‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 341:
Israel bombs two displacement shelters in Gaza, kills 11 Palestinians in West Bank
Casualties
· 41,118 + killed* and at least 94,825 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*
· 708+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes 146 children.**
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,140.
· The Israeli army recognizes the death of 706 Israeli soldiers and the injury of 4096 others 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 September 12, 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 September 11, 2024.
*** 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) Fearing Israeli Strikes, Gaza School Shelters Try to Keep Gunmen Out
Residents, already forced to flee their homes by intense bombardment, want to avoid becoming a target for Israeli forces hunting Hamas.
By Bilal Shbair and Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Sept. 10, 2024
Checking a school housing displaced people that was hit during Israeli bombardment in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, in June. Credit...Bashar Taleb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When the war forced Nasser al-Zaanin to flee his home in northern Gaza in October, he, along with his adult sons and grandchildren, moved to a school that had been turned into a shelter.
There, at the Abdul Kareem al-Aklouk school in the town of Deir al Balah, he helped set up a system of committees to improve life for families who had taken refuge. The committees oversaw food, water and medical needs, and they had one red line: No armed men were allowed in the compound.
Residents, already forced to evacuate their homes because of Israel’s intense bombardment, wanted to avoid becoming a target for Israeli forces hunting down Hamas militants. Every few days in recent weeks, Israel has hit a school building turned shelter where it has said militants are hiding, including on Saturday, when it struck two compounds in northern Gaza that it said Hamas was using as a military base.
Early in the conflict, Mr. Zaanin said, Hamas had wanted to station police officers at the shelter where he was staying. The group said it would ensure security, but he said the residents had gathered to stop that.
“All the families agreed,” said Mr. Zaanin, 56, who once worked as a civil servant for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza.
“We simply want to save all families, women and children and not let there be any potential threat against us because of the existence of police and members of the Hamas government,” he said. The police, Mr. al-Zaanin added, could stand outside the building but not inside.
Several other residents of school shelters in central Gaza recounted similar stories, though attitudes in other areas were unknown. It is hard to know how widespread the phenomenon is, and whether the armed militia are from Hamas, Islamic Jihad or other armed gangs, but these residents’ experiences suggest that at least some evacuees have blocked armed militias from moving into these shelters.
“We will quickly kick anyone who has a gun or a rifle out of this school,” said Saleh al-Kafarneh, 62, who lives at another government school in Deir al Balah and said he locked the gates at night. “We don’t allow anyone to ruin life here, or cause any strike against those civilians and families.” A third resident, Mohammed Shehda al-Obwaini, 57, said he would fight any armed men if he found them in a school shelter.
The residents’ testimonies also suggested that Hamas’s grip on the enclave may be weakened by the war and that ad hoc community groups are starting to operate outside the organization’s control, at least on a small scale.
The accounts, which cannot be independently confirmed, come as Israel has sharply increased the rate of its airstrikes on schools turned shelters to target what it calls Hamas command-and-control centers. It says militants have “cynically exploited” these sensitive sites to plan operations. Hamas, a militant group rather than a conventional army, has used both civilian structures and tunnels as defenses. It was not possible to confirm whether armed or unarmed militants stay in the school shelters.
“Strikes against this infrastructure are conducted in accordance with international law, with the purpose of preventing the restoration of terrorist organizations’ capabilities,” an Israeli military statement said last month. The military also says it acts using precise intelligence and takes steps to minimize civilian harm.
Hundreds of people have been killed in the attacks, according to local health officials. In one particularly deadly example on Aug. 10, the Gaza Civil Defense emergency service said that more than 90 people were killed in a strike on a school in northern Gaza. The toll could not be confirmed independently. Israel said that it had killed at least 31 Islamic Jihad and Hamas fighters and that the compound itself had not been severely damaged.
In Saturday,’s strikes, Gazan rescue services said the first had killed four people, and medics said the second had killed three and wounded 20 more.
The Israeli military has said that it has found weapons stored at schools or struck armed militants there. In some cases, the military has said that Hamas used schools as a “hiding place to direct and plan numerous attacks” against Israeli troops.
More recently, some of the military’s reports about the strikes have not mentioned weapons, and on Saturday, it did not say whether the militants targeted in the strike were armed.
The military, in recent weeks, has not explained in its statements how it arrived at its intelligence conclusions or given more details about whom it has targeted.
The United Nations, the European Union and several governments have sharply criticized Israel’s government over the strikes. Senior U.N. officials argue that to target schools — many of which are run by the United Nations — violates international law and that Israel has a duty to protect civilians caught in the war.
Formal education has been suspended in Gaza because of the war, and hundreds of schools have been turned into shelters. The shelters have played a vital role in Gaza, which has been shattered by more than 10 months of war. Almost all of the enclave’s 2.2 million residents have fled their homes, and some people say they have been forced to move as many as 10 times, often in response to Israeli warnings.
In addition, more than half of all residential buildings in the enclave have been damaged or destroyed, mainly by Israeli airstrikes, the World Bank said in January. At the same time, more than 80 percent of Gaza’s schools and all 12 of its universities have been severely damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations.
Some people have stayed with relatives. Hundreds of thousands now live in makeshift tents. Others have decamped to overcrowded school compounds, with families living in classrooms, corridors and yards.
In the close-knit Gazan society, established families seem to have sway in the shelters.
“We are the oldest generation here,” Mr. Kafarneh said. As new people arrive, he said, “We ask about that person, their political views, just to be aware of who they are.”
“We don’t allow anyone to enter with their rifle, whether he is a militant or from a big tribe or family.”
Israel’s recent attacks on the schools have deepened the misery and sense of insecurity for civilians who live there, not least because the attacks often come without warning.
Mai Riyad al-Basyouni, 22, who lived at a government school in Deir al Balah with her husband and 3-month-old daughter, said that women and children were particularly at risk because they stayed indoors at the school, whereas men were often at the markets during the day.
She said she had been at the school for nine months and wanted to leave because of the airstrikes but could not afford to rent elsewhere. A particular worry was shrapnel, which she said she feared could pierce her tent with ease.
“Hearing the news of targeting more schools makes my daily life more miserable, stressful and traumatic,” she said.
Mohammed Shehda al-Obwaini, 57, said he used to live in a school shelter west of Deir al Balah but left after it was hit a few weeks ago and has now pitched a tent for himself and his family near a soccer field.
He described the attack on the school where he had stayed as terrifying.
“Is Israel fighting the Palestinians or Hamas?” he said. “We have had enough suffering and killing. We have enough death among us.”
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2) Israel Says Its Forces Likely Shot American Activist as U.S. Issues Rebuke
The Israeli military expressed regret over what it called the unintentional killing of Aysenur Eygi in the occupied West Bank. The top U.S. diplomat said Israel’s conduct there must change.
By Adam Rasgon reporting from Jerusalem, Sept. 10, 2024
A funeral for Aysenur Eygi in the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank on Monday. Credit...Alaa Badarneh/EPA, via Shutterstock
The Israeli military said on Tuesday that it was highly likely that a slain American activist was “unintentionally” struck by Israeli gunfire last week at a protest in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the killing was “not acceptable.”
In the toughest criticism the United States has leveled at Israel over the death of the activist, Aysenur Eygi, Mr. Blinken said that “no one should be shot and killed for attending a protest.” He said she was the second American to be killed by Israeli security forces in recent years, after a Palestinian American journalist was fatally shot in the West Bank in 2022.
“Israeli security forces need to make some fundamental changes to the way they operate in the West Bank, including changes to their rules of engagement,” he said at a news conference in London.
The Israeli military, in a statement describing its initial inquiry into Ms. Eygi’s death last Friday, expressed regret over her killing and said that it had meant to target a person it described as a “key instigator” of the protest, which it called “a violent riot.”
But eyewitnesses vehemently disputed Israel’s justifications for opening fire, saying that the clashes had finished by the time Ms. Eygi, was shot, and that they had occurred in a separate location. They said Ms. Eygi and the other protesters were more than 200 yards away from the soldiers, who were in an elevated position, when the fatal shot was fired.
Palestinians have long said that Israel uses excessive force against them at clashes and protests in the West Bank, but the death of Ms. Eygi has shined a spotlight on the issue. An autopsy report obtained and reviewed by the Times found a bullet hit Ms. Eygi’s head near her left ear.
The criminal investigation division of the military police has been investigating the episode and will share its findings with military prosecutors later, the Israeli military said. Ms. Eygi’s family has demanded that President Biden and other senior U.S. officials order an independent investigation to “ensure full accountability for the guilty parties,” saying that an Israeli inquiry was not adequate.
Human rights advocates said Israel has a history of failing to take meaningful action against soldiers accused of wrongdoing in the West Bank.
“We absolutely do not expect meaningful accountability to emerge this case,” said Sarit Michaeli, a spokesman for the Israeli rights group B’Tselem. “Similar incidents occur against Palestinians all the time and they don’t lead to any real consequences for perpetrators.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, two key eyewitnesses said the military hadn’t contacted them to collect their testimony.
The bullet, according to the autopsy conducted by forensic examiners at An-Najah National University in Nablus, penetrated Ms. Eygi’s head near her left ear, leading to a major bleed in the area. Fragments of the bullet were recovered, including one that was approximately 5 millimeters by 5 millimeters by 4 millimeters, and handed over to the office of the Palestinian Authority’s attorney general, the report said.
The autopsy said that the cause of death was “bleeding, edema, and laceration of brain matter,” adding that a CT scan of Ms. Eygi’s body didn’t show other injuries.
The office of the Palestinian Authority’s attorney general confirmed it received the fragments of the bullet and transferred them to a criminal investigations laboratory directed by the Palestinian police. The office declined to respond to further questions, saying it wouldn’t discuss other details about Ms. Eygi’s case while its investigation was ongoing.
Ms. Eygi, a Turkish American dual citizen who immigrated to the United States from Turkey as an infant and lived in Seattle, had recently arrived in the West Bank to join activists affiliated with the International Solidarity Movement, who demonstrate alongside Palestinians in the West Bank. On Friday, she joined the protest, in the northern West Bank village of Beita, where residents have been demonstrating for years — sometimes violently — against a settler outpost on lands claimed by the village. The Israeli government had recently said it would legalize the outpost.
The Israeli military said on Friday that soldiers had “responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity” who had thrown stones at Israeli forces and posed a threat.
Witnesses at the scene confirmed that some protesters had hurled rocks at Israeli troops, who responded with tear gas and gunfire, but they stressed those clashes had ended by the time Ms. Eygi was shot. “There was no stone-throwing and it was calm for a few minutes,” said Eran Maoz, an Israeli activist who was at the protest.
Jonathan Pollak, 42, a second activist, said he was roughly 50 feet away from Ms. Eygi at the protest. He said the soldiers were standing at an elevated location at least 240 yards from her, undermining the assertion that their safety was threatened.
“She was not involved in the confrontations at any point,” said Mr. Pollak. “She was taking cover next to an olive tree when an Israeli soldier shot her dead without justification.”
No one in the area, Mr. Pollak said, was known to be carrying firearms other than the Israeli forces.
The demonstrations around Beita began before the current war between Israel and Hamas. Israeli settlers took over a nearby hilltop in 2021, erecting an outpost known as Evyatar on land claimed by the village. That prompted months of deadly protests in which several residents of Beita were killed and scores wounded.
The outpost was illegal under Israeli law when it was established, lacking Israeli government authorization. But in June, Israel’s cabinet agreed to retroactively legalize Evyatar and four other outposts, following a demand by Bezalel Smotrich, the hard right Israeli finance minister and a settler leader.
Most of the world considers all Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank to be illegal under international law, which Israel disputes. Roughly 500,000 Israeli settlers live in the territory alongside some three million Palestinians, who live under Israeli military occupation.
Over the past several days, friends and fellow activists have mourned her death, calling her a staunch supporter of marginalized communities.
“She was passionate about helping others and every action she did was through a lens of compassion and care,” Juliette Majid, a close friend who studied with Ms. Eygi at the University of Washington, said in an interview. “It’s heartbreaking that we lost such a human being.”
