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Israel’s Genocide Day 367: Israel orders new evacuations in Gaza, expands bombing on Lebanon
The Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon continues to face stiff resistance along the border one week on, while the Israeli army has renewed its assault on northern Gaza, laying siege to Jabalia refugee camp for the sixth time since October 7.
Casualties
· 41,909 + killed* and at least 97,303 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 32,280 of the slain have been identified, including 10,627 children and 5,956 women, representing 60% of the casualties, and 2,770 elderly as of August 6, 2024. Some 10,000 more are estimated to be under the rubble*
· 743+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
· 2,083 Lebanese killed and more than 9,869 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,189.
· The Israeli army recognizes the death of 720 Israeli soldiers and the injury of at least 4,100 others since October 7.****
* Gaza’s branch of the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report, published through its WhatsApp channel on October 7, 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 7, 2024.
*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on October 7, 2024. The counting is based on the Lebanese official date for the beginning of “the Israeli aggression on Lebanon,” when Israel began airstrikes on Lebanese territory after the beginning of Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza.
**** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7 and as of June 18.
Source: mondoweiss.net
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On this Wrongful Conviction Day, Leonard Peltier, the longest-serving Indigenous political prisoner, is incarcerated in lockdown-modified operations conditions at USP Coleman I, operated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).
Yet, in this moment of silence, Leonard speaks.
To honor his birthday and all those who are unjustly convicted and incarcerated, the Leonard Peltier Official Ad Hoc Committee has released a video of Leonard Peltier that is going viral. Narrated by renowned scholar Ward Churchill and set to a video created by award-winning filmmaker Suzie Baer, the film most importantly centers Leonard’s personal reflection on his 80th year.
Jenipher Jones, Mr. Peltier's lead counsel, commented, "This powerfully moving film captures the essence of who I know Leonard to be. I am grateful to Professor Churchill and Suzie Baer for their work and longstanding advocacy of Leonard. As the recent execution of Marcellus Williams-Imam Khaliifah Williams shows us, we as a society bear a responsibility to uplift the cases of all those who are wrongfully convicted and also hold the government accountable to do that for which it professes to exist. We must challenge our impulses of blind blood-thirst for guilt and the use of our legal systems to carry out this malignant pathology. There is absolutely no lawful justification for Leonard's incarceration."
“Leonard Peltier is Native elder whose wrongful incarceration is shameful. His continued imprisonment exemplifies the historical cruelty of the US Government toward Native people. The US BOP's treatment of Leonard Peltier is unlawful, and he deserves his freedom.” —Suzie Baer
Leonard's Statement: Peltier 80th Statement.pdf:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ABHSRNdyB8SKn0I&id=DFF2DD874157D44A%21118178&cid=DFF2DD874157D44A&parId=root&parQt=sharedby&o=OneUp
To view the film, please visit:
https://tinyurl.com/Peltier80thPresentation
We hope to have additional updates on Leonard soon. In the meantime, please engage our calls to action or donate to his defense efforts.
Miigwech.
Donate/ActNow:
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
U.S. Parole Commission Denies Leonard Peltier’s Request for Freedom; President Biden Should Grant Clemency
In response to the U.S. Parole Commission denying Leonard Peltier’s request for parole after a hearing on June 10, Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, made the following statement:
“Continuing to keep Leonard Peltier locked behind bars is a human rights travesty. President Biden should grant him clemency and release him immediately. Not only are there ongoing, unresolved concerns about the fairness of his trial, he has spent nearly 50 years in prison, is approaching 80 years old, and suffers from several chronic health problems.
“Leonard Peltier has been incarcerated for far too long. The parole commission should have granted him the freedom to spend his remaining years in his community and surrounded by loved ones.
“No one should be imprisoned after a trial riddled with uncertainty about its fairness. We are now calling on President Biden, once again, to grant Leonard Peltier clemency on humanitarian grounds and as a matter of mercy and justice.”
Background
· Leonard Peltier, Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), was convicted of the murders of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. He has always maintained his innocence. Amnesty International joins Tribal Nations, Tribal Leaders, Members of Congress, former FBI agents, Nobel Peace Prize winners and former U.S. Attorney James Reynolds, whose office handled Peltier’s prosecution and appeal, in urging his release.
· Parole was also rejected at Peltier’s last hearing in 2009. Due to his age, this was likely the last opportunity for parole.
· A clemency request is pending before President Joe Biden. President Biden has committed opens in a new tab to grant clemency/commutation of sentences on a rolling basis rather than at the end of his term, following a review of requests by the White House Counsel’s Office and the Department of Justice.
Amnesty International has examined Peltier’s case extensively for many years, sent observers to his trial in 1977, and long campaigned on his behalf. Most recently, Amnesty International USA sent a letter to the U.S. Parole Commission urging the commission to grant him parole.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/u-s-parole-commission-denies-leonard-peltiers-request-for-freedom-president-biden-should-grant-clemency/
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Beneath The Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024) is a collection of revolutionary essays, written by those who have been detained inside prison walls. Composed by the most structurally dispossessed people on earth, the prisoner class, these words illuminate the steps towards freedom.
Beneath the Mountain documents the struggle — beginning with slavery, genocide, and colonization up to our present day — and imagines a collective, anti-carceral future. These essays were handwritten first on scraps of paper, magazine covers, envelopes, toilet paper, or pages of bibles, scratched down with contraband pencils or the stubby cartridge of a ball-point pen; kites, careworn, copied and shared across tiers and now preserved in this collection for this and future generations. If they were dropped in the prison-controlled mail they were cloaked in prayers, navigating censorship and dustbins. They were very often smuggled out. These words mark resistance, fierce clarity, and speak to the hope of building the world we all deserve to live in.
"Beneath the Mountain reminds us that ancestors and rebels have resisted conquest and enslavement, building marronage against colonialism and genocide."
—Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency
Who stands beneath the mountain but prisoners of war? Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black have assembled a book of fire, each voice a flame in captivity...Whether writing from a place of fugivity, the prison camp, the city jail, the modern gulag or death row, these are our revolutionary thinkers, our critics and dreamers, our people. The people who move mountains. —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people’s understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography
These are the words each writer dreamed as they sought freedom and they need to be studied by people inside and read in every control unit/hole in every prison in America. We can send this book for you to anyone who you know who is currently living, struggling, and fighting
Who better to tell these stories than those who have lived them? Don’t be surprised with what you find within these pages: hope, solidarity, full faith towards the future, and most importantly, love.
Excerpt from the book:
"Revolutionary love speaks to the ways we protect, respect, and empower each other while standing up to state terror. Its presence is affirmed through these texts as a necessary component to help chase away fear and to encourage the solidarity and unity essential for organizing in dangerous times and places. Its absence portends tragedy. Revolutionary love does not stop the state from wanting to kill us, nor is it effective without strategy and tactics, but it is the might that fuels us to stand shoulder to shoulder with others regardless. Perhaps it can move mountains." —Jennifer Black & Mumia Abu-Jamal from the introduction to Beneath The Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader
Get the book at:
https://www.prisonradiostore.com/shop-2/beneath-the-mountain-an-anti-prison-reader-edited-by-mumia-abu-jamal-jennifer-black-city-lights-2024
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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*Major Announcement*
Claudia De la Cruz wins
Peace and Freedom Party primary in California!
We have an exciting announcement. The votes are still being counted in California, but the Claudia-Karina “Vote Socialist” campaign has achieved a clear and irreversible lead in the Peace and Freedom Party primary. Based on the current count, Claudia has 46% of the vote compared to 40% for Cornel West. A significant majority of PFP’s newly elected Central Committee, which will formally choose the nominee at its August convention, have also pledged their support to the Claudia-Karina campaign.
We are excited to campaign in California now and expect Claudia De la Cruz to be the candidate on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party in November.
We achieved another big accomplishment this week - we’re officially on the ballot in Hawai’i! This comes after also petitioning to successfully gain ballot access in Utah. We are already petitioning in many other states. Each of these achievements is powered by the tremendous effort of our volunteers and grassroots organizers across the country. When we’re organized, people power can move mountains!
We need your help to keep the momentum going. Building a campaign like this takes time, energy, and money. We know that our class enemies — the billionaires, bankers, and CEO’s — put huge sums toward loyal politicians and other henchmen who defend their interests. They will use all the money and power at their disposal to stop movements like ours. As an independent, socialist party, our campaign is relying on contributions from the working class and people like you.
We call on each and every one of our supporters to set up a monthly or one-time donation to support this campaign to help it keep growing and reaching more people. A new socialist movement, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, is being built but it will only happen when we all pitch in.
The Claudia-Karina campaign calls to end all U.S. aid to Israel. End this government’s endless wars. We want jobs for all, with union representation and wages that let us live with dignity. Housing, healthcare, and education for all - without the lifelong debt. End the ruthless attacks on women, Black people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. These are just some of the demands that are resonating across the country. Help us take the next step:
Volunteer: https://votesocialist2024.com/volunteer
Donate: https://votesocialist2024.com/donate
See you in the streets,
Claudia & Karina
Don't Forget! Join our telegram channel for regular updates: https://t.me/+KtYBAKgX51JhNjMx
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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The writers' organization PEN America is circulating this petition on behalf of Jason Renard Walker, a Texas prisoner whose life is being threatened because of his exposés of the Texas prison system.
See his book, Reports from within the Belly of the Beast; available on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/Reports-Within-Belly-Beast-Department-ebook/dp/B084656JDZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-whistleblowers-in-carceral-settings
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Daniel Hale UPDATE:
In February Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale was transferred from the oppressive maximum-security prison in Marion, Illinois to house confinement. We celebrate his release from Marion. He is laying low right now, recovering from nearly 3 years in prison. Thank goodness he is now being held under much more humane conditions and expected to complete his sentence in July of this year. www.StandWithDaniel Hale.org
More Info about Daniel:
“Drone Whistleblower Subjected To Harsh Confinement Finally Released From Prison”
https://thedissenter.org/drone-whistleblower-cmu-finally-released-from-prison/
“I was punished under the Espionage Act. Why wasn’t Joe Biden?” by Daniel Hale
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Fears of a Global Oil Shock if the Mideast Crisis Intensifies
The threat of an escalating conflict between Israel and Iran has created an “extraordinarily precarious” global situation, sowing alarm about the potential economic fallout.
By Peter S. Goodman, Oct. 7, 2024
Destruction last week in Dahiya, Lebanon, after several days of deadly Israeli airstrikes. Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times
As the world absorbs the prospect of an escalating conflict in the Middle East, the potential economic fallout is sowing increasing alarm. The worst fears center on a broadly debilitating development: a shock to the global oil supply.
Such a result, actively contemplated in world capitals, could yield surging prices for gasoline, fuel and other products made with petroleum like plastics, chemicals and fertilizer. It could discourage investment, hiring, and business expansion, threatening many economies — particularly in Europe — with the risk of recession. The effects would be potent in nations that depend on imported oil, especially poor countries in Africa.
The possibility of this calamitous outcome has come into focus in recent days as Israel plots its response to the barrage of missiles that Iran unleashed last week. Some scenarios are seen as highly unlikely, yet still conceivable: An Israeli strike on Iranian oil installations might prompt Iran to target refineries in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, both major oil producers. Iranian-supported Houthi rebels claimed credit for an attack on Saudi oil installations in 2019. The Trump administration subsequently pinned the blame on Iranian forces.
As it has done before, Iran might also threaten the passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway that is the conduit for oil produced in the Persian Gulf, the source of nearly one-third of the world’s oil production. Such a move could entail conflict with American naval ships stationed in the region.
That, too, is currently considered to be improbable. But the upheaval in the region in recent months has pushed out the parameters of possibility, rendering imaginable scenarios that were once dismissed as extreme.
As Israel plots its next move, it has other targets besides Iranian oil installations. Iran would have reason for caution in crafting its own retaliation. Broadening the war to its Persian Gulf neighbors would invite a punishing response that could push Iran’s own economy — already bleak — to the brink of collapse.
