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Israel’s Genocide Day 370: Israel strangles northern Gaza in apparent implementation of the ‘Generals’ Plan’
Israeli strikes target the last functioning bakery in northern Gaza while Israeli troops continue to besiege and invade Jabalia for the sixth day in a row. Meanwhile, Israeli forces encounter heavy resistance in southern Lebanon.
Casualties
· 42,065 + killed* and at least 97,886 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*
· 749+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
· 2,141 Lebanese killed and more than 10,096 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,189.
· The Israeli army recognizes the death of 720 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 October 10, 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 October 9, 2024.
*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on October 9, 2024. The counting is based on the Lebanese official date for the beginning of “the Israeli aggression on Lebanon,” when Israel began airstrikes on Lebanese territory after the beginning of Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza.
**** 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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On this Wrongful Conviction Day, Leonard Peltier, the longest-serving Indigenous political prisoner, is incarcerated in lockdown-modified operations conditions at USP Coleman I, operated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).
Yet, in this moment of silence, Leonard speaks.
To honor his birthday and all those who are unjustly convicted and incarcerated, the Leonard Peltier Official Ad Hoc Committee has released a video of Leonard Peltier that is going viral. Narrated by renowned scholar Ward Churchill and set to a video created by award-winning filmmaker Suzie Baer, the film most importantly centers Leonard’s personal reflection on his 80th year.
Jenipher Jones, Mr. Peltier's lead counsel, commented, "This powerfully moving film captures the essence of who I know Leonard to be. I am grateful to Professor Churchill and Suzie Baer for their work and longstanding advocacy of Leonard. As the recent execution of Marcellus Williams-Imam Khaliifah Williams shows us, we as a society bear a responsibility to uplift the cases of all those who are wrongfully convicted and also hold the government accountable to do that for which it professes to exist. We must challenge our impulses of blind blood-thirst for guilt and the use of our legal systems to carry out this malignant pathology. There is absolutely no lawful justification for Leonard's incarceration."
“Leonard Peltier is Native elder whose wrongful incarceration is shameful. His continued imprisonment exemplifies the historical cruelty of the US Government toward Native people. The US BOP's treatment of Leonard Peltier is unlawful, and he deserves his freedom.” —Suzie Baer
Leonard's Statement: Peltier 80th Statement.pdf:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ABHSRNdyB8SKn0I&id=DFF2DD874157D44A%21118178&cid=DFF2DD874157D44A&parId=root&parQt=sharedby&o=OneUp
To view the film, please visit:
https://tinyurl.com/Peltier80thPresentation
We hope to have additional updates on Leonard soon. In the meantime, please engage our calls to action or donate to his defense efforts.
Miigwech.
Donate/ActNow:
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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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) A harrowing escape from an apartment, followed by flooding and uncertainty.
By Patricia MazzeiReporting from the Tampa Bay area, October 10, 2024
Hurricane Milton flooded an apartment complex in Clearwater, Fla. Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times
Andreína Zapiaín and her family watched with growing desperation Wednesday night as the floodwaters rose outside their apartment complex in Clearwater, Fla. Hurricane Milton’s winds howled, whipping a palm tree against the wall of their second-floor unit.
Two weeks ago, when Hurricane Helene hit Florida, the complex — which housed many working-class, mostly Hispanic residents — had endured a flood about thigh-high, said Ms. Zapiaín, 31. But on Wednesday with Milton, the water crept higher and higher.
Ms. Zapiaín and her family realized the swell would only get worse, she said. Despite the dark, they decided to leave. They figured they could swim and trudge through the flood to a higher building in the same complex where some of their relatives lived.
Her husband lifted their 11-year-old daughter onto his back and led the way, Ms. Zapiaín said. She followed behind them with her 25-year-old cousin. She could hear first-floor residents trapped by the water behind their closed doors screaming for help, she said, but could do nothing to help them.
At 4 feet 9 inches tall, Ms. Zapiaín could barely keep her chin above the water.
“I couldn’t touch the bottom, really,” she said in Spanish as she recalled the deepest point of the flood. “I was floating. I think it’s the worst thing I’ve experienced in my life.”
In the darkness, facing the wind and fighting the water, she prayed. “I asked God that we wouldn’t run into anything underwater,” Ms. Zapiaín said.
She and her family made it to their relatives’ apartment, a long stretch of buildings away.
By morning, the flood had receded a bit, but the water level still covered the doorknobs on the first-floor apartment below them. On the street, pickup trucks peeked out above the water. Some sedans and hatchbacks were still nearly covered.
Sheriff’s deputies and other rescuers commandeered small boats to help stranded people reach safety. One woman carried an infant. Another family clutched two small dogs.
A rescuer in an orange vest waded through the flood and knocked on the doors of first-floor units.
Ms. Zapiaín, a Venezuelan immigrant who arrived in the United States two months ago, stood on the side of an elevated road, looking down at the destruction and chaos. She worried that one of her downstairs neighbors, an older man who lived alone, had not escaped. She yelled for a rescue team not only to knock on his door but also to push it in to make sure he was safe.
“I kind of want to swim there myself,” she said.
Later, more rescuers arrived carrying red paint to mark units that had been checked — and tools to break down doors.
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2) Rubble, and Defiance
By David Guttenfelder, October 10, 2024
The Dahiya, a collection of neighborhoods on the southern outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, was in ruins, smoke still rising from the rubble of destroyed buildings.
The Israeli military has warned Lebanese civilians to evacuate many areas as it pursues its campaign to eliminate the leaders of the militant group and political party Hezbollah, who live among the general population. Dahiya has been a stronghold for the militant group.
Hezbollah began striking Israeli positions with rockets last October, a show of support for the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel from Gaza. Now, after almost a year of cross-border rocket fire and the assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Israeli and Hezbollah are fighting on the ground. Israel’s military has been bombarding Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon, including in the Dahiya, and said this week that it had sent more troops to Lebanon to join the fight against Hezbollah.
Last week, Hezbollah gave news organizations including The New York Times a tour of three buildings in the Dahiya area that were hit in recent airstrikes. Hezbollah members were not near reporters as they interviewed residents and had no say over what would be published.
The journalists, wearing blue body armor and helmets marked “Press,” were escorted through the streets, passing downed power lines and rubble.
Our first stop was at the vast heap of concrete and twisted rebar shown above. Two days earlier, Israeli bombs had brought down a whole building there.
It was a residential apartment block, though it was also home to Al-Sirat TV, a Lebanese religious and cultural network that has a pro-Hezbollah slant. Residents said the building had been mostly evacuated, but there were concerns that there might be bodies buried in the rubble, and rescuers cannot bring in excavation equipment to begin searching while the Israeli bombardment persists.
On one yellow sign was a defiant message.
“No banner of ours will fall,” it said.
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3) U.N. Says Israel Opened Fire on Peacekeepers in Lebanon
Israel’s military said it was looking into the claim. The U.N. force in Lebanon said two peacekeepers were wounded.
