, are routinely over-sexualized by law enforcement and the judiciary: The lead investigator in the case against Mr. Volar wrote of one of Mr. Valor’s victims that she was “prostituting herself out.” He was writing about a 15-year-old.
Beth Richie, the author of the classic book “Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women,” told me that racist stereotypes enable court systems to filter out all understanding that a Black woman “could possibly have been a victim of horrendous abuse. She presents as a violent Black woman, not a survivor of gender-based violence.”
Ms. Kizer’s case is not unique. Cyntoia Brown, another young Black woman who made national news, spent 15 years in a Tennessee prison after she killed a man who’d trafficked her when she was 16. Tammy Johnson, also Black, was trafficked starting at age 14 by a boyfriend who later became her pimp. She had to “earn” his love by sleeping with other men and bringing in the money. If she refused, she was beaten with a baseball bat, or a belt buckle or the heel of a shoe. Eventually, another pimp killed one of her clients, and she drove the getaway car. She was convicted and sentenced to life without parole. She served 28 years before her sentence was commuted. Ms. Brown and Ms. Johnson were eventually freed, their sentences finally recognized as egregious injustices. But countless others whose stories we don’t know still languish in prison cells across the U.S.
Ms. Kizer was trying, in the best way she knew, to help her family: She posted the ad on backpage.com so she could buy food and school supplies. Ms. Kizer didn’t know that under federal law, it is illegal to solicit someone under the age of 18 for prostitution. What she did know were the layers of systemic racism embedded into her life: poverty, homelessness, abuse, hunger.
After the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, she had a choice. She could go to trial and risk getting a life sentence — her life for his, if you didn’t count how he’d already hijacked hers — or take a plea deal and some lesser time to serve. She faced up to 30 years on the plea. But 30 years wasn’t life, at least. She took the plea.
She could have risked a trial, of course. But consider what the world had taught her by then, a poor Black girl with men’s violence and control all around her, with a law-enforcement system that prioritized her abuser’s freedom at the cost of her trauma, a world that said sometimes you were hungry and sometimes you needed school supplies, but no good comes from wanting. For six years her case was in and out of court, all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and what did that get her? An impossible gamble. What were the odds she’d prevail, in this world we’ve made for her?
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11) In a Grim Palestinian Refugee Community, People See Hope in Hamas
In Ein al-Hilweh, Lebanon, long mired in poverty and despair, Hamas recruitment is up and the downtrodden air has given way to defiance and celebration.
By Maria Abi-Habib and Hwaida Saad, Reporting from Ein al-Hilweh, Lebanon, Aug. 24, 2024
Images of the Qassam Brigades spokesman, Abu Ubaida, on the right in this mural in Bourj al-Barajne, are a common sight in Palestinian refugee communities in Lebanon. Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Ein al-Hilweh, Lebanon’s largest community of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, has long been a downtrodden place, impoverished and racked by factional violence. Its residents usually have a grim view of their future.
But now, the mood here is nothing but exuberant.
Recruitment for Hamas and its armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, is way up across Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian refugee communities, according to Hamas and Lebanese officials. They say that hundreds of new recruits have joined the militants’ ranks in recent months, exhilarated by Hamas’s ongoing war with Israel.
On a rare visit to Ein al-Hilweh, journalists from The New York Times saw posters of the Qassam Brigades’ spokesman, Abu Ubaida, everywhere, his eyes peering out from a red and white checked scarf wrapped around his face like a balaclava, imploring residents to “fight on the path of God.”
In Hamas’s stronghold, the Gaza Strip, where some 40,000 Palestinians have died in 10½ months of war, many people have soured on the group. But elsewhere, Hamas’s willingness to combat Israel has won new adherents.
“It’s true that our weapons cannot match our enemy’s,” Ayman Shanaa, the Hamas chief for this area of Lebanon, said in an interview. “But our people are resilient and they support the resistance. And are joining us.”
Young men milling in a street in Ein al-Hilweh said this was the first time they were hopeful, and they each knew dozens of family members or friends who had joined Hamas since the war began in October. Such enlistment doesn’t affect the fight in Gaza because getting into the territory is prohibitively hard, but it bolsters Hamas in Lebanon. Recruits typically remain in the community, helping to manage local affairs, and sometimes approach Lebanon’s southern border to launch rockets into Israel.
The young men were upbeat that Hamas could win for Palestinians the ability to return to the only home they acknowledge, the land that is now Israel. That such a return will occur, however unlikely it seems, has long been an article of faith for Palestinian refugees.
In the late 1940s, in the wars surrounding the creation of Israel, Jewish forces expelled many Palestinian Arabs, and many others fled in anticipation of violence. Israel has not allowed them or their descendants to return or reclaim ownership of property.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians settled in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. Over decades the camps became built-up towns — often still called camps — that are home now to millions.
