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Israel’s Genocide Day 356: Netanyahu denies accepting U.S./French ceasefire proposal with Lebanon
As Israel expands bombing in Lebanon, Hezbollah rockets have reached reached Akka, Haifa, Tiberias, and the lower Galilee. Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israel returned a truckload of decomposing bodies without identification that it had abducted from Gaza.
By Qassam Muaddi, September 26, 2024
Casualties
· 41,467 + killed* and at least 95,921 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 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*
· 718+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,140. The Israeli army recognizes the death of 714 Israeli soldiers and the injury of at least 4,100 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 26, 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 25, 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
Editor’s note: This dispatch is a continuation of the ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ daily dispatches, which we have been publishing since October 7, 2023. Moving forward, the dispatches will be filed under the title ‘Israel’s Genocide’, though the subject matter will remain the same. We will continue to bring you updates of the latest events in Gaza and as we enter one year since Israel’s genocidal war began, we believe this new title best reflects the reality of the Palestinian experience on the ground in Gaza and across occupied Palestine.
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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) ‘Don’t Kill My Child. Kill Me Instead.’
By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist, reporting from the Chad-Sudan border, Sept. 28, 2024
Naima with her son, Nazir, outside their hut. Credit...Nicholas Kristof/The New York Times
Side by side with the worst of humanity, you regularly encounter the best. And so it was that while covering murder, rape and starvation in Sudan, I was awed by a heroic refugee, Naima Adam.
I’m on the Chad-Sudan border reporting on atrocities against Black African ethnic groups in Sudan, wrenchingly similar to the Darfur genocide here two decades ago. To report here is to appreciate that “evil” is not just an archaic Hebrew Bible term, but a force still powerful in the 21st century.
And yet: When civilization collapses and we humans are tested, some people reveal themselves as sociopaths, but a remarkable number turn out to be saints like Naima.
Naima, 48, is a member of one of the Black ethnic groups that have been targeted by destructive extremists in Sudan’s Arab leadership. Four times in the last 20 years Arab marauders have burned her home in their efforts at ethnic cleansing of non-Arab groups, and the Janjaweed Arab militia murdered her husband nine years ago.
After two military factions started a civil war in 2023, one of them — a descendant of the Janjaweed called the Rapid Support Forces, armed and supported by the United Arab Emirates — tried once again to drive Black Africans from Darfur. Naima recounted the same pattern I heard from so many people: The militia surrounded her village, lined up men and boys, then shot them one by one.
“We’re going to get rid of this Black trash,” she quoted the Arab gunmen saying.
Then the gunmen went house to house to kill, plunder and rape. Mostly, those they raped were girls and women, she said, but they also raped at least one man.
Two men took one of Naima’s daughters into a room and closed the door; she suspects they raped the girl, but sexual violence is such a taboo that she never asked her daughter what happened. Rape survivors bear the trauma on their own, and while a civil society group has formed a women’s center on the border to help, it is a struggle to find funding.
With the militia killing even young boys, Naima was terrified the gunmen would murder her 10-year-old son, Nazir. So she put Nazir on her back, the way Sudanese moms carry young children, to make him seem smaller.
A gunman saw through the ruse and demanded that she hand Nazir over.
“He’s a boy,” the man shouted. “Kill him!”
“Don’t kill my child,” Naima pleaded. “Kill me instead.”
One man clubbed Naima with the butt of his rifle to try to grab the boy. Another raised his gun and shot Naima twice, through the breast and in the leg; she showed me the scars. Both were flesh wounds, and even as she bled she fought and would not surrender her son.
Some men in the militia think it is bad luck to shoot a woman, and perhaps for that reason the attackers retreated and went on to attack the next house. Naima and her children were able to escape and find refuge in another village.
But the Rapid Support Forces then attacked this new location, she said, and this time they grabbed Naima’s 14-year-old niece to rape. Naima blocked them and told them to rape her instead.
So two of the gunmen men stripped Naima naked and held her down, she said, while one of the attackers pulled down his pants and prepared to rape her. This was hard for her to talk about, but eventually she explained how she stopped the assault: She grabbed the man’s penis and yanked.
“I bent it like this,” she said, demonstrating a furious shaking movement. “I tried to break it.”
The man clubbed her with his gun and was ready to shoot her, but his partner was rattled and told him to leave her alone, she said. They left without raping her or her niece.
Naima may single-handedly have done more to disincentivize rape in Sudan than all the world leaders put together.
Naima’s mother was murdered, and her father and one of her sons are missing and may be dead. She led the surviving members of her family to the safety of a refugee camp across the border in Adré, Chad, where one of her adult sons remains hospitalized after brutal torture in Sudan. He suffered a mental breakdown and can’t talk about what he endured.
Nazir has nightmares but is recovering. He is devoted to his mother and told me gravely that he understands that she was shot for saving his life.
As for Naima, she has recovered from the bullet wounds but is impoverished. I asked if she was sending Nazir to school in the camp. She laughed at the idea that she could afford school fees. “I was embarrassed that I couldn’t make tea for you,” she said. “I have nothing.”
Yet she still supports orphans in the refugee camp. Helping those in danger is a priority for her.
I asked her whether she wanted revenge against the Sudanese Arabs who had caused her so much tragedy. Would she favor attacking Arab villages, killing the men and raping the women?
She looked shocked at the question. “We are human beings,” she told me firmly. “We are Muslims. We have principles. We don’t want this to happen to the Arabs.”
In one sense, Naima is exceptional; in another, she reflects the magnificent response of so many ordinary Sudanese and Chadians to the recent atrocities. Sudan has been largely abandoned by the world, including by President Biden and other leaders. But Sudanese civil society has been as heroic as the country’s military leadership has been deplorable.
