Israel’s Genocide Day 440: New reports of mass killings in Gaza surface
A new report documents the mass killing of Palestinians in northern Gaza. Meanwhile, Hamas and Israel have discussed the details of a prisoner exchange that could serve as the centerpiece of a 60-day ceasefire.
By Qassam Muaddi, December 19, 2024
Casualties
· 45,129 + killed* and at least 107,338 wounded in the Gaza Strip, 59% of whom are women, children, and elderly.
· 822+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. This includes at least 146 children.**
· 3,962 Lebanese killed and more than 16,520 wounded by Israeli forces since October 8, 2023***
· Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,189.
· Israel recognizes the death of 890 Israeli soldiers, policemen and intelligence officers and the injury of at least 5,065 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 December 19, 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 December 19, 2024.
*** This figure was released by the Lebanese Health Ministry, updated on December 9, 2024. The counting is based on the Lebanese official date for the beginning of “the Israeli aggression on Lebanon,” when Israel began airstrikes on Lebanese territory after the beginning of Hezbollah’s “support front” for Gaza.
**** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on August 4, 2024, that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association told Israel’s Channel 12 that the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000, including at least 8,000 who have been permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel 7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system since October 7 and as of June 18.
Source: mondoweiss.net
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It’s Movement Time
It’s movement time.
As the Trump presidency take shape, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. Disbelief meshes with despair, and some are quite frankly desolate.
Dry your tears, blow your noses, and join movements of resistance to this madness. Blacks in America have never known a time when resistance wasn’t necessary, including life under a Black president.
For centuries for generations, people have had to struggle for freedom, for respect, for justice. Why should this time be any different?
The ancestors, like the revered Frederick Douglass, lambasted Abraham Lincoln as a fool or coward who wouldn’t fight the civil war with thousands of willing Black troops. Said Douglass, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Said Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without demand.”
So let us struggle. Let us build movements that lift our hearts. Let us remake our history with the brick and mortar of struggle.
—Prison Radio, November 21, 2016
https://www.prisonradio.org/commentary/it-is-movement-time/
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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On this Wrongful Conviction Day, Leonard Peltier, the longest-serving Indigenous political prisoner, is incarcerated in lockdown-modified operations conditions at USP Coleman I, operated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).
Yet, in this moment of silence, Leonard speaks.
To honor his birthday and all those who are unjustly convicted and incarcerated, the Leonard Peltier Official Ad Hoc Committee has released a video of Leonard Peltier that is going viral. Narrated by renowned scholar Ward Churchill and set to a video created by award-winning filmmaker Suzie Baer, the film most importantly centers Leonard’s personal reflection on his 80th year.
Jenipher Jones, Mr. Peltier's lead counsel, commented, "This powerfully moving film captures the essence of who I know Leonard to be. I am grateful to Professor Churchill and Suzie Baer for their work and longstanding advocacy of Leonard. As the recent execution of Marcellus Williams-Imam Khaliifah Williams shows us, we as a society bear a responsibility to uplift the cases of all those who are wrongfully convicted and also hold the government accountable to do that for which it professes to exist. We must challenge our impulses of blind blood-thirst for guilt and the use of our legal systems to carry out this malignant pathology. There is absolutely no lawful justification for Leonard's incarceration."
“Leonard Peltier is Native elder whose wrongful incarceration is shameful. His continued imprisonment exemplifies the historical cruelty of the US Government toward Native people. The US BOP's treatment of Leonard Peltier is unlawful, and he deserves his freedom.” —Suzie Baer
Leonard's Statement: Peltier 80th Statement.pdf:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21ABHSRNdyB8SKn0I&id=DFF2DD874157D44A%21118178&cid=DFF2DD874157D44A&parId=root&parQt=sharedby&o=OneUp
To view the film, please visit:
https://tinyurl.com/Peltier80thPresentation
We hope to have additional updates on Leonard soon. In the meantime, please engage our calls to action or donate to his defense efforts.
Miigwech.
Donate/ActNow:
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Beneath The Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader (City Lights, 2024) is a collection of revolutionary essays, written by those who have been detained inside prison walls. Composed by the most structurally dispossessed people on earth, the prisoner class, these words illuminate the steps towards freedom.
Beneath the Mountain documents the struggle — beginning with slavery, genocide, and colonization up to our present day — and imagines a collective, anti-carceral future. These essays were handwritten first on scraps of paper, magazine covers, envelopes, toilet paper, or pages of bibles, scratched down with contraband pencils or the stubby cartridge of a ball-point pen; kites, careworn, copied and shared across tiers and now preserved in this collection for this and future generations. If they were dropped in the prison-controlled mail they were cloaked in prayers, navigating censorship and dustbins. They were very often smuggled out. These words mark resistance, fierce clarity, and speak to the hope of building the world we all deserve to live in.
"Beneath the Mountain reminds us that ancestors and rebels have resisted conquest and enslavement, building marronage against colonialism and genocide."
—Joy James, author of New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency
Who stands beneath the mountain but prisoners of war? Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black have assembled a book of fire, each voice a flame in captivity...Whether writing from a place of fugivity, the prison camp, the city jail, the modern gulag or death row, these are our revolutionary thinkers, our critics and dreamers, our people. The people who move mountains. —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
Filled with insight and energy, this extraordinary book gifts us the opportunity to encounter people’s understanding of the fight for freedom from the inside out. —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag and Abolition Geography
These are the words each writer dreamed as they sought freedom and they need to be studied by people inside and read in every control unit/hole in every prison in America. We can send this book for you to anyone who you know who is currently living, struggling, and fighting
Who better to tell these stories than those who have lived them? Don’t be surprised with what you find within these pages: hope, solidarity, full faith towards the future, and most importantly, love.
Excerpt from the book:
"Revolutionary love speaks to the ways we protect, respect, and empower each other while standing up to state terror. Its presence is affirmed through these texts as a necessary component to help chase away fear and to encourage the solidarity and unity essential for organizing in dangerous times and places. Its absence portends tragedy. Revolutionary love does not stop the state from wanting to kill us, nor is it effective without strategy and tactics, but it is the might that fuels us to stand shoulder to shoulder with others regardless. Perhaps it can move mountains." —Jennifer Black & Mumia Abu-Jamal from the introduction to Beneath The Mountain: An Anti Prison Reader
Get the book at:
https://www.prisonradiostore.com/shop-2/beneath-the-mountain-an-anti-prison-reader-edited-by-mumia-abu-jamal-jennifer-black-city-lights-2024
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Amazon Warehouse Workers in New York City Join Protest
The workers’ union hopes that adding employees at the Staten Island warehouse to a protest started by delivery drivers will increase pressure on Amazon.
By Noam Scheiber and Santul Nerkar, Dec. 21, 2024
Workers at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Staten Island picketing after walking off the job after midnight on Saturday morning. Credit...Dakota Santiago for The New York Times
Signaling an escalation in a labor campaign that began at seven Amazon delivery hubs on Thursday, workers at the company’s largest Staten Island warehouse began a protest there at midnight Saturday morning. They were joined by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, later in the morning.
The Staten Island warehouse, known as JFK8, has more than 5,000 workers, by far the largest group at Amazon who have sought to be represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. That makes it the union’s greatest potential source of leverage as the Teamsters tries to pressure Amazon to bargain with drivers and other workers who have organized.
“Amazon is jeopardizing the holidays for consumers so they can try to make an extra buck,” Connor Spence, president of the local chapter representing workers at JFK8, said in a statement. “Amazon workers are standing up to demand this corporation finally treat them with respect.”
Unlike the drivers the Teamsters have attempted to unionize at delivery hubs, the Staten Island workers are employed by Amazon directly rather than through contractors. That gives them a somewhat stronger legal foothold for challenging the company.
But union leaders at JFK8 have struggled to sustain the support of workers in the warehouse since they voted to unionize in 2022, and only several dozen workers were participating in the action late Saturday morning. Some said they had been scheduled to work that day and did not clock in, while others said they had not been scheduled to work.
That raises questions about how much of an impact they will have on Amazon’s operations during the critical holiday season. Similar questions have accompanied the Teamsters-led walkouts at delivery hubs in New York, Georgia, Illinois and California that began Thursday.
Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said the protest had not impacted the Staten Island warehouse.
The JFK8 workers joined a union called the Amazon Labor Union when they voted to unionize in 2022. The A.L.U. was initially independent, but it struggled to secure gains from Amazon, which challenged the election outcome and has refused to recognize or bargain with the union. (The National Labor Relations Board certified the election, but a federal court paused further action on the case while the company challenged the constitutionality of the board.)
In June, the A.L.U. affiliated with the Teamsters under an agreement that gave the new A.L.U. local the exclusive right within the Teamsters to organize Amazon warehouses in New York City. The agreement also promised that the international union would help the local with organizing, research, communications and legal matters.
At the time, A.L.U. leaders said that the Teamsters told them that the international union had allocated $8 million for organizing efforts at Amazon, and that the Teamsters were also prepared to tap a strike fund of more than $300 million to support the effort.
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2) The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky
By David Gelles and Christopher Flavelle, Dec. 22, 2024
This summer, Bill Gates huddled in London with representatives of some of the world’s wealthiest people, including the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, the SoftBank founder, Masayoshi Son, and Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.
They were evaluating their joint investments in companies that could help the world combat climate change. Among the businesses in their portfolio, four stood out as having a particularly audacious goal: They were working to strip carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, for a profit.
As countries around the world continue to pump planet-warming pollution into the skies, driving global temperatures to record levels, the financial world is racing to fund the emerging field of carbon dioxide removal, seeking both an environmental miracle and a financial windfall.
The technology, which did not exist until a few years ago, is still unproven at scale. Yet, it has a uniquely alluring appeal. Stripping away some of the carbon dioxide that is heating up the world makes intuitive sense. And with a small but growing number of companies willing to pay for it, investors are jockeying to be first movers in what they believe will inevitably be a big industry that is necessary to help fight global warming.
Companies working on ways to pull carbon dioxide from the air have raised more than $5 billion since 2018, according to the investment bank Jefferies. Before that, there were almost no such investments.
“It’s the single greatest opportunity I’ve seen in 20 years of doing venture capital,” said Damien Steel, the chief executive of Canada-based Deep Sky, which has raised more than $50 million to develop carbon dioxide removal projects. “The tailwinds behind the industry are greater than most industries I’ve ever looked at.”
The group assembled by Mr. Gates, known as Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is among the biggest backer of the more than 800 carbon removal companies that have been started in recent years. Others investors include Silicon Valley venture capitalists, private equity firms from Wall Street and major corporations like United Airlines.
Investors believe the market is poised for explosive growth.