Yet the risks of a broader conflict have heightened in recent days as Israel has expanded its military campaign against its enemies to southern Lebanon, where it has targeted the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah. Iran’s strikes on Israel have raised the stakes further.
Visions of an intensifying war in the Middle East have added an enormous variable to a global economy already laced with unpredictable forces, from Russia’s war in Ukraine, to the trade conflict between the world’s two largest economies — the United States and China — and the ever-present risk of provocation from North Korea.
“This is an extraordinarily precarious global situation,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund who is now a professor at Harvard University. “The world is probably the most unstable that it’s been since the Cold War. That’s not even mildly an overstatement. It could get worse in a hurry. That would certainly have a big impact on the global economy.”
Every conflict in the Middle East holds the potential to jeopardize the world’s access to oil. This one appears no different.
Last Thursday, after President Biden said his administration was “discussing” the possibility of supporting an Israeli strike on Iran’s oil facilities, oil prices spiked by more than 4 percent. The price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, breached $77 a barrel, up from about $71 a barrel before Iran unleashed missiles toward Israel.
The following day, Mr. Biden sought to alleviate concerns, telling reporters that the Israelis “should be thinking about other alternatives than striking oil fields.”
Experts assert that Israel’s efforts to limit the threat from Iran would be better served by targeting its military capabilities, perhaps firing on its elite Quds Force, which is widely unpopular within Iranian society.
Even if Israel does attack Iran’s oil production, the ramifications of that alone would be minimal for the global economy, analysts say. Iran is a major oil producer, pumping out nearly four million barrels a day, or about 4 percent of the global total, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But other Persian Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates could expand production to make up that volume, easing pressures on international prices, experts say.
A similar scenario played out five years ago, after a drone assault on oil installations in Saudi Arabia shut down roughly half the nation’s production. Oil prices surged by a fifth, but then quickly dropped as Saudi Arabia released stocks from its reserves.
“We have precedent for that kind of supply shock,” said Eli Berman, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, and a research director at the University of California Institute on Conflict and Cooperation. “That attack did not result in a regional tit for tat.”
The key question is how Israel will respond to the Iranian missile attack, and what comes after. Iran appears to have strengthened ties with its Persian Gulf neighbors over the last year, diminishing the chance that it would pursue a broader regional conflict. But if that analysis proves wrong and Iran strikes refineries in the region or disrupts shipping, the world could be in for a considerable shock.
In a regional war involving Israel and Iran, oil prices would spike to $130 a barrel and the global economy would suffer a hit of 0.4 percent, according to an analysis by Oxford Economics.
That scenario would hit the global economy with a new source of rising prices just as central banks from the United States to Europe have been declaring victory over inflation in lowering interest rates. Lower rates spell easier credit terms for businesses and consumers, stoking anticipation of a spur to investing, hiring, home-buying and economic growth.
An oil shock could reverse that momentum. Oil prices are not merely a key metric in markets, but an elemental force influencing economic activity, policymaking and sentiments in virtually every nation. They largely determine the price of gasoline, which flashes from signs at gas stations, serving as a crude encapsulation of consumer confidence and economic well-being.
Unlike in the early 1970s, when concerted action by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries — the international cartel of oil exporters — choked off supply and sent prices soaring, the world today is far less susceptible to such shocks.
The United States has swelled into the leading oil producer, owing to its aggressive development of shale oil. Some economies have moved aggressively to expand production of wind, solar, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy, reducing dependence on oil.
The trouble is that global demand for energy has grown even faster, reinforcing the status of oil as a crucial commodity.
From 1971 to 2010, the share of the world’s total energy stocks made up by oil dropped to 31 percent from 44 percent, according to the International Energy Agency. But in the years since, that share has remained steady, even as renewable sources have increased — the result of increased demand from fast-growing developing economies like India, Indonesia and Brazil.
An oil supply crisis would reinforce the imperative for nations to diminish dependence on fossil fuels by expanding supplies of renewable energy. But that would not address the immediate economic threat.
The most wrenching consequence of an oil supply shock would be seen in lower-income countries contending with debt crises, including Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania and Angola. Governments have slashed spending on public health, education and other services to avoid defaulting on debts. Higher costs for importing oil would worsen that problem.
Pressure would also fall on China, which purchases more than 90 percent of Iran oil exports and depends on imports for roughly three-fourths of its oil consumption.
The Chinese government has cushioned itself against risks of disruption by aggressively increasing the use of electric vehicles and by adding to its oil reserves. Still, a higher energy bill would present an extra challenge as Chinese authorities grapple with worries over huge losses in real estate and weakening economic growth.
The United States may be best positioned to absorb a shock. American companies engaged in fossil fuel production would benefit from a hit to the global supply of oil, reaping gains from higher prices. Yet the impact of slower global economic growth would hinder other American businesses, especially those that export.
Europe appears especially vulnerable to disruption. The continent has long relied on low-priced Russian energy. That supply was crimped after Russia invaded Ukraine, bringing international condemnation and sanctions. The Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin, severely restricted the shipment of energy to Europe, forcing many countries to seek alternatives while limiting consumption. A sudden jolt in the price of oil would present another crisis.
“What you would end up with in Europe is stagflation,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, using a term coined in the 1970s to describe a persistent combination of rising prices and slower growth. “You likely get a recession and high inflation at the same time.”
The clearest beneficiary of higher oil prices would be Russia, Mr. Kirkegaard added, supplying Mr. Putin with greater wherewithal to redouble his military assault on Ukraine.
Greater oil revenues would also position Russia to lavish more aid on a key Middle Eastern ally: Iran. The Iranian government has looked to Mr. Putin to help provide the last elements needed to achieve the capability to produce nuclear weapons.
That reality, Mr. Kirkegaard suggested, may limit Israel’s willingness to risk greater escalation of the conflict. If Israel hits Iran hard enough to provoke an Iranian strike aimed at damaging regional energy production, that would increase the price of oil, effectively handing more money to Mr. Putin.
And that would increase the risk of a nuclear-armed Iran.
“If you’re Israel, why help the country that would help Iran reach the nuclear threshold?” Mr. Kirkegaard asked.
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2) Gaza in Ruins After a Year of War
Much of Gaza has been destroyed by Israel’s relentless military campaign.
By Raja Abdulrahim, Helmuth Rosales, Bilal Shbair, Anjali Singhvi, Erika Solomon, Iyad Abuheweila, Abu Bakr Bashir, Ameera Harouda, Malika Khurana, Veronica Penney and Scott Reinhard Oct. 7, 2024
Subuh family land, Khan Younis
Before
Subuh family land, Khan Younis
After
One year ago, Gaza became a battlefield as Israel began a military offensive to root out Hamas in response to the Oct 7. Hamas-led attacks. The war has left Gaza unrecognizable. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, and almost everyone living there has been displaced — many of them multiple times.
Nearly 60 percent of buildings have been damaged or destroyed in the besieged enclave, an area about half the size of New York City. Videos and images from before and after the war started in some of the hardest hit areas — including Khan Younis, Gaza City and Jabaliya — reveal the magnitude of ruin across the strip.
Israel says its goal was to eradicate Hamas and destroy the tunnel network it built below ground. But in that attempt, it laid waste to an area that is home to some two million people.
KHAN YOUNIS
54% of buildings have been likely damaged or destroyed.
In Gaza’s south is the governorate of Khan Younis, stretching from its eponymous medieval city, where the citadel wall stands as its historic anchor, to the lush fields that families have tilled for generations.
Now, the people of Khan Younis say they feel unmoored from time and place: The square where they played, prayed and gossiped is a ghost town. The farms that once nourished them have been bulldozed and pounded by Israeli artillery.
Israel says such strikes are necessary to attack Hamas militants and weapons hidden in hospitals, mosques, schools and other civilian areas. International law experts say Israel still has a responsibility to protect civilians even if Hamas exploits them.
CITY CENTER
Within the city of Khan Younis, only one citadel wall remains of its Mamluk-era fortress, ground away by centuries and wars past. It is the city’s lodestone.
That wall has lent its name to everything from the nearby marketplace to a space locals called “Citadel Square.” Here, vendors set up stalls to hawk goods and sugary concoctions and friends gathered around hookah pipes. A young oud player nicknamed Abu Kayan came during Eid holidays to strum Palestinian folk songs.
It was a humble outing even the most impoverished Gazan could enjoy, with a view of the citadel wall and the Grand Mosque on either side.
“What made it cool was that all kinds of people met there,” said Abu Kayan, 22, whose real name is Ahmed Abu-Hasaneen. “It was a place you could feel the spirit of our ancestors. It was a place we could hold on to and preserve.”
Now, the citadel wall looks out over a wasteland of rubble.
“I don’t think this place could be rebuilt,” said Abu Kayan. “Even if it could, nothing can replace the many friends I met there who have been killed, displaced, or fled abroad.”
Towering over the other side of the square was the 96-year-old Grand Mosque — the place to go for Friday prayers and staying up late into the night with family during the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan.
“That mosque was like the city’s address — the symbol of Khan Younis,” said Belal Barbakh, 25, who once volunteered to clean its carpets and perfume the halls before holidays.
That address no longer exists — Israel’s military said it struck the mosque to destroy Hamas infrastructure inside it, information The Times could not independently verify.
These days, Mr. Barbakh continues that ritual of cleaning and perfuming in the small plastic tent erected as a prayer hall at the foot of the pile of rubble that is all that remains of the Grand Mosque.
Beyond the mosque was the citadel’s commercial district, where playful hearts, young and old, sought out Hamada Ice Cream and the balloon-festooned Citadel of Toys.
Sisters Asan and Elan al-Farra, 16 and 14, remember birthday parties at Hamada, and the excitement they felt when their parents let them stop there after shopping.
Passing by what is left of Hamada now, Elan said, is like watching the color drained out of her childhood: “It’s depressing seeing a place that was so bright end up black, battered, and dirty.”
Just a few meters away are the pancaked floors of the building once home to the Barbakh brothers and their families — and their Citadel of Toys.
Abdulraouf Barbakh opened the toy store on the ground floor, indulging a childhood obsession with “any and all toys.”
During Eid celebrations, he welcomed a parade of children who marched in, clutching the holiday money their relatives had given them, eager to buy a long coveted doll, ball or water gun.
“I loved to see that smile of pure joy on children’s faces, especially for a people like ours that have suffered so much,” he said.
War has razed the Barbakh building to the ground, and the siblings and cousins who lived there are scattered.
Outside the remnants of their family building, Mr. Barbakh’s nieces and nephews sometimes linger, looking for signs of toys that survived beneath the ruins.
Mr. Barbakh cannot imagine going back to being a purveyor of joy to children.
“My only wish is to rescue my family from this war,” he said. “I have no plans to buy any more toys.”
FARMLAND IN KHUZA’A
The verdant Khuza’a region of Khan Younis, the breadbasket of southern Gaza, is land Jamal Subuh’s family has plowed for over a century. His children still remember their first time helping their father with the harvest, and the taste of the melons, tomatoes and peas they had picked fresh off the vine.
Mr. Subuh shared an image of what his cropland looked like before the war.
Gaza’s farmlands represented a rare source of self-sufficiency in an area that has endured a decades-long blockade by Israel and Egypt.
“From generation to generation, we handed down a love of farming this land,” said Mr. Subuh, who was ordered off his property by Israeli military officials. “We eat from it, make money from it and feed the rest of our people from it.”
For Mr. Subuh, his fields were a chance to leave the next generation better off than his own: Each year, he farmed more lands, to pay for his son’s veterinary school and his daughter’s agricultural engineering degree.
He estimates that miles upon miles of fields have been bulldozed, his crops crushed. Advancing Israeli troops destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of tractors, water pumps and other equipment. The image provided here is the closest Mr. Subuh has been able to get to his land since the war began.
According to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, some 41 percent of the Gaza Strip is cropland. Of that land, it said some 68 percent has been damaged.
