10/23/2024

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, October 24, 2024

  

Palestinians mourn over their loved ones killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a house in the Jabalia refugee camp, Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, October 21, 2024. (Photo: Hadi Daoud/APA Images)

Israel’s Genocide Day 381: Israel pummels northern Gaza amid intensifying extermination campaign

 

Israel's conditions for a ceasefire with Lebanon include allowing the Israeli army to continue operating in Lebanese territory. Meanwhile, Israel steps up its extermination campaign in northern Gaza, targeting its last remaining hospitals.

 

By Qassam Muaddi, October 21, 2024


Casualties

 

·      42,010 + killed* and at least 97,590 wounded in the Gaza Strip, including 59% women, children and elderly, as of October 21, 2024.*

 

·      759+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**

 

·      2,367 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 748 Israeli soldiers and the injury of at least 4,969 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 21, 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 19, 2024.

 

*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on October 20, 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

 
FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!
END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
FOR A DEMOCRATIC, SECULAR PALESTINE!

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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:

https://www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org/donate?link_id=2&can_id=1b2409958245a3dd77323d7f06d7f2df&email_referrer=email_2476307&email_subject=leonard-peltiers-80th-birthday-statement-2024


Leave a message at the Whitehouse:
www.whitehouse.gov/contact

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.

Video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWdJdODKO6M&feature=youtu.be


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 

By Monica Hill

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

Prison Radio is a project of the Redwood Justice Fund (RJF), which is a California 501c3 (Tax ID no. 680334309) not-for-profit foundation dedicated to the defense of the environment and of civil and human rights secured by law.  Prison Radio/Redwood Justice Fund PO Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94141


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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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Articles

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1) He Dreamed of Escaping Gaza. The World Watched Him Burned Alive.

A video of Shaaban al-Dalou burning to death after an Israeli strike at a hospital has stoked criticism from Israel’s allies and highlighted the plight of people trapped in Gaza.

By Bilal Shbair and Erika Solomon, Oct. 20, 2024

Bilal Shbair reported from central Gaza, visiting the site of the fire at Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital compound and speaking to several members of the Dalou family.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/world/middleeast/gaza-escape-burned.html

A hand reaching over a head as fire consumes everything around the person.A still image from a video of Mr. al-Dalou amid burning debris. Credit...Hani Abu Rezeq, via Reuters


A fire blazing in a crowded area of tents and makeshift structures.

A picture provided by UNRWA of burning tents of displaced Palestinians in Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah. Credit...UNRWA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


A man throwing water on fires raging around him, with two other men nearby.Palestinians trying to extinguish the flames. Credit...Ramadan Abed/Reuters


A man with bandages on his head and arm walking surrounded by other men, under a damaged awning.“He kept my secrets, and I kept his,” Ahmad al-Dalou, Mr. al-Dalou’s father, said. Credit...Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press


He was the son his mother boasted about: He memorized the entire Quran as a boy, and rose to the top of his university class. He wanted to become a doctor. But most of all, Shaaban al-Dalou dreamed of escape.

 

Since Israel launched its devastating retaliation for the Hamas-led attack just over a year ago, Mr. al-Dalou wrote impassioned pleas on social media, posted videos from his family’s small plastic tent and even launched a GoFundMe page calling out to the world for help getting out of the Gaza Strip.

 

Instead, the world watched him burn to death.

 

Mr. al-Dalou, 19, was identified by his family as the young man helplessly waving his arms, engulfed in flames, in a video that has become a symbol of the horrors of war for Gazans, trapped inside their blockaded enclave as the international community looks on.

 

On Oct. 14, Israel said it conducted a “precision strike” on a Hamas command center operating near Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al Balah, a coastal city in central Gaza. Dozens of families like the Dalous, forced to flee their homes, had set up tents in a parking lot inside the hospital compound. They had hoped that international laws forbidding most attacks on medical facilities would ensure their safety.

 

The Israeli military said that the fire that erupted afterward was probably caused by “secondary explosions,” without specifying what that meant. It added that “the incident is under review.”

 

As fire consumed the Dalou family’s tent, Mr. al-Dalou’s father, Ahmed, ran back inside. He carried his young son, and then his two older daughters, out to safety. By the time he turned back, it was too late for his eldest son.

 

“I could see him, sitting there, he was lifting his finger and praying,” he said, referring to the Muslim shahada, a creed of faith recited upon birth and at death. “I called out to him: ‘Shaaban, forgive me, son! Forgive me! I can’t do anything.’”

 

Mr. al-Dalou died the day before his 20th birthday. The moment of his death was not only seared into his father’s memory — it was circulated around the world.

 

The images of people in that camp burning alive, among them also Mr. al-Dalou’s mother, prodded even Israel’s staunchest ally, the United States, to question that attack.

 

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said on Wednesday that she had “watched in horror as images from central Gaza poured across my screen.”

 

“There are no words, simply no words, to describe what we saw,” she said in a statement to the United Nations. “Israel has a responsibility to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, even if Hamas was operating near the hospital.”

 

The video of the burning body, which the family identified as Mr. al-Dalou, was geolocated by The New York Times to the location of the camp in Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

 

Mr. al-Dalou, who had become sickly from trauma and malnutrition amid the ever-worsening siege, often confided in his aunt, Karbahan al-Dalou, about his ideas for escaping Gaza.

 

“His plan was to get himself out, and then find a way to get out his sisters and his brothers and his parents,” she said in an interview with The Times, as she sat in the hospital room of her daughter Tasnim, who was recovering from shrapnel injuries to her stomach from the same strike.

 

Mr. al-Dalou also turned to the internet, contacting activists abroad who have helped Gazans set up fund-raising pages online.

 

“You have to open your heart for us. I am nineteen and I buried my dreams,” he wrote in one Instagram post. “Support me to find them again!”

 

The campaign raised over $20,000. But even if it had been enough to pay the exorbitant fees to arrange an escape out of Gaza for him and some of his relatives, the effort was futile: Since May, Israel has closed the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, making such exits impossible.

 

In a text exchange from May that his aunt showed The Times, Mr. al-Dalou asked her if his recurrent illnesses might qualify him for a medical evacuation, which have occasionally taken place. She replied that it was unlikely, and that even a friend “whose sister lost an eye, they are struggling to find a way to get her out.”

 

Yet she said her nephew, who often joined her in her tent for lunch, seemed unflappable. He would watch the news, analyze speeches by Israel’s prime minister, and tell her: “Be optimistic, all will be well. God willing, God will help us, auntie,” she recalled.

 

It was a different story among his friends, said his cousin and schoolmate Mohyeddin al-Dalou. During the war, the two often whiled away wistful evenings on the beach.

 

Mr. al-Dalou used to spin dreams of going abroad to get a Ph.D. in software engineering, which he had studied in his last two years at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. He had already forsaken his ambition to become a doctor, his cousin said, because his family could not afford the cost of those studies.

 

As the war dragged on, he said, Mr. al-Dalou’s vision of escape transformed from traveling to dying.

 

“More and more, he would tell me that he wanted to be martyred, he wanted to be with his friends who were martyred, with his grandfather and grandmother in heaven,” he said.

 

Just 10 days before the attack that killed him, Mr. al-Dalou had a brush with death when Israel struck the mosque near the hospital, where he had been reciting the Quran and spent the night. Israel also said at that time that it was targeting a Hamas command center.

 

In that blast, which the local authorities said killed 26 people, a piece of shrapnel cut across Mr. al-Dalou’s neck, behind his ear. “His stitches hadn’t even been removed yet,” his aunt said, breaking down into sobs.

 

In a social media post after the mosque strike, Mr. al-Dalou described waking up in the hospital, shouting to the medics that he had reached heaven with a friend, Anas al-Zarad.

 

Mr. al-Dalou appeared especially tormented in recent posts over the recent death of that friend, posting pictures of them together as boys and teenagers, laughing and joking.

 

“I’ve never felt anything more terrifying than the thought of the dead being absent,” he wrote in one post. “The human mind, with all its brain cells and all of its capacity to absorb and to create, is helpless in the face of this absence.”

 

Those who now face that same rupture in Mr. al-Dalou’s absence recall a young man far wiser than his years, whose ambition and energy seemed boundless, and who made everyone his friend.

 

Ms. al-Dalou, his aunt, remembered the way his mother, Alaa, had treated Mr. al-Dalou “more like her brother than her son,” with lots of teasing and intimate conversations.