Edward Wong contributed reporting from London and Aaron Boxerman and Hiba Yazbek from Jerusalem.
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3) Rescuers Struggle to Reach Victims After Israel Targets Militants in Tent Camp
By Ephrat LivniRawan Sheikh Ahmad and Abu Bakr Bashir, September 10, 2024
A crater at the site of the strike. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
Israeli airstrikes slammed into a humanitarian area in southern Gaza early Tuesday, leaving large craters where Palestinians had crowded for shelter and, according to Gazan officials, killing or wounding dozens of people.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the strikes had targeted three senior Hamas militants who had been involved in the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assault on Israel.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 19 people were confirmed dead and more than 60 others injured — figures that appeared likely to rise because it said that there were still victims in the area, including some buried in rubble and sand, and that ambulances had not been able to reach them. Health officials in Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and combatants when reporting casualties.
An official with Civil Defense emergency services in Gaza, Muhammad al-Mughaier, had said that 40 bodies were recovered from the site of the strike. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear, although official accounts of death tolls often fluctuate in the early hours after an attack.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the figures from Civil Defense “do not align with the information” it has, but did not offer its own casualty estimate or comment on the numbers from the Health Ministry. It said it had carried out a “precise strike” and had tried to mitigate the risk to civilians, though it declined to answer questions from The Times about the specific steps it had taken.
Videos of the aftermath of the attack verified by The New York Times show craters in the southwestern part of Al-Mawasi, where satellite imagery from a week earlier showed several tents. Images taken at the scene Tuesday morning show people searching in rubble using the lights on their phones, and emergency workers from the Palestine Red Crescent Society digging with shovels.
Palestinians sheltering in Al-Mawasi said the strike came without warning around midnight or 1 a.m., with large explosions jolting their tents and filling them with smoke.
“It was like an earthquake,” said Marwan Shaath, a 57-year-old civil servant from the southern Gaza city of Rafah who has been sheltering with his family in Al-Mawasi for more than three months. “The entire area, and of course the tent, all kept shaking.”
Fatoom al-Garra, a 30-year-old widow from Rafah, said she and her children ran for safety from sounds of “horror” and a burning smell. “We couldn’t see anything as black smoke and dust were covering the area,” she said.
Al-Mawasi, a once sparsely populated part of southern Gaza, is now packed with tens of thousands of Palestinians who took shelter there. The Israeli military has designated the area as a humanitarian zone, but it has maintained that it will go after militants wherever it believes them to be. Israeli airstrikes also hit the area in July, in operations the military said were aimed at Hamas commanders. At the time, Gaza health officials said that strike had killed scores of people.
In its statement on Tuesday, the Israeli military said that it had conducted aerial surveillance in the hours before the strike that it said confirmed the presence of militants in the area where it struck.
Israeli has long said that Hamas embeds itself among civilians to use them as human shields. International law experts have said Israel still has a responsibility to protect civilians during its military operations. More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza in 11 months of war, according to the Gazan Health Ministry, whose figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Tor Wennesland, condemned the strike. “The killing of civilians must stop, and this horrific war must end,” he said.
The United Nations and other rights organizations have said that there is no safe place in Gaza. Almost the entire population of Gaza — more than two million Palestinians — has been displaced multiple times. Israel has ordered frequent evacuations and has shrunk the size of the humanitarian zone, forcing an increasing number of Palestinians to squeeze into ever tighter areas.
Ms. al-Garra said that Israel’s urgings to seek shelter in Al-Mawasi were hollow.
“What safety are they talking about?” she said. “There is no safety.”
Farnaz Fassihi, Anushka Patil, Iyad Abuheweila and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.
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4) Israeli Forces Mount Fresh Raids in Two West Bank Cities
By Reporting from Jerusalem, September 11, 2024
Mourners took part in a funeral procession for Aysenur Eygi in Nablus in the occupied West Bank on Monday. Nasser Nasser/Associated Press
The Israeli military has launched fresh raids of two cities in the occupied West Bank where it has recently conducted destructive and lengthy incursions, resuming operations in Tulkarm after a brief pause and carrying out an overnight strike on Tubas that the Palestinian Health Ministry said killed at least five people.
Israel’s military said early Wednesday that its forces were carrying out an operation against militants in Tubas, adding that its aircraft “attacked an armed terrorist squad in the Tubas area.”
The Health Ministry did not elaborate on the identities of those killed. But Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reported that the strike killed five young Palestinian men near a mosque. It said that Israeli forces had closed all entrances to Tubas and were inspecting ambulances before allowing them to enter a local hospital. The Israeli military said it could not immediately comment on the reports.
The operation came as an Israeli raid on Tulkarm, a city west of Tubas, was in its second day on Wednesday. At least two Palestinians, a man and a woman, were killed and several others wounded on Tuesday in Tulkarm, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. The Palestinian Red Crescent said that Israeli forces had detained five of its emergency and rescue crew members overnight in Tulkarm while they were transporting a patient and evacuating children. Israel’s military did not comment on the claim.
Since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, raids have been a near-daily reality for the nearly three million Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. But the latest operations followed a particularly intense 10-day campaign that had appeared to ease last week and killed at least 39 people, according to Palestinian health authorities.
Many Palestinians, especially in the cities of Tulkarm and Jenin, were trapped in their homes for days while bulldozers ripped up streets in what the Israeli military said was an effort to unearth improvised explosives planted by armed groups.
In Tubas on Wednesday, Harith al-Hasani, a 33-year-old resident, said that Israeli forces had stormed the city during the early morning hours before “clashes erupted and we started hearing explosions.”
Israeli aircraft and drones buzzed in the city’s skies, he said, adding that soldiers also were “walking around on foot.”
“Usually they move around in their vehicles,” he said.
Mr. al-Hasani said that Israeli forces had closed roads with earthen barriers, were interrogating young men in the streets and raiding people’s homes around the area.
Israeli officials have described the West Bank raids as necessary to combat rising Palestinian militancy, particularly a spate of attempted bombings, over the past few weeks. Israeli officials have said that more than 150 attacks against Israelis have emanated from the Jenin and Tulkarm areas in the past year.
More than 600 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the Hamas-led attack on Israel last October, both in military strikes and at the hands of extremist Jewish settlers, according to the United Nations.
KEY DEVELOPMENTS
Israel strikes another school turned shelter, and other news.
· Israel’s air force said it struck a former U.N. school in Nuseirat in central Gaza on Wednesday. Israel called the site a Hamas command and control center and said it took steps to “mitigate the risk of harming civilians.” But a spokesman for the Gaza Civil Defense emergency services said the building housed displaced people. The spokesman said the strike killed 10 people, including women, children and two U.N. employees, and injured 18 others. Israel has increasingly been striking schools being used as shelters, with military analysts saying that its military has largely destroyed the group’s network of tunnels, forcing more fighters above ground.
· Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, arrived in Iraq on Wednesday for his first trip abroad since taking office in July. The visit is a demonstration of the value the Iranians place on the strategic alliance with their neighbor as tensions have flared anew with Israel. A few hours before Mr. Pezeshkian’s plane landed, a rocket attack on U.S. troops based at Baghdad Airport served as a reminder of the volatility across the region. Read more about the visit here.
· An Israeli helicopter crashed in southern Gaza while on a mission to evacuate a wounded soldier, the military said, killing two soldiers and injuring seven others. The Israeli military said that enemy fire did not appear to have been to blame and that the cause of the crash was being investigated.
· Israel’s military said a driver attempted to ram into soldiers near the West Bank city of Ramallah on Wednesday. The driver was “neutralized” by soldiers and an armed civilian, the military said in a statement. Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency medical service, said its paramedics had responded to the scene and treated a man who was in critical condition.
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5) 2,000-pound bombs were likely used in the Mawasi strike, according to weapons experts and a Times analysis.
By Sanjana VargheseMalachy Browne and Lauren Leatherby, September 11, 2024
Large craters at the site of an Israeli strike on Al-Mawasi, an area of the southern Gaza Strip, on Tuesday. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
Large craters and a bomb fragment from an Israeli airstrike on a camp for displaced people early Tuesday provide strong evidence that Israel used 2,000-pound bombs, according to three weapons experts.
The United States has previously warned Israel that the powerful munitions can cause excessive civilian casualties in the densely populated Gaza Strip, and suspended exporting U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs to Israel earlier this year.
Israel said it had carried out “precise strikes” aimed at Hamas militants, but has so far declined to say what sort of bombs were used. At least 19 people were killed in the blasts and more than 60 others injured, Gazan authorities said, a toll that appeared likely to rise. Health officials in Gaza do not distinguish between civilians and combatants when reporting casualties.
Video filmed after the attack and verified by The New York Times showed two enormous blast craters measuring close to 50 feet wide. Satellite imagery captured on Monday showed no craters at the location, confirming they were new.
One of the weapons experts — Chris Cobb-Smith, a former British Army artillery officer and director of Chiron Resources, a security and logistics agency told The Times that the dimensions of the craters were broadly consistent with the use of 2,000-pound munitions.
“The dimensions of the crater indicate it’s likely that this strike involved the use of a 2,000-pound aerial dropped bomb by the I.D.F.,” Mr Cobb-Smith said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
A second expert, Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, identified a weapons fragment found at the scene as “the tail section of a SPICE-2000 kit,” a precision guidance kit that is used with 2,000-pound bombs.
A third expert, Patrick Senft, at the consulting firm Armament Research Services, also said that “one fragment is visually consistent with the tail section of a SPICE 2000 guidance kit, suggesting that at least one 2,000-pound bomb was employed.” He noted that the large craters also indicated the use of a heavyweight bomb.
In its campaign in Gaza, Israel has routinely used 2,000-pound bombs, which shatter into razor-sharp fragments that can kill or incapacitate people over several hundred feet.
When Washington suspended the export of U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs in May, officials said their use could lead to wide civilian casualties and were not needed by the Israelis. Biden administration officials said at the time they were especially worried about the damage that could be done by such bombs in a crowded area with many displaced civilians.
Mr. Cobb-Smith underscored that concern, saying, “Such bombs have the technological ability to be highly accurate, but I consider the use of a munition in a densely populated area, and one designated as a ‘safe zone’ to be disproportionate.”
The area targeted in Khan Younis was part of a humanitarian zone that Gazans had been instructed to move to. Satellite imagery reviewed by The Times shows that temporary structures, including tents, began to fill the area starting in February and expanded through the year, especially following evacuation orders in the southern city of Rafah in May.
Images captured by witnesses and local journalists posted online on Tuesday morning and verified by The New York Times showed a devastating scene as emergency service workers and other residents used shovels and their hands to try to find bodies in and around the craters.
Other videos, also verified by The Times show furniture, clothes and other household items strewn around a wide area, and a car almost completely immersed under the sand. What appeared to be greenhouses situated adjacent to the strike were mostly destroyed.
In satellite imagery captured about a day before the attack, around a dozen tents and other temporary structures can be seen in the area that was directly hit. They were destroyed in the attack, as were dozens of other tents surrounding the area, which could no longer be seen in photos and videos of the aftermath.
The area was previously targeted by Israeli airstrikes, including a similar attack using 2,000-pound bombs in July targeting a top Hamas commander, Mohammed Deif, less than two miles away.
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6) Cholera Deaths Soar Worldwide Despite Being Easily Preventable
Fatalities spiked 71 percent last year, far outpacing the 13 percent rise in cases, the World Health Organization said.
By Stephanie Nolen, who covers global health, has reported on cholera outbreaks in the Middle East, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, Sept. 11, 2024
A patient in an isolation tent being treated for cholera last year in Malawi. The spread of the disease there was driven by catastrophic weather events. Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times
The cholera outbreaks spreading across the globe are becoming more deadly. Deaths from the diarrheal disease soared last year, far outpacing the increase in cases, according to a new analysis by the World Health Organization.
Cholera is easy to prevent and costs just pennies to treat, but huge outbreaks have swamped even well-prepared health systems in countries that had not confronted the disease in years. The number of cholera deaths reported globally last year increased by 71 percent from deaths in 2022, while the number of reported cases rose 13 percent. Much of the increase was driven by conflict and climate change, the W.H.O. report said.