After decades of nourishing Gazans, the Subuh family now relies on humanitarian handouts at a displacement camp in central Gaza.
Mr. Subuh expects it would take years to extricate all the unexploded ordinances, replow his fields and ensure the earth is clean of toxic substances that may have seeped into the ground.
Sometimes he regrets not giving up farming sooner, like many Gazan farmers had in previous wars. Yet he mourns the potential end of his farm.
“I had a relationship with that land,” he said. “We had a history together, and I am heartbroken.”
Still, his daughter, Dina, refuses to give up: “I won’t lose my will to plant and care for this land again.”
GAZA CITY
74% of buildings have been likely damaged or destroyed.
Gaza City, the strip’s capital, is home to the ancient Old City, as well as Al-Rimal, a once-vibrant, upper-middle-class neighborhood. The war has torn through the area’s cultural and religious landmarks, including the oldest mosque in Gaza.
OLD CITY
Al-Omari Mosque, wrecked by the war, was the heart of the Old City. It had been a place of worship for thousands of years — evolving as the area’s rulers changed. The ruins of a Roman temple became the site of a Christian Byzantine church in the fifth century, then was repurposed into a mosque in the seventh century.
For Gazans, the unusual architecture of the mosque set it apart from other Muslim houses of worship.
In December, the mosque was all but destroyed in an airstrike by the Israeli military, which said the site had become a command center for Hamas, information that The Times could not independently verify. The strike toppled much of the mosque’s minaret and ruined most of its stone structure — including walls with carved Arabic inscriptions.
Ahmed Abu Sultan used to spend the last 10 days of Ramadan worshiping, sleeping and eating in Al-Omari Mosque. For him, the mosque had spiritual echoes of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a sacred site for Muslims.
“The atmosphere you feel in Jerusalem when you enter the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, you feel the same atmosphere when you enter the Al-Omari Mosque,” Mr. Abu Sultan said.
Seven months before the war began, he took two of his sons — then 8 and 9 years old — to spend a night at Al-Omari during Ramadan, with hopes of beginning an annual tradition. “I wanted to plant this connection in my children,” he said.
To mark another right of passage, generations of Gazans have passed through the Gold Market abutting the mosque.
Riyad Al-Masri, 29, grew up seeing his brother and other older male relatives shop for jewelry for their brides in the tiny shops under the arched ceilings.
Mr. Al-Masri and his wife, who have been living apart because of the war, had shopped at the market soon after they became engaged in February 2023. Presenting the bride with gold jewelry is a long-standing tradition in Palestinian wedding culture.
“These rituals, we all went through them,” he said. “My older brother, my father, my grandfathers, we would get engaged and then go to the Gold Market with our fiancées and buy what they wanted.”
What remain are shuttered doors and piles of debris.
AL-RIMAL
Al-Rimal was one of the first targets of Israeli airstrikes.
For decades, the neighborhood had been the center of commerce, trade, academia and entertainment in Gaza. On any given day, Gazans could be seen strolling through the Unknown Soldier Park, a welcome green space in the midst of a busy city.
Many Gazans who visited the park, along Omar Al-Mukhtar Street, could enjoy slushies in the summer or a warm custard drink in the winter from the nearby ice cream parlor, Qazim.
The park was a gathering place for rallies and protests. When past wars ended in a cease-fire deal, people celebrated there.
Now the park has been razed and bulldozed. The Palestine Bank tower, along with other buildings overlooking the square, has been gutted and damaged.
Not far away, the Rashaad Shawa center, which housed the oldest library in the Gaza Strip, has been severely damaged. The first cultural center in Gaza, it once stored the strip’s historical archives, passports and other documents of families who moved to the strip.
Opened in 1986 as a single meat spit, it had inspired restaurants from the north to the south. It was initially called “The People’s Cafeteria,” but it soon took on a different name after one of its owners, Ihsan Abdo, became known for dressing like “a sheikh” with a long robe and white turban.
Back in the 1950s, the neighborhood was mostly an empty, sandy expanse. Al-Rimal, which means sands in Arabic, was named for its terrain.
As nearby Gaza City areas began to get overcrowded, traders and businessmen started to buy land in Al-Rimal. There they built large homes and multistory buildings, bringing their trades with them into ground-floor shops and storefronts.
“These landmarks have memories and imprints in the heart of every person who came to Gaza,” said Husam Skeek, a community and tribal leader.
JABALIYA
81% of buildings have been likely damaged or destroyed.
The town of Jabaliya in the north, which had a role in one of the most pivotal moments of modern Palestinian history, has now become a byword for Gaza’s destruction.
As descendants of Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes in 1948, many in Jabaliya say this war has evoked a sense of transgenerational trauma. Some describe it as reliving the “Nakba,” or catastrophe: The loss of land, community, and above all, home.
Nowhere has that loss felt as potent as in Al-Trans, the heart of Jabaliya’s social life and its history as a place to protest every power that has controlled Gaza — from Israel to Hamas.
Al-Trans is one of the areas that has been decimated by several Israeli incursions into Jabaliya, where the Israeli military repeatedly used 2,000-pound bombs.
Israel says Jabaliya is a stronghold for Hamas and other militants responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks. After a strike near Al-Trans last October, the Israeli military told The Times that it had destroyed a “military fighting compound” and a tunnel that had been used by Hamas. But locals describe the extent of the destruction as collective punishment.
Named after the first electricity transmitter erected in the area, Al-Trans intersection stood at the center of Jabaliya — figuratively and geographically. This is where people went to shop for groceries, get their hair done, meet friends — and, perhaps most significantly, to protest.
“Jabaliya, and Al-Trans specifically, was a place of change,” said Fatima Hussein, 37, a journalist from the town. “Whenever we have confronted a regime or oppressive force — no matter what that force was — the movement started here.”
In 1987, protests against Israeli occupation that started in Al-Trans set off the First Intifada. Locals rebelled against their own leaders, too: The 2019 “We Want to Live” protests took off from Al-Trans, voicing growing popular anger over repressive Hamas rule.
“Our creativity, our awareness, it was born out of suffering,” said Ahmed Jawda, 30, a protest organizer born in Jabaliya. “Suffering makes you insist on living life.”
That creativity was present in local businesses like the Nahed Al-Assali furniture store. In an enclave struggling with poverty, Al-Assali became hugely successful by offering bargain prices and pay by installment.
“The secret of our success was taking people into consideration,” said Wissam, Nahed’s brother and business partner. “We went easy on people, especially with the price.”
Al-Assali was where newlyweds furnished their new home, and pilgrims purchased prayer rugs. Now it is a pile of charred concrete.
Gone, too, is the Rabaa Market and Cafe, where friends lingered for hours to gossip, and activists planned their protests. So is Abu Eskander Cafe, the local nut roastery, and the Syrian Kitchen, a restaurant so popular that locals simply called it “The Syrian.”
The loss of the landmarks that mapped Gazans’ most cherished memories makes the notion of rebuilding seem impossible to many.
The war has no end in sight. Even if it were to stop today, the cost of rebuilding Gaza would be staggering.
In the first eight months alone, a U.N. preliminary assessment said, the war created 39 million tons of rubble, containing unexploded bombs, asbestos, other hazardous substances and even human remains. In May, a World Bank report estimated it could take 80 years to rebuild the homes that have been destroyed.
But for Gazans, neither time nor money can replace all that has been lost.
If the trauma of previous generations of Palestinians was displacement, Mr. Jawda said, it is now also the feeling of an identity being erased: “Destroying a place destroys a part of who you are.”
Sources and methodology
The Times reviewed and verified user-generated videos that captured neighborhoods in Jabaliya, Gaza City and Khan Younis, posted from 2021 through 2023, before the Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7, 2023. Reporters also reviewed footage taken in the same neighborhoods after the war to show what was damaged or destroyed.
The map animation of the Gaza Strip comes from analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. The analysis identified all buildings that have likely been damaged since October 2023 using radar signals from passing satellites that measure changes in ground height.
The percentage of buildings likely damaged or destroyed displayed at the top of each section is based on analysis by Mr. Scher and Dr. Van Den Hoek for the boundaries of Khan Younis governorate, Gaza City governorate and Jabaliya municipality.
The neighborhood maps use Humanitarian OpenStreetMap data for building footprints. Structure damage estimates use data from the United Nations Satellite Centre and from the analysis by Mr. Scher and Dr. Van Den Hoek. In cases where verified video showed the damage was more severe than in the data, the neighborhood maps were updated accordingly.
Additional reporting by Aric Toler and Haley Willis.
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3) Israel Sends More Soldiers Into Lebanon
Israel added a fourth division to its forces entering the country and pounded the Hezbollah-dominated suburbs south of Beirut on Tuesday. The Iranian-backed group fired more than 100 rockets toward the Israeli city of Haifa.
By Gabby Sobelman and Euan Ward, October 8, 2024
Israel sent more troops into Lebanon on Tuesday and pounded the densely populated neighborhoods south of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway. The midday airstrikes could be heard from miles away.
The bombardment followed the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel that set off the war in Gaza. Israel said in a statement on Tuesday that a fourth division of soldiers had begun operating in Lebanon.
The Israeli military said Hezbollah had fired “approximately 135 projectiles” as of 3 p.m. local time, most of which were intercepted. A home was hit north of Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city. It was the second time since Sunday that areas near Haifa were struck by Hezbollah rockets. No injuries were reported.
Hezbollah has been firing into Israel over the past year in support of Hamas, which, like Hezbollah, is backed by Iran. Last week, Israel sent ground troops into southern Lebanon to try to stop the attacks and eliminate the threat near its border.
Here is what else to know:
· Houthi arms talks: The Russian arms dealer Viktor A. Bout is trying to broker a deal with Houthi militants in Yemen, who are backed by Iran and have been attacking Israel in solidarity with Hamas, according to Western officials. The negotiations are continuing, but no deal has been completed and no arms have been transferred, the officials said.
· Lebanon deaths: More than 2,000 people have been killed and nearly 10,000 injured in Lebanon since the war in Gaza began last October, according to Lebanon’s ministry of health. Most of the deaths and injuries have occurred over the past three weeks. The World Health Organization said that Israeli attacks in Lebanon had killed at least 65 health workers and injured 40 others since Sept. 17.
· Retaliation on Iran: Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said on Monday that Israeli officials were debating when and where to attack Iran in retaliation for the missile barrage it fired at Israel last week. “It will happen,” he said.
· Gaza deaths: The Palestinian health authorities said the death toll over the past year had surpassed 41,900, with more than 97,590 people injured. Adding to the toll, Palestinian civil defense said on Tuesday that 12 people had been killed and several others injured in Israeli airstrikes on a home and tents housing displaced people in the Bureij area of central Gaza. The Israeli military said its troops were “eliminating terrorists” in the area.
Aryn Baker and Hiba Yazbek contributed reporting.
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4) Lead Drinking-Water Pipes Must Be Replaced Nationwide, E.P.A. Says
The “historic” rule aims to eliminate a major source of lead poisoning and comes a decade after a drinking-water crisis in Flint, Mich.
By Hiroko Tabuchi, Oct. 8, 2024
Lead, a neurotoxin, is particularly dangerous to children. A length of lead pipe being replaced in Newark in 2019. Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times
The Biden administration unveiled on Tuesday a landmark rule that would require water utilities to replace virtually every lead pipe in the country within 10 years, tackling a major source of a neurotoxin that is particularly dangerous to infants and children.
President Biden is scheduled to visit Wisconsin to tout the new policy, which is widely seen as popular in industrial Midwestern states that are expected to play a major role in deciding the presidential election next month. Replacing lead pipes nationwide could also create jobs. Vice President Kamala Harris has also called for replacing lead pipes, an issue especially important for underserved communities, a priority.
“The President understands the urgency of getting lead out of communities because he and Vice President Harris know that ensuring everyone has access to clean water is a moral imperative,” Michael S. Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said.