 

Mr. al-Dalou’s mother once sold her gold bracelets to fund his high school studies. When the war began last year, his aunt said, Mr. al-Dalou used the money he earned working in software engineering online to buy them back for her.

 

She said Mr. al-Dalou also used his money help his father and uncle, Karbahan’s husband, set up a falafel stand by their tent outside the hospital, as a way to earn money after the two brothers’ small clothing factory was destroyed in the war.

 

Mr. al-Dalou’s father said he saw their relationship as something beyond that of father and son.

 

“He kept my secrets, and I kept his,” he said, his face and arms heavily bandaged from burns. “We were friends, and I was proud of that.”

 

As he stood watching the fire that took his wife and son’s lives, he said he kept speaking to Mr. al-Dalou: “I told Shaaban that I’ve never felt so broken the way I feel broken now. I’ve never felt so defeated like I feel defeated now.”

 

His last memory of them is from a day before the fire. The three of them had gone to the beach, chewing sunflower seeds and chatting. “Now, well,” he said, “God rest his soul.”

 

On Friday, the elder Mr. al-Dalou was dealt another blow: His youngest son, 10, died from the severity of his burn injuries despite his father’s efforts to rescue him. He was buried alongside his mother and his brother.

 

Arijeta Lajka contributed reporting.


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2) Jill Stein Won’t Stop. No Matter Who Asks.

People in Stein’s life have implored her to abandon her bid for president, lest she throw the election to Donald Trump. She’s on the ballot in almost every critical state.

By Matt Flegenheimer, Oct. 20, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/us/politics/jill-stein-harris-trump.html

Ms. Stein sitting in a chair, speaking to reporters holding microphones.

Ms. Stein has run for president twice before, receiving nearly 1.5 million votes in 2016 when she ran against Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump. Her support in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that year exceeded Mr. Trump’s margins of victory in those states.Credit...Nic Antaya for The New York Times


Jill Stein, the Green Party’s serial presidential candidate, has heard the pleading from strangers.

 

“How does it feel to be personally responsible for actually bringing Donald Trump into power?” Ms. Stein recalled being asked this year by a man in New York — another heckler accusing Ms. Stein of tipping the 2016 election.

 

She has absorbed the glowering across her anxious blue neighborhood outside Boston.

 

“When people are being propagandized,” Ms. Stein said, “they won’t be especially friendly on the street, put it that way.”

 

And as she weighed another campaign this time, she found resistance in the most intimate constituency: her own family.

 

“For her political activities, she does not have the support of the family,” one of Ms. Stein’s adult sons said in an interview, asking not to be identified by name to avoid any personal or professional repercussions from associating with her. “When she told us she was going to run again back in October 2023, we asked her not to.”

 

Ms. Stein has ignored them all.

 

Now, strategists in both parties agree, her decision might well echo again through history — by helping a man whose values she nominally abhors.

 

Ms. Stein is back on the ballot almost everywhere that matters, returning to the campaign fore in an ostensible coin-flip race between Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Democrats see Ms. Stein’s bid as a direct threat in a year when even relatively small voter pools might carry near-existential stakes.

 

While Ms. Stein condemns both “zombie political parties” as tools of Wall Street and war profiteers, her campaign has focused largely on hammering Ms. Harris, blaming the White House she serves for relentless violence in Gaza and Lebanon.

 

And Democrats, as never before, are focused on Ms. Stein.

 

The party has prepared a negative ad blitz for the election’s final weeks, its first-such effort ever directed at a third-party candidate. Fearful that Ms. Stein might divert critical votes in places like Michigan, Democrats are also pressing their case on billboards plastered recently across swing states:

 

“Jill Stein Helped Trump Once. Don’t Let Her Do It Again.”

 

For the last eight years, Ms. Stein has taken her place as a peace-peddling, Democrat-bashing, Republican-aided, formerly Russian-boosted villain of the left (and champion, admirers say, of the farther left) while Mr. Trump’s opponents relitigate his rise and move desperately to prevent his return.

 

In 2016, when Ms. Stein received nearly 1.5 million votes, her support in the decisive states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania exceeded Mr. Trump’s margins of victory. Some national polls now place her around 1 percent, which could be more than enough to make a difference and infuriate her detractors anew.

 

Such is the lot of the third-party candidate, quadrennially scorned by voters who often wish they had options beyond the major parties’ nominees — only to conclude, by election’s eve, that the choice is effectively binary.

 

“Forget the lesser evil,” Ms. Stein likes to counter. “Fight for the greater good.”

 

She dismisses the “spoiler mythology” that has come to define her mainstream identity, noting — accurately enough — that some of her supporters would never back Ms. Harris anyway.

 

She says that Democrats would do well to look inward, disputing that she bears any responsibility for Mr. Trump’s fortunes, then or now.

 

“Those conversations never go anywhere,” Ms. Stein, 74, said in a wide-ranging interview.

 

But then, to Democrats’ eternal distress and consternation, neither does she.

 

Her bid can feel precision-engineered to damage Ms. Harris with key subgroups: young voters appalled by the United States’ support for Israel; former supporters of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns who feel abandoned by Democrats; Arab American and Muslim voters, especially in Michigan, where fury at Ms. Harris and President Biden has been conspicuous for months. (The state, decided in 2016 by just over 10,000 votes, has more than 300,000 residents with Middle Eastern or North African ancestry.)

 

“The goal is to punish the vice president,” Hassan Abdel Salam, a founder of Abandon Harris, a group dedicated to her defeat, said this month at a rally in Dearborn, Mich., headlined by Ms. Stein. The group has since endorsed her.

 

“We are not in a position to win the White House,” another speaker, Kshama Sawant, a former member of the Seattle City Council, told a crowd of about 100 inside an Arab American cultural center. “But we do have a real opportunity to win something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan.”

 

In the interview, Ms. Stein said she had “kind of a divergent point of view” of her candidacy, with an emphasis on the “kind of.”

 

“I myself do not speak in terms of defeating one candidate,” she said. “But I really understand — for the communities that are being savaged by Kamala Harris right now and Biden — I totally understand why their prime directive right now is to clarify that this comes with a price to pay.”

 

At minimum, Ms. Stein seems to concede this much: The goal is to be heard and counted.

 

If she helps to reinstall Mr. Trump, well, that would certainly register.

 

“I like her very much,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Stein at a rally in June. “You know why? She takes 100 percent from them.”

 

Mindful of 2016 (and Ralph Nader’s 2000 campaign before that), Democrats are giving Ms. Stein their full attention.

 

Supplementing the ad campaign, Ms. Harris’s allies have also emphasized some of Ms. Stein’s curious associations and remarks, including statements considered deferential to Russia and figures with ties to Mr. Trump and Republicans who have worked to help Ms. Stein secure ballot access.

 

In Wisconsin, a lawyer who was previously involved in lawsuits seeking to overturn the 2020 election results represented the Green Party. In New Hampshire, a veteran Republican operative submitted signatures for Ms. Stein.

 

Jay Sekulow, who defended Mr. Trump at his first impeachment trial, has worked on behalf of the Green Party in Nevada, a rare battleground where Democrats have successfully thwarted her.

 

“We have never knowingly received help from Republicans,” Ms. Stein said, a claim that Democrats find ludicrous. “Now, they might have done this once or twice, having kind of snuck in under the radar.”

 

To Ms. Stein, any disdain toward her represents the imperial flailing of a desperate party.

 

She has likened Democratic voters to a spouse trapped in a toxic relationship, “constantly making excuses for your abusive partner.”

 

Asked if she could imagine any good-faith reason for voters — even those who are plenty frustrated with Democrats — to support Ms. Harris for the sake of stopping Mr. Trump, she paused for a beat.

 

“I believe that some people are genuine,” she said, “in being misinformed.”

 

Doctor, Guitarist, Candidate

 

Ms. Stein does not look the part of a Democratic scourge.

 

She is a Harvard-trained internist and former folk rocker who gave interviews this month beside a handmade campaign banner that read “People Planet Peace.”

 

She pushes a $25 minimum wage and the abolition of student and medical debt, shuttling between tossup states like Michigan and less competitive ones like Texas and Washington without obvious electoral coherence.

 

Her highest elected office was a seat on a town body in Massachusetts more than a decade ago, but she “would not accept as written in stone” that she will not be sworn in as president in January.

 

Raised in a Reform Jewish household outside Chicago, Ms. Stein aligns herself with civil rights leaders across the ages, gilding her appearances with curated quotations.