“For death rates to be rising so much faster even than cases are increasing, this is totally unacceptable,” said Philippe Barboza, who leads the cholera team in the health emergencies program of the W.H.O. “It reflects the world’s lack of interest in a disease that has plagued humans for thousands of years, afflicting the poorest people who cannot find clean water to drink,” he said.
More than 4,000 people were officially reported to have died from cholera in 2023, but the true number is probably far higher, Dr. Barboza said. The W.H.O.’s efforts to model the actual number of cholera deaths, using data gathered from testing programs, found that the total death count for 2023 could be more than 100,000.
Cholera can cause death by dehydration in as little as a single day, as the body tries to expel virulent bacteria in streams of vomit and watery diarrhea.
“How can we accept that in 2024 that people are dying because they don’t have access to a simple bag of oral rehydration salts that cost 50 cents?” Dr. Barboza said. “It’s not because they don’t have an I.C.U. — it’s just IV fluid and antibiotics that they need.”
There were 45 countries with reported cholera cases in 2023, up markedly from 35 countries with cases in 2021. The global burden of the disease has shifted from the Middle East and Asia to Africa, where there was a 125 percent increase in cases in 2023 compared with the previous year.
Cholera’s spread in southern Africa has been propelled by catastrophic weather events, including both floods and droughts. When people lack access to water, they often crowd around a few sources, which, if they become polluted, can quickly sicken thousands.
Zambia and Malawi both mounted strong responses to cholera outbreaks, Dr. Barboza said, but their health systems were overwhelmed. In the Zambian capital, Lusaka, the government had to set up a cholera treatment center in a stadium.
In Sudan, where more than nine million people have been displaced by a brutal civil war, people are packed into camps with minimal sanitation infrastructure. Nevertheless, health workers managed to bring a cholera outbreak under control last year, said Dr. Bashir Hamid, the health and nutrition director for Save the Children in Sudan. But now, he said, the disease is back, with more than 5,600 cases reported since mid-August.
“We are seeing children who are already badly weakened by malnutrition, and they have no defense against cholera,” Dr. Hamid said.
In 2023, very large outbreaks, defined as more than 10,000 suspected or confirmed cases, were reported by nine countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, Malawi, Mozambique, Somalia and Zimbabwe. This was more than double the number of such outbreaks reported annually from 2019 to 2021, the W.H.O. found.
The primary reason for last year’s higher death rate was an increase in what the W.H.O. calls “community deaths”: people who died of cholera without receiving any care in a health center.
Cholera surveillance in some large countries is consistently weak. India, for example, reports just a handful of cases each year.
The outlier is Bangladesh, which has made major strides in surveillance. The country accounted for more than 23,000 reported cases in 2023, a figure which reflects better counting rather than worsening outbreaks, the W.H.O. said.
Overall in 2023, the organization registered 535,321 cases globally, up from 472,697 the year before.
Currently, there are 24 countries with cholera outbreaks; the number of cases and deaths usually spikes toward the end of the year because of weather patterns.
The cholera crisis has also been exacerbated by a persistent global shortage of vaccines. Demand has outstripped supply for years, ever since key producers stopped making it. All of the market for cholera vaccines is low-and middle income markets, where the product sells for as little as $1.50 per dose.
In 2022, the organization that manages the global emergency stockpile of cholera vaccines, made an unprecedented recommendation that people in outbreak areas receive only a single dose of the vaccine instead of the standard two, in an effort to stretch the supply. One dose of the vaccine provides six months to two years of protection from cholera, while the full regimen of two doses, delivered a month apart, gives adults roughly four years of protection.
In 2023, countries with outbreaks requested 74 million doses of the vaccine. Fewer than half of the requests could be filled, and no vaccines remained for preventive campaigns in vulnerable places such as Sudan or Gaza.
“When we got access to the vaccine for the outbreak last year, it really helped a lot,” said Dr. Hamid, who is based in Port Sudan. “We really saw the cases fall. But we don’t know if there will be any vaccine available for this outbreak.”
EuBiologics, a South Korean pharmaceutical company, is currently the only global supplier of a cholera vaccine. The company is in the process of switching its production to a simplified formula of the vaccine that will allow it to increase output by 40 percent by the end of this year, said Rachel Park, its director of international business.
But even with that change, the total supply next year will not exceed 50 million doses. It is difficult to estimate future demand given the sharp change in outbreak numbers, Dr. Barboza said, but a minimum need for even a single-dose strategy would most likely equal or surpass the 74 million requested doses in 2023.
Another vaccine, called HillChol, is made by the Indian company Bharat Biotech and was recently approved by the Indian government for domestic use. The company is expected to apply for W.H.O. authorization for the vaccine and hopes to start making it for the global stockpile in late 2026, targeting an initial production of 40 million doses a year.
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7) How a U.N. Agency Became a Flashpoint in the Gaza War
UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, has survived 75 years of Israeli-Palestinian strife. Can it survive the latest conflict?
By Ben Hubbard, who conducted more than three dozen interviews and visited refugee camps in the West Bank. He has spent more than a decade covering the Middle East, and reported from inside Gaza for The Times during the Hamas-Israel war in 2014, Sept. 12, 2024
“UNRWA was born soon after the United Nations itself. In the aftermath of World War II, the new world body was trying to solve global problems through consensus. One such problem was what to do about the more than 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee into exile when Israel was founded, an event Arabs call the Nakba, or ‘catastrophe.’ World powers hoped that the displaced would soon return to their communities or start new lives elsewhere. But it was not clear how this would happen. The new Israeli government refused to let the refugees back in, and the Arab governments to whose territories they fled did not want them to stay. In the meantime, the refugees were sleeping in the open and facing starvation. So, in 1949, the United Nations General Assembly created UNRWA to address their immediate needs until a permanent solution could be found. Seventy-four years later, it still hasn’t been.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/magazine/unrwa-gaza-war.html
Food distribution at an UNRWA building in Gaza in March 2024. The war has forced it to scale up an enormous aid operation amid widespread destruction, including the deaths of its own staff members. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In mid-January, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, was handed a piece of paper that threatened to doom his organization. It was already in deep crisis. Three months had passed since Hamas militants burst through the barrier between Gaza and Israel, killing about 1,200 people and dragging 250 back as hostages. In retaliation, Israel rained bombs on Gazan cities, killing tens of thousands as it vowed to eradicate Hamas.
Lazzarini’s organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA, was uniquely equipped to respond to the humanitarian crisis that ensued. More than two-thirds of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are refugees, and providing them with services has given UNRWA an outsize role in the territory. After Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 from the Palestinian Authority, which now functions only in the West Bank, Gazans were left with a highly dysfunctional government and came increasingly to depend on the agency. Before the war, UNRWA maintained more than 300 schools, health centers, warehouses, fuel depots and other facilities in Gaza and had 13,000 employees. Unlike other U.N. agencies, its staff is made up not of international aid workers but almost entirely of local Palestinians. Amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment, there was simply no other organization as deeply integrated in the territory and with the infrastructure necessary to distribute food, provide shelter and meet the basic needs of so many displaced, traumatized people.
Lazzarini, a Swiss-Italian veteran of United Nations aid operations in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, took the helm of UNRWA in 2020. He hoped to put the agency on sure footing. For more than seven decades, it had lurched from one emergency to another, as turmoil in the Middle East buffeted the impoverished Palestinians that UNRWA sought to help. The war put an end to those plans. Repeated evacuation orders and the destruction caused by Israel’s air campaign have displaced about nine in 10 Gazans, some multiple times. At various points, the agency says, more than a million people — nearly half of Gaza’s population — have sought shelter in UNRWA facilities, with large families crowded into its classrooms or into warehouses that once held flour and medicine.
As the war devastated Gaza, Lazzarini met regularly with Israeli officials to facilitate the movement of aid and agency staff members into and around the territory. The relationship between UNRWA and Israel has long been fraught because of the agency’s link to one of the most contentious issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the fate of Palestinian refugees. Since its founding in 1949, UNRWA has been tasked with caring for the Palestinians who fled or were pushed from their homes during the creation of the Jewish state. As the original Palestinian refugees passed their status from one generation to the next, their numbers grew to nearly six million, spread mainly across the Middle East.
UNRWA is a historic anomaly: It is the only U.N. agency dedicated to a specific group of refugees, but it has no ability to solve their root problems of displacement and statelessness. Its mostly Western funders see the agency as a force for stability in a volatile region until the Palestinian-refugee issue can be resolved through a peace deal. Many Israelis take a less charitable view, particularly as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed the country to the right. They argue that UNRWA’s mere existence perpetuates the conflict by keeping alive the idea that, someday, somehow, these refugees will return to the land of their forefathers, in what is now Israel, destroying the Jewish state.
On Jan. 18, Lazzarini arrived at the David Kempinski Hotel, in Tel Aviv, to see Amir Weissbrod, a deputy director at the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Weissbrod had told him that he had information to share, so Lazzarini was expecting bad news. Now, Weissbrod produced a list, handwritten in Hebrew, of 12 UNRWA employees who Israel believed participated in the Oct. 7 attack. The allegations were cursory but explosive: The men, Weissbrod said, had assisted with logistics, entered Israel during the assault, attacked Israelis and helped take hostages.
“That is absolutely horrible — if true,” Lazzarini told me, recalling his reaction. It was mid-May, and we were having drinks at a hotel in Amman, Jordan, near UNRWA’s main headquarters. Lazzarini said he remembered feeling the gravity of the charges sink in. “I know how sensitive this is,” he said. It is “like an accusation to have participated in 9/11. We were talking about something huge.”
Lazzarini does not read Hebrew, so Weissbrod translated the list into English and asked him to verify whether the men worked for UNRWA. The names checked out quickly; two of the men had since died. Lazzarini had no easy way to figure out what the 12 men had or had not done, but it was not inconceivable that some UNRWA employees also had covert roles in Hamas. Lazzarini switched into crisis mode. He flew to New York to alert his boss, António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, and informed the United States government, at the time UNRWA’s largest funder.
As the days passed, Lazzarini worried that the accusations would leak to the news media, providing ammunition for UNRWA’s critics. Though the United Nations has not designated Hamas a terrorist organization, Israel, the United States and other Western governments have. On Jan. 26, in an effort to get ahead of the story, UNRWA went public, releasing a brief statement about the allegations and announcing that the agency had fired the accused men and would investigate in order “to establish the truth without delay.”
The news was incendiary, dominating global headlines and newscasts. The United States froze funding for UNRWA. Other donors followed suit. Britain, Canada, Australia, Finland, Germany, Estonia and Japan suspended donations over the next two days. Within four days, 18 countries froze more than $430 million in expected funds, threatening to hobble the organization during the greatest crisis in its history.
The donors’ reactions shocked UNRWA officials; the allegations were unverified and involved less than 0.1 percent of UNRWA’s staff in Gaza. They warned that funding cuts would make it even harder to help Gaza’s most vulnerable people during a crippling war. “I expected that some donors might be very concerned, alarmed, on edge,” Lazzarini told me. “But I did not expect such a domino effect within 48 hours. My first reaction was: How is this possible? This is collective punishment.”
Israel soon fleshed out the allegations, sharing with the news media names and photos of the accused, with brief summaries of what Israel said they had done. They included a school principal, a counselor, some teachers, a social worker and a health-center clerk. Over the next few weeks, Israeli officials broadened their accusations, claiming that nearly 10 percent of UNRWA’s Gaza staff, some 1,200 people, had ties to Hamas and other militant groups. Israel offered little evidence to support this allegation, but Israeli leaders seized on it, arguing that the agency should be shut down. “It is time that the international community and the U.N. itself understand that UNRWA’s mission has to end,” Netanyahu told a group of U.N. ambassadors on Jan. 31. “UNRWA is self-perpetuating. It is self-perpetuating also in its desire to keep alive the Palestinian refugee issue.”