Sudanese doctors work without pay, local groups set up soup kitchens and refugee volunteers train child victims of trauma to make handicrafts that they can sell to earn money. I spoke to one of these trainers, Um Salama Umar, who said that the Rapid Support Forces had murdered two of her sons and three of her sisters; now she tries to heal by helping traumatized children rebuild their lives.
Anybody who wants to help might consider grass-roots groups in the Mutual Aid Sudan coalition, MutualAidSudan.org.
So, yes, Sudan reveals the human capacity for evil, but it’s also a reminder of an equally powerful human capacity for strength, resilience and courage. It’s thus possible to return from a land aching from famine, massacres and rape and feel honored to be part of the same gallant species as those Sudanese like Naima who emerge from an ultimate test as moral exemplars for us all.
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2) Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War
The United States’ ability to influence events in the Mideast has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers.
By Roger Cohen, Sept. 29, 2024
Over almost a year of war in the Middle East, major powers have proved incapable of stopping or even significantly influencing the fighting, a failure that reflects a turbulent world of decentralized authority that seems likely to endure.
Stop-and-start negotiations between Israel and Hamas to end the fighting in Gaza, pushed by the United States, have repeatedly been described by the Biden administration as on the verge of a breakthrough, only to fail. The current Western-led attempt to avert a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon amounts to a scramble to avert disaster. Its chances of success seem deeply uncertain after the Israeli killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah on Friday.
“There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.”
The killing of Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world, leaves a vacuum that Hezbollah will most likely take a long time to fill. It is a major blow to Iran, the chief backer of Hezbollah, that may even destabilize the Islamic Republic. Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear.
“Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East and the author of a book on the world’s upheaval since Oct. 7. “Now the Islamic Republic is weakened, perhaps mortally, and one wonders who can even give an order for Hezbollah today.”
For many years, the United States was the only country that could bring constructive pressure to bear on both Israel and Arab states. It engineered the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, and the Israel-Jordan peace of 1994. Just over three decades ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, shook hands on the White House lawn in the name of peace, only for the fragile hope of that embrace to erode steadily.
The world, and Israel’s primary enemies, have since changed. America’s ability to influence Iran, its implacable foe for decades, and Iran’s proxies like Hezbollah, is marginal. Designated as terrorist organizations in Washington, Hamas and Hezbollah effectively exist beyond the reach of American diplomacy.
The United States does have enduring leverage over Israel, notably in the form of military aid that involved a $15 billion package signed this year by President Biden. But an ironclad alliance with Israel built around strategic and domestic political considerations, as well as the shared values of two democracies, means Washington will almost certainly never threaten to cut — let alone cut off — the flow of arms.
The overwhelming Israeli military response in Gaza to the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis and its seizure of some 250 hostages has drawn mild reprimands from Mr. Biden. He has called Israel’s actions “over the top,” for example. But American support for its embattled ally has been resolute as Palestinian casualties in Gaza have risen into the tens of thousands, many of them civilians.
The United States, under any conceivable presidency, is not about to desert a Jewish state whose existence had been increasingly questioned over the past year, from American campuses to the streets of the very Europe that embarked on the annihilation of the Jewish people less than a century ago.
“If U.S. policy toward Israel ever changed, it would only be at the margins,” Mr. Haass said, despite the growing sympathy, especially among young Americans, for the Palestinian cause.
Other powers have essentially been onlookers as the bloodshed has spread. China, a major importer of Iranian oil and a major supporter of anything that might weaken the American-led world order that emerged from the ruins in 1945, has little interest in donning the mantle of peacemaker.
Russia also has scant inclination to be helpful, especially on the eve of the Nov. 5 election in the United States. Reliant on Iran for defense technology and drones in its intractable war in Ukraine, it is no less enthused than China over any signs of American decline or any opportunity to bog America down in a Middle Eastern mire.
Based on his past behavior, the potential return to the White House of former President Donald J. Trump is likely seen in Moscow as the return of a leader who would prove complaisant toward President Vladimir V. Putin.
Among regional powers, none is strong enough or committed enough to the Palestinian cause to confront Israel militarily. In the end, Iran is cautious because it knows the cost of all-out war could be the end of the Islamic Republic; Egypt fears an enormous influx of Palestinian refugees; and Saudi Arabia seeks a Palestinian state, but would not put Saudi lives on the line for that cause.
As for Qatar, it funded Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars a year that went in part to the construction of a labyrinthine web of tunnels, some as deep as 250 feet, where Israeli hostages have been held. It enjoyed the complicity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw Hamas as an effective way to undermine the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and so undercut any chance of peace.
The disaster of Oct. 7 was also the culmination of the cynical manipulation, by Arab and Israeli leaders, of the Palestinian quest for statehood. A year on, nobody knows how to pick up the pieces.
So in their annual pilgrimage, now ongoing, world leaders troop to the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations, where the Security Council is largely paralyzed by Russian vetoes over any Ukraine-related resolutions and American vetoes over Israel-related resolutions.
The leaders listen to Mr. Biden depict, yet again, a world at an “inflection point” between rising autocracy and troubled democracies. They hear the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, deplore the “collective punishment” of the Palestinian people — a phrase that incensed Israel — in response to the “abhorrent acts of terror committed by Hamas almost a year ago.”
But Mr. Guterres’s words, like Mr. Biden’s, seem to echo in the strategic vacuum of an à la carte world order, suspended between the demise of Western domination and the faltering rise of alternatives to it. The means to pressure Hamas, Hezbollah and Israel all at once — and effective diplomacy would require leverage over all three — do not exist.
This unraveling without rebuilding has precluded effective action to stop the Israel-Gaza war. There is no global consensus on the need for peace or even a cease-fire. In the past, war in the Middle East led to soaring oil prices and tumbling markets, forcing the world’s attention. Now, said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, “the attitude is, ‘OK, so be it.’”
