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) 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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2) 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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3) 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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4) 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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5) As Hopes Rise for Gaza Cease-Fire, Conditions There Have Worsened
Human rights organizations and residents describe the situation in the enclave as getting more desperate. Here is a closer look.
By Aryn Baker and Abu Bakr Bashir, Dec. 28, 2024
Children sit inside their family’s tent at a camp in the central Gaza Strip. Over the last 14 months, at least 90 percent of Gaza’s population has been displaced at least once. Credit...Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press
For the past several weeks, Fadia Nasser, a widow sheltering in Deir al Balah in central Gaza, says she has subsisted on nothing but a small sandwich of herbs for breakfast and a tomato she shares with her daughter for lunch.
Eleven miles away in a tent camp in southern Gaza, Said Lulu, who used to run a small coffee kiosk in Gaza City, says he is suffering in pain from kidney disease but has no access to the clean water doctors say he must drink to keep it from getting worse.
And Ola Moen, in Beit Lahia in the enclave’s north, fears going outside because of frequent airstrikes. But she doesn’t feel she has a choice: She says she spends her days scouring pharmacies for burn cream and painkillers for her 9-year-old nephew, whose legs were broken and burned by an Israeli airstrike in October.
Even as mediators try to secure a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, Palestinians and human rights organizations say the humanitarian situation is getting more desperate.
In the 14 months since Israel launched its invasion of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led terror attack on Israel, military bombardments have turned cities into rubble-filled wastelands and 90 percent of the population of about 2.1 million has been displaced at least once. Winter is adding to the misery. A doctor at a hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, said that four infants in tent encampments had died from the cold in the past week.
Israel says that its target is Hamas and that it does everything possible to limit the loss of civilian life. But the increasingly dire humanitarian situation has prompted a particularly scathing chorus of condemnation from the United Nations and international human rights organizations.
Here is a closer look at three parts of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.
Food
Yaser Shaban, a 58-year-old civil servant for the Palestinian Authority who is living with six people in a tent in Gaza City, is dependent on the limited supplies of food — beans, lentils and pasta — brought in by humanitarian organizations.
When those run out he begs for food or uses his few remaining shekels to buy items from the market at vastly inflated prices. Fruit and meat are out of reach, he said. And eggs, at 15 shekels, or $4, each, are a rare treat. “I am not looking for delicious, healthy or luxury food,” he said. “The goal is to only beat hunger.”
The United Nations warned in November that 1.95 million people were at risk of famine and that absent a dramatic increase in food aid, people would start dying of hunger. On Dec. 24, it said deliveries of humanitarian aid were still inadequate, particularly in the north, where Israel has ordered evacuations and severely restricted access. Israel is pressing a renewed offensive there in an effort to stamp out what it has called a Hamas resurgence, unleashing some of its military’s most devastating attacks yet.
Georgios Petropoulos, a senior U.N. official based in the southern city of Rafah, noted that even when Israeli authorities allow shipments of humanitarian aid in, they sometimes strip the deliveries of vital components, such as the fuel needed to run generators in hospitals and shelters. Israel says that the fuel cannot be sent to areas where militants are active.
“From where we are in Gaza, it looks like the aid system has been weaponized,” Mr. Petropoulos said. “Every day as an aid worker in Gaza, you’re forced to make horrible decisions: Should I let people die of starvation or the cold?”
On Dec. 5, Amnesty International accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza, citing prevalent hunger, the risk of famine and the inaccessibility of aid as contributing factors. Israel rejected the claim, and the Israeli authority that coordinates the flow of goods to Gaza said on social media that the group’s accusation that it is obstructing aid deliveries and precipitating famine “deliberately and inaccurately ignores the extensive humanitarian efforts made by Israel,” and listed recent deliveries of food, fuel and medical supplies.
There is little question that aid delivery has been reduced to a trickle, both because of Israeli restrictions and concerns about looting. To Ms. Nassar, what matters is that she still does not have enough to eat. She said that there is food in the market — most often smuggled in, or looted from humanitarian aid convoys — so, to outsiders, “it may not look like famine.”
