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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) Rebels Easily Toppled Syria’s Army. Their Challenge Now: Rebuilding.
The rebels’ path to victory is littered with evidence of Syria’s defeated military. It also reflects the sizable task of trying to put the country back together.
By Carlotta Gall, Photographs by David Guttenfelder, Jan. 1, 2025
A reporter and a photographer for The New York Times and a Syrian translator spent 10 days journeying through central and northern Syria for this article, visiting scenes of battles and interviewing dozens of combatants.
More than 50 tanks and military vehicles lay scattered and abandoned across the parade and training grounds of an army base in northern Syria, captured by rebels in their lightning-fast offensive that toppled President Bashar al-Assad.
The main garrison building bore the marks of two large explosions, but little sign of close-contact fighting. The assault was over in a day when the Syrian soldiers retreated, said Abu Muhammad, a rebel fighter guarding the base.
The government soldiers left behind a filthy jumble of army life: clothes, blankets, gas masks and helmets, and empty tin cans. Living conditions were primitive, with no windows or doors — instead, sacks or sheets of tin roofing were fixed over openings.
The base reflected the opportunity for a new government borne out of a well-prepared military campaign, bringing together different rebel groups, whose success surprised even its own fighters. But it also was a measure of the challenges ahead as they look to rebuild a country broken by more than a decade of civil war, depriving and depleting its military.
The country’s new leadership recently announced a plan to unite the various rebel factions under one government and for their armed fighters to serve together in one army.
In interviews with dozens of combatants, many said they had already accepted a single command under Ahmad al-Shara and his rebel force, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and had benefited from uniting their forces.
“The important thing is to be together,” said Nasr al-Nahar, 41, a senior rebel commander who said his own group had settled its differences with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. “We are fighting together for liberation.”
But bitterness and divisions are likely to continue with forces that remain in opposition, including the Kurdish militia that controls much of northeastern Syria; the Islamic State extremist group, which operates in parts of central Syria; and remnants of Mr. al-Assad’s security forces who have shown signs of resistance.
While the rebels are taking over security of the country and its borders, they are inheriting a devastated military infrastructure that will be hard to capitalize on or rebuild.
A 10-day journey along the path of the rebels’ advance by a reporter and a photographer for The New York Times and a Syrian translator showed that the Syrian Army they defeated — and are now replacing — was so ill-equipped and demoralized that its soldiers had laid down their arms or fled in panic.
The rebels breached defenses that had held strong for years, encircling and assaulting military garrisons often without much of a fight. The tank base, which fell on the second day of the operation, was decrepit, its windowless buildings barricaded with a makeshift protection of tractor tires and metal drums filled with earth.
On other bases and checkpoints near the former front line, Syrian soldiers clearly lacked resources. They had dug a makeshift bunker inside a farm building, heaping rubble on top of sheets of corrugated iron to provide protection from shelling, and had patched up shell holes in the walls with a mixture of mud and straw.
“We started the operation thinking we would take only one village, and we took all of Syria,” said a Hayat Tahrir al-Sham fighter, Abu Aisha, with a wide grin.
The 24-year-old was hanging out with a fellow fighter, Abu Hamza, 25, in the central park of the city of Hama, lending his assault rifle to local youths to pose with it for photographs. Both men said they had been training and fighting since they were 15 and would readily join the national army.
Some of the fighting during the rebel offensive was intense. Abu Aisha said his commander and deputy commander were killed at a main intersection in the first days of the operation. Others were killed and wounded in airstrikes.
But rebel fighters said that they had encountered weaker resistance than in previous years of fighting. Russian air power and Iranian-backed militias on the ground, which in the past had provided much of the glue that held the Assad regime together, had been reduced in recent months.
Aleppo fell to the rebels on Nov. 30 after just three days of fighting.
A fabled city centered around an ancient citadel, Aleppo was the site of grueling fighting when the 2011 peaceful uprising spiraled into civil war. It had taken Mr. al-Assad four years to wrest control of the city from the rebels in 2016, and then only with the help of Iranian militias and Russian troops. Its sudden fall stunned the Syrian leadership.
“It was serious from the moment Aleppo fell,” said Abed, 39, a Syrian police officer, who gave only his first name for fear of reprisals.
“There was no command,” he added. “ The silence was clear.”
After Aleppo, the rebels pushed southward to attack the cities of Hama and then Homs, with the capital, Damascus, already in their sights.
On the roads along the way, tanks and armored vehicles were left abandoned, had crashed or had broken down. Few of them showed signs of fighting, such as being burned in explosions or bearing bloodstains from casualties.
There were some indications of panic. An armored personnel carrier had smashed into the corner of a house in a village, and a tank lay upside down where it that had crashed into a trench.
As the rebels advanced, two soldiers, Mahmoud, 23, and his brother Mamdur, 26, serving in separate Syrian Army bases, prepared to desert. The brothers asked that their surname not be published to avoid repercussions.
Mahmoud escaped when rebels attacked his base in the southern region of Golan. He ran through a forest with three other soldiers and sheltered in a village for two nights until their host told them that Mr. al-Assad had fallen.
On Dec. 7, Mamdur heard an order come over his senior officer’s radio to evacuate the base. The soldiers changed into civilian clothes, left their weapons and rode in a truck to the provincial capital.
At a checkpoint, rebel fighters searched him for weapons but then told him, “Just go home,” he recounted. “They knew everyone was running away.”
Poor conditions, low pay and disaffection all played a role in the Syrian military’s collapse, the two soldiers said.
“They did not fight,” said Mahmoud, who was conscripted into the army 18 months ago. “No one loves Assad, but no one could say it.”
“Assad forced us into the army,” he added. He had wanted to continue his studies but was ordered into the military, where he received a salary of $10 a month. His brother was forced to stay in the army for five and a half years, he said.
The soldiers were happy to be home. The police officer was wary of the new group in charge.
But the rebel commander, Mr. al-Nahar, was optimistic. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham fighters cared about the future of the nation, he said. “Most of them are for Syria, and I respect them,” he said.
He added that he hoped the new government could work out an agreement with the Kurdish group, too.
For many, the promises made during the rebel’s campaign provide hope about the potential for the future — even if it remains to be seen whether the new government makes good on them.
Importantly, for the new leadership, the rebel campaign was successful because it reached out to communities in the government-controlled parts of Syria and was in touch with people inside the regime’s structures, said Ammar Kahf, the executive director of the Omran Center for Strategic Studies in Istanbul.
Their promise that members of minority groups would not be harmed and a call for members of the security services to lay down their weapons sharply reduced the level of conflict, he said.
In the end, Mr. al-Assad’s grip on the country was anchored by the fear his regime instilled in the population, the Syrian police officer, Abed, said.
“We hate Assad, and we like life,” he said.
Ronen Bergman contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.
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2) Gazans Endure Harsh Conditions as New Year Begins
Several people were killed in an attack on the city of Jabaliya, according to the Palestinian Civil Defense. Israel’s military did not immediately comment.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 1, 2025
Children amid the damage at the site of an Israeli strike the previous night, in Jabaliya, in the central Gaza Strip on Wednesday. Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Displaced Gazans largely entered the new year on Wednesday shivering in tent camps or taking refuge in schools-turned-shelters as Israel’s war with Hamas neared its 16th month.
At least five people were killed in an Israeli strike in northern Gaza before dawn in the northern city of Jabaliya, according to the Palestinian Civil Defense, an emergency service overseen by the Hamas-run Interior Ministry.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the reported attack. The report could not be independently verified and Gaza health authorities do not differentiate between civilians and combatants when reporting death tolls.
More than a year into the war between Israel and Hamas, many Gazans are living in makeshift tents, and finding enough food and clean water has become a daily ordeal. Over the past few days, Gazans have endured chilly winter rainstorms; Gazan officials say some infants have died from the cold.
In the southern city of Khan Younis, Awad Abid, a displaced former taxi driver, spent the past two days huddling with his children in a half-flooded tent. Mr. Abid said he was barely able to purchase enough flour to keep them fed, let alone buy new blankets and coats.
“Tonight we’ll cover ourselves in blankets that are still drenched in water, because the sun was too weak to dry out,” said Mr. Abid.
In northern Gaza, Israeli ground forces have been fighting for almost three months against what Israel says is a renewed Hamas insurgency in the area that has displaced more than 100,000 people.
Repeated Israeli offensives have turned the area into a devastated landscape of vacant, torn-up streets and ruined buildings. On Wednesday night, the Israeli military again ordered residents remaining in parts of northern Gaza to leave for Gaza City, warning that it would soon operate there in response to Hamas rocket fire.