Absent any coherent and coordinated international response, Mr. Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader and a mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, face no consequences in pursuing a destructive course, whose endpoint is unclear but which will certainly involve the loss of more lives.
Mr. Netanyahu has shunned a serious American effort to bring about the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most important country in the Arab and Islamic world, because its price would be some serious commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the very thing he has devoted his political life to preventing.
Mr. Netanyahu’s interest in the prolonging of the war to sidestep a formal reprimand for the military and intelligence failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack — a catastrophe for which the buck stopped on the prime minister’s desk — complicates any diplomatic efforts. So does his attempt to avoid facing the personal charges of fraud and corruption brought against him. He is playing a waiting game, that now includes offering little or nothing until Nov. 5, when Mr. Trump, whom he considers a strong ally, may be elected.
Israeli families who send their children to war do not know how committed their commander in chief is to bringing those young soldiers home safely by seizing any viable opportunity for peace. This, many Israelis say, is corrosive to the soul of the nation.
As for Mr. Sinwar, the Israeli hostages he holds give him leverage. His apparent indifference to the massive loss of Palestinian life in Gaza affords him considerable sway over world opinion, which has progressively turned against Israel as more Palestinian children are killed.
In short, Mr. Sinwar has little reason to change course; and, in what Stephen Heintz, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund philanthropic organization has called “the age of turbulence,” the world is not about to change that course for him.
”The institutions that have guided international relations and global problem solving since the mid-20th century are clearly no longer capable of addressing the problems of the new millennium,” Mr. Heintz wrote in a recent essay. “They are inefficient, ineffective, anachronistic, and, in some cases, simply obsolete.”
That, too, has been a lesson of the year since Hamas struck.
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3) Israel Bombards Hezbollah in Lebanon and Strikes Yemen’s Houthis
The Israeli military said it struck the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah in response to recent attacks by the Iranian-backed Houthis that targeted Israel.
By Euan WardAaron Boxerman and Matthew Mpoke Bigg, September 29, 2024
![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/09/29/multimedia/29mideast-carousel-jmpq/29mideast-carousel-jmpq-square640.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
Israel’s military pounded Hezbollah targets in Lebanon on Sunday as it also carried out a strike against another Iranian-backed adversary, the Houthis, in Yemen.
The attacks in Lebanon are part of a major escalation of Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah over the past two weeks, after nearly a year of trading cross-border fire. This has increased the threat of an all-out regional war that could potentially draw in Iran, whose proxies include Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas in Gaza. In recent weeks, the Houthis have launched missiles at targets in Israel — and Israel’s military said the strikes on Sunday were a response.
The attack in Yemen came after Israel’s military said on Sunday that it had struck dozens of targets in Lebanon, including rocket launchers and buildings that it said were used for storing weapons, and announced that it had further targeted the group’s top leadership. At least four people were killed in eastern Lebanon, according to the country’s health ministry.
At least one strike hit the same area south of Beirut where Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed on Friday in an attack that Israel’s military said had hit the militia’s underground headquarters. On Sunday, video showed the extent of the damage in that area.
Mr. Nasrallah was a beacon for anti-Israel forces across the Middle East and beyond, and his death is a major blow to Hezbollah. It deprives the organization of a leader whose stature, experience, political relationships and rhetoric served as a powerful unifying force.
Both Hezbollah and Israel’s military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, have vowed to continue fighting.
Here’s what else to know:
· Hezbollah’s leadership: Two days after Mr. Nasrallah was killed and one day after announcing his death, Hezbollah has yet to provide information about his funeral — or name his successor. In the meantime, several other senior Hezbollah leaders have been confirmed dead. The Israeli military said on Sunday that it had killed Nabil Kaouk, the deputy head of the group’s central council, in an airstrike a day earlier. Hezbollah confirmed that death and also that of Ali Karaki, another top commander.
· Israeli prime minister: Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement on Saturday that he had ordered the assassination of Mr. Nasrallah because he could have rebuilt Hezbollah, no matter how battered. Mr. Netanyahu said that his death was necessary to advance Israel’s goal of allowing tens of thousands of displaced residents of northern Israel to return home. He said the work was “still incomplete.” Israel’s strikes in Lebanon in recent days have been a moment of triumph for the Israeli leader.
· The toll in Lebanon: The health ministry in Lebanon said that 14 paramedics had been killed over the past two days and that about half a million people had been displaced in recent weeks. Thousands of people have camped on the streets and beaches of Beirut, where some reacted to Mr. Nasrallah’s death with grief and shock. The World Food Program said it had plans to provide food assistance for up to a million people in shelters.
· International reaction: The White House wants a cease-fire and a diplomatic solution rather than all-out war, President Biden’s national security spokesman, John F. Kirby, told CNN on Sunday. For its part, Iran, Hezbollah’s main backer, has reacted with caution to Mr. Nasrallah’s killing. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, mourned publicly, calling on all Muslims to rise against Israel, but did not pledge retaliation or revenge.
Farnaz Fassihi and Edward Wong contributed reporting.
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4) Video shows that Israel most likely used 2,000-pound bombs in attack that killed Hezbollah leader.
By Aric Toler and Riley Mellen, September 28, 2024
A video published by the Israeli military showed that planes it said were used in the attack that killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on Friday night carried 2,000-pound bombs, according to munitions experts and a New York Times analysis.
The video showed eight planes fitted with at least 15 2,000-pound bombs, including the American-manufactured BLU-109 with a JDAM kit, a precision guidance system that attaches to bombs, according to Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician. These bombs, a type of munition known as bunker busters, can penetrate underground before detonating.
Wes Bryant, a former U.S. Air Force targeting specialist who also reviewed the video, agreed with the analysis. In text messages with The Times, he said the bombs were “exactly what I would expect” to be used in what Israel has said was an attack on Mr. Nasrallah in Hezbollah’s underground headquarters.