He called for other aid agencies to replace UNRWA in Gaza, painting it as irredeemable. “UNRWA is totally infiltrated with Hamas.”
UNRWA was born soon after the United Nations itself. In the aftermath of World War II, the new world body was trying to solve global problems through consensus. One such problem was what to do about the more than 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee into exile when Israel was founded, an event Arabs call the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” World powers hoped that the displaced would soon return to their communities or start new lives elsewhere. But it was not clear how this would happen. The new Israeli government refused to let the refugees back in, and the Arab governments to whose territories they fled did not want them to stay. In the meantime, the refugees were sleeping in the open and facing starvation. So, in 1949, the United Nations General Assembly created UNRWA to address their immediate needs until a permanent solution could be found.
Seventy-four years later, it still hasn’t been.
As the original Palestinian refugees passed their status to their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, UNRWA grew, too. It has 32,000 staff members in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, working mostly in 58 official refugee camps, which have evolved from makeshift tent cities into neighborhoods crowded with small dwellings and apartment blocks. In its first decade, UNRWA tried to help individual refugees set themselves up as shoemakers, blacksmiths and carpenters, while at the same time pursuing ambitious regional water plans, inspired by the Tennessee Valley Authority, in hopes that they would create long-term agricultural jobs. Those efforts to quietly resettle the refugees outside historic Palestine failed, largely because Arab countries didn’t want to integrate the refugees, and the refugees did not wish to resettle — they wanted to go home. As a result, the bulk of UNRWA’s work in recent decades has focused on education and health care. Before the war, more than a half a million children attended its 700 schools, and two million patients sought care at its 140 health centers every year.
In the panoply of U.N. agencies, there is nothing else like it. No other agency is dedicated to such a specific group or runs school and health systems. More than 97 percent of its employees are Palestinians who earn much less than other U.N. workers and do not receive diplomatic passports. Although the organization has existed for decades, it remains officially “temporary.” The U.N. General Assembly renews its mandate every few years, but the U.N. provides only a tiny portion of its budget. The rest comes from donors. “U.N. in name only,” one UNRWA official says.
Jamie McGoldrick, a senior U.N. official in Jerusalem during the early part of the war, describes it as “a strange beast.” He told me: “It’s a bit like a crazy uncle outside the system that works to the extent that it can work and keeps the lid on things in Palestine. It just keeps the pressure down by providing services, offering jobs, putting money in the economy, you know, doing things for the community of which it’s a part.” He added: “But it was never envisaged to be something that would hang around forever.”
Over the years, Israelis have leveled a range of criticisms at UNRWA. Government officials charge that far from being a neutral U.N. agency, it is a Palestinian organization in international garb. They accuse UNRWA’s top leaders (most of whom are Westerners) of violating U.N. neutrality rules by criticizing Israel. One research organization based in Israel issues periodic reports arguing that UNRWA schools encourage militancy and antisemitism, highlighting the appearance in their schools of regional maps that exclude Israel or lessons on Palestinian figures whom Israel considers terrorists. UNRWA officials say that they use local textbooks so students can easily transfer to regional high schools but that they supplement them with UNRWA’s own materials and expunge any content that violates U.N. principles.
The most common criticism, however, is that UNRWA allows Palestinians to pass their refugee status to each new generation, ensuring that their numbers continue to increase and turning calls for the “right of return” into a growing existential threat to the Jewish state. U.N. officials point out that this policy is not unique to the Palestinians. It is common practice for people displaced by long conflicts, like those in Afghanistan and Myanmar, to pass their refugee status to their children. More than one-third of the 625,000 registered Syrian refugees in Jordan were born there, and the Syrian war began only 13 years ago. The phenomenon is more pronounced among Palestinians, because they were displaced seven decades ago and have no state to which to return.
Still, in some ways, the U.N. does treat Palestinians differently. When the U.N. created global standards for the treatment of refugees in 1951, Egypt and Iraq successfully pressed to keep the Palestinians under UNRWA, rather than under the new global refugee agency, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, or U.N.H.C.R. The rationale was that the U.N. bore a unique responsibility to the Palestinians, given the failure of its plan to partition historic Palestine between Arabs and Jews. To this day, UNRWA applies different rules from U.N.H.C.R. While most refugees lose refugee status when they acquire citizenship elsewhere, Palestinians do not. Most of the more than 2.2 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan are Jordanian citizens but officially remain refugees, as can those who have obtained citizenship in the United States or elsewhere. And while U.N.H.C.R. actively seeks to resolve refugees’ status through voluntary return, integration wherever they have fled or resettlement elsewhere, UNRWA can only provide aid. This, many Israelis argue, fuels the notion that Israel’s creation inflicted a grave historical wrong on the Palestinians that can be rectified only through Israel’s destruction.
Of course, many Palestinians believe that they were subjected to a grave historical wrong. And despite UNRWA’s inability to provide them with a permanent solution, the refugees have long viewed the agency as proof that the U.N. remains invested in resolving their plight.
This spring, in the Balata refugee camp in the West Bank, I met Mustafa Sallam, 63, a vegetable seller. He was born in the camp but considered his true home a village near Lod, in central Israel, which his parents fled in 1948. In the 1980s, while working in Israel, Sallam stopped there to look around. “There were still some traces, but they are all gone now,” he told me. “If my grandson went, he wouldn’t recognize it.” Still, he longed to reclaim his parents’ land. “Day and night, we think about return,” he said. “Each family dreams about it.” That may not happen during his lifetime, he allowed, but he has five children and 25 grandchildren, the youngest 4 months old, all registered with UNRWA. Perhaps, someday, they would live on that land. “From generation to generation, we keep struggling,” he said. “We fought, we went to prison, and they will, too — for the sake of our homeland.”
That kind of talk exasperates Jewish Israelis, who see the demand for the “right of return” as a demographic Trojan horse. And because it is UNRWA that registers each new refugee — even if the last family member to set foot in Israel was a great-grandfather — they regard the agency as a co-conspirator. That it does so with the imprimatur of the U.N. makes the sting worse.
“UNRWA needs to go, because UNRWA is the flaming sword that hangs above the Jewish state,” Einat Wilf, a former Labor member of the Israeli Knesset and anti-UNRWA campaigner, told me over Zoom from her home in Israel. The agency, she said, should be abolished. “Close it, defund it, in order to send a message to Palestinians that the war of 1948 is long over, the state of Israel is here to stay, and they need to move on.”
Current and former UNRWA officials say the agency cannot be blamed for the world’s failure to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Many say UNRWA is part of the problem, and it perpetuates the conflict, but we all know that what perpetuates the conflict is the absence of a political solution,” Lazzarini says.
Many Palestinians, and some UNRWA officials, told me that they view Israeli attacks on the agency as fueled by the hope that getting rid of UNRWA will somehow get rid of the refugees. “UNRWA for us is an international umbrella to preserve and protect our rights,” Tayseer Nasrallah, a refugee and a veteran leader in Fatah, the main faction in the Palestinian Authority, told me when we met in his office in the Balata camp in May. The agency, along with the camps and the refugees themselves, were evidence of the original Palestinian displacement, a history he accused Israel of trying to erase. He considered the Israeli attacks on UNRWA to be “aimed at liquidating the issue of the Palestinian refugees so that there is no core to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.”
Since the Israeli government first charged that 12 members of UNRWA participated in the Oct. 7 attack, it has leaned heavily into the accusation that UNRWA in Gaza is deeply infiltrated by militants. When I spoke with Weissbrod and other Israeli officials in Jerusalem, they claimed that Israeli forces had collected Hamas membership lists and other intelligence in Gaza indicating that more than 2,000 UNRWA staff members belonged to militant groups, and some 450 of those were fighters. They declined, however, to share these lists or any other evidence with me, saying it was sensitive intelligence. When I asked why Israel, with its security agencies so sharply focused on Hamas, had not discovered this before the war, they said UNRWA had not been an intelligence target. “This is one of the wake-up calls that we had in Israel after Oct. 7,” Weissbrod told me.
In January and February, the United Nations began two inquiries: one, a review of UNRWA’s neutrality; another, a more formal investigation of potential staff participation in the assault on Israel. Israeli officials considered them insufficient. In May, Weissbrod complained to Guterres, the U.N. Secretary General. In a letter he shared with me, he wrote that Israel had provided extensive information, but that the U.N. had failed to address the scope of Israel’s allegations. “The practical ramification is grave,” he wrote. “No U.N. agency is investigating the most extensive infiltration ever of a U.N. body by a terrorist organization.”
UNRWA denies that its Gaza staff is full of Hamas operatives, and a spokeswoman says that they welcomed both inquiries. But even before they were both complete, Weissbrod sent a second letter, in July, directly to Lazzarini. It included the names and identification numbers of 100 UNRWA employees whom Israel said were fighters from Hamas. He demanded that UNRWA take immediate action. Lazzarini wrote back four days later. The agency, he said, needed evidence to substantiate Israel’s concerns before it could act; he suggested that they establish a way to facilitate information sharing. Israel never responded.
There is little reason to expect that an organization like Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for 17 years while secretly digging an extensive tunnel network and developing increasingly innovative ways to attack Israel, would refrain from infiltrating a well-resourced organization like UNRWA. Hamas and UNRWA have long inhabited a complicated Venn diagram. In theory, both want the agency to provide services: UNRWA because that’s its job; Hamas because it lessens the burden of governance on the group. In practice, the goals of the organizations clash: UNRWA seeks to improve the lives of refugees; Hamas seeks to destroy Israel and considers widespread Palestinian suffering a necessary cost, even a weapon, in its fight.
Current and former UNRWA officials paint a complex picture of their interactions with Hamas, referring to it as “the de facto authority,” or simply “the de factos.” Like any U.N. agency, they say, UNRWA can work only with the cooperation of whoever is in charge. That means dealing, like it or not, with both accommodating governments and hostile regimes like the Taliban.
Hamas has at times imposed its will in egregious ways. In 2014, according to one current and one former UNRWA official, an UNRWA legal adviser was pursuing investigations that included looking into the potential involvement of agency staff with Hamas. During a trip to Jerusalem, he received anonymous emails warning him not to return to Gaza. He did anyway. A bouquet of flowers soon showed up at his apartment with a note that read: “You are someone who is not welcome in Gaza.” It warned him to leave within 24 hours. He stayed. A few days later, a man on a motorcycle threw a hand grenade, with a note to the adviser attached, into UNRWA’s Gaza compound. The grenade did not explode — the pin was left in — but UNRWA pulled the adviser out of Gaza, fearing that his presence posed a threat to him and those around him. (One current and two former UNRWA officials involved in the matter say that the outcome of those investigations is unclear.)
More often, however, the two organizations have coexisted uneasily. Matthias Schmale, who is now the United Nations resident and humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, led UNRWA’s Gaza office from 2017 until 2021. He told me that right before he arrived in Gaza, a student fell into a hole at an UNRWA school. When the staff pulled the child out, they realized they had accidentally discovered a Hamas tunnel. Schmale complained to Hamas that the tunnel endangered children and violated U.N. rules. The group did not protest, so UNRWA filled the hole with concrete. Later in his tenure, engineers detected an underground cavity under the proposed site of a new UNRWA school. UNRWA moved the project elsewhere.
Schmale says he never faced broad accusations from Israel regarding Hamas infiltration of UNRWA, but he did recall receiving an anonymous tip that an UNRWA school employee was moonlighting as a Hamas fighter. UNRWA verified the information, and Schmale fired him. During his four-year tenure, he says, he dismissed seven other staff members for breaking U.N. rules, which include bans on self-enrichment, overt political activity and using corporal punishment in schools. The school employee was the only case that involved Hamas, and the tip did not come from Israel.
More common, Schmale says, was trouble with UNRWA’s local staff and their union. In 2018, the Trump administration froze funding for UNRWA, calling the contributions the United States made “disproportionate” and deeming the agency unsustainable, given the “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries.” UNRWA was suddenly deprived of more than $350 million, a quarter of its yearly budget. Schmale was obliged to lay off 130 employees. In response, the union blockaded him in his office and called for his removal. Eventually, Hamas’s security forces escorted him out. “I never thought that Hamas police would protect me from my own staff,” Schmale says. When the protests continued, Schmale had a meeting with an adviser to Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s Gaza leader at the time (and a plotter of the Oct. 7 attacks), and told him that the “de facto authorities” were responsible for keeping UNRWA staff safe. Soon after, the demonstrations stopped.