Aid groups have lamented a deteriorating humanitarian situation in northern Gaza. Israel says it is allowing enough aid to enter the area, although government attorneys conceded in a December court filing that the Israeli military might have initially underestimated how many people remained there.
Montaser Bahja, an English teacher from Jabaliya, said he was lucky enough to find an empty apartment in Gaza City to shelter with his family. In a vain effort to keep out of the cold, he spread plastic wrap over its window frames, which had been shattered in the fighting.
During the rainstorm, the near-constant sound of Israeli airstrikes slowed to the occasional distant blast, said Mr. Bahja. But then on New Year’s Eve, as the downpour began to let up, the bombardment resumed across northern Gaza, he said.
“We hoped that by the new year, the war would end,” said Mr. Bahja. “Instead, there was bombing all night.”
At least 45,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the Hamas-led attack on Israel last year prompted the war, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Hamas’s assault on Oct. 7, 2023, killed around 1,200 people in Israel and saw 250 taken hostage back to Gaza, mostly civilians, according to Israel.
Mediators are trying to secure a cease-fire deal to end the war and free the remaining hostages held in Gaza. Israeli officials have said they want a deal that frees at least some hostages but allows Israel to continue fighting if necessary, while Hamas has refused any agreement that does not include an end to the war.
Officials and mediators had voiced tentative optimism last month that the negotiations could move forward, citing a weakened Hamas more willing to make concessions and increased pressure by the incoming Trump administration on both sides. But that has yet to be borne out, despite last-ditch attempts by President Biden’s advisers to clinch a truce before he leaves office.
For Gazans, the reports of progress brought a surge of optimism — quickly followed by yet another crushing disappointment as the talks have appeared to stall.
“We looked through Facebook at videos of everyone abroad happy and celebrating the new year with their children,” said Mr. Abid. “Meanwhile, we’re still being bombed and hungry and cold.”
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3) Israeli Threat to Banish Aid Agency Looms Over Gaza
The U.N. agency known as UNRWA has been the backbone of aid to Gaza. Now, Israel is moving to ban it over accusations that it shielded Hamas militants.
By Jack Nicas, Reporting from Jerusalem and from the Qalandiya refugee camp in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Jan. 2, 2025
Bags of flour at a distribution center for the main U.N. aid agency that aids Palestinians in Gaza, UNRWA, in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, in October. Credit...Haitham Imad/EPA, via Shutterstock
To Palestinians, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, is a critical lifeline, providing food, water and medicine to hundreds of thousands of Gazans who have endured more than a year of war.
To the Israeli government, it is a dangerous cover for Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that led the 2023 surprise attack on Israel. Now, Israeli legislators have laid the groundwork to ban the agency with the passage of two bills set to take effect this month.
If Israeli authorities enforce the new laws, U.N. officials are warning that no other group will be able to replace UNRWA and that its crucial humanitarian operations in Gaza will grind to a halt at a moment when experts say famine is threatening parts of the territory.
U.N. officials say they are preparing to shutter UNRWA operations in both Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“It would be a massive impact on an already catastrophic situation,” said Jamie McGoldrick, who oversaw the U.N. humanitarian operation across Gaza and the West Bank until April. “If that is what the Israeli intention is — to remove any ability for us to save lives — you have to question what is the thinking and what is the end goal?”
UNRWA, the main U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, stands apart from other agencies in the international body. Its 30,000 employees — mostly Palestinians — operate schools, medical clinics, job-training centers, food banks and even garbage collection for six million Palestinians across Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, UNRWA has transformed itself into an anchor of the international aid response. With 5,000 workers still on the ground, it oversees aid deliveries, runs shelters and medical clinics and distributes food assistance. It clears trash and human waste and provides the fuel that powers hospitals, water wells and nearly every other aid organization in Gaza.
“The world has abandoned us. We have nothing but the aid we get from UNRWA to survive,” said Sami Abu Darweesh, 30, who lives in a refugee camp in southern Gaza run by UNRWA. “If that stops, what will we do?”
Israel and UNRWA have had a tense relationship for decades. It ruptured last year when Israel accused 18 of the agency’s employees of taking part in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel. Israel has also claimed that Hamas uses UNRWA schools to hide fighters.
A U.N. investigation found that nine employees may have been involved in the attack on Israel and the agency fired them. U.N. officials reject most of Israel’s accusations and say the government has refused to share much evidence.
A recent New York Times analysis of Hamas records showed that at least 24 members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, a smaller Palestinian militant group, worked at UNRWA schools.
In late October, the Israeli Parliament voted overwhelmingly for legislation to ban UNRWA activity on Israeli soil. The ban is set to go into effect this month, 90 days after the measures were passed.
There are a number of uncertainties surrounding what exactly will happen next.
The legislation does not directly address the agency’s operations in Gaza or the West Bank, and the Israeli government has been vague about how, or whether, it plans to enforce the new laws there.
Sharren Haskel, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, declined to clarify the government’s approach to UNRWA in the territories when she spoke to reporters in late December. She suggested only that Palestinian officials should deal with UNRWA in the West Bank, while accusing the agency of harboring terrorists in Gaza.
U.N. officials have said they are preparing to close down operations in both territories largely because the laws would prohibit Israeli officials from interacting with UNRWA. The agency says it must coordinate with Israel’s military every time its workers deliver aid or move across Gaza and parts of the West Bank.
“If we can’t share that information with Israeli authorities on a daily basis,” said Louise Wateridge, a senior UNRWA official on the ground in Gaza, “then we have staff lives in danger.” She said more than 250 UNRWA workers had already been killed in the Gaza war.
The Israeli lawmakers behind the legislation have suggested that they hope it will effectively banish the agency from Gaza and the West Bank. Some have said that the 90-day deadline for the laws to take effect was intended to give time for other aid groups to take UNRWA’s place.
“We gave the government 90 days, and, actually, the entire world 90 days,” said Yuli Edelstein, the chairman of the parliamentary committee that drafted the UNRWA bills. “Whoever truly cares about the population, let them bring about the groups that would help.”
Israel is already moving away from cooperating with UNRWA, agency officials say.
Officials at the agency said the Israeli military had prevented UNRWA from using crossings between Israel and northern Gaza, an area where Israel has mounted intense assaults in recent months.
At the same time, UNRWA’s aid deliveries have been repeatedly looted in southern Gaza, prompting the agency to halt deliveries at one key southern border crossing since the beginning of December.
That has deepened Gazans’ desperation, Ms. Wateridge said.
Enas al-Hila, 31, said she and her three children fled their home in central Gaza earlier in the war and now live in a tent in a camp managed by UNRWA. She said the agency had been providing food, dried milk and diapers for her children.
Even those basic supplies have recently become rare, forcing her to wait in long lines to buy them from resellers for several times the normal price.
“UNRWA has always been our only hope for jobs, food, flour,” she said. “It’s the lifeline for us and our children, just as it was for our parents and grandparents.”
The United Nations established UNRWA in 1949 to aid the approximately 750,000 Palestinians who were made refugees in the war surrounding Israel’s founding in 1948.
Many Israelis view the agency as perpetuating conflict because generations of Palestinians have been allowed to inherit refugee status. Some Israelis also accuse UNRWA teachers of indoctrinating young Palestinians to hate Israel. The United Nations denies this.
Since the laws banning UNRWA were passed, the Israeli government has kept up a drumbeat of criticism of the agency and suggested that plenty of aid groups were prepared to replace it.
The United States is among the nations that have pushed Israel to allow UNRWA to keep operating. Washington has long been the primary funder of the agency, though it suspended donations in January after Israel’s accusations.
U.S. officials warned Israel in October that banning UNRWA “would devastate the Gaza humanitarian response at this critical moment.”
In Gaza, UNRWA has become central to the aid response partly because it was already so woven into the community. Before the war, UNRWA said its 288 schools educated 300,000 students in Gaza, nearly half of the territory’s school-age children, and its 22 medical clinics handled 2.6 million patient visits a year.
“My grandparents used to say, ‘You have God with you and the UNRWA coupon,’” recalled Yasser Abu al-Assal, 39, who said his family long relied on the agency for education and medical care before the war and for food since the conflict began. “Now it feels like even that promise is slipping away.”
UNRWA is also critical in parts of the West Bank, serving 900,000 Palestinians there.
A recent visit to the Qalandiya refugee camp in the West Bank and East Jerusalem showed how UNRWA operates in a quasi-governmental role.
In the poor, densely populated neighborhood of at least 16,500 people, UNRWA runs four schools, a job training center, a medical clinic and garbage collection. All the services are free.
The Qalandiya camp is one of the UNRWA operations most likely to be closed by the new laws.
