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) 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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2) 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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3) 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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4) 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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5) 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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6) 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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7) 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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8) The conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon remain stuck, even if a wider Middle East war has been averted for now, analysts say.
By Patrick Kingsley reporting from Jerusalem, August 26, 2024
Smoke billowing from the site of an airstrike on Zibqin in southern Lebanon on Sunday. Credit...Kawnat Haju/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The day after Israel and Hezbollah exchanged some of the biggest salvos since the start of their 10-month cross-border battle, both appeared to have stepped back from the brink of a bigger confrontation. Israel’s defense minister spoke on Sunday of “the importance of avoiding regional escalation,” while the leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, said “people can take a breath and relax.”
But even if a wider Middle East war has been averted for now, analysts said, Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah, along with the fighting with Hamas in Gaza, show every sign of continuing, their fundamental dynamics unchanged.
Israel and Hezbollah returned on Monday to a low-level conflict with smaller strikes, albeit one that could escalate at any point into a bigger war that could draw in Iran, Hezbollah’s benefactor. Hundreds of thousands of people in Israel and Lebanon remain displaced by the fighting. And Iran has yet to respond militarily to Israel’s assassination of a Hamas leader last month in Tehran.
“Strategically, the situation has not changed and we are where we were,” said Shira Efron, an analyst at Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group.
A truce in Lebanon is dependent on a truce in Gaza, which remains a distant prospect. Four days of meetings between Israeli officials and U.S., Egyptian and Qatari mediators in Cairo concluded on Sunday without a breakthrough, although negotiators said talks would continue.
Hezbollah has said it will continue its battle until Israel agrees to a cease-fire with Hamas in Gaza. And its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a speech on Sunday that the militia reserved the right to attack again to avenge Israel’s killing of a senior Hezbollah commander last month.
“This in practice means continuous attritional war, with constant risk of escalation with no end in sight,” Ms. Efron said. “In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of Israelis and millions of Palestinians continue to suffer amidst a region teetering on the edge.”
The focus, for now, will return to the Gaza cease-fire talks, which appeared stuck despite a renewed push by the United States and optimistic commentary from Biden administration officials.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is still opposed to clauses in the proposed truce agreement that would make it harder for Israel to resume battle after a weekslong pause, arguing that such a deal would allow Hamas to survive the war intact. Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition relies on lawmakers who have pledged to bring down his government if he agrees to such a deal, even as many Israelis publicly demand an agreement, saying it is the only way to free dozens of Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza.
Hamas, for its part, is determined to remain a force in postwar Gaza and has said it rejects any cease-fire that is temporary and does not ensure Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza. The group, along with Egypt, has pushed back strongly against Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence that Israel retain a military presence in a narrow strip of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt, which Israel has said is necessary to prevent Hamas from rearming through smuggling.
“Hamas is being asked to accept Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, entirely or partly,” said Ibrahim Dalalsha, director of the Horizon Center, a Palestinian research group in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“Asking them to even consider such a condition is basically asking them to commit suicide, politically speaking,” Mr. Dalalsha added. “This is something Hamas would never, ever agree to.”
Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.
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9) As polio vaccines arrive in Gaza, distributing them is the next challenge.
By Hiba Yazbek reporting from Jerusalem, August 26, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/26/world/israel-hamas-gaza-war
Workers unloading a shipment of polio vaccines at a depot belonging to Gaza’s health ministry on Sunday. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Polio vaccines arrived in Gaza on Monday, kicking off an expansive effort to vaccinate more than 640,000 Palestinian children and curb a potential outbreak, the United Nations, Israel and health authorities in Gaza said, after the first confirmed case of the disease in the territory in 25 years.
The U.N. children’s fund, UNICEF, said it was bringing in 1.2 million doses of polio vaccine for children in Gaza in cooperation with the World Health Organization, the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, known as UNRWA, and other groups.
The Gaza Health Ministry confirmed on Monday that the vaccines had reached Gaza and that preparations to launch the vaccination campaign for children under 10 were underway. It was not immediately clear how quickly the vaccines could be distributed to vaccination centers in Gaza, where continued hostilities and bombardment have hindered humanitarian efforts during 10 months of war.
The ministry warned that inoculations alone could not be effective, amid a lack of clean water and personal hygiene supplies, and issues with sewage and waste collection in overcrowded areas where displaced families were sheltering. It said medical teams would need to spread out across the territory, “which requires an urgent cease-fire.”
The W.H.O. chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a statement on Thursday that a 10-month-old child in Gaza had contracted polio and become paralyzed in one leg. The virus had been found last month in wastewater samples, but this was the first confirmed case in Gaza in a quarter-century.
COGAT, the Israeli defense ministry’s agency that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories, said in a statement on Monday that the vaccines had been delivered to Gaza through the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel. The agency added that the campaign would be conducted in coordination with the Israeli military “as part of the routine humanitarian pauses” that it observes, which it said would allow Palestinians to reach vaccination centers.
