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URGENT STEP ONE:
Demand EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER & TREATMENT
FOR IMAM JAMIL
The Bureau of Prisons is denying medical treatment to Imam
Jamil Al-Amin, 81 years old, formerly known as H. Rap Brown.
He has a potentially life-threatening growth on his face, on
top of his multiple myeloma (cancer) & other significant
medical issues.
A civil and human rights leader, wrongfully imprisoned for
the past 24 years, he needs Your Help to avoid his
Death By Medical Neglect
CALL TUCSON COMPLEX 520-663-5000
EMAIL WARDEN Mark Gutierrez, mggutierrez@bop.gov
Give Name & Inmate Number: Jamil Al-Amin, #99974-555
Demand they grant Imam Jamil an EMERGENCY MEDICAL TRANSFER from United States Penitentiary (USP) Tucson to Federal Medical Center (FMC) Butner for his Immediate Medical Treatment NOW!!
***Deputy Director of BOP [Bureau of Prisons], (202) 307-3198
URGENT STEP TWO:
Tell his Congressional Delegation of his condition, Urge them to use their offices to inquire the BOP & demand that their constituent (Imam Jamil, West End Community Masjid, 547 West End Pl., SW, Atlanta) receive the emergency medical transfer, diagnosis & treatment.
- Email GA Cong. Nikema Williams PressGA05@mail.house.gov
- Email US Sen. Rafael Warnock press@warnock.senate.gov
- Email US Sen. Jon Ossoff press@ossoff.senate.gov
- Email Atlanta City Councilman Jason Dozier jdozier@atlantaga.gov
- Email GA State Rep Park Cannon park.cannon@house.ga.gov
- Email GA State Sen. Sonya Halpern sonya.halpern@senate.ga.gov
This is most urgent step before Step Three: campaigning for Medical Reprieve by the GA Bd. Of pardons & Parole, THE entity standing in the way of freeing Imam from his unjust conviction by granting a Medical Reprieve.
IMAM JAMIL ACTION NETWORK.ORG
216.296.4617
NATIONAL
347.731.1886
MEDIA
252.907.4443
SOUTHERN
347.731.1886
NJ/NY
202.520.9997
WASH., DC
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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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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) Live Updates: Allies, Foes and Palestinians Reject Trump’s Gaza Takeover Talk
Middle East partners, world leaders and Gazans swiftly opposed President Trump’s idea to force Palestinians out of the territory and take it over. Experts said the plan would violate international law.
By Qasim Nauman, Lara Jakes and Aaron Boxerman, Feb. 5, 2025
A Palestinian in the ruins of a building in Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Wednesday. Credit...Hatem Khaled/Reuters
President Trump’s brazen proposal to move all Palestinians out of Gaza and make it a U.S. territory met with immediate opposition on Wednesday from key American partners and officials around the world, with many expressing support for a Palestinian state as experts called it a breach of international law.
The proposal also threatens a U.S. ambition for normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In a statement issued before 4 a.m. local time, Saudi Arabia expressed its “unequivocal rejection” of attempts to displace Palestinians and reiterated that it would not establish diplomatic ties with Israel in the absence of an independent Palestinian state.
Egypt’s foreign ministry said in a separate statement that aid and recovery programs for Gaza must begin “without the Palestinians leaving.”
Gaza has been devastated by Israel’s military campaign against Hamas since the militant group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Speaking alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House on Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump described Gaza as “a demolition site” that the United States would rebuild into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Hamas has ruled in Gaza for most of the past two decades and has begun re-establishing control there since a cease-fire took effect last month. The group immediately rejected the idea of a mass relocation of the territory’s roughly two million Palestinians, a politically explosive proposal in a region with a long and bloody history of forced displacement.
Riyad Mansour, the leader of the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations, said that world leaders should respect Palestinians’ desire to rebuild Gaza themselves. Those who want to send Gazans “to a happy ‘nice place,’” Mr. Mansour said, using language that Mr. Trump had employed, should “let them go back, you know, to their original homes inside Israel.”
The Geneva Conventions prohibit the forcible relocation of populations. The United States and Israel have both ratified the conventions.
Here is what else to know:
· Around the world: Mr. Trump brought together allies and adversaries alike in opposition to his proposal, though some sought to strike a balance by not criticizing him directly.
· Against the law: The proposition would unquestionably be a severe violation of international law, experts say. Forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime and a crime against humanity.
· Swift rejection: Mr. Trump has floated the idea of Palestinians leaving Gaza multiple times in recent days, including a proposal to move them to Egypt and Jordan. That was rejected last week by a broad group of Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, in addition to Egypt and Jordan.
· Reaction in Israel: It was not clear whether Mr. Netanyahu was expecting Mr. Trump to announce such a proposal, but he smiled as the president talked about moving all Palestinians out of Gaza. Back home, far-right Israeli politicians celebrated Mr. Trump’s proposals as a vindication of their long-held dreams of the mass departure of Palestinians from Gaza. “It is now clear: this is the only solution,” said Itamar Ben-Gvir, until recently the country’s national security minister.
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2) Trump’s proposal puts Egypt and Jordan in an impossible position.
By Vivian Yee, Reporting from Cairo, Feb. 5, 2025
For decades, the question of whether and how Palestinians might build a state in their homeland has been at the center of Middle East politics — not only for the Palestinians themselves, but also for Arabs around the region, many of whom regard the Palestinian cause almost as their own. Forcing Palestinians out of their remaining territory, Arabs say, would doom that shared desire for Palestinian statehood and destabilize the entire region in the process.
So it was a nightmare for the Palestinians’ closest Arab neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, and a dream come true for Israel’s far-right-dominated government, when President Trump proposed moving everyone out of the Gaza Strip and onto Egyptian and Jordanian soil, an idea he repeated in a White House news conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Tuesday.
To the two Arab governments, it is not a matter of real estate or refugee camps, but of compromising their own long-held principles, angering their people, risking their own security and stability and perhaps paving the way for West Bank Palestinians to meet the same fate. They have responded with categorical “nos.”
That refusal has been backed up by politically independent and opposition figures in Egypt alongside mouthpieces for the country’s authoritarian government, underscoring how the Palestinian issue unifies even the bitterest political opponents in Egypt.
But Mr. Trump has shown little regard for the two countries’ concerns, their sovereignty or the idea of Palestinian statehood.
“They say they’re not going to accept,” Mr. Trump said of Egypt and Jordan during an earlier meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in the Oval Office. “I say they will.”
The president may have ways of bending them to his will. Egypt and Jordan are among the top recipients of American military aid worldwide; Mr. Trump has mentioned the funding in recent weeks, though without publicly threatening to pull it over the Gaza issue.