In May, the Biden administration announced it had paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because of concerns over civilian safety in Gaza.
The video, published Saturday on the Israeli military’s official Telegram channel with the caption “Israeli Air Force Fighter Jets Involved in the Elimination of Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah’s Central Headquarters in Lebanon,” shows at least eight planes in a row armed with 2,000-pound bombs. Some are too far away to clearly identify the exact model, but the closer planes are seen armed with BLU-109 bombs. That model of bomb is also identifiable when the video shows two planes taking off, with one plane carrying at least seven of those munitions. Then the video shows a plane returning at dusk to the Israeli air base without any bombs.
While the video does not show the planes dropping the bombs, Mr. Ball said that videos showing the explosions in the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut, as well as the damage caused, are consistent with the 2,000-pound bombs carried by the Israeli jets in the video. A New York Times analysis of verified videos, photos and satellite imagery showed that the attack destroyed at least four apartment buildings that were each at least seven stories tall.
Two senior Israeli defense officials told The Times that more than 80 bombs were dropped over a period of several minutes to kill Mr. Nasrallah, but did not confirm the type of munitions used. The Israeli military did not answer questions from The Times on the bombs seen in this video or used on the attack on Mr. Nasrallah. U.S. government officials referred questions on the munitions to the Israeli military.
Israel continued to pound Beirut’s southern suburbs on Saturday. Visual evidence analyzed by The Times shows at least 13 sites were struck on Friday and Saturday across at least three miles of densely developed city. The full extent of the strikes is unclear.
Lebanon’s health ministry said on Saturday that at least 33 people had been killed and more than 195 people injured by the strikes, and the toll is expected to rise with many still buried under rubble.
Mr. Nasrallah’s assassination was a stunning escalation of Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in a conflict that has gone on for nearly a year. Hezbollah began firing into northern Israel on Oct. 8 in solidarity with Hamas, which is also supported by Iran, and Israel frequently responded, intensifying its attacks dramatically over the last two weeks. That has fueled fears of an all-out regional war that could draw in bigger players like Iran.
A correction was made on Sept. 29, 2024: An earlier version of this report misstated the number of munitions carried by an Israeli military plane. It was at least seven, not six.
Devon Lum, Aaron Boxerman, Eric Schmitt and Ronen Bergman contributed reporting. McKinnon de Kuyper contributed video editing.
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5) There’s a Dangerous Misconception About the Military’s Obligations to the President
By Graham Parsons, Sept. 29, 2024
Dr. Parsons is a professor of philosophy at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he studies and teaches military ethics.
By James Marshall
The prospect of a second Trump administration has rekindled a debate from four years ago about the proper role of the military in our democracy.
During the tumultuous period before and after the 2020 presidential election, several extraordinary conflicts took place between Donald Trump and senior leaders of the military. In June 2020, for example, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said publicly that active-duty military should not be used to control protests in American cities — despite a threat from Mr. Trump to do precisely that.
Likewise, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took a series of unusual steps during the final months of the Trump administration to protect the country from a president who he believed was looking for ways to remain in power. General Milley even went as far as to solicit assurances from the military chain of command that it would not launch a nuclear strike on Mr. Trump’s order without his involvement.
Recent reporting has raised concerns that a second Trump administration would once again strain relations between the military and civilian authorities. Mr. Trump and his potential appointees are apparently considering deploying the military for a variety of purposes that might invite scrutiny from military leaders: to patrol the border, arrest undocumented immigrants, combat urban crime and quell protests.
Now, as then, a question arises: When is the military permitted (and perhaps obligated) to criticize or even refuse an order from a commander in chief — and when must it defer?
Of course, if an order is clearly illegal, service members are legally bound to disobey it. But the law in this space can be ambiguous. For example, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally prohibits using the U.S. military for domestic policing purposes, but that prohibition has exceptions — and the Insurrection Act of 1807 grants the president the authority to unilaterally deploy the military to restore domestic law and order. A president’s advisers have plenty of wiggle room to make reasonable-sounding legal defenses of domestic policing operations.
This sort of legal uncertainty might seem to dictate a very strict policy of military deference. Indeed, people on both the right and the left have criticized General Milley and Mr. Esper for their actions in 2020, arguing that they overstepped, undermining the authority of the commander in chief and compromising the military’s political neutrality. The assumption here is that political neutrality means the military must obey all presidential orders, as long as those orders are not clearly illegal.
But this assumption is mistaken. It is true that political neutrality means having the military generally defer to civilian authority. But neutrality also means not letting the military become a partisan political tool, which is why service members are prohibited from, among other things, taking part in political events in uniform. If the president orders the military to take actions that jeopardize its neutrality, the military is ethically justified in criticizing and even resisting the order, even if it is not clearly illegal.
Critics of General Milley and Mr. Esper fail to appreciate that political neutrality exists to solve two problems. The first is to ensure that the military does not usurp power and turn on the society it is designed to defend. Insofar as the military remains obedient to civilian authorities, there is no risk of a military coup.
If avoiding military coups were the only problem that political neutrality was meant to solve, equating neutrality with obedience would suffice, and actions like General Milley’s probably would violate it. But political neutrality exists to solve a second problem, as well: to ensure that the military is subordinate only to legitimate democratic authority — not to, say, a tyrant.
In a political system like ours, unlike in an autocracy, the people are the ultimate sovereign. This is why, when members of the military take their oath of office, they pledge to defend the Constitution, not the president. Political neutrality is a democratic ideal. As such, it is not a promise of absolute military subordination to the executive. On the contrary, it is a commitment to uphold the political order that ensures the sovereignty of the people. This requires a clear separation of the military from the president’s partisan political agenda.
For this reason, the military has an obligation to object to or resist certain commands that blur this line. If the president orders the military to disperse protesters who are upset that the president will not leave office after losing an election, military leaders could be obligated to refuse on the ground that the operation threatens the democratic order.