 

“Martin Luther King said …”

 

“Remember what Alice Walker said …”

 

“As Frederick Douglass said,” she said in the interview, reciting the line twice within 10 minutes, “‘Power concedes nothing without a demand.’”

 

In Michigan, she campaigned while flanked by men in fezzes, who stood silently in formation as she accused Ms. Harris of fomenting genocide in Gaza. (An aide referred to the men as her security; one called himself simply “a friend.”)

 

Ms. Stein’s running mate, Butch Ware, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has studied African and Islamic history, has called Ms. Harris the “Black face of white supremacy” and likened Barack Obama to a “house negro.” On Oct. 7, one year after the Hamas-led attacks that amounted to the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Mr. Ware recorded a video to “commemorate the one-year anniversary of the modern equivalent of Nat Turner’s rebellion,” invoking the American slave revolt of 1831.

 

Ms. Stein’s coalition, such as it is, can be disorienting. Her campaign was recently compelled to disavow an endorsement from the antisemitic white supremacist David Duke, who supported Mr. Trump’s past runs. (Mr. Duke told followers that Ms. Stein was “the only candidate who speaks clearly against the war in the Middle East.”)

 

On some subjects, Ms. Stein can sound something like Mr. Trump and his associates. She complains of being “shadow-banned” on social media and dismisses “the Russia-gate smear” that ensnared her after Mr. Trump’s election.

 

In 2015, Ms. Stein attended an event in Moscow celebrating RT, the Russian TV network that gave heavy airtime to her 2016 campaign, sitting at a table with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. (Ms. Stein has downplayed the episode, saying she was there to preach peace.)

 

Investigators later determined that the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency used social media accounts in 2016 to promote Ms. Stein, hoping to help Mr. Trump. No public finding has suggested that Ms. Stein was aware of the effort.

 

To some who have known her for years, the notion of Ms. Stein as an international chaos agent is broadly absurd.

 

At Harvard, she distinguished herself as a gifted student, a nonconformist and a guitarist forever seeking optimal acoustics.

 

“She would sit in the stairwell with her guitar and sing, to her own amusement,” said Ty Cobb, a schoolmate who later worked as a White House lawyer under Mr. Trump, whom he has since criticized. “She was sort of a free spirit back then, had her own drummer.”

 

After college, Ms. Stein continued playing music as she transitioned into medicine, occasionally merging the two pursuits.

 

“She wrote songs to remember all the bones,” said Mark Allen, a retired advertising executive who became friends with Ms. Stein in the 1970s.

 

As a Vietnam War-era dissident long skeptical of mainstream politicians, Ms. Stein said she generally voted Democrat anyway before being galvanized by Mr. Nader and the Green Party.

 

Her political career began in 2002, when she said she was approached to run for governor of Massachusetts. The field included Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner.

 

“I moved from clinical medicine to political medicine because politics is the mother of all illnesses,” Ms. Stein said — a line she has used since at least her 2012 presidential campaign.

 

Quickly, she inspired the kind of political zingers that continue to trail her. Some who know her suspect that her contempt for Democrats congealed around this time, deepening with each campaign.

 

“It was basically the same thing,” Ms. Stein said. “‘A vote for Stein is a vote for Romney.’”

 

Though Ms. Stein received more than 3 percent of the vote, a surprisingly strong showing, and acquitted herself capably on the debate stage, one exchange seemed to capture her party’s perpetual quest for name recognition.

 

Mr. Romney turned toward Ms. Stein to address a point she had made about education policy.

 

“Carla, I agree,” he said, accidentally naming the Libertarian candidate, Carla Howell, who corrected him (“I’m Carla”) as Mr. Romney backpedaled. “I’m sorry. Excuse me. Dr. Stein.”

 

‘Please Be Courageous and Strategic’

 

For months, people who know Ms. Stein — friends, relatives, long-lost peers — have discussed privately how best to get through to her.

 

They worried she was aiding Mr. Trump, despite her protestations. They believed that another dead-end campaign would undercut the ideals she claimed to embody.

 

Some tried to raise the subject delicately through intermediaries. Others composed painful, pointed messages and sent them directly.

 

“Your constituents and their votes in swing states could make the difference as to whether the U.S.A. joins the many authoritarian nations of the world,” Mr. Allen, the friend from the 1970s, wrote recently to Ms. Stein, urging her to instruct supporters to back Ms. Harris. “If the election weren’t so close, I’d vote for you, as I did in 2016. Instead, I’m asking you to please be courageous and strategic.”

 

He received no response.

 

While both major parties have trained their focus on Ms. Stein as a possible factor, some strategists expect third-party support to be more muted this time.

 

In 2016, when many voters were convinced that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in, protest voting could feel fairly low-stakes. Few consider Ms. Harris’s candidacy a sure thing.

 

In recent weeks, Democratic leaders like Jaime Harrison, the party chair, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have gone out of their way to tweak Ms. Stein, whom the congresswoman described as a “predatory” figure who exploits voters’ understandable grievances.

 

“Democrats have finally learned the lessons of 2000 and 2016,” said Lis Smith, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee on third-party and independent candidates.

 

Republicans have learned some lessons, too.

 

“No Republican knows that oil production under Biden is higher than ever. But Jill Stein’s people do,” Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief strategist, said earlier this year, adding, “The more exposure these guys get, the better it is for us.”

 

After consecutive campaigns in 2012 and 2016, Ms. Stein did not run in 2020. The Green Party nominee that year, Howie Hawkins, received only about 400,000 votes.

 

For a time, it appeared that Cornel West, the left-wing intellectual, would represent the Green Party in 2024. After he decided to run instead as an independent, Ms. Stein reassumed the mantle — and reignited Democratic complaints about her.

 

“The Republicans don’t do it, for some strange reason, as much as the Democrats,” Mr. Nader said in an interview, noting that Libertarians, who are historically considered likelier to siphon votes from Republicans, had not faced equivalent venom or legal challenges. (Gary Johnson, the 2016 Libertarian nominee, received more than four million votes.)

 

Mr. Nader said that Democrats’ habitual finger-pointing masked their own failure to appeal to disaffected voters. He accused the party of “massive political bigotry.”

 

Ms. Stein’s supporters tend to explain their choice as a product of principle and exasperation.

 

Bob McMurray, a campaign volunteer who attended the rally in Dearborn, said he voted for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Biden in the last two elections. But he faulted Democrats for violence in the Middle East, he said, and could not abide another nose-holding November, even as he surmised that Mr. Trump would be worse for Gaza.

 

“I’ve spent my entire adult life voting for the lesser of two evils,” he said. “I’m tired of it.”

 

Ms. Stein has also suggested that a Trump victory might serve the cause of left-wing protest.

 

“It’s sad to say,” she said, “but the common wisdom is that under Democrats the antiwar movement goes to sleep.”

 

Asked why she seemed to denounce Ms. Harris so much more often, Ms. Stein said that while the Democrats’ case against Mr. Trump was “generally true,” Republicans illogically attack Democrats “for being too socialist and for being Marxist.”

 

“If only,” her campaign manager, Jason Call, interjected with a laugh.

 

As a committed activist, Ms. Stein said, it was her duty to “correct the record,” drawing on decades of field research.

 

“The Democrats,” she said, exhaling for effect, “you have to really study them.”

 

And no one could keep her from her chosen trade.

 

Kitty Bennett contributed research.


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3) Athens Dockworkers Block Ammunition SHIPMENT Bound for Israel

By People's Dispatch., October 19, 2024

https://popularresistance.org/athens-dockworkers-block-ammunition-shipment-bound-for-israel/

Photo: PAME Greece.


Workers At Piraeus Port Prevented The Loading Of Ammunition Destined For Israel.

Condemning the political elite’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

 

Workers at the Piraeus Port in Athens successfully blocked a shipment of ammunition bound for Israel in a late-night action on October 17. Following a call to action by the dockworkers’ union ENEDEP, port workers and activists mobilized to prevent a container of bullets, designated for the port of Haifa, from being loaded onto the ship Marla Bull, owned by Israeli company ZIM Integrated Shipping Services.

 

In addition to ENEDEP, the action was supported by several workers’ organizations, including the Labor Center of Piraeus and unions of metalworkers and the shipbuilding industry. The workers declared they would not be complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza by allowing the container to sail, as its cargo would be used to kill more Palestinians.

 

As a result of the action, the Marla Bull was forced to leave the port without the shipment. According to local Palestine solidarity groups, the container remains near the port, guarded by workers and awaiting more investigation by port authorities.