Later, however, Hamas turned on him. After a short war between Israel and Hamas in 2021 ended, Schmale, in an interview on Israeli television, appeared to agree with the suggestion that Israel’s strikes had been precise. “I also have the impression that there is a huge sophistication in the way the Israeli military struck over the last 11 days,” he said. He emphasized the severity of the strikes, noting that 60 children had been killed, including 19 UNRWA students, but his comments nonetheless sparked outrage in Gaza. Hamas called his words “a complete distortion in favor of the Zionists” and informed UNRWA that it could no longer guarantee his security. His boss pulled him out, ending his posting.
When I asked Schmale about Israel’s latest accusations, he said that his Gaza employees had complex views about Hamas. Many hated it as a government but supported its fight against Israel as legitimate resistance. Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006, he noted, and because the agency staff was broadly representative of society, it would be naïve to expect that some portion did not support Hamas.
“Would I be totally surprised if at the end of the day there is proof that 2,000 UNRWA staff are members of Hamas?” he said. “No, I wouldn’t be. It would be a bit shocking if it is such a high number”— and he would need to see serious evidence, he said — “but it makes sense given the circumstances of Gaza.”
Over the last year, Gilad Erdan, until recently the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., issued regular tirades against the agency and the U.N. itself, once from the floor of the General Assembly. The Israeli military frequently posts images, videos and recordings on social media that it says link UNRWA with militant activities. In February, it took journalists, including some from The New York Times, to see a tunnel that ran beneath an UNRWA school to a room full of computer equipment below UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters. The military said that it was a Hamas communications hub that drew its power from UNRWA and that agency employees must have known about it.
Israeli officials contend that UNRWA has failed to vet its staff for Hamas members and keep militants out of its facilities. UNRWA’s own rules bar staff from being members of or participating in any group that “promotes violence, terrorism or the overthrow of a government or a state,” and UNRWA says that its vetting process is similar to that of other U.N. agencies. It has for years regularly submitted lists of its employees in the West Bank and Gaza to Israel.
As for tunnels under UNRWA schools or staff members doubling as fighters, Lazzarini says UNRWA’s ability to investigate is limited. “How can you ask an agency mandated to invest in the human development of the people of Gaza to have at the same time the military expertise and all the technology available to look at what’s going on underground?” he says. “We are an organization providing education and primary health care. We are not an organization tasked with collecting intelligence in this kind of environment.”
Months of war have transformed the agency in Gaza. Most of UNRWA’s buildings have been affected by the bombing, and two-thirds of its schools are damaged or destroyed. Israeli forces have demolished a number of schools in controlled detonations, at least one while soldiers looked on and cheered. UNRWA’s staff were forced to flee their Gaza headquarters early in the war, and the complex is now trashed, its perimeter wall gone, its facade marred by bullets and shrapnel. Israeli forces have occupied it twice, the agency says. UNRWA estimates that more than 560 people have been killed and more than 1,790 wounded in strikes in or near its shelters.
About 5,000 of its employees work in the aid operation. People who used to teach math or history or dispense medication or offer prenatal care now struggle to transport, store and distribute food and fuel throughout Gaza. Many of them also sleep in tents. And more than 200 have been killed — the highest number of U.N. workers ever killed in a conflict.
UNRWA staff members describe the situation as “almost apocalyptic,” with teachers, drivers and clerks shouldering grim new burdens. Brian Baker, UNRWA’s security risk-management director, told me that during a drive through Gaza this spring, he saw people swarming aid trucks for food and pallets to use as firewood. The trucks had stopped near an Israel military checkpoint, and the soldiers fired at the crowd. Baker’s team performed first aid on a man who had been shot through the abdomen. Then they retrieved a dead body that no one else had been able to reach because it was near the Israeli checkpoint. But animals had seemingly gotten to it before they did; its head and arm were missing. On three separate occasions, UNRWA says, Israel has sent trucks carrying dead bodies, more than 220 total, to Gaza and called UNRWA to receive them. (When asked, the Israeli military did not comment on the bodies.)
“U.N. staff shouldn’t be dealing with containers of dead bodies,” Baker says. “Nobody signed up for that. Nobody signed up to pick up half-eaten bodies.”
As Israel’s interactions with UNRWA have grown increasingly bitter, it has dispatched foreign, defense and intelligence officials to make the case to donors that UNRWA is hopelessly riddled with Hamas. The effort has largely failed. On March 8, six weeks after the Israeli allegations that UNRWA employees participated in the Oct. 7 assault became public, Canada resumed funding the agency, citing UNRWA’s critical role in Gaza. Sweden, Australia, Finland, France and Japan soon followed. Germany, UNRWA’s second largest donor before the war, restored its funding in April; Britain followed in July.
The United States remains the only significant holdout because this March Congress blocked all funds for UNRWA for the remainder of the fiscal year. A senior Biden administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in accordance with government protocols, told me in May that the White House opposed the congressional freeze and did not try to dissuade other countries from working with UNRWA. “Right now in Gaza, when it comes to humanitarian assistance, UNRWA is the only game in town,” the official said.
In my conversations with officials from six major donor countries, some said they found Israel’s claim that Hamas had extensively infiltrated UNRWA unconvincing. Others considered the allegations plausible but said they trusted the U.N. investigations, even though the war prevented investigators from entering Gaza, limiting their ability to fully explore Israel’s claims. Many countries resumed funding even before those inquiries were complete.
The first U.N. inquiry, headed by the former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, looked into UNRWA’s neutrality. Its report, released in April, found that UNRWA had “a more developed approach to neutrality” than other aid groups and U.N. agencies. It acknowledged the difficulty of remaining neutral with a predominantly Palestinian staff during a long-running conflict, cited individual breaches and suggested ways for UNRWA to better vet its staff and investigate violations. UNRWA vowed to implement all the recommendations. The second, by the U.N.’s top investigative body, looked at 19 UNRWA employees whom Israel accused of participating in the Oct. 7 attack. These included the 12 accused in January and seven others who were added later. The inquiry concluded in August that the evidence was absent in one case and insufficient in nine others. In the nine remaining cases, however, it found that the accused “may have been involved.” A U.N. spokesman said that they probably did take part.
Erdan, then the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., dismissed that investigation as “a disgrace” on X, saying Israel needed to “outlaw UNRWA, declare it a terrorist organization and expel its leaders from Israeli territory.”
For his part, Lazzarini told me that before the Gaza war took over his days, he began thinking about UNRWA’s future. He had become acutely aware of the growing gap between what countries expected UNRWA to do and the amount of money they gave it. In December, UNRWA will mark its 75th anniversary. If the dynamic doesn’t change, he says, the organization will reach “a breaking point.”
Other senior UNRWA officials I spoke to also wondered how much longer the organization could last, given the expanding number of refugees and the unanticipated needs that have arisen because of the region’s frequent crises. Most officials from donor countries said the best hope is a two-state solution that grants refugees citizenship in a Palestinian state. It is a nice vision, but one that feels increasingly remote, given the chronic divisions in Palestinian politics and the current Israeli government’s outright hostility to the idea. After so much violence, many people on both sides cannot imagine two states side by side.
Israel, on its own, can’t shut down UNRWA, but it can restrict its operations by denying visas to international staff members and barring them from Gaza and the West Bank. So far, the Israeli foreign ministry has scaled back its coordination meetings with UNRWA, and the agency’s Israeli bank account has been frozen, locking up $3 million. The Knesset is considering bills that would declare UNRWA a terrorist organization and force it to remove its field office from East Jerusalem, which oversees operations in the West Bank.
Baker, the UNRWA security chief, worries that Israel’s verbal attacks will inspire physical ones. “I’m ex-military. If my politicians are telling me, ‘All this group are terrorists,’ then don’t be surprised when your soldiers start attacking that group,” Baker says. UNRWA staff members told me that Israelis regularly flip them off when they see their blue-and-white U.N. cars. On May 9, someone set the tall grass in UNRWA’s East Jerusalem compound on fire. UNRWA’s West Bank director ran down with a fire extinguisher to put it out.
In Gaza, whenever the war ends, UNRWA will no longer be dealing merely with a deprived population confined to a narrow strip of land, but one irrevocably scarred by a war. It will have to care for its own traumatized staff and serve a society whose social fabric has been shredded. The Gaza health authorities say that more than 40,000 people have been killed, or 1.8 percent of the population. In April, U.N. Women estimated that the dead included 6,000 mothers, leaving behind 19,000 orphans. More than 91,000 Gazans, according to the Gaza health authorities, have been wounded. Many have lost arms or legs; some have lost both.
This spring, a senior U.N. development official, Abdallah Al Dardari, said that the damage to schools, health care and the economy had set Gaza’s human development back 40 years, a lost investment of nearly $50 billion. “We haven’t seen anything like this since 1945,” he said. In April, a U.N. mine expert estimated that Gaza was strewed with 37 million tons of rubble, containing an unknown number of unexploded munitions. Clearing that wreckage, he said, could take 100 trucks, working full time, 14 years.
Many Palestinians have given up hope that the Palestinian Authority, headed by 88-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, can lead them toward self-determination. Polls indicate that support for Hamas has risen, although it is anybody’s guess what will remain of the group when the war is over. The brutality of the war may only increase militancy and amplify the longing to return to an ancestral land.
In the Jalazone refugee camp in the West Bank in May, I met with the student parliament at an UNRWA-run girls’ school. For a half-hour, nine students between the ages of 13 and 15 told me about the hardships of the camp — the crowding, the lack of privacy, the Israeli Army raids — and about their dreams: to become doctors, lawyers, judges, psychologists and tour guides. Not once did they use the word Israel, instead referring to it as “the occupation” or “the Zionist occupation.” All but one were refugees. When I asked about the solution to their plight, they grew animated, speaking quickly in Arabic and English and cutting one another off as they called for Palestinian unity, the end of the occupation and the right of return.
“The only solution is for other countries to stand with us so that we can be liberated,” one ninth grader said. “It is our country and our land in the end. It does not belong to them, it belongs to us, and we will continue fighting until future generations so that we can take that land.”
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8) Israel Defends Strike on School Compound as Condemnation Mounts
By Liam Stack reporting from Tel Aviv, September 12, 2024
Palestinians inspecting the rubble of a former United Nations school in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, on Wednesday. Credit...Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock
Palestinians searching for missing people under the rubble of a former United Nations school in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, on Wednesday. Credit...Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock
Condemnation of a deadly Israeli strike on a school turned shelter in central Gaza mounted on Thursday, as Israel said that the complex crowded with people driven from their homes had become a headquarters for militants.
The site, once known as Al-Jaouni School, had been home to around 12,000 displaced people from the Gaza Strip, mainly women and children, according to the United Nations, which operated the school. Israel has struck the compound five separate times since the war began last October, it said.
The Palestinian authorities said the Israeli strike on Wednesday killed 18 Gazans. Among them were six U.N. employees, including the shelter’s manager, the most U.N. employees to die in a single strike in Gaza since the war began, the organization said.
Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, on Thursday joined in criticism from the United Nations and others, called the deaths of the U.N. workers “appalling” and reiterated calls for a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. The government of Qatar, a key mediator in talks over a cease-fire, called the strike a “horrifying massacre.”
The Israeli military continued to defend the strike, saying the compound in Nuseirat was being used as a Hamas “command and control center,” a claim it has repeatedly made in an effort to justify increasingly frequent strikes on schools serving as shelters.
Israel issued a list of nine names of people it said were Hamas militants who had been killed in the strike, including three that it said were employees of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians. UNRWA could not be immediately reached for comment on the claim.
Earlier, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said that the military had asked the United Nations for the identities of the six employees it said were killed so Israel could “thoroughly review the claim” that they were U.N. workers, but that the organization had so far not provided them.
Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, the main U.N. agency working in Gaza, said that it was “not aware of any such request,” adding that it shares a list of its staff members in Gaza and the occupied West Bank with Israel every year.
She added that UNRWA was “not in a position to determine” whether Al-Jaouni School had been used for military or fighting purposes.
“This is precisely why we have repeatedly called for independent investigations to look into these very serious claims,” she said.
Israel and UNRWA have long had contentious relations, and they have sharply deteriorated since the war began. Earlier this year, Israel accused a dozen workers of participating in the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terror attack in Israel or its aftermath, an allegation that imperiled the organization because it led donors, including the United States, to suspend their financial support.
The United Nations fired 10 of the 12 employees Israel accused. An internal U.N. investigation later found that Israel had not provided evidence to back up its separate allegation that many UNRWA workers had ties to Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.
Israel’s increasing strikes on school grounds appear to reflect a shift in its efforts to root out Hamas in Gaza. Some military analysts say that as Israel has destroyed Hamas fighting units and part of the group’s network of tunnels, it has forced more fighters above ground.
The Israeli military says that Hamas has exploited schools, hospitals and shelters, using them as bases and civilians as human shields. It has said its strikes “are conducted in accordance with international law.”
Human rights activists say that Israel still has a responsibility to protect civilians during its military operations.
“What’s happening in Gaza is totally unacceptable,” António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, said in a statement late Wednesday. “These dramatic violations of international humanitarian law need to stop now.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.
KEY DEVELOPMENTS
An Israeli intelligence chief will step down, and other news.
· A top Israeli intelligence commander has announced his resignation, the Israeli military said on Thursday. The commander, Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, leader of Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, notified the military of his plans and will leave his post “in the near future,” the military said in a statement. The 8200 division was long seen as a pillar of a vaunted Israeli intelligence apparatus, but its reputation suffered after the Hamas-led attack last year. The New York Times reported in November that the 8200 division failed to detect the attack in part because it had stopped eavesdropping on the hand-held radios of Hamas militants in Gaza, seeing it as a waste of effort.
· Israel revoked the accreditation of Al Jazeera journalists on Thursday, four months after the government’s decision to shut down the pan-Arab satellite network’s operations there and block its broadcasts. Nitzan Chen, the director of the government press office, said in a statement that the network “disseminates false content” that could “jeopardize state security.” Al Jazeera has strongly rejected those claims, calling them “slanderous and deceptive,” and said it would pursue legal action against the state.
· Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat, met with Lebanese officials in Beirut, where he renewed calls for a cease-fire in Gaza and an end to the conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Mr. Borrell said that the region had so far “avoided the worst” but that “the threat remains” of a full-scale war along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Israel and Lebanon have carried out tit-for-tat strikes over the past year, including a major round of aerial attacks last month.
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9) The Fight for Control Over the Philadelphi Corridor
The increasingly bitter dispute has not just affected cease-fire talks but also destabilized a once-strong security partnership between Egypt and Israel.
By Vivian YeeAdam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman, Sept. 13, 2024
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo, Adam Rasgon from Jerusalem and Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv.
The border between Gaza and Egypt in February, as seen from Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Credit...Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
The border between Egypt and Gaza has become a major point of contention in the negotiations over a cease-fire to end the war in Gaza — not just between Israel and Hamas, but also between Israel and Egypt.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, says the country must occupy the border area to prevent Hamas from smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. He has cast control of the Philadelphi Corridor, as the border zone is known, as a matter of existential importance for Israel, though some Israeli politicians believe he is using the issue to avoid reaching a deal for a cease-fire and the release of hostages.
Egypt argues that it has already cracked down on smuggling there — because doing so serves its own security interests, not just Israel’s — by building barriers, destroying tunnels and patrolling the area. For Cairo, accepting Israeli troops on the border would threaten its own national security and draw criticism from the Egyptian public, analysts say.
The increasingly bitter dispute has destabilized the once strong security partnership between Egypt and Israel, whose landmark 1979 peace treaty has been a linchpin of Middle East geopolitics for decades.
Here’s a look at the issue.
What has Hamas been able to smuggle through the border?
Exactly how much Hamas has been able to smuggle into Gaza via the Gaza-Egypt border — above ground or through tunnels — is unknown.
The question has come underfierce debate even in Israel: Some Israelis — who want to see an agreement reached to free Israeli hostages — have played down the issue of smuggling through the Philadelphi Corridor. . But others who want Israel to keep fighting to destroy Hamas have emphasized the danger to Israel’s security.
That, along with the difficulty of obtaining independent information, makes it difficult to assess the scale of the smuggling.
Current and former Israeli security officials have often said that tunnels and insufficient screening at the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Israel have allowed Hamas to stock up on weaponry and other supplies that can be turned into weapons.
Hamas has smuggled in components of long-range rockets, rocket-propelled grenades, sniper rifles, machine guns, bullets and other weapons, according to an Israeli security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to communicate with the media.
Nadav Argaman, a former director of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, said in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 that only “a very small amount of weapons” had been smuggled into Gaza through tunnels since Egypt acted to clear the border zone of tunnels and infrastructure. Most smuggling had instead occurred aboveground at the Rafah crossing, he said, adding that there was “no connection between the weapons in Gaza and the Philadelphi Corridor.”
Hamas has also heavily relied on other routes, including small fishing boats coming by sea and through the Kerem Shalom crossing between southern Gaza and Israel, three Israeli defense officials said.
And Hamas has failed to import sophisticated anti-tank missiles, a sign that Egypt’s efforts to stamp out smuggling have had success, two of the three defense officials said. Most of Hamas’s weapons have been locally made, the officials said. In contrast, Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group and a beneficiary of Iranian support, like Hamas, has repeatedly fired advanced anti-tank missiles against Israel.
Current and former Israeli security officials have often said that tunnels and insufficient screening at the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Israel have allowed Hamas to stock up on weaponry and other supplies that can be turned into weapons.
Hamas has smuggled in components of long-range rockets, rocket-propelled grenades, sniper rifles, machine guns, bullets and other weapons, according to an Israeli security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to communicate with the media.
Nadav Argaman, a former director of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, said in an interview with Israel’s Channel 12 that only “a very small amount of weapons” had been smuggled into Gaza through tunnels since Egypt acted to clear the border zone of tunnels and infrastructure. Most smuggling had instead occurred aboveground at the Rafah crossing, he said, adding that there was “no connection between the weapons in Gaza and the Philadelphi Corridor.”
Hamas has also heavily relied on other routes, including small fishing boats coming by sea and through the Kerem Shalom crossing between southern Gaza and Israel, three Israeli defense officials said.
And Hamas has failed to import sophisticated anti-tank missiles, a sign that Egypt’s efforts to stamp out smuggling have had success, two of the three defense officials said. Most of Hamas’s weapons have been locally made, the officials said. In contrast, Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group and a beneficiary of Iranian support, like Hamas, has repeatedly fired advanced anti-tank missiles against Israel.
A dossier compiled by an Arab intelligence agency in April and obtained by The Times says that some 2,500 tunnels once existed between Gaza and Egypt, but that most were destroyed in an Egyptian government crackdown between 2013 and 2016.
Around 10 tunnels existed as of early 2024, but increased Egyptian oversight has eroded smuggling in recent years, the document says. Two Israeli defense officials also said Egypt had stepped up anti-smuggling enforcement in recent years, especially regarding the tunnels.
But in their heyday, the tunnels frustrated Israeli officials because they allowed for both weapons and goods like fuel to enter Gaza unchecked.
Egypt considers Hamas a security threat and is eager to prevent it from arming itself. Yet, the document adds, Egyptian personnel at the border often accept bribes to look the other way.
What does Israel say about smuggling there?
In a news conference on Wednesday evening, Mr. Netanyahu insisted that Israel would not agree to a cease-fire unless Israel could secure the corridor.
“Somebody has to be there,” he said, adding that until “they can actually prevent the recurrence of what happened there before,” Israel should remain.
Control of the Philadelphi corridor only appeared as a serious stumbling block in the past few weeks. Before that, Mr. Netanyahu barely mentioned it in public, if at all, leading some of his critics to say he was using the matter as a way to sabotage talks.
Israel, with U.S. backing, has previously pressed Egypt to heighten security along the border by building a high wall extending below ground, with sensor systems that would alert both the Israeli and Egyptian militaries to tunneling and smuggling, according to Egyptian and Israeli security experts.
Such a system would be similar to the 40-mile underground wall, outfitted with hundreds of cameras, radars and sensors, that Israel built after uncovering tunnels from Gaza into Israel.
Some have called for advanced screening equipment to be installed at the Rafah crossing to prevent smuggling there.
What does Egypt say?
Egypt says it has effectively cut off smuggling routes into Gaza. Years ago, it destroyed the main smuggling tunnels, flooded them with seawater and razed the buildings that provided cover for people using the tunnels. Egypt also destroyed its side of Rafah, a city that formerly straddled both sides of the Egypt-Gaza border, and moved Egyptian residents out.
Egypt views Hamas, an offshoot of an Egyptian Islamist group that Cairo considers an enemy, as an existential threat as well.
“Netanyahu’s attempt to blame Egypt for all the smuggling is total, utter nonsense,” said Abdel Monem Said Aly, a pro-government Egyptian political analyst.
Egypt believes the presence of Israeli troops in the corridor risks further angering the Egyptian public. And Egypt wants to show that it can manage the border itself.
Egypt is also extremely sensitive to the danger that Israel might use its control of the border to push Gazans to flee into Sinai.
What does it mean for the relationship?
Earlier this year, Egypt warned Israel that its actions at Rafah and in the border zone could constitute a violation of the two countries’ peace treaty. In recent weeks, it has accused Israel of fixating on the border area to stall a cease-fire.
Following Mr. Netanyahu’s Wednesday remarks, Al Qahera News, a state-owned broadcaster, quoted an unnamed senior official accusing Israel of overlooking other smuggling routes and blaming Egypt to cover up Israel’s own “failures.”
Yet neither side appears willing to give up on the peace treaty. Israel has tried to win more Arab partners, not enemies. For Egypt, the accord has generated valuable military and intelligence cooperation against an insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as natural gas imports from Israel, a close relationship with the United States and billions of dollars in American aid.
Emad Mekay and Adam Goldman contributed reporting.
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10) The Organizers Are Jewish. The Cause Is Palestinian. This College Won’t Be Hosting.
By M. Gessen, September 14, 2024
The New York Times
On the surface, this is a small story: A college canceled an event planned by a magazine. But it seems to be a story about something bigger: fear. Rather, it’s a story about many fears — including the fear of antisemitism, the fear of being accused of antisemitism, and the fear of controversy generally — and how they can combine to turn an institution designed to facilitate open discussion into something that makes open discussion impossible.
The college is Brooklyn College. The magazine is Jewish Currents. If you’ve never heard of it, that is because it’s tiny. Decades ago, it was militantly atheist and affiliated with the Communist Party. In this century, a new generation took over — not Communist and not necessarily atheist or even secular, but still well to the left of the political mainstream. Since its relaunch in 2018, the magazine has risen to minor media-world stardom (both The Times and The New Yorker have published profiles of it). The publication has grown, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, but its subscribers still number around 10,000. I serve on the board of Jewish Currents, and I am a professor in the same university system that Brooklyn College is a part of.
Back in May, the magazine arranged to use Brooklyn College facilities for a day of panels and performances about politics and culture that would include, among many other speakers, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories and Robert Malley, who served as the lead American negotiator on the Iran nuclear deal. Scheduled for Sunday, the event was also a fund-raiser for humanitarian services for Palestinian children and legal support for pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. But just two weeks ago, Brooklyn College canceled. It told the magazine that the reason was a roof leak in the main auditorium, but all the other spaces the magazine had arranged to use were placed off-limits, too — even though they were in a different building altogether.