“But when food is so expensive that most people cannot afford it, is it still available?” she asked.
Water
Mr. Lulu, the former coffee seller, has no regular access to a tap for water. He lives in a tent camp in Rafah, in southern Gaza, and the water there is delivered by the tank-load to a central area, where residents wait in line for hours to fill up their jars and buckets, at 2 shekels, or 50 cents, a gallon.
But the quality is dubious: smelly, cloudy and flecked with debris. “The only good thing about it,” he said, “is that it is less bad than the seawater.” He knows that drinking the water will exacerbate his kidney problems, but bottled water is unaffordable.
It wasn’t always that way. Gaza has water treatment plants, desalinization facilities and three pipelines channeling fresh water from Israel. But in a report released on Dec. 19, Human Rights Watch said Israel was intentionally depriving Palestinians in Gaza of adequate access to safe water for drinking and sanitation.
The pipelines were turned off and damaged from bombing at the start of the war and only partially reopened a month later, the report found. Israel’s restrictions on fuel imports have virtually halted desalinization activities. Water and sanitation infrastructure has sustained extensive damage, the report found. Israel also prevented the importation of equipment and chemicals, such as chlorine, needed for purifying water, saying those items risked being used by Hamas.
As a result, Gazans have little access to clean water. The report recorded 669,000 recorded cases of acute watery diarrhea since the war began, and more than 132,000 cases of jaundice, a sign of hepatitis. Both diseases spread via contaminated water.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense said in response to the report that Israeli pipelines were sending millions of gallons of water into the Gaza Strip and that Israel had helped repair damage to the water infrastructure caused by Hamas. Human Rights Watch noted that water from the pipelines was insufficient to offset the decrease in water production from other sources.
Ms. Moen says she spends two hours a day waiting in line to buy drinking water — at 19 shekels a gallon, or more than $5, in north Gaza. And she still has to boil and filter it. “At least I don’t see worms in it,” she said. “That is our criteria now.”
Medicine
When Ms. Moen’s house in Beit Lahia was hit in October, most of her immediate family died. Others were injured and are still in need of medical treatment. But painkillers, antibiotics and medicine for chronic diseases like diabetes are impossible to find.
She fears getting sick or injured. Going to a hospital is out of the question, she said. They are unclean, reek of death and blood, and lack the most basic supplies.
Few are functioning properly. The Israeli military forced patients and staff members on Friday to leave one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza, saying it was a stronghold for Hamas. Fighting has raged around the facility, Kamal Adwan, for nearly three months.
On Dec. 19, a report from Doctors Without Borders described repeated Israeli military attacks on Gaza’s civilians and medical infrastructure, along with the “systematic denial of humanitarian assistance,” as “clear signs of ethnic cleansing.” Israel’s foreign minister slammed the report as “blood libel.”
Ms. Moen doesn’t need a report to tell her what is going on in Gaza, she said. Nor does she think it will make a difference.
“It’s been over a year of mass killing, starvation, displacement, and misery, and no one seems to care,” she said.
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6) Behind the Dismantling of Hezbollah: Decades of Israeli Intelligence
A Times investigation shows how extensively Israel penetrated the Lebanese militia, closely tracking the group’s commanders and culminating in the assassination of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
By Mark Mazzetti, Sheera Frenkel and Ronen Bergman, Reporting from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Dec. 29, 2024
Right up until he was assassinated, Hassan Nasrallah did not believe that Israel would kill him.
As he hunkered inside a Hezbollah fortress 40 feet underground on Sept. 27, his aides urged him to go to a safer location. Mr. Nasrallah brushed it off, according to intelligence collected by Israel and shared later with Western allies. In his view, Israel had no interest in a full-scale war.
What he did not realize was that Israeli spy agencies were tracking his every movement — and had been doing so for years.