By Euan Ward and Liam Stack, Oct. 10, 2024
Euan Ward reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and Liam Stack from Tel Aviv.
“At least 65 health workers have been killed in Lebanon since Israel intensified its offensive there against Hezbollah three weeks ago, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday. It added that the agency had recorded 16 “attacks on health care” across the country in the same period of time.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/10/world/middleeast/lebanon-israel-hezbollah.html
Rescuers searching for survivors at a civil defense base in southern Lebanon early on Thursday. Credit...Bilal Kashmar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israeli forces fired on United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon on Thursday and wounded two of them, according to the U.N. force.
The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon — commonly known by its acronym, UNIFIL — said Israeli tank fire hit an observation tower at the force’s headquarters in Naqoura and that soldiers also struck the entrance of a bunker at a separate base nearby where peacekeepers were sheltering.
“Any deliberate attack on peacekeepers is a grave violation of international humanitarian law,” the U.N. force said in a statement on Thursday, adding that it was following up with the Israeli military. When asked for comment, Israel’s military said it was “looking into the reports” that its forces had fired on peacekeepers.
Israel’s military continued to pound Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, part of its broadening campaign to cripple the Iranian-backed militant group that for a year has been firing rockets across the border. Israeli warplanes have pummeled Hezbollah’s stronghold south of Beirut, targeting and killing its leader and other senior commanders. Last week, Israeli ground troops invaded southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah holds sway, and they have been battling the militants in deadly and close combat in the days since.
UNIFIL stressed that it was paramount for Israel, Hezbollah and other actors to “to ensure the safety and security” of its personnel and facilities, noting that the episode on Thursday came amid intensified combat that was “causing widespread destruction of towns and villages in south Lebanon.”
Last week, a UNIFIL spokesman said Israel’s military had established new positions beside a peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon and been firing at Hezbollah positions from those locations — raising concerns about the safety of the peacekeepers.
The spokesman, Andrea Tenenti, said Israel’s military had asked UNIFIL to relocate its personnel as it invaded southern Lebanon but that the mission had declined to do so. An Israeli military official confirmed the presence near that peacekeeping base, and said that Hezbollah was launching rockets from next to the base with impunity.
The two soldiers injured on Thursday — who the peacekeeping force said were hospitalized but whose wounds were “not serious” — were from Indonesia, according to a U.N. official briefed on the attacks.
The peacekeepers inside the bunker in the second episode — at a base in the town of Labbouneh, about two miles from Naqoura — were Italian, said the official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. UNIFIL said vehicles and communications equipment were damaged.
It also said that a day earlier Israeli soldiers had “fired at and disabled” the security cameras around the perimeter of the U.N. facility in Labbouneh.
UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, has been tasked since 1978 with maintaining peace along a volatile 75-mile stretch called the Blue Line, the de facto border to which Israel withdrew after ending its occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000.
The town of Naqoura has been home to UNIFIL headquarters for decades. While other troops have been injured since last October, when Hezbollah and the Israeli military started increasingly trading cross-border fire, the recent cases have been more serious and raised alarm.
Hezbollah exercises de facto control over much of southern Lebanon, and Israeli officials have repeatedly criticized UNIFIL for failing to deter Hezbollah’s operations in that part of the country. The U.N. force has said that its powers as a peacekeeping operation are inherently limited.
Elsewhere in southern Lebanon, an Israeli strike killed at least five members of the country’s civil defense agency overnight, according to Lebanon’s health ministry and state news media.
The strike hit a base of operations where the emergency workers were waiting to respond to relief calls, said Elie Khairallah, a spokesman for the agency. He said the agency’s regional chief was among those killed and that the building, near a church in the southern Lebanese town of Derdghaiya, was leveled in the attack.
Lebanon’s health ministry condemned the killings, accusing the Israeli military of targeting ambulance crews and rescue teams. There was no immediate comment from Israel’s military.
At least 65 health workers have been killed in Lebanon since Israel intensified its offensive there against Hezbollah three weeks ago, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday. It added that the agency had recorded 16 “attacks on health care” across the country in the same period of time.
Israel’s military has accused Hezbollah of hiding within the civilian population, in one case saying that the militant group had set up a command center next to a hospital.
Hezbollah kept up its rocket attacks into Israel on Thursday, setting off sirens in parts of the country’s north. Some were intercepted but several struck the area, according to the military. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
Hezbollah said it had been targeting Israeli troops stationed along the border with Lebanon, and in the city of Kiryat Shmona. On Wednesday, a rocket attack in Kiryat Shmona killed two civilians.
The Israeli military said it had detected 105 rocket launches from Lebanon on Thursday. It earlier said it had struck 110 sites in the country over the past day and claimed to have killed two Hezbollah commanders. Hezbollah did not comment on the claims.
With the fighting showing no sign of letting up, Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, suggested on Thursday that diplomatic efforts with the United States and France to secure a pause in the fighting had “intensified.”
Mr. Mikati’s comments, in a statement from his office, could not be independently verified. There was no immediate comment from the United States or France, which last month had put forward a proposal for a 21-day pause in the fighting.
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4) THE PRICE
By W.J. Hennigan, Photographs by An-My Lê, October 10, 2024
Mr. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion. Ms. Lê is a professor of photography at Bard College.
Submarines are constructed in sections at Quonset Point, R.I., then placed on barges and floated down the Atlantic coast for final assembly in Groton, Conn.
To understand how America is preparing for its nuclear future, follow Melissa Durkee’s fifth-grade students as they shuffle into Room 38 at Preston Veterans’ Memorial School in Preston, Conn. One by one, the children settle in for a six-week course taught by an atypical educator, the defense contractor General Dynamics.
“Does anyone know why we’re here?” a company representative asks. Adalie, 10, shoots her hand into the air. “Um, because you’re building submarines and you, like, need people, and you’re teaching us about it in case we’re interested in working there when we get older,” she ventures.
Adalie is correct. The U.S. Navy has put in an order for General Dynamics to produce 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines by 2042 — a job that’s projected to cost $130 billion. The industry is struggling to find the tens of thousands of new workers it needs. For the past 18 months, the company has traveled to elementary schools across New England to educate children in the basics of submarine manufacturing and perhaps inspire a student or two to consider one day joining its shipyards.
The coursework — on this particular day, welding crackers together with Easy Cheese to create mini-submarines — is one small facet of the much bigger preparations America is making for a historic struggle with its nuclear rivals. With Russia at war, China escalating regional disputes and nations like North Korea and Iran expanding their nuclear programs, the United States is set to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion over 30 years to revamp its own arsenal.
The spending spree, which the government began planning in 2010, is underway in at least 23 states — nearly 50 if you include subcontractors. It follows a decades-long freeze on designing, building or testing new nuclear weapons. Along with the subs, the military is paying for a new fleet of bomber jets, land-based missiles and thermonuclear warheads. Tally all that spending, and the bill comes to almost $57 billion a year, or $108,000 per minute for three decades.