If the president orders the military to police urban areas, military leaders could be obligated to refuse on the ground that the operation threatens the due process rights of civilians (because the military is designed to confront combatants, not enforce laws in a civil society). Mere passive obedience to orders like these would be inconsistent with the demands of political neutrality.
Regardless of who ends up in the White House in 2025, it is crucial to a just and stable society that we understand how the relationship between the military and civilian leaders ought to function. Contrary to a dangerously naïve conception of military obligation, resisting a legal order is not necessarily a violation of political neutrality. Military resistance does not always undermine the rightful authority of civilian leaders, nor is it always tantamount to putting one’s personal political or moral convictions above one’s loyalty.
Sometimes resistance is essential to preserving our democracy. And that is one of the fundamental purposes of our military.
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6) Israel Conducts Raids in Lebanon to Set Up Possible Invasion, Officials Say
Military officials said no decision had yet been made about whether or when to launch a major ground operation targeting Hezbollah. An Israeli airstrike killed a Hamas leader in Lebanon, extending a string of attacks against Iranian-backed militias.
Patrick KingsleyRonen BergmanNatan Odenheimer and Mike Ives, September 30, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/09/30/world/israel-lebanon-hezbollah
An apartment block damaged by a blast on Monday in Beirut, Lebanon. Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Israeli commando units have made brief incursions into Lebanese territory in recent days to prepare for a possible wider invasion targeting Hezbollah, although no decision has yet been made about whether or when to begin one, officials said.
The raids — confirmed by six Israeli officers and officials, and one Western official — have focused on gathering intelligence about Hezbollah positions close to Israel’s northern border, as well as on identifying Hezbollah tunnels and military infrastructure in preparation to attack them from the air or the ground.
The officials all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter. The incursions follow months of similar covert missions in which Israeli special forces briefly crossed the Lebanon border for reconnaissance, but have increased in intensity in recent days as commanders prepared for a wider maneuver, three of the officials said.
American officials said on Monday that the United States has been trying to dissuade Israel from conducting a major ground invasion, and they believe those efforts have been productive. Israel is now planning smaller, targeted incursions, these officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic negotiations and intelligence reports.
Publicly, however, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, has hinted that Israel could send ground troops into Lebanon. On Monday, he told mayors from Israeli towns along the border with Lebanon that “the next stage of the war against Hezbollah will soon commence.” In a statement released by his office, Mr. Gallant pledged that the next phase would “constitute a significant factor in changing the security situation,” allowing the tens of thousands of Israelis who have fled Hezbollah rocket fire over the past year to return to their homes.
The preparations come as Israel conducts a far-reaching string of attacks across the Middle East aimed at Iranian-backed militias including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, released an English-language video addressing the Iranian public, saying, “The people of Iran should know — Israel stands with you.” He reiterated his threats against Iran, saying, “There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach. There is nowhere we will not go to protect our people and protect our country.”
Here’s what else to know:
· Hamas official killed: Hamas said on Monday that its leader in Lebanon, Fatah Sherif, had been killed with his family in an airstrike on a refugee camp for Palestinians in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military said he had coordinated Hamas’s ties with Hezbollah. The main United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on Monday that Mr. Sharif had been an employee of the agency but had been placed on leave in March after it received allegations “about his political activities.”
· Hezbollah’s future: Sheikh Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary general of Hezbollah, said in a televised address on Monday that the group would name a leader to replace Hassan Nasrallah “at the closest opportunity.” Israel killed Mr. Nasrallah on Friday in a bombardment in a densely populated neighborhood near Beirut, and launched dozens more attacks on Hezbollah targets on Sunday, targeting rocket launchers and buildings that Israel said the militia had used to store weapons.
· Beirut strike: Israel said it was behind a blast in Beirut that hit a residential building overnight. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a militant group based in Lebanon and Gaza, said that three of its members had been killed in the blast, in the largely Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Cola. The group is mostly known for a string of airline hijackings and bombings decades ago. It was the first known Israeli attack in central Beirut since Israel and Hezbollah fought a war in 2006.
· Yemen: Israeli warplanes attacked power plants and shipping infrastructure on Sunday in Yemen, where the Iran-backed Houthi militia has been conducting attacks against Israel and menacing trade in the Red Sea. The Houthis have been acting in solidarity with Hamas, the Iran-backed group fighting Israel in the Gaza Strip.
· Gaza: An Israeli strike in northern Gaza on Sunday killed at least four Palestinians and wounded several others, according to the Palestinian civil defense. The Israeli military said it had struck Hamas militants who were using a school-turned-shelter as a command and control center.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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7) U.S. officials believe they have talked Israel out of a full Invasion of Lebanon
By Julian E. Barnes, Reporting from Washington, September 30, 2024
Israeli vehicles staged in northern Israel on Sunday. Israeli special operations forces have been conducting raids into southern Lebanon. Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
American officials said on Monday that they believed they had persuaded Israel not to conduct a major ground invasion of southern Lebanon.
The understanding came after intense talks over the weekend. The United States saw some signs that Israel was preparing to move into Lebanon, and some American officials believed a major ground operation was imminent.
After the discussions, U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence and diplomatic negotiations, said they believed Israel was planning only smaller, targeted incursions into southern Lebanon. The recent raids by Israeli special operations forces would be designed to eliminate fighting positions from which Hezbollah has attacked towns in northern Israel.
But Israeli officials assured their American counterparts that they did not intend to follow up those incursions with a bigger operation by conventional forces or by occupying parts of southern Lebanon. U.S. officials said they believed the commandos would quickly pull back after the operations were finished.
It is not clear if Israel has made a final decision, and it is possible that a full-scale invasion could still follow targeted raids, despite the White House’s concerns.