In Lebanon, those Palestinians have been barred from gaining citizenship or holding a wide range of jobs.
One such community is Ein al-Hilweh, with 80,000 residents crammed into barely half of a square mile, largely within the Sidon, a southern port city. There is no shortage of men here willing to sacrifice their lives to fight Israel, Mr. Shanaa said, but he refused to say how many had been recruited from the Sidon area.
He spoke at a Hamas-run community center where men sat drinking coffee and eating dates while they watched gory footage from the Gaza war. Pictures of the recently assassinated Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, colored in by children, adorned the walls.
On the streets, a new recruitment poster for the Qassam Brigades showed dozens of smiling young men and boys barely out of middle school superimposed onto Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a site revered by Muslims. Hamas named its Oct. 7 attack on Israel — which left about 1,200 people dead, kidnapped around 250 and sparked the ongoing war in Gaza — “Al Aqsa Flood.”
The poster offered a training workshop for the new “Al Aqsa generation,” declaring that Jerusalem is “for us.”
Some Palestinians claim Abu Ubaida, the Qassam spokesman, as their Che Guevara, the long-dead Marxist revolutionary who remains a cultural touchstone. Inside Ein al-Hilweh, Abu Ubaida’s picture is nearly omnipresent, adorning scarves and key chains.
Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim militia, political party and social movement with strong ties to Iran, is the most powerful force in Lebanon, with especially deep roots in the south. But in Palestinian enclaves like Ein al-Hilweh, multiple Palestinian groups operate and have followings — some secular and others, including Hamas, hewing to a Sunni Muslim ideology. Hamas, which is also backed by Iran, and Hezbollah are allied in their hostility to Israel.
For years the Lebanese military has barred journalists from entering Ein al-Hilweh, where armed factions have repeatedly battled each other, and the Lebanese military, for control. Under a decades-old international agreement, the military generally stays out of the Palestinian enclaves, which operate quasi-independently within a nation where the weak central government can barely provide electricity, let alone security.
But journalists from The New York Times were able to enter the town, swept up in a crowd of mourners during a funeral procession for a Hamas official, Samer al-Hajj, who was killed this month by an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military called him a senior militant responsible for launching attacks from Lebanon into Israel; Hamas confirmed that he worked for the group but refused to say what position he held.
Mourners carried the coffin from a nearby morgue through an entrance to Ein al-Hilweh, where a banner proclaimed, “Al-Aqsa Flood Battle, the Battle of Glory and Victory.”
The crowd chanted, “Our blood and our souls we will sacrifice to you, martyr!”
Men fired automatic weapons into the air. “No shooting! Save it for the Israelis!” a woman yelled at them.
The procession snaked its way into the labyrinth of buildings and alleyways so narrow they could barely fit a fruit cart, to Mr. al-Hajj’s home, where his widow and two children awaited his body.
Khaireyah Kayed Younes, 82, said she knew that Mr. al-Hajj, a close friend of her son, was with Hamas, but she did not know he was an important figure until Israel targeted him. She said he was known for his gentle demeanor — he often played with local children — and willingness to lend a hand to neighbors in need.
“This man is from our people, our neighborhood, our camp and what used to be our country, Palestine. We cry for his loss,” she said.
“If one of us dies, 100 will rise up; we won’t stop,” she added, her voice rising to a shout as she wiped tears from her wrinkled cheeks. “We are steadfast!”
Outside Mr. al-Hajj’s home, a woman, Feryal Abbas, led the crowd in chants addressed to Yahya Sinwar, an architect of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, who succeeded Mr. Haniyeh as Hamas’s overall political leader.
“Sinwar don’t worry, we have men willing to give their blood!” she yelled.
Though Israeli officials have neither confirmed nor denied that their forces killed Mr. Haniyeh, as is widely believed, they have said they aim to kill Mr. Sinwar. But whether radical movements like Hamas can be weakened or destroyed through campaigns to assassinate their top leaders has long been a matter of debate among experts who study insurgencies.
They say the strategy of meeting violence with violence, instead of addressing underlying grievances, risks radicalizing more people.
The secular groups that long dominated the Palestinian movement have fallen out of favor. Two decades after his death, photos of Yasir Arafat, the once wildly popular head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, were noticeably scarce and faded throughout Ein al-Hilweh. Photos of his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, were even scarcer.
Conflict between the Palestinian Authority and militant groups like Hamas has spilled over into violent clashes in Gaza, the West Bank and refugee communities, undermining the ability of Palestinians to confront Israel politically.
“The fact that there isn’t a central address in Palestine to negotiate for peace has weakened the Palestinian cause and destabilized the region,” said Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, a research organization in Washington.
Any deal Mr. Abbas makes with Israel can be disrupted by Hamas, he said, adding: “Not one group has the monopoly to negotiate peace or wage war among the Palestinians. And that has weakened them and will continue to weaken them in the future.”