 

During the action, workers demanded “disengagement from the imperialist plans and their consequences that turn our country and Piraeus Port into a target for retaliation.” They added that Piraeus should not serve as a “base of war.”

 

“In a port where we fight daily for better living and working conditions for ourselves and our children, there is no place for the butchers of the people,” ENEDEP asserted.

 

A delegate from the General Union of Palestinian Workers, Mohamed Iqnaibi, commended the workers for their solidarity, stating that Palestinian workers continue to draw strength and courage from their struggles. Similarly, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) praised the action, stating that the working class has shown its strength and is standing on the right side of history.

 

The party emphasized that the workers’ resistance sends a message of solidarity with the people of Palestine and Lebanon, opposing “the ‘strategic allies’ of the bourgeoisie who support the murderous state of Israel and other Euro-Atlantic butchers of the people.”

 

In June of this year, workers at Piraeus Port already refused to handle cargo from the ship MSC Altair over concerns that it would be used in Israel’s ongoing attacks on the Gaza Strip. Their determination and resistance are a testament to the working class’ commitment to solidarity and peace, in contrast to the political elites’ complicity in Israel’s crimes.

 

While the Marla Bull’s cargo was successfully blocked, questions remain about what will follow. According to some reports, workers involved in the action could face legal persecution. However, ENEDEP remains resolute in its support for the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian people.


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4) Hamas’s Guerrilla Tactics in North Gaza Make It Hard to Defeat

Israel has decimated Hamas’s military wing, along with much of Gaza. But the group’s small-scale, hit-and-run approach poses a threat in the enclave’s north.

By Patrick Kingsley and Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Oct. 22, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/world/middleeast/hamas-israel-gaza-guerrilla.html

Groups of people, some with belongings, walking down a road with destroyed buildings on either side.Palestinians carry their belongings as they flee from areas in the northern Gaza Strip this monthCredit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


The top commanders of Hamas are mostly dead. The group’s rank and file has been decimated. Many of its hide-outs and stockpiles have been captured and destroyed.

 

But Hamas’s killing of an Israeli colonel in northern Gaza on Sunday underscored how the group’s military wing, though unable to operate as a conventional army, is still a potent guerrilla force with enough fighters and munitions to enmesh the Israeli military in a slow, grinding and as yet unwinnable war.

 

Col. Ehsan Daksa, a member of Israel’s Arab Druse minority, was killed when a planted explosive blew up near his tank convoy. It was a surprise attack that exemplified how Hamas has held out for nearly a year since Israel invaded Gaza late last October, and will likely be able to even after the death of its leader, Yahya Sinwar, last week.

 

Hamas’s remaining fighters are hiding from view in ruined buildings and the group’s vast underground tunnel network, much of which remains intact despite Israel’s efforts to destroy it, according to military analysts and Israeli soldiers.

The fighters emerge briefly in small units to booby trap buildings, set roadside bombs, attach mines to Israeli armored vehicles or fire rocket-propelled grenades at Israeli forces before attempting to return underground.

 

While Hamas cannot defeat Israel in a frontal battle, its small-scale, hit-and-run approach has allowed it to continue to inflict harm on Israel and avoid defeat, even if, according to Israel’s unverified count, Hamas has lost more than 17,000 fighters since the start of the war.

 

“The guerrilla forces are working well and it will be very difficult to subdue them — not just in the short run, but in the long term,” said Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, a Hamas member and a former fighter in the group’s military wing who is now an analyst based in Istanbul.

 

Though Israel may have destroyed Hamas’s long-range rocket caches, Mr. al-Awawdeh said, “there are still endless explosive devices and light arms at hand.”

Some of those explosives were stockpiled before the start of the war. Others are repurposed Israeli munitions that failed to explode on impact, according to both Hamas and the Israeli military. Hamas released a video this week that appeared to show Hamas combatants turning an unexploded Israeli missile into an improvised bomb.

 

In open combat, Hamas’s fighters are no match for Israel’s army, as the killing of Mr. Sinwar in southern Gaza last week showed. Cornered in the ruins of Rafah, Mr. Sinwar was killed by an Israeli unit that could call on tanks, drones and snipers for backup.

 

But his death is unlikely to affect the capacity of the Hamas fighters in northern Gaza, according to Israeli and Palestinian analysts.

 

Since Israel took control last November of a key thoroughfare that divides north and south Gaza, Hamas’s leadership in the south, which included Mr. Sinwar, has exercised little direct control over fighters in the north. And after over a year of guerrilla fighting, Hamas’s remaining fighters are likely now used to making decisions locally instead of taking orders from a centralized command structure.

 

In addition, the group said over the summer that it had recruited new fighters, though it is unclear how many it signed up, or how well trained they are.

 

Hamas has also benefited from Israel’s refusal to either hold ground or transfer power in Gaza to an alternative Palestinian leadership. Time and again, Israeli soldiers have forced Hamas from a neighborhood, only to retreat within weeks without handing power to Hamas’s Palestinian rivals. That has allowed the group to return and re-exert control, often prompting the Israeli military to return months or even weeks later.

 

Israel’s current campaign in Jabaliya in northern Gaza, where Colonel Daksa was killed, is at least its third operation there over the past year.

 

Israeli officials say that this latest action is necessary to undercut a resurgent Hamas.

 

Yet the aimlessness of Israel’s strategy has led to questions from both Israelis and Palestinians about why its soldiers were sent again to Jabaliya.

 

“We occupy territories, and then we get out,” said Michael Milstein, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs. “This kind of doctrine means that you find yourself in endless war.”

Meanwhile, Palestinians say this operation in Jabaliya has been one of the most traumatic of an already brutal war. As fighting intensifies, the specter of famine once again looms over northern Gaza, and health care workers have warned that the area’s last remaining hospitals are at risk of collapse.

 

For Palestinians, the general assumption is that this is an attempt to expel the remaining population of northern Gaza. The majority of the north’s prewar population — roughly one million people — fled south at the war’s onset, but about 400,000 are thought to remain.

 

The Palestinian alarm has been partly fomented by a prominent former Israeli general, Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, who has publicly pressed Israel’s government to depopulate northern Gaza by cutting off food and water.

 

Under General Eiland’s plan, the Israeli military would give the remaining 400,000 one week to move south before declaring the north a closed military zone. Israel would then block all supplies to the north in an effort to force Hamas militants to capitulate and return the hostages it has been holding since last October’s attack on Israel.

 

“They will face two alternatives: either to surrender or to die of starvation,” General Eiland, a former director of Israel’s national security council, said in an interview.

 

Any civilians who refused to leave would suffer the consequences, without any new supplies entering, the general said.

 

“We are giving them all the chance. And if some of them decide to stay, well, it is probably their problem,” said General Eiland.

 

The plan has generated significant debate and some support in Israel, including from government ministers and lawmakers, as some Israelis seek decisive solutions to a repetitive war.

 

Human rights advocates have said that such a policy, if carried out, would violate international law and severely threaten the welfare of civilians in northern Gaza.

Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer, said General Eiland’s plan would involve “the deliberate creation of humanitarian crises as a weapon of war.” Besieging an enemy in a small area could be acceptable, he said, but not a siege of such a wide territory.

 

The general’s proposals “could very likely amount to a war crime,” said Mr. Sfard.

 

Both Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, and Omer Dostri, the spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said this month that the government is not implementing the plan.

 

Still, Mr. Dostri said Mr. Netanyahu had studied the plan.

 

Palestinians speculate that a version of it has become Israeli government policy: Israel has issued evacuation warnings for more neighborhoods in northern Gaza, home to at least tens of thousands of people, and the amount of aid entering the area has sharply declined the start of October.

 

Montaser Bahja, 50, said he fled his home in Jabaliya to shelter elsewhere in northern Gaza at the start of Israel’s renewed operation. He said relatives who remained have described Israel’s bombardments as unusually fierce, and that the new policy appeared to be part of an attempt — along with the restriction on humanitarian aid — to force people to move south.

 

“They might be shy about saying it in front of the world and deny it,” said Mr. Bahja, a high school English teacher. “But based on what they’re doing on the ground, it seems like that’s what it is.”

Israeli officials have said that they allow plenty of aid into all parts of Gaza and blamed shortages on the United Nations and relief organizations’ logistical challenges.

 

Just 410 relief trucks have entered Gaza in the first three weeks of October, compared to roughly 3,000 in September, according to the United Nations. The Israeli military’s own figures show a similar drop.