More than 1,000 big companies have pledged to eliminate their carbon emissions over the next few decades. As part of those efforts, more corporations are starting to pay for carbon dioxide removal. This year, Microsoft, Google, and British Airways were among the companies that committed a total of $1.6 billion to purchase removal credits.
That figure was up from less than $1 million in 2019, according to CDR.fyi, a website that tracks the carbon dioxide removal industry. Next year, industry executives believe companies could spend up to $10 billion on such purchases. In a recent report, McKinsey estimated the market could be worth as much as $1.2 trillion by 2050.
While huge sums of money are being dedicated to the nascent field, these projects will not have a meaningful effect on global temperatures anytime soon.
There are a few dozen facilities operational today, including ones in Iceland and California. But the biggest of these capture only a sliver of the greenhouse gases humans produce in one day. Even if hundreds more such plants were built, they would not come close to counteracting even 1 percent of annual carbon dioxide emissions.
“Let’s not pretend that it’s going to become available within the time frame we need to reduce emissions,” said former Vice President Al Gore, a co-founder of Climate Trace, which maps global greenhouse gas emissions.
Last year a United Nations panel cast significant doubt on the industry’s ability to make a difference. “Engineering-based removal activities are technologically and economically unproven, especially at scale, and pose unknown environmental and social risks,” it said.
Instead, many scientists and activists say the most effective way to combat global warming is to rapidly phase out oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is heating the planet.
“We need to obey the first law of holes,” Mr. Gore said. “When you’re in one, stop digging.”
Carbon dioxide removal is the most developed form of what is known as geoengineering, a broad set of speculative technologies designed to manipulate natural systems in order to cool the planet. In the past several years, as climate change has worsened, such ideas have moved from the stuff of science fiction into the mainstream.
Other proposed plans include changing the chemistry of the world’s rivers and oceans to absorb more carbon dioxide, genetically altering bacteria to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, and reflecting sunlight away from Earth by brightening clouds or spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere.
But it is carbon dioxide removal that is attracting the big money.
Investors believe that, while the impact on temperatures may be negligible in the short term, the industry will start to make a difference as global emissions fall and the technology becomes more powerful.
And decades from now, even if the world is able to completely eliminate all new greenhouse gas emissions, many experts, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a scientific body convened by the United Nations, believe it will still be necessary to remove some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reduce global temperatures.
Critics argue that carbon dioxide removal is a dangerous distraction that will perpetuate the behavior that is causing the climate crisis.
“Carbon capture will increase fossil fuel production, there’s no doubt about it,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. “It does not help climate one bit.”
But for now, neither investors nor customers are shying away.
A group of companies including Stripe, H&M, J.P. Morgan and Meta have banded together to make more than $1 billion in purchase commitments for carbon dioxide removal. Other companies including Airbus, Equinor and Boeing have pledged to pay for the service, too.
Some companies are trying to offset their emissions. Some see value in helping to develop a new industry they might one day profit from. And some say they are simply trying to do the right thing.
“This isn’t intrinsically tied to our day-to-day business,” said Nan Ransohoff, the head of climate at Stripe, an online payments company that is coordinating the group purchasing. “But we care a lot about progress and trying to help the world move in the right direction.”
The U.S. government is supporting the industry. The Inflation Reduction Act more than tripled the tax credit for capturing and storing carbon removed directly from the atmosphere, to $180 per ton. The bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Biden in 2021 included $3.5 billion for the creation of four demonstration projects.
Executives don’t believe that the carbon dioxide removal industry will be knocked off course by President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has called climate policies a “scam” and has said he wants to roll back many of Biden’s climate initiatives.
Support for the new technology “has been very bipartisan,” said Noah Deich, who until recently was the deputy assistant secretary of carbon management at the Energy Department.
Last month, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, and Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, introduced legislation that would create additional tax incentives for the carbon dioxide removal industry.
And the demonstration projects being funded by the infrastructure law have been championed by some Republicans. “This will help ensure our economy is built for the future,” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana posted on X when his state was selected as one of the sites. “It is great for our state!”
Yet even as enthusiasm for the technology grows, there is not nearly enough supply to meet the demand. Only 4 percent of all purchases have been fulfilled, according to CDR.fyi.
Pulling greenhouse gases out of the air is also expensive. Today, it can cost as much as $1,000 per ton to capture and sequester carbon dioxide. Many analysts say the price would need to drop to around $100 a ton for the industry to take off.
“This isn’t a market,” Mr. Steel said. “A market means liquidity, repeatability, standards. We have none of that here.”
But at least for now, investors are still eagerly funding new companies in the field, hoping that some of their bets pay off.
Svante, one of many Canadian companies in the industry, has received more than $570 million from small venture firms as well as big energy companies like Chevron.
And Climeworks, a Swiss company that has already built the largest operational direct air capture facility in the world, in Iceland, has raised more than $800 million from investors including Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund and individuals like the venture capitalist John Doerr.
Mr. Doerr is also a partner in Breakthrough Energy Ventures and was with Mr. Gates in London this summer.
“We’re going to need carbon removal,” Mr. Doerr said, adding that the need to quickly scale the companies was a “code red” situation.
As with any industry, many start-ups are likely to fail for every one that hits it big. But to investors, that is a risk worth taking.
“There will be some big winners in this space,” said Clay Dumas, co-founder of Lowercarbon Capital, a venture firm that has backed several of the companies. “You could be wrong 95 percent of the time and still look like a genius when you send a bunch of money back to your investors.”
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3) University of California Resolves Civil Rights Complaints Over Gaza Protests
Five schools agreed to changes after reports that they failed to protect students from antisemitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination.
By Orlando Mayorquín, Dec. 21, 2024
The University of California has resolved federal civil rights complaints from students who cited antisemitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination at U.C.L.A. and four other campuses following protests over the Israel-Hamas war, the Education Department announced Friday.
The announcement follows similar agreements that the Education Department’s office of civil rights has made in recent months with other schools and institutions including Brown University, Temple University, the University of Cincinnati and the School District of Philadelphia.
Since the University of California and other universities receive federal funds, they are required to comply with federal regulations that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race and other protected identities. The regulations were designed to prevent intolerant environments that hinder learning. Dozens of schools have faced inquiries from the Education Department since 2023 over complaints of such violations, with many still pending.
After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces, many students at U.C.L.A. said they heard antisemitic chants at pro-Palestinian events, including “no peace until they’re dead,” according to a report by the Education Department after an investigation. The department also said that pro-Palestinian students complained that they had been harassed by other students and members of the public.
In April, at a pro-Palestinian encampment on the U.C.L.A. campus, some Jewish students said they were denied access to occupied areas and campus buildings by pro-Palestinian protesters unless they renounced Zionism, and many Palestinian, Arab and pro-Palestinian students said they were attacked by counterprotesters, the department said.
Similar environments hostile to Jewish, Arab and Muslim students were reported at University of California campuses at Davis, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz, the department said. At UC Santa Barbara, the department said the school had been notified of antisemitic vandalism at a dorm room and signs at a student center targeting some Jewish students.
To resolve the complaints, the University of California agreed to measures that include more thoroughly investigating the reports of discrimination and harassment to determine if additional action is needed; providing more training to university authorities about their responsibilities to comply with federal law prohibiting discrimination; and obtaining approval from the department for any revisions to university policies regarding discrimination involving race, color or nationality.
In a statement after the Education Department’s announcement, the University of California said it “unequivocally rejects antisemitism, Islamophobia, and all forms of harassment and discrimination.” It added that it had taken more steps to support students and others, including creating a systemwide office of civil rights.
The wave of protests at college campuses following Oct. 7 resulted in a litany of legal action against universities and the ouster of some of their leaders, who were accused of failing to protect students from discrimination.
Some institutions, such as New York University, agreed to make payments in addition to reviewing policies to settle legal claims.
U.C.L.A. was among the most active protest sites in the country. In April, U.C.L.A. administrators initially took a relatively tolerant approach to a pro-Palestinian encampment at the school. But after several days, the university’s chancellor, Gene Block, declared the encampment illegal and told demonstrators to leave. On April 30, agitators who were said to identify as Zionist attacked the encampment.
A university report found that the pro-Palestinian students inside the encampment were attacked with “bear mace and other chemical irritants, hammers, knives, stink bombs, high-grade fireworks, baseball bats, metal and wooden rods.”
One counterprotester reportedly had a gun, and protesters said they had pleaded with campus security to intervene. They said the attackers had been allowed to leave without being apprehended when law enforcement stepped in hours later, according to university reports.
On May 2, police officers raided and cleared the encampment, arresting more than 200 protesters.
Last month, an independent investigation report on the events was released and is under review by the university. Its recommendations are largely focused on developing concrete response plans to campus unrest.
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4) We’ve Misunderstood Human Nature for 100 Years
By Kurt Gray, Dec. 22, 2024
Dr. Gray is a social psychologist and the author of the forthcoming book “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground,” from which this essay is adapted.
Christian Philip Scott
One day in the summer of 1924, an anthropologist named Raymond Dart made an incredible discovery — and drew a conclusion from it about human nature that would mislead us for a century.
Dart was examining a set of fossils that had been unearthed by miners near the town of Taung in South Africa when he found the skull of a “missing link” between ancient apes and humans. It belonged to a juvenile member of the species Australopithecus africanus who was later nicknamed the Taung Child.
The skull conclusively demonstrated that Africa was the birthplace of humankind. It also seemed to reveal something sinister about human nature: There was a series of grooves etched in the bone, which Dart believed could be produced only by human-made tools. These marks convinced him that this young hominid had been butchered and eaten by another member of its tribe (perhaps a hungry uncle).
Our ancestors, Dart concluded, were cannibalistic killers. He argued that Australopithecus africanus represented a “predatory transition” in which our ancestors evolved from eating plants and fruits to devouring meat — and one another.
Dart’s thesis quickly became scientific consensus, and other anthropologists found facts to support the theory that humans evolved as ruthless hunters. For instance, we can run long distances (presumably to exhaust prey), throw objects with accuracy (to kill prey with spears) and work well together (to coordinate killing prey).
The idea that humans are natural-born predators was not just a scientific claim; it also found expression in the broader culture. In the 1954 novel “Lord of the Flies,” a group of school-age boys stranded on an island descend into savage violence, revealing their true nature. The 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” begins with a tribe of prehistoric apes — our ancestors — discovering how to use a leg bone as a weapon to assault one another. Today, self-help gurus argue that we should reconnect with our “ancestral lifestyle” of eating raw meat and organs.
The assumption that our nature is predatory colors our everyday life. We might generally believe that other people mean well, but as soon as someone causes us harm — like cutting us off in traffic — we assume that they intended it (it’s why we get so angry). The predatory assumption also shapes our perceptions of politics: The “other side” often seems ruthless, callous and happy to inflict harm.