Not long after, Israeli F-15 jets dropped thousands of pounds of explosives, obliterating the bunker in a blast that buried Mr. Nasrallah and other top Hezbollah commanders. The next day, Mr. Nasrallah’s body was found in an embrace with a top Iranian general based in Lebanon. Both men died of suffocation, the intelligence found, according to several people with knowledge of it.
The death of Hezbollah’s feared leader, who for decades commanded a Lebanese militia in its fight against the Israeli state, was the culmination of a two-week offensive. The campaign combined covert technological wizardry with brute military force, including remotely detonating explosives hidden in thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, as well as a withering aerial bombardment with the aim of destroying thousands of missiles and rockets capable of hitting Israel.
It was also the result of two decades of methodical intelligence work in preparation for an all-out war that many expected would eventually come. A New York Times investigation, based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli, American and European officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations, reveals just how extensively Israeli spies had penetrated Hezbollah. They recruited people to plant listening devices in Hezbollah bunkers, tracked meetings between one top commander and his four mistresses, and had near constant visibility into the movements of the militia group’s leaders.
It is a story of breakthroughs, as in 2012 when Israel’s Unit 8200 — the country’s equivalent of the National Security Agency — stole a trove of information, including specifics of the leaders’ secret hide-outs and the group’s arsenal of missiles and rockets.
There were stumbles, as in late 2023 when a Hezbollah technician got suspicious about the batteries in the walkie-talkies.
And there were scrambles to save their efforts, as in September, when Unit 8200 collected intelligence that Hezbollah operatives were concerned enough about the pagers that they were sending some of them to Iran for inspection.
Worried that the operation would be exposed, top intelligence officials persuaded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to give the order to detonate them, setting in motion the campaign that culminated in the assassination of Mr. Nasrallah.
Israel’s decimation of Hezbollah was a significant victory for a country that, one year earlier, had suffered the greatest intelligence failure in its history, when Hamas-led fighters invaded it on Oct. 7, 2023, killed more than 1,200 people and took 250 hostages.
The Hezbollah campaign, part of a broader war that has killed thousands of people in Lebanon and displaced more than a million, defanged one of Israel’s greatest adversaries and dealt a blow to Iran’s regional strategy of arming and funding paramilitary groups bent on Israel’s destruction. The weakening of the Iran-led axis reshaped the dynamics in the Middle East, contributing to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.
The contrast between Israel’s approaches to Hezbollah and to Hamas is also stark and devastating. The intense intelligence focus on Hezbollah shows that the country’s leaders believed that the Lebanese militia group posed the greatest imminent threat to Israel. And yet it was Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a group Israeli intelligence believed had neither the interest nor the abilities to attack Israel, that launched a surprise attack and caught the nation unprepared.
Israel was in a standoff with Mr. Nasrallah and his top commanders of Hezbollah, the “Party of God,” for decades, and Israeli intelligence assessments have concluded that it will take years, possibly more than a decade, for the group to rebuild after their deaths. The group of leaders now in charge has far less combat experience than the earlier generation.
And yet the new leaders, like Hezbollah’s founders, are driven by a central animating principle: conflict with Israel.
“Hezbollah can’t continue to get support and funding from Iran without being in a war against Israel. That’s the raison d’être for Hezbollah,” said Brig. Gen. Shimon Shapira, a former military secretary for Mr. Netanyahu and the author of “Hezbollah: Between Iran and Lebanon.”
“They will rearm and rebuild,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time.”
Building a Network of Sources
The 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah was a bloody stalemate. Israel withdrew from Lebanon after 34 days of fighting, which began after Hezbollah kidnapped and killed two Israeli soldiers. The war, which did not achieve Israel’s objectives, had been something of a humiliation, forcing an investigation panel, resignations of top generals and a reckoning inside Israel’s security apparatus about the quality of its intelligence.