Times Opinion spent six months traveling to cities and towns around the nation to discover how this modern Manhattan Project is coming together, interviewing more than 100 residents, workers, community leaders and federal officials. The portrait that emerged is a country that is being transformed — physically, financially and philosophically — by an unprecedented wave of nuclear revitalization. The effort is as flush with cash as it is rife with problems and delays: At least 20 major projects are already years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
If you don’t live where the submarines are welded or the missile silos are dug, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t know it’s happening. The federal government has said little about the plan in public, outside of congressional hearings and strategy papers, or the vast amount being spent. There has been no significant debate. The billion-dollar programs move under the radar. At a time when funding for politicized issues such as climate change, foreign military aid and border security are under a microscope, this issue miraculously appears to have sidestepped the crossfire.
But each day, more than 110,000 scientists, military personnel and private contractors with high-level security clearances are scanning into facilities, putting on safety gear and piecing together a modern arsenal for a volatile new nuclear age.
We should talk about why Washington is making America nuclear again and what we hope to achieve with one of the most ambitious, far-reaching construction projects in the country’s history. The money is already flowing, assembling weapons everyone hopes will never be used.
GENERAL DYNAMICS ELECTRIC BOAT may face a labor shortage, but you wouldn’t know it standing inside one of the company’s football-field-size warehouses along Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.
On a morning in September, roughly 2,000 employees were at work across the sprawling complex, moving among mammoth machinery and the hulls of several submarines sliced into segments like giant sushi rolls. “What you’re seeing is the future of American naval power,” Rear Adm. Todd Weeks, who oversees strategic submarine construction for the U.S. Navy, shouted above the din.
At 560 feet long and 43 feet in diameter, the Columbia-class submarines under construction at the site will be the largest America has ever built when the first boat enters service this decade. They are also the most expensive, at an average of $11 billion per boat. Engineering a nuclear submarine is widely considered to be more challenging than building a spacecraft: The sub needs to carry more than 100 people to crushing ocean depths, along with the nuclear reactor that powers it, and be capable of launching its nuclear-tipped missiles to any location on the planet. Every cut, every weld, every rivet matters.
On the factory floor, it is plain to see the dream of nuclear disarmament, once shared by Republican and Democratic presidents alike, is dead. Or, at the very least, on life support. Not so long ago, the consensus among global leaders was that the world needed fewer nukes and means to deliver them, not more. America’s nuclear portfolio was deprioritized after 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. After spending trillions of dollars over decades, Washington cut back on nearly everything nuclear-related. The prongs of the American military’s so-called triad — nuclear-weapon-carrying submarines, jets and intercontinental ballistic missiles — were maintained, rather than replaced, for years beyond their intended use.
Nuclear ballistic missile submarines — known as boomers by sailors — are arguably the most important part of that ecosystem. They are America’s guarantee that the military can strike back in the event of the country incurring a first attack, even if an adversary manages to turn Washington into radioactive ash. They are constantly deployed around the world, are virtually undetectable under the water and can carry up to 20 long-range missiles loaded with several nuclear warheads apiece.
The 14 boomers now at sea are about 40 years old, on average — ancient in submarine years. The aging boats come with a host of liabilities, including higher maintenance costs and onboard technology that predates the personal computer revolution. With China operating the world’s largest, newest naval force (234 warships to America’s 219), the U.S. Navy says new submarines can’t be produced fast enough. Once U.S. production hits its stride, the plan is to build one boomer and two attack submarines a year. To make that happen, the Quonset Point factory has added six buildings, doubling its floor space, from one million square feet to two million square feet, over the past 10 years.
But four years in, the first boat is hundreds of millions of dollars over budget because of a combination of supply chain issues, design problems and nagging labor shortages. Recent analysis from the Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog, calculated cost overruns that are more than six times the company’s estimates.
When the Cold War ended, the demand for subs dropped, and the pipeline of trade specialists trained to work on these highly specialized boats did, too. General Dynamics Electric Boat’s work force sank from around 22,000 to 7,000. The Navy now estimates it needs at least 100,000 new workers to join defense companies to meet production demands.
Though the new Columbia-class subs are primarily being built in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Virginia, the Navy is going to tremendous lengths to recruit talent across the country. Over the past year, a blitz of ads has appeared at various sports events — including major league baseball games, WNBA games and even atop a NASCAR hood — steering fans to buildsubmarines.com. The website connects job seekers with hiring defense contractors as part of a nearly $1 billion campaign. Some of that money will go toward helping restore the network of companies that can supply the more than three million parts that go into a Columbia sub. Like so much of the nation’s nuclear infrastructure, those supplier numbers have plummeted since the 1990s.
Arms control advocates argue that the U.S. industrial buildup risks igniting another arms race. But to hear Admiral Weeks tell it, the Navy is well beyond such hand-wringing, thanks in part to Russia and China: “As we see the world today, that dip that we had in the late 1990s, early 2000s — we don’t see that happening again.”
ANY PASSING DRIVER can watch the construction on the industrial park along Bear Creek Road in Oak Ridge, a city in the far eastern corner of Tennessee. Crowds of laborers move among four unfinished buildings, heavy machinery growling at the edges. It looks like any other work site, until you notice the tiers of razor wire, patrols of armed guards around the perimeter and the peculiar fact that none of the structures have any windows.
This construction site, for the Y-12 National Security Complex, is the top-secret centerpiece of America’s plans to rebuild the nation’s nuclear bomb-making complex. When the $10 billion overhaul is done, the revamped site will be solely responsible for processing the highly enriched uranium used in U.S. weapons into the next century. But if you keep driving down the road, it feels as though you’re moving back in time. Row after row of aging brick buildings are scattered across Y-12’s campus, many containing hazardous waste that dates back decades.
After World War II and the start of the Cold War arms race, manufacturing uranium components for nuclear weapons became the site’s defining mission. Every nuclear weapon in America’s current arsenal of 3,748 nuclear bombs and warheads contains uranium from Y-12.
The Energy Department, which oversees the nuclear stockpile, went through an extensive retrenchment after the U.S.S.R. collapsed, much like the military. The overall number of weapons was cut. The budgets of the labs that designed the weapons were cut. The skilled work force that manufactured and assembled them was cut. The facilities where this work took place, full of modern equipment during the Cold War, were never updated.
Few, if any, sites embody this neglect better than Y-12. Despite all the technological advancements that have unfolded outside Y-12’s barbed wire fences over the past 80 years, America’s nuclear arsenal is still largely put together there by hand, like a Ferrari engine, using machines created decades before their operators were born.