In a 2022 study led by the moral psychologist Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, researchers found that Democrats and Republicans perceived their opponents’ policies — on issues such as taxation, gun control and environmental regulation — as driven by malicious intent. While people acknowledged the unintended, regrettable trade-offs in their own side’s policies, they believed the other side’s policies were deliberately harmful. When it came to debates about curtailing industry to protect the environment, Democrats saw Republicans as intentionally damaging the environment, while Republicans believed Democrats were actively trying to destroy blue-collar jobs.
There is a glaring problem, however, with the widespread assumption that humans are predators by nature: It’s wrong.
Start with Dart’s finding. In the 1990s, the archaeologist Lee Berger and other researchers re-examined the fossils studied by Dart. The Taung Child bones had been found in a pile with butchered animal bones, suggesting the den of a human predator. But Berger also found eagle-like eggshells in this den. Why, he wondered, would humans go through the trouble to collect and eat eagle eggs, risking lethal falls for a tiny snack?
It seemed that Dart had discovered evidence not of human predation but rather of an ancient eagle nest, complete with discarded eggshells from hatchlings. A closer look at the “butchery” marks on the Taung Child corroborated this new theory: The pattern was consistent with the scraping of an eagle’s beak. Modern-day harpy eagles can carry off small goats, and prehistoric eagles were certainly big enough to pick up a hominid child. That child had been prey.
Similar discoveries, such as hominid skulls punctured by the fangs of saber-toothed cats, support the claim that our ancestors (and not just their children) were more prey than predators. Our weak bodies also betray our original status as prey. Unlike true predators, we have teeth that are more suited for chewing plants and fruits, and our claws are laughable. Sure, we can throw things, but the sharpened sticks of early humans would barely annoy a large predator. And our ability to run far? Science shows that exhaustion hunting is historically rare.
Finding that hominids were hunted also implies that humans evolved with a prey mind-set, living in fear and constantly seeking protection. Anthropologists now believe that early humans spent many days worrying about predators — and most nights, too. Big cats, like leopards, hunt primates at night. Their eyes can see in darkness, while our eyes, evolved for detecting ripe fruit in daylight, cannot.
This picture of fearfulness is consistent with our understanding of human psychology. We’re hard-wired to detect threats quickly and to stay fixated on places where threats once appeared, even after they have vanished. We fear that “child predators” will abduct our kids even when they are safer than ever.
Modern humans, ensconced in towns and cities, are now mostly safe from animal predators, but we are still easily frightened. Whether we’re scrolling social media or voting for a presidential candidate, we all still carry the legacy of our ancestors, who worried about big cats lurking in the darkness.
Bearing in mind that our species is by nature more prey than predator is a good rule of thumb when interacting with people — and it could help soothe today’s intense political animosity by increasing our sympathy for the other side. Just as you vote to protect yourself and your family, so do those who vote differently. The next time you feel angry at your political opponents, pause to think about how they might feel threatened. When people want to close the southern border, for example, it’s usually not because they want to harm migrants, but because they want to protect against the perceived threat of crime and job loss.
Unless they see you as naïve, your political opponents probably view you as a predator. To help them understand your true motivation, consider explaining how your beliefs relate to your fears and your desire to protect yourself, your family, your community. You might start a political conversation by asking, “What worries you most about the future?” or “What makes you feel threatened?”
The answer is probably not “an eagle snatching my child” — but it might as well be.
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5) Organized Looting Throws Gaza Deeper Into Chaos
Gangs are filling a power vacuum left by Israel in some parts of southern Gaza, hijacking desperately needed aid for Palestinian residents.
By Adam Rasgon and Aaron Boxerman, Dec. 23, 2024
Reporting from Jerusalem. This article is based on more than 20 interviews with officials, aid workers, businessmen and Gaza residents.
"International aid workers have accused Israel of ignoring the problem and allowing looters to act with impunity. The United Nations does not allow Israeli soldiers to protect aid convoys, fearing that would compromise its neutrality, and its officials have called on Israel to allow the Gaza police, which are under Hamas’s authority, to secure their convoys. ...As looters have run rampant in areas nominally controlled by the Israeli military, truck drivers and aid workers have suggested the Israeli military mostly turns a blind eye."
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid entering Gaza via the Rafah crossing have become easy prey for organized gangs. Credit...Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Hazem Isleem, a Palestinian truck driver, was passing through the ruins of southern Gaza last month with a truckload of aid when armed looters ambushed his convoy.
One of the gunmen broke into his truck, forcing him to drive to a nearby field and unload thousands of pounds of flour intended for hungry Palestinians, he said by phone from Gaza. By the next morning, the gang had stripped virtually all of the supplies from the convoy of about 100 trucks of United Nations aid, enough to feed tens of thousands of people, in what the United Nations described as one of the worst such episodes of the war.
“It was terrifying,” said Mr. Isleem, 47, whom the looters held for 13 hours while they pillaged the flour. “But the worst part was we weren’t able to deliver the food to the people.”
Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack last year has unleashed a humanitarian crisis in the enclave, with more than 45,000 people dead, according to local health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Hunger is widespread, and Israel has placed restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza and blocked movement of aid trucks between the north and south.
Though Hamas has been routed in much of the territory, Israel has not put an alternative government in place. In parts of southern Gaza, armed gangs have filled the resulting power vacuum, leaving aid groups unwilling to risk delivering supplies.
The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said this month that it would no longer deliver aid through Kerem Shalom, the main border crossing between Israel and southern Gaza, because of the breakdown in law and order.
Hundreds of truckloads of relief are piling up at the crossing in part because aid groups fear they will be looted.
What began as smaller-scale attempts to seize aid early in the year — often by hungry Gazans — has now become “systematic, tactical, armed, crime-syndicate looting” by organized groups, said Georgios Petropoulos, a senior U.N. official based in the southern city of Rafah. “This is just larceny writ large,” he said.
This article is based on more than 20 interviews with Israeli and U.N. officials, aid workers, Gaza residents and Palestinian businessmen. The New York Times also reviewed internal U.N. memos in which officials discussed the looting and its consequences.
The situation in Gaza deteriorated after the Israeli military invaded Rafah in May, seeking to oust Hamas from one of its final strongholds. Hamas’s security forces fled, and organized gangs — with no one stopping them — began intercepting aid trucks as they headed from the main border crossing into southern Gaza. They are stealing flour, oil and other commodities and selling them at astronomical prices, aid groups and residents say.
In southern Gaza, the price of a 55-pound sack of flour has risen to as much as $220. In northern Gaza, where there are fewer aid disruptions, the same sack can cost as little as $10.
International aid workers have accused Israel of ignoring the problem and allowing looters to act with impunity. The United Nations does not allow Israeli soldiers to protect aid convoys, fearing that would compromise its neutrality, and its officials have called on Israel to allow the Gaza police, which are under Hamas’s authority, to secure their convoys.
Israel, which seeks to uproot Hamas, accuses the group of stealing international aid and says that the police are just another arm of the militant group. They have repeatedly targeted Hamas’s police force, severely weakening it, and police officers are rarely seen in much of Gaza, residents say.
Over the past two weeks, Israel has allowed some aid trucks to travel along Gaza’s border with Egypt, a new route fully controlled by the Israeli military. U.N. agencies have been able to avoid looters and deliver some relief.
But that has not done enough to address the shortfall in aid, aid groups and residents say. The high prices of goods sold by looters have contributed to desperate scenes among ordinary Gazans fighting for what little affordable food is available.
In late November, crowds had already gathered at Zadna bakery in the central city of Deir al Balah hours before it opened, hoping to buy a 20-piece bag of bread for the U.N.-subsidized price of $1. Suddenly, mayhem broke loose as ordinary people in the crowd — some brandishing knives — pushed to reach the front of the line, said Abdelhalim Awad, the bakery’s owner.
During the commotion, gunshots rang out. Two women were killed and others were injured, he said, and a third later died of her wounds.
With unrest rising, all of the U.N.-backed bakeries in southern and central Gaza have closed their doors for now.
“Today, the ordinary Gazan’s dream, his aspiration, is to obtain a piece of bread,” Mr. Awad said. “I can’t say anything sadder than that.”
Gazan transportation company owners, truck drivers and aid groups say multiple gangs have participated in looting recently. But many people involved in aid delivery named Yasser Abu Shabab, 35, as the man who runs the most sophisticated operation.
They say Mr. Abu Shabab’s gang dominates much of the Nasr neighborhood in eastern Rafah, which the war has transformed into a wasteland. Mr. Petropoulos, the U.N. official, called him “the self-styled power broker of east Rafah.”
Mr. Isleem, the truck driver who was ambushed in Rafah, said the looters who captured him told him that Mr. Abu Shabab was their boss. Awad Abid, a displaced Gazan who said he had tried to buy flour from Mr. Abu Shabab’s gang in Rafah, said he had seen gunmen guarding warehouses containing stolen cartons of U.N.-marked aid.
“I asked one of them for a sack of flour to feed my children,” Mr. Abid said, “and he raised a pistol at me.”
Mr. Abu Shabab denied looting aid trucks on a large scale, although he conceded that his men — armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles — had raided half a dozen or so since the start of the war.
“We are taking trucks so we can eat, not so we can sell,” he said in a phone interview, claiming he was feeding his family and neighbors. “Every hungry person is taking aid.” He accused Hamas of being primarily responsible for stealing the aid, a claim that Hamas has denied.
The looters’ chokehold on supplies and soaring prices are undermining Hamas in the areas that it still controls. On Nov. 25, Hamas’s security forces raided Mr. Abu Shabab’s neighborhood, killing more than 20 people, including his brother, Mr. Abu Shabab said.
Official Hamas media reported at the time that its forces had killed 20 members of “gangs of thieves who were stealing aid.”
As looters have run rampant in areas nominally controlled by the Israeli military, truck drivers and aid workers have suggested the Israeli military mostly turns a blind eye.
“There is continued tolerance by the Israel Defense Forces of unacceptable amounts of looting of areas that are ostensibly and de facto under their military control,” Mr. Petropoulos said.
At times, Israeli tanks have deployed along main roads where aid trucks travel. And Israeli ministers have said they debated authorizing private security contractors to protect international aid convoys inside Gaza.
Until recently, Israeli forces largely did not target the looters unless they were affiliated with Hamas or other militant groups, according to U.N. officials. But that appears to have changed in recent weeks.
In Israeli military drone footage viewed by The Times, looters can be seen confiscating white sacks of aid from cars in southern Gaza in November. Minutes later, an Israeli airstrike killed them, the footage appears to show.