That roof may indeed be leaky; subsequent events have also been canceled. But with the magazine being shut out entirely, my mind flashed to a time about 20 years ago when I trailed Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess champion turned opposition politician and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, on what was supposed to be a speaking tour of southern Russia. In city after city, venues he had rented would fall through: A sewage pipe supposedly burst in one of them, electricity was shut off in another, and a giant stage curtain had either collapsed or got stuck in a third.
So last week I reached out to Dena Beard and Marcus Richardson, of the college’s performing arts center (which runs the auditorium), and Michelle Anderson, the college’s president. I heard back from Richard Pietras, the college’s director of communications, who began our phone conversation by saying, “I’m not comfortable being on the record.” The college told New York Jewish Week that politics played no part in the cancellation. But the refusal to answer questions and speak openly about the matter, as well as recent events at that college and elsewhere, leave a very different impression.
“It seems silly to say this,” Corey Robin, an outspoken professor of political science at Brooklyn College, told me, “but this” — fostering open discussion — “is what a university is for. You can’t talk about a two-state solution or a one-state solution if you can’t even have a conversation about it on a college campus.”
Discussion of Israel and Palestine has long fallen into a special category. Some have called it “the Palestine exception to free speech.” Brooklyn College, like other universities, has weathered many controversies in this area.
In 2010, an alumnus very publicly cut the college out of his will after a book by the Brooklyn College professor Moustafa Bayoumi, “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America,” was assigned as that year’s required reading for incoming students. The problem? Bayoumi’s advocacy of Palestinian rights. The following year, the college fired an adjunct professor after a local assemblyman objected to unpublished academic writing that was critical of Israel. In 2013, the college came under fire from politicians, the Anti-Defamation League and one of its most prominent alumni, the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, for hosting a conversation between the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement co-founder Omar Barghouti and the philosopher Judith Butler. In 2016, the then chancellor of City University of New York, of which Brooklyn College is a part, commissioned an outside investigation into allegations of antisemitism there and on three other campuses. It concluded that most of the statements in question concerned constitutionally protected political speech.
In May 2023, a student speaker at the CUNY School of Law commencement, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, gave a speech about public interest law and devoted three minutes to a discussion of the plight of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The speech ended without incident, but two weeks later The New York Post put her picture on its front page, with the headline “Stark Raving Grad.” That’s when CUNY’s chancellor, Felix Matos Rodriguez, and the board of trustees issued a statement denouncing her talk as “hate speech.” The mayor of New York, state legislators from both parties and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas piled on, too. A group called Stop Antisemitism, whose specialty is getting people fired, accused Matos of transforming CUNY “into America’s most antisemitic university.” Word among faculty was that Matos might lose his job — largely because a student speaker had cited facts that have been documented by the United Nations, many human rights groups and this publication.
It all put me in mind of an observation Hannah Arendt made in her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics” about facts that “are publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not — namely, secrets. That their assertion then should prove as dangerous as, for instance, preaching atheism or some other heresy proved in former times seems a curious phenomenon.”
At the end of October, Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered an external review of allegations of antisemitism at CUNY. For months, lawyers from the firm Latham and Watkins interviewed professors, administrators and students at Brooklyn College. They still have not released a report.
And most of that happened before the congressional hearings on antisemitism on college campuses — before the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, who tried to give nuanced testimony respectful of their students’ speech rights, and the president of Columbia University, who threw her students and faculty under the bus, lost their jobs.
Last year Anderson, the Brooklyn College president, criticized a pro-Palestinian protest scheduled to take place on campus. The protest moved just off campus grounds. Soon The Nation published a series of articles about whether the college was targeting Muslim students. Meanwhile, a sizable and diverse coalition of students had organized to demand Anderson’s resignation.
Separately, some Jewish students complained that the off-campus protests made them feel unsafe. Several lawmakers said that they would attend the rallies in order to protect Jewish students. One of them, the City Council member Inna Vernikov, brought a gun.
Before the start of the new school year, Governor Hochul, joined by her commissioner of homeland security, Jackie Bray, gathered more than 200 administrators of CUNY, State University of New York and private colleges and urged them to adopt strict rules to limit campus protests — something the Jewish Currents event very well might attract.
Through dozens of email messages, the closest I got to why Jewish Currents was shut out of not just the leaky theater but all the secondary venues, too, was that they are too small for everyone to squeeze in all at once — which is true but irrelevant, since no one was proposing to do so.
Particularly given the way this was all communicated, I think a simpler explanation is fear. Certainly, there would be good reason for Brooklyn College leaders to fear the way these issues are manipulated in public discourse. By choosing the path of excessive caution, however — cancelling the event entirely and being cagey about the reasons — Brooklyn College not only betrayed its own mission, it also scored another victory for those who cynically wield accusations of antisemitism to quash open discussion and turn facts into dangerous secrets.
Matos, CUNY’s chancellor, survived the firestorm following the law school graduation speech. Meanwhile, the school’s administrators decided that they would not include student speakers in the 2024 graduation ceremony. Guest speakers pulled out in protest against this decision. There was now almost no risk that anything controversial would be said during the ceremony — or that much would be said at all. Because the law school does not have an auditorium large enough, the festivities were supposed to be held at Hunter College, which is also a part of CUNY and had hosted the ceremony before. But Hunter notified the law school that it would not be providing the space. Law school administrators scrambled unsuccessfully to find another venue anywhere in the university system.
The law school ultimately held its commencement at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Jewish Currents found an alternative venue, too. It’s not a university.
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11) At Funeral in Turkey, Family Mourns American Activist Killed by Israeli Gunfire
The father of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a dual citizen of Turkey and the United States, said that Washington had not done enough to pressure Israel over her death.
By Ben Hubbard and Gulsin Harman, Reporting from Didim, Turkey, Sept. 14, 2024
The coffin of Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was carried during her funeral at the Didim Merkez Camisi (Didim Central Mosque) in the Turkish Aegean town of Didim, western Turkey, on Saturday. Credit...Bradley Secker for The New York Times
With Turkish flags flying and chants of “God is great” resounding through the cemetery, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a Turkish American activist killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank, was laid to rest on Saturday in a town near Turkey’s Aegean coast.
Although she moved to the United States as a toddler, acquired citizenship and spent most of her life there, the funeral for Ms. Eygi, 26, was deeply Turkish, and profoundly pro-Palestinian.
Hundreds of people, many carrying Palestinian flags and wearing Palestinian scarves, gathered at the central mosque in the town of Didim to say prayers for her, including senior Turkish officials. No American officials attended, and there was not an American flag in sight.
In the 11 months since the war in Gaza began, Ms. Eygi’s two countries have taken starkly different stances toward the conflict. The United States has stood by Israel, continuing to supply its military with bombs even as concerns about civilian deaths have mounted. Turkey, on the other hand, has embraced the Palestinians, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan decrying Israel’s conduct and standing up for Hamas, which Israel, the United States and other countries consider a terrorist organization.
Two relatives of Ms. Eygi said the American response to her killing had frustrated them. In an interview before her funeral, her father, also a U.S. citizen, said the United States had not stood up for her.
“I have been living in the U.S. for 25 years, and I know how seriously the U.S. looks out for the safety of its citizens abroad,” said her father, Mehmet Suat Eygi. “I know that when something happens, the U.S. will attack like the eagle on its seal. But when Israel is in question, it transforms into a dove.”
Ms. Eygi, 26, was shot in the head and died on Sept. 6 during a protest by Palestinian and international activists against an Israeli settler outpost near the West Bank village of Beita. The Israeli military has said it is “highly likely” that she was hit “indirectly and unintentionally” and that the matter was still being investigated.
Other activists who were with her at the time said that she had been standing more than 200 yards away and downhill from the soldiers. They added that the protest, during which some demonstrators had thrown stones, had calmed down by the time she was shot.
Senior officials from both of Ms. Eygi’s countries — she was born in Turkey but obtained U.S. citizenship in 2005, her father said, and had lived in the Seattle area — have condemned her killing.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken on Tuesday called the killing “unprovoked and unjustified,” and on Wednesday, President Biden said in a statement that he was “outraged and deeply saddened” by her death.
“There must be full accountability,” Mr. Biden said.
But addressing the mourners in Didim on Saturday, Numan Kurtulmus, the speaker of the Turkish Parliament, criticized not just Israel, but at the countries that support it.
“This is not only the crime of a few murderous Israeli soldiers,” he said. “This is also the crime of the collaborative states who have the back of that terrorist state.”
Underlining the extent to which Turkey had adopted her killing as a national cause, other officials who attended the funeral included the vice president; the justice, interior and foreign ministers; the head of the largest opposition party and a former prime minister.
Her death came as international criticism of Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza has been rising. More that 41,000 people have been killed, according to the Gazan health ministry, which does not differentiate between combatants and civilians.
Airstrikes continued into Saturday, with Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reporting that 10 people, including women and children, had been killed in a strike that hit a home in Gaza City, among other deaths in the enclave. The Israeli military did not immediately comment.
Ms. Eygi’s body arrived in Turkey on Friday, where Turkey performed its own autopsy. The Turkish president, Mr. Erdogan, said on Monday that his country would pursue her case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Israel has rejected accusations of genocide, saying it is defending itself after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 that killed an estimated 1,200 people.
In Didim, a resort town near the Aegean coast where Ms. Eygi was to be buried, her father said that Turkey had taken a great interest in her case but that he had not received even a condolence call from any American official. An official from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara said that it had been providing consular assistance and had been in touch with Ms. Eygi’s family and with the Turkish authorities.
Mr. Eygi said, “The Turkish government is following the case,” adding, “I hope the U.S. government will do the same. An independent investigation is our biggest wish, but we don’t know how it can be done.”
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12) Nixon Started the War on Drugs. Privately, He Said Pot Was ‘Not Particularly Dangerous.’
President Richard Nixon’s remarks were captured on his secret White House recording system but had eluded the notice of leading Nixon era historians until now.
By Ernesto Londoño, Sept. 14, 2024
President Nixon in an image from Oct. 12, 1973, with, from left, Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford and Alexander Haig. Credit...Associated Press
Demonstrators in Berkeley, Calif., protested the Vietnam War in 1965. Credit...Associated Press
Two years after former President Richard M. Nixon launched a war on drugs in 1971, calling substance use the nation’s “public enemy No. 1,” he made a startling admission during a meeting in the Oval Office.
Speaking to a small group of aides and advisers at the White House in March 1973, Nixon said he knew that marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.”
Nixon, who had publicly argued that curbing drug use globally warranted an “all-out offensive,” also privately expressed unease about the harsh punishments Americans were facing for marijuana crimes. “Penalties should be commensurate with the crime,” Nixon said during that Oval Office conversation, calling a 30-year sentence in a case he recently had learned about “ridiculous.”
The remarks were captured on the president’s secret recording system amid a set of tapes that were only recently made widely available. A lobbyist for the cannabis industry in Minnesota pored over hours of the tapes and came across the remarks, which leading historians on the Nixon era said they found revelatory.
The comments, on scratchy, sometimes hard-to-hear recordings, provide a surprising glimpse into the thinking of the president who implemented the federal government’s drug classification system and decided that marijuana belonged in a category of substances deemed most prone to abuse and of no proven medical value. Over five decades, that designation has led to millions of arrests, which disproportionately affected Black people and hobbled efforts to rigorously study the therapeutic potential of cannabis.
These new insights into the way Nixon spoke about marijuana are coming to light as federal marijuana policy is being reconsidered.
In 2022, President Biden issued a proclamation pardoning thousands of people convicted of certain marijuana crimes under federal law. This spring, the Justice Department signaled its intention to downgrade marijuana in the government’s drug regulatory system, citing a consensus by federal health officials that the plant did not belong in the category of drugs deemed most harmful, known as Schedule I, which includes heroin and L.S.D. (Cocaine and fentanyl, for instance, are included in a more lenient category.)
The two main presidential candidates, too, have voiced support for less restrictive marijuana policies. Vice President Kamala Harris said in March that it was “absurd” that marijuana remains a Schedule I drug. Donald J. Trump has also backed loosening marijuana laws.