UNRWA schools serve 50,000 students in the West Bank. The public schools elsewhere in the territory — mostly run by the Palestinian Authority government — are already near breaking point with 650,000 students. Teachers at those schools have gone on strike in recent years because of low pay.
Jamila Lafi, 40, has two children in UNRWA schools and a third at UNRWA’s job-training center in Qalandiya, and her entire family uses its medical clinics. The agency’s classes are overcrowded but there is no alternative, she said.
“We don’t have the means to send them anywhere else,” she said. “Without UNRWA, I don’t know how we’d survive.”
Reporting was contributed by Bilal Shbair from Gaza, Johnatan Reiss from Tel Aviv and Fatima Abdul Karim from the West Bank.
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4) Palestinian Authority Suspends Al Jazeera, in Latest Blow to Channel
The authority’s official news media accused the Qatari-backed broadcaster of “inciting sedition” and “interfering in internal Palestinian affairs,” though it did not provide detailed examples of law breaking.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 1, 2025
The Palestinian Authority announced on Wednesday that it would temporarily bar Al Jazeera from operating in its areas, accusing the Qatari-funded broadcaster of “inciting sedition” and “interfering in internal Palestinian affairs.” The move comes several months after the news outlet was banned by Israel on national security grounds.
WAFA, the Palestinian government’s official media arm, said Al Jazeera — one of the Arab world’s most influential broadcasters — must immediately shutter its local offices and “freeze all the work of its journalists.” The ban would last until the channel had “corrected its legal status,” the announcement said.
Palestinian officials did not provide detailed examples of how Al Jazeera had broken any local laws. The Palestinian Authority administers some areas in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, including major Palestinian cities.
Al Jazeera denounced the Palestinian decision, calling it “an attempt to prevent coverage of the escalating events witnessed in the occupied territories.” The channel broadcast footage of Palestinian security officers handing the order to one of its journalists.
“From this moment, any broadcast or activities are forbidden,” an officer said.
Palestinian critics and human rights groups have charged the Palestinian Authority with launching an increasingly authoritarian crackdown on dissent, violently assaulting demonstrators and intimidating critics of Mahmoud Abbas, the authority’s president.
The decision was the latest blow to Al Jazeera’s operations in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza in recent months.
In May, Israel shut down Al Jazeera in the country and shuttered its offices on security grounds, prompting an outcry from press-freedom advocates. Months later, Israeli forces raided the channel’s offices in the West Bank city of Ramallah, seizing computers and cameras.
Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have long labeled the network a “mouthpiece” for Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that led the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that set off the war in Gaza.
Israel has also accused members of the Al Jazeera team in Gaza of belonging to Hamas. In July, the Israeli military killed Ismail al-Ghoul, an Al Jazeera reporter in Gaza, in an airstrike, claiming he was a member of Hamas’s military wing. Al Jazeera has rejected all the allegations as baseless.
But there has also been bad blood between Al Jazeera and the Palestinian Authority, which is dominated by the secularist Fatah party. Fatah officials have sometimes accused the channel of being a bulwark of support for Hamas, which ejected Fatah from Gaza in 2007.
The tensions appeared to escalate in recent weeks after the Palestinian Authority launched a rare operation in the northern West Bank city of Jenin to crack down on militants, some of whom are affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. At least five Palestinian officers were killed in battles with the militants since the operation began last month.
Pressed for examples of incitement, Mounir al-Jaghoub, a Fatah official, pointed to an Al Jazeera clip critical of the crackdown in Jenin as evidence. Through a satirical skit, the video accused the Palestinian Authority of collaborating with Israel to crack down on Palestinian militants fighting against Israeli rule.
In its statement, Al Jazeera accused the Palestinian Authority of “attempting to hide the truth of events in the occupied territories, especially Jenin.”
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5) Honduras Threatens to Expel U.S. Military as Latin America Gears Up for Trump Deportations
In pushing back against President-elect Donald J. Trump’s plan, President Xiomara Castro threatened that a base hosting U.S. troops could “lose all reason to exist in Honduras.”
By Annie Correal, Reporting from Mexico City, Jan. 3, 2025
President Xiomara Castro of Honduras on Wednesday, in an image released by the Honduran Presidency. She warned that she would oust the U.S. military from Honduras if President-elect Donald J. Trump made good on his threat to order massive deportations of Hondurans. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Honduras’s president threatened to push the U.S. military out of a base it built decades ago in the Central American country should President-elect Donald J. Trump carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants from the United States.
The response by President Xiomara Castro of Honduras, in an address broadcast on television and radio on Wednesday, was the first concrete pushback by a leader in the region to Mr. Trump’s plan to send back millions of Latin American citizens living in the United States.
The threat came as foreign ministers were set to meet later this month to address the deportation issue.
“Faced with a hostile attitude of mass expulsion of our brothers, we would have to consider a change in our policies of cooperation with the United States, especially in the military arena,” Ms. Castro said of Honduras.
“Without paying a cent for decades,” she added, “they maintain military bases in our territory, which in this case would lose all reason to exist in Honduras.”
Honduras’ foreign minister, Enrique Reina, said afterward in a radio interview that Honduras’s leader had the power to suspend without the approval of the country’s Congress a decades-old agreement with the United States that allowed it to build the Soto Cano air base and operate America’s largest military task force in Central America from there.
The move would present grave risks for the small country, which depends on the United States as its largest trading partner and a source of humanitarian aid.
Will Freeman, a fellow in Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said of the Honduran president’s statement: “I’m surprised a bit by the boldness of it.”
A spokesman for the Trump transition team, Brian Hughes, responding to Ms. Castro’s warning, said in a statement, “The Trump administration looks forward to engaging our Latin American partners to ensure our southern border is secure and illegal immigrants can be returned to their country of origin.”
Mr. Trump promised to swiftly deport undocumented immigrants when he took office, but his transition team has not shared any concrete plans, leaving Latin American governments guessing even as they try to prepare. Mr. Trump also vowed to slap a 25 percent tariff on Mexico and Canada if they did not stop the flow of migrants and fentanyl to the United States.
Most governments in Latin America, including Mexico’s, have worked to stay on a good footing with Mr. Trump, even as they have sought to emphasize the contributions their citizens make to the American economy, whatever their legal status.
This week, Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico, reiterated: “We will continue to demonstrate how the Mexican people in the U.S. contribute in a very important way to the U.S. economy. And if Mexican people were not in the U.S., there would be no food on American tables.”
The governments have also sought to reassure their citizens in the United States that they are preparing for any large-scale expulsions. Honduras has said it will establish mobile consulates, and Mexico created an online application for its citizens to alert consulate authorities if they are at imminent risk of being detained.
On Friday, in an apparent shift from her previous goal to reach a deal with Mr. Trump to avoid receiving such migrants, Ms. Sheinbaum also suggested that Mexico might take in deportees from other countries, even as she reiterated that her administration did not agree with mass deportations.
“We are going to ask the United States that, as far as possible, migrants who are not from Mexico can be taken to their countries of origin. And if not, we can collaborate through different mechanisms,” Ms. Sheinbaum said.
“There will be a time to talk with the U.S. government if these deportations really occur,” she added. “But here we are going to receive them; we are going to receive them well, and we have a plan.”
Governments in the region rely on remittances from immigrants in the United States. They account for as much as 25 percent of Honduras’s economy. More than half a million undocumented Hondurans — about 5 percent of the Honduran population — were estimated to be living in the United States in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center.
Since the 1980s, an American task force has operated out of Soto Cano, an air base owned by the Honduran government in Comayagua, a town about 50 miles from the capital, Tegucigalpa. It was originally built by the United States in the 1980s to help contain what it said was the Communist threat in the region.
Soto Cano currently hosts more than a thousand American military and civilian personnel, a spokeswoman for the task force there, Joint Task Force Bravo, said on Friday.
“We are guests of the Honduran government on a Honduran base,” said the spokeswoman, Capt. Hillary Gibson.
While the task force has played a role in counternarcotics efforts, Captain Gibson said, it has recently focused on disaster relief and administering humanitarian aid.
The United States Embassy in Honduras did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. military maintains a presence at bases in other countries in the region, including in El Salvador, though these have fewer U.S. military troops than Soto Cano.
While many Hondurans celebrated Ms. Castro’s statements, some elected officials sought to distance themselves from the president. Several members of Congress noted the need for dialogue with the Trump administration and pointed out that pushing out the U.S. military from the base would not stop Mr. Trump from carrying out mass deportations.
Mr. Reina, the foreign minister, said on Thursday that Honduras intended to stay on good terms with the United States. But he stood behind the president’s statements, saying that “if mass deportations that violate the rights of migrants come about,” the country’s leaders had “a right to rethink” its relationship with the United States.