Shani Sasson, a spokeswoman for the Israeli military agency that regulates aid to Gaza, said Israeli forces were targeting armed looters who attacked convoys, not just those affiliated with Hamas. She denied that Israel was providing any immunity to criminal gangs stealing aid.
In late November, Israeli forces opened fire on looters waiting to waylay trucks in Rafah, forcing them to retreat, according to an internal U.N. memo. With the path cleared, U.N. aid trucks rushed toward central Gaza.
But the gangs were far from deterred.
The looters soon regrouped and hijacked them on the road, the U.N. memo said. The trucks were stripped bare.
Abu Bakr Bashir and Bilal Shbair contributed reporting from Deir al Balah, Gaza.
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6) Israel Intercepts Houthi Missile and Threatens Militant Group’s Leaders
Israel said it had shot down a missile fired by Houthi militants in Yemen, hours after Israel’s defense minister threatened to “behead” the group’s leadership.
By Aaron Boxerman and Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Dec. 24, 2024, Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem.
Protesters at an anti-U.S. and anti-Israel rally in Sana, Yemen, last week. Credit...Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
Israel said it had intercepted a ballistic missile fired at it by Houthi militants in Yemen on Tuesday, hours after Israel’s defense minister suggested the Israeli government would seek to kill the Houthi leadership.
Sirens wailed in Tel Aviv and other parts of central Israel early on Tuesday morning, and loud booms could be heard as far away as Jerusalem as the country’s aerial defenses sought to repel the attack. The Israeli military later said the missile had been successfully intercepted outside of its territory; there were no reports of casualties.
The Houthis, an Iran-backed group that acts as the de facto government in northern Yemen, have been firing on Israel in solidarity with their Palestinian allies since shortly after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that prompted the war in Gaza. They have also menaced cargo vessels traversing the Red Sea in an attempt to enforce an embargo on Israel, posing a threat to international trade.
The group’s attacks appear to be growing more frequent. Since the beginning of December, Houthi militants have fired rockets and drones at Israel at least eight times. A missile from Yemen landed in Tel Aviv early Saturday morning after air defenses failed to intercept it. And last week, a school in Ramat Gan, a Tel Aviv suburb, was damaged after a missile fired from Yemen was partially intercepted, the Israeli military said. The attacks have not caused any serious injuries.
In response, Israeli warplanes have struck deeper into Yemen, targeting power plants in Sana, the Houthi-run capital.
But it is far from clear what Israel, the United States and their allies could do to decisively stop the Houthis from occasionally shooting rockets and drones at their enemies in the region.
On Monday, Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, threatened to assassinate Houthi leaders in an attempt to force them to come to terms. Throughout the war, Israel has killed many of its adversaries’ top commanders, including the leader of Hamas and the leader of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah. Like the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah are backed by Iran.
“We will inflict a devastating blow to the Houthi terrorist organization in Yemen,” said Mr. Katz. “We will hit its strategic infrastructure and behead its leadership.”
For months, Israel and allies like the United States and Britain have bombarded Houthi-held territory in Yemen in an attempt to compel the militants to stop their attacks. But those strikes have not seemed to deter the Houthis, who have vowed to persist as long as Israel continues its war in Gaza.
The Houthis are relatively far removed from their foes — over 1,000 miles away from Israeli territory — and have resisted numerous efforts to quash them since they rose to power in Yemen’s decade-long civil war.
The United States and Britain consider the Houthis to be a terrorist group. As part of its proxy war with Iran, Saudi Arabia led a military campaign against them in Yemen in an attempt to restore the country’s government, deepening the humanitarian crisis there.
The Houthis were once poorly organized rebels, but in recent years, the group has bolstered its arsenal, adding cruise and ballistic missiles and long-range drones. Analysts say Iran has supplied the Houthis and other militias across the Middle East to expand its influence in the region.
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7) Pro-Palestinian Activists Removed From Michigan’s Student Government
The president and vice president of the University of Michigan’s student assembly were impeached after they demanded divestment and stopped funding campus activities.
By Halina Bennet, Dec. 24, 2024
A protest in support of Palestinians at the University of Michigan in February. Credit...Nic Antaya for The New York Times
Alifa Chowdhury’s successful campaign to lead the University of Michigan’s student government promised just one thing: to block financing for campus groups until the university agreed to divest from companies that Ms. Chowdhury said profited from the Israel-Hamas war.
Nine turbulent months later, Ms. Chowdhury is out, impeached and removed from office by the student assembly just before midnight on Monday.
Ms. Chowdhury’s ouster follows a lopsided impeachment vote in mid-November, which also led to the removal of Elias Atkinson, the body’s vice president and a fellow activist.
In a student judicial hearing that spanned seven days and lasted more than 20 hours, they were found guilty on a single charge of dereliction of duty — the consequence of effectively fulfilling the shutdown their campaign promised.
Like the protest encampments at universities across the country, the takeover of Michigan’s student government by pro-Palestinian activists last spring polarized the campus. The activists’ tactics drew objections from students who said their obstructionism went too far and did little to help the Palestinian cause.
The activists saw their movement as a way to shake university officials and students out of what they saw as complacency, and face the plight of Palestinians living in Gaza.
But like many student protests, the takeover made little headway — and maybe even stirred up opposition. The university, which had long said that it would not divest, adopted a policy of institutional neutrality in October, meaning that it would avoid taking stances on political or social issues that were not directly connected to the school.
The administration also agreed in August to lend money to campus groups, allowing them to pay for activities like ballroom dancing and Ultimate Frisbee. By October, the student assembly had voted to reinstate the funding.
Margaret Peterson, a sophomore member of the student assembly who started the impeachment motion, said that the president and vice president’s conduct in office and their unwillingness to aid the student body were “inexcusable.”
Many students, even some empathetic to the Palestinian cause, saw the activists’ efforts as a futile quest that blocked money meant to help needy students, while alienating allies.
“If anything, it’s only set the social image of the movement backwards, at least on campus,” said Tiya Berry, an Arab American member of the student assembly who grew up in Lebanon.
Though Ms. Berry said that she agreed with the activists’ political stance, she believed their methods unnecessarily hurt students and were a poor means to bring about change. “They look like extremists,” she said.
The impeached president and vice president, both of whom declined to comment, ran for their positions last spring as part of the Shut It Down Party, with the promise that they would withhold the roughly $1.3 million of annual funding until the university’s regents agreed to total divestment from companies that they said profited from Israel’s war in Gaza. They won their elections handily with a low voter turnout.
The impeachment motion itself set off a debate about the line between free speech and incitement. The motion, which passed overwhelmingly in an initial vote, accused the leaders of “incitement of violence” for encouraging demonstrators to attend an Oct. 8 student government meeting that was called to reinstate funding for campus groups.
During the meeting, Ms. Chowdhury joined the protesters across the room from the assembly, a move that Ms. Peterson said encouraged verbal attacks and threatening language. She said that one assembly member was spat on by a protester.
The impeachment was “abhorrent,” said Kaitlin Karmen, a member of the Shut It Down Party who resigned from the student assembly after the vote.
“Asking constituents to show up to a meeting to advocate for a cause they believe in is not inciting violence,” Ms. Karmen said. Speaking of student assembly members, she added: “Being uncomfortable doesn’t mean you’re experiencing violence.”
Danah Owaida, a Shut It Down assembly member who also stepped down after the vote, said that her tenure was marked by indifference from many of her colleagues and a decline in her mental health. “As a Palestinian, it’s a dismissal all the time,” she said.
But Ms. Peterson, the student who started the removal process, said that the impeachment, which was the first in the assembly’s history, set a precedent for the student government in helping to define what kind of speech was truly free.
“There is a line between free speech and hate speech, between engaging in your rights as a student and as an American to disagree as vehemently as you might want to, and crossing that line into threatening someone,” she said.
“That kind of speech has never been tolerated” in the student government before, she added, “and should not be tolerated in the future.”
With the assembly’s leadership ousted, the speaker of the student assembly, Mario Thaqi, will finish out the presidential term.
His job could be quite fraught.
“It doesn’t matter if you hate me or not — we’re still representatives of the entire student body,” he said. “That’s very important to me in dealing with the backlash after this impeachment vote and making sure that our campus doesn’t become more divided.”
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8) Syria’s New Leaders Try to Unite Rebel Factions Under a Single Government
The fighters who ousted Bashar al-Assad are aiming to transform their revolutionary movement and assert control over the country.
By Adam Rasgon, Dec. 25, 2024
Children resting on a Syrian Air Force helicopter that was destroyed by Israeli strikes against military targets across Syria at a military airport on the outskirts of Damascus on Sunday. Credit...Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times
Syria’s new leadership has taken steps to unite disparate rebel factions under a single government in the wake of Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.
Under a new accord, a number of rebel factions agreed to dissolve themselves, according to a report on Tuesday by Sana, the Syrian state-run news service. The agreement suggested that the new administration was making progress in asserting its authority over the country.
The rebel groups agreed to be integrated under the defense ministry, the Sana report said. Pictures posted to social media on Tuesday showed Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of the offensive that overthrew the Assad dictatorship this month, meeting with dozens of rebel faction leaders, many of them clad in military uniforms.
Mr. al-Shara, formerly known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has participated in official meetings recently wearing a business suit rather than a military uniform. Since his faction, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, took power, he has presented himself as more the statesman and less the rebel leader, and has espoused relatively moderate political positions despite past links to Islamist extremists.
On Sunday, he told a news conference that the “logic of a state is different from the logic of a revolution.” He spoke standing alongside Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan.
“We absolutely will not allow for weapons outside the framework of the state,” Mr. al-Shara said, adding that he was referring both to rebel groups and a Kurdish-led militia, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which is separate from the rebels.
The Syrian Democratic Forces control an autonomous region dominated by Kurds in northeastern Syria, while the rebel groups hold sway in other parts of the country. Those groups, in accord Hayat Tahrir al-Sham played a central role in toppling the Assad dictatorship.
The Sana report said all rebel factions signed onto Tuesday’s unity agreement. But The New York Times was not able independently verify that.
The Syrian Democratic Forces did not appear to be part of the agreement.
Farhad Shami, a media official for the Syrian Democratic Forces, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Kurdish-led force has been battling the Islamic State terrorist group inside Syria for years with U.S. military backing. Neighboring Turkey is hostile to the Kurdish force, viewing it as an extension of a Kurdish group in Turkey that has been fighting the Turkish state for decades. Analysts said disbanding rebel factions was a logical step for the Syrian leaders vying to establish a single national military.
“They are trying to build a state,” said Dareen Khalifa, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group. “You can’t build a state while you have a million and one militias running around doing their own things.”