Signs of decay and decrepitude are everywhere. Eric Helms, the deputy director of enriched uranium operations, who has worked at Y-12 for 23 years, leads me through a labyrinth inside the complex of narrow hallways in Building 9212, where workers stand in coveralls. Strips of the ceiling hang overhead like ribbons. Sections of pipe that jut from the hulking machinery are wrapped with duct tape, and paint on the steel doors and walls has chipped away, exposing layers of green, brown and cream underneath. “That’s where we painted over contamination spills,” he says. “Stripping the paint would just create a bigger problem.”
Large areas of the floors have also been painted over or feature a patchwork of stainless steel sheeting to cover contaminated concrete below. On the day I visit, the internal 1950s-era vacuum system has been broken for more than a week, so workers can’t suck away scraps of uranium that fell around the furnaces. Mr. Helms says it’s a nagging problem. “We’re looking forward to moving into the new facility,” he says.
Today Y-12 is under the control of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a quasi-independent arm of the Energy Department. Once the new facility is up and running, it will process uranium not only for nuclear weapons but also for the nuclear reactors aboard U.S. Navy ships and nuclear research reactors. Much of the radioactive material will be shipped by truck to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Pantex plant in Texas, where it will be assembled into different types of nuclear warheads. The surplus will be held in an onsite storage vault nicknamed the Fort Knox of uranium.
For that, Mr. Helms and the rest of the staff will have to wait. Six years into its renovation, construction at Y-12 is years behind schedule and around $4 billion over budget because of a combination of supply chain hiccups and unforced errors. (At one point, a contractor mistakenly designed the roof 13 feet lower than it needed to be in the new uranium-processing building, costing $540 million alone.)
Because of the repeated delays, the earliest that Mr. Helms and his team can move into the new facilities is 2031.
UNLIKE MOST OF the U.S. military’s weapons systems, America’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, which ferry nuclear warheads to their target, aren’t kept on military bases or in warehouses. Currently, 400 Minuteman III missiles are buried 80 feet underground in people’s backyards — or, more specifically, their farm fields — in Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Montana and North Dakota.
For decades, these aging missile systems have been on 24-hour alert, ready to obliterate almost any spot on Earth using the best technology available in the 1970s, when they were installed. The Air Force, which is in charge of the land-based missiles, has been maintaining the missiles for half a century.
Now the entire system is set to be replaced. Changing out the missiles, silos, command hubs and roughly 7,500 miles of underground cables snaking under the property of thousands of landowners will be one of the most expensive projects in military history, rivaled only in scale and technical complexity by the operation to build the Interstate System of highways.
For the past two years, representatives of the Air Force have fanned out across the northern Great Plains to talk to residents about the plans. Construction crews have begun work on support buildings at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. The hope is to open new silos through the next two decades — but the project could go well beyond that, given the current delays — and steadily bring the Sentinel system online while maintaining the old Minuteman III system until it’s fully replaced. Up to 3,000 laborers will descend on dozens of small towns to live in temporary camps, potentially doubling or tripling the local populations for however long they need to be there.
The Air Force does not yet know how or where the workers will be housed, which is a concern for some people living in these missile-hosting towns, many of which have only one or two law enforcement officers. Robin Darnall, a commissioner for Banner County in western Nebraska, says she’s focused on how to balance the influx of workers along with the safety of farming and ranching families, whose forebears, in some cases, arrived there in homesteading days. “I feel like we need to increase our law enforcement in Banner County for this project,” she says. “Our sheriff can’t do that all and satisfy his current responsibilities.”
When the Air Force installed missiles there in the 1960s, locals enthusiastically embraced the idea of providing a home to a critical national security project aimed at defeating the Soviets. The arms race was on, after all. But today, like in most of America, the grave threat of nuclear war barely registers to many residents of the heartland, even if classified work is happening beneath the communities they live in.
In the Great Plains, too, things are taking longer than they should. The missile modernization program, called LGM-35A Sentinel, was first estimated to cost about $96 billion in 2020, when the defense company Northrop Grumman won the initial contract to build the system. The price tag has since skyrocketed, with current costs pegged at around $141 billion, a cost increase so severe that it triggered the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which requires the Pentagon and Congress to evaluate whether to cancel troubled programs. The government is reviewing the details but has already decided to move forward with building the new missiles.
Walter Schweitzer passes a missile silo almost every day on his way to work as president of the Montana Farmers Union. He and his members are military supporters but are increasingly concerned with the lack of information provided by the Air Force. Another point of contention involves restrictions around the silos, such as forbidding wind farms within a two-mile radius. “Unless you’re prepared to reimburse property owners the loss of their rights, then the farmers’ union can’t support that,” Mr. Schweitzer says. “No way. No how.”
OUTSIDE THE LAB, the scenic town of Los Alamos, N.M., is being renovated with all manner of construction projects to accommodate the new arrivals. Inside the lab, technicians and scientists are busily melting, refining and shaping plutonium into grapefruit-size cores that trigger the explosions in nuclear bombs.
Manufacturing plutonium pits, which is what the nuclear industry calls them, can be a messy and dangerous business. The radioactive metal has to be shaped into hollow spheres. Workers do this by handling it with rubber gloves inside workstations called glove boxes. It takes skill and nearly a year of training to become comfortable working with such perilous material. A tiny shaving of plutonium can kill a person if it is inhaled. Accounting for every bit of it is crucial.
In 2018, Congress directed Los Alamos, which is overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration, to produce 30 plutonium pits a year by 2026. The agency plans to manufacture an additional 50 pits a year at a larger facility in Savannah River, S.C. The pits will go into the warheads that are affixed to the new Sentinel missiles.
Some progress is being made: On Oct. 1, Los Alamos produced the first pit certified to enter the war reserve. But meeting the full production mark won’t happen until the mid-2030s, at the earliest, the National Nuclear Security Administration says, as the cost estimate has climbed to more than $28 billion. The upside is the delays won’t hurt as much because everything is behind schedule, including the missiles.
The last time the United States was mass-producing plutonium pits, it didn’t go well. The Rocky Flats production site in Colorado was the last place to do it. In 1989 the facility, overseen by the Energy Department, was raided by the F.B.I. and Environmental Protection Agency and later shut down after rampant environmental violations were discovered. It was a rare episode in U.S. history in which one federal agency raided another.
The output at Rocky Flats, which at one point during the Cold War hit 1,000 pits per year, dwarfs the modern ambitions of Los Alamos. Still, the new production is expected to generate levels of radiological and hazardous waste that the lab has not experienced. This comes on top of the contamination already present, which the government estimates will cost some $7 billion to clean up. “We’re endangering our community for an unnecessary arms race that puts us all at risk,” says Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a Santa Fe-based watchdog.
Environmental contamination isn’t the only concern that Los Alamos’s neighbors have. The Los Alamos County Council recently passed a $377 million budget for fiscal year 2025 — an eye-popping sum for a population of just 19,400. County officials say their primary focus is housing and amenities. The lab hired 4,000 employees over the past two years, and it’s been a struggle to find homes for them all. A recent study found they have a housing shortfall of at least 1,300 units, which county officials attribute largely to the lab expansion.