Lead poisoning can cause irreversible damage to the nervous system and the brain and poses a particular risk to infants and children, impairing their cognitive development and causing behavioral disorders. Service lines, the lead pipes that bring water into homes, are thought to be a major source of lead exposure for children. (Lead-based paint, sometimes found in older buildings, is another.)
The dangers of lead contamination came into sharp relief in Flint, Mich., a decade ago. A change in the water source in 2014, coupled with inadequate treatment and testing, caused high amounts of lead and Legionella bacteria to leach into the tap water of about 100,000 residents.
The new rule imposes the strictest limits on lead in drinking water since federal standards were first set decades ago. Utilities will be required to take stock of their lead pipes and replace them over the next 10 years. The measure replaces less stringent regulations, adopted during the Trump administration, on lead in drinking water.
The improvements will protect millions of Americans from exposure to lead, the E.P.A. said. The rule will also protect up to 900,000 infants from having low birth weight, and will prevent up to 200,000 I.Q. points lost among children, among other health benefits, the E.P.A. estimated.
“This rule is historic. It’s a game changer, said Mona Hanna, associate dean at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine and a local pediatrician whose research helped to expose the Flint water crisis. “We’ve been living too long on our great-grandparents’ infrastructure,” she said.
Favored for their malleability and durability, lead pipes were installed on a major scale from the late 1800s, particularly in large cities. When the plumbing corrodes, however, lead can leach into drinking water. The federal government banned lead pipe in new plumbing in 1986. But tens of millions of Americans are still thought to drink water from old systems with lead-contamination issues.
Digging up and replacing the nation’s lead pipes to address that health risk will be a colossal undertaking. The E.P.A. estimates that water utilities must replace about nine million lead pipes at a total cost of $20 billion to $30 billion over a decade. While much of that cost will fall to the utilities, and most likely their customers, $15 billion in federal funding is also available under the 2021 infrastructure law to help pay for the effort. On Tuesday, the E.P.A. announced $2.6 billion in new funding to support lead pipe replacement.
The rule was expected to face opposition from some utilities, which have cited rising costs, supply-chain problems, labor shortages and incomplete or missing building records as obstacles to the rapid replacement of lead pipes. Earlier this year, the group joined chemical companies to sue over rules requiring the cleanup of so-called forever chemicals linked to cancer and other health risks.
The new rule, which updates regulations under the 1991 Safe Drinking Water Act, also lowers the allowable amount of lead in the meantime to 10 parts per billion, from the current 15 parts per billion. If the water supply repeatedly exceeds the new threshold, utilities must make water filters available. Some public-health advocates had called for a lower standard of between zero and five parts per billion.
The rule also doesn’t require utilities to pay for the portion of lead lines that are on private property, including within a home. E.P.A. officials have expressed concerns that such a requirement would go beyond the agency’s legal authority.
However, environmental groups say that such an omission would shift the onus onto lower-income homeowners who may be unable to afford lead-pipe removal. Research has shown that Black, Latino and low-income neighborhoods are disproportionately more likely to receive contaminated water through a lead pipe.
People “who for many decades have already been disadvantaged, who live in communities that have lead pipes, lead paint, dirty air, and have suffered extra burdens” could get left behind, said Erik D. Olson, senior strategic director for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Nevertheless, he added, the policy was a big step forward.
The new rule allows some utilities with a particularly large number of lead service lines to go beyond the 10-year deadline. Under a draft version of the rule, Chicago, which has the most lead pipes in the nation, would have gotten as long as 50 years to remove them all. The final rule promises to shorten that timeline significantly.
Lead scares continue to pop up across the country. Earlier this year, testing in Syracuse, N.Y., found lead levels in the drinking water of some homes at many times the federal limit. Syracuse now plans to use state and federal financing to start replacing the approximately 14,000 service lines in the city, which expects to get to 2,400 of them next year.
“We’d been told for decades that our water was safe,” said Oceanna Fair, a retired nurse who found out a month ago that her home in Syracuse is serviced by lead pipes. Concerned for her grandchildren, whom she cares for during the day, she is now getting filters installed in her home.
She also looked into the cost of getting her pipes replaced: $10,000. “Most people can’t afford that,” she said. “We need help to ensure everyone gets safe and clean water.”
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5) Removing Books From Libraries Often Takes Debate. But There’s a Quieter Way.
Weeding, or culling old, damaged or outdated books, is standard practice in libraries. But in some cases it is being used to remove books because of the viewpoint they express.
By Elizabeth A. Harris, Oct. 8, 2024
Two lawsuits have recently taken up weeding. The practice allows librarians to keep collections current, but some have argued that it has been used in some instances to remove books for their content. Credit...Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press
Thousands of books have been removed from schools and libraries over the past several years, often accompanied by stormy public meetings and acrimonious debate. But there is a quieter way books have been pulled from libraries — a process called weeding.
The practice is standard for librarians, a regular part of keeping their collections current. Traditionally, weeding involves removing books that are damaged, out of date or haven’t been checked out in a long time. This makes room for new editions and titles that are of more interest to the community.
Now, three years into surge in challenges and removals of books from libraries, weeding is sometimes being used to remove books because of the viewpoint they express or the story they tell. The issue is now working its way through the court system.
Advocates say that, increasingly, administrators and library board officials are using this approach to avoid the public spectacle of formally pulling them because of their content.
“When you remove a book because you believe it’s critical race theory, or portrays L.G.B.T.Q. lives or because you believe it’s too vulgar,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, Director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, “that’s not weeding. That’s censorship.”
In recent years, the number of books that have been restricted or removed has surged around the country, fed in part by conservative organizations, lists of books that circulated on social media and state laws that have decided what kinds of books are appropriate for children.
Those in favor of restricting access to certain titles say they are trying to protect children from encountering difficult, inappropriate or sensitive topics while they are alone in the library, or at school without guidance from their parents. Those who oppose these restrictions say libraries should represent a wide range of viewpoints.
Usually, removing a book from a school or library because of its content requires a process. That can include extensive public notice and input as well as board meetings, which can get volatile and heated.
Weeding, on the other hand, is part of the day-to-day work of maintaining a collection. Librarians do this largely on their own, though most libraries have weeding policies and criteria to help guide the choices.
One common standard is called “MUSTIE,” which stands for Misleading, Ugly (damaged or worn out), Superseded (by a newer edition), Trivial, Irrelevant (to the community) and Elsewhere (meaning the material could easily be found someplace else).
The work is essential to keep collections in good shape. Caldwell-Stone of the library association said that librarians never know what they’re going to find when they go into a library’s book return drop box — and generally, they try to sort through it while wearing gloves. She was once told that a book was returned with a strip of bacon pressed between the pages as a book mark. That book, for example, had to go.
Two lawsuits have recently taken up the practice, and how it is being used.
According to a suit filed in federal court this year, officials in Nassau County, Florida removed or restricted access to 36 books in its public school library after members of an organization called Citizens Defending Freedom said they were inappropriate for children. County officials said they removed most of the books because they violated a state obscenity law.
Three of those books did not go through the usual process, according to Lauren Zimmerman, a partner at Selendy Gay, and one of the lawyers who filed the case. Instead, they were weeded. Among them was a picture book called “And Tango Makes Three,” about a penguin family with two penguin dads.
The district said it weeded its only copy of “Tango” because of a “lack of circulation,” the lawsuit said. But according to court documents, it had been checked out at least five times in the previous five years, while thousands of other books in the district’s public libraries that had not been checked out at all during that period were not removed.
The other weeded books were “Ghost Boys,” about racism in the United States, and “Almost Perfect,” a coming-of-age story about a high school romance involving a transgender student, according to the court documents.
The Nassau County case settled last month and all three books will go back on the shelves, along with 21 others. The remaining 12 books will be available for checkout to students who are at least 18 years old, or who have permission from their parents. A lawyer representing Nassau County did not respond to requests for comment.
“It took generations of work by countless individuals for books like ‘Tango’ to make it onto shelves of libraries,” said Justin Richardson, one of the authors of “And Tango makes Three,” who was a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “We’re simply not going to sit by and let them take them off.”
Another instance where weeding has landed in court is a case that began in Llano County, Tex. and is now in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. According to court documents, public library officials removed 17 books, including “Caste,” by Isabel Wilkerson, which is about race in the United States, and “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health,” by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley, which has illustrations of sex and masturbation.
County officials said those books were weeded. Lawyers for Llano County have asked the court to reverse a 29-year-old precedent on the issue. They’ve argued that while none of these books were removed because of their content or viewpoint, library officials have the right to do so. Removing books is not a violation of patrons’ rights, the lawyers argued, because the government is not obligated to supply books in the first place. The government is not allowed to stop you from accessing books, but it doesn’t have to help.
This summer, a three-judge panel ruled, in a split decision, that books could not be removed based on their viewpoint. But a few weeks later, the Fifth Circuit made an unusual choice: It would rehear the case, this time in front of the full court. Oral arguments took place last month, and a decision is expected in several months.
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6) Biden’s Moral Failure in Israel
By Peter Beinart, Oct. 8, 2024
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Joe Biden’s presidency has a distinct origin story. As he tells it, he was done with politics, happily retired from public life. That changed after Donald Trump’s equivocal response to the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va. It was then that Mr. Biden realized that Mr. Trump and his allies threatened what he called the “soul of this nation”: its commitment to equality. So he re-entered the fray.
Ever since, Mr. Biden has argued that championing equality is the key to preserving American democracy at home and enhancing American influence abroad. He began a 2019 campaign announcement video by noting that Charlottesville was home to Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the words “all men are created equal.” In his acceptance speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, he claimed America’s “great purpose” was “to be a light to the world once again. To finally live up to and make real the words written in the sacred documents that founded this nation that all men and women are created equal.”
In his 2021 Inaugural Address, he described American history as a “constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart.” He promised to make the United States once again a “beacon to the world.” Since taking office, the president has framed a commitment to equality as the answer not only to the rise of domestic white nationalism but also to the authoritarian powers who threaten democracy overseas.
This self-presentation now lies in ruin. Through his unwavering backing of Israel, Mr. Biden has effectively supported its unequal treatment and oppression of Palestinians—especially in Gaza—and undermined the ethical rationale for his presidency.
Domestically, Mr. Biden counterposed equality to his predecessor’s ethnonationalistic tendencies. Mr. Trump has repeatedly implied that Americans who aren’t white and Christian are not truly American. In 2016, he said that Gonzalo Curiel, a judge born in Indiana, could not rule fairly on civil lawsuits against Trump University because of his Mexican heritage, given Mr. Trump’s promises to build a wall between this country and Mexico. In 2019, Mr. Trump demanded that the four congresswomen of color who constitute the so-called Squad—three of whom were born in the United States—“go back” to the countries they were from. Mr. Biden, by contrast, declared in a May 2023 speech to Howard University’s graduating class that America was based on an idea—equal rights—“not religion, not ethnicity.” Throughout his presidency, Mr. Biden has depicted himself as defending that principle from authoritarian impulses both at home and abroad.
But Israel’s political system is explicitly based on religion and ethnicity. Its controversial 2018 nation-state bill declares that Jews alone can “exercise national self-determination.” Most of the Palestinians under Israeli control—those in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—can’t become citizens of the state that dominates their lives. A minority of Palestinians who live within Israel’s 1967 borders do enjoy citizenship and the right to vote. But when Arab Israeli politicians advanced a bill that would have made legal equality between Arab and Jewish citizens a foundation of Israeli law in 2018, the speaker of Israel’s parliament refused to allow a vote on it because it would “gnaw at the foundations of the state.”
As I have previously argued, there was a Zionist tradition that envisioned Jews living equally alongside Palestinians in a binational state—although many Americans now take for granted that Israel gives Jews legal supremacy.
But when it comes to Israel, Mr. Biden hasn’t supported equality under the law. The war in Gaza has made that contradiction impossible to ignore. It is most glaring when Biden expresses deep empathy for Israeli suffering but relative indifference to the far larger number of dead Palestinians, or when his administration seems to distinguish even between American citizens, showing more concern for those murdered by Hamas than for those killed by Israel’s military.