Mr. Reina also announced on social media that the leaders of Honduras and Mexico had called the foreign ministers’ meeting to discuss mass deportations. The post was accompanied by a photo of Ms. Castro holding hands with Ms. Sheinbaum.
Mr. Freeman, the fellow in Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the Honduran government’s posture came as a surprise because while Ms. Castro had recently taken what he described as a publicly confrontational approach to the United States — including moving to end a longstanding extradition treaty — behind closed doors she had been known to “play friendly” with the U.S. ambassador, trying to elicit America’s continued support.
He said it was also surprising that Ms. Castro would send such a warning before Mr. Trump assumed office, particularly in light of statements from Mr. Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida.
Mr. Rubio had warned that Honduras under Ms. Castro’s government could become “the next Venezuela,” Mr. Freeman said, where a spiraling crisis under the authoritarian rule of Nicolás Maduro has led to mass migration.
“I think it will sour the relationship, which would have already been sour, with the Trump administration,” Mr. Freeman said. “And I don’t see these northern Central American countries are in a position to leverage much with the U.S. over the shape of migration policy.”
“Now Mexico,” he added, “is a totally different story.”
The United States does not have full diplomatic relations with some countries in the region, including Venezuela and Cuba, which have faced harsh U.S. sanctions. As a result, these countries are unlikely to accept large numbers of deportation flights.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed reporting.
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6) Gaza Rescuers Are Haunted by Voices of Those They Couldn’t Save
Rescuers rushing to the scene of Israeli airstrikes save those who they can, but are forced to leave many behind. “My soul is tired from this war,” one said.
By Raja Abdulrahim, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 4, 2025
A rescue after an Israeli bombardment in northern Gaza City in October. Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When he sleeps, Nooh al-Shaghnobi, a rescue worker in Gaza, is haunted by the cries of those he could not save.
The memories of the past 14 months come flooding back, nightmares of collapsed buildings with no equipment to dig out survivors.
“We hear the voices of the people under the rubble,” he said in an interview between rescue calls. “Imagine there are people under the rubble who we know are alive, but we can’t save them. We have to leave them to die.”
For more than a year now, Gaza’s rescue workers, paramedics and ambulance drivers have toiled on the front lines of the war, racing to the sites of countless Israeli airstrikes to try to save those who survived and recover the bodies of those who did not. In the war’s first seven weeks alone, Israel fired nearly 30,000 munitions into Gaza, unleashing one of the most intense bombing campaigns in contemporary warfare.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has said that Gaza rescuers face dangerous conditions without sufficient equipment, vehicles or fuel. They are mostly left to dig out survivors from under tons of broken stone, concrete and twisted metal with their hands and rudimentary tools.
The carnage has taken a heavy physical, mental and emotional toll on rescuers, and Israeli strikes have killed at least 118 of them during the conflict, according to local rescue officials.
“First responders suffer from unspeakable levels of stress, anxiety and frustration,” said Hisham Mhanna, a Red Cross spokesman in Gaza. “We have heard them describe feelings of helplessness toward the victims who they could not save, and of the immense pain of losing colleagues on duty.”
From the war’s onset — which began after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel — rescue workers were struggling to keep up with the pace of airstrikes. In the first year of the war, the Israeli military said it struck more than 40,000 targets across an area the size of Detroit with approximately 60,000 bombs and other munitions.
This war has been like no other that Gazans have lived through, with no safe place to shelter and no target off limits, residents and aid officials say. The Israeli military has said it takes “feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm.”
Despite the trauma, Mr. al-Shaghnobi, 23, said he was compelled to persist with his rescue work with the Gaza Civil Defense, an emergency services agency, knowing that he could save at least some lives.
He said he regularly shared videos and images on social media to draw attention to the suffering in Gaza.
In one video posted in October in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City, he calls out to a young boy whose muffled screams can be heard from under rubble.
“Don’t be scared,” Mr. al-Shagnobi yells, issuing a stream of rapid-fire instructions: “Rashid, don’t tire yourself out. Don’t talk. Don’t lose consciousness.”
Illuminated by a head lamp, the rescuer crawls in between collapsed floors to reach Rashid’s partly exposed head, the rest of him buried in crushed cement and stone. After three hours, Rashid is pulled alive from the rubble.
“Every day is harder than the day before,” Mr. al-Shaghnobi said. “My soul is tired from this war.”
The Red Cross, which has provided masks, boots, protective uniforms and body bags to rescuers, has also offered limited mental health counseling. But given the extreme trauma of the situation, the sessions have not been enough, said Mr. Mhanna, the Red Cross spokesman.
Amir Ahmed, a paramedic, said that a few months ago, his nightmares had become too much for him and he quit his work with the Palestine Red Crescent rescue service.
“You reach a point where you can no longer continue with this,” he said recently.
Mr. Ahmed said he had worked in antiquity preservation before the war, and also volunteered with the Red Crescent during Gaza’s many conflicts because he was trained as an emergency medical technician. He said he was called to duty on the second day of the war.
As the conflict dragged on, he said, he found himself falling deeper into depression. At home with his wife and three children, he grew increasingly tense and angry.
Some days, he tried to avoid talking to anyone and wanted to spend all of his time sleeping, even when they were displaced in tents or crowded into one-room apartments.
“I would dream of the people who were in pieces that I picked up with my own hands,” he said, lowering his voice.
The smell of blood lingered on his hands for days after one rescue and recovery, he said, adding that there had been almost no psychological support or mental health help.
Although he feels guilty about quitting his work as a rescuer, he said he did not regret his decision.
Some rescue workers accuse Israel of targeting them, an accusation that the Red Crescent and the Gaza Civil Defense have echoed.
The Israeli military said it had never targeted rescue workers, and would never do so deliberately. “The Israel Defense Forces also recognize the importance of the special protections given to medical teams under international humanitarian law and takes action to prevent harm to them,” a military statement said.
Mr. Ahmed said he had lost several colleagues during the war.
Among them were two Red Crescent paramedics, Yousef Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun. In February, the two were dispatched to rescue Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old girl who was trapped in a vehicle with several dead family members.
They lost contact with Red Crescent dispatchers soon after arriving at the scene and nearly two weeks later were found dead in their burned ambulance. Hind, too, was found dead inside her family’s vehicle.
The Red Crescent accused Israeli forces of bombing the ambulance as it arrived “despite prior coordination” between the organization and the Israeli military. The Israeli military did not comment on the attack despite repeated requests.
Early on in the war, Mr. al-Shaghnobi said, he and his fellow rescuers would bid one another farewell each night, unsure how much longer they would survive the Israeli onslaught.
In November 2023, he said, he was with his crewmates at the scene of a seven-story building that had been felled by an Israeli airstrike days earlier, trying to retrieve the bodies of a family.
As the rescuers combed through the rubble, another Israeli airstrike hit, killing two rescue workers and the two surviving family members, according to accounts from relatives at the time and Mr. al-Shaghnobi.
He captured the immediate aftermath of the strike on video.
“Why is this happening to those of us who just rescue people?” he said more recently. “We have nothing to do with the weapons or the resistance. All our work is humanitarian work. Why are the Israelis targeting us?”
Naseem Hassan, a paramedic and ambulance driver, said that his brother was killed nearly a year ago at Al Amal Hospital while working with the Red Crescent. He died in an airstrike after going up to the hospital’s roof to turn on a generator, the surviving brother said. The Israeli military said it was “not aware of the incident.”
Mr. Hassan, 47, said he had been worn down by the strain and exhaustion of rescuing the war’s wounded.
When the conflict began, he said, he weighed 190 pounds. Now, after living mostly off canned food and bug-infested bread and enduring physically draining days spent digging through rubble, he is down to about 150 pounds.
“Mentally, we are patient and resolute, because we have to be,” he said. “If we were to have a nervous breakdown, who else is going to rescue people? Who is going to recover the bodies? Who is going to bury them?”
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting.
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7) State Dept. Tells Congress It Plans to Send $8 Billion in Arms to Israel
The arms transfer could be the final one the Biden administration provides to Israel. President Biden has largely ignored critics of Israel’s war in Gaza who have urged a halt to weapons aid.
By Edward Wong, Published Jan. 3, 2025, Updated Jan. 4, 2025
An Israeli F-15 fighter jet over southern Israel last year. Missiles for fighter jets are among the items in the arms package. Credit...Amir Cohen/Reuters
The State Department has told Congress that it intends to approve $8 billion in purchases of U.S.-made arms by Israel, the department’s office in charge of arms transfers said on Friday.
It could be the final set of arms transfers to Israel by President Biden, and represents a marker of continued support from the administration to a longtime ally even as the rising death toll in Israel’s war in Gaza has fueled growing opposition within his party to further weapons sales.