On Monday, after the raids became public, U.S. officials said the possibility of “mission creep” remained, and that Israel could decide it needed to support the raids with a larger force. But for now, American officials believe, Israel will not conduct a full-scale invasion.
U.S. officials have tried to prevent a wider regional conflict since the war in Gaza began last October after Hamas-led attacks in Israel.
Israel eventually cut back the intensity of its bombing campaign in Gaza, but months after the U.S. military had urged a shift to more targeted operations. The United States wanted the Israeli military to eschew major combat operations and said that operations in the city of Rafah needed to be more precise. The eventual Israeli operations in Rafah were extensive.
This month, some officials in the U.S. government have watched the Israeli operations against Hezbollah anxiously, fearing that the extensive attacks would provoke Iran to join the fight far more openly. But other officials believe that Israel’s actions have dramatically curbed Hezbollah’s military power. The risk of Iranian intervention remains, American officials said.
Still, to keep the wider conflict in check, American officials want to persuade Israel not to move large number of forces into Lebanon. U.S. and French officials had been pushing for a cease-fire proposal. But after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel authorized the strike on Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, U.S. officials said that for now their cease-fire plan had been withdrawn.
Despite hitting pause on the effort to broker a cease-fire, Americans have tried to convince Israeli officials that a ground invasion would be counterproductive.
American intelligence agencies stuck by their assessment throughout September that any sort of large-scale invasion of southern Lebanon would court disaster. While Israel’s strikes have diminished Hezbollah’s caches of weapons and hurt its ability to launch rocket attacks, the group’s forces maintain dug-in positions in the hilly and easily defended terrain of southern Lebanon.
The Hezbollah tunnel network largely remains intact, and American officials assessed that Hezbollah fighters would be able to move through it quickly to ambush advancing Israeli forces.
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8) U.S. and Allies Sound Alarm Over War Ties Among Axis of Adversaries
The Biden administration is struggling to halt cooperation among Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. It feels urgency over the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East while also aiming to protect Taiwan.
By Edward Wong, Sept. 30, 2024
Reporting from New York during the United Nations General Assembly and from Ukraine and China on trips with the U.S. secretary of state
In speeches and closed-door talks, most recently at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, U.S. officials have been sounding the alarm on the coalition of powers working to strengthen one another’s militaries to defeat America’s partners. Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Call it the Axis of Anger.
It is ripped from the pages of the World Wars or the Cold War: a coalition of powers working to strengthen one another’s militaries to defeat America’s partners and, by extension, the United States.
That is how the Biden administration characterizes Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, as those nations align more closely. U.S. officials have been sounding the alarm in speeches and closed-door talks around the world, most recently at the United Nations General Assembly in New York that ended over the weekend.
As the conflict in the Middle East widens — and as the world watches for whether Iran will retaliate against Israel for the killing on Friday of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and its strikes across Lebanon — U.S. officials feel an even greater sense of urgency.
Yet the partnerships are not as unified as they might appear, and U.S. officials say they still see ways to slow that trend.
At a Security Council meeting on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the council’s priority should be stopping the stream of military aid — including ballistic missiles, drones and artillery shells — from North Korea and Iran to Russia. And he noted that China had sent machine tools, microelectronics and other supplies to Russia’s defense industry as President Vladimir V. Putin presses his invasion of Ukraine.
“If countries stopped supporting Russia, Putin’s invasion would soon come to an end,” Mr. Blinken said.
Russia, in turn, is helping those nations meet their ambitions, including by sharing nuclear technology and “space information” with Iran, Mr. Blinken said. Another senior U.S. official said that while the nuclear aid to Iran seemed to be for use in its civilian nuclear program for now, the space information was more alarming — it could eventually allow Iran to develop capable intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Russia is also considering arming the Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen with advanced anti-ship cruise missiles, U.S. officials say.
Those nations have denied some of the specific American assertions. And they say it is the United States that is forming blocs around the world to maintain dominance. On Saturday at the United Nations, Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, said the Americans were “merely seeking to preserve their hegemony and to govern everything.”
But there is no doubt those powerful countries seeking to counter the United States have grown their military, diplomatic and economic cooperation.
Leaders of U.S. partner nations are quick to point out the growing threats. In an interview with The New York Times at the United Nations last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine denounced the shipments of arms to Russia from North Korea and Iran.
Sitting next to him, the prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, said, “This is a global issue, because the closer cooperation between North Korea, Iran and Russia is a challenge for all of us, of course, including the U.S., and with China helping one way or the other.”
Some of the leaders of the adversarial nations are making flashy displays of their alliances, as if throwing a gauntlet down at the Americans. In June, Mr. Putin revived a Cold War-era mutual defense pact with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, during a visit to Pyongyang, the capital. Those two nations are “all in” on anti-American cooperation, said the senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence.
Two weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow and Beijing announced a “no limits” partnership in a 5,000-word joint statement when Mr. Putin visited President Xi Jinping in China.
“The militarization of these relationships is very remarkable,” said Michael Kimmage, a former State Department official and a professor of Cold War history and U.S.-Russia relations who is a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. “The overt part is the most worrying aspect for the U.S.”
Mr. Kimmage cautioned that “it’s possible to over-interpret the degree of political alignment,” and that “what the U.S. got wrong during the Cold War is that they interpreted more homogeneity in this than was the actual reality.”
In important ways, the current alignments are a continuation of the Cold War. Now, as then, the center of gravity of the anti-American partnerships is Russia. That nation has pitted itself against an American and European partner — Ukraine — and is trying to wipe it out that. Russia is attracting aid from North Korea, Iran and China.
In fact, Ukraine has become the kind of proxy-war battlefield that was common during the Cold War, in places like the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam. The shadow of the Korean War, which never officially ended, is even at play here: While North Korea is giving weapons to Russia, South Korea has done the same with Ukraine, via the United States.