Still, analysts say the financial incentives of keeping that aid, which makes up a limited portion of each country’s budget, are minor compared to the two governments’ fears of alienating their populations by appearing complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and other anxieties. Though the rulers of both countries often brook little dissent on other matters, often using repression to silence internal criticism of their decisions, analysts say they know they cannot afford to ignore public opinion on such a crucial issue.
“It’s no joke going up against Trump, particularly for Egypt and Jordan,” said Paul Salem, the vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute. But since “this would really be a bridge way too far for much of public opinion,” he added, “there is no other option for an Arab leader. I don’t see what else they could do.”
For President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, the issue is particularly sensitive because he has tried to rally public support for himself at a time when Egyptians are enduring a prolonged economic crisis by painting himself as a champion of the Palestinians. Egypt also sees the possibility of Palestinians settling en masse in Egypt as a serious security threat, government officials, diplomats and analysts say: Officials worry that members of militant groups among forcibly displaced Palestinians could launch attacks at Israel from Egyptian soil, inviting Israeli military retaliation.
Jordan, with its far smaller population — many of Palestinian descent — and heavy dependence on U.S. support, is perhaps even more vulnerable. Far-right Israelis have long talked of Jordan as the place where Palestinians forced out of Gaza and the West Bank should make their home instead of their current territories, raising fears in Jordan that if people from Gaza are forced out, Israel will next drive Palestinians out of the West Bank and annex it.
Many, if not all, would likely be forced to go next door to Jordan, destabilizing a country already unsettled by tensions between citizens who are of Palestinian descent and those who are not, analysts say.
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3) Gazans condemn Trump’s proposal for a U.S. takeover.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 5, 2025
Palestinians in Gaza expressed a mixture of condemnation and confusion on Wednesday over President Trump’s declaration that the United States should seize control of the devastated coastal territory and forcibly displace its entire population.
A number of Gazans said they found Mr. Trump’s comments reprehensible, noting they were in harmony with plans presented by far-right members of Israel's governing coalition. But while some rejected leaving Gaza under any circumstances, others said conditions were so unlivable after 15 months of Israeli bombardment that they would consider relocating.
“I need to stay in my land. My life, my family, and my memories are here,” said Mohammed Fares, 24, a resident of Gaza City who was displaced to the southern city of Khan Younis. “I have something in Gaza I can’t get anywhere else. I’ll stay, even through hell.”
Mr. Fares said he was staying at a relatives’ home in Khan Younis because his family’s home in Gaza City was in tatters and because there was little water available there.
About two million Palestinians remain in Gaza after a war that has reduced cities to rubble and killed tens of thousands of people. Israel waged a war against Hamas after the armed Palestinian group led the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which killed about 1,200 people.
Mr. Trump said that all Palestinians in Gaza should be moved to neighboring Arab countries such as Egypt and Jordan because of the devastation wrought by the war.
Palestinians blasted the notion of forced displacement, though some said they would be open to finding a more stable life outside Gaza.
“It’s unacceptable to expel people from their homes,” said Mukhlis al-Masri, 33, a resident of the northern town of Beit Hanoun displaced to Khan Younis. “But I never thought I would get to this place, where everything is a struggle.”
If he were able to move outside Gaza, Mr. al-Masri said, he would.
“Do I want to live through a tragedy for another 20 or 30 years? Do I want to continue to live through hell? “I can't.”
Since a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas came into effect on Jan. 19, the entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza has surged but residents have said restoring a relative degree of normalcy still feels years away. The simplest of tasks before the war — charging a phone or bathing — have become daily ordeals.
To take a shower, Mr. Mukhlis, his wife, and three sons lay out a sheet of plastic across a classroom at a United Nations school and dump glasses of water on themselves, he said.
Other Palestinians criticized Mr. Trump’s claim that they would live in “peace and harmony” in new places outside Gaza.
Some Arab countries have seriously restricted the rights of Palestinian refugees. For example in Lebanon, they are barred from working in several professions.
“Arab countries consider us 7th-class citizens,” said Abd al-Rahman Basem al-Masri, 27, a doctor from the central Gaza city of Deir al Balah. “Why should I leave the land of my fathers and forefathers for that?”
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4) A question surrounding Trump’s plan: Does he mean it?
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 5, 2025
President Trump’s plan to place Gaza under American occupation and transfer its two million Palestinian residents has delighted the Israeli right, horrified Palestinians, shocked America’s Arab allies and confounded regional analysts who saw it as unworkable.
For some experts, the idea felt so unlikely — would Mr. Trump really risk American troops in another intractable battle against militant Islamists in the Middle East? — that they wondered if it was simply the opening bid in a new round of negotiations over Gaza’s future.
To the Israeli right, Mr. Trump’s plan unraveled decades of unwelcome orthodoxy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, raising the possibility of negating the militant threat in Gaza without the need to create a Palestinian state. In particular, settler leaders hailed it as a route by which they might ultimately resettle Gaza with Jewish civilians — a long-held desire.
To Palestinians, the proposal would constitute ethnic cleansing on a more terrifying scale than any displacement they have experienced since 1948, when roughly 800,000 Arabs were expelled or forced to flee during the wars surrounding the creation of the Jewish state.
“Outrageous,” said Prof. Mkhaimar Abusada, a Palestinian political analyst from Gaza who was displaced from his home during the war. “Palestinians would rather live in tents next to their destroyed homes rather than relocate to another place.”
“Very important,” wrote Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right Israeli lawmaker and settler leader, in a social media post. “The only solution to Gaza is to encourage the migration of Gazans.”
“Comical,” said Alon Pinkas, a political commentator and former Israeli ambassador. “This makes annexing Canada and buying Greenland seem much more practical in comparison.”
But it is the very outlandishness of the plan that signaled to some that it was not meant to be taken literally.
Just as Mr. Trump has often made bold threats elsewhere that he ultimately has not enacted, some saw his gambit in Gaza as a negotiating tactic aimed at forcing compromises from both Hamas and from Arab leaders.
In Gaza, Hamas has yet to agree to fully cede power, a position that makes the Israeli government less likely to extend the cease-fire. Elsewhere in the region, Saudi Arabia is refusing to normalize ties with Israel, or help with Gaza’s postwar governance, unless Israel agrees to the creation of a Palestinian state.
Mr. Trump’s maximalist plans may have been an attempt to get both sides to shift their positions, Israeli and Palestinian analysts said.
Faced with a choice between preserving its own control over Gaza and maintaining a Palestinian presence there, Hamas might perhaps settle for the latter, according to Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs.
And Saudi Arabia is being prodded to give up its insistence on Palestinian statehood and settle instead for a deal that preserves Palestinians’ right to stay in Gaza but not their right to sovereignty, according to Professor Abusada, the Palestinian political scientist.
Saudi Arabia swiftly rejected Mr. Trump’s plan on Wednesday, issuing a statement that underlined its support for Palestinian statehood. But some still think the Saudi position could change. During Mr. Trump’s previous tenure, in 2020, the United Arab Emirates made a similar compromise when it agreed to normalize ties with Israel in exchange for the postponement of Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.