Support for easing marijuana policy is not universal. In July, 11 attorneys general urged the Department of Justice to keep cannabis in Schedule I. In a letter, they expressed concern about the appeal of newer, more potent strains of THC, the psychoactive component in marijuana, particularly among young users.
Experts on the Nixon years said that they were previously unaware of the recordings of Nixon speaking about marijuana and that the remarks were significant in light of the policies he had championed, which remain the backbone of today’s drug laws.
“It is counter to his image as sort of the ultimate square of the 1960s and ’70s,” said Gregory Cumming, a government archivist and historian who has worked since 2003 at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library.
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University who coauthored two books about the Nixon tapes, said the comments bolster other historical evidence suggesting that Nixon’s war on drugs was less a reflection of his personal philosophy than a strategy aimed in large part at undermining his political opponents.
“It reinforces Nixon as a Machiavellian political operative,” Mr. Brinkley said, adding that the former president “dehumanized drug users because it was in his political interest to do so.”
Dr. Jerome H. Jaffe, a psychiatry professor who served as Nixon’s drug czar from 1971 to 1973, said in an interview that he did not recall hearing the former president say that marijuana was not particularly dangerous.
Dr. Jaffe called Nixon’s recorded remarks “an interesting discovery.” But he added that he was “not surprised that a number of people, maybe including Nixon, didn’t think marijuana was as dangerous as heroin or cocaine.”
Dr. Jaffe said discussions of drug policy from the era, in which some American troops were returning from Vietnam addicted to drugs like heroin, often overlook Mr. Nixon’s emphasis on getting people with substance abuse issues into treatment.
Prevailing views on marijuana at the time would have made it politically tough for Nixon to take a more lenient approach, Dr. Jaffe said. “Not everything a politician does at a high level is highly correlated with what they think,” he said.
The legal status of cannabis in the United States had fluctuated for decades by the time Nixon, a Republican, was first elected president in 1968.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, American doctors used cannabis to treat a range of conditions. But in the early 1900s, a surge of migrants from Mexico, some of whom smoked marijuana recreationally, led to a backlash, prompting several states to criminalize its use.
In 1937, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act, which effectively criminalized recreational cannabis and all but ended research into its medical applications.
In 1969, the Supreme Court found that law unconstitutional because it violated protections against self-incrimination. But a year later, Nixon once again made marijuana use illegal under federal law, signing the Controlled Substances Act, which established a five-tier classification system ranking drugs based on the government’s perception of their medicinal value and potential for abuse.
The Nixon administration provisionally placed marijuana in Schedule I and appointed a commission to study the health risks. Nixon picked nine of the commission’s 13 members.
All along, Nixon made it clear that he intended marijuana to remain illegal, saying in a recorded 1971 conversation that historians documented years ago: “I want a goddamn strong statement on marijuana.”
But a year later, the commission issued a report that seemed starkly at odds with that desire.
The commission concluded that cannabis use did “not constitute a major threat to public health,” and said it had found no compelling evidence to support widely held notions that marijuana was a gateway to more harmful drugs or a driver of violent crime.
Cannabis use should be decriminalized, the commission suggested, urging the government to curb its use through “persuasion rather than prosecution.”
Nixon ignored the recommendations and kept marijuana in Schedule I.
“In the 1970s, we have to remember that there was a significant group of Americans who thought that marijuana was just about the worst drug in the world,” Mr. Cumming said.
Yet the newly noted recordings indicate that he did not share that view.
In a 1972 recording, Nixon can be heard telling a senior aide that he favored a “modification of penalties” as they discussed drug crimes, “but I don’t talk about it anymore.”
In the Oval Office meeting the following year, Nixon was more expansive. John Ehrlichman, a Nixon aide who later went to prison over the Watergate scandal, and Jerry V. Wilson, who at the time was the police chief in Washington, were among those present.
“Let me tell you, I know nothing about marijuana,” Nixon said at one point. “I know that it’s not particularly dangerous, and most of the kids are for legalizing it. But on the other hand, it’s the wrong signal at this time.”
Nixon can be heard pondering whether marijuana is more harmful than other popular substances like alcohol, cigarettes and even coffee. He said he was open to loosening penalties for drug crimes. But at a time when Nixon perceived the government was “starting to win the war on drugs,” he was reluctant to have a candid debate about substance use.
There were earlier signs of a disconnect between Nixon’s drug policies and his private views.
Mr. Wilson, who became a critic of the war on drugs, wrote in 1994 that Nixon had once told him marijuana was likely no more dangerous than the president’s “favorite psychoactive drug,” the martini.
In 2016, Harper’s Magazine published an article that included excerpts from a 22-year-old interview with Mr. Ehrlichman, who was quoted saying that the Nixon administration intentionally misled the public about the danger of drugs to undermine some of its main opponents: Black activists and groups opposed to the Vietnam War.
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Mr. Ehrlichman said, according to Harper’s.
Kurtis Hanna, a Minnesota lobbyist who supports drug legalization, has been fascinated by the history of drug policy ever since he was arrested inside a casino in Iowa in 2009 and charged with possession of marijuana.
Last year, he spent hours listening to recordings on the Nixon Library website, including some that were posted online only in the last couple of years. When he heard Nixon say marijuana was not “particularly dangerous,” Mr. Hanna said, he was shocked.
“He was essentially saying the exact opposite of what I understood him to believe,” said Mr. Hanna, 39, who shared his findings with The New York Times.
Mr. Cumming and Mr. Brinkley said it was unsurprising the remarks had been overlooked. Scholars, they said, have tended to focus more on Nixon’s foreign policy and the Watergate scandal. While the Nixon tapes — some 3,700 hours of recordings in all — have given historians a trove of information, mining them has been a laborious process.
Since Colorado and Washington in 2012 became the first states to legalize recreational cannabis, its use in the United States has soared, turning marijuana into a multibillion dollar industry. Public support for legalizing marijuana has grown, polling shows.
Dr. Peter Grinspoon, a cannabis expert who teaches at Harvard Medical School, said that the Nixon era policy meant that for years the government mainly funded studies looking into marijuana’s dangers and showed little interest in its medicinal value. That has begun to change as experts have come to see cannabis as a promising tool to treat opioid addiction, side effects from cancer treatments and chronic pain.
“The opportunity cost of the policies of that era,” he said, “has been tremendous.”
Jack Begg contributed research.
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13) Ending the Boeing Strike Won’t Be Easy. Here’s Why.
The vehemence of workers over wages and other issues caught the company and union leaders off guard.
By Peter Eavis, Sept. 14, 2024
Boeing workers picketed outside the company’s facility in Renton, Wash. The strike comes at a critical time for Boeing’s finances and its reputation with customers and the public. Credit...Grant Hindsley for The New York Times
When thousands of Boeing employees rejected a new labor contract, precipitating a strike that began on Friday, they were at odds not just with management but also with the leaders of their union, who backed the proposed deal.
Now, any attempt to reach an agreement must take account of the demands of the rank and file of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. What they want — significantly larger pay raises and far more lucrative retirement benefits than their leaders and Boeing agreed to — may be too much for management. But labor experts said the strength of the strike vote — 96 percent in favor — should help the union get a better deal.
“Those overwhelming numbers are kind of embarrassing, certainly from a public relations standpoint for the union,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist who studies labor at Washington University in St. Louis. “But they also simultaneously present the union with leverage when it does resume negotiations.”
And Boeing is in a difficult spot after a slowdown in commercial jet production — required by regulators after a panel blew out of a passenger jet fuselage in January — led to big financial losses. A long strike at Boeing’s main production base in the Seattle area would add significantly to the losses and possibly tip its credit rating into junk territory, a chilling development for a company with nearly $60 billion in debt.
The federal mediation service said on Friday that the union and Boeing management would resume talks in the coming days.
“We’re going to go back to the bargaining table, and bargain for what our members deserve,” Jon Holden, the president of District 751, the part of the machinists’ union that represents most of the workers on strike, said in an interview. “We’ll push this company farther than they ever thought they’d go.”
Asked whether union leadership had been out of step with the rank and file, Mr. Holden said the vote on the deal enabled members’ views to be heard. “You must never forget that the real power is within your membership,” he said.
Brian West, Boeing’s chief financial officer, speaking at an investor conference on Friday, said the strike would “jeopardize our recovery,” but he also said management was willing to talk to try to get a deal done. “We want to get back to the table and we want to reach an agreement that’s good for our people, their families, our community,” he said.
Asked to comment for this article, Boeing referred to Mr. West’s remarks.
Reaching a deal will not be easy. Wages are a primary reason.
Mid-ranking workers represented by the machinists’ union currently earn a minimum of $20 an hour, which is in line with Amazon delivery drivers, who do not belong to unions. And though that $20 an hour is 25 percent higher than the $16 at the start of the contract, in 2008, inflation has been 44 percent since then.
“The cost of living in the Seattle area is very, very high,” said Andrew Hedden, associate director of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington. “There’s been all these pressures that the company hasn’t kept up with.”
Boeing says it offered to raise wages by 25 percent on average for all jobs covered by the contract, with larger increases going to lower-paid workers. Employees who have been at the company for six years or longer earn significantly more than those making the minimum rate. The 5,000 mechanics who do the final check of airplane components and systems were offered annual wages of $130,000 in the deal at the end of the four-year contract, up from $102,000, Boeing said.
And the company offered to let workers carry over the higher wage rate when they switch jobs within the company. The machinists’ union said the current arrangement discouraged workers from seeking other types of work at Boeing to develop their careers.
Despite such offers, the rank and file wanted more, a 40 percent wage increase in particular. “We are firm on that,” said Phet Bouapha, a mechanic who has been at Boeing for nine years and is a union shop steward.
Retirement pay is also a key issue. A decade ago Boeing stopped offering a type of pension that pays out a predictable sum in retirement. “That’s a wound that may never heal,” Mr. Holden, the union leader, said.
Union members want the pension to return in a new contract and said the additional 401(k) contributions offered by management were not enough. “It’s important for people to have long-term security,” Mr. Bouapha said.
The last strike at Boeing, in 2008, lasted nearly two months, a long time for striking workers to be without a paycheck. Strike pay from the union is just $250 a week, beginning in the third week. Ruben Tishchuk, a mechanic who has been at Boeing for six years, said he had sufficient savings to get through at least two weeks of a strike.
“My kid wants to be like his dad and make airplanes, but what will his future be like if they keep chipping away at our benefits?” Mr. Tishchuk said, “It goes beyond me — I’m fighting for my kids’ and grandkids’ futures.”
Asked whether his members could bear a long strike on little income, Mr. Holden, the union leader, said, “The battle of time is going to play out here.”
The strike comes at a critical time for Boeing’s finances and its reputation with customers and the public. The company had to contend with the fallout from fatal crashes, in 2018 and 2019, of its 737 Max plane. The pandemic, which caused a severe drop in global air travel and supply chain snarls, walloped Boeing’s business. And this year a fuselage panel blew out of a plane in flight. Its defense business is weighed down by losses on fixed-price contracts.
Boeing’s leaders had hoped that production of commercial jets would pick up, enabling it to reverse the cash drain from its operations. In the first half of this year, the company’s operations had a cash outflow of over $7 billion. A strike on its own could cause a cash outflow of over $1 billion a month, Jefferies, a Wall Street firm, said in a research note on Friday.
Mr. West, the Boeing executive, said on Friday that the company would be “laserlike focused on actions to conserve cash.” Moody’s Investors Service said on Friday that it was weighing whether to downgrade Boeing’s credit rating to noninvestment grade — “junk” territory.
But labor experts say Boeing is not in such dire straits financially that it cannot afford to improve its offer. For all its problems, Boeing is an effective duopoly, with the European aerospace consortium Airbus, in the making of commercial aircraft and has an order book that will bring in significant revenue. The company said in a recent securities filing that its order backlog was $516 billion at the end of June, and that it expected nearly a fourth of that to be converted into revenue next year, and over two-thirds by the end of 2028.
“They are strong in the long run and in very solid market position,” said Harry Katz, a professor at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “They are not like a garment manufacturer with a whole range of competitors.”
Julie Weed contributed reporting and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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