But since October, within Ein al-Hilweh, the groups have stopped pointing fingers at each other — for now.
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12) New Training and Tougher Rules: How Colleges Are Trying to Tame Gaza Protests
University officials are spelling out strict codes around protests. They say they are trying to be clear. Others say they are trying to suppress speech.
By Alan Blinder, Reporting from Nashville, Aug. 24, 2024
Pro-Palestinian protesters marched in May through Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Credit...Nicole Hester / The Tennessean / USA TODAY NETWORK, via Reuters
Less than 10 minutes had passed before Daniel Diermeier, Vanderbilt University’s chancellor, told hundreds of new students what the school would not do.
The university would not divest from Israel.
It would not banish provocative speakers.
It would not issue statements in support or condemnation of Israeli or Palestinian causes.
Before the hour was up on Monday, he added that Vanderbilt would not tolerate threats, harassment or protests “disrupting the learning environment.”
This month, Vanderbilt required all first-year undergraduate students to attend mandatory meetings about the university’s approach to free speech, with the hope that clear expectations — and explanations for them — would help administrators keep order after protests rocked American campuses toward the end of the last academic year.
“The chaos on campuses is because there’s lack of clarity on these principles,” Dr. Diermeier said in an interview.
There is no guarantee that the pre-emptive, plain-spoken meetings will work. Many student activists and professors at Vanderbilt have condemned the university’s rules as suppressing their speech, and even universities with histories of hard-nosed tactics have struggled with demonstrations.
But university officials nationwide are grasping for new approaches as they brace for renewed protests over the Israel-Hamas war, along with a bitterly contested presidential election. Many administrators remain shaken by the closing weeks of the spring semester, when encampments, building occupations and clashes with the police helped lead to thousands of arrests across the country.
The strategies that are coming into public view suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is perilous, and that a harder line may be the best option — or perhaps just the one least likely to invite blowback from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters.
University presidents used summer break to huddle with police commanders, lawyers, trustees and other administrators to rewrite rules, tighten protest zones, and weigh possible concessions to maintain, or restore, order. Many have studied universities that temporarily defused tensions by striking deals with protesters.
But so far, universities are signaling little overt interest in negotiations.
On Monday, the University of California’s president, Michael V. Drake, told campus chancellors to ensure that their policies included bans on unapproved encampments and “masking to conceal identity.” Columbia University, where contentious protests helped drive Nemat Shafik from her 13-month-old presidency on Aug. 14, is limiting campus access. Northwestern University said that students would receive “mandatory trainings on antisemitism and other forms of hate,” with more policy changes coming.
“The question is how do we get more consistent in the way we respond to these issues — and clearer about what the rules are and what the tiered responses will be,” said Richard K. Lyons, the new chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, a campus with one of the nation’s most robust records of protest. Dr. Lyons estimated that planning for demonstrations had consumed up to 15 percent of the summer for top administrators at Berkeley.
Some universities are saying little, for now, about their playbooks. For example, the University of Texas at Austin, where the authorities made more than 100 arrests in the spring, did not respond to inquiries. And a spokeswoman for Emory University, where administrators provoked fury in April by swiftly ordering the removal of an encampment, said the school in Atlanta had no “updates to share.”
A series of recent court rulings, as well as investigations from Capitol Hill and the Department of Education, have created pressure on universities. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction this month that said the University of California, Los Angeles, could not allow protesters to block Jewish students from campus facilities. (U.C.L.A. objected to the court telling it how to manage demonstrations. The court’s order, the university said, could “hamstring our ability to respond to events on the ground.”)
And university officials in Texas have scrambled in recent months to comply with Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order to “review and update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses.” A federal lawsuit challenging the order, which Mr. Abbott issued in March, is pending.
Even as some universities have prepared more rigorous rules and procedures, it remains to be seen how strongly or consistently they will be enforced. The lasting consequences of defiance are also murky. Officials nationwide ultimately dropped many of the criminal charges that protesters faced after the spring demonstrations, and school discipline is still pending for many students. Suspensions have often been lifted in the meantime.
Vanderbilt, which is in Nashville, did not experience the scale of pandemonium that some other universities did. But with about 13,000 students, there have been tensions, including a sit-in that led to a handful of arrests.
In March, university administrators, citing a possible risk to Vanderbilt’s government contracts, blocked a vote to align student government spending with the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. Students and administrators have also bickered over the distribution of fliers and a meeting room reservation by the campus’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
The S.J.P. branch did not respond to an interview request, but the chapter and its allies have spent months warning against university tactics they saw as stifling. Last semester, a group of Vanderbilt divinity students invoked the university’s 1960 expulsion of the civil rights leader James M. Lawson Jr. and declared that “protest is once again facing Vanderbilt’s repressive and unjust reactions, all in the name of a ‘principled neutrality’ which favors the care and needs of certain students over others.”