“Trump is showing maximum pressure against Hamas to scare them, so they make real concessions,” Professor Abusada said. “I also think he is using maximum pressure against the region, so they would settle for less in exchange for normalization with Israel. Exactly like what the U.A.E. did.”
In turn, Mr. Trump has given the Israeli right a reason to support an extension of the cease-fire, Israeli analysts said.
For more than a year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing allies have threatened to collapse his coalition if the war ends with Hamas still in power. Now, those hard-liners have an off-ramp — a pledge from Israel’s biggest ally to empty Gaza of Palestinians at some point in the future.
Nadav Shtrauchler, a former adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, referring to those right-wing elements, said, “In time, they will need to see some evidence that it is actually happening.”
But for now, he added, “They will be more patient.”
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting from Rehovot, Israel.
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5) Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab
In the radical opening weeks of his second term, President Trump has appeared to feel little constraint by any need to show respect for the rule of law.
By Charlie Savage, Feb. 5, 2025
Charlie Savage has been writing about presidential power and legal policy for more than two decades. He reported from Washington.
President Trump has encountered few obstacles so far in his second term’s assault on the federal government. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
In his first term, President Trump seemed to relish ripping through the norms and standards of self-restraint that his predecessors had respected. Three weeks into his second term, hand-wringing about norms seems quaint.
Other presidents have occasionally ignored or claimed a right to bypass particular statutes. But Mr. Trump has opened the throttle on defying legal limits.
“We are well past euphemism about ‘pushing the limits,’ ‘stretching the envelope’ and the like,” said Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University and the author of a casebook on separation-of-powers law. The array of legal constraints Mr. Trump has violated, Mr. Shane added, amounts to “programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.”
Mr. Trump has effectively nullified laws, such as by ordering the Justice Department to refrain from enforcing a ban on the wildly popular app TikTok and by blocking migrants from invoking a statute allowing them to request asylum. He moved to effectively shutter a federal agency Congress created and tried to freeze congressionally approved spending, including most foreign aid. He summarily fired prosecutors, inspectors general and board members of independent agencies in defiance of legal rules against arbitrary removal.
More than two dozen lawsuits have been filed so far challenging moves by the Trump administration, though many overlap: At least nine, for example, concern his bid to change the constitutional understanding that babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents are citizens.
Courts have temporarily blocked that edict, along with his blanket freeze on disbursing $3 trillion in domestic grants from money Congress appropriated. And a federal judge has temporarily blocked the transfer of a transgender federal inmate to a male prison, pausing a move in line with one of Mr. Trump’s executive orders.
But those obstacles so far have been rare in Mr. Trump’s blitzkrieg, which has raised the question of whether, in his return to office, he and his advisers feel constrained by the rule of law.
This week, Mr. Trump moved to effectively dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and fold its functions into the State Department, making Secretary of State Marco Rubio its acting director. He had already crippled U.S.A.I.D. by imposing a “temporary” freeze on disbursing foreign aid that Congress appropriated, which as time passes is increasingly at odds with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
Since the first Congress, it has been the legislative branch — not the president — that decides how to structure the executive branch, creating departments and agencies, giving them functions and providing them with funds to carry out those missions. And Congress has enacted laws that say U.S.A.I.D. is to exist as an “independent establishment,” not as part of any executive department.
No matter. On Monday, Mr. Trump was asked whether he needed an act of Congress to do away with the agency. He dismissed that suggestion and insulted the officials who work there.
“I don’t think so, not when it comes to fraud,” Mr. Trump said. “If there’s fraud — these people are lunatics — and if — if it comes to fraud, you wouldn’t have an act of Congress. And I’m not sure that you would anyway.”
Rumors abound that Mr. Trump is weighing executive actions to at least partly dismantle the Education Department, another component of the government that Congress has mandated exist by law.
Mr. Trump and his appointees have also been firing people in naked defiance of statutes Congress enacted to protect against the arbitrary removal of certain officials, like civil servants or board members at independent agencies.
For example, Mr. Trump shut down three agencies by ousting Democratic members before their terms had ended. That effectively hobbled the agencies, the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, because they were left with too few officials to have a quorum to act.
Congress created those agencies to be independent of the White House, and all three have been understood to have forms of protections limiting the president’s ability to remove their leaders without a good cause, like misconduct, although only the labor board statute says that. Regardless, Mr. Trump flouted the limit.
In so doing, the Trump administration appears to be setting up test cases should those officials sue, that would give the Republican-appointed supermajority on the Supreme Court an opportunity to expand on the so-called unitary executive theory. That doctrine, developed by the Reagan administration legal team, holds that the Constitution should be interpreted to prohibit Congress from enacting laws that limit a president’s absolute control of the executive branch.
The Justice Department has fired most of the prosecutors who worked on the cases that led to two indictments of Mr. Trump, along with those who worked on cases against ordinary rioters from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault. Top career leaders across the F.B.I. have been fired as well, and on Tuesday the bureau turned over a list of the thousands of agents who participated in those investigations, raising fears that they, too, will be purged.
None of those firings have complied with laws aimed at protecting the civil service and its senior career officials from losing their posts without a good cause, a process that includes hearings before the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Peter L. Strauss, a professor emeritus of law at Columbia University who is a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, said the Trump administration had embraced lawlessness.
“President Trump and his friends are ignoring both federal law and the, to me, clear limitation of presidential power in Article II of the Constitution,” he said. “The Constitution did not imagine what we are seeing. All one has to do is to read the whole of Article II to understand that.”
Bulldozing Legal Constraints
It is not clear what lawyers Mr. Trump’s team has consulted for all his intended moves, although the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the office of the White House counsel, David Warrington, approved the blanket spending freeze, which has now been suspended and enjoined by a court.
“White House Counsel’s Office believes that this is within the president’s power to do it, and therefore, he’s doing it,” she said at a news briefing last week.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
During the campaign, Mr. Trump’s advisers made clear that they would use aggressively permissive legal gatekeepers in a second term.
And the Trump team has at least partly sidelined the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is supposed to review proposed executive orders and substantive proclamations for form and legality.
During transitions, the normal process is for a career lawyer in that office, walled off from the exiting administration’s political appointees, to vet drafts of directives the president-elect is considering issuing upon taking office. But Mr. Trump’s transition team did not use that mechanism for his slew of early directives, instead vetting drafts with handpicked lawyers from outside.
Nothing suggests this practice of shopping around for outside legal advice has abated; the Office of Legal Counsel’s website lists no Trump political appointee currently filling the role of its acting chief. A person familiar with the matter said there is now one political appointee in the office.