But coalitions are not as hardened as they appear, which the United States discovered in the sprawling conflicts of the 20th century, sometimes belatedly. And today they are based not so much on a shared ideology — communism was a unifying factor for much of the Cold War — as on opposition to U.S. power rooted in each autocratic nation’s specific interests. Analysts say the partnerships now are marriages of convenience or pragmatism.
For instance, the theocratic leaders of Iran obviously have a different ideological perspective than do the leaders of Russia, China or North Korea, known formally as the D.P.R.K., which all share a communist history.
China, the most powerful of those nations and the greatest challenger to American power, does not seem intent on knitting together a cohesive coalition based on a grand ideology, the way the Soviet Union once tried to do.
“China’s foreign policy is drawing the dividing line using the U.S. as the criteria,” said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center. “What it means is that when China looks at Russia, D.P.R.K. and Iran, it sees anti-U. S. partners.”
“China believes it doesn’t have an alliance or axis with these countries, as the very thing that anchors their alignment is the U.S.,” she added. “But for the end result, the motivation matters much less than the substance, and the relationships come across as an axis. When it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.”
For months, the Biden administration has warned China against commercial trade that allows Russia to rebuild its defense industry. The Biden administration has imposed sanctions on more than 300 Chinese entities. But U.S. officials also say China has not given direct weapons aid to Russia.
China has the world’s second-largest economy and does robust trade with the United States and its allies. American officials note that Mr. Xi appears to want to keep China within the global network of institutions and commerce that the United States has dominated for decades. They say he believes that America is in terminal decline, and that his aim is to displace the United States within that network rather than build a rival global system.
Mr. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, often meet with Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, and occasionally with Mr. Xi. Their idea is that keeping up high-level diplomacy, along with bolstering U.S. military power in Asia, will help deter China from invading Taiwan or making other aggressive moves. On Friday, Mr. Blinken and Mr. Wang met in New York and talked about areas of both cooperation and concern.
“Our intent is not to decouple Russia from China,” Mr. Blinken told reporters afterward. “But insofar as that relationship involves providing Russia what it needs to continue this war, that’s a problem, and it’s a problem for us and it’s a problem for many other countries, notably in Europe, because right now Russia presents the greatest threat, not just to Ukrainian security, but to European security since the end of the Cold War.”
U.S. and allied officials say the kind of Sino-Soviet split that began between the late 1950s and early 1960s is unlikely. But European officials are calling out China’s aid to Russia in the hopes that Chinese leaders will realize they are placing their economic ties with Europe in jeopardy.
On a trip to Ukraine with Mr. Blinken this month, David Lammy, the foreign secretary of Britain, said, “We’re seeing this new axis — Russia, Iran, North Korea; we urge China not to throw their lot in with this group of renegades, renegades in the end that are costing lives here in Ukraine.”
U.S. and allied officials are also carefully watching Iran to see whether there is a diplomatic opening, perhaps through future nuclear negotiations, to try to get it to limit its cooperation with Russia. They are wary, because Iran has a decades-long history of hostility with the United States and Israel. But analysts say Iranian leaders are intent on getting the United States and its allies to lift sanctions on Iran.
In a speech on Tuesday at the United Nations, the country’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, used conciliatory language, saying, “We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”
After leaving New York, Mr. Pezeshkian wrote on social media that his government “is seeking political and economic diplomacy from west to east, from New York to Samarkand.”
Julian E. Barnes and Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting.
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9) U.S. Ramps Up Hunt for Uranium to End Reliance on Russia
Miners aim to meet a growing demand for emissions-free energy, though a failure to clean up old sites haunts the industry.
By Ivan Penn and Rebecca F. Elliott, Photographs and Video by Jesse Rieser, Sept. 30, 2024
Ivan Penn reported from Kaibab National Forest in Arizona, and Rebecca Elliott from Sweetwater County, Wyo.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/business/energy-environment/uranium-russia-united-states.html
Uranium ore held by Matthew Germansen, an assistant mine superintendent at Pinyon Plain.
More than 1,400 feet below an Arizona pine forest, miners are blasting tunnels in search of a radioactive element that can be used to make electricity.
Two states north, in central Wyoming, drillers have been digging well after well in the desert, where that element — uranium — is buried in layers of sandstone.
Uranium mines are ramping up across the West, spurred by rising demand for electricity and federal efforts to cut Russia out of the supply chain for U.S. nuclear fuel.
Those twin pressures have helped lift uranium prices to their highest levels in more than 15 years, according to the consulting firm TradeTech, helping to resuscitate mining regions that entered a steep decline toward the end of the Cold War.
Nuclear power is coming back into vogue in the United States as politicians and investors embrace the technology as a way to meet growing energy demand without releasing the gases responsible for climate change. This month, Microsoft, which is building energy-hungry data centers, said it would pay an energy company to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, closed since 2019.
Uranium is just one of the elements that corporations and government officials are seeking to produce domestically to help the country transition away from oil, gas and coal. Lithium and nickel are some of the others.
Whether the new generation of American uranium prospectors thrives or fails will largely depend on how long that momentum lasts — and whether prices remain high enough to encourage companies to dust off old mines.
“I liken it to a broken arm that’s been in a cast for a long time,” said John W. Cash, chief executive of Ur-Energy, a mining firm that is ramping up uranium production in central Wyoming. “The muscle atrophies, and that’s where our industry is.”
While some communities have welcomed the new investment, others — particularly in Arizona — are pushing back over concerns about the potential health and environmental consequences of harvesting radioactive materials near homes and livestock.
“We’re already contaminated here in the Southwest,” said Carletta Tilousi, a member of the Havasupai, a tribe that recognizes land near a uranium mine in Kaibab National Forest, south of the Grand Canyon, as sacred. “This is our homeland.”