But operations during the war, based on Israeli intelligence gathering, formed the foundation for the country’s later approach. One operation planted tracking devices on Hezbollah’s Fajr missiles that gave Israel information about munitions hidden inside secret military bases, civilian storage facilities and private homes, according to three former Israeli officials. In the 2006 war, the Israeli Air Force bombed the sites, destroying the missiles.
In the years after the war, Mr. Nasrallah projected confidence that Hezbollah could win another conflict against Israel, likening the nation to a spider web — menacing from afar but a threat that could be easily brushed aside.
As Hezbollah rebuilt, the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, expanded a network of human sources inside the militia, according to 10 current and former American and Israeli officials.
Specifically, the Mossad recruited people in Lebanon to help Hezbollah build secret facilities after the war. The Mossad sources fed the Israelis information about the locations of hide-outs and assisted in monitoring them, two officials said.
The Israelis generally shared Hezbollah intelligence with the United States and European allies.
A significant moment came in 2012, when Unit 8200 obtained a trove of information about the specific whereabouts of Hezbollah leaders, their hide-outs and the group’s batteries of missiles and rockets, according to five current and former Israeli defense and European officials.
That operation raised confidence within Israeli intelligence agencies that — should Mr. Netanyahu make good on threats to attack Iran’s nuclear sites — the Israeli military could help neuter Hezbollah’s ability to retaliate.
Mr. Netanyahu visited the Tel Aviv headquarters of Unit 8200 shortly after the operation. During the visit, the head of Unit 8200 made a show by printing out the trove of information, producing a tall stack of paper. Standing next to the material, he told Mr. Netanyahu, “You can now attack Iran,” according to two current and former Israeli defense officials with knowledge of the meeting.
Israel did not attack.
During the years that followed, Israeli spy agencies worked to refine the intelligence gathered from the earlier operation to produce information that could be used in the event of a war with Hezbollah.
According to two Israeli defense officials with knowledge of the intelligence, when the 2006 war ended, Israel had “target portfolios” for just under 200 Hezbollah leaders, operatives, weapons caches and missile locations. By the time Israel launched its campaign in September, it was tens of thousands.
Turning Pagers Into Deadly Devices
To gain an advantage in an eventual war with Hezbollah, Israel also developed plans to sabotage the militia from within. Israel’s Unit 8200 and Mossad championed a plan to supply Hezbollah with booby-trapped devices that could be detonated at a future date, according to six current and former Israeli defense officials.
Within the Israeli intelligence community, the devices were known as “buttons” that could be activated at Israel’s moment of choosing.
Designing and producing the buttons was relatively straightforward. Israeli engineers mastered placing PETN explosives within the batteries of electronic devices, turning them into small bombs.
The more difficult operation fell to the Mossad, which for nearly a decade tricked the group into buying military equipment and telecommunication devices from Israeli shell companies.
In 2014, Israel seized an opportunity when the Japanese technology company iCOM stopped producing its popular IC-V82 walkie-talkies. The devices, originally assembled in Osaka, Japan, were so popular that replicas were already being made across Asia and sold in online forums and in black market deals.
Unit 8200 discovered that Hezbollah was specifically searching for the same device to equip all of its frontline forces, according to seven Israeli and European officials. They had even designed a special vest for their troops with a chest pocket tailored for the device.
Israel began manufacturing its own replicas of the walkie-talkies with small modifications, including packing explosive material into their batteries, according to eight current and former Israeli and American officials. The first Israeli-made replicas arrived in Lebanon in 2015 — and more than 15,000 were eventually shipped, some of the officials said.
In 2018, a female Israeli Mossad intelligence officer drafted a plan that would use a similar technique to implant explosive material into a pager battery. Israeli intelligence commanders reviewed the plan, but determined that Hezbollah’s use of pagers was not widespread enough, according to three officials. The plan was shelved.
Over the next three years, Israel’s increasing ability to hack into cellphones left Hezbollah, Iran and their allies increasingly wary of using smartphones. Israeli officers from Unit 8200 helped fuel the fear, using bots on social media to push Arabic-language news reports on Israel’s ability to hack into phones, according to two officers in the agency.