Even before taking office, Mr. Trump challenged the rule of law by declaring he would nullify a statute barring TikTok from operating in the United States unless its Chinese owners sold it. He made the assertion even though the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law. And in his directive to the Justice Department forbidding enforcement, Mr. Trump ordered that TikTok and its support services be notified “that there has been no violation of the statute” if they defied it.
Even if that could be seen as a particularly aggressive example of prosecutorial discretion, presidents have never been understood to have the power to make acting contrary to a law not count as a violation of it.
Since then, Mr. Trump appears to have been basically operating with a philosophy that he will do whatever he wants despite any legal impediments, then fight in court if necessary.
During the campaign, Mr. Trump’s advisers outlined their hope to fundamentally overhaul the structure of the federal government to curb the civil service and expand presidential power. But it was not clear at the time that the incursion would be effectively outsourced to Elon Musk, the billionaire whom Mr. Trump has unleashed upon the executive branch in search of “efficiency.”
Mr. Musk and employees from his various companies have also been rampaging through the federal bureaucracy, including by seizing access to a Treasury Department system that handles federal payments and has sensitive information, like Social Security numbers, whose disclosure is limited by the Privacy Act. Mr. Musk’s team also got into a standoff with employees at U.S.A.I.D. over its demand for access to classified information.
Federal employees at both the Treasury and U.S.A.I.D. who resisted him were placed on administrative leave. Mr. Musk’s team also shut down U.S.A.I.D.’s headquarters overnight, emailing employees not to come in, and its website went dark.
The Trump team has been opaque about exactly what legal status allows Mr. Musk to be exercising executive power, even at Mr. Trump’s behest, but The New York Times reported this week that Mr. Musk has been deemed a “special government employee.”
The administration has not said when he acquired that status, nor whether or to what extent Mr. Trump has waived a criminal conflict-of-interest law that binds even special employees from touching government matters that could affect their personal interests. For Mr. Musk, that category is vast given how heavily his companies rely on federal contracts.
Meekness by Congressional Republicans
There were reasons to believe that Mr. Trump’s second term would be more radical than his first even before the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed supermajority last summer proclaimed a new constitutional doctrine that current and former presidents are largely immune from prosecution if they use their official powers to commit crimes.
Unlike last time, the advisers who stuck with him worked to ensure there would be no appointees around him inclined to check his impulses.
Mr. Trump also has little reason to fear impeachment, which he has already survived twice. He has tightened his grip on the Republican Party, which controls Congress and so far has put up scant defense of its institutional prerogatives.
No Republican joined Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a letter on Sunday warning Mr. Rubio that “any effort to merge or fold U.S.A.I.D. into the Department of State should be, and by law must be, previewed, discussed, and approved by Congress.”
A Virginia Democrat, Representative Don Beyer, echoed that point on Monday during a news conference outside the aid agency’s headquarters, calling what Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk were doing “illegal.” He added, “Stopping this will require action by the courts and for Republicans to show up and show courage and stand up for our country.”
Nor have congressional Republicans sharply pushed back against Mr. Trump’s summary firing of 17 inspectors general, the independent watchdogs Congress created to hunt for waste, fraud, abuse and illegality in the government. The firings defied a law that required him to give detailed, written justifications to lawmakers 30 days in advance.
For example, Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who leads the Judiciary Committee and styles himself as a champion of inspectors general, reacted mildly, issuing a statement and a letter to Mr. Trump that noted that the removals had not followed the law and asked for the rationale behind them. He has not demanded that Mr. Trump rescind the firings, nor unleashed tactics — like holding up cabinet nominees — that lawmakers can use as leverage.
In 1952, when the Supreme Court struck down President Harry S. Truman’s attempt to seize steel mills, Justice Robert Jackson observed that Congress has tools to resist presidential arrogation of its power. But in practice, he added, lawmakers may lack the political fortitude to prevent their authority from slipping through their fingers.
“I have no illusion that any decision by this court can keep power in the hands of Congress if it is not wise and timely in meeting its problems,” he wrote. “A crisis that challenges the president equally, or perhaps primarily, challenges Congress. If not good law, there was worldly wisdom in the maxim attributed to Napoleon that ‘The tools belong to the man who can use them.’”
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6) U.S. Postal Service Reverses Decision to Halt Parcel Service From China
The Postal Service will continue to accept parcels from Hong Kong and China despite a new executive order that will require greater inspection of packages.
By Keith Bradsher, Ana Swanson and Jordyn Holman, Published Feb. 4, 2025, Updated Feb. 5, 2025
Keith Bradsher reported from Bangkok, Ana Swanson from Washington, and Jordyn Holman from New York.
The United States Postal Service on Wednesday reversed its decision to temporarily stop accepting packages from mainland China and Hong Kong. Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The United States Postal Service on Wednesday said it would continue to accept packages from China and Hong Kong, reversing a decision to temporarily halt those deliveries after an order by President Trump took effect that ended duty-free handling of many smaller parcels.
Mr. Trump ordered on Saturday that all goods leaving China starting on Tuesday must follow the rules for higher-value shipments. Until the change, parcels worth up to $800 apiece were not required to include detailed information on their contents and were not subject to tariffs.
A spokesman for the postal service said that as of Wednesday, it “will continue accepting all international inbound mail and packages from China and Hong Kong Posts. The USPS and Customs and Border Protection are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery.”
The United States imports close to four million of such lower-value parcels a day with little or no customs inspection and no duties collected, with most of them coming from China.
The Trump administration and other critics have contended that allowing these packages into the United States has created a conduit for fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, and related supplies to enter the United States.
But the duty-free provision on lower-value parcels, known as the de minimis rule, has also been used by many e-commerce companies to bring regular consumer items from China into the United States without paying tariffs on them.
Private shipping companies including FedEx and UPS are also affected by the change in customs rules, as they move a large portion of the parcels, running frequent cargo flights from China to the United States. Neither company has responded yet to questions about how they will handle the new rules.
The de minimis provision was included in a broader order by Mr. Trump that imposed an extra 10 percent tariff on all imports from China.
Lower-value parcels from China, which previously were tariff-free, now face not only the 10 percent tariff but also the many complex tariffs on every category of goods that these shipments previously skirted entirely.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Service did not respond to a question about whether stoppages were related to the change in trade rules, referring to a statement the service had released announcing the suspension.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which is responsible for inspecting imports and assessing tariffs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House did not immediately provide comment. Trade lawyers said the postal stoppage was caused by the executive order.
The rapid rollout of Mr. Trump’s trade orders left little time for postal and customs officials to prepare to scrutinize so many packages. Mr. Trump said on Jan. 22 that he would put tariffs on Canada and Mexico on Feb. 1.
He added China to the list on Jan. 23, but did not say then that he would include a ban on duty-free handling of shipments under $800 from any of the three countries. He signed the executive orders on Feb. 1, including the de minimis ban for all three countries, to take effect just three days later. On Monday, he suspended the orders on Canada and Mexico, but left in place the tariffs and de minimis rule on China.