In June, Israel announced that it would observe partial daily suspensions of its military activity in areas of Gaza, calling them humanitarian pauses, saying they were aimed at making it safer for humanitarian groups to deliver aid in the territory.
According to UNICEF, at least 95 percent of children will need to receive both doses of the vaccine to prevent the spread of the disease and reduce the risk of its re-emergence, “given the severely disrupted health, water and sanitation systems in the Gaza Strip.”
UNICEF and the W.H.O. in a statement called on “all parties to the conflict” to implement a weeklong humanitarian pause in Gaza to allow “children and families to safely reach health facilities” for the doses. The statement added that “without the humanitarian pauses, the delivery of the campaign will not be possible.”
Philippe Lazzarini, the director of UNRWA, said on Friday that the agency’s medical teams would distribute the vaccines at its clinics and through its mobile health teams. He added that “delaying a humanitarian pause will increase the risk of spread among children.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.
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10) Humanitarians Are Dying. Why Doesn’t the World Care?
By Kate Forbes, Ms. Forbes is the president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Aug. 26, 2024
A Palestinian member of Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) reacts over the bodies of his two fellow paramedics, who according to medics, were killed when an ambulance on a mission to rescue people was hit in an Israeli strike, during their funeral in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, May 30, 2024. Credit...Hatem Khaled/Reuters
In February I met a man. Three hours later, he was dead.
Mohammed Al-Omari was a paramedic with the Palestine Red Crescent Society; we met in southern Gaza. As the president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, I’ve been one of very few people able to visit there this year. Mohammed smiled; we shook hands and had a brief conversation. That afternoon, while rushing to give medical aid to those in need, Mohammed was killed. He is one of 21 Palestine Red Crescent volunteers to have lost their lives while on duty in the conflict in Gaza so far.
It’s not just in Gaza where humanitarian aid workers are in peril. Since the beginning of 2024, the Aid Worker Security Database has recorded 187 humanitarian deaths worldwide. This year is on track to be the deadliest on record.
Long-established norms that protect humanitarians don’t seem as recognized today as they once were. Misinformation, whether inadvertent or deliberate, can suggest humanitarians are taking sides or participating in conflict or conspiracy. That can fuel local resentment and hostility, putting them at greater risk. The attention paid to protecting humanitarians is also insufficient. Some deaths, like those of the international World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza in April, make headlines. But in general it seems the world has hardly noticed the extent to which humanitarian workers are dying. When civilians, including humanitarians, are being killed in unacceptable numbers, all — particularly those in governments — must ask why and address it.
Every death is a profound loss for the communities we serve, leaving fewer trained hands to care for those in need. From wildfires in California and landslides in India to earthquakes in Turkey and Syria and drought in Lesotho, our teams respond without hesitation. Every humanitarian death makes our ability to respond that much harder.
Many people on our teams live in the communities we serve and provide comfort and care immediately after disaster hits, whether that’s with a warm blanket, water, a meal or psychological support. In the long term, they can coordinate recovery and financial assistance to help the most vulnerable people get back their futures. Our local focus allows us to help our neighbors and friends. It also makes us vulnerable when geopolitical conflicts escalate. When discussing the Sudanese Red Crescent, which has lost seven humanitarian workers this year, a volunteer recently told me that with each humanitarian killed “our hearts break just a little bit more, and a piece of the community is torn apart each time.”
Since the attacks of Oct. 7 and the escalation of the conflict in Gaza, the violence against our volunteers and staff in both Israel and Palestinian territories has been like nothing we’ve seen before. Among the dead are ambulance drivers, medical personnel and staffers who worked with young people. The paramedic volunteer Amit Man was tending to wounded patients in her community when she was killed. She was one of six staffers and volunteers from Magen David Adom (the name of our national society in Israel) to die in the line of duty. Recently, her boyfriend shared with me the psychological trauma he has experienced since her death. “All she wanted was to help others,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
For the past year, my colleagues and I at the I.F.R.C. (as well as at the International Committee of the Red Cross, which leads conflict responses as part of our movement) have called for the international community to protect humanitarians. But our pleas remain unanswered.
I propose three concrete actions for world leaders, governments and other stakeholders to protect those of us who serve others. First, all parties must ensure unrestricted and safe access for humanitarians to reach those in need. In over 100 years of doing this work alongside many partners, our group has found again and again that open communication with all sides saves lives. While safety can never be guaranteed, it can be increased through good transport, communication tools such as radios and telephones and proper visibility for people, vehicles and buildings. This is an area where donor support helps.