 

Prices of vegetables and canned goods in northern Gaza’s makeshift street markets are skyrocketing, Palestinians say, adding to concerns among rights activists that Israeli restrictions have already led to widespread hunger.


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5) The F.B.I. is investigating a leak of classified documents that appear to show Israel’s plans for retaliatory attacks on Iran.

By Adam Goldman Reporting from Washington, October 22, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/22/world/israel-iran-lebanon-hezbollah#fbi-israel-iran-leak

People standing and sitting by the side of a road; on the left is a family sitting among rocks, the man is holding a baby tightly. The scene is at night.Israelis taking cover near Kfar Saba, Israel, on Oct. 1 during air-raid sirens warning of incoming missiles fired from Iran. Credit...Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times


The F.B.I. is investigating a leak of highly classified documents that appear to show Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for a missile attack earlier this month, the agency confirmed on Tuesday.

 

The documents were prepared by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is responsible for analyzing images and information collected by American spy satellites. The N.G.A is part of the United States intelligence community and conducts sensitive work in support of clandestine and military operations.

 

The information in the documents is highly classified and details interpretations of satellite imagery that shed light on a possible strike by Israel on Iran. They began circulating on Friday on the Telegram app. U.S. officials have previously said they did not know from where the documents had been taken, and that they were looking for the original source of the leak.

 

In a statement, the F.B.I. said it was “working closely with our partners in the Department of Defense and intelligence community. As this is an ongoing investigation, we have no further comment.” The bureau is responsible for investigating violations of the Espionage Act, which outlaws the unauthorized retention of defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary.

 

Israel has made it clear it intends to retaliate for an Iranian missile barrage on Oct. 1. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said that the strike was launched after the assassinations of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Lebanon; Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, killed in Tehran in July; and an Iranian commander. U.S. officials believe the strike could take place in the coming days.


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6) Settler activists meet at the Gaza border for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.

By Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Be’eri, Israel, Oct. 21, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/22/world/israel-iran-lebanon-hezbollah#fbi-israel-iran-leak

In the desert, a few rows of white sheets are set up on small makeshift structures. Half a dozen people are standing between the rows.Israeli settler activists on Monday setting up for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot near the border with the Gaza Strip. Credit...Abir Sultan/EPA, via Shutterstock



For more than a year, Israel has restricted access to the sandy area between Israeli villages and the eastern border of Gaza. But on Monday, authorities made a rare exception for an event promoting settlement construction in the Gaza Strip, led by 10 members of the government and senior ministers, half from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party, and including the far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

 

Though only a few hundred, mostly religious, attendees gathered in the remote desert makeshift compound of wooden huts with white sheets as walls — built to reflect the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which commemorates the Israelites’ journey through the desert by spending time in temporary shelters — the event highlighted the influence of settler activists within the Israeli government and Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party.

 

In January, Mr. Netanyahu said that his government did not support plans to build settlements on the ruins of Gaza. His opposition likely stems from concerns that re-establishing settlements could complicate Israel’s security situation and damage its standing abroad, as settlements are considered illegal under international law. Israel also faces frequent criticism for the hardships Palestinians endure under Israeli military rule and the presence of settlers in the West Bank.

 

But as the war against Hamas continues with no end in sight, and amid uncertainty about Israel’s postwar plan, some in the Israeli leader’s coalition want to put pressure on him to reverse, or at least soften, his position on reviving Jewish settlements in Gaza.

 

“Everyone in Likud supports this as an idea,” said Avihai Boaron, a member of the Knesset from the Likud party who attended the event. “Our job now is to legitimize this as a plan.”

 

For much of the world, the settlements, which were dismantled in Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, were viewed as a barrier to resolving the conflict — a stance that continues to apply to those in the West Bank.

 

But for settler activists who believe the Gaza Strip is part of a biblical land promised to the Jewish people, leaving it in 2005 wasn’t just a mistake: it was a sin. They argue that if a Jewish civilian population had remained there, protected by the military, Hamas would not have been able to carry out the brutal attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

 

Rebuilding Jewish settlements in Gaza, they now say, is the only thing that can ensure the security of Israelis. “This will prevent the next massacre,” said Yinon Goldstein, 23, a West Bank settler who is part of an activist group that aspires to establish New Gaza, or a Jewish metropolitan area in place of the devastated Palestinian Gaza City.

 

Polling since the beginning of the war has suggested that the majority of Israelis aren’t persuaded by these arguments, and some security experts disputed these claims, saying that the real motivations for building settlements in Gaza are religious, not practical.

 

Behind the main stage, later taken by Mr. Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister — who praised efforts to encourage Palestinians to leave Gaza — and Mr. Smotrich, the finance minister, who vowed to reintroduce Jewish settlements in Gaza, clouds of smoke rose from a distant Palestinian town in the enclave, accompanied by the thunderous roar of artillery fire. Yet, the attendees seemed to pay little notice.

 

Most came for the day, but a group of about 10 settler activists hoping to be the first to rebuild in Gaza has been camping for several months a short drive from there — near a highway, under a concrete bridge, a mile and a half from the northeast corner of the Gaza border.

 

A squad of soldiers, still dusty from fighting in northern Gaza, stopped by for coffee. Their officer, Yaron Arkash, 24, asked one of the settlers camping there who in the government was pushing for resettling Gaza.

 

“If I could,” Mr. Arkash said, “I’d build a home there in a heartbeat.”


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7) In Gaza Camps Where Tents Are Now a Luxury, a Harsh Winter Looms

After a year of war, at least one million people are facing months in the cold. Some said tents, blankets and warm clothes now qualified as luxuries.

By Hiba Yazbek, Reporting from Jerusalem, Oct. 23, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/world/middleeast/gaza-displaced-winter-tents.html

A family trying to keep warm by a fire outside a tent.

In a tent camp for displaced Palestinians in Rafah, in southern Gaza, in February. Many Gazans have now had to flee more than once. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock


A year into the war in Gaza, the prices of ready-made tents and supplies to build even flimsy shelters are soaring. Warm blankets, clothes and firewood are hard to get or prohibitively expensive. Finding a vacant apartment is out of the question for most displaced civilians. And many have no income at all.

 

So people eking out an existence in tattered tents and makeshift shelters across the enclave are bracing for a tough, rainy winter. This one, many expect, will be worse than the last.

 

Most of the roughly two million people in Gaza have been displaced at least once by the war, compounding the hardships of a population enduring waves of Israeli bombardment and widespread lawlessness.

 

Last week, Israel issued yet more evacuation orders for people in the north of Gaza, at the same time its expanded military operations in the south resulted in the killing of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar but little movement toward an end to the war.

 

Mahmoud Abu Helal, a 33-year-old pharmacist, has been sharing a leaky self-made tent with 12 relatives since he fled the southern city of Rafah in May, when the Israeli ground invasion there began. He thought they would be able to return to their homes in a few days, he said, so they only brought summer clothes.

 

But Israel’s military operations in Rafah have stretched on, and more than five months later, he, his parents, his wife, two children, two brothers and their families are all still living in a tent camp in Al-Mawasi, outside the city. There, they struggle to get by and worry about a winter that he said “feels harsh already.” Winter in Gaza brings rain and wind, especially at night, and temperatures can drop to the low 40s Fahrenheit.

 

“Our tent is not protecting us against rain — it keeps leaking all the time,” Mr. Abu Helal said, adding, “Without winter clothes, mainly coats, I am in real trouble.”

 

For months, his main challenge was finding food and water. “Now,” he said, “I need to prioritize clothes.” But even secondhand clothing is now largely unaffordable in Gaza, he said. “This is not getting any easier.”

 

Earlier this month, the Israeli military called on Palestinians to evacuate swaths of the northern Gaza Strip, saying that its forces were operating “with great force” in the area. It urged residents and the displaced to head to the southern part of the territory, where tens of thousands of people have already crammed into Al-Mawasi, a once sparsely populated beachside strip.

 

Israeli officials had declared Al-Mawasi to be safer for civilians, but it continues to be hit by airstrikes as the military attacks sites it believes to contain Hamas fighters.

 

While the new evacuation orders will put more people on the move in northern Gaza, some residents interviewed by The New York Times said they had no intention of moving to the south, citing the lack of basic necessities there.

 

“If we go to the south, we’ll be in a tent,” said Saher Abu Dagheem, 38, a resident of Jabaliya. “We won’t have the stuff we need there.”