Separately, Palestine Legal, a civil rights group, sent the university a cease-and-desist letter in March, accusing the school of arbitrarily restricting student speech and protest, which it said was “incongruous with Vanderbilt’s commitment to freedom of expression.”
Even without protests that commanded the national spotlight, Dr. Diermeier said in the interview that he had concluded over the summer that Vanderbilt needed to reinforce and explain its longstanding ethos of open inquiry and institutional neutrality, which means avoiding taking stands on debates that do not directly affect university operations.
“People are not always clear what the principles are, and they’re not always clear for the reasons for it,” said Dr. Diermeier, a former provost of the University of Chicago, where incoming students are told that freedom of expression is “an essential element of the university’s culture.”
The University of Chicago’s own experience this year suggests that even those deeply held principles do not always prevent turmoil. In May, the university brought in the police to remove an encampment that violated its policy barring unapproved tents.
Dr. Diermeier framed the sessions at Vanderbilt as gatherings intended to develop a common understanding.
“If you join a community that is governed by a certain set of rules, you want to know what they are, you want to discuss them, you want to be clear about them,” he said. “We’re not forcing anybody to be members of this community.”
Bruce Barry, a professor of management who has been on Vanderbilt’s faculty since 1991, said he saw merit to orienting new students to the university’s principles. But Dr. Barry, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee who is married to a Democratic candidate for Congress, said he would worry if university leaders were deliberately “sending a message that your protest activities occur on a very thin edge of compliance.”
He noted that Dr. Diermeier’s administration hardly seemed to hesitate to discipline some students in the spring.
Some of the campus’s newest residents said they welcomed the mandatory gatherings.
Shayna Mehta, a first-year student from New Jersey, said she thought the university’s early efforts to detail policies “will make people more mindful about protests and the decisions they’re making.”
On Monday, after new students filled Langford Auditorium, there were subtle signs of discomfort with the university’s policies, particularly around its $10 billion endowment. Barrie Barto, the editor in chief of the campus newspaper, The Vanderbilt Hustler, moderated two onstage discussions with the chancellor and afterward estimated that about a quarter of the submitted questions were related to divestment. Others prodded Dr. Diermeier about how to discern the line between permitted protests and disruptions that might lead to discipline.
But as the chancellor answered questions, he faced more sleeping students (a handful, including one in the front row) than vocal protesters (none).
Anemona Hartocollis contributed reporting from New York.
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13) Message from the DNC: The Democrats do not care about Palestinians
The Democratic National Convention did not go well for supporters of Palestinian rights where Democrats were largely successful in burying their deep complicity in the Gaza genocide.
By Mitchell Plitnick, August 23, 2024
“Haile Sofer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and Harris’ former national security adviser, declared with confidence that Harris will never halt or condition military aid to Israel. She made the statement at an event sponsored by the American Jewish Committee on the sidelines of the DNC.”
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/message-from-the-dnc-the-democrats-do-not-care-about-palestinians/
Kamala Harris speaking to the Democratic NATIONAL Convention, on August 22, 2024. (Photo: Twitter/KamalaHarris)
The Democratic National Convention did not go well for supporters of Palestinian rights.
The one positive to emerge from the DNC was that the first panel ever officially sanctioned by the DNC on the subject of Palestinian rights marked a major step forward politically, and was the result of a powerful grassroots movement to get Palestine mentioned in some official capacity at the Convention.
But aside from that small but still significant victory, the Democrats were largely successful in burying their deep complicity in the genocide in Gaza. Protesters outside clashed occasionally with police, and some protesters inside the convention and some associated events caused brief disruptions, but little attention was paid to Gaza on the whole, either from the stage or in the media.
That doesn’t mean the political situation remained stagnant, however, even while Israel was continuing its merciless slaughter, targeting schools and other places of refuge. Unfortunately, the politics have taken an even grimmer turn, leaving little hope that the killing will end any time soon.
Taken together, the recent developments are a recipe for a genocide that will continue for months and ongoing regional escalation.
“Gaza Ceasefire Talks” are the new “Peace Process”
Despite the false optimism peddled by Joe Biden and his flunkies, the latest round of ceasefire talks, though ongoing, have already failed. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken collaborated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to essentially destroy any chance of a ceasefire in the near term.
Blinken announced what he termed “bridging proposals,” to fill the gaps between Hamas and Israel based on the ceasefire proposal Biden presented at the end of May. Blinken did not address the question of why such proposals were necessary when Biden claimed that the plan he presented back then was actually an Israeli one, and that, after that falsehood became too threadbare, repeatedly claimed that Israel had accepted it.
Hamas, in fact, had long since stated it would accept the Biden proposal, as endorsed by the United Nations Security Council. Clearly this was an unexpected turn for Netanyahu, who quickly set about creating new conditions that Hamas couldn’t possibly accept.