Second, these parties must prioritize the safety and security of humanitarians. In most cases, the only protection our volunteers have is the emblems on their vests. As the situations in Gaza, Israel and Sudan show, more training in international humanitarian law is needed. When you see our emblems, it should be widely understood that the Red Cross and the Red Crescent do not take sides in a conflict. We maintain neutrality. To further guarantee safety, we continue to encourage open communication between governments and others involved in conflict.
There are glimmers of hope. When deadly protests erupted in Bangladesh this summer, people recognized our teams’ neutrality as they provided lifesaving assistance. A robust presence within the community and the continued advocacy to protect the emblem contributed to the positive outcome.
Third, society as a whole must invest in long-term solutions that address the root causes of these complex crises. Every day our teams support community resilience before disasters and conflict strike. But sustainable development, climate adaptation and conflict resolution initiatives can address the underlying issues and help communities reduce their dependency on aid.
Mohammed and Amit are gone, but their deaths don’t have to be in vain. Let’s honor their memory with action.
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11) A Trial Asks: If Grocery Rivals Merge, Do Workers Suffer?
As Kroger seeks to acquire Albertsons, federal regulators argue that the biggest supermarket combination in history will hurt not only consumers, but workers as well.
By Danielle Kaye, Aug. 26, 2024
The supermarket in West Hills, Calif., where Leonard De Monte works is slated to be sold as part of merger. The last time his store was part of a merger, he found himself out of work. Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times
Back in 2015, Leonard De Monte was feeling settled. At 31, he had health insurance and was making a union wage at the Vons grocery store in Woodland Hills, Calif., where he had worked for more than a decade. A familiar face in the bakery section, he knew dozens of frequent shoppers’ orders by heart.
Then came a corporate merger: Albertsons acquired its rival Safeway, Vons’s parent company. Mr. De Monte’s store was sold to a third chain as part of the deal, and within months of the change, the store’s new owner declared bankruptcy. Mr. De Monte found himself out of work.
Former customers vouched for him, and he found a new job at a local Pavilions, part of another grocery chain owned by Albertsons. But he had lost his seniority and was demoted to minimum wage.
“All my hard work was flushed down the toilet,” Mr. De Monte said.
Now, nearly 10 years older and having finally worked his way up to a wage of nearly $27 per hour, he’s experiencing déjà vu: Albertsons is trying to merge with Kroger in a $24.6 billion deal that will be the biggest grocery combination in history if it goes through. The two chains have agreed to sell 579 stores — out of about 5,000 — to a third company in an effort to satisfy antitrust regulators. The Pavilions where Mr. De Monte works is on that list.
Mergers often create anxiety for workers who stand to lose jobs or benefits when companies combine. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, or U.F.C.W., which represents most in-store workers at Kroger and Albertsons, has spoken out against the proposed deal, though it doesn’t have much ability to stop it.
But the union does have a powerful ally: the Federal Trade Commission. The agency sued to block the combination, and a trial that will decide whether the two chains can join forces is scheduled to start in federal court in Oregon on Monday.
The F.T.C. is making arguments typical of antitrust enforcers in recent decades: The merger will decrease competition, leading to higher prices for consumers.
But within its legal complaint is another claim, one that has surprised some antitrust experts because of its novelty. The combination of the nation’s two biggest supermarket chains, the F.T.C. argues, would erode the bargaining power of unions and harm not just consumers, but workers as well.
Starting in the late 1970s, after a period of robust antitrust enforcement, regulators eased up on challenging corporate mergers. Regulators under the Biden administration, however, have made cracking down on corporate concentration a priority. And for the first time, merger guidelines updated last year by the F.T.C. and the Justice Department explicitly outline the agencies’ emphasis on how corporate mergers could reduce competition for workers and result in lower wages or worse benefits.
“Recognizing that there’s a web of intersecting harm that can happen is an extension, in my mind, of the underlying principles of antitrust enforcement,” said Christine Bartholomew, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law who teaches antitrust. “The pendulum is swinging back to recognize the broader types of harm from anticompetitive conduct.”
The attorneys general of Colorado and Washington State, who have separately sued to block the supermarket deal, also centered workers in their complaints.
The grocery industry has seen waves of consolidation since the 1990s. Now just four companies — Walmart, Kroger, Costco and Albertsons — account for about half of all grocery sales.
Kroger and Albertsons collectively employ about 700,000 people. The new corporation would operate under the Kroger name, and a Kroger spokeswoman said all frontline workers would keep their jobs and existing union contracts. But Mr. De Monte is not convinced that his job and benefits would be guaranteed, or that the chain buying his store would keep it open.
His wounds from the last merger are still fresh.
A Regulatory Shift
The F.T.C.’s position today looks very different from the one it took in 2015. Back then, the regulator approved the merger of Albertsons and Safeway, satisfied that the 146 stores eventually sold to a third party — Haggen — would prevent dominance by a single supermarket chain in certain markets.