Worried about smartphones being compromised, Hezbollah’s leadership decided to expand its use of pagers. Such devices allowed them to send out messages to fighters but did not reveal location data nor have cameras and microphones that could be hacked.
As it did, Hezbollah began looking for pagers hardy enough for combat conditions, according to eight current and former Israeli officials. Israeli intelligence officers reconsidered the pager operation, and worked to build a network of shell companies to hide their origins and sell the products to the militia.
Israeli intelligence officers targeted the Taiwanese brand Gold Apollo, well known for pagers.
In May 2022, a company called BAC Consulting was registered in Budapest. One month later, in Sofia, Bulgaria, a company called Norta Global Ltd. was registered to a Norwegian citizen named Rinson Jose.
BAC Consulting bought a licensing agreement from Gold Apollo to manufacture a new pager model known as the AR-924 Rugged. It was bulkier than the existing Gold Apollo pagers, but it was promoted as waterproof and with a longer-lasting battery life than competitors’ devices.
The Mossad oversaw production of the pagers in Israel, according to Israeli officials. Working through intermediaries, Mossad agents began marketing the pagers to Hezbollah buyers and offered a discounted price for a bulk purchase.
The Mossad presented the gadget, one without any hidden explosives, to Mr. Netanyahu during a meeting in March 2023, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting. The prime minister was skeptical about their durability, and asked David Barnea, the Mossad chief, how easily they might break. Mr. Barnea assured him they were sturdy.
Not convinced, Mr. Netanyahu abruptly stood up and threw the device against the wall of his office. The wall cracked, but the pager did not.
The Mossad front company shipped the first batch of pagers to Hezbollah that fall.
Conducting War Games
The pager operation was not fully in place in October 2023, when the Hamas-led attacks ignited a fierce debate within the Israeli government about whether Israel should launch a full-scale war against Hezbollah.
Some, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, argued for striking at Hezbollah, which began launching missiles at Israel on Oct. 8 in solidarity with Hamas. It was an opportunity, he said, to deal with the “hard enemy” of Hezbollah before turning to what he considered the less difficult enemy of Hamas, according to five Israeli officials familiar with the meetings.
After a phone call with President Biden on Oct. 11, 2023, Mr. Netanyahu, along with his newly formed war cabinet, decided for the time being against opening another front with Hezbollah, effectively ending high-level debate about the topic for months.
Even as Israel focused on Hamas, military and intelligence officials continued to refine plans for an eventual war with Hezbollah.
Israeli intelligence analysts, who were constantly monitoring the use of the devices, discovered a potential problem with the operation. At least one Hezbollah technician began to suspect that the walkie-talkies might contain hidden explosives, according to three Israeli defense officials. Israel dealt with it swiftly this year, killing the technician with an airstrike.
For nearly a year, Israeli intelligence and the air force also ran roughly 40 war games built around killing Mr. Nasrallah and other senior Hezbollah leaders, said two Israeli officials. They wanted to be able to target them at the same time, even if they were not in the same place.
Along the way, Israel collected mundane and intimate details about Hezbollah commanders, including the identities of the four mistresses of Fuad Shukr, a founding member of Hezbollah long ago identified by the U.S. government as one of the planners of the 1983 bombing of the barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 American Marines.
At one point this year, apparently feeling uncomfortable about his situation, Mr. Shukr sought assistance from Hezbollah’s highest religious cleric to marry all four women, according to two Israeli officials and a European official. The cleric, Hashem Safieddine, arranged four separate phone-based wedding ceremonies for Mr. Shukr.
The simmering conflict boiled over this summer, when a Hezbollah rocket attack in July killed a dozen Israelis, including schoolchildren, in Majdal Shams, a town in the Golan Heights.
Israel responded days later with an airstrike in Beirut that killed Mr. Shukr. It was a provocative step to take, to assassinate a top commander of Hezbollah’s forces.