Ms. Khalifa, who met Mr. al-Shara earlier this week, said she was under the impression that dissolving the rebel factions was a top priority for Syria’s new leaders because “wayward factions” were acting outside their command in parts of rural Syria.
Beyond dissolving rebel factions, the new administration has taken other actions to build a new Syrian state, including appointing a caretaker prime minister to lead a transitional government until March 1, 2025. Mr. al-Shara has also said a legal committee would draft a new constitution for the country.
Muhammad Haj Kadour contributed reporting.
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9) Judge Strikes Down Portions of Arkansas Law That Threatened Librarians
Republicans passed the law in 2023, joining other conservative states and counties that have sought to restrict the availability of certain books.
By Eduardo Medina, Dec. 24, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/24/us/arkansas-book-ban-law.html
Nate Coulter, executive director of the Central Arkansas Library System, in the main branch of the public library in downtown Little Rock, Ark. Credit...Katie Adkins/Associated Press
A federal judge has struck down portions of an Arkansas law that could have sent librarians and booksellers to prison for providing material that might be considered harmful to minors.
The ruling by Judge Timothy Brooks of the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Arkansas is certain to be appealed. But his decision on Monday provided at least a temporary victory to librarians and booksellers who have said that the law would create a chilling effect since anyone could object to any book and pursue criminal charges against the person who provided it.
“This was an attempt to ‘thought police,’ and this victory over totalitarianism is a testament to the courage of librarians, booksellers and readers who refused to bow to intimidation,” said Holly Dickson, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, said in a statement that “schools and libraries shouldn’t put obscene material in front of our kids,” and she vowed to work with Tim Griffin, the state’s attorney general, to appeal the ruling.
Republicans passed the law, known as Act 372, in 2023, joining a wave of other conservative states and counties around the country that have increasingly sought to restrict the availability of certain kinds of books, particularly those with themes centered around race and L.G.B.T.Q. issues.
An earlier ruling in July 2023 blocked parts of the law from taking effect while it was being challenged in court.
The law required that any material that might be “harmful” to minors, including books, magazines and movies, be shelved in a separate “adults only” area. It also ended protections for librarians and educators that shielded them from prosecution if they used educational materials or provided books that some might find objectionable. The law also made it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison, for librarians and booksellers to distribute a “harmful item” to a minor.
Judge Brooks, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, described parts of the law in his ruling as “unconstitutionally overbroad,” writing that the measures would deputize “librarians and booksellers as the agents of censorship.”
“When motivated by the fear of jail time, it is likely they will shelve only books fit for young children and segregate or discard the rest,” Judge Brooks wrote.
Judge Brooks also wrote that Section 5 of the law would censor books that are constitutionally protected for adults.
Sections of the law that were less consequential went into effect last year, such as one that allows parents to monitor their child’s library records.
State Senator Dan Sullivan, who sponsored the bill, defended the law in an opinion piece last year in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
“We don’t exempt pharmacists from drug-dealing laws, slaughterhouses from animal-cruelty laws and doctors from sexual-assault laws,” Mr. Sullivan, a Republican, wrote. “Yet prior to my bill, teachers and librarians, who are the closest to our children, were 100 percent legally free to provide children obscene material at their jobs.”
Ben Seel, the senior counsel for Democracy Forward, which represented several Arkansas library associations, said in a statement that the state law “was written so broad and vague that librarians would have been forced to turn libraries into segregated vaults to avoid going to jail.”
Earlier this year, PEN America, a free speech group that gathers information from school board meetings, school districts, local media reports and other sources, said that more than 10,000 books were removed, at least temporarily, from public schools in the 2023-24 school year. That was almost three times as many removals as during the previous school year.
A fast-growing network of conservative groups, such as Moms for Liberty and Utah Parents United, has fueled the surge in book bans, describing its advocacy at school board meetings and in state legislative chambers as attempts to protect parental rights.
The materials they have targeted are often described in policies and legislation as sensitive, inappropriate or pornographic. But in practice, the books most frequently identified for removal have been by or about Black or L.G.B.T.Q. people, according to the American Library Association.
In May 2023, an Iowa law barred public K-12 schools from having books that depict sexual acts, with the exception of religious texts.
In South Carolina, new rules that went into effect in June state that school districts cannot have books or materials that include any depiction of sexual conduct, regardless of the grade level they are intended for. Critics have said the new rules could remove from shelves classics like “The Bluest Eye,” “1984” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”
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10) Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians
Surprised by Oct. 7 and fearful of another attack, Israel weakened safeguards meant to protect noncombatants, allowing officers to endanger up to 20 people in each airstrike. One of the deadliest bombardments of the 21st century followed.
By Patrick Kingsley, Natan Odenheimer, Bilal Shbair, Ronen Bergman, John Ismay, Sheera Frenkel and Adam Sella, Dec. 26, 2024
The reporters interviewed more than 100 soldiers and officials in Israel, dozens of victims of the strikes in Gaza, and experts on the rules of armed conflict.
"Under Israeli military protocols, there are four categories of risk for civilian casualties: Level Zero, which forbids soldiers to put any civilians at risk; Level One, which allows up to five civilian deaths; Level Two, which allows up to 10; and Level Three, which allows up to 20 — and became the standard on Oct. 7."
At exactly 1 p.m. on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s military leadership issued an order that unleashed one of the most intense bombing campaigns in contemporary warfare.
Effective immediately, the order granted mid-ranking Israeli officers the authority to strike thousands of militants and military sites that had never been a priority in previous wars in Gaza. Officers could now pursue not only the senior Hamas commanders, arms depots and rocket launchers that were the focus of earlier campaigns, but also the lowest-ranking fighters.
In each strike, the order said, officers had the authority to risk killing up to 20 civilians.
The order, which has not previously been reported, had no precedent in Israeli military history. Mid-ranking officers had never been given so much leeway to attack so many targets, many of which had lower military significance, at such a high potential civilian cost.
It meant, for example, that the military could target rank-and-file militants as they were at home surrounded by relatives and neighbors, instead of only when they were alone outside.
In previous conflicts with Hamas, many Israeli strikes were approved only after officers concluded that no civilians would be hurt. Sometimes, officers could risk killing up to five civilians and only rarely did the limit rise to 10 or above, though the actual death toll was sometimes much higher.
On Oct. 7, the military leadership changed its rules of engagement because it believed that Israel faced an existential threat, according to a senior military officer who answered questions about the order on the condition of anonymity.
Hours earlier, Hamas-led terrorists had stormed into southern Israel, seizing towns and army bases, committing atrocities, firing thousands of rockets at civilian areas, killing up to 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages. As Israelis battled Hamas fighters inside their borders, the officer said, Israel’s leaders also feared an invasion from the group’s allies in Lebanon and believed that they had to take drastic military action.
“All of the places where Hamas was deployed, in this city of evil, all of the places where Hamas has been hiding and operating from — we will turn them into rubble,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a speech on Oct. 7.
An investigation by The New York Times found that Israel severely weakened its system of safeguards meant to protect civilians; adopted flawed methods to find targets and assess the risk of civilian casualties; routinely failed to conduct post-strike reviews of civilian harm or punish officers for wrongdoing; and ignored warnings from within its own ranks and from senior U.S. military officials about these failings.
The Times reviewed dozens of military records and interviewed more than 100 soldiers and officials, including more than 25 people who helped vet, approve or strike targets. Collectively, their accounts provide an unparalleled understanding of how Israel mounted one of the deadliest air wars of this century. Most of the soldiers and officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were barred from speaking publicly on a subject of such sensitivity. The Times verified the military orders with officers familiar with their content.
In its investigation, The Times found that:
· Israel vastly expanded the set of military targets it sought to hit in pre-emptive airstrikes, while simultaneously increasing the number of civilians that officers could endanger in each attack. That led Israel to fire nearly 30,000 munitions into Gaza in the war’s first seven weeks, more than in the next eight months combined. In addition, the military leadership removed a limit on the cumulative number of civilians that its strikes could endanger each day.
· On a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants — crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary Western military.
· The military struck at a pace that made it harder to confirm it was hitting legitimate targets. It burned through much of a prewar database of vetted targets within days and adopted an unproven system for finding new targets that used artificial intelligence at a vast scale.
· The military often relied on a crude statistical model to assess the risk of civilian harm, and sometimes launched strikes on targets several hours after last locating them, increasing the risk of error. The model mainly depended on estimates of cellphone usage in a wider neighborhood, rather than extensive surveillance of a specific building, as was common in previous Israeli campaigns.
· From the first day of the war, Israel significantly reduced its use of so-called roof knocks, or warning shots that give civilians time to flee an imminent attack. And when it could have feasibly used smaller or more precise munitions to achieve the same military goal, it sometimes caused greater damage by dropping “dumb bombs,” as well as 2,000-pound bombs.
The air campaign was at its most intense during the first two months of the war, when more than 15,000 Palestinians were killed — or roughly a third of the overall toll, according to the Gazan health ministry, which does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
From November 2023 onward, amid a global outcry, Israel began to conserve ammunition and tighten some of its rules of engagement, including by halving the number of civilians who could be endangered when striking low-ranked militants who posed no imminent threat. But the rules remain far more permissive than before the war. Since those early weeks, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, and while Israel disputes the ministry’s figures, the total continues to climb.
Provided a summary of The Times’s findings, the Israeli military acknowledged that its rules of engagement had changed after Oct. 7 but said in a 700-word statement that its forces have “consistently been employing means and methods that adhere to the rules of law.”
The changes were made in the context of a conflict that is “unprecedented and hardly comparable to other theaters of hostilities worldwide,” the statement added, citing the scale of Hamas’s attack; efforts by militants to hide among civilians in Gaza; and Hamas’s extensive tunnel network.
“Such key factors,” the statement said, “bear implications on the application of the rules, such as the choice of military objectives and the operational constraints that dictate the conduct of hostilities, including the ability to take feasible precautions in strikes.”
The relatives of Shaldan al-Najjar, a senior commander in a militia allied with Hamas that joined the Oct. 7 attacks, were among the first casualties of Israel’s loosened standards.
When the military struck his home in a war nine years earlier, it took several precautions to avoid civilian harm — and no one was killed, including Mr. al-Najjar.
When it targeted him in this war, it killed not just him but also 20 members of his extended family, including a 2-month-old baby, according to his brother Suleiman, who lived in the home that was hit and witnessed the immediate aftermath. Some relatives were blown from the building. His niece’s severed hand was found in the rubble.
“Blood was splattered all over the neighbor’s wall — as though some sheep had just been slaughtered,” the brother recalled.