 

The Norwegian Refugee Council said last month that more than a million displaced Palestinians in central and southern Gaza urgently needed kits to prepare or repair tents and shelters before winter arrives. Many of the materials provided by aid agencies can no longer be used because of wear and tear, and few new tents have entered Gaza in recent months, the aid group said.

 

Israel regulates the entrance of all goods into Gaza and restricts the import of what it calls “dual use” items: civilian products and supplies that could also be used for military purposes. Tents do not fall into this category, according to COGAT, the Israeli military agency coordinating aid delivery.

 

The lack of aid flowing into Gaza more generally, though, is of increasing concern to aid groups and others. Israel’s Supreme Court has demanded answers from its government on the situation, and the Biden administration recently warned that a failure to allow more aid into Gaza could have consequences for American military assistance to Israel.

 

Manufactured tents are now a luxury, according to Juliette Touma, the spokeswoman for the United Nations agency in charge of Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA. Unable to afford them — tents now sell for hundreds of dollars each, according to residents of Gaza — most people have had to improvise shelters using whatever materials they can find.

 

Hazem Hassouna, who said his family has been displaced six times, was waiting for aid groups like UNRWA to provide blankets, tarps and tents. He does not yet know what, if anything, they will receive.

 

Mr. Hassouna, who is from Gaza City in the north, now shares a tent with his wife and four children in central Gaza. Their tent is partially open to the sky, he said, and would flood easily in heavy winter rains. To prevent that, he would need a tarp that costs about $200 — a price he says he simply cannot afford.

 

“We can’t buy food,” he said. “So how can we buy a tarp?”

 

Mr. Hassouna’s family uses firewood for cooking and heat, but that, too, has become expensive — when he can find any at all. The family is also short on blankets, with two family members having to share one thin blanket between them.

 

“I will be drowning in winter, seriously,” he said. “When it’s about to rain, I say, ‘May God save us from this humiliation.’”

 

Reporting was contributed by Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel; Iyad Abuheweila from Istanbul; Abu Bakr Bashir from London; and Adam Rasgon from Jerusalem.


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8) Austin says U.S. has yet to see evidence of Hezbollah bunker under Beirut hospital.

By Aaron Boxerman and Eric Schmitt, Oct. 23, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/23/world/israel-iran-lebanon-hezbollah

A building with a half dozen stories, with a sign reading “Sahel General Hospital” on the top. A red “Emergency” sign is on the ground floor.  A parking lot is in the foreground with people standing around.The Sahel General Hospital in Beirut’s southern outskirts on Tuesday. Credit...Mohamed Azakir/Reuters


Lloyd J. Austin III, the U.S. secretary of defense, said Wednesday that Washington had not seen proof of Israeli claims that Hezbollah had set up a bunker complex under a hospital in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

 

“We’ve not seen evidence of that at this point,” Mr. Austin told reporters at a news conference in Italy. “We’ll continue to collaborate with our Israeli counterparts to gain better fidelity on exactly what they’re looking at.”

 

The Israeli military has repeatedly asserted over the past few days that Hezbollah — the powerful Lebanese armed group backed by Iran — had stashed hundreds of millions of dollars in an underground command center beneath al-Sahel hospital.

 

Fadi Alameh, the hospital’s director, called the claims baseless and invited international observers to visit the hospital. Journalists who arrived on a supervised tour on Tuesday reported no evidence of any underground bunker or hoards of wealth.

 

On Wednesday, Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, accused Hezbollah of masking the entrance to the site and preventing reporters from accessing it. “Hezbollah doesn’t want you to find the money,” he added.

 

It is a war of words with a now-familiar ring to it: Israel has repeatedly surrounded and raided hospitals in the Gaza Strip in its yearlong war there, accusing Hamas of using them for military purposes. Hamas has denied the claim, although at least some returned Israeli hostages have testified that they were held captive inside Gaza hospitals.

 

Mr. Austin said Hezbollah had a history of placing weapons beneath mosques and schools and using civilian sites as cover for military operations. Both groups have denied the claims.

 

“The Israelis need to be as careful as possible to protect civilians,” Mr. Austin said, but added that Hezbollah and Hamas’s tactics were making that “more complicated.”

 

Euan Ward contributed reporting.


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9) Israel strikes a Lebanese port city after ordering a large-scale evacuation.

By Euan Ward, Reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, Oct. 23, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/23/world/israel-iran-lebanon-hezbollah#israel-strikes-a-lebanese-port-city-after-ordering-a-large-scale-evacuation

Smoke rising above Tyre, Lebanon, on Wednesday. Credit...Aziz Taher/Reuters


Israel attacked the ancient port city of Tyre on Wednesday after issuing its broadest evacuation order there so far, pressing on with its bombing campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon even as U.S. officials press for a diplomatic solution to the escalating conflict.

 

The strikes came hours after Israel’s military warned civilians in a large portion of the southern city to move around 25 miles north. The evacuation area covered a densely populated stretch between two UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the city, which was until recently a hub for people fleeing other parts of southern Lebanon. The extent of the damage or any casualties was not immediately clear.

 

“We’ve been busy,” said Mortada Mhanna, the head of Tyre’s disaster management unit, who coordinated efforts on Wednesday to move civilians to safety.

 

Israel has previously targeted Tyre with airstrikes in the weeks since its forces invaded southern Lebanon, but this was the first time it had called for evacuations in such a large portion of the city. The warning posted on social media on Wednesday covered an area equivalent to several city blocks.

 

Tyre is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and is home to Roman ruins that attract international tourists. The city had around 125,000 residents before the war, but many have fled in recent weeks amid Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah, the powerful Lebanese militant group.

 

The Israeli military said that it had targeted command centers in Tyre belonging to Hezbollah, and accused the group of embedding in civilian areas.

 

Around 15,000 people still lived in Tyre when the Israeli military issued the evacuation warning, Mr. Mhanna said. Many had fled to Tyre’s Christian quarter or took refuge along the coast, believing they would be safer there, he said.

 

Local emergency services workers had spent the morning driving through the city’s streets with loudspeakers in an attempt to warn civilians of impending bombardment. Hours later, the Israeli military began to target the area, sending huge clouds of smoke towering above the city.

 

The U.N. refugee agency said last week that more than a quarter of Lebanese territory was now under Israeli evacuation warnings. At least one million people in Lebanon — around a fifth of the population — have been displaced, dispersed among schools, sleeping on sidewalks and taking shelter in abandoned buildings.

 

Lebanon’s culture ministry condemned the attacks in Tyre in a statement and called on UNESCO to intervene to protect the archaeological sites.


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10) Professors in Trouble Over Protests Wonder if Academic Freedom Is Dying

Universities have cracked down on professors for pro-Palestinian activism, saying they are protecting students and tamping down on hate speech. Faculty members say punishments have put a “chill in the air.”

By Anemona Hartocollis, Oct. 23, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/us/faculty-protests-academic-freedom-tenure-discipline.html

Faculty members, some in academic gowns, stand on a steps in front of Low Library at Columbia University. Some hold signs that say “Hands off our students.”

Professors at Columbia University and across the country have joined their students in activism. Credit...C.S. Muncy for The New York Times


Maura Finkelstein, an anthropology professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, was an avid poster on social media. She called a fund-raiser for the Israeli war effort “students raising money for genocide,” and she frequently ended her posts with the words “Free Palestine.”

 

After complaints, federal civil rights investigators and the college began looking into her online postings and classroom discussions about the war in Gaza.

 

But it was her sharing of an Instagram post by a Palestinian American poet, Remi Kanazi, that got her fired, Dr. Finkelstein said. “Do not cower to Zionists,” the post said. “Don’t normalize Zionists taking up space.”

 

A student complained that the post made her feel unsafe, as a Zionist and as a Jew. “She said she wouldn’t feel comfortable in my classes,” Dr. Finkelstein said in an interview.

 

As protests unfolded at scores of college campuses last spring, students were not the only ones punished for participating. Faculty members also faced consequences for supporting the students in their protests or for expressing views that were construed as antisemitic or, less commonly, for pro-Israel activism.

 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has intensified what many faculty members and their allies believe is part of a growing assault on the ideals of academic freedom, a principle that most American colleges and universities hold dear.

 

Visiting scholars, adjuncts and lecturers without tenure have had their contracts terminated or not renewed. Some had their classes suddenly canceled. Faculty members say they have been publicly criticized in ways that have trampled on their reputations and hurt their careers.

 

Faculty members have been affected at more than a dozen major universities, according to unofficial records being kept by faculty union activists.