Supporters of de minimis have long said that eliminating the provision would increase the burden on U.S. customs officials. Customs and Border Protection is also the primary agency responsible for carrying out much of Mr. Trump’s enforcement actions at the border.
In an online event in October, Ralph Carter, the vice president of regulatory affairs at FedEx, observed that resources were stretched for U.S. customs officials and that a change to de minimis rules could lead to bottlenecks for shippers.
“If we convert these millions of shipments from de minimis into formal, informal clearances, we’re going to have serious supply chain backups, because there simply isn’t the resources to manage that,” he said. “And so that’s going to affect all importers, not just importers of de minimis.”
DHL, a global logistics company, said on Monday that applying tariffs to lower value shipments into the United States would require it to assess how it processes packages. The company said it was in discussions with U.S. customs officials.
Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail, a research and consulting firm, said that the decision to stop international packages coming from China and Hong Kong would have its greatest impact on marketplaces like Shein, Temu and to some extent Amazon.
“They are the ones putting millions of packages into the system each week,” Mr. Saunders said in an interview. “That route has now been cut off at least temporarily.”
Shein and Temu are two of the largest e-commerce companies that connect low-cost Chinese factories to millions of American households. Shein declined on Tuesday to comment on the new rules on small packages, while Temu has not yet responded to questions sent on Monday. Amazon also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Raising the duty-free minimum has allowed millions of American households to buy low-cost goods from China. But U.S. manufacturers in sectors like textiles and apparel have contended that the imports of small parcels have undermined their ability to stay in business.
The rapid expansion of e-commerce has for years posed a dilemma for Customs and Border Protection. Customs officials were already starting to be overwhelmed by small e-commerce parcels in 2016, when they persuaded Congress and the Obama administration to raise the minimum value for customs inspection and tariff collection to $800, from $200.
But with the increase in the duty-free limit, the number of duty-free parcels has risen tenfold since 2016. Congress has been debating for the past year how to change the rule on duty-free parcels.
Proposals in Congress had tended to focus on matching the policies of China, which discourages de minimis imports. China restricts de minimis imports to a few kinds of products, closely checks what is imported and sets very low limits on the value of each parcel — for many products, less than $100.
The end of the American de minimis rule for goods from China could particularly complicate American imports of clothing. American law bars the import of any goods produced with forced labor in Xinjiang, a region of northwest China where Beijing has ordered a far-reaching crackdown on Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities.
The legislation requires importers to prove that goods with any content from Xinjiang did not involve forced labor — a hard legal standard to meet because China does not allow independent labor inspections there. And Xinjiang produces much of China’s cotton.
The de minimis imports skirted those rules. The suspension of de minimis rules may make it harder for companies to ship such goods from China.
Traditional retailers with stores, like Gap, ship their merchandise in bulk from overseas and pay tariffs on it, and already must comply with legislation against forced labor. So they may be affected much less by the rule change than e-commerce companies.
Peter Eavis contributed reporting.
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7) Trump’s Gaza Plan Reflects Broader Push for Annexation of Palestinian Land
Right-wing officials in Israel, evangelical Christians in the United States and Trump appointees have become increasingly outspoken in calling for Israel to take more territory.
By Mark Mazzetti and Patrick Kingsley, Feb. 6, 2025
Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, and Patrick Kingsley from Jerusalem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/us/politics/trump-gaza-israel-annexation-palestinian.html
The aftermath of an attack in August by Jewish settlers on the village of Jit, in the occupied West Bank. Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
President Trump’s statements on Tuesday about an American takeover of the Gaza Strip and displacing millions of Palestinians were immediately dismissed by many as reckless and half-baked pronouncements, a provocative threat that Mr. Trump was unlikely to enforce.
At the same time, his comments are the latest example of how government officials on the right in both the United States and Israel now speak publicly about a shared goal: the takeover of Palestinian land.
The question of whether the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — territories captured and occupied by Israel in 1967 — might become the foundation of a future Palestinian state has been at the center of decades of failed diplomacy, bedeviling American presidents, Palestinian leaders and Israeli prime ministers.
While the prospects for this future dimmed long ago, Mr. Trump’s election has newly emboldened right-wing ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, and some of Mr. Trump’s own appointees, to speak publicly about Israel’s right to fully take over the West Bank.
“It’s the most right-wing government that we’ve ever had in Israel — and there never was a U.S. administration that shared these views to this extent, either,” said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington.
Days after Mr. Trump’s election, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, whom Mr. Netanyahu has given broad authority over the West Bank, said Mr. Trump’s return to the White House meant that “the year 2025 will, with God’s help, be the year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical name for the territory that makes up the West Bank.
During his news conference with Mr. Netanyahu on Tuesday, Mr. Trump was asked directly whether he supported Israeli annexation of the West Bank. He declined to answer, saying that his administration would have an announcement in “four weeks.”
But he has already appointed at least two people to his administration — Elise Stefanik, his choice to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, and Mike Huckabee, who has been nominated by Mr. Trump to be ambassador to Israel — who hold views similar to Mr. Smotrich and his allies.
During her confirmation hearing, Ms. Stefanik was asked by Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, whether she shared Mr. Smotrich’s view that Israel had a biblical right to the entire West Bank.
She said she did.
In an interview, Mr. Van Hollen said that “there is a very dangerous alignment right now” between American and Israeli officials on the issue of Palestinian self-determination.
“Now we have someone in the White House who wants to greenlight the dreams of far-right extremists like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir,” he said, referring to Itamar Ben-Gvir, who recently resigned as Mr. Netanyahu’s national security minister over the cease-fire deal in Gaza.
On his first day in office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order reversing the Biden administration’s sanctions against a group of Israeli settlers responsible for violence and land grabs against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Israeli annexation of the West Bank is a goal shared by both ultranationalists in Israel and many evangelical Christians, including Mr. Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, who see the conflict in the Middle East — and the power struggle over the land itself — as a sign of the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Mr. Huckabee has said that “there’s no such thing as a West Bank.” He said that Israeli settlements in the territory, which are considered illegal under international law, are not settlements but “neighborhoods.”
“There’s no such thing as an occupation,” he said during a visit to the West Bank in 2017.
An American or Israeli takeover of Palestinian land would all but scuttle the chances of another diplomatic prize that Mr. Trump said he seeks: the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government has said that Israel must take concrete steps toward an independent Palestinian state if there is any chance for the kingdom to officially recognize Israel.
Hours after Mr. Trump’s news conference, the Saudi foreign ministry issued a statement saying that “the establishment of the Palestinian state is a firm, unwavering position” of the kingdom.
With Mr. Trump’s ambitions for the region in possible conflict, Mr. Rabinovich, the former Israeli ambassador, said he thought the president could ultimately be persuaded to block an Israeli push toward West Bank annexation.