On Thursday, an Israeli official told the Times of Israel that Blinken’s bridging proposals “meet Israeli security demands,” which include continuing the genocide, after a brief pause, until Israel “reaches all of its war aims,” and a continued Israeli presence along Gaza’s border with Egypt, the so-called Philadelphi Corridor.
One hardly needs a degree in international affairs to recognize that these are not “bridging proposals,” but are conditions Hamas couldn’t possibly accept. Neither, it should be noted, would anyone else, whether a government or a militant group.
Indeed, these conditions have even quietly undermined the triumvirate of the U.S., Qatar, and Egypt by directly challenging Egypt’s stance, backed by two treaties, that Israel may not remain on the southern border. While neither country has loudly objected to the proposal, neither have they backed it. And Egypt has made it clear they will not accept it.
The idea that Israel would remain in the Philadelphi Corridor is an explicit violation of a 2005 agreement governing that strip of land which forbids Israeli deployment there. Israel has called for scrapping that agreement entirely and revising the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Egypt has categorically refused these requests and warned that continued attempts to implement them could endanger the treaty entirely.
With the latest failure of ceasefire talks, the threat of an attack on Israel from Iran, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, and the rest of the Axis of Resistance rises again. But with the passage of time since the assassination of Hamas’ lead negotiator Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran has given the United States the time it needed to redeploy forces to bolster its naval and air defenses of Israel. This has the potential to render an attack on Israel, which remains highly likely, largely symbolic, like the one in April. But should the Axis decide that is insufficient, it also increases the risk that a more significant attack could spark a regional conflagration that the U.S. could also be drawn into.
Diminishing hope for Harris
The refusal by the Democrats and the Kamala Harris campaign to have a Palestinian-American speaker address the DNC was just the latest misstep by a party that, even when it recognizes its need for progressive, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian voters, cannot bring itself to confront its own devaluation of Palestinian lives, especially in Gaza.
This wasn’t complicated. The Uncommitted Movement and other Palestinians and Palestine advocates in the party just wanted someone to speak to the audience about the suffering in Gaza and the need for a ceasefire. It could easily have been a moderate voice, one which aimed at the hearts of the audience, crafting a speech calling for an end to Israel’s slaughter that even the pro-Israel wing of the party couldn’t have overtly attacked.
Instead, they froze Palestinians out while giving the space to the parents of an Israeli-American hostage, who, while both-sidesing the conflict (quite understandable given the situation of their son) and very clearly focusing on the Israeli hostages, showed more empathy for Palestinians in Gaza in their speech than just about anyone else at the convention. That is a shameful comment on the Democrats, on the Kamala Harris – Tim Walz ticket, and on the party as a whole, including many of its so-called progressive members.
The decision to silence Palestinian voices while centering the awful suffering of an American Jewish hostage and his family sends a strong message to the Democratic base that the lives of Israeli Jews matter just as much as they should while the lives of Palestinians matter not at all.
There was no political necessity for this. AIPAC and donors might have been unhappy about a Palestinian speaker, but they wouldn’t have just dumped Democrats because there was concern expressed for civilians in Gaza. And that wasn’t the only concerning signal from Harris at the DNC.
Haile Sofer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America and Harris’ former national security adviser, declared with confidence that Harris will never halt or condition military aid to Israel. She made the statement at an event sponsored by the American Jewish Committee on the sidelines of the DNC.
Sofer is a significant figure in both the Democratic Party and the Jewish community, and she does not have a reputation for making policy statements without any basis in fact. Her proximity to Harris lends this statement a good deal of credibility, even though she was not specifically speaking on Harris’ behalf but merely giving her own estimation of Harris’ views. She knows those views well since she helped shape them.
Somewhat less credible, but still very concerning, was Illinois Rep. Brad Schneider who told the same audience that Ilan Goldenberg, who was hired just last week by Harris as her liaison to the U.S. Jewish community, told him that Harris will not try to re-enter the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal.
Schneider is a somewhat less reliable source. He is more given to bombastic statements, misunderstandings, and poor judgment than Sofer. He also has a reputation here in Washington for not always thinking much before he speaks. Moreover, the statement itself is widely open to interpretation, both in terms of what Goldenberg might have meant (he may well have been merely trying to assuage fanatical pro-Israel concerns over his own stance on Iran, for example) and in terms of how Schneider himself is reading it. In other words, it’s a bit concerning, but it’s far from certain that this reflects Harris’ actual thinking on policy.
The trouble is, Harris isn’t giving us any reason to hold out hope for a better Middle East policy than her current boss has. All the early signals are negative. The much-touted “empathetic tone” that Harris has tried to adopt is not only wearing thin and fading as time goes on, but it also reflects little more than a greater ability than Joe Biden has shown to deceive the American public with sweet-sounding words that thinly veil a genocidal policy in Palestine, a militaristic approach to Iran and the broader region, and pure indulgence of our criminal and brutal allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia.