The U.F.C.W. did not strongly object to that merger or to the sale of stores, either, something the union came to regret once Haggen filed for bankruptcy and thousands of workers lost their jobs.
This time around, Kroger and Albertsons have proposed a similar solution to gain antitrust approval: selling 579 stores — along the West Coast and in Colorado, Arizona, Illinois and a handful of other states — to a company called C&S Wholesale Grocers. But the F.T.C. is not convinced that separating out about a tenth of the stores would effectively maintain competition or mitigate the harm to workers and consumers.
Although only about 13 percent of grocery store workers are unionized, most of the workers at Kroger and Albertsons are represented by the U.F.C.W.
“I have great health benefits because I’ve been with the company so long,” Mr. De Monte said, adding that he needs regular checkups because of a past cancer diagnosis. “If I lose my health benefits, I would have to pay out of pocket.”
The U.F.C.W. is concerned that the combined strength of Kroger and Albertsons would intensify a power imbalance with the union. John Marshall, a financial analyst for U.F.C.W. chapters in California and Washington State, said that, individually, both chains had been aggressive at the bargaining table. In 2003, they each demanded concessions from the U.F.C.W., including the introduction of a two-tiered pay structure. Despite setbacks, unionized workers at the companies have retained health and retirement benefits that their counterparts at nonunion rivals like Walmart lack.
Kroger has said it needs to merge with Albertsons to compete against Walmart and Amazon. Walmart employs two million people and has been accused of illegal union busting, allegations the company has denied. A Kroger spokeswoman said nonunion rivals would become “even more powerful and unaccountable” if the merger was blocked.
The F.T.C., however, argues that a combined Kroger and Albertsons would erode unions’ ability to negotiate better pay and benefits in bargaining talks.
“The unions that represent grocery workers leverage the fact that Kroger and Albertsons are separate companies competing for customers and workers to negotiate better terms of employment for union grocery workers,” the F.T.C. complaint reads. The deal would “eliminate that competition” and lead to lower wages, worse benefits and weaker worker protections. An agency representative declined to provide additional comment beyond the legal complaint.
Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who focuses on antitrust, noted that a more dominant Kroger would chip away at unions’ ability to use strikes as a bargaining tool.
“If the worker can find an equally good job elsewhere, then the workers can stay on strike longer, and that means the employer will have to give and make concessions,” Mr. Posner said.
He said he was not aware of any other antitrust cases that limited the scope of harm to unionized workers. And regulators have raised labor-related concerns in only one other case that has gone to court, Mr. Posner added. In that 2022 suit, the Justice Department successfully blocked a merger of book publishers, focusing on authors as workers who stood to be harmed by the deal.
Closings and Layoffs Feared
On top of weakened bargaining power, workers — especially those who experienced the fallout from Albertsons’s takeover of Safeway a decade ago — are concerned about potential store closings and layoffs.
Michael Lawing, a meat manager at an Albertsons in the Seattle area, has been an employee of the company on and off since 1987. He said he and all his colleagues lost their jobs when their store switched over to Haggen ownership in 2015.
“I lost all my seniority as far as vacation time, as far as health benefits,” Mr. Lawing said. “I had to restart from the beginning.”
Kroger has portrayed C&S, which has signed up to buy the 579 stores that would be shed under the merger, as a pro-union operator. Lauren La Bruno, a C&S spokeswoman, said the company would recognize the union work force and honor all collective bargaining agreements.
But Mr. Marshall of the U.F.C.W. said that at two meetings in January, C&S representatives had refused to promise to negotiate new collective bargaining agreements with the union once the current contracts expired. Contracts covering more than 100,000 Kroger and Albertsons workers, mostly on the West Coast, are set to run out next year, he said. Ms. La Bruno did not respond to a request for comment on those meetings.
C&S is primarily in the wholesale grocery supply business and currently operates just 23 supermarkets nationwide, according to the F.T.C. While Ms. La Bruno said the company had enough financial strength and experience in food retailing to operate hundreds more stores, antitrust experts and regulators say another Haggen-style collapse is likely if the deal goes through. They argue that C&S doesn’t appear to be equipped to efficiently operate hundreds of supermarkets.
“This company might just shut down the stores after buying them,” Mr. Posner said.
Yasmin Ashur, who has been an Albertsons employee for nearly 25 years, works as a cashier at one of the company’s stores in Port Orchard, Wash., which is set to be sold to C&S. Her pension and health insurance are top of mind as she thinks about what will happen after the current U.F.C.W. contract expires.
Ms. Ashur earns $26 an hour, about $10 above the minimum wage in her state. She said there were other places she could look for work, if need be — maybe at a nursing home or a discount retailer like Big Lots.
“But then again, you’re starting from scratch,” Ms. Ashur said. “Nobody will hire you for whatever I was making, and I’m going to have to start from the bottom.”
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