No wonder, according to a September survey by the Institute for Global Affairs, Democrats consider Mr. Biden’s policy on Gaza his greatest foreign policy failure. Young Americans are especially alienated by the chasm between Mr. Biden’s actions and his stated ideals. A March poll by Harvard’s Institute of Politics found that more than three-quarters of Americans under the age of 30 disapprove of his policy toward Israel’s war in Gaza.
Mr. Biden’s near-unconditional support for Israel’s actions has damaged his reputation overseas, as well. He has long claimed that the United States, unlike Russia and China, defends a “rules-based” order in which all countries, irrespective of their power, are bound by certain standards. That rhetoric reached a crescendo after Russia tried to overrun Kyiv in February 2022. At stake in Ukraine, Mr. Biden told a Polish audience the following month, was the choice “between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” That September, Mr. Biden told the United Nations that members of the Security Council should “refrain from the use of the veto, except in rare, extraordinary situations.” It was another swipe at Moscow, which during Mr. Biden’s presidency had employed its veto seven times, and an effort to associate the United States with a fairer international order, in which even the most powerful nations cannot act with impunity. To strengthen those rules, the Biden administration in July of last year reportedly ordered the United States to share evidence on Kremlin officials that could help the International Criminal Court in its investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine.
Then came the Oct. 7 massacre and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. In the war’s first seven months, the Biden administration vetoed four resolutions concerning Israel and Palestine. Mr. Biden denounced the I.C.C.’s chief prosecutor for requesting warrants for the arrests of Hamas and Israeli leaders. While Mr. Biden has warned against Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza and the loss of civilian life, he has also repeatedly reiterated his support of Israel and supplied the country with vast quantities of arms.
Whatever chance Mr. Biden had of convincing large numbers of foreigners that the United States believed that international law applies to all has now largely collapsed. Over the past year, according to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of people who trust Mr. Biden “to do the right thing regarding world affairs” has dropped by double digits in Britain, Japan, Australia, Spain and Sweden—all key allies in the great power struggle Mr. Biden is waging against Moscow and Beijing. Britons, Canadians and Italians have less faith in Mr. Biden today than they had in George W. Bush in 2003, the year he invaded Iraq.
Last month, in his final speech to the United Nations, Mr. Biden acknowledged that “many look at the world today and see difficulties and react with despair.” What he didn’t acknowledge is that for many who believe in the vision of equality Mr. Biden himself once outlined, he has contributed to that despair—by effectively treating Palestinians as lesser human beings, and by treating Israel as above international law.
A few days before Mr. Biden’s speech, the Gaza Health Ministry released a catalog of the names and ages of Palestinians killed in this war. According to The Guardian, the first 100 pages are composed entirely of the names of children who died under the age of 10. Their lives will need to be accounted for when historians gauge how Mr. Biden shaped the “soul of this nation.”
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7) Hurricane Milton Is Terrifying, and It Is Just the Start
By Porter Fox, Oct. 9, 2024
Mr. Fox is the author of “Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them,” and spent three years reporting on extreme weather.
Zack Wittman for The New York Times
As Hurricane Milton roars toward Florida’s west coast with winds that spiked to a staggering 180 miles per hour, we are witnessing a new reality. Supercharged hurricanes are no longer outliers, freak disasters or storms of the century. Fossil fuel pollution has made them a fixture of life around the world, and they are going to get worse — with millions of people in their cross hairs.
Many Americans refuse to believe that a major hurricane could hit them. The United States government isn’t much better. Flood insurance remains optional for many coastal residents. Homes continue to be built — and rebuilt — in low-lying flood zones. State governments often lack the funds and staffing to manage recovery. Some loans from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to rebuild are contingent on good credit. But if we are going to withstand this new era of extreme weather, we need to be honest about what has become the most expensive and deadly kind of natural disaster in the country.
I spent the past three years sailing through storms and visiting research labs around the world to learn about the recent increase in extreme cyclones. I spoke to captains who logged changes in the Gulf Stream, the jet stream, trade winds and storm seasons. I interviewed scientists who studied amplifying typhoons in the Pacific, whose barometric pressure could drop so low that they triggered a spider web of earthquakes. I studied major cyclones that hit parts of the Middle East for the first time and some of the first hurricane landfalls to strike Europe. Experts consistently tied storm intensity, range and destruction to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and said that if we reduced it, storm intensity would also diminish in lock step.
Here is a glimpse of where we are headed. The heat accumulating in the ocean from global warming will make tropical cyclones last longer than they once did, and occasionally move slower, making damage many times worse. Rapid intensification — in which storm winds increase by 35 miles per hour or more in 24 hours — will continue to rise, especially in coastal waters.
A 2021 study by Yale University researchers shows that warmer waters in the north and south will soon draw extreme storms toward the poles, threatening to inundate densely populated, and especially unprepared, cities like Washington, D.C., New York and Boston. A northwestward migration from the region where most Atlantic tropical cyclones originate could result in an uptick in landfalls along the East Coast later this century.
The compounding forces of climate change are worsening the effects, too. Storms now carry vastly more precipitation — and can dump more than 40 inches of rain in just a few days as Hurricane Harvey did in Houston in 2017. Storm surge rides on an elevated sea level, flooding coastlines with walls of water up to 25 feet high, as Hurricane Katrina did in New Orleans in 2005. If Superstorm Sandy had occurred in 1912 instead of 2012, it would have likely not flooded Lower Manhattan because the sea level was so much lower then among other reasons, according to Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at M.I.T.
By the end of this century, the number of major hurricanes is expected to increase by 20 percent. And hurricanes of all sizes could set the country back over $100 billion annually by then.
If you are reading this in the Midwest, Northeast or even Southwest, consider that this meteorological nightmare might come for you. A recent study by the First Street Foundation, a research firm that studies climate threats to housing, showed that hurricanes will penetrate farther inland in decades to come, affecting states with tropical storm conditions as far west as Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin. In North Carolina, the damage from Hurricane Helene nearly 500 miles from the coast far outweighed that of the landfall site in Florida.
When the hurricane season ends later this year, the media, the government and America at large will move on from these storms and their victims, and our collective amnesia will set in. Towns in Appalachia will be left to fend for themselves; homeowners who didn’t add or couldn’t afford flood insurance will have to find a way to rebuild or relocate, and neighbors in Central Florida may have to rely on one another to finish the work that the federal government starts.
As long as hurricanes continue to be treated like one-off disasters, recovery efforts will play from behind. This head-in-the-sand approach empties the coffers and ranks of FEMA year after year, often leaving victims to fend for themselves. Less than two weeks ago, Hurricane Helene, with more than 230 dead and damage estimates running as high as $250 billion, was one of the deadliest and costliest storms to hit the United States in the last 50 years. But in lieu of investing in dikes, levees, updated building codes, evacuation corridors and other storm preparation, the U.S. government is often overwhelmed simply trying to clean up.
In the Tampa Bay area, the state is trying to accelerate the clean up from Hurricane Helene. But Hurricane Milton is following it too closely, and millions of cubic yards of storm debris from Helene could soon become projectiles. This “compound event,” as emergency officials call it, will likely also be considered a one-in-a-million coincidence. Until, of course, it happens again.
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8) One-Quarter of Lebanon Under Israeli Evacuation Warnings, U.N. Says
Hezbollah said its fighters were clashing with Israeli troops in southern Lebanon. The militia fired rockets at northern Israel, killing two people.
By Aryn Baker, Ben Hubbard and Aaron Boxerman, October 9, 2024
Hezbollah militants fought ground battles with Israeli forces in southern Lebanon on Wednesday and lobbed more rockets at northern Israeli towns, as the United Nations warned that hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians had fled their homes because of the escalating hostilities. Israel’s emergency services said two people were killed when a Hezbollah strike hit the northern city of Kiryat Shmona.
A quarter of Lebanon’s territory — mostly the southern areas abutting Israel, but also parts of the Hezbollah-dominated Bekaa Valley and along the Syrian border — is now under Israeli military evacuation warnings, according to the U.N. human rights commissioner. The Israeli military repeated its directive to residents of southern Lebanon on Wednesday to move north, saying that its forces were continuing “to attack Hezbollah sites in and near your village, and for your own safety you are prohibited from returning to your homes until further notice.”
As the fighting continued, Iran’s foreign minister was in Saudi Arabia as part of a diplomatic tour aimed at preventing further military escalation in the region. But a much anticipated meeting on Wednesday between Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III was postponed amid tensions between the countries’ leaders.
Mr. Gallant had been expected in Washington to discuss Israel’s potential response to Iran’s missile attack last week, but he said on Wednesday that he had delayed the trip at the request of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told him he first wanted to speak with President Biden. Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant have been at odds for months over Israel’s strategy in Gaza, while U.S. officials have found the Israeli defense minister to be a key interlocutor as their ties with Mr. Netanyahu have become strained.
Here is what else to know:
· Stabbing attack: Six people were injured, two of them critically, in a stabbing attack in central Israel on Wednesday, according to Israeli medics. The Israeli police called it an act of terrorism, a term used almost exclusively to refer to attacks by Palestinian militants. No Palestinian group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
· Speaking up for UNRWA: Two days after Israel’s Parliament advanced legislation that would in effect ban the main United Nations agency that aids Palestinians, the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, warned that such a move “would be a catastrophe” for the more than two million Palestinians in Gaza and damage prospects for long-term peace.
· Lebanon deaths: More than 2,000 people have been killed and nearly 10,000 injured in Lebanon since the war in Gaza began last October, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Most of the deaths and injuries have occurred over the past three weeks. The World Health Organization said that Israeli attacks in Lebanon had killed at least 65 health workers and injured 40 others since Sept. 17.
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9) The U.N. says a quarter of Lebanese territory is under Israeli evacuation warnings.
By Aryn Baker, Oct. 9, 2024
Displaced people setting up a tent on the beach in Beirut, Lebanon, on Sunday. Credit...Carl Court/Getty Images
A quarter of Lebanon’s territory is now under Israeli military evacuation orders, according to the United Nations, in an indication that Israel’s air and ground campaign against Hezbollah militants could spark another humanitarian crisis in the Middle East.
The assessment released Wednesday by the U.N. human rights commissioner came as smoke from airstrikes bloomed over parts of southern Lebanon, where Lebanese news media reports said that Israeli warplanes had carried out more air attacks in and around the cities of Tyre and Saida.
Hezbollah said on Wednesday that it was engaged in skirmishes with Israeli troops in southern Lebanon. Its fighters launched another barrage of missile attacks at the northern Israeli city of Haifa on Wednesday afternoon, after the militant group warned that it would render the city uninhabitable if the Israeli military continued its offensive in Lebanon.
Sirens sounded in Haifa Bay and were followed by approximately 40 rockets, according to the Israeli military, which said that many were intercepted by air defenses. Explosions were heard in Haifa and surrounding villages, and Israeli emergency services officials reported that they were treating six people for shrapnel injuries after a rocket hit a bypass road near Haifa.
The Israeli airstrikes have continued more than a week after the start of a ground invasion of southern Lebanon that the military has described as “limited,” saying it aims to clear the border area of Hezbollah fighters, weapons and tunnels that threaten the security of northern Israel’s residents.
“To the people of South Lebanon, be careful!” an Israeli military spokesman, Avichay Adraee, warned in a post in Arabic. He said that Israeli forces were continuing “to attack Hezbollah sites in and near your village, and for your own safety you are prohibited from returning to your homes until further notice.”
The Israeli calls for evacuations have sent residents of more than 100 villages and urban areas of southern Lebanon fleeing north, according to the United Nations, which said that the Israeli warnings now cover a quarter of Lebanon’s land area, including areas in the Bekaa Valley and along the Syrian border. More than 600,000 people in the country of 5.4 million are now displaced, threatening to overwhelm shelters, the U.N. warned.