“If he wants a Saudi deal, then he won’t go along with annexation,” Mr. Rabinovich said.
Since returning to office in 2022, Mr. Netanyahu has become increasingly blunt about his opposition to Palestinian sovereignty. After years of equivocating on the issue, he boasted last year that “my insistence is what has prevented, over the years, the establishment of a Palestinian state that would have constituted an existential danger to Israel.”
As his coalition prepared to enter office in December 2022, it issued a declaration of the Jewish people’s “exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel” and pledged to bolster Jewish settlement in all areas, including the occupied West Bank.
Since then, Mr. Netanyahu has made good on that pledge by granting Mr. Smotrich vast new powers over West Bank governance. Critics denounced the move — which gave Mr. Smotrich, a civilian, authority over matters previously overseen by the military — as a form of de facto annexation.
And Mr. Smotrich himself described the move last year as an attempt to seal Israel’s control over the territory without being accused of formally annexing it.
Analysts see Mr. Netanyahu’s most recent appointments to government as an effort to cement that opportunity. His new ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, is a West Bank settler who had been a spokesman for the settler movement.
Caroline Glick, an adviser to Mr. Netanyahu appointed in recent days who accompanied the prime minister to Washington this week, has long pushed for Israel to annex the West Bank and rejects Palestinian statehood.
And, even though he recently left Mr. Netanyahu’s government, Mr. Ben-Gvir remains an influential voice among the prime minister’s supporters. Shortly after Mr. Trump’s statements on Tuesday, Mr. Ben-Gvir took to social media to give his enthusiastic support.
“Donald, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” he wrote.
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8) Trump’s Gaza Takeover Plan May Sound Death Knell for the Two-State Solution
Already unlikely, the prospects for creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel could vanish altogether if the United States takes over Gaza and displaces the population, as President Trump proposes.
By Peter Baker, Feb. 6, 2025
Peter Baker is covering his sixth presidency and briefly served as the chief correspondent in Jerusalem.
For decades, successive presidents in Washington have favored some version of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What no one imagined until now was that the second state would be American, not Palestinian.
President Trump’s stunning plan to displace the entire Palestinian population of Gaza and have the United States take over the seaside enclave has not only convulsed the Middle East. It may have also all but written the obituary for the long-sought but maddeningly elusive goal of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel in peaceful coexistence.
Any vision of a Palestinian state has included Gaza as an integral part of it, along with the West Bank. In Mr. Trump’s vision, however, Gaza would become a U.S. territory transformed into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” It would not belong to the Palestinians anymore but would be open to anyone who wanted to live there. And for that matter, he signaled openness to Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank, promising to reveal his position within four weeks.
The prospects for a Palestinian state had already dwindled in recent years, especially after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 people and led to the Israeli retaliatory war in Gaza that has killed 47,000 combatants and civilians, according to Gaza health authorities. Neither Israeli nor Palestinian populations see the two-state scenario as a viable plan anymore, according to polls.
But the rest of the world, led until now by the United States, has continued to cling to the idea as official policy, if for no other reason than a lack of alternatives. And Saudi Arabia has insisted that a Palestinian state has to be part of any deal establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, a goal avidly pursued by both Mr. Trump and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“If Trump thinks that somehow the U.S. owning Gaza and allowing Israel to annex parts of the West Bank facilitates a deal, he’s completely wrong about that,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal, pro-Israel, Washington-based organization that promotes a negotiated peace in the Middle East. “There’s no way forward to a deal.”
But opponents of a Palestinian state feel emboldened at this point. While few took Mr. Biden’s continued insistence on the two-state solution all that seriously, they feel confident that Mr. Trump’s return to power means that there will never be a Palestinian state.
“It’s a dead issue,” said Morton A. Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, which opposes the two-state solution. “I think most people think it’s a dead issue.” He added: “They had a state in Gaza. How did that work?”
Mr. Trump has long cast himself as the one person who could bring peace to the Middle East — just Thursday, he told an audience at the National Prayer Breakfast that he wanted to be remembered as “a peacemaker” — but he has never achieved his own aspiration. When he took office in 2017, he took on the mission of finally resolving the generations-old conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, boldly predicting that it would be “not as difficult as people have thought over the years.”
But it turned out to be just as difficult as people have thought over the years. He assigned his son-in-law Jared Kushner to develop a plan that was released in 2020 that envisioned a Palestinian state of sorts, but one so truncated that the proposal was widely seen as tilted toward Israel. Under the plan, Israel would have been allowed to keep its settlements in the West Bank and full control of a unified Jerusalem as its capital, while the Palestinians would have been offered $50 billion in international investment.
The plan went nowhere, but Mr. Trump was able to score a consolation prize by presiding over the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab states, including Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, in what was called the Abraham Accords.
Saudi Arabia declined to join at the time, but Mr. Biden came close to securing a deal until the Oct. 7 attack blew up the negotiations. Now back in office, Mr. Trump hopes to finalize such an agreement, which would help transform the region.
But he has made no recommitment to a two-state solution since returning to power and his newly designated ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, all but ruled it out. “I’d be very surprised if he comes and says, ‘Let’s go out there and get a two-state solution,’” Mr. Huckabee said last month in an interview with Ami Magazine, a Jewish magazine based in New York.
Mr. Trump remained ambiguous about that this week. When he announced his plan to take “ownership” over Gaza at a White House news conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, he was asked if that meant he no longer supported the two-state solution. “It doesn’t mean anything about a two-state or a one-state or any other state,” he replied. “It means that we want to have — we want to give people a chance at life.”
Asked about that the next day on CBS News, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, said, “I certainly didn’t hear the president say it was the end of the two-state solution.” But neither he nor any other administration officials have explained how taking Gaza away from the Palestinians could be reconciled with establishing a state that would be acceptable to them.
The reaction to Mr. Trump’s Gaza plan was broadly negative outside Israel. In the past couple of days, António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, as well as leaders from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Turkey, Canada, Japan, the European Union and others all restated support for the two-state solution. “There is only one solution and that is a two-state solution,” Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen of Denmark told Danish media.
But at some point, that came across more as a diplomatic ritual of talking points than a realistic agenda. In Israel and the Palestinian territories, the notion of two states living side by side in peace has lost the broad support it once had.
In Israel, just 27 percent of people still backed a two-state solution in Gallup polling last summer, while 64 percent opposed it. That was a reversal from 2012, when 61 percent supported it and just 30 percent opposed it.
And that was almost identical to the views of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where just 28 percent of those interviewed last summer supported such a plan, while 64 percent opposed it. That too represented a radical drop in enthusiasm from 2012, when 66 percent in those areas supported it compared with 32 percent who did not.
Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, said that the two-state solution as long conceived was dead.