 

Attempts to discipline scholars have been rising, to 145 a year in 2022, from four a year in 2000, as education has become more polarized, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit that monitors free speech violations.

 

“There’s a chill in the air,” said Peter Lake, a law professor and director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University in Florida.

 

The disciplinary actions have followed a movement to ensure students feel safe on campus. In the last year, many Jewish students have said protests and classroom discussions about the war have threatened that feeling of safety, sometimes intimidating them from expressing their views and making them nervous about revealing their Jewish identity.

 

Academic freedom is also not absolute. It does not protect “propagating wrongheaded ideas” in teaching or research, said Nadine Strossen, a former head of the American Civil Liberties Union. And it does not put faculty members above the law or above campus rules meant to make sure protests, whatever their point of view, do not disrupt learning.

 

But it means that academics are broadly allowed the First Amendment right to express opinions or to speak beyond their area of expertise outside the classroom, including on social media.

 

Yet that is where many faculty members are getting into trouble, Ms. Strossen said.

 

Professors have been criticized for creating hostile environments in classrooms and stifling the speech of students who might not agree with them, taking on the role of activists instead of teachers. And some say faculty members are professing views that could cross legal lines requiring universities to protect students from discrimination.

 

Much of the pressure to crack down on faculty has come from external sources, including alumni, lawmakers, advocacy groups and donors.

 

“Those external voices are something that any president who wants to keep their job has to pay some attention to,” Alison Byerly, the president of Carleton College in Minnesota, said.

 

In hearings on antisemitism on campuses last school year, congressional Republicans zeroed in on several professors, urging universities to discipline or fire them over speech or writing they said was hateful.

 

When Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, testified, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York singled out Mohamed Abdou, an assistant visiting professor. Ms. Stefanik quoted from one of his posts on Facebook, under a different spelling of his name, supporting Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad four days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

 

“What are the consequences in this case?” Ms. Stefanik asked.

 

“He will never work at Columbia again,” Dr. Shafik replied.

 

Dr. Abdou’s contract was not renewed, and he is suing Dr. Shafik and the university for defamation and “loss of academic freedom,” among other complaints. He said he had been quoted incompletely, noting that his full post said that he supported Hamas and its allies “up to a point — given ultimate differences over our ethical political commitments.”

 

By condemning him, Dr. Shafik “blacklisted me globally and tarnished my scholarship,” he said in an interview.

 

(Dr. Shafik resigned over the summer, after losing the support of many members of the faculty, who criticized her in a no-confidence vote for ignoring “our statutes and our norms of academic freedom and shared governance.”)

 

Columbia declined to comment on Dr. Abdou’s case because it is in litigation.

 

The university recently barred from campus a vocally pro-Israel assistant professor in its business school, Shai Davidai, saying he had harassed and intimidated university employees. The professor has accused the university of not doing enough to limit pro-Palestinian activism that he says veers into antisemitism.

 

Dr. Finkelstein argues that if there was any antisemitism at work in her case, it came from Muhlenberg College, not her.

 

“Once the administration called me into meetings, I realized that I had thought being Jewish was going to protect me, and it didn’t,” Dr. Finkelstein recalled. “So I am being told that there are good Jews and bad Jews and Jews that count and Jews that don’t, which is inherently antisemitic.”

 

She was fired on May 30, and she is appealing.

 

In a separate investigation, the Education Department’s civil rights arm reached an agreement with Muhlenberg in September to resolve complaints including that Dr. Finkelstein had created a hostile environment for Jews — in violation of civil rights law — and that the college had not taken enough corrective action. A spokesman for the college, Todd Lineburger, said it was “steadfastly devoted to principles of academic freedom, tenure and due process.”

 

Dr. Finkelstein, who was the chair of sociology and anthropology, is the only tenured professor known to have been dismissed on the basis of speech or conduct related to the war in Gaza, according to Anita Levy, senior program officer for academic freedom of the American Association of University Professors, which will conduct an inquiry into her case.

 

The most vulnerable faculty members are those on the lower end of the totem pole, without tenure.

 

At the University of California, Los Angeles, another hot spot during the protests last spring, several faculty members, including two tenured professors, two on the tenure track, eight lecturers and one adjunct, faced criminal charges and internal disciplinary proceedings for their participation in campus protests, according to faculty members involved.

 

Graeme Blair, an associate professor of political science who was arrested at the U.C.L.A. encampment, said he believed that he had lost a promotion to full professor for standing by students during a violent confrontation with the police.

 

“I think they are trying to send a message,” Dr. Blair said.

 

U.C.L.A. said it supported academic freedom but could not comment on individual conduct cases.

 

A smaller number of cases have involved pro-Israel instructors and faculty members.

 

In many cases, however, the pressure to crack down on faculty speech has illustrated the enduring power of the tenure system.

 

Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, believes he lost a job offer to direct a Holocaust and genocide center at the University of Minnesota because a pro-Israel group lobbied against him for calling Israel’s conduct of the war “a textbook case of genocide.”

 

Dr. Segal remains in his tenured position at Stockton University, a public university in southern New Jersey.

 

Jake Ricker, a spokesman for the University of Minnesota, said that Dr. Segal had been offered a faculty position instead of the directorship, though Dr. Segal disputed this.

 

Annelise Orleck, a history professor at Dartmouth, was arrested while recording a student protest on her phone and was barred from central areas of campus, including the president’s house.

 

For weeks she dodged through backyards on her way to class to avoid the block where the president’s house is, she said. Now the charges have been dropped and the ban lifted, but she still avoids the Green, where she was arrested.

 

Justin Anderson, a spokesman for Dartmouth, said that the university had an “unwavering commitment” to academic freedom.

 

Dr. Orleck said she felt fortunate, compared with colleagues elsewhere. “I feel like a lot of my colleagues this fall are being caught up in a new wave of repression, and so far, I have not,” she said.

 

Susan C. Beachy, Kirsten Noyes and Kitty Bennett contributed research.


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11) France backs expansion of Lebanon’s army, and will give €100 million to aid displaced Lebanese, Macron says.

By Matthew Mpoke Bigg, October 24, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/24/world/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-iran
Lebanese soldiers ride atop camouflaged armored vehicles, driving in a line down a road, beneath billboards showing a candle and the words “Pray for Lebanon.” Lebanese military soldiers in Beirut last month. Credit...Wael Hamzeh/EPA, via Shutterstock

France will support the recruitment of thousands of extra troops for Lebanon’s military and donate around $100 million to support people who have fled their homes because of a war between Israel and the militia group Hezbollah, President Emmanuel Macron of France said Thursday at a conference on Lebanon.

 

Mr. Macron called for a cease-fire and said that Hezbollah, which has fired thousands of drones and missiles at Israel in the past year, should stop its attacks. He also said that Israel’s continuing invasion of Lebanon, launched this month to end Hezbollah’s aggression, was “regrettable” and he appeared to criticize the rationale for Israel’s push.

 

“There has been a lot of talk in recent days of a war of civilizations, or of civilizations that must be defended. I’m not sure you can defend a civilization by sowing barbarism yourself,” he said at the opening of the conference in Paris held to help raise funds for Lebanon.

 

Mr. Macron did not specify exactly how France would support the recruitment of additional troops for Lebanon, whose bitter sectarian divisions and weak central government have helped Hezbollah, a Shiite movement backed by Iran, to gain power.

 

Thursday’s meeting is the latest example of Mr. Macron’s bid to wield influence in Lebanon, a former French mandate. The historical ties, as well as the fact that French is spoken alongside English and Arabic, the official language, have long given Paris a sense of responsibility toward the country. France, for example, is one of the largest contributors of troops to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.

 

At the same time, the United States, Israel’s leading backer, remains the region’s most powerful diplomatic force. President Biden’s envoy on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, Amos Hochstein, visited Beirut this week, and met with Lebanese officials. The State Department said it would send its deputy secretary for management, Richard Verma, to the Paris conference.

 

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, also called for a cease-fire at the conference and said that Israeli attacks had put 13 Lebanese hospitals out of service. More than 1.2 million people have fled their homes because of the conflict, the United Nations said more than two weeks ago.

 

Mr. Mikati said that his government could deploy additional troops to the south as part of any cease-fire deal. The military, which receives support from the United States, is not a party to the conflict and Israel has said repeatedly that it is at war with Hezbollah, not Lebanon. Still, Lebanon refers to Israel as the enemy and does not have diplomatic ties with the country.