The weapons package includes artillery shells, small-diameter bombs, missiles for fighter jets and helicopters, and GPS guidance systems for bombs, according to the informal notification provided to two committees of Congress. Many of the weapons are not for immediate use but instead would go into a manufacturing pipeline, with delivery possibly taking years.
Israel would use money provided by the United States to buy the weapons. The annual aid had been about $3 billion, but Mr. Biden increased that amount after Israel began waging war in Gaza following terrorist attacks by Hamas that left about 1,200 dead on Oct. 7, 2023.
During the informal notification period, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee are expected to review the proposed sales and ask questions of the State Department. They can hold up the transfers if they have doubts. The top Democrats on both committees have been more skeptical of arms transfers to Israel, while the top Republicans have quickly granted approval.
Once the four top members grant approval to the State Department, the agency would give formal notification to Congress, which essentially means the proposed sales will go through. Congress would need a two-thirds vote in each house to pass a resolution blocking the sales.
The informal notification was reported earlier by Axios.
Weapons transfers to Israel have been a contentious issue that has dogged Mr. Biden among liberals. In the presidential election in November, some progressive voters and some Muslim American voters said they could not bring themselves to back Mr. Biden because of his steadfast support of Israel.
The Israeli military, supplied with U.S. weapons, has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, including many civilians, during the war, according to the health ministry in Gaza. Critics of Israel’s conduct of the war have beseeched Mr. Biden to withhold weapons aid to Israel to pressure it to curb its military operations, which have demolished most of Gaza.
Mr. Biden and his top aides, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, have tried to walk a fine line, sometimes criticizing Israeli actions even as they have said Israel has the right to defend itself. At one point, Mr. Biden said he was withholding a single shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel to try to dissuade it from destroying Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, but the Israeli military reduced most of Rafah to rubble anyway.
At another point, the Biden administration held up an order of 24,000 assault rifles out of concern that settlers in the West Bank could use the rifles in violence against Palestinians there.
President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has a record of strongly backing Israel and supported robust weapons shipments to the Jewish state in his first administration, has been urging Israel and Hamas to enter into a cease-fire deal before he takes office this month.
American officials working under Mr. Biden are trying to make a cease-fire deal now to get hostages abducted in the Oct. 7 attacks freed.
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8) Surgeon General Calls for Cancer Warnings on Alcohol
Dr. Vivek Murthy’s report cites studies linking alcoholic beverages to at least seven malignancies, including breast cancer. But to add warning labels, Congress would have to act.
By Roni Caryn Rabin, Jan. 3, 2025
The advisory called for updating labels on all alcoholic beverages with a warning that drinking heightens the risk for at least seven cancers, including common ones like breast and colon cancers. Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Alcohol is a leading preventable cause of cancer, and alcoholic beverages should carry a warning label as packs of cigarettes do, the U.S. surgeon general said on Friday.
It is the latest salvo in a fierce debate about the risks and benefits of moderate drinking as the influential U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans are about to be updated. For decades, moderate drinking was said to help prevent heart attacks and strokes.
That perception has been embedded in the dietary advice given to Americans. But growing research has linked drinking, sometimes even within the recommended limits, to various types of cancer.
Labels currently affixed to bottles and cans of alcoholic beverages warn about drinking while pregnant or before driving and operating other machinery, and about general “health risks.”
But alcohol directly contributes to 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 related deaths each year, the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, said.
He called for updating the labels to include a heightened risk of breast cancer, colon cancer and at least five other malignancies now linked by scientific studies to alcohol consumption.
“Many people out there assume that as long as they’re drinking at the limits or below the limits of current guidelines of one a day for women and two for men, that there is no risk to their health or well-being,” Dr. Murthy said in an interview.
“The data does not bear that out for cancer risk.”
Only Congress can mandate new warning labels of the sort Dr. Murthy recommended, and it’s not clear that the incoming administration would support the change.
Still, President-elect Donald J. Trump does not drink, and his choice to head the Health and Human Services Department, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., swore off alcohol and drugs decades ago, and says he regularly attends AA meetings.
There is no question that heavy consumption is harmful. But supporters of moderate drinking — including makers of wine, beer and spirits, and some physicians and scientists — argue that a little alcohol each day may reduce cardiovascular disease, the No. 1 killer in the United States.
Newer scientific studies have criticized the methodology of earlier studies, however, and have challenged that view, which was once a consensus.
While most cancer deaths occur at drinking levels that exceed the current recommended dietary guidelines, the risk for cancers of the breast, the mouth and the throat may rise with consumption of as little as one drink a day, or even less, Dr. Murthy said on Friday.
Overall, one of every six breast cancer cases is attributable to alcohol consumption, Dr. Murthy said. More recent studies have also linked moderate alcohol consumption to certain forms of heart disease, including atrial fibrillation, a heart arrhythmia.
Two scientific reviews will be used to inform the updated recommendations about alcohol consumption in the federal dietary guidelines.
Five years ago, the scientific report that informed the writing of the 2020-2025 dietary guidelines acknowledged that alcohol is a carcinogen and generally unhealthy and suggested “tightening guidelines” by capping the recommendation for men at one standard drink, or 14 grams of alcohol a day.
When the final guidelines were drafted, however, there was no change in the advice that moderate drinking of up to two drinks a day for men was acceptable.
But the government acknowledged emerging evidence indicating that “even drinking within the recommended limits may increase the overall risk of death from various causes, such as from several types of cancer and some forms of cardiovascular disease.”
Since then, even more studies have linked alcoholic beverages to cancer. Yet any attempt to change the warning labels on alcoholic beverages is likely to face an uphill battle.
The current warning label has not been changed since it was adopted in 1988, even though the link between alcohol and breast cancer has been known for decades.
It was first mentioned in the 2000 U.S. Dietary Guidelines. In 2016, the surgeon general’s report on alcohol, drugs and health linked alcohol misuse to seven different types of cancer.
More recently, a scientific review of the research on moderate drinking, carried out under the auspices of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, was commissioned by Congress.
That analysis found a link between alcohol consumption and a slight increase in breast cancer, but no clear link to any other cancers. The report also revived the theory that moderate drinking is linked to fewer heart attack and stroke deaths, and fewer deaths overall, compared with never drinking.
The World Health Organization says there is no safe limit for alcohol consumption, however, and 47 nations require warnings on alcoholic beverages. But cancer is rarely mentioned.
To date, only South Korea has a label warning about liver cancer, though manufacturers can choose alternative labels that don’t mention cancer. Ireland is currently slated to introduce labels that say there is a “direct link between alcohol and fatal cancers” in 2026.
The industry has a strong history of fighting warning labels that mention cancer, and alcohol-producing nations have also challenged warning labels under international trade law.
Industry opposition led to the premature termination of a federally funded Canadian study of the impact of warning labels that mentioned cancer.
The surgeon general’s advisory provided a brief overview of research studies and reviews published in the past two decades, including a global study of 195 countries and territories involving 28 million people.
They all found that higher levels of alcohol consumption were associated with a greater risk of cancer.
Other studies looked at specific cancers, like breast cancer and mouth cancer, finding the risks increased by 10 percent and 40 percent, respectively, for those who had just one drink a day, when compared with those who did not drink.
The report described the biological mechanisms by which alcohol is known to induce cancerous changes at the cellular level.
The most widely accepted theory is that inside the body, alcohol breaks down into acetaldehyde, a metabolite that binds to DNA and damages it, allowing a cell to start growing uncontrollably and creating a malignant tumor.
Animal experiments have shown that rodents whose drinking water was spiked with either ethanol, the alcohol used in alcoholic beverages, or with acetaldehyde developed large numbers of tumors all over their bodies.
Research has shown that alcohol generates oxidative stress, which increases inflammation and can damage DNA.
It also alters levels of hormones like estrogen, which can play a role in breast cancer development, and makes it easier for carcinogens like tobacco smoke particles to be absorbed into the body, increasing susceptibility to cancers of the mouth and the throat.
The surgeon general’s report also goes into detail about the increase in risk associated with drinking, differentiating between the increases in absolute risk and in relative risk.
For example, the absolute risk of breast cancer over a woman’s life span is about 11.3 percent (11 out of 100) for those who have less than a drink a week.
The risk increases to 13.1 percent (13 of 100 individuals) at one drink a day, and up to 15.3 percent (15 of 100) at two drinks per day.
For men, the absolute risk of developing an alcohol-related cancer increases from about 10 percent (10 of every 100 individuals) for those who consume less than one drink a week to 11.4 percent (11 per 100) for those who have a drink every day on average. It rises to 13 percent (13 of 100 individuals) for those who have two drinks a day on average.