“There is no way to rebuild Gaza,” he told Al Arabiya television. “The West Bank is another political issue to be discussed. But in Gaza, I don’t see two million Palestinians living in less than 400 square kilometers in which 80 percent of the buildings have been destroyed.”
Elliott Abrams, who has advised multiple Republican presidents on the Middle East, including Mr. Trump during his first term, said the reality is that a two-state solution has not been viable for quite some time even if world leaders refuse to accept that. While the president’s Gaza takeover plan may itself be untenable, Mr. Abrams said it focused on the plight of Palestinians living in an area devastated by war rather than lines on a map.
“Trump’s plan changed the subject from politics to what happens to the people,” Mr. Abrams said. “He spoke about how Gazans live now, and could live so much better in the future, and he did not demonize Gazans. So his plan is a reminder that the two-state solution is just foreign ministers shouting at each other, and it’s no solution at all.”
From the other side of the debate, Mr. Ben-Ami agreed that Mr. Trump had a point. “There is an element of truth underneath all this, which is that it’s really hard to conceive how you would rebuild with two million people still there,” he said.
He also agreed that “the concept of an old-fashioned two-state solution has actually been gone for a while.” But he held out hope that it would still be part of a broader, regionwide change driven by Arab rapprochement with Israel, led by Saudi Arabia. “It’s going to have to be part of that normalization deal,” Mr. Ben-Ami said. “We’ve been referring to it as a 23-state solution.”
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9) U.S.A.I.D. Turmoil Threatens Key Aid Supplies to Gaza, Officials Say
Washington has funded roughly a third of the aid sent to the enclave since the war began. With most agency workers set to be put on leave, officials say that those supplies are under threat.
By Patrick Kingsley and Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, Feb. 7, 2025
In northern Gaza. The aid agency known as U.S.A.I.D. has provided roughly $1 billion in aid to international aid groups on the ground since the war began, according to the United Nations. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the United States Agency for International Development have endangered the funding for food, tents and medical treatment for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, according to U.S. officials and workers for humanitarian groups funded by the agency.
Officials said that the threats to the aid supply chain risked destabilizing the fragile cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which is contingent on the weekly entry of 4,200 aid and commercial trucks to the territory.
With almost all U.S.A.I.D. staff set to be placed on administrative leave by Friday night, there will be only a handful of officials left to sign off on and audit hundreds of millions of dollars in outstanding payments to the agency’s partners on the ground in Gaza, raising alarm about how those groups will fund their operations.
Of more than 200 officials in the agency’s Mideast team, just 21 will remain in post to manage its entire regional portfolio, according to an internal agency email reviewed by The New York Times. The team that organizes emergency aid supplies in dozens of crisis zones around the world each year, of which Gaza was just one, is down to just 70 staff members from more than 1,000.
This is expected to slow or prevent the delivery of food packages to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, as well as tents, mattresses, blankets, hygiene kits and medical treatment, according to three officials and an aid worker. All four people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.
While the aid agency does not operate inside Gaza, it has provided roughly $1 billion in aid to international aid groups on the ground since the war began in October 2023 — about a third of the total aid response, according to the United Nations. Hundreds of millions of dollars have yet to be disbursed and now may never be transferred to United Nations agencies and other major aid organizations, three officials said.
“They’re making an already fragile cease-fire more fragile,” said Dave Harden, a former U.S.A.I.D. mission director for Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. “Lifesaving aid to Gaza is going to be disrupted.”
The State Department, which oversees the aid agency, declined to comment. The agency’s director in Jerusalem referred reporters to the U.S.A.I.D. press department, which did not respond to requests for comment. It was unclear if it was still operational.
The World Food Program, the International Organization for Migration and the International Medical Corps, all of which distribute aid or run projects in Gaza funded by U.S.A.I.D., also declined to comment.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a television interview this week that the moves were “not about getting rid of foreign aid,” but an attempt to prevent “rank insubordination” by uncooperative workers.
The Trump administration says the agency wastes taxpayers’ money on costly and unfocused overseas programs that do little for the American people.
Mr. Rubio said that agency employees “take taxpayer money and they spend it as a global charity irrespective of whether it is in the national interest.”
Officials interviewed for this article said that the aid to Gaza was a clear example of how the agency’s work was helping to further President Trump’s stated foreign policy goals. He has repeatedly called for an extension of the cease-fire, which is partly dependent on the smooth flow of aid.
The virtual collapse of U.S.A.I.D. is expected to remove a key form of oversight over that aid delivery. The agency is set to lay off officials who monitor the distribution of supplies within the territory, three officials said, making it harder for the United States to assess who controls and receives the aid within areas run by Hamas.
It is also likely to sideline officials who previously coordinated between the Israeli military, the Egyptian government, the United Nations and private aid groups, helping various parties to troubleshoot problems in the supply chain and prevent soldiers from mistakenly firing on aid convoys. An Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, confirmed the importance of the aid agency’s coordination role and said it was unclear which institution would step in to fill it.
Some aid and development programs in Gaza and the West Bank have already been halted or restricted after a freeze in January on most of U.S.A.I.D.’s programs and the firing or suspension of thousands of its workers. By the start of this week, more than half of the roughly 50 officials who work on the Gaza response in Jerusalem and Washington had already been placed on leave or had their contracts terminated.
They included a U.S.A.I.D. representative who worked from an Israeli military control room in Tel Aviv, helping to coordinate between the military and aid groups in Gaza, according to three U.S. officials.
The funding freezes have already suspended tens of millions of dollars earmarked for Gaza, including for water infrastructure, mobile hospital units and psychological support programs, according to one of the U.S. officials.
Among the groups affected was the International Medical Corps, a Los Angeles-based medical aid group funded by U.S.A.I.D. that runs two large field hospitals in Gaza. As a result, the group said in a statement that it may no longer be able to sustain an emergency room that treats up to 200 patients a day, an outpatient department that serves up to 2,000 people a day and a childbirth unit that delivers roughly 20 babies a day.
Anera, a Washington-based aid group, said in a statement that the freeze on a U.S.A.I.D. grant worth $50 million had forced it to suspend work on a program to restore Gaza’s decimated health services.
Tens of millions of dollars for West Bank and East Jerusalem projects have also been frozen, endangering key funds for several hospitals that President Biden pledged to sustain during a visit to the region in 2022.
Ronen Bergman contributed reporting from Tel Aviv.
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10) Now Will We Believe What Is Happening Right in Front of Us?
By Katherine Stewart, Feb. 7, 2025
Ms. Stewart has reported on the religious right for more than 15 years. Her most recent book is “Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.”
Will Matsuda for The New York Times
They told us they would smash the institutions that safeguard our democracy. And that is exactly what they are doing.
Many Americans chose not to believe what they were saying. Will we now believe what we are seeing?