Los Alamos’s strategic location, nestled between canyons, poses a vexing challenge. The limited space creates transportation problems in and out of the town, which has led to a spate of auto accidents, including one in September in which a former lab director, Charles McMillan, was killed. To alleviate traffic, money is also going into infrastructure improvements and an expansion of the Atomic City Transit system.
“Our whole community has changed with this new bomb factory,” says Greg Mello, the executive director at the Los Alamos Study Group, a nonprofit watchdog that is critical of the nuclear weapons complex’s expansion. “There’s no telling where it will end.”
LAST CENTURY, the world watched in horror as the number of nuclear weapons around the globe rocketed from approximately 3,000 warheads in 1955 to more than 70,000 by the late 1980s. It took time for nuclear nations to grasp the mutual vulnerability, the financial investment and general insanity of the arms race. Cooler heads prevailed. International treaties were signed. Now there are an estimated 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world.
All of the progress meticulously made over the past 40 years is now at risk. Agreements are being abandoned rather than forged. The future of arms control appears bleak. The United States is considering increasing the number of weapons in its arsenal — not just replacing the old ones — after the New Start Treaty with Russia expires in February 2026. If such a decision is made, foreign adversaries will certainly follow suit.
After all, decisions about an arsenal in one nation trigger rethinking among them all. Since the United States first took concrete steps toward rebuilding its weapons in 2010, the eight other nuclear-armed nations are believed to have expanded or enhanced theirs. Russia has overhauled its nuclear arsenal. China is on track to double the number of its nuclear warheads by the decade’s end and may continue building, according to U.S. intelligence estimates.
It is undeniably true that the world is becoming more contentious, and nuclear weapons do deter our adversaries. But it’s also true that our children will inherit this — the nationwide nuclear complex revitalization, the astronomical bill, the potential for confrontation. Congress decided that America needed new weapons when it first allocated funding to their replacement more than a decade ago. But it’s clear, after I visited these places, that the American people have not. Even in communities where this work is happening, there is too little awareness about what’s occurring, let alone in the rest of the country.
Our next president will have to decide whether America needs these new weapons. Americans deserve to know more about the candidates’ views, how our money is being spent and what’s at stake. After all, the weapons under development using taxpayer dollars are expected to be with us well into the next century. And if any one of them were ever used, it would fundamentally change the course of human history.
So should Americans brace for another arms race? Another Cold War? To put it in perspective: The Manhattan Project cost about $30 billion, adjusted for inflation, over the course of World War II. The United States is on pace to spend nearly double that amount each year for at least 30 years. It’s time to reflect on whether we are on a path toward a brighter future or headed back to a darker past.
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5) Rescuers Search for Survivors After Strikes Rock Central Beirut
At least 22 people were killed and more than 100 injured in the overnight attack, Lebanese officials said. The Israeli military, which has been targeting Hezbollah militants, did not comment.
By Christina Goldbaum, Euan Ward and Liam Stack, Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and Tel Aviv
Basta, the area in central Beirut that was struck overnight, is a middle-class neighborhood of narrow streets and shabby buildings, some more than 100 years old. The area was originally home mostly to Sunni Muslims, but over the past two decades many Shia families have also moved here. David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
Rescue workers scoured the wreckage of a central Beirut neighborhood on Friday after Lebanese officials said that Israeli airstrikes had killed at least 22 people, in what would be the deadliest attack in Lebanon’s capital in more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strikes, which came as it escalates its bombing campaign against Hezbollah militants and their top leaders.
One of the strikes in Beirut hit the central Basta neighborhood, which is close to several Western embassies and the Lebanese Parliament, and near the site of an attack that killed nine rescue workers last week. Another hit the Ras el-Nabaa neighborhood a few blocks to the south, near the French Embassy.
More Israeli attacks hit the Dahiya, a crowded area south of Beirut where Hezbollah predominates, sending a stream of smoke rising over the city skyline. Sonic booms from Israeli jets shook buildings on Friday morning, sending panicked residents scrambling to their balconies.
Israel has been heavily bombing sites across Lebanon in recent weeks as part of a major offensive against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group. Several strikes in Beirut have succeeded in killing their targets, including the longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and some of his close associates or presumed successors.
Here’s what else to know:
· Security cabinet meets: Israel’s security cabinet convened on Thursday night to discuss Israel’s response to an Iranian barrage of ballistic missiles last week, officials said. The cabinet was expected to authorize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to initiate the response at their discretion, said two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions. Details of the meeting were not released.
· Peacekeepers struck: United Nations officials said Thursday that Israeli forces had fired on U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, wounding two and touching off international criticism. The U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known by its acronym, UNIFIL, said the two soldiers, from Indonesia, had been injured when an Israeli tank fired toward and directly hit an observation tower at the force’s headquarters in Naqoura, Lebanon.
· Northern Gaza: Many residents of northern Gaza are staying put despite the Israeli military’s dropping of leaflets over the town of Jabaliya over the weekend, warning people to evacuate to the south because of a coming offensive against Hamas. Roughly 400,000 people remain in Gaza’s north, according to the United Nations, and many do not have the means to flee or are fearful of being permanently displaced from their homes.
· Oil prices: The spiraling conflict between Israel and Iran has sent shock waves through the oil market, increasing prices as investors grapple with potential disruptions to the global oil supply. Oil prices have jumped since Iran fired about 200 ballistic missiles at Israel last week. Brent crude, the international benchmark, surpassed $81 a barrel in the days afterward, a gain of about 15 percent. It traded around $79 a barrel on Friday.
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6) Israel orders Gazans to leave the north, but most are staying put.
By Raja Abdulrahim and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Raja Abdulrahim reported from Jerusalem, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel, October 11, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/11/world/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-news
Smoke rising as seen from a shelter in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, on Wednesday. Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
For more than a year, as Israeli bombs pounded northern Gaza around Mariam Awwad’s home, she and her family of 11 have refused to leave.
Their resolve did not change even after the Israeli military dropped leaflets over the town of Jabaliya on Sunday, ordering Palestinians in northern Gaza to evacuate to the south. The military was renewing an offensive on the north, saying it was going after Hamas fighters.
“We refuse to flee only to die in humiliation,” Ms. Awwad, 23, an advertising copywriter who lives with her parents, siblings, nieces and nephews, said Thursday in an interview. “Death is death, whether we die here or elsewhere. So let’s die with dignity in our home.”
Roughly 400,000 people remain in Gaza’s north, according to the United Nations, and most appear to either be taking a defiant stance similar to Ms. Awwad’s, or do not have the means to flee. Others may be fearful of being permanently displaced from their homes, even as the United Nations and aid groups are sounding the alarm over a worsening humanitarian situation, including the closure of hospitals.