It is disappointing and dangerous that, in the face of progressives, Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs, and a whole lot of anti-genocide Jews and allies almost begging the Democrats to stop taking their votes for granted and just give them some reason to vote for Harris rather than just voting against Donald Trump, Kamala Harris is failing to even get over even that remarkably low bar.
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14) Live Updates: Israel Strikes Hezbollah in Lebanon and Says It Thwarted Major Attack
The Israeli military said it had destroyed rocket launchers aimed at Israel. Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group, later said it had fired hundreds of rockets, but both sides appeared to signal they did not intend to escalate further.
By Aaron BoxermanIsabel KershnerEuan Ward and Julian E. Barnes, August 24, 2024, Updated August 25, 2024
![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/08/25/multimedia/25mideast-crisis-carousel-qjbc/25mideast-crisis-carousel-qjbc-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
Smoke rising on the Lebanese side of the border with Israel, after Israel carried out strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.
Israeli warplanes bombarded dozens of targets in southern Lebanon on Sunday to stop what Israel said were preparations for a major attack by Hezbollah, which later said it had fired hundreds of rockets at Israel in retribution for the killing of a senior commander. But within hours of the strikes, some of the heaviest between them in months, both sides signaled they were moving to de-escalate.
Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia, said its military operation had “finished for the day” and that its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, would deliver an address later on Sunday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that while Israel had successfully intercepted the Hezbollah attack, “what happened today is not the final word,” and the Israeli military said it was still carrying out air attacks against Hezbollah targets.
For now, at least, the exchange of attacks fell short of the major escalation that many had feared after an Israeli airstrike killed Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander, in the Beirut suburbs last month. Iran has also warned it would strike Israel, which it blamed for the killing of a Hamas leader on its soil shortly after that, although an attack by Tehran hasn’t materialized, and officials there had indicated in recent days that a direct strike on Israel might have been placed on hold.
Still, the attacks underscored the threat of a wider war in the Middle East, and added urgency to the Biden administration’s push to close a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, an effort to lower temperatures in the region.
Here’s what else to know:
· Israel’s attacks: The Israeli military said roughly 100 of its fighter jets bombed more than 40 targets in southern Lebanon, and Mr. Netanyahu said “thousands of rockets” pointed toward Israel had been destroyed. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, said Hezbollah had intended to fire a few hundred rockets at northern Israel and launch unmanned drones at the center of the country. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said that at least three people had been killed and two others hurt in Israel’s attack. An Israeli Navy officer was killed in the Hezbollah strikes and two other service members wounded, the military said.
· Hezbollah barrage: Hezbollah later said it had fired more than 320 rockets at nearly a dozen Israeli military bases and positions. If confirmed, it would be one of the largest barrages since the war in Gaza began last October. It was not immediately clear whether any of the rockets had hit their targets. Israel said it had largely thwarted the strikes, and an Israeli military spokesman said there had been “very little damage.”
· Regional tensions: Concerns of a wider conflict in the region have been elevated in recent weeks, following the assassinations of Mr. Shukr and Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed on July 31 during a visit to Tehran. Israel claimed responsibility for the airstrike on Mr. Shukr in the Beirut suburbs, saying it was a response to a rocket from Lebanon that had killed 12 people, including children, playing soccer days earlier. But Israel has remained silent about the other killing. To show support for Israel and in a bid to deter Iran, the United States has steadily moved Navy forces closer to the area, including two aircraft carrier groups and a guided-missile submarine.
· Nasrallah to speak: Hezbollah said that its leader would deliver a speech at 6 p.m. (11 a.m. Eastern) in which he would refute Israel’s claim that it had disrupted his group’s attacks.
· Gaza talks: Officials from the United States, Egypt and Qatar — who are mediating the talks — held talks in Cairo on Sunday with an Israeli delegation to discuss the latest proposal for a cease-fire in Gaza. Hamas leaders were also in Cairo, according to a person briefed on the issue, but were not participating in the meeting. Despite a full-bore diplomatic push from the Biden administration, Israel and Hamas remain far apart on key issues, leading officials to conclude that an immediate breakthrough is unlikely.
Ronen Bergman, Hwaida Saad and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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15) Within hours, both Israel and Hezbollah signal they will opt for containment.
By Isabel KershnerReporting from Jerusalem, August 25, 2024
An Israeli Air Force fighter jet ejecting flares as it intercepts a drone launched from Lebanon, over the border area with southern Lebanon on Sunday. Credit...Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
For weeks, Israelis have waited in trepidation for a major attack by Hezbollah in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of a senior commander of the Lebanese group in Beirut last month, amid widespread fears that a cross-border escalation could spiral into an all-out regional war.
But much of Israel woke up on Sunday to find that, at least for the immediate term, the long-dreaded attack appeared to be over almost before it started.