 

Lebanon’s government is largely powerless to rein in Hezbollah or deploy additional troops to the southern border without Hezbollah’s consent. Lebanese officials, including, Mr. Mikati, say that Hezbollah is on board with a nearly 20-year-old U.N. resolution that would allow them to do so, but Hezbollah has not yet publicly said this.

 

The C.I.A.’s website said Lebanon’s military had around 73,000 active troops, but experts say it has been severely weakened by the country’s economic crisis. Israeli forces killed three Lebanese soldiers this week in southern Lebanon. Israel apologized. On Thursday, Lebanon’s military said that another Israeli attack had killed three more of its soldiers in the south.

 

Mr. Macron appealed to the conference to support a plan to recruit at least 6,000 additional soldiers and enable the deployment of at least 8,000 additional soldiers in the south.

 

This is not the first donor conference that Mr. Macron has organized for Lebanon. After a port blast devastated parts of Beirut in 2020, he toured the city before Lebanese politicians did, and held a conference that raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

 

Euan Ward and Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting


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12) Gaza’s main emergency service says it has ‘completely ceased’ rescue operations in the north.

By Raja Abdulrahim, Reporting from Jerusalem, October 24, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/10/24/world/israel-lebanon-hezbollah-iran

People walk past rubble and destroyed buildings.Displaced Palestinians in northern Gaza on Tuesday. Credit...Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters


The main emergency service in Gaza has said it has ceased all rescue operations in the northern part of the territory amid a renewed Israeli offensive in the area.

 

Scores of Palestinians have been killed since Israel stepped up military operations in northern Gaza this month, saying it was trying to eliminate a regrouped Hamas presence there. 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.

 

Palestinian Civil Defense, the emergency service, has been responding to the scenes of attacks to treat the wounded and try to pull people from rubble. But on Wednesday night, it said its work in northern Gaza had “completely ceased.”

 

“The situation has become catastrophic,” it said in a statement on Telegram. “The residents there are left without humanitarian services.”

 

The statement said three of its rescue workers had been injured by an Israeli drone strike and that five others had been detained by Israeli forces. It added that Israeli tanks had shelled the only fire truck operating in northern Gaza.

 

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

United Nations officials have expressed alarm about the humanitarian situation in northern Gaza, and said the Israeli authorities have denied aid workers’ requests to help find survivors in the aftermath of Israeli strikes.

 

Gloria Lazic, an aid worker with the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said on social media this week that requests by the agency to help people trapped under rubble in the northern town of Jabaliya had been “repeatedly denied by the Israeli authorities.”

 

Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the main U.N. agency for Palestinians, said much the same in a social media post the same day, writing that “in northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die.”

 

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.


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13) Boeing Workers Resoundingly Reject New Contract and Extend Strike

The vote, hours after Boeing reported a $6.1 billion loss, will extend a nearly six-week-long strike at factories where the company makes its best-selling commercial plane.

By Niraj Chokshi, Reporting from Seattle, Published Oct. 23, 2024, Updated Oct. 24, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/business/boeing-union-vote-strike.html

Gina Forbush, of Gig Harbor, Wash., reacting to news that striking Boeing machinists had rejected a tentative labor contract on Wednesday. Credit...M. Scott Brauer for The New York Times


Boeing’s largest union rejected a tentative labor contract on Wednesday by a wide margin, extending a damaging strike and adding to the mounting financial problems facing the company, which hours earlier had reported a $6.1 billion loss.

 

The contract, the second that workers have voted down, was opposed by 64 percent of those voting, according to the union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. The union represents about 33,000 workers, but it did not disclose how many voted on Wednesday.

 

“There’s much more work to do. We will push to get back to the table, we will push for the members’ demands as quickly as we can,” said Jon Holden, president of District 751 of the union, which represents the vast majority of the workers and has led in the talks. He delivered that message at the union’s Seattle headquarters to a room of members chanting, “Fight, fight.”

 

Boeing declined to comment on the vote, which was a setback for the company’s new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, who is trying to restore its reputation and business with a strategy he described in detail earlier on Wednesday. In remarks to workers and investors, Mr. Ortberg said Boeing needed to undergo “fundamental culture change” to stabilize the business and to improve execution.

 

“Our leaders, from me on down, need to be closely integrated with our business and the people who are doing the design and production of our products,” he said. “We need to be on the factory floors, in the back shops and in our engineering labs. We need to know what’s going on, not only with our products, but with our people.”

 

Mr. Ortberg delivered that message alongside the company’s quarterly financial results, which included the loss of more than $6.1 billion. This month, Boeing also announced plans to cut its work force by about 10 percent, which amounts to 17,000 jobs. The company also recently disclosed plans to raise as much as $25 billion by selling debt or stock over the next three years as it tries to avoid a damaging downgrade to its credit rating. The strike is costing the company tens of millions of dollars each day, according to various estimates.

 

The negotiations have been contentious. The strike began on Sept. 13 after 95 percent of workers voting rejected an earlier contract offer that had been backed by union leaders and Boeing. Later that month, the company made what it described as its “best and final” offer. The company gave workers just days to approve or reject it, but leaders of the union never put it to a vote. Boeing eventually rescinded the offer, with talks breaking down this month.

 

The two sides arrived at the now-rejected deal only after the Biden administration got involved. Senior administration officials had been working closely with Boeing and the union in recent months, at President Biden’s direction. Last week, Julie Su, the acting labor secretary, flew to Seattle to meet with company executives and union officials. On Wednesday, Mr. Holden said he planned to ask the White House to continue to try to help the parties find a resolution.

 

Boeing is important to the United States as an economic engine and as a symbol of manufacturing prowess. It employs almost 150,000 people across the country — nearly half in Washington State — and is one of the nation’s largest exporters. The company also makes military jets, rockets, spacecraft and Air Force One.

 

Under the contract, workers would have received cumulative raises of nearly 40 percent over four years, a significant increase over the rejected offer and approaching what the union initially sought. The offer included a $7,000 one-time bonus and additional contributions to retirement plans. It also would have preserved an incentive bonus program that the initial rejected offer would have replaced.

 

Boeing machinists make about $75,000 in average annual pay. Over the last decade, the workers have seen raises under the union contract of 8 percent and more than $4 an hour in additional cost-of-living adjustments, according to the company. Consumer prices in the Seattle area have risen more than 40 percent over the past decade, according to federal data.

 

But the contract did not revive a defined-benefit pension plan that was frozen a decade ago — an important priority for many union members. Many workers have been furious over that loss for years, and some have said that they felt Boeing had bullied them into agreeing to the freezing of the pension. Workers have also been angry with the leadership of the union’s parent organization, which they say scheduled the vote in a way that supported approval of the offer, prompting a rule change that limited the authority to schedule votes to local union chapters.

 

“There’s some deep wounds,” Mr. Holden told reporters after announcing the vote results. Mr. Holden also said that the union may explore what he called hybrid defined-benefit programs in negotiations.

 

On Wednesday afternoon, union members streamed in and out of the Angel of the Winds Arena in Everett, Wash., one of the voting locations and a short drive from a large Boeing factory. A handful held signs and handed out fliers urging others to reject the offer.

 

In interviews, several said they voted against the offer because they believed the union could hold out for better terms on wages, retirement, health coverage and other benefits. Many said they were frustrated over the lost pension, even if the odds of getting it restored remain in doubt.

 

“How do they expect to have anybody stay at the company if they don’t have some kind of a pension plan or better investments?” said Darryl Shore, who has worked at Boeing in different roles since 1989.

 

Mr. Shore said he grew up in the area and both his parents worked at Boeing, but that jobs at the company today don’t hold the same economic promise they did back then.

 

The rejection of the new contract comes as Boeing is trying to recover from a crisis that began when a panel fell off a 737 Max jet during an Alaska Airlines flight in January, reigniting concerns about the quality and safety of Boeing’s planes. Five years earlier, two fatal Max crashes led regulators worldwide to ground the plane for nearly two years.

 

After the January episode, the Federal Aviation Administration limited production of the Max, Boeing’s best-selling plane. The company has since increased inspections, added training for new hires, started to simplify procedures and limited tasks performed out of sequence.

 

The contract’s defeat is also bad news for the manufacturer’s many suppliers. Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the body of the 737 Max and has agreed to sell itself to Boeing, recently announced plans to furlough about 700 employees, starting next week, because of the strike.

 

The contract being negotiated would replace one that was agreed to in 2008 and extended multiple times. That offer came together only after a two-month strike that led to a decline of more than $6 billion in revenue and a delay in delivering more than 100 airplanes that year, Boeing said at the time.


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