The World Food Program said Wednesday that with the main aid crossings into northern Gaza closed and its partner kitchens forced to shut because of the evacuation orders, it is no longer able to distribute food to families who desperately need it.
Israel has said it is trying to eliminate a regrouped Hamas presence in the north, and accuses Hamas of embedding in civilian areas. On Thursday, Israel said it had killed 12 Hamas and Islamic Jihad members in a strike on a command center in Jabaliya, in an area that had been a medical compound. It said two of those killed took part in the Hamas-led attack on Israel last year that prompted the war.
The latest Israeli offensive in the north has killed more than 100 people over the past five days, according to Palestinian state media, adding to what health officials say are more than 42,000 Gazans killed since the beginning of the war. The figures do not differentiate between civilians and fighters.
Even as the Israeli military has ordered Palestinians in the north to leave, it has made it harder for those in Jabaliya to do so, according to residents, aid groups and Palestinian news media. Since Wednesday, Jabaliya has been surrounded by Israeli forces, trapping people inside, according to the United Nations.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to questions about whether people were being prevented from leaving Jabaliya.
In a statement on Wednesday, Hamas said that “the steadfast and proud northern Gaza is being annihilated by the terrorist enemy.” It added that “massacres” were being committed against the Palestinians in an attempt to break their will.
Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, UNRWA, said, “People are now trapped in Jabaliya, there’s a lot of military operations around Jabaliya, so our colleagues are reporting that the ones who stayed are now trapped and unable to leave.”
She added that the situation in the north was “pretty chaotic,” and that the evacuation maps the Israeli military had put out were not always clear. “These evacuation orders cause a lot of confusion,” she said.
Some people in northern Gaza are simply choosing to stay in their homes, Ms. Wateridge said, while others are just moving to other places in the north, and there has been no mass evacuation to the south.
The Israeli military has also ordered three hospitals in the north to evacuate their patients and staff, according to the Gazan Health Ministry. The director of one of them, the Kamal Adwan Hospital, recorded a video plea on Thursday morning, calling on the international community and international rights groups to prevent Israel from forcing them to evacuate.
“All our cases are severe cases,” the director, Dr. Husam Abu Safiyeh, said in the video, which was released by the ministry. It shows a tiny baby with a pink blanket in an incubator, and then several children on beds, all on ventilators.
All of the patients, the doctor said, were victims of Israeli airstrikes. “These patients can’t be transferred, and I don’t think any other hospital can admit this many patients who are on ventilators,” he said.
A U.N. investigation commission said Thursday in a report that “Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s health care system” with its relentless attacks on medical personnel and facilities.
The three hospitals fall in the evacuation zone. The Israeli military did not respond to questions about why they were being ordered to evacuate, but it has accused Hamas of using hospitals to hide its fighters and operations, and has raided and attacked several in Gaza over the course of the war.
Hamas, and hospital administrators, have rejected Israel’s claims.
Evidence provided by the Israeli military and examined by The New York Times suggests that Hamas has used one hospital, Al Shifa, to store weapons inside it while also maintaining a tunnel beneath it. But the Israeli military has not presented similar evidence about numerous other hospitals across the Gaza Strip that it has raided and attacked.
Ms. Awwad and her family are living in their partly destroyed home. When gunfire and explosions sound nearby, the adults try to comfort the children with hugs, she said.
On Wednesday, she said a window fell on a family living on the floor above them.
“We sit in the middle of the house, away from the windows, and pray for our situation to improve,” Ms. Awwad said. “We repeat our prayers asking for relief. That’s how we survive these dark days.”
Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.
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7) Many Haitians Prospered in Springfield, Ohio. Then Came the Hate.
A young family came to love the city where they rebuilt their lives and bought a home. Since a false rumor spread, they have scrapped outings, even to the park.
By Miriam Jordan, Reporting from Springfield, Ohio, Oct. 11, 2024
Sadrac Delva said his family had grown to feel at home in Springfield. Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Sadrac and Gerda Delva found happiness again in Springfield.
After fleeing political corruption and violent intimidation in Haiti, the Delvas felt cocooned in the safety of the small Ohio city where they arrived in 2021 and rebuilt their lives.
The couple had steady jobs. Their young daughters were thriving. On weekends, the family of five visited nearby Buck Creek State Park and worshiped at a local church. They moved into what they thought would be their forever home.
“We were very comfortable here, thinking Springfield is our place,” Mr. Delva said in an interview, almost two years to the day since receiving the keys to a cream-colored, three-bedroom house.
It has been a month since former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, injected Springfield into the election by spreading baseless rumors about Haitians abducting and eating pets. But many immigrants are still shaken, reordering their daily routines and reconsidering whether to stay where they feel unwanted and unsafe.
Members of hate groups have descended on Springfield several times in the last month. One group unfurled a huge banner outside city hall inscribed with “Haitians Have No Home Here” in English and in Haitian Creole. Ku Klux Klan fliers have popped up around town. A neo-Nazi group waved swastikas in front of the home of the mayor, Rob Rue, who has praised Haitians’ contributions while acknowledging the challenges created by the influx of new residents.
Most of the newly arrived Haitians are in the country legally, many of them granted what is known as Temporary Protected Status because of the widespread violence and instability in their homeland. Last week, Mr. Trump said that he would rescind Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status and deport them.
In the streets and stores, strangers have hurled insults at Haitians. The tires on their cars have been slashed overnight. Some shoppers have meowed at Haitians in supermarket aisles, according to Haitians, community leaders and immigrant advocates.
After hearing from friends who have been targeted, Mr. Delva, 43, said that he had no choice but to take precautions.
Gone are the afternoons at the park for his girls, ages 10, 5 and 2. Outings to Chuck E. Cheese have been scrapped. Even playtime in the backyard is on hold.
“Everybody is staying inside,” Mr. Delva said, except to go to school, commute to work or shop for groceries.
“I can’t remember the last time we went to church,” he said. “I talk to a lot of friends who are very scared, too.”
Thousands of Haitians have arrived in Springfield in the last few years. They have filled jobs in manufacturing, distribution and the service sector that were available after the city created a revitalization plan that attracted new businesses to the area.
Haitians are not the first newcomers to face hostility in Springfield.
In the early 20th century, the city drew poor southerners, white and Black, to work in factories. In 1904, a Black man was lynched and a Black neighborhood was set ablaze. Members of the Ku Klux Klan paraded through the streets.
White migrants were derided as backward people with “undesirable qualities of the new immigrant,” Max Fraser, a labor scholar, wrote in “Hillbilly Highway,” his history of Appalachian migration.
In the 1990s, Hispanics began arriving in Springfield and they, too, faced discrimination, said Jason Barlow, a representative in Ohio for United Automobile Workers, whose grandfather migrated to Springfield from Alabama in the 1940s. “It’s not the first time we see this animosity, unfortunately.”