Both Israel and Hezbollah quickly claimed victories of sorts: Israel for its predawn pre-emptive strikes against what the military said were thousands of Hezbollah’s rocket launcher barrels in southern Lebanon; and Hezbollah for its subsequent firing of barrages of rockets and drones at northern Israel, which the Israeli military initially said had caused little damage.
By breakfast time, the two sides were employing the language of containment.
Hezbollah announced that it had completed the “first stage” of its attack to avenge the assassination of the senior commander, Fuad Shukr, and appeared to be calling it a day, at least for now. Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said he had spoken with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and they had “discussed the importance of avoiding regional escalation,” according to a statement from Mr. Gallant’s office.
Still, the Middle East remained on edge, the days ahead uncertain.
“There can be stages,” cautioned Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research group. “You can have escalation that is gradual.”
Later Sunday morning, the Israeli military said it was continuing to strike Hezbollah launchers in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah is estimated to possess tens of thousands of rockets and a smaller number of more sophisticated, precise missiles.
And Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, still has an open account with Israel, blaming it for the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of its ally Hamas, while he was in Tehran, just hours after the killing of Mr. Shukr. Israel officially took responsibility for Mr. Shukr’s death but not for Mr. Haniyeh’s.
Based on intelligence, Israel took the decision to pre-empt Hezbollah’s attack on Sunday “but not to go beyond,” Mr. Yaari said. The targets that Israel struck were all less than 30 miles inside Lebanon, he said. Israel said they were focused on thwarting Hezbollah’s immediate attack plans, not its wider assets or infrastructure.
Hezbollah, for its part, appears to be “signaling that it is done for now,” Mr. Yaari said. “At the same time, they are saying this was the first stage of retaliation, leaving open the option to do more, if they get a green light from the Iranians,” he added.
The events on Sunday have raised the stakes for negotiators gathering in Cairo to try to advance a cease-fire and hostage release deal for the ongoing war in Gaza. The United States is leading the push, along with Qatari and Egyptian mediators, for a deal that would end the 10-month conflict between Israel and Hamas, in the hope that such an agreement could help calm tensions in the region.
Hezbollah and Israel had already engaged for months in tit-for-tat cross-border clashes. Hezbollah began firing in solidarity with Hamas after last October’s Hamas-led assault on southern Israel prompted Israel to go to war in Gaza.
The exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah have grown in intensity in recent weeks, in what many analysts have described as a war of attrition.
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16) Trying to head off war, the U.S. moves naval forces closer to Israel.
By Eric Schmitt, Reporting from Washington, Aug. 25, 2024
A U.S. fighter jet taking off from the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier when it was in the East Sea a few months ago. It is now in or near the Gulf of Oman, the Pentagon said. Credit...Aaron Haro Gonzalez/U.S. Navy, via Associated Press
With fears rising that a wider war could break out in the Middle East, the United States has steadily been moving Navy forces closer to the area, including two aircraft carrier groups and a guided-missile submarine. And it has not been shy about announcing the details, in a clear effort to deter Iran and its allies from more intense attacks on Israel.
Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III ordered additional combat aircraft and missile-shooting warships to the region.
Two aircraft carriers — the Theodore Roosevelt and the Abraham Lincoln — and their accompanying warships and attack planes are now in or near the Gulf of Oman. Mr. Austin also made public his order to send the guided-missile submarine Georgia to the region, an unusual move as the Pentagon seldom talks about the movements of its submarine fleet. The Georgia can fire cruise missiles and carry teams of Navy SEAL commandos.
The orders came in response to threats from Iran and its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen to attack Israel to avenge the assassination of a top Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran on July 31.
While the United States has said these moves are to help defend Israel and avert a wider regional war, a senior U.S. official said on Saturday night that the American military was better positioned to address a threat from Iran, and that the Israeli Defense Forces would shoulder the bulk of any defense from attacks carried out by Hezbollah across the border in Lebanon.
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17) On Immigration, Harris and Democrats Walk a Delicate—and Harder—Line
The message Democrats put forward at their convention last week, a tougher line than in decades, reflects how deeply immigration remains a political vulnerability for the party.
The U.S.-Mexico border in June, as seen from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Credit...Paul Ratje for The New York Times
When Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination last week at her party’s convention in Chicago, she sought to strike a delicate balance on the issue of immigration, promising to approach enforcement and security at the nation’s southern border as the prosecutor she once was, without abandoning the country’s values.
“I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system,” she said on Thursday night. “We can create an earned pathway to citizenship and secure our border.”
It was the kind of equilibrium on the issue that Democrats had striven for all week — a leveling between calls for more officers and judges at the country’s southern border and a system that treats people humanely, between promises to uphold the law and rebukes of the fear-mongering over “the other” that has permeated the national immigration debate.