Israel, which has been accused of genocide in a case before the International Court of Justice, says it complies with international law by taking all feasible precautions to minimize civilian casualties, often by ordering evacuations of whole cities before strikes, and by dropping leaflets over neighborhoods and posting online maps about imminent operations.
Israel says that Hamas’s military strategy makes bloodshed more likely. The group embeds itself in the civilian population, firing rockets from residential areas, hiding fighters and weapons inside homes and medical facilities, and operating from underground military installations and tunnels.
Unlike Hamas, which fires rockets indiscriminately at civilian areas, Israel and all Western armies operate under a multilayered oversight system that assesses the legality of planned strikes. Each attack plan is usually meant to be analyzed by a group of officers, which often includes a military lawyer who can advise on whether strikes might be unnecessary or unlawful.
To comply with international law, officers overseeing airstrikes must conclude that the risk of civilian casualties is proportional to the target’s military value, and take all feasible precautions to protect civilian life. But officers exercise significant discretion because the laws of armed conflict are vague about what counts as a feasible precaution or an excessive civilian toll.
After the shock of the Oct. 7 attack, a dozen officers recalled, some Israeli officers involved in the counteroffensive became less stringent about adhering to military protocol. While some commanders tried hard to maintain standards, five senior officers used the same phrase to describe the prevalent mood inside the military: “harbu darbu.”
It is an expression derived from Arabic and widely used in Hebrew to mean attacking an enemy without restraint.
Why Civilians Were at Higher Risk
The Israeli military first targeted Shaldan al-Najjar during the war in August 2014. He was a senior commander in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which had conducted suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israel for decades.
Before that strike in Deir al Balah, central Gaza, the air force gave his neighbors three chances to escape, according to his brother Suleiman.
Israeli officers called one neighbor, and then another, with warnings of an upcoming strike on a nearby target that the military did not identify. Then the military dropped a small projectile on the house, what it calls a “roof knock,” standard practice then before strikes on targets believed to hold ammunition or tunnel entrances. That was enough for everyone, including Shaldan al-Najjar, to escape unharmed.
But seven hours after Hamas attacked Israel last year, the order from Israel’s high command made roof knocks optional. In practice this meant the procedure was rarely used, officers said.
There were no warnings before an Israeli fighter jet fired at Shaldan al-Najjar on the evening of Oct. 10, 2023, as he visited his siblings’ home. The explosion killed Mr. al-Najjar, along with his stepmother, four children, a younger brother, a sister-in-law, 13 nephews and nieces, including the 2-month-old baby boy, named Zein, and at least one neighbor, according to records compiled by Gaza’s health authorities.
The Israeli military confirmed that it had been targeting a member of Islamic Jihad, but declined to release more information.
Under Israeli military protocols, there are four categories of risk for civilian casualties: Level Zero, which forbids soldiers to put any civilians at risk; Level One, which allows up to five civilian deaths; Level Two, which allows up to 10; and Level Three, which allows up to 20 — and became the standard on Oct. 7.
Suddenly, officers could decide to drop one-ton bombs on a vast array of military infrastructure — including small ammunition stockpiles and rocket factories — as well as on all Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters. The definition of a military target included lookouts and money changers suspected of handling Hamas’s funds, as well as the entrances to the group’s underground tunnel network, which were often hidden in homes.
Authorization from senior commanders was required only if the target was too close to a sensitive site, like a school or health facility, though such strikes were regularly approved too.
The effect was swift. Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor, documented 136 strikes that each killed at least 15 people in October 2023 alone. That was almost five times the number the group has documented during any comparable period anywhere in the world since it was founded a decade ago.
Strikes that endangered more than 100 civilians were occasionally permitted to target a handful of Hamas leaders, as long as senior generals or sometimes the political leadership approved, according to four Israeli officers involved in target selection. Three of them said those targeted included Ibrahim Biari, a senior Hamas commander killed in northern Gaza in late October, in an attack that Airwars estimated killed at least 125 others.
Another order, issued by the military high command at 10:50 p.m. on Oct. 8, provides a sense of the scale of civilian casualties deemed tolerable. Strikes on military targets in Gaza, it said, were permitted to cumulatively endanger up to 500 civilians each day.
Military officials characterized the order as a precautionary measure intended to cap the number of strikes that could take place each day. A scholar at West Point consulted by The Times, Prof. Michael N. Schmitt, said it risked being construed by mid-ranking officers as a quota that they had to reach.
In any case, the limit was removed two days later — allowing officers to sign off on as many strikes as they believed were legal. The Gazan authorities later reported occasional daily tolls of more than 500, but it was unclear how many were civilians or if their deaths had occurred over several days.
The risk to civilians was also heightened by the Israeli military’s widespread use of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs, many of them American-made, which constituted 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in the first two weeks of the war. By November, two officers said, the air force had dropped so many one-ton bombs that it was running low on the guidance kits that transform unguided weapons, or “dumb bombs,” into precision-guided munitions.
This forced pilots to rely on unguided and less accurate bombs, the officers said. They were also increasingly dependent on outdated Vietnam-era bombs that can fail to detonate, according to two U.S. military officials briefed on Israel’s arsenal.
The air force used the one-ton bomb to destroy whole office towers, two senior Israeli military officials said, even when a target could have been killed by a smaller munition.
While declining to comment on specific incidents, the Israeli military said that its “choice of munitions” was always governed by the rules of war. The senior military official said that heavy munitions were required to hit Hamas’s tunnels.
The Najjar family was struck by a precision-guided one-ton bomb — an American-made JDAM, according to a Times assessment of a guidance fin that the family said it had found in the rubble. The bomb completely destroyed their three-story building, flattening five apartments as well as a car workshop on the ground floor, according to the brother and two other surviving members of the family.
“After the dust and smoke cleared, I looked at my building,” said Suleiman al-Najjar, who said he survived because he was on his way back from the hospital. “There was no building.”
A Depleted Target Bank
Throughout the war, hundreds of Israeli intelligence officers spread across several military bases scrambled to find and strike new targets, relying on an automated surveillance system that enabled them to work exponentially quicker.
In earlier wars in Gaza, officers had typically worked their way through a “target bank” — a database of hundreds of militants and locations that already had been methodically researched and vetted. In this war, the air force raced through much of the list within days, 11 officers and officials said, putting intelligence officers under intense pressure to find new targets.
Many were encouraged to propose a certain number of targets each day, according to five officers.
Several elite intelligence units, officials said, were given more time to find small numbers of high-value targets, like senior Hamas political leaders and top military commanders. Other units focused on rocket launch sites and ammunition stores. One unit looked specifically for civilians who provided financial services to militant groups.
But most intelligence units, particularly those in infantry divisions preparing to invade Gaza, were given very little time to build a much longer list of targets, officials said. That mainly involved trying to locate tens of thousands of low-ranking militants.
Israel has long maintained databases, one of which was code-named “Lavender,” that list phone numbers and home addresses of suspected militants, according to 16 soldiers and officials. Israel also controls Gaza’s telecom networks, allowing it to tap and track Palestinian phones. By listening to calls made by phones associated with the militants, intelligence officers tried to work out where they were, officials said.
But the databases sometimes included outdated data, according to six officers, increasing the likelihood that officers would misidentify a civilian as a combatant. There were also too many calls for the officers to manually track.
To speed up the process, officers used artificial intelligence.
In recent years, the Israeli military had developed computing systems, one of which was known as “The Gospel,” that could automatically cross-reference information from several different sources, including phone conversations, satellite imagery and mobile phone signals.
In the chaotic opening weeks of the war, different intelligence units harnessed these automated computing systems in varied ways to triangulate data and locate militants.
One common method involved automatically cross-referencing the location of a phone with its owner’s home address. When a phone appeared to be in roughly the same place as an address linked to its owner, the system flagged and recorded the owner’s phone calls.
Arabic-speaking soldiers then listened to these calls to determine whether a wanted militant had been found. Some units used speech-to-text software to translate the conversations automatically.
The military said officers always verified the information provided by the automated systems and it denied that artificial intelligence was ever more than the starting point of a human-led verification process. But the amount of verification varied from unit to unit, according to at least eight officers.
Some officers said they would only confirm someone as a militant if they overheard the person speaking about their involvement in Hamas’s military wing.
In other units, three officers said, an individual was considered a confirmed militant if he was simply listed in Lavender. Details of that process were previously reported by +972, an Israeli-Palestinian news website; the Israeli military has denied that was military policy and said that any analyst who relied solely on Lavender would have been overruled by superiors.
Once officers were satisfied that they had confirmed a legal target, they would begin planning an attack, such as a missile strike if the target seemed to be staying the night at home, the soldiers said.
In the most rigorous version of that assessment, officers sometimes hacked a target’s phone handset to listen to the conversations taking place nearby, in order to build a better picture of whom he was with, according to three officers familiar with the process. In some cases, the hacking allowed officers to pinpoint the target’s location as well as which way he was facing, how many floors he had climbed and how many steps he had recently taken.
As an additional precaution, officers sometimes attempted to trace the phones of the buildings’ other known prewar residents — a laborious process that could take more than an hour.
But the military was pursuing so many targets that officers often lacked the time or resources for such sophisticated surveillance, particularly when tracking low-ranking militants early in the war, according to seven officials and soldiers.
Officers could still intercept calls and determine a phone’s rough location by checking which cellphone towers received its signals. That information was less precise — and it was more difficult to ascertain who was nearby.
Overlooked Civilians
In the absence of more accurate data, Israeli intelligence officers routinely used a simplistic model to estimate the number of civilians who might be killed in an airstrike, according to 17 soldiers and officials.
The military divided Gaza into 620 sectors, most the size of a few city blocks, and estimated the number of working phones in each using the signals received by cellphone towers. After comparing phone and Wi-Fi usage with prewar levels, the military then estimated the proportion of residents who remained in each sector.
To gauge the number of civilians inside a particular building, officers typically assumed that the building’s prewar residents had fled at the same rate as the surrounding neighborhood.
Even at its best, the model provided information that might be out of date by the time of an airstrike. The volume of attacks meant that there was often an hourslong gap between the assessment of civilian risk and the actual strike on the target, according to eight officers.
When the air force tried to kill a money changer connected to Islamic Jihad in mid-November 2023, for example, seven hours had passed since intelligence officers last checked where he was and who he was with, according to an official familiar with the attack. The strike killed two women — but the target survived because he was no longer there, according to the official and a second person familiar with the incident.
The model also suffered from fundamental flaws.
It relied, for example, on people having enough electricity to power their phones — and a working phone network. But power and network outages in Gaza often made that impossible.
The location of handsets also cannot be determined with complete accuracy based on phone signals; phones that seem to be in one neighborhood may be in an adjacent one. And the model also ignored how, during times of war, people often cluster together in large groups, three officers said.