But the Haitians have been settling in Springfield at a moment when immigration has become one of the most contentious issues in the country, fueled by Mr. Trump, who has vilified immigrants and promised mass deportations if he returns to the White House. The influx of newcomers had strained government services in Springfield and had been fueling anxiety and tensions in the city, even before Mr. Trump used the presidential debate last month to stoke the debunked rumors of pet abductions. In the days that followed, Springfield faced a wave of bomb threats and Haitians encountered growing hostility from inside and outside the city.
“I haven’t seen hate rise to this level in my lifetime,” said Mr. Barlow, 50, who grew up in Springfield.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance have dismissed the outcry over the comments and instead have redoubled their attacks on Haitians in the United States.
In interviews, dozens of Haitians in Springfield said that they had fled their homeland to survive or to provide for loved ones living through the humanitarian crisis that has engulfed Haiti.
Nearly half of the country’s population is experiencing acute food insecurity, according to experts, and many have been forced to abandon their homes as gangs take territory. Last week, gangs rampaged through a town in Haiti’s main agricultural region, killing at least 70 people.
It is impossible to know how many Haitians have left Springfield because of the recent intimidation, but everyone seems to know someone who has relocated, or who is weighing that option.
Amanda Mullins, a real estate agent, said that Haitians who had saved as much as $50,000 to make down payments on homes have given up. One buyer backed out of a signed contract.
“Most everybody wants to wait,” Ms. Mullins said during a drive through northern Springfield, where she pointed to homes that she had sold to Haitians.
Lamarre Joseph, a 55-year-old teacher, and Charly Colin, a 41-year-old agronomist, share a two-bedroom apartment and work at a warehouse to support their families in Haiti. They were among those who said that they were contemplating leaving Springfield.
“We’ll find another city — Columbus, Boston, New York,” Mr. Joseph said. “We’ll go where there is opportunity.”
But for families with children, like the Delvas, Springfield is home. Even amid the fear and hate, uprooting is a tough option to consider.
The Delvas were financially secure in Haiti. They owned a home and two cars and traveled abroad on vacation. Ms. Delva worked as a biomedical technician.
“We never intended to leave Haiti,” Mr. Delva said.
Then their lives were upended.
Mr. Delva, an accountant, oversaw the disbursement of funds for a European charity.
In 2019, politicians began demanding that Mr. Delva give them aid to distribute to their constituents. When he resisted, Mr. Delva received threats on his life, which eventually spread to include his family.
Mr. Delva varied his route to work, and his wife and children limited their movements.. Armed assailants almost killed Mr. Delva when they accosted him in his car and opened fire.
By June 2020, the family had fled to Florida, where they applied for asylum.
They moved to Springfield after a friend told them that they would find good jobs, affordable housing and tranquillity.
“We started to work and save,” recalled Mr. Delva, who got a job working the overnight shift at an Amazon warehouse.
They began to love their life in Springfield and wanted to stay.
In 2022, the couple were expecting their first U.S.-born child. The Delvas made a down payment on a $152,000 house with three bedrooms on the north side of Springfield.
“We felt blessed, really blessed,” Ms. Delva said of their fresh start in Springfield.
She started a course at a local college to become a licensed nurse practitioner, and Mr. Delva studied and passed an exam to earn a real estate license. This fall, their middle daughter, 5, was so excited about starting kindergarten that she selected her outfits weeks before school started.
Then the rumor spread that pets were being eaten, disrupting everyone’s routine.
Mr. Delva said a Haitian friend was beaten up while walking to a Walgreens. There were bomb threats. White supremacists marched on the town.
“I told my wife not to go anywhere with the kids,” Mr. Delva said.
Mr. Delva has friends who have asked for transfers to other cities where their employers have branches. A few have already left.
“I think twice about leaving, of course,” Mr. Delva said. “I have three kids, I bought this house, my wife is studying.”
Asked how she liked Springfield, his eldest daughter responded, “Ten out of 10!”
Mr. Delva’s eyes welled up. “You cannot find words to explain the situation to children.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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8) Hurricanes Amplify Insurance Crisis in Riskiest Areas
After Helene and Milton, some small Florida companies risk bankruptcy. Larger ones will be in the hot seat with lawmakers and consumer groups.
By Emily Flitter, Oct. 12, 2024
A severely damaged home in Port Charlotte, Fla., on Thursday, the day after Hurricane Milton swept through the region. Credit...Paul Ratje for The New York Times
Until late last month, there was optimism in the insurance industry. Hurricane season had been quiet and the number of wildfires was still below the yearly average. Insurers were beginning to hope that the cost of reinsurance — that is, insurance for insurers — would only inch up next year, instead of shooting higher as it did the previous two years.
Two major hurricanes have upended their calculations.
Total economic losses from Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene could soar over $200 billion, according to early estimates. While it’s far too soon to know exactly what portion will be covered by insurance companies, some consumer groups, lawmakers and analysts are already worried about a big hit to insurers’ finances that could ultimately affect millions of people living in the most vulnerable areas.
As climate change increases the intensity of natural disasters, insurance companies have pulled back from many high-risk areas by raising premiums or ending some types of coverage. The fallout from the two hurricanes, which landed within the span of two weeks, could accelerate that retreat. It could also further strain an already feeble federal flood insurance program that has filled in gaps for homeowners living in areas where private insurance companies no longer offer flood coverage.
Hurricane Milton, which hit Florida’s west coast as a Category 3 storm on Wednesday, did not ultimately cause the catastrophe that had been predicted for the Tampa Bay area. But it still did plenty of damage.
Sridhar Manyem, an analyst for the insurance industry ratings agency AM Best, said that while it was too early to estimate insurers’ obligations, industry insiders were already beginning to compare Milton to Hurricane Ian, which caused more than $55 billion of insured losses in 2022 when it hit the same area.
“Because of lack of information at first blush, usually people do this,” Mr. Manyem said. “This storm is pretty comparable to another storm in terms of size and path and intensity, so we can try to figure out what an inflation-adjusted loss would be.”
If the storm is that expensive for insurers, it will have a knock-on effect for customers. It will give insurance companies another reason to either raise premiums or stop selling policies to people living and working in certain areas. It could even drive some insurers out of business, as Ian did. Since 2021, nine property and casualty insurers have gone bankrupt in Florida.
Insurance companies will most likely have to cover more damage from Milton than from Helene, because its major destructive force was windstorms, not floods, which private insurers do not frequently cover.
Helene, which landed before Milton, also caused considerable damage. But the cost of repairing that damage, mostly caused by flooding, is more likely to fall on the National Flood Insurance Program, which provides more than two-thirds of all flood insurance coverage in the United States.
Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill are wondering whether that program will have enough money to pay flood claims without more funding from Congress. It could draw on about $15 billion before a new reauthorization bill would be necessary.