Many Americans don’t know there is a link between alcohol and cancer.
Fewer than half of Americans identified alcohol use as a risk factor for cancer, compared with 89 percent who recognized tobacco as a carcinogen, according to a 2019 survey of U.S. adults aged 18 and older carried out by the American Institute for Cancer Research.
Yet alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of cancer, after tobacco and obesity, according to the surgeon general’s report.
Dr. Murthy said it was important to know that the risk rises as alcohol consumption increases. But each individual’s risk of cancer is different, depending on family history, genetic makeup and environmental exposures.
“I wish we had a magic cutoff we could tell people is safe,” he said. “What we do know is that less is better when it comes to reducing your cancer risk.”
“If an individual drinks occasionally for special events, or if you’re drinking a drink or two a week, your risk is likely to be significantly less than if you’re drinking every day,” he added.
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9) Israel’s Military Pounds Gaza as Pressure Mounts for Cease-fire
Gaza’s health ministry said that 88 people had been killed over the past day. Israeli and Hamas officials have been holding indirect cease-fire talks via mediators in Qatar.
By Hiba Yazbek and Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, Jan. 5, 2025
The site of an Israeli strike in Gaza City on Saturday. Credit...Rami Ali/Reuters
Dozens of Israeli strikes pounded the Gaza Strip over the weekend as Israeli and Hamas officials continued indirect cease-fire talks through mediators in Qatar.
Israel’s military said on Sunday that it had hit more than 100 targets across the enclave over the weekend, including sites from which militants had fired at least four projectiles toward Israeli territory on Friday and Saturday. It said that the strikes had killed Hamas militants and that the military had taken measures to mitigate the risk of harming civilians. The claims could not be independently verified.
The Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Sunday that 88 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes over the last 24 hours. The ministry’s figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The Gaza Civil Defense, an emergency services agency, said that its crews had responded to multiple airstrikes on family homes on Sunday in which several people were killed and wounded.
Pressure has been mounting on both sides to reach a cease-fire agreement that would include the release of hostages held in Gaza before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office on Jan. 20. Hamas and Israel both said they were sending delegations to the Qatari capital, Doha, in recent days to meet with mediators.
The Israeli delegation remained in Doha over the weekend, according to an Israeli person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a lack of authorization to discuss the secretive talks publicly. The person said that the discussions in Doha were making slow progress and were aimed at reaching a limited deal that would see a temporary halt in the fighting and some Israeli hostages released in exchange for a number of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.
Reflecting the abiding gap between the sides, at least in their public positions, Hamas said in a statement on Friday that the current round of talks would focus on an agreement leading to a complete cease-fire and the details for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. Israel had not committed to ending the war, an official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said last week.
Roughly 100 hostages are still being held in Gaza out of some 250 people taken captive during the Hamas-led attacks in October 2023 that prompted the war. At least a third of them are presumed to be dead.
A weeklong truce in November 2023 allowed for the release of 105 hostages, but subsequent efforts to reach a cease-fire have faltered amid gaps in the two sides’ demands. Each side blames the other for the failure to reach a deal.
Israeli officials have recently said that they believe that Hamas is rebuilding its forces in Gaza. And the group appears to be recruiting new fighters faster than Israel can eliminate them.
Security officials reportedly told an Israeli parliamentary committee last week that Hamas has up to 19,000 fighters, with about 9,000 of them in organized units. Before the war, Israel estimated that Hamas had roughly 25,000 fighters, though Hamas never confirmed that figure.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in November that Israel’s military had killed close to 20,000 fighters.
In all, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been killed during the war, according to the health ministry in Gaza.
And as hopes for even a limited cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas rise again, Palestinians and human rights organizations say the humanitarian situation in Gaza is getting even more desperate.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said on Sunday that overnight Israeli airstrikes near Al-Amal Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis caused significant damage to several hospital facilities and killed one person.
Last week, Israeli forces raided the last remaining major hospital in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan, and forced its staff and patients to evacuate. The Israeli military said that Kamal Adwan was a stronghold for Hamas and that it was carrying out “targeted operations” in the area.
The hospital had been the main provider of medical care in the northernmost stretch of Gaza amid a monthslong offensive by Israel’s military against what it says is a resurgent Hamas.
The World Health Organization said that the raid on Kamal Adwan “put the last major health facility in North Gaza out of service” — and that the remaining patients, caregivers and health workers were transferred to the Indonesian Hospital.
But on Sunday, Gaza’s health ministry said that the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza was no longer providing services to patients or the wounded, leaving the northern part of the enclave without any functioning hospitals amid the near-constant bombardment.
Aaron Boxerman contributed to this report.
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10) In Damascus, Syrians Reclaim Freedoms Off Limits Under al-Assad
Residents of Syria’s capital are picnicking on a once-forbidden mountaintop and trading openly in dollars and imported Nescafe. They say the city seems theirs again.
By Raja Abdulrahim, Photographs by Laura Boushnak, Reporting from Damascus, Syria, Jan. 5, 2025
Painting Syria’s new flag on the face of a girl on Friday outside the Umayyad Mosque, where the Assad regime long suppressed antigovernment demonstrations.
For much of her life, Sumaya Ainaya spent weekend and summer nights on Mount Qasioun, which overlooks the city of Damascus, joined by other Syrians drinking coffee, smoking hookah and eating corn on the cob roasted on grills nearby.
But soon after the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, the military under President Bashar al-Assad closed the mountain to civilians. Suddenly, instead of families and friends shooting fireworks into the sky, soldiers with tanks and artillery launchers were firing at rebel-held areas below.
This New Year’s Eve, weeks after a coalition of rebels ousted the Syrian regime, Ms. Ainaya, 56, and her family returned to Mount Qasioun with snacks, soda and scarves to protect from the winter chill — and reclaimed a favorite leisure spot.
“Thank God, we’ve returned now — we feel like we can breathe again,” said Ms. Ainaya, an Arabic literature graduate and a mother of four, standing along a ridge and pointing out several Damascus landmarks.
“We feel like the city has returned to us,” said her son Muhammad Qatafani, 21, a dental student.
Across Damascus, as in much of the country, Syrians are reclaiming, and in some cases embracing anew, spaces and freedoms that had been off limits for years under the Assad regime. There were places ordinary Syrians were not allowed to go and things that they were not permitted to say when the Assad family was in power. The country, many said, increasingly felt as if it did not belong to them.
But with the newfound sense of freedom comes some trepidation about the future under a government formed by Islamist rebels, and whether with time it might institute new restrictions and limitations.
Many Syrians are watching each decision and announcement as a harbinger of how their new rulers may govern. Last week, Syria’s de facto new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, said it could take two to three years to draft a new Constitution and up to four years to hold elections, alarming Syrians who fear they may have traded one authoritarian leader for another.
For now, there is also a level of chaos under the interim government as it races to prioritize certain state-building measures over others. With many economic restrictions and regulations gone, men and boys sell smuggled gas from large water jugs on street corners. The city’s traffic is snarled, as few police officers are on patrol, and double parking is rife, residents said.
Despite the anxiety, people are returning to or rediscovering spaces across Damascus, the capital. Protest songs that could have landed someone in prison a month ago can be heard on the street.
“We weren’t seeing the city, Damascus, or any city, in all its details,” Yaman Alsabek, a youth group leader, said of his country under the Assad regime. “The public spaces — we stopped going to them because we felt they weren’t for us, they were for the regime.”
His organization, Sanad Team for Development, has begun to organize youth efforts to help clean the streets and direct traffic. “When Damascus was liberated and we felt this renewed sense of ownership, people came out to rediscover their city,” he said.
After last month’s stunning sweep by the rebels, icons of the Assad regime were torn down. Children play on the pedestals and plinths that once held towering statues of Mr. al-Assad, his father and his brother. Murals cover spaces where pro-regime slogans were emblazoned.
On a recent gray and drizzly day, it was standing room only in the auditorium that had been the headquarters of the ruling Baath party, which represented the Assad family’s totalitarian grip on political discourse. Hundreds of people gathered to hear a Syrian actress and activist, Yara Sabri, speak about the country’s thousands of detained and missing prisoners.
“We all decide on what it will look like and what we want it to be,” Ms. Sabri said of the country’s future.
Weeks ago, she had been in exile because of her activism. Now, a Syrian flag, with its new colors, hung over the lectern at which she spoke. Above the building’s entrance, the old Syrian flag and the Baath party flag were partly painted over.
Salma Huneidi, the event’s organizer, said the choice of venue was deliberate. “We consider this a victory,” she said. “This was a place that we couldn’t do any activities, and now we are not only holding activities, but important ones that expose the previous regime.”
An event to discuss the writing of a new Syrian Constitution was also held in the building recently.