But the overall message on immigration from the Democratic Party in the past week, as it has been since Ms. Harris announced her candidacy last month, has been decidedly more hard-line than it has been in decades. The shift reflects just how much of a political vulnerability the issue remains for Ms. Harris and down-ballot Democratic candidates in November, as many voters have come to see the challenges at the southern border as a top concern, and a small but growing minority of Republicans and independents want to curb pathways into the country.
The most common refrain from the stage in Chicago was a denunciation of former President Donald J. Trump and Republicans for tanking a bipartisan border security deal this year that, as former President Barack Obama said on Tuesday, was “written in part by one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress.”
There were little to no condemnations of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies or pledges to reverse them. There were vague calls to expand legal pathways to citizenship but no mention of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants who would stand to benefit from the move, many of whom have been working and building families in the United States for years. The immigrants known as Dreamers, who were brought to the country illegally as children and who have become leaders in a national push for legal status, were absent from the podium.
When Democrats were not seeking to neutralize the issue with remarks leaning into border security, they were downplaying it. The party relegated immigration toward the bottom of its platform’s priorities. Few panels, held by national Democrats or associated groups, centered on the issue. One of the most anticipated — billed as a discussion about the future of comprehensive immigration reform — drew fewer than two dozen attendees scattered in a drab ballroom across rows of empty chairs.
Andrea Flores, a former Biden administration official turned critic of its immigration policies who moderated the session, said she had found it hard to tell the difference between Mr. Trump and Democrats on border policy. She cautioned that the lack of contrast was allowing Mr. Trump to exploit voter dissatisfaction.
“You see support growing for mass deportations, you see support growing for ending asylum, you see support growing for his policies,” she said.
Last month, Republicans made the border and immigration central to their national convention, with a line of speakers accusing migrants of taking jobs and stealing votes, and red-white-and-blue placards emblazoned with “Mass deportation now!” Before Ms. Harris took the lectern on Thursday, Mr. Trump stood at the border fence in Cochise County, Ariz., and falsely argued that she and fellow Democrats had “unleashed a plague of migrant crime.”
Ms. Harris has yet to release her full immigration platform, though she is expected do so in the coming weeks. Her approach so far has sought to echo that of President Biden, who in recent months — as the bipartisan deal in Congress fell apart — took a tougher line at the southern border while promising to open pathways to citizenship for law-abiding undocumented immigrants long in the United States. In June, he signed one executive order denying most migrants the ability to gain asylum and another expanding legal protections for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens.
Onstage on Thursday, as she has in her campaign rallies, Ms. Harris pledged to sign the bipartisan bill. It would have expanded detentions, prohibited most migrants from gaining asylum when the number of crossings soared, provided funding for thousands of new Border Patrol agents and personnel, and invested in new technology to catch drug smugglers.
In an interview, Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said his party’s support of the border security bill was “a significant shift on border security, on asylum, on the treatment of those who cross our border.”
“It’s important that the Democratic Party continues to stand clearly on we’re willing to do this,” Mr. Coons said.
Some Democrats and pollsters believe the stricter stance will help Ms. Harris in critical swing states like Arizona and Michigan, where immigration has been front and center for many independent voters.
“She is a border state prosecutor, and I think Democrats will be wise to remind voters of that,” said Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a centrist Democratic advocacy group.
Other Democratic candidates have been assuming tough positions as they run in closely watched House and Senate races across the country.
Michelle Vallejo, a Democrat running for a House seat in South Texas, drew criticism from progressives and immigrant rights groups for releasing an ad promising to support increases in border patrol officers and describing her region as “overwhelmed by the chaos at the border.”
Representative Tom Suozzi of New York gave Democrats fresh hope that they could neutralize the issue of immigration after he flipped his seat from Republicans this year, despite their attempts to paint him as far left on the issue. In his race, Mr. Suozzi had called for temporarily shutting down the border and deporting migrants who assault the police. In a notable speaking slot in Chicago, he reserved his sharpest words for Republicans.
“To be a nation of immigrants is hard sometimes, too — you have to work for it,” Mr. Suozzi said, adding, “We reject the divisiveness. We reject the dysfunction.”
Four years ago, in 2020, Democrats largely skirted talking about policy proposals and instead focused their messaging on rolling back Trump-era policies. At the time, more Americans were taking more permissive views toward the issue, as they grappled to digest some of the Trump administration’s most extreme actions, including a travel ban from certain Muslim-majority nations and the separations of thousands of families at the United States’ southern border.
Now, some Democrats worry that their party’s response is not substantive enough, and that it remains too focused on the 2,000-mile line dividing Mexico and the United States.
Walking into the arena in Chicago last week, Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona, a Latino voter mobilization group, said she wanted to hear more about helping laborers and undocumented immigrants who had long been working and paying taxes.
“If we don’t define the message,” she said, “Republicans will define it for us.”
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
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