Starting in November, senior officers in the American Joint Special Operations Command repeatedly raised concerns about the model’s accuracy with their Israeli counterparts, warning that it was leading to catastrophically imprecise assessments, according to the two senior U.S. military officials familiar with the conversations.
Some within the Israeli military also sounded the alarm. Throughout November and December, Israeli Air Force analysts urged colleagues to use more extensive drone surveillance to check for the presence of civilians, according to internal military assessments. Little to no action was taken, at least for several weeks, according to those assessments. The air force was supposed to recheck estimates of civilian presence but did not always do so.
Even when conducting after-action reviews, the military rarely tried to count how many civilians had been killed, making it almost impossible for officers to assess the model’s accuracy, according to 11 officers involved in target selection.
The Israeli military’s statement to The Times did not address questions about the model, but it said that in general the military’s methods “adhere to the rules of law, whether it be the choice of munitions or the use of digital technologies to support this effort.”
Israel’s strike on a residential street on the edge of Gaza City on Nov. 16, 2023, exemplified how inaccurate the model could be. The military told The Times in a statement that it was trying to destroy one of the many tunnels used by Hamas’s military wing. In the process, it hit a large house.
Before the war, 16 members of the extended Malaka family lived in the three-story building, according to two surviving brothers, Hazem and Nidal Malaka. After the war began, dozens of other relatives moved in, they said.
At the moment of the strike, 52 people — including Hazem and Nidal Malaka — were crammed into the bottom two floors. The brothers drew a family tree for The Times that detailed their names and backgrounds, and provided photographs of many of them. The oldest was the 64-year-old family patriarch, Jamal, and the youngest was his 2-year-old granddaughter, Sham.
By this point in the war, the surrounding neighborhood, Zeitoun, was largely depopulated. Israel’s formula for assessing the building’s occupancy, based on phone usage in the wider neighborhood, would have suggested there was only a handful of civilians left.
And several hours before the strike, phone reception was lost across Gaza, service providers announced at the time. That meant that a manual attempt to track the handsets of the building’s prewar residents may have suggested there was no one there at all.
The first reports of the strike emerged only after the network outage ended, three days later on Nov. 19.
By the brothers’ count, at least 42 people were killed and just 10 survived. Hazem Malaka said that most of them were not officially recorded as dead because the victims’ bodies were left trapped in the rubble instead of being taken to the nearest hospital where deaths are registered.
Hazem Malaka, 40, lost his pregnant wife, son and daughter. To the best of his knowledge, he said, their bodies still lie crushed “under three floors of concrete.”
Tightening the Reins
About two months ago, Israel struck a hospital compound in central Gaza where thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering. Several burned to death, including Shaaban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old university student, who was filmed flailing helplessly in his tent as the flames engulfed him.
Israeli officials blamed Hamas for the blaze, saying it likely occurred after an Israeli missile, targeting a Hamas command center, hit munitions that the group had stored in the hospital compound.
“All I wanted was for him to look at me one last time,” said Mr. al-Dalou’s father, Ahmed, as he recalled watching his son burn to death.
The attack occurred about 500 yards south of where the militant commander Shaldan al-Najjar was killed a year and four days earlier.
Still, the military has steadily used fewer munitions over the past 12 months, according to officers and records reviewed by The Times. The average number of munitions used by Israel each month in Gaza fell from a high of nearly 15,000 in October and November 2023 to less than 2,500 from February through May. (The Times was unable to verify the number of munitions fired since June.)
In relative terms, Israel has also tightened its rules of engagement.
On Nov. 5, 2023, the military leadership decreed that officers needed special permission to endanger more than 10 civilians in strikes on low-ranking militants who posed no imminent threat to Israeli infantry. By late January, officers needed special permission for nearly all such deadly strikes, except for those targeting the most senior Hamas commanders.
But the rules were still far looser than they were before Oct. 7.
Mid-ranking officers could still sign off on most strikes that endangered 10 civilians or less — a threshold far higher than the prewar norm.
And many strikes proved far deadlier.
In July, Israel fired several missiles at Hamas militants, including a top commander, Muhammad Deif, killing at least 57 people, according to Airwars.
Israeli officers have also acted with near impunity. Only two officers are known to have been fired for their role in the air campaign, after they oversaw a drone strike that killed several foreign aid workers whom the officers had confused for militants.
The military said that a panel appointed by the military chief of staff was investigating the circumstances of hundreds of strikes.
No one has been charged.
Abu Bakr Bashir, Johnatan Reiss and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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11) South Korean Lawmakers Impeach Acting President as Crisis Deepens
The vote was the second major impeachment in two weeks after President Yoon’s ill-fated martial law bid set off turmoil. The country’s currency has plunged.
By Jin Yu Young and Choe Sang-Hun, Jin Yu Young reported from Seoul, Published Dec. 26, 2024, Updated Dec. 27, 2024
Han Duck-soo, South Korea’s acting president, during a cabinet meeting in Seoul on Tuesday. Credit...Yonhap, via Associated Press
South Korea’s leadership crisis deepened on Friday after lawmakers voted to oust a second head of state, the acting president, in less than two weeks.
The move prolonged the political vacuum that has gripped South Korea since President Yoon Suk Yeol shocked the country this month by briefly putting it under military rule for the first time in decades.
Lawmakers impeached and suspended Mr. Yoon on Dec. 14 over the martial law move, and Prime Minister Han Duck-soo stepped in as acting president. But Mr. Han’s tenure would also prove short-lived, as opposition lawmakers voted on Friday to impeach Mr. Han, as well.
This was the first time South Korea had impeached an interim leader. It meant that South Korea continued to be without a strong elected leader who could take charge of the government and military in one of Washington’s most important allies, at a time when the country is grappling with North Korea’s nuclear threats and economic challenges at home. The political uncertainty has pushed business and consumer confidence lower and caused the currency, the won, to plunge.
The latest impeachment “suggests to the world the possibility that Korea’s political unrest could be prolonged and worsen,” Jeong Hoiok, a professor of political science at Myoungji University in Seoul, said in an email. This would cause “significant harm to the diplomacy and economic status that Korea has built so far.”
Mr. Han’s impeachment meant that the finance minister and deputy prime minister, Choi Sang-mok, would be next in line to be named acting president. But like Mr. Han, Mr. Choi has no electoral mandate.
“The most important thing right now is to minimize the confusion in state affairs,” Mr. Choi said after assuming his role as interim leader. “The government will do its best to stabilize them.”
The move to impeach Mr. Han on Friday came after he refused to appoint three judges to fill vacancies in the Constitutional Court, the body that will be deciding whether to reinstate or formally remove Mr. Yoon.
At the heart of the matter is how the court might rule on Mr. Yoon’s impeachment. Six or more justices of the nine-member court must vote in favor of impeachment to remove Mr. Yoon from office. The top court currently has only six justices, after three others retired earlier this year, so the impeachment could be overturned with just one dissenting voice in Mr. Yoon’s trial.
Mr. Yoon has vowed to overturn his impeachment at the Constitutional Court. But the opposition wanted him ousted through a full nine-justice Constitutional Court as soon as possible and described Mr. Han’s refusal to appoint the justices as a delaying tactic by the governing camp.
The opposition had pushed for Mr. Han, as acting president, to sign off on nominees to fill the bench in the Constitutional Court. All the three vacancies were slots to be filled by the National Assembly, although they were formally appointed by the president. But Mr. Yoon’s governing party argued that only an elected president has the power to appoint justices.
Mr. Han had said that he would not appoint the nominees unless the rival parties came to an agreement on whether he had the authority to do so as the acting president, and on who should be appointed as justices.
An acting president should “refrain from exercising the president’s own significant powers, including the appointment of constitutional institutions,” said Mr. Han, a career bureaucrat.
The opposition has accused Mr. Han of aiding Mr. Yoon in his brief declaration of martial law on Dec. 3. Lawmakers accused Mr. Yoon of perpetrating an insurrection by sending troops into the National Assembly to block them from voting down his martial law and to detain his opponents.
The Constitutional Court has up to six months to decide whether to reinstate or remove Mr. Yoon. Mr. Yoon’s trial started on Friday. He did not attend court, but was instead represented by his lawyers.
Mr. Yoon also faces investigations by the police and prosecutors on charges including insurrection. On Friday, the police raided a presidential safe house where Mr. Yoon was alleged to have met with officials to discuss imposing martial law, according to the Korean news agency, Yonhap.
The political crisis has added to worries about South Korea’s economy, which was already facing slowing growth and worries about exports. On Thursday, the won, one of the weakest currencies in Asia this year, tumbled to levels against the U.S. dollar not seen since the global financial crisis a decade and a half ago. The stock market is down about 10 percent this year.
The rival parties had disagreed on how many votes were needed for Mr. Han to be impeached. The governing party maintained that just as in the impeachment of a president, at least two-thirds of the 300-member National Assembly had to vote in favor for the motion to pass. (President Yoon’s party controls 108 seats.) The opposition asserted, however, that a simple majority vote would be enough to remove him from his office as prime minister as outlined by the Constitution.
On Friday, the speaker of the National Assembly, Woo Won-shik, a member of the Democratic Party, announced that only 151 votes — a majority — were required. Lawmakers from the governing party then shouted that the vote was invalid and that Mr. Woo should resign.
Professor Cha Jina, a law professor at Korea University in Seoul, said that Mr. Han should be subject to a majority vote because “the acting president in South Korea is not actually the president and is just working in their stead as the prime minister.”
The motion was passed, 192-0. Mr. Han said he would respect the National Assembly’s decision and indicated that he would step aside to allow Mr. Choi to take over as the interim leader. He also said he would wait for the Constitutional Court to decide whether the impeachment vote was constitutional.
“In order not to add to the confusion and uncertainty, I will suspend my duties in line with relevant laws, and wait for the swift and wise decision of the Constitutional Court,” Mr. Han said in a statement.
Mr. Han has been working in the government since the early 1970s, serving in posts that include trade negotiator, finance minister and ambassador to the United States.
Like Mr. Han, Mr. Choi had been a career bureaucrat, climbing the ranks at the finance ministry. He served as a deputy finance minister when former President Park Geun-hye was impeached and removed from office in 2017. He then left government until Mr. Yoon picked him as his presidential secretary for economic affairs in 2022 and later made him the finance minister.
“The most important thing right now is to minimize the confusion in state affairs,” Mr. Choi said after assuming his role as interim leader. “The government will do its best to stabilize them.”
Lee Jae-mook, a professor of political science from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, said that he expected the governing party to contest the legal validity of Friday’s vote.