Workers began extracting uranium from that mine, Pinyon Plain, late last year. Owned and operated by a company called Energy Fuels, the facility is composed of a web of damp, 10-foot-by-10-foot tunnels that are a five-minute elevator ride below the ground. Miners with hand-held jackleg drills and explosives remove dark gray chunks of uranium-rich ore from the earth.
Back above ground, that rock is trucked some 260 miles northeast to the White Mesa uranium mill in Utah, where workers turn it into a bright powder known as yellowcake. That concentrated form of uranium is then further processed, enriched and turned into fuel for nuclear power plants.
In 1980, the United States produced nearly 44 million pounds of yellowcake, federal data show, enough to feed most domestic nuclear reactors today.
But nuclear power fell out of favor after accidents that included a cooling failure at Three Mile Island in 1979 and an explosion at the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl plant in 1986. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia agreed to dilute weapons-grade uranium for use in U.S. reactors, flooding the market.
Last year, the United States produced just 50,000 pounds of yellowcake. The rest was harvested in mines from Canada to Kazakhstan, and enriched in several countries, including Russia.
The United States is now seeking to reduce its dependence on Russia after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022. A law that went into effect this year will block American power plants from buying Russian uranium by 2028. Roughly a quarter of the enriched uranium used in U.S. nuclear reactors comes from Russia, federal data shows.
Consultants expect domestic mining activity to rebound relatively quickly, with U.S. production reaching roughly six million pounds of yellowcake around 2028.
But people who live near uranium mines, including Indigenous tribes, fear such a quick rebound.
Much of the activity during the last American uranium boom of the 1950s through the 1980s happened on or near Native lands. When prices collapsed, companies abandoned hundreds of mines. Scores of those sites have yet to be cleaned up, leaving residents exposed to elevated levels of radiation, which can increase the risk of developing lung and bone cancer and other diseases.
Signs put up on Navajo land along Energy Fuels’ transportation route in Arizona by the Environmental Protection Agency warn people against “Building, Gathering, Playing, Corrals, Digging.” The agency has been working with the Navajo Nation and mining companies to assess and clean up contamination.
This summer, members of the Navajo and Havasupai tribes were among those who staged protests seeking to block Energy Fuels from trucking ore through Navajo land. Energy Fuels voluntarily suspended uranium transportation in August and said it was working with the tribes.
Mable Franklin, 66, was among the Navajos who protested. Referring to the abandonment of mines in the area, she said, “It’s just something that shouldn’t have happened.”
Environmental regulations and radiation safety have improved over the past half-century, in part because of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act. Companies operating today, including Energy Fuels, are required to monitor radiation levels in the soil and water around their sites, as well as post bonds to cover cleanup costs.
Tribal communities are particularly concerned about their groundwater. In the tunnels at Pinyon Plain, water levels can be at the midpoint of an adult’s calf muscle from moisture in the rock.
But a former Arizona regulator who was charged with approving state permits, Misael Cabrera, said the mine does not pierce underground barriers to the major aquifer that supplies drinking water throughout the state.
Mr. Cabrera, a former director of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, said Pinyon Plain was “the most stringently regulated facility in the state of Arizona.”
In an Aug. 13 letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Arizona’s attorney general requested a supplemental environmental impact study related to surrounding aquifers. The letter followed an Energy Fuels report to state regulators about elevated levels of heavy metals in water pumped from the mine in 2023. The company said that the pumped water is placed in a pond designed to protect the surrounding area.
Miners today are exposed to far less radiation on the job than they were in the 1970s. Risks differ, though, depending on the type of mine. Underground mines can be hazardous for workers if poorly ventilated.
Energy Fuels said it did not operate and abandon mines on Navajo land. The company, which is based in Lakewood, Colo., said it pumped fresh air underground through enormous ducts to help clear harmful gases such as carbon monoxide and radon.
In an interview, the company’s chief executive, Mark Chalmers, said he knew well the toll that uranium mining had taken on Native American communities. The owner of the first mine where Mr. Chalmers worked was dying of cancer from inhaling toxic air in a uranium mine when he gave Mr. Chalmers part ownership of the operation, with a warning: “Don’t be stupid like I am.”
Because of that experience, Mr. Chalmers said, he has made sure his mines are properly ventilated. Energy Fuels said it also protected neighboring communities by controlling dust, monitoring radiation levels and cleaning up sites.
Even so, many tribal communities filed lawsuits that blocked Pinyon Plain’s mining operations for a time. The tribes claimed that the company was mining on sacred ground. Eventually, the courts determined that the operation could proceed, and Arizona regulators approved permits in 2022, Mr. Cabrera said.
The uptick in mining activity hasn’t sparked the same pushback in other places, some of which are more remote.
In Wyoming, Ur-Energy’s Lost Creek mine is some 15 miles from the nearest town, Bairoil, home to fewer than 100 people. The company’s extraction process is akin to the techniques used to produce oil and gas. Rather than removing chunks of rock from the earth, the company is drilling hundreds of small wells in the desert, then sending groundwater mixed with oxygen and carbon dioxide into the uranium-rich sandstone below.
Some 450 feet beneath the surface, uranium dissolves into that fluid, and Ur-Energy pumps it back up. Nearby, the company sends the solution through a series of tanks and a vacuum dryer, processing it into yellowcake. The water is reused to extract more uranium.
This technique is the most common way of producing uranium, partly because it is generally less expensive and requires fewer people than other approaches.
That’s one reason uranium mining is unlikely to ever become the economic engine it once was. Fewer than 400 people worked in the industry in the United States last year, down from around 22,000 in 1979, according to federal records.
Byron T. Seeley lives and works as a potter north of Lost Creek, in the onetime uranium boomtown of Jeffrey City. The wind regularly gusts more than 30 miles per hour there, whipping past abandoned homes.
“I doubt the town’s ever coming back,” Mr. Seeley said. “Nobody wants to live someplace like this.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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