The air and land attacks in the south followed another night of Israeli airstrikes in the densely populated areas near Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway. Though a barrage of attacks overnight into Wednesday appeared to be less intense than those of previous days, Lebanon’s death toll continued to rise, with the health ministry saying that 36 people had been killed and more than 100 injured across the country over the past day.
More than 2,100 people have been killed and more than 10,000 injured since Israel intensified its air campaign against Hezbollah leadership in late September. The attacks have killed Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and several other top figures.
Israeli officials said on Tuesday that Mr. Nasrallah’s presumed successor, Hashem Safieddine, had also been killed in a recent strike, although Hezbollah has not confirmed his death.
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Euan Ward contributed reporting.
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10) They Flew 7,000 Miles to Fight Haiti’s Gangs. The Gangs Are on Top.
Hundreds of Kenyan police officers are in Port-au-Prince, trying to take the capital back from gangs, but financing and personnel shortages have hampered the effort.
By Frances Robles, Photographs by Adriana Zehbrauskas, Oct. 9, 2024
Frances Robles and Adriana Zehbrauskas spent a day in an armed personnel carrier embedded with Kenyan police officers in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and interviewed their commander.
A human skull on a stick and another on the ground seem to serve as a warning from gangs on a street outside a government office.
If the burned-out cars, bullet-riddled schools, demolished buildings and desolate streets in downtown Port-au-Prince weren’t enough evidence of the terrible things that happened here, someone left an even more ominous hint: skulls in the middle of the street.
A human head propped up on a stick with another on the ground beside it in front of a government office was apparently intended as a menacing message from gang members to the Kenyan and Haitian police officers trying to restore order to Haiti: Beware, we rule these streets.
A Kenyan police officer wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet and patrolling in an American armored personnel carrier took a photograph with his cellphone, while another maneuvered the vehicle around the skulls.
I, along with a New York Times photographer, went on patrol through Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, with a Kenyan-led multinational security mission deployed in the country. During the six-hour tour, the Kenyans were mostly ignored by people on the street and occasionally heckled; the vehicle was shot at once.
The patrol offered a glimpse into the enormous challenges the Kenyan force faces in trying to wrest control of Port-au-Prince from armed groups that have unraveled life in the country, killing indiscriminately, raping women, burning neighborhoods and leaving hundreds of thousands hungry and in makeshift shelters.
The route taken by the officers revealed many buildings the police had demolished to try to eliminate gang hide-outs.
The officers also traveled to the Port-au-Prince seaport — the main conduit for food, medicine and other goods into Haiti — at all times alert for potential snipers hiding on rooftops.
At the port, workers were loading a ferry for a new maritime route to move items to provinces by water, avoiding gang strongholds on land.
The officers, whose supervisors were not permitted to give interviews, said they had recently intensified their operations in an effort to “squeeze” gangs from several fronts.
A day later, a dockworker at the seaport was shot and injured.
That same day, the Kenyans engaged in a shootout with gang members on motorcycles and encountered the paths to the seaport blocked.
“What surprised me so much when I came here is how the gangs could dare to attack in broad daylight,” Godfrey Otunge, the Kenyan commander of the multinational police force, said in an interview. “How on earth can this happen?”
Since the first Kenyan officers arrived in June, officials cite important progress as life in some neighborhoods slowly returns to normal.
The Port-au-Prince airport has reopened after gangs were cleared from around its perimeter. Many street vendors are back working, and gangs have also been pushed out of the capital's main public hospital.
But the Kenyan officers are vastly outnumbered, and the heavily armed gangs remain firmly entrenched in many parts of Port-au-Prince. Huge swaths remain no-go zones, including downtown and the area around the U.S. Embassy. Gangs no longer control the public hospital, but it is in shambles and has not reopened.
Criminal groups have also expanded their control outside the capital, seizing three key roads linking Port-au-Prince to other parts of the country and laying siege to smaller cities and towns that the international force does not have the resources to reach.
Last week, a gang in the Artibonite Valley in the central part of the country attacked a town, leaving 88 people dead, including 10 gang members.
More than 700,000 people who fled their homes during a wave of violence over the past year and a half are still unable to return. Half the country’s population — roughly 5.4 million people — struggles to eat every day, and at least 6,000 people living in squalid camps are facing starvation, according to an analysis released recently by a group of global experts.
“They came to help us — and we do hope they will help us — but we see no difference yet,” Junior Lorveus, a 40-year-old cellphone repairman, said as the Kenyan officers patrolled the Champs de Mars downtown plaza on foot.
Gang violence forced Mr. Lorveus from his home and workshop, and he longs to go back.
Mr. Otunge, who projects relentless optimism, believes he can.
People should be able to return to the areas his officers have “pacified,” he said, “so at least we can now provide them with security.”
“Security is perception,” he added.
Haiti has been gripped by astonishing levels of gang violence for more than three years, since the country’s last elected president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated.
Many people who fled the violence took up residence in public schools and government buildings. Nearly 3,700 people have been killed this year, according to the United Nations.
The blocked roads leading to and from Port-au-Prince make it “almost impossible” for the police to intervene in time when gangs attack new locations outside the metropolitan area, Haiti’s prime minister, Garry Conille, said at a meeting in New York last month.
But the Kenyan-led force is woefully small.
Originally planned for 2,500 officers, it has just over 400. On the other side, experts estimate that up to 15,000 people are members of 200 Haitian gangs.
The $600 million mission was sanctioned by the United Nations but largely financed and organized by the United States. It relies on voluntary contributions, and has so far been given $369 million by the United States and $85 million by other nations.
The Biden administration recently announced a separate aid allocation — $160 million — for the Haitian National Police.
Kenya’s foreign affairs minister, Musalia W, Mudavadi, said at last month’s meeting in New York that there was only so much 400 officers could accomplish, making clear that the force’s capabilities were “currently lacking.”
The Biden administration is trying to turn the deployment into an official U.N. peacekeeping mission, which would require member states to contribute money and personnel.
The Kenyan officers conduct joint operations with the Haitian police to take down gang roadblocks — usually shipping containers stolen from the port — but sometimes the sole bulldozer at their disposal breaks down, Mr. Otunge said.
He acknowledged that the mission needs air support and more personnel, adding that the operation “is expensive.”
Kenya’s president, William Ruto, plans to send 300 more officers this month and 300 more by the end of November. Jamaica and Belize have also sent a small number of officers.
Reinforcements would allow the Kenyans to set up a dozen forward operating bases throughout the metropolitan area and in the nearby Artibonite Valley so that an area retaken from gangs can be held, Mr. Otunge said.
When the Kenyans responded in late July to a gang attack in Ganthier, about 20 miles east of Port-au-Prince, the operation took a week because of the lack of air support, and officers had to sleep in their vehicles, Mr. Otunge said. There was no food for the Kenyan officers so the Haitian police shared theirs, he added.
Still, he added proudly, “we pushed the gangs.”
Recounting the deployment’s early days in Haiti when it was trying to force gangs out of the airport, Mr. Otunge said, “Our officers were being shot at each and every day.’’
But they pressed on, he added. “We said, ‘We can’t stop. We have to sustain whatever we are doing.’
“We sustained it.”
Shifting the Kenyan deployment to a peacekeeping mission could be the only way to free Haiti from the grip of gangs and allow the scheduling of elections to choose a new president, experts said.
The Biden administration believes it would be the most effective way to ensure that an international mission continues for as long as needed, a senior Biden administration official said in a briefing where reporters were told that the official could not be identified discussing diplomatic matters.
“We have a chance, a chance to build on this foundation of security, to build on this progress, to build on a renewed sense of hope,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said during September’s meeting with Haitian and Kenyan officials.
U.N. peacekeeping operations have a long and complicated history in Haiti, rife with sexual abuse and poor sanitation that brought cholera to the country and caused thousands of deaths.
But despite the past troubles, the head of Haiti’s transitional presidential council, which is charged with setting elections, has urged the United Nations to return.
“I am convinced that this change of status, while recognizing that the errors of the past cannot be repeated, would guarantee the full success of the mission,’’ Haiti’s acting president, Edgard Leblanc Fils, told the U.N. General Assembly last month.
Carlos Hercule, Haiti’s justice minister, said he was feeling “impatient” because many Haitian police officers have left the country, adding that Haiti needed a beefed-up deployment soon.
Mr. Otunge, a former director of security operations for the Kenyan Police who has participated in peace missions in South Sudan and Somalia, urged patience.
He will not stop, he said, until Haiti “regains its glory.”
“I cannot fail the Haitian people,” Mr. Otunge said. “I’ve never failed, and I’m not ready to fail in Haiti.”
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11) A harrowing escape from an apartment, followed by flooding and uncertainty.
By Patricia MazzeiReporting from the Tampa Bay area, October 10, 2024
Hurricane Milton flooded an apartment complex in Clearwater, Fla. Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times
Andreína Zapiaín and her family watched with growing desperation Wednesday night as the floodwaters rose outside their apartment complex in Clearwater, Fla. Hurricane Milton’s winds howled, whipping a palm tree against the wall of their second-floor unit.
Two weeks ago, when Hurricane Helene hit Florida, the complex — which housed many working-class, mostly Hispanic residents — had endured a flood about thigh-high, said Ms. Zapiaín, 31. But on Wednesday with Milton, the water crept higher and higher.
Ms. Zapiaín and her family realized the swell would only get worse, she said. Despite the dark, they decided to leave. They figured they could swim and trudge through the flood to a higher building in the same complex where some of their relatives lived.
Her husband lifted their 11-year-old daughter onto his back and led the way, Ms. Zapiaín said. She followed behind them with her 25-year-old cousin. She could hear first-floor residents trapped by the water behind their closed doors screaming for help, she said, but could do nothing to help them.
At 4 feet 9 inches tall, Ms. Zapiaín could barely keep her chin above the water.
“I couldn’t touch the bottom, really,” she said in Spanish as she recalled the deepest point of the flood. “I was floating. I think it’s the worst thing I’ve experienced in my life.”
In the darkness, facing the wind and fighting the water, she prayed. “I asked God that we wouldn’t run into anything underwater,” Ms. Zapiaín said.
She and her family made it to their relatives’ apartment, a long stretch of buildings away.
By morning, the flood had receded a bit, but the water level still covered the doorknobs on the first-floor apartment below them. On the street, pickup trucks peeked out above the water. Some sedans and hatchbacks were still nearly covered.
Sheriff’s deputies and other rescuers commandeered small boats to help stranded people reach safety. One woman carried an infant. Another family clutched two small dogs.
A rescuer in an orange vest waded through the flood and knocked on the doors of first-floor units.
Ms. Zapiaín, a Venezuelan immigrant who arrived in the United States two months ago, stood on the side of an elevated road, looking down at the destruction and chaos. She worried that one of her downstairs neighbors, an older man who lived alone, had not escaped. She yelled for a rescue team not only to knock on his door but also to push it in to make sure he was safe.
“I kind of want to swim there myself,” she said.
Later, more rescuers arrived carrying red paint to mark units that had been checked — and tools to break down doors.
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12) Rubble, and Defiance
By David Guttenfelder, October 10, 2024
The Dahiya, a collection of neighborhoods on the southern outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, was in ruins, smoke still rising from the rubble of destroyed buildings.
The Israeli military has warned Lebanese civilians to evacuate many areas as it pursues its campaign to eliminate the leaders of the militant group and political party Hezbollah, who live among the general population. Dahiya has been a stronghold for the militant group.
Hezbollah began striking Israeli positions with rockets last October, a show of support for the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel from Gaza. Now, after almost a year of cross-border rocket fire and the assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Israeli and Hezbollah are fighting on the ground. Israel’s military has been bombarding Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon, including in the Dahiya, and said this week that it had sent more troops to Lebanon to join the fight against Hezbollah.
Last week, Hezbollah gave news organizations including The New York Times a tour of three buildings in the Dahiya area that were hit in recent airstrikes. Hezbollah members were not near reporters as they interviewed residents and had no say over what would be published.