“The essence of democracy is mutual respect for the other side,” he said. But with politics becoming “more polarized, South Korean democracy is being put to the test.”
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12) Israeli Military Forces Patients and Staff to Leave Hospital in Northern Gaza
The hospital, Kamal Adwan, has been caught in the middle of Israel’s monthslong offensive against Hamas militants in northern Gaza.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, Dec. 27, 2024
Outside Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip in October. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli military forced patients and staff members to leave one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza on Friday, leaving health officials in the territory concerned for the people who had been getting treatment there amid continued fighting.
The hospital, Kamal Adwan, has been caught in the middle of Israel’s offensive against Hamas militants in the northern part of Gaza, and fighting has raged around the facility for nearly three months.
In a statement, the Israeli military said that the hospital was a “stronghold” for Hamas, and that soldiers had evacuated medical staff and patients from the facility “in order to mitigate harm to the civilian population in the area.”
The Gaza health ministry said the Israeli military was forcing sick and wounded people to move to another nearby hospital, which it said lacked medical supplies, water and electricity.
“There are sick people at risk of dying at any moment as a result of the harsh conditions,” the ministry said in a statement, adding that Israeli military vehicles were surrounding Kamal Adwan.
The hospital has been a main provider of medical care for the thousands of people who have stayed in Jabaliya and other towns in the northernmost stretch of Gaza. It has often been inundated with patients and kept offering services despite severe shortages of medical workers.
Alaa Okal, who was working as a nurse at the hospital, said in an interview that Israeli soldiers had told female medical workers and patients to leave Kamal Adwan, without immediately giving the same instruction to men.
She said she had left the hospital and was walking to Gaza City, southwest of the hospital.
Earlier on Friday, Gazan health officials said they were concerned about the safety of Kamal Adwan’s staff and patients.
“The fate of everyone at the hospital is unknown to us,” said Yousef Abu al-Rish, the deputy health minister in the territory, who is based in southern Gaza.
Israel has said the aim of its offensive in northern Gaza is to root out a regrouped Hamas presence in the area. The fighting has displaced tens of thousands of people.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyah, the director of Kamal Adwan, has said the hospital has been attacked many times since Israel’s offensive began on Oct. 6.
Israel’s military has repeatedly denied bombarding the hospital. Israeli officials have accused Hamas of exploiting Kamal Adwan and other civilian infrastructure in Gaza for military purposes.
While Dr. Abu Safiyah spoke about the situation at the hospital in a video posted to social media on Dec. 24, explosions could be heard in the background.
“All night, we are bombarded in this way,” he said. “We are being killed and slaughtered every day.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Abu Bakr Bashir contributed reporting.
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13) Ten Years Ago, a U.S. Thaw Fueled Cuban Dreams. Now Hope Is Lost.
A decade since the United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations — which many believed would transform the island — Cuba is in its worst crisis since Fidel Castro took power.
By Frances RoblesEd Augustin and Hannah Berkeley Cohen
Frances Robles reported from Florida, and Ed Augustin from Havana, Cuba, Dec. 27, 2024
It wasn’t long ago that Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution was packed with American tourists knocking into each other with selfie sticks while taking photos of the iconic image of the revolutionary Che Guevara and trying to catch a ride in a candy-apple red 1952 Chevrolet Bel-Air.
Today, those polished 1950s-era American convertibles that came to symbolize quintessential Cuba sit empty, the tourists they once carried largely gone.
The drivers spend their lives like most Cubans do: coping with prolonged power outages, standing in line at poorly stocked supermarkets and watching their friends, family and neighbors — sick of all the hardships — pack up and leave.
Ten years ago, President Barack Obama stunned the world by restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba, ending more than 50 years of Cold War estrangement between the United States and a country with which it had once been on the brink of nuclear war.
For two and a half years, Cuba brimmed with enthusiasm amid a remarkable wave of investment and tourism, fueled by deals signed by major American companies such as Google, AT&T and Major League Baseball.
But a financial implosion caused by a cascade of factors — the tightening of U.S. policy by the Trump administration, Cuba’s mismanagement of its economy, the crushing effect of the Covid-19 pandemic — has kept visitors away and launched an immigration exodus of epic proportions.
Tourism, once a lifeblood of Cuba’s economy, has collapsed, down nearly 50 percent since 2017, with new U.S. visa regulations making it harder for even Europeans to travel there.
“The comparison between then and now is literally night and day,” said Luis Manuel Pérez, who works as a chauffeur.
A former engineering professor, Mr. Pérez, 57, once had a stream of customers who paid $40 an hour to ride in a classic car. Now, he’s lucky to land one a day.
“The difference is abysmal,” he said.
Many of the thousands of private businesses that the Cuban government allowed to open in recent years are trying to stay afloat after losing so many workers to migration. Streets are filled with garbage as fuel shortages impede trash pickup.
Many Cubans put it succinctly: 10 years ago, there was hope. Now, there’s despair.
“You go on the street, and people’s smiles are fading,’’ said Adriana Heredia Sánchez, who owns a clothing store in Old Havana.
Cuba’s unraveling underscores the United States’ oversized role in the country, and comes as Donald J. Trump is about to return to the White House: He has nominated Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida and a Cuba hard-liner, to be secretary of state.
By many measures, Cuba is suffering its worst crisis since Fidel Castro seized power 66 years ago, surpassing even the early 1990s when the dissolution of the Soviet Union left Cuba without its chief lifeline.
Cuba has suffered three nationwide blackouts since October. Official figures show the population has plunged by at least one million, or 10 percent, since the pandemic. More than 675,000 of those Cubans moved to the United States.
Even the infant mortality rate, which communist rulers had so proudly brought to levels lower than the United States, has been climbing.
Cuba was one of the few countries in Latin America touted for eliminating child malnutrition. But today its milk rations for children, as well as staples such as rice and beans, are often delivered late to state-run stores, if at all.
The sense of misery is a far cry from the excitement felt the week in 2016 when Mr. Obama attended a Tampa Bay Rays baseball game in Havana with Cuban President Raúl Castro.
“If Obama had run for president in Cuba, he would have been elected,” Jaime Morales, a tour guide in Havana, said laughing.
Mr. Obama also eased U.S. policy toward the island, allowing American cruise ships to dock in Cuba, more U.S. airlines to fly there and more Americans to visit.
Then, President Trump reversed course. In 2018, after mysterious illnesses befell U.S. embassy employees, which some believed to be an attack by a hostile nation, he sent so many workers home that it effectively closed the embassy. (The Biden administration reopened it in 2023.)
In his last days in office, Mr. Trump also returned Cuba to a list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation severely limiting its ability to do business globally and that President Biden kept in place.
Mr. Morales, 44, recalls that a ship was already at port when the cruise policy was revoked: He was at a pier waiting for passengers with reservations for his walking tours of Havana, but nobody disembarked.
“It was like a bucket of cold water in the face,” he said. “The fantasy had ended.”
Ricardo Zúniga, a top Obama aide who conducted the secret negotiations to restore diplomatic ties, acknowledged that the administration failed to calculate how strongly allies loyal to Fidel Castro would oppose U.S. measures after the former leader spoke out against them publicly.
Though there was never an official quid pro quo for the lifting of travel and trade restrictions, Cuba freed political prisoners and broadly agreed to increase internet access and permit more private enterprise.
But the government was slow to authorize contracts with U.S. companies, while small businesses faced many bureaucratic roadblocks.
Fidel Castro knew that increased internet access and economic freedoms would lead more people to question Cuba’s lack of basic rights and could undermine the regime, Mr. Zúniga said. Castro saw the moves as a U.S. Trojan horse, and “that’s 100 percent what it was,” he said.
“My biggest takeaway is that Cuban government leadership never took advantage of opportunities to allow for gradual change in response to popular will,” he said. “So now they are stuck with social collapse.”
Ben Rhodes, another former Obama aide who worked on the negotiations, said that Mr. Biden’s decision to largely keep the Trump policies was particularly damaging, because it made them “bipartisan.”
“What U.S. interests are advanced by trying to turn a country 90 miles from Florida into a failed state with a starving population?” he said.
Two senior Biden administration officials defended its Cuba policy, noting that Mr. Biden did reverse some restrictions. It lifted a cap on how much money Cubans in the United States could send home, increased flights and created more banking opportunities for Cuban entrepreneurs.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the administration did not authorize on-the-record-interviews.
But Cuba, one of the officials said, never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Cuba’s harsh crackdown of a popular uprising in 2021 left hundreds of people in prison, which made it harder for Mr. Biden to justify easing restrictions, the official said.
Several Cuban American members of Congress who favored the restrictions also held considerable sway, and critics said the White House was concerned about the political landscape ahead of November’s election.
Mr. Rubio and other Republicans who helped shape Mr. Trump’s Cuba policy did not return requests for comment.
The Cuban government said recently that Mr. Obama’s brief rapprochement was positive for the country, but it was followed by eight years of aggression. Officials on Friday held a large protest outside the U.S. embassy.
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez, Cuba’s first ambassador to Washington when the embassies reopened in July 2015, said the United States was to blame for Cuba’s ills.
The Trump administration helped trigger mass arrivals at the southern border by shutting down visa operations, which forced Cubans to take irregular paths to the United States, he said.
The justifications for cutting back diplomatic relations, like accusing Cuba of sending troops to Venezuela or sickening embassy employees, were absurd, he said. “They simply lied,” he said.
Cuba’s inability to maintain its electric grid is directly tied to U.S. sanctions that cut the country’s income, he said.
“We’re concerned about the deterioration of the population’s standard of living, which is a fact, and it is tangible,” said Mr. Cabañas, who is now director of the government’s Center for International Policy Research.
“But at the same time, this has not been a country that sits on its hands waiting for someone to bring a solution,” he added. “We have lived through other previous cycles which impacted the quality of life, which many times were linked to hostile U.S. policy.”
Many Cubans have grown tired of their government blaming Washington, said Arianna R. Delgado, a makeup artist who left Cuba this year for Miami.
“Let’s be clear: Cuba was always bad, but now the situation is not that there’s less; it’s that there’s nothing,” she said through tears. “Now it’s a concentration camp, and the whole world has to know it.”
Rubén Salazar, 58, said people are cooking with charcoal, because there’s not enough gas.
“There’s no life here,” he said, “Cubans have no future.”
A pharmacy in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood doles out 200 numbered tickets the day before medicines are delivered. As a result, people must line up for hours, twice.
“Sometimes there are medicines that run out before they get to 200,” said Maritza González, 54, a teacher’s assistant, who needed an asthma inhaler. She’s found one only once this year. “Sometimes, they run out before they get to 50.”
On this day, she was No. 136.
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