“Syria feels bigger, the streets feel bigger — gone are the images that used to irritate us, the slogans that used to irritate us,” Ms. Huneidi said. “We used to feel so restricted before.”
Even the utterance of the word “dollar” could land someone in prison under Mr. al-Assad. Foreign-currency exchanges, which were banned for years under the Assad regime, have sprung up seemingly everywhere. Men walk through markets yelling: “Exchange! Exchange!” A seller hawking warm winter porridge offered stacks of Syrian pounds in exchange for crisp $100 bills.
Mohammad Murad, 33, sat in his car on a street corner, wearing a beanie with the colors of the new Syrian flag. A sign in his window said, “Dollars, euros and Turkish.”
Mr. Murad had long worked in currency exchange, but after the previous regime banned foreign currencies, his business went underground. If a customer needed dollars or euros, Mr. Murad said, he would go to the person’s house, bills hidden inside a sock.
In the new Syria, he said, he stands in line at the central bank to exchange $1,000 for stacks of Syrian pounds. When potential patrons come to his window to inquire about the exchange rate, he assures them he is offering the “best price.”
Across the street, the shelves of a small corner store look very different from only a few weeks ago, when shop owners had to smuggle foreign brands and hide them from most customers.
“I would only sell those brands to my regular customers that knew I sold smuggled goods, not to just anyone coming in,” said the owner, Hussam al-Shareef.
Syrian-made products now mingle openly with brands from Turkey, Europe and the United States. Customers walk in and freely ask for “Nescafe, the original.”
Three years ago, a police officer came into his shop and saw six Kinder chocolate eggs in a glass case in the back. Mr. al-Shareef was fined 600,000 Syrian pounds, or roughly $50, and sentenced to a month in jail. He has been fighting it in court ever since.
Back on Mount Qasioun, a man was peddling illegal fireworks smuggled from Lebanon. Hours later, they would light up the sky to ring in 2025.
Ali Maadi, 35, was busy setting up a stand to sell drinks, snacks and hookahs. Before the war, his family had a small but comfortable rest area along the mountain’s ridge. When he returned more than a week ago, he found that Syrian Army soldiers had used it as an outpost and had broken everything, including the bathrooms. He plans to slowly rebuild.
From two speakers in the back of his Peugeot, he was blasting a mix of Syrian protest and folk songs. The lyrics of one song said:
We want to adore, we want to love
We want to walk the path
We want to learn to be men and love Damascus
From our hearts and see Damascus up close.
Nearby, Aya Kalas, 28, and her soon-to-be fiancé, Khalid al-Qadi, 26, sat at a picnic table enjoying the view. She was 15 the last time she came to the mountain, she said.
“Any place you were banned from, you want to come back to it,” said Ms. Kalas, a beautician.
Damascus, where Ms. Kalas has lived her entire life, feels unrecognizable at times, she said. “There were entire streets you couldn’t walk along because a military officer or official lived there,” she said.
“We feel like seeing the country anew; we feel like tourists,” Mr. al-Qadi said. “It feels like it’s ours again.”
Zeina Shahla contributed reporting.
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11) West Bank Settlers Hope Trump Will Back Annexation Dreams
Settler leaders say they are confident that a Palestinian state is off the table, but their expectations are tempered by their experience of Donald Trump’s first term.
By Isabel Kershner, Jan. 6, 2025
To report this article, Isabel Kershner and the photographer Avishag Shaar-Yashuv visited the settlements of Shilo and Eli in the occupied West Bank.
Eliana Passentin delights in her house, which sits nearly 3,000 feet above sea level in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, with a view from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean coast. The dining room looks out over ancient Shiloh, the Israelites’ first capital in ancient times.
But Ms. Passentin would feel even better if the area was annexed by Israel.
Some of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staffing choices have raised hopes among settlers that that could happen. Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump’s contentious choice for defense secretary, went to ancient Shiloh for an episode of his “Battle in the Holy Land” series on Fox Nation. Mike Huckabee, Mr. Trump’s pick as the next ambassador to Jerusalem, has visited several times over the years and has argued that all of the West Bank belongs to Israel.
Nearly half a million settlers and roughly 2.7 million Palestinians live in the West Bank. The Palestinians, and much of the world, have long envisioned the territory as part of a future independent Palestinian state, alongside Israel, and consider the Jewish settlements to be illegal. After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel from Gaza, and with the prospect of a more sympathetic administration in Washington, settler leaders say they are confident that a Palestinian state is off the agenda.
They also hope that Israel will extend its sovereignty over parts, or all, of the territory through annexation — a step it has formally avoided since capturing the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war amid opposition from much of the world.
“We want to live our lives in Israel,” Ms. Passentin said, adding, “I believe the new administration will support whatever Israel decides.”
The West Bank has grown increasingly volatile. Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians and their property have risen sharply, while Israel has carried out a series of deadly raids and drone strikes targeting armed Palestinian militants that have chewed up streets and left many Palestinian civilians in fear.
Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since the beginning of 2023, according to the United Nations. The Israeli authorities say that most were armed fighters, but at least some were uninvolved civilians. About 50 Israelis were killed by Palestinian assailants in the West Bank during the same period, 18 of them members of the security forces, according to U.N. data. Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, said it had thwarted more than a thousand attacks in 2024, including hundreds of shooting attacks.
On Monday, gunmen shot at a civilian bus and cars passing the Palestinian village of Al-Funduq in the northern West Bank, killing at least three Israelis — a police investigator and two women from a nearby settlement — in what the Israeli authorities described as a terrorist attack.
Some settlers express a wariness of Mr. Trump born of experience. He has not articulated clear plans for the region, other than a vague aim of bringing peace. But they nonetheless believe that the new administration will go along with the wishes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — the most right-wing in Israel’s history.
“Trump’s team was here, they saw the reality, and for me, that’s a total relief,” said Yisrael Ganz, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council, which governs the settlements around ancient Shiloh, including the adjacent settlement of Shilo. He is also the chairman of the umbrella council representing the rest of the settlements.
Mr. Ganz recently took Doug Burgum, Mr. Trump’s nominee for interior secretary, on a tour in the area. “I see the people he chose,” Mr. Ganz said of the president-elect.
Support for a two-state solution has been waning for years among Israel’s Jewish majority, and since the Oct. 7 attack, many Israelis fear that a Palestinian state would endanger their country. A recent survey found that nearly two-thirds of Jewish Israelis think Palestinians have no right to a state of their own.
But in his public statements, Mr. Ganz has avoided explicitly telling Mr. Trump what to do. To sound less provocative, instead of sovereignty, he uses vaguer terms like “changing the reality” in Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank, which the Israeli government considers disputed, not occupied, territory.
During his first term, Mr. Trump showered Israel with diplomatic gifts, including moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and recognizing the contested city as Israel’s capital. Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state, reversed four decades of U.S. policy by stating that settlements did not violate international law. (Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken returned to the traditional U.S. position in 2024, saying the American government considers settlements to be “inconsistent with international law,” in line with most countries.)
Mr. Trump’s administration also floated a peace plan that strongly favored Israel, discarding the longtime goal of granting the Palestinians a viable state with its capital in Jerusalem.
The proposal, which Mr. Trump called the “deal of the century,” called for Israeli annexation of about 30 percent of the West Bank, including its current settlements, and a disjointed Palestinian state with limited sovereignty. It was immediately rejected by Palestinian leaders and many settlers, who preferred continued ambiguity over what they saw as a patchwork of Israeli and Palestinian territory that would leave many settlements as isolated enclaves.
Adding to the settlers’ wariness, the idea of Israeli annexation was abruptly dumped by both Mr. Trump and Israel’s leaders in favor of forging diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, a process known as the Abraham Accords. The Trump administration is expected to try to expand the accords to include Saudi Arabia, which would most likely require some kind of Israeli acceptance of a pathway to Palestinian statehood.
The settlers are far from homogenous. They include secular, middle-class Israelis seeking affordable housing as well as religious ideologues who believe settling the land is part of a Messianic plan ordained by God.
But in the hills around Shilo and the neighboring settlement of Eli in the central West Bank, the mission of Jewish settlement expansion is clear. Alongside official government-approved settlements, outposts have been built in recent decades without official permits. Some have been retroactively authorized by Israel and have come to resemble the more established neighborhoods.
Ms. Passentin, a mother of eight, came to Israel as a child from San Francisco. She and her husband, David, lived for 10 years in a trailer, then in a tent, helping to establish outposts, before settling in Hayovel, a satellite of Eli, parts of which are still unauthorized after years of court battles over the ownership and status of the land.
As the Binyamin Council’s international relations director, she has accompanied some of Mr. Trump’s close circle on tours and hosted Mr. Hegseth in her home.