‘Use It or Lose It’
After the back-and-forth attacks, the debate renewed inside Israel’s government about opening a “northern front” against Hezbollah. The Israeli military and the Mossad drew up different strategies for a campaign against Hezbollah, according to four Israeli officials.
In late August, Mr. Barnea, the Mossad chief, wrote a secret letter to Mr. Netanyahu, according to a senior Israeli defense official. The letter advocated a two-to-three-week campaign that included eliminating more than half of the group’s missile abilities and destroying installations within about six miles of the Israeli border. At the same time, senior military officials began their own effort to lobby Mr. Netanyahu to intensify a campaign against Hezbollah.
New intelligence disrupted the planning. Hezbollah operatives had become suspicious that the pagers might be sabotaged, according to several officials.
On Sept. 11, intelligence showed that Hezbollah was sending some of the pagers to Iran for examination, and Israeli officials knew it was only a matter of time before the covert operation would be blown.
On Sept. 16, Mr. Netanyahu met with top security chiefs to weigh whether to detonate the pagers in a “use it or lose it” operation, according to four Israeli security officials. Some opposed it, saying it might prompt a full Hezbollah counterattack and possibly a strike by Iran.
Mr. Netanyahu ordered the operation. The following day, at 3:30 p.m. local time, the Mossad ordered an encrypted message to be sent to thousands of the pagers. Seconds later, the pagers detonated.
At the time the pagers exploded, Mr. Jose, the Norwegian who was the head of one of the Mossad front companies, was attending a technology conference in Boston.
Within days, Mr. Jose was identified in news articles as a participant in the operation, and the Norwegian government announced that it wanted him back in Norway for questioning.
Israeli officials secretly pressured the Biden administration to ensure that Mr. Jose could leave the United States without going back to Norway, according to one Israeli and one American official.
Israeli officials would not disclose Mr. Jose’s location. One senior Israeli defense official said only that he was in a “safe place.”
Approving an Assassination
After the pager operation, the Netanyahu government, with the support of high-ranking defense officials, opted for all-out war, a campaign marked by a series of escalations.
The day after detonating the pagers, the Mossad blew up the walkie-talkies, most of which were still in storage because Hezbollah leaders had not yet mobilized fighters for a battle against Israel.
In all, dozens of people were killed by the pager and walkie-talkie explosions, including several children, and thousands were wounded. Most of the casualties were Hezbollah operatives, sowing chaos among the top ranks of the group.
Days after, on Sept. 20, Israeli jets struck a building in Beirut where commanders of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force were meeting in a bunker, killing several of them along with Ibrahim Aqeel, the head of Hezbollah’s military operations.
On Sept. 23, the Israeli Air Force conducted a major campaign, hitting more than 2,000 targets aimed at Hezbollah’s stores of medium and long-range missiles.
The most consequential decision remained: whether or not to kill Mr. Nasrallah.
As senior Israeli officials debated, intelligence agencies received new information that Mr. Nasrallah planned to move to a different bunker, one that would be far more difficult to hit, according to two Israeli defense officials and a Western official.
On Sept. 26, with Mr. Netanyahu set to fly to New York for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, the prime minister gathered with his top political, intelligence and military advisers to discuss approving the assassination. They also had to decide whether to tell the Americans in advance.
Mr. Netanyahu and other top advisers opposed notifying the Biden administration. They believed that U.S. officials would push back against the strike, but that regardless, the United States would come to Israel’s defense in case Iran retaliated.
They agreed to keep the Americans in the dark.
Mr. Netanyahu approved the assassination the next day, after he landed in New York and only hours before standing at the podium at the United Nations.
In his speech, he spoke about the grip that Hezbollah had over Lebanon. “Don’t let Nasrallah drag Lebanon into the abyss,” he told the presidents and prime ministers gathered.
Soon after, the Israeli F-15 jets above Beirut dropped thousands of pounds of explosives.
Adam Goldman contributed reporting from Washington.
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