The journalists, wearing blue body armor and helmets marked “Press,” were escorted through the streets, passing downed power lines and rubble.
Our first stop was at the vast heap of concrete and twisted rebar shown above. Two days earlier, Israeli bombs had brought down a whole building there.
It was a residential apartment block, though it was also home to Al-Sirat TV, a Lebanese religious and cultural network that has a pro-Hezbollah slant. Residents said the building had been mostly evacuated, but there were concerns that there might be bodies buried in the rubble, and rescuers cannot bring in excavation equipment to begin searching while the Israeli bombardment persists.
On one yellow sign was a defiant message.
“No banner of ours will fall,” it said.
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13) U.N. Says Israel Opened Fire on Peacekeepers in Lebanon
Israel’s military said it was looking into the claim. The U.N. force in Lebanon said two peacekeepers were wounded.
By Euan Ward and Liam Stack, Oct. 10, 2024
Euan Ward reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and Liam Stack from Tel Aviv.
“At least 65 health workers have been killed in Lebanon since Israel intensified its offensive there against Hezbollah three weeks ago, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday. It added that the agency had recorded 16 “attacks on health care” across the country in the same period of time.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/10/world/middleeast/lebanon-israel-hezbollah.html
Rescuers searching for survivors at a civil defense base in southern Lebanon early on Thursday. Credit...Bilal Kashmar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israeli forces fired on United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon on Thursday and wounded two of them, according to the U.N. force.
The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon — commonly known by its acronym, UNIFIL — said Israeli tank fire hit an observation tower at the force’s headquarters in Naqoura and that soldiers also struck the entrance of a bunker at a separate base nearby where peacekeepers were sheltering.
“Any deliberate attack on peacekeepers is a grave violation of international humanitarian law,” the U.N. force said in a statement on Thursday, adding that it was following up with the Israeli military. When asked for comment, Israel’s military said it was “looking into the reports” that its forces had fired on peacekeepers.
Israel’s military continued to pound Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, part of its broadening campaign to cripple the Iranian-backed militant group that for a year has been firing rockets across the border. Israeli warplanes have pummeled Hezbollah’s stronghold south of Beirut, targeting and killing its leader and other senior commanders. Last week, Israeli ground troops invaded southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah holds sway, and they have been battling the militants in deadly and close combat in the days since.
UNIFIL stressed that it was paramount for Israel, Hezbollah and other actors to “to ensure the safety and security” of its personnel and facilities, noting that the episode on Thursday came amid intensified combat that was “causing widespread destruction of towns and villages in south Lebanon.”
Last week, a UNIFIL spokesman said Israel’s military had established new positions beside a peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon and been firing at Hezbollah positions from those locations — raising concerns about the safety of the peacekeepers.
The spokesman, Andrea Tenenti, said Israel’s military had asked UNIFIL to relocate its personnel as it invaded southern Lebanon but that the mission had declined to do so. An Israeli military official confirmed the presence near that peacekeeping base, and said that Hezbollah was launching rockets from next to the base with impunity.
The two soldiers injured on Thursday — who the peacekeeping force said were hospitalized but whose wounds were “not serious” — were from Indonesia, according to a U.N. official briefed on the attacks.
The peacekeepers inside the bunker in the second episode — at a base in the town of Labbouneh, about two miles from Naqoura — were Italian, said the official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. UNIFIL said vehicles and communications equipment were damaged.
It also said that a day earlier Israeli soldiers had “fired at and disabled” the security cameras around the perimeter of the U.N. facility in Labbouneh.
UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, has been tasked since 1978 with maintaining peace along a volatile 75-mile stretch called the Blue Line, the de facto border to which Israel withdrew after ending its occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000.
The town of Naqoura has been home to UNIFIL headquarters for decades. While other troops have been injured since last October, when Hezbollah and the Israeli military started increasingly trading cross-border fire, the recent cases have been more serious and raised alarm.
Hezbollah exercises de facto control over much of southern Lebanon, and Israeli officials have repeatedly criticized UNIFIL for failing to deter Hezbollah’s operations in that part of the country. The U.N. force has said that its powers as a peacekeeping operation are inherently limited.
Elsewhere in southern Lebanon, an Israeli strike killed at least five members of the country’s civil defense agency overnight, according to Lebanon’s health ministry and state news media.
The strike hit a base of operations where the emergency workers were waiting to respond to relief calls, said Elie Khairallah, a spokesman for the agency. He said the agency’s regional chief was among those killed and that the building, near a church in the southern Lebanese town of Derdghaiya, was leveled in the attack.
Lebanon’s health ministry condemned the killings, accusing the Israeli military of targeting ambulance crews and rescue teams. There was no immediate comment from Israel’s military.
At least 65 health workers have been killed in Lebanon since Israel intensified its offensive there against Hezbollah three weeks ago, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday. It added that the agency had recorded 16 “attacks on health care” across the country in the same period of time.
Israel’s military has accused Hezbollah of hiding within the civilian population, in one case saying that the militant group had set up a command center next to a hospital.
Hezbollah kept up its rocket attacks into Israel on Thursday, setting off sirens in parts of the country’s north. Some were intercepted but several struck the area, according to the military. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
Hezbollah said it had been targeting Israeli troops stationed along the border with Lebanon, and in the city of Kiryat Shmona. On Wednesday, a rocket attack in Kiryat Shmona killed two civilians.
The Israeli military said it had detected 105 rocket launches from Lebanon on Thursday. It earlier said it had struck 110 sites in the country over the past day and claimed to have killed two Hezbollah commanders. Hezbollah did not comment on the claims.
With the fighting showing no sign of letting up, Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, suggested on Thursday that diplomatic efforts with the United States and France to secure a pause in the fighting had “intensified.”
Mr. Mikati’s comments, in a statement from his office, could not be independently verified. There was no immediate comment from the United States or France, which last month had put forward a proposal for a 21-day pause in the fighting.
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14) THE PRICE
By W.J. Hennigan, Photographs by An-My Lê, October 10, 2024
Mr. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion. Ms. Lê is a professor of photography at Bard College.
Submarines are constructed in sections at Quonset Point, R.I., then placed on barges and floated down the Atlantic coast for final assembly in Groton, Conn.
To understand how America is preparing for its nuclear future, follow Melissa Durkee’s fifth-grade students as they shuffle into Room 38 at Preston Veterans’ Memorial School in Preston, Conn. One by one, the children settle in for a six-week course taught by an atypical educator, the defense contractor General Dynamics.
“Does anyone know why we’re here?” a company representative asks. Adalie, 10, shoots her hand into the air. “Um, because you’re building submarines and you, like, need people, and you’re teaching us about it in case we’re interested in working there when we get older,” she ventures.
Adalie is correct. The U.S. Navy has put in an order for General Dynamics to produce 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines by 2042 — a job that’s projected to cost $130 billion. The industry is struggling to find the tens of thousands of new workers it needs. For the past 18 months, the company has traveled to elementary schools across New England to educate children in the basics of submarine manufacturing and perhaps inspire a student or two to consider one day joining its shipyards.
The coursework — on this particular day, welding crackers together with Easy Cheese to create mini-submarines — is one small facet of the much bigger preparations America is making for a historic struggle with its nuclear rivals. With Russia at war, China escalating regional disputes and nations like North Korea and Iran expanding their nuclear programs, the United States is set to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion over 30 years to revamp its own arsenal.
The spending spree, which the government began planning in 2010, is underway in at least 23 states — nearly 50 if you include subcontractors. It follows a decades-long freeze on designing, building or testing new nuclear weapons. Along with the subs, the military is paying for a new fleet of bomber jets, land-based missiles and thermonuclear warheads. Tally all that spending, and the bill comes to almost $57 billion a year, or $108,000 per minute for three decades.
Times Opinion spent six months traveling to cities and towns around the nation to discover how this modern Manhattan Project is coming together, interviewing more than 100 residents, workers, community leaders and federal officials. The portrait that emerged is a country that is being transformed — physically, financially and philosophically — by an unprecedented wave of nuclear revitalization. The effort is as flush with cash as it is rife with problems and delays: At least 20 major projects are already years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
If you don’t live where the submarines are welded or the missile silos are dug, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t know it’s happening. The federal government has said little about the plan in public, outside of congressional hearings and strategy papers, or the vast amount being spent. There has been no significant debate. The billion-dollar programs move under the radar. At a time when funding for politicized issues such as climate change, foreign military aid and border security are under a microscope, this issue miraculously appears to have sidestepped the crossfire.
But each day, more than 110,000 scientists, military personnel and private contractors with high-level security clearances are scanning into facilities, putting on safety gear and piecing together a modern arsenal for a volatile new nuclear age.
We should talk about why Washington is making America nuclear again and what we hope to achieve with one of the most ambitious, far-reaching construction projects in the country’s history. The money is already flowing, assembling weapons everyone hopes will never be used.
GENERAL DYNAMICS ELECTRIC BOAT may face a labor shortage, but you wouldn’t know it standing inside one of the company’s football-field-size warehouses along Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.
On a morning in September, roughly 2,000 employees were at work across the sprawling complex, moving among mammoth machinery and the hulls of several submarines sliced into segments like giant sushi rolls. “What you’re seeing is the future of American naval power,” Rear Adm. Todd Weeks, who oversees strategic submarine construction for the U.S. Navy, shouted above the din.
At 560 feet long and 43 feet in diameter, the Columbia-class submarines under construction at the site will be the largest America has ever built when the first boat enters service this decade. They are also the most expensive, at an average of $11 billion per boat. Engineering a nuclear submarine is widely considered to be more challenging than building a spacecraft: The sub needs to carry more than 100 people to crushing ocean depths, along with the nuclear reactor that powers it, and be capable of launching its nuclear-tipped missiles to any location on the planet. Every cut, every weld, every rivet matters.
On the factory floor, it is plain to see the dream of nuclear disarmament, once shared by Republican and Democratic presidents alike, is dead. Or, at the very least, on life support. Not so long ago, the consensus among global leaders was that the world needed fewer nukes and means to deliver them, not more. America’s nuclear portfolio was deprioritized after 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. After spending trillions of dollars over decades, Washington cut back on nearly everything nuclear-related. The prongs of the American military’s so-called triad — nuclear-weapon-carrying submarines, jets and intercontinental ballistic missiles — were maintained, rather than replaced, for years beyond their intended use.
Nuclear ballistic missile submarines — known as boomers by sailors — are arguably the most important part of that ecosystem. They are America’s guarantee that the military can strike back in the event of the country incurring a first attack, even if an adversary manages to turn Washington into radioactive ash. They are constantly deployed around the world, are virtually undetectable under the water and can carry up to 20 long-range missiles loaded with several nuclear warheads apiece.
The 14 boomers now at sea are about 40 years old, on average — ancient in submarine years. The aging boats come with a host of liabilities, including higher maintenance costs and onboard technology that predates the personal computer revolution. With China operating the world’s largest, newest naval force (234 warships to America’s 219), the U.S. Navy says new submarines can’t be produced fast enough. Once U.S. production hits its stride, the plan is to build one boomer and two attack submarines a year. To make that happen, the Quonset Point factory has added six buildings, doubling its floor space, from one million square feet to two million square feet, over the past 10 years.
But four years in, the first boat is hundreds of millions of dollars over budget because of a combination of supply chain issues, design problems and nagging labor shortages. Recent analysis from the Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog, calculated cost overruns that are more than six times the company’s estimates.
When the Cold War ended, the demand for subs dropped, and the pipeline of trade specialists trained to work on these highly specialized boats did, too. General Dynamics Electric Boat’s work force sank from around 22,000 to 7,000. The Navy now estimates it needs at least 100,000 new workers to join defense companies to meet production demands.