One immediate request of the Trump administration from settler leaders is to cancel sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on more than 30 individuals and organizations accused of violence against Palestinians and destruction or seizure of Palestinian property.
Settler leaders like Mr. Ganz say they do not condone the violence, some of which is directed at Israeli forces who come to remove illegal settlement structures. But they say that it is a police matter and that it is a fraction of the anti-settler violence perpetrated by Palestinians.
For all of the enthusiasm in settler circles surrounding Mr. Trump’s election, expectations of what he will actually do once in office are tempered.
Citing an adage that marriage is often better the second time around, Aaron Katsof, a winemaker in Esh Kodesh, a hilltop outpost perched above Shilo, between the Palestinian villages of Qusra and Duma, said of a second Trump term: “You don’t come with the lovey-dovey infatuation of high school sweethearts. But you come with a lot more experience and maturity.” Esh Kodesh still lacks Israeli government authorization and permits for permanent housing.
Rivka Amar, 19, who is nine months pregnant, moved in the fall to Alei Ayin, a tiny outpost between Esh Kodesh and Qusra. She and her husband live in a lone quick-build home there, accompanied only by some young men who sleep in a tent, in what was open land.
Ms. Amar had been lunching at the Merlot Cafe in Shilo with her friend Rina Kohen, 18, who lives on a settler farm in the northern West Bank with her brother and 150 head of cattle. The idea, she said, was for a few settlers to control as much land as possible, to keep territory away from Palestinians.
“If I’m not there, my enemy will be there,” Ms. Amar said.
But, she said, she keeps her focus on the tasks at the hand, not on political shifts in Israel or the United States.
“I don’t wake up in the morning thinking of Biden or Trump,” she said, “but of where to graze the goats.”
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12) Massacre Upon Massacre: Haiti’s Bleak Spiral Into a Failed State
In Haiti, gangs have killed hundreds of people and shot journalists at a news conference, exposing the country’s fragility and the government’s failures.
By David C. Adams and Frances Robles, Jan. 6, 2025
David C. Adams and Frances Robles reported from Florida
Journalists climb a wall to take cover from gunfire after being shot at by armed gangs at the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince. Credit...Jean Feguens Regala/Associated Press
A fresh injection of about 150 foreign officers arrived in Haiti this weekend to bolster an international security force charged with taking on the powerful and well-armed gangs that have inflicted so much misery on the country for months.
But if the past is any guide this latest infusion is unlikely to make much of a difference.
Back-to-back massacres that killed more than 300 people, followed by a Christmas Eve assault on Haiti’s largest public hospital have underscored the Haitian government’s increasing lack of control over the nation’s deepening crisis.
A news conference to announce the reopening of a public hospital that had been closed for nine months because of gang violence came under another gang attack, killing two reporters and a police officer.
More than two dozen journalists caught in the ambush were trapped for two hours triaging seven wounded colleagues before they were rescued. They ripped their own clothing to fashion tourniquets and used tampons to stanch the bleeding because, witnesses said, the few doctors at the hospital ran for their lives. Reporters escaped by climbing a rear wall.
“There was blood all over the floor and on our clothes,” said Jephte Bazil, a reporter with an online news outlet, Machann Zen Haïti, adding that the hospital had nothing “available to treat the victims.”
The hospital shooting followed two massacres in separate parts of the country that killed more than 350 people and have shined a harsh spotlight on the failures and shortcomings of local authorities and an international security force deployed to protect innocent civilians.
One of the massacres unfolded last month in an impoverished, sprawling, gang-controlled Port-au-Prince neighborhood where a lack of any police presence meant that for three days older people were dismembered and thrown to the sea without the authorities finding out. At least 207 people were killed between Dec. 6 and Dec. 11, according to the United Nations.
At about the same time, another three-day killing spree took place 70 miles north in Petite Rivière. Community leaders say 150 people were killed as gang members and vigilante groups attacked one another.
The violence is part of a relentless string of bloodshed that has befallen Haiti in the last two months, exposing the fragility of its interim government, raising concerns about the viability of a U.S.-brokered security mission and leaving a planned transition to elections and more stable leadership on the verge of collapse.
With President-elect Donald J. Trump about to assume the reins of an international deployment that has been criticized as ineffective and underfunded, the future of Haiti has never seemed so bleak.
Justice Minister Patrick Pelissier said he believed the 150 soldiers, mostly from Guatemala, should help turn the tide. He stressed that some gang-controlled areas had been retaken and that the government is tending to displaced people.
“The state has not collapsed,” Mr. Pelissier said. “The state is there. The state is working.”
But many experts believe Haiti is a failing state, with various factions of the interim government embroiled in political bickering with no apparent strategy for tackling the worsening violence and providing a path to elections, which were supposed to be held this year.
“Political disputes translate into violence,” said Diego Da Rin, a Haiti analyst with the International Crisis Group. “The gangs are very aware of when is the right moment to shift from defensive mode to offensive mode. They flex their muscles when they need to.”
The gang attacks have also drawn attention to the weakness of the U.S.-backed Multinational Security Support mission, a detachment of several hundred mostly Kenyan police officers that began arriving in Haiti last June.
The mission was supposed to have up to 2,500 officers, but with little international financing, the force numbers far less and lacks the staffing to tackle the many gang-entrenched areas.
Several experts said the Christmas Eve killings gave a sense that the government was inept. The event announcing the hospital’s reopening was held in a gang stronghold, with virtually no security. Even as people came under attack, the police took at least an hour to respond, though their headquarters are nearby.
The country’s heath minister, Dr. Duckenson Lorthe Blema, who was sick and running late, believes he was the intended target.
“I am not crazy — I wanted to do well, and it went badly,” Dr. Blema, who was fired in the aftermath of the attack, said in an interview. “It turned into a fiasco. The scapegoat is me.”
Dr. Blema insisted that he had asked for police deployments at the event and did not know why there was so little protection. He defended the hospital’s dearth of supplies, saying he had intended to open the facility “gradually” as an outpatient clinic, which would not have been for treating gunshot wounds.
The justice minister acknowledged that there was no coordination between the ministry of health and the police, nor was a proper security assessment done in advance.
“Neighborhoods are controlled by gangs, and the police are working to recover them,” he said, noting that while the crisis is severe in the capital and the rural Artibonite Valley, much of the country was operating normally.
Haiti’s descent into chaos was largely triggered by the assassination in July 2021 of its last elected president, Jovenel Moïse. Gangs earning income from illegal checkpoints, extortion and kidnappings used the political vacuum to expand their territories.
With no elected national leaders, the country is ruled by a transitional council made up of rival political parties, with an interim presidency rotating among its members.
The latest surge in violence began Nov. 11, when the council replaced the prime minister, and gangs took advantage of the political upheaval to fire on U.S. commercial aircraft and escalate their brutality. Haiti’s main airport has been closed since.
More than 5,300 people were killed in Haiti last year and the total number of people forced to flee their homes now exceeds 700,000, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Gang checkpoints and ambushes have disrupted food supplies and the nonprofit group Mercy Corp, estimates that nearly 5 million people — half the country’s population — are facing severe food insecurity.
The new prime minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, in his only news conference since taking office nearly two months ago, announced pay increases for police officers and said he was committed to restoring the rule of law.
The prime minister and members of the presidential council declined to comment for this article.
In a New Year’s Day speech, the president of the council, Leslie Voltaire, insisted that elections would still take place this year, but likened the current situation to war. A police spokesman said he had no comment.
The commander of the Kenyan-led mission, Godfrey Otunge, who also did not respond to requests for comment, has complained that the mission’s successes have not been sufficiently touted.
In a recent message posted online, he said “the future of Haiti is bright.”
The U.S. State Department, which has committed $600 million for the Kenya mission, defended its record, noting that a recent operation with the police led to the death of a high-profile gang member.
Two police stations recently reopened and the Kenyan mission now has a permanent presence near the main port, which has long been controlled by gangs, the State Department said.
The U.S. government sent several shipments of materials in December, the agency said.
But absent significantly greater outside help, experts say Haiti’s worsening trajectory is unlikely to be reversed.
“The Haitian government is really not clear on what they are doing,” said Sophie Rutenbar, a visiting scholar at New York University, who helped run United Nations operations in Haiti until 2023. “Unfortunately right now they are faced with not good choices and worse choices.”
Some of the injured journalists blamed gangs — and the government — for a debacle that cost precious lives.
“If the state had taken its responsibilities, none of this would have happened,” said Velondie Miracle, who was shot seven times in the leg, temple and mouth. “The state is a legal force and should not give bandits access to places where the state cannot respond.”
André Paultre contributed reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
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