“Hurricane Milton may blow through the N.F.I.P.’s remaining resources,” said Representative Maxine Waters of California, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees the program, in a statement to The New York Times. “Even just one more storm could bankrupt the entire N.F.I.P. and prevent future claims payments to devastated communities.”
The program is plagued with problems. It is in debt to the Treasury Department for $20 billion already, with interest payments piling up.
Ms. Waters said Congress should pass legislation that would forgive the flood program’s debt.
The program also threatens to become unaffordable to people living in flood-prone areas who are required by their mortgage lenders to buy its policies. Lawmakers want to pass changes to the program, including a need-based plan that would help its poorest customers.
Consumer groups are worried that private insurers will continue to pull back from areas where people are in grave danger of damage from big storms but cannot afford to move. The Greenlining Institute, a consumer group based in California, is beginning to pressure insurers to write affordable policies for low-income homeowners.
Until recently, Greenlining focused its work on urging banks to do business with people who had been historically shut out of the banking system by redlining and other discriminatory policies. It expanded its mission when it realized that difficulties getting insurance were also taking a toll on poor and minority areas, said Monica Palmeira, the group’s climate finance strategist. Insurance companies are “allowed to essentially discriminate against climate-vulnerable communities,” she said.
On Friday, Daniel Schwarcz, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, proposed a federally administrated marketplace for homeowners insurance modeled after Obamacare.
Smaller insurers will have other things to think about first. If they have been poorly managed or have concentrated business too narrowly, they could collapse under the weight of claims from the storms.
“Florida-focused property insurers, they are really at the highest level of danger,” Mr. Manyem said. Those companies, he said, are likely to have the hardest time getting new reinsurance policies, too.
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9) Israeli Strikes on Northern Gaza Kill at Least 20, Aid Workers Say
Israel’s military said it was “operating with great force” against Hamas and allied groups and issued new evacuation orders, as it also continued its campaign in Lebanon.
By Liam Stack and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Oct. 12, 2024
Liam Stack reported from Tel Aviv, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel.
Mourning on Saturday over the bodies of Palestinian relatives killed overnight in the Jabaliya area of the northern Gaza Strip. Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The humanitarian crisis in the northern Gaza Strip deepened on Saturday as an Israeli bombardment killed at least 20 people, trapped thousands more and prompted one of the area’s last functioning hospitals to issue desperate pleas for assistance.
Israeli airstrikes overnight and into Saturday hit the Jabaliya area of northern Gaza, even as the Israeli military is also pressing ahead with its campaign in Lebanon, where it warned residents of 23 more towns to evacuate on Saturday.
Roughly 400,000 people remain in northern Gaza, according to the United Nations, and many have been trapped in their ruined neighborhoods by Israeli airstrikes, which the military says are targeting Hamas and other allied groups.
Doctors Without Borders said in a statement late Friday that five of its staff members were trapped in Jabaliya, and that one of them had relayed that “about 20 people” were killed in an airstrike on Al-Yemen Al-Saeed Hospital. The Palestinian health ministry said that at least 49 people had been killed across Gaza since Friday, and that 219 wounded people had arrived at hospitals in the enclave.
Israel’s military has issued evacuation warnings for the area in recent days, but aid workers said the fighting made it difficult to follow those instructions.
“Nobody is allowed to get in or out,” Sarah Vuylsteke, a project coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said in the group’s statement. “Anyone who tries is getting shot.”
Jabaliya was once a large town with an adjoining refugee camp, composed of dense urban dwellings, that shared its name. But it has largely been destroyed by ground combat and repeated Israeli bombardments of the area since the war began last year after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
This past week, the Israeli military issued an evacuation order for the area, and a new one was issued on Saturday morning. Avichay Adraee, the military’s Arabic-language spokesman, said on X that the military was “operating with great force” against Hamas and other allied groups, “and will continue to do so for a long period of time.”
“The designated area, including the shelters located there, is considered a dangerous combat zone,” he added.
Jonathan Crickx, a spokesman for UNICEF in the Palestinian territories, described Israel’s evacuation order in northern Gaza as “extremely concerning,” because it explicitly warned that shelters would not be safe and included sites like Kamal Adwan Hospital.
On Saturday, Gaza’s government media office said that the hospital’s intensive care unit was facing a “catastrophic situation.”
“The coming hours will be decisive for the lives of many children in the intensive care unit, because fuel is running out and the occupation is preventing it from reaching hospitals in the north, and because of overcrowding,” the media office said.
Mr. Crickx said in an interview that he had visited that hospital three weeks ago, including its pediatric intensive care unit, one of the few left in the Gaza Strip.
“I remember seeing a baby, around eight or nine months old, whose body had been hit by shrapnel,” he said. “I’m wondering what’s happening to that child now. These evacuation orders put already vulnerable children, struggling for their lives, at even greater risk.”
Israel has routinely struck areas of Gaza that it has described as safe humanitarian zones, and buildings that house displaced civilians, including schools being used as shelters. The Israeli military has said that such strikes are targeting Hamas and other militants who operated from those areas, using the civilians as human shields — which Hamas has denied doing.
On Saturday, Mr. Adraee, the Israeli military spokesman, also posted evacuation warnings for almost two dozen towns in southern Lebanon, saying that Israel would strike them as part of its war against Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group.
He accused Hezbollah of using ambulances to transport weapons and fighters, and said that Israel would strike ambulances if it believed them to be used for that purpose.
“We call on medical teams to avoid dealing with Hezbollah members and not to cooperate with them,” Mr. Adraee said, adding that the Israeli military “confirms that necessary measures will be taken against any vehicle transporting gunmen, regardless of its type.”
Israeli forces have fired on United Nations peacekeepers repeatedly in recent days, destroying several of their facilities, injuring at least four peacekeepers and drawing wide international criticism. The Israeli military said the incidents were inadvertent.
On Saturday, Israel asked the United Nations force in southern Lebanon, commonly known by its acronym UNIFIL, to retreat from nearly 30 border positions roughly three miles from the border, according to Andrea Tenenti, a spokesman for the U.N. force.
Mr. Teneti said that UNIFIL had refused to withdraw from the border — known in diplomatic circles as the Blue Line — because the organization’s mandate from the United Nations Security Council requires it to remain in the area. About 2,000 UNIFIL personnel are in the area, he said.
In its statements, Doctors Without Borders called on Israel to protect civilians and hospitals in the Gaza Strip and to “allow desperately needed humanitarian supplies to enter the north as a matter of extreme urgency.”
“Forced evacuations of homes and bombing of neighborhoods by the Israeli forces is turning north Gaza into uninhabitable ruins,” it added.
WAFA, the official news media of the Palestinian Authority, a rival to Hamas, said in a report on Saturday that Israeli airstrikes had also caused deaths and injuries in the areas of Al-Safatay and Al-Tawam, close to Jabaliya.
The news agency said the humanitarian situation there was “deteriorating rapidly,” with the military operations blocking the entry of food, medical supplies and potable water into the area.
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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