Though the new Columbia-class subs are primarily being built in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Virginia, the Navy is going to tremendous lengths to recruit talent across the country. Over the past year, a blitz of ads has appeared at various sports events — including major league baseball games, WNBA games and even atop a NASCAR hood — steering fans to buildsubmarines.com. The website connects job seekers with hiring defense contractors as part of a nearly $1 billion campaign. Some of that money will go toward helping restore the network of companies that can supply the more than three million parts that go into a Columbia sub. Like so much of the nation’s nuclear infrastructure, those supplier numbers have plummeted since the 1990s.
Arms control advocates argue that the U.S. industrial buildup risks igniting another arms race. But to hear Admiral Weeks tell it, the Navy is well beyond such hand-wringing, thanks in part to Russia and China: “As we see the world today, that dip that we had in the late 1990s, early 2000s — we don’t see that happening again.”
ANY PASSING DRIVER can watch the construction on the industrial park along Bear Creek Road in Oak Ridge, a city in the far eastern corner of Tennessee. Crowds of laborers move among four unfinished buildings, heavy machinery growling at the edges. It looks like any other work site, until you notice the tiers of razor wire, patrols of armed guards around the perimeter and the peculiar fact that none of the structures have any windows.
This construction site, for the Y-12 National Security Complex, is the top-secret centerpiece of America’s plans to rebuild the nation’s nuclear bomb-making complex. When the $10 billion overhaul is done, the revamped site will be solely responsible for processing the highly enriched uranium used in U.S. weapons into the next century. But if you keep driving down the road, it feels as though you’re moving back in time. Row after row of aging brick buildings are scattered across Y-12’s campus, many containing hazardous waste that dates back decades.
After World War II and the start of the Cold War arms race, manufacturing uranium components for nuclear weapons became the site’s defining mission. Every nuclear weapon in America’s current arsenal of 3,748 nuclear bombs and warheads contains uranium from Y-12.
The Energy Department, which oversees the nuclear stockpile, went through an extensive retrenchment after the U.S.S.R. collapsed, much like the military. The overall number of weapons was cut. The budgets of the labs that designed the weapons were cut. The skilled work force that manufactured and assembled them was cut. The facilities where this work took place, full of modern equipment during the Cold War, were never updated.
Few, if any, sites embody this neglect better than Y-12. Despite all the technological advancements that have unfolded outside Y-12’s barbed wire fences over the past 80 years, America’s nuclear arsenal is still largely put together there by hand, like a Ferrari engine, using machines created decades before their operators were born.
Signs of decay and decrepitude are everywhere. Eric Helms, the deputy director of enriched uranium operations, who has worked at Y-12 for 23 years, leads me through a labyrinth inside the complex of narrow hallways in Building 9212, where workers stand in coveralls. Strips of the ceiling hang overhead like ribbons. Sections of pipe that jut from the hulking machinery are wrapped with duct tape, and paint on the steel doors and walls has chipped away, exposing layers of green, brown and cream underneath. “That’s where we painted over contamination spills,” he says. “Stripping the paint would just create a bigger problem.”
Large areas of the floors have also been painted over or feature a patchwork of stainless steel sheeting to cover contaminated concrete below. On the day I visit, the internal 1950s-era vacuum system has been broken for more than a week, so workers can’t suck away scraps of uranium that fell around the furnaces. Mr. Helms says it’s a nagging problem. “We’re looking forward to moving into the new facility,” he says.
Today Y-12 is under the control of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a quasi-independent arm of the Energy Department. Once the new facility is up and running, it will process uranium not only for nuclear weapons but also for the nuclear reactors aboard U.S. Navy ships and nuclear research reactors. Much of the radioactive material will be shipped by truck to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Pantex plant in Texas, where it will be assembled into different types of nuclear warheads. The surplus will be held in an onsite storage vault nicknamed the Fort Knox of uranium.
For that, Mr. Helms and the rest of the staff will have to wait. Six years into its renovation, construction at Y-12 is years behind schedule and around $4 billion over budget because of a combination of supply chain hiccups and unforced errors. (At one point, a contractor mistakenly designed the roof 13 feet lower than it needed to be in the new uranium-processing building, costing $540 million alone.)
Because of the repeated delays, the earliest that Mr. Helms and his team can move into the new facilities is 2031.
UNLIKE MOST OF the U.S. military’s weapons systems, America’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, which ferry nuclear warheads to their target, aren’t kept on military bases or in warehouses. Currently, 400 Minuteman III missiles are buried 80 feet underground in people’s backyards — or, more specifically, their farm fields — in Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Montana and North Dakota.
For decades, these aging missile systems have been on 24-hour alert, ready to obliterate almost any spot on Earth using the best technology available in the 1970s, when they were installed. The Air Force, which is in charge of the land-based missiles, has been maintaining the missiles for half a century.
Now the entire system is set to be replaced. Changing out the missiles, silos, command hubs and roughly 7,500 miles of underground cables snaking under the property of thousands of landowners will be one of the most expensive projects in military history, rivaled only in scale and technical complexity by the operation to build the Interstate System of highways.
For the past two years, representatives of the Air Force have fanned out across the northern Great Plains to talk to residents about the plans. Construction crews have begun work on support buildings at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. The hope is to open new silos through the next two decades — but the project could go well beyond that, given the current delays — and steadily bring the Sentinel system online while maintaining the old Minuteman III system until it’s fully replaced. Up to 3,000 laborers will descend on dozens of small towns to live in temporary camps, potentially doubling or tripling the local populations for however long they need to be there.
The Air Force does not yet know how or where the workers will be housed, which is a concern for some people living in these missile-hosting towns, many of which have only one or two law enforcement officers. Robin Darnall, a commissioner for Banner County in western Nebraska, says she’s focused on how to balance the influx of workers along with the safety of farming and ranching families, whose forebears, in some cases, arrived there in homesteading days. “I feel like we need to increase our law enforcement in Banner County for this project,” she says. “Our sheriff can’t do that all and satisfy his current responsibilities.”
When the Air Force installed missiles there in the 1960s, locals enthusiastically embraced the idea of providing a home to a critical national security project aimed at defeating the Soviets. The arms race was on, after all. But today, like in most of America, the grave threat of nuclear war barely registers to many residents of the heartland, even if classified work is happening beneath the communities they live in.
In the Great Plains, too, things are taking longer than they should. The missile modernization program, called LGM-35A Sentinel, was first estimated to cost about $96 billion in 2020, when the defense company Northrop Grumman won the initial contract to build the system. The price tag has since skyrocketed, with current costs pegged at around $141 billion, a cost increase so severe that it triggered the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which requires the Pentagon and Congress to evaluate whether to cancel troubled programs. The government is reviewing the details but has already decided to move forward with building the new missiles.
Walter Schweitzer passes a missile silo almost every day on his way to work as president of the Montana Farmers Union. He and his members are military supporters but are increasingly concerned with the lack of information provided by the Air Force. Another point of contention involves restrictions around the silos, such as forbidding wind farms within a two-mile radius. “Unless you’re prepared to reimburse property owners the loss of their rights, then the farmers’ union can’t support that,” Mr. Schweitzer says. “No way. No how.”
OUTSIDE THE LAB, the scenic town of Los Alamos, N.M., is being renovated with all manner of construction projects to accommodate the new arrivals. Inside the lab, technicians and scientists are busily melting, refining and shaping plutonium into grapefruit-size cores that trigger the explosions in nuclear bombs.
Manufacturing plutonium pits, which is what the nuclear industry calls them, can be a messy and dangerous business. The radioactive metal has to be shaped into hollow spheres. Workers do this by handling it with rubber gloves inside workstations called glove boxes. It takes skill and nearly a year of training to become comfortable working with such perilous material. A tiny shaving of plutonium can kill a person if it is inhaled. Accounting for every bit of it is crucial.
In 2018, Congress directed Los Alamos, which is overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration, to produce 30 plutonium pits a year by 2026. The agency plans to manufacture an additional 50 pits a year at a larger facility in Savannah River, S.C. The pits will go into the warheads that are affixed to the new Sentinel missiles.
Some progress is being made: On Oct. 1, Los Alamos produced the first pit certified to enter the war reserve. But meeting the full production mark won’t happen until the mid-2030s, at the earliest, the National Nuclear Security Administration says, as the cost estimate has climbed to more than $28 billion. The upside is the delays won’t hurt as much because everything is behind schedule, including the missiles.
The last time the United States was mass-producing plutonium pits, it didn’t go well. The Rocky Flats production site in Colorado was the last place to do it. In 1989 the facility, overseen by the Energy Department, was raided by the F.B.I. and Environmental Protection Agency and later shut down after rampant environmental violations were discovered. It was a rare episode in U.S. history in which one federal agency raided another.
The output at Rocky Flats, which at one point during the Cold War hit 1,000 pits per year, dwarfs the modern ambitions of Los Alamos. Still, the new production is expected to generate levels of radiological and hazardous waste that the lab has not experienced. This comes on top of the contamination already present, which the government estimates will cost some $7 billion to clean up. “We’re endangering our community for an unnecessary arms race that puts us all at risk,” says Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a Santa Fe-based watchdog.
Environmental contamination isn’t the only concern that Los Alamos’s neighbors have. The Los Alamos County Council recently passed a $377 million budget for fiscal year 2025 — an eye-popping sum for a population of just 19,400. County officials say their primary focus is housing and amenities. The lab hired 4,000 employees over the past two years, and it’s been a struggle to find homes for them all. A recent study found they have a housing shortfall of at least 1,300 units, which county officials attribute largely to the lab expansion.
Los Alamos’s strategic location, nestled between canyons, poses a vexing challenge. The limited space creates transportation problems in and out of the town, which has led to a spate of auto accidents, including one in September in which a former lab director, Charles McMillan, was killed. To alleviate traffic, money is also going into infrastructure improvements and an expansion of the Atomic City Transit system.
“Our whole community has changed with this new bomb factory,” says Greg Mello, the executive director at the Los Alamos Study Group, a nonprofit watchdog that is critical of the nuclear weapons complex’s expansion. “There’s no telling where it will end.”
LAST CENTURY, the world watched in horror as the number of nuclear weapons around the globe rocketed from approximately 3,000 warheads in 1955 to more than 70,000 by the late 1980s. It took time for nuclear nations to grasp the mutual vulnerability, the financial investment and general insanity of the arms race. Cooler heads prevailed. International treaties were signed. Now there are an estimated 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world.
All of the progress meticulously made over the past 40 years is now at risk. Agreements are being abandoned rather than forged. The future of arms control appears bleak. The United States is considering increasing the number of weapons in its arsenal — not just replacing the old ones — after the New Start Treaty with Russia expires in February 2026. If such a decision is made, foreign adversaries will certainly follow suit.
After all, decisions about an arsenal in one nation trigger rethinking among them all. Since the United States first took concrete steps toward rebuilding its weapons in 2010, the eight other nuclear-armed nations are believed to have expanded or enhanced theirs. Russia has overhauled its nuclear arsenal. China is on track to double the number of its nuclear warheads by the decade’s end and may continue building, according to U.S. intelligence estimates.
It is undeniably true that the world is becoming more contentious, and nuclear weapons do deter our adversaries. But it’s also true that our children will inherit this — the nationwide nuclear complex revitalization, the astronomical bill, the potential for confrontation. Congress decided that America needed new weapons when it first allocated funding to their replacement more than a decade ago. But it’s clear, after I visited these places, that the American people have not. Even in communities where this work is happening, there is too little awareness about what’s occurring, let alone in the rest of the country.
Our next president will have to decide whether America needs these new weapons. Americans deserve to know more about the candidates’ views, how our money is being spent and what’s at stake. After all, the weapons under development using taxpayer dollars are expected to be with us well into the next century. And if any one of them were ever used, it would fundamentally change the course of human history.
So should Americans brace for another arms race? Another Cold War? To put it in perspective: The Manhattan Project cost about $30 billion, adjusted for inflation, over the course of World War II. The United States is on pace to spend nearly double that amount each year for at least 30 years. It’s time to reflect on whether we are on a path toward a brighter future or headed back to a darker past.
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