To be clear, “they” are not just Donald Trump and his billionaire co-pilot. Over the past half-century, an anti-democratic movement has coalesced in the United States. It draws on super-wealthy funders, ideologues of the new right, purveyors of disinformation and Christian nationalist activists. Though it pretends to revere the founders and the Constitution, it fundamentally rejects the idea of America as a modern pluralistic democracy.
The natural tendency in a functioning democracy is to look for ways to “work across the aisle” and “agree to disagree.” But appeasement now would be a mistake. This anti-democratic movement has no interest in compromise. Any concessions will help consolidate the powers of a lawless presidency and entrench a new, kleptocratic, authoritarian form of government in the United States.
It is also bad politics. The Trump administration has charted a course for eventual catastrophic failure. Those who attempt to work with it will go down with it. We must work instead to safeguard our democratic institutions, communicate the threat to the many sectors of the American public that have yet to understand it and prepare for a major cleanup operation in years to come.
Democracy isn’t just about the results of the most recent election. Without a system of justice that applies equally to all citizens, you’re voting for the next elected despot. That is why the leaders of the anti-democratic movement made clear well before the election — in documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which sought to provide Trump with an aggressive right-wing agenda he could just pick up and run with — that they intend to demolish the system of justice as we know it and replace it with a form of policing in service of the ruling party and its chosen leaders.
In its first two and a half weeks, the Trump administration has delivered on that promise. The stream of transparently lawless executive orders — to make it easier to fire federal officials, to freeze spending that the president cannot freeze, to take away a right to citizenship that is written into the Constitution, to name just three — tell us in no uncertain terms that this administration has no intention of respecting the law or the Constitution. (And if you are comforting yourself with the idea that the administration will respect injunctions from judges, which it has in the past, I invite you to consider Mr. Trump’s recent behavior in court.)
The decapitation at the F.B.I., the sidelining of individuals at the Department of Justice and the de facto shuttering of the foreign aid agency U.S.A.I.D. all serve the same purpose. It means that Mr. Trump and his favorites of the moment will find it much easier to operate with the kind of immunity that the Supreme Court has already granted the president.
Tellingly, the most galling indicator of the administration’s lawless intentions actually came early: the blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol, even those who attacked Capitol Police officers, which provides Mr. Trump with a powerful recruiting tool for elements that might wish to support him with political violence.
Democracy relies equally on a professional government, staffed with individuals who are subject to ethics constraints and act on the basis of reason and evidence in accordance with the law. That is why the leaders of the anti-democratic movement declared war long ago on what they jeeringly call the “administrative state.” Project 2025 promised a brutal assault on what it maintains is a “weaponized” and “woke” civil service bent on persecuting conservatives, and proposed purges.
Russell Vought, a leading figure behind Project 2025 and now Mr. Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget for the second time, promised to put government employees “in trauma.” The new-right intellectuals behind the anti-democratic movement draw heavily on crackpot writers like Curtis Yarvin, who condemns “the cathedral” — his term for the people and institutions that sustain a functioning modern state — and openly champions monarchical rule.
In its first weeks, the Trump administration has delivered on that promise. The probably illegal firing of inspectors general throughout the federal government; the tawdry “buyout” offer for federal employees; the commandeering of highly sensitive government data by Elon Musk’s DOGE minions; and the ongoing dismantling, firings and deletions of data at multiple federal agencies — these are not ways of making the government accountable to the voters in the last election, as partisans falsely suggest. They are about making sure that the people can never hold the president and his cronies to account. They also have nothing to do with “efficiency.” We are about to witness administrative dysfunction on a grand scale.
Democracy also depends on a corporate sector and a media sector that work independently of the government in power. That is why the leaders of the anti-democratic movement essentially opened a storefront in advance of the inauguration and began inviting corporations and wealthy individuals to prove their loyalty to the ruling party with inaugural fund contributions. Then came the meme coins that allow anyone to enrich the president and his wife, at least in theory, by purchasing digital tokens with no intrinsic purpose or value.
This proved to be one of the easiest parts of the process. The leaders of Meta, Amazon, JP Morgan, Google, OpenAI and a long list of other corporate titans seem to be making it clear that if protecting their profits means appeasing a corrupt autocratic regime, then that is what they will do.
Democracy relies on something softer, too, namely a sense of unity and shared purpose that allows people to work with one another despite their differences. That is why Rule No. 1 of the authoritarian playbook is to divide the populace. Mr. Trump, of course, is a renowned expert in that department. It is hard to think of another American president who would have taken advantage of an airplane tragedy to push hateful rhetoric about D.E.I. To be sure, reforming policies on diversity is not inherently unreasonable. But the administration’s total war on anti-discrimination law has nothing to do with “merit” and everything to do with stoking division.
Similarly, immigration policy is and ought to be debated. But in the past weeks, the administration has made clear that it will use its powers not to solve the many real immigration issues but instead to perform stunts intended mainly to reinforce the myths that helped get Mr. Trump elected (like the myth that immigrants commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans or the myth that the previous administration encouraged bands of these immigrant-criminals to roam free).
Why are they so desperate to weaken or even destroy democracy? Mainly, because they know that our system of justice, a functioning government, an independent economic sector and a united people stand in the way of unearned wealth and privilege. But it is important to understand that the anti-democratic movement is not monolithic. In fact, it isn’t even coherent.
One part of the program answers to the oligarchs — that is, the leaders of tech oligopolies and the most narrow-minded of our nation’s billionaires. These people are betting that the deconstruction of the administrative state means no pesky government oversight on their economic activities, plus tax cuts as well as privileged contracts. They may fatten their pocketbooks in the short term, but the idea that wreaking havoc on our democracy will enhance their wealth is tragically mistaken.
Another part of the program is the work of fanatics. I do not use the term loosely. If you take the trouble to read the writings of the thought leaders of the new right, who form a good portion of the brain trust of the anti-democratic movement, you will discover a group of men who really hate women, admire Nazi political theorists such as Carl Schmitt and believe in the existence of an insidious, all-controlling monster called “the woke,” which apparently works out of diversity, equity and inclusion offices in the back of “the cathedral.” They are acting out their fantasies now, taking revenge on imaginary enemies, and the American republic will be the principal victim.
The Christian nationalist ideologues who supply much of the rest of the ideology of the movement are no less extreme. Just listen to Doug Wilson, the powerful pastor from Moscow, Idaho, whom Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, has praised. Mr. Wilson is among the growing contingent who say that women should not have a right to vote. Or Lucas Miles, senior director of Turning Point USA Faith and the author of “Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity,” who has called progressive Christianity “heretical.” In a promotional video at December’s AmericaFest, an annual convention sponsored by Turning Point USA, Mr. Miles said, “I want to see woke church defunded.”
The left, “recognized early on,” Mr. Miles added, “that they knew they needed a vehicle to carry this progressive ideology, this Marxist agenda, and the best vehicle is the church. … It’s been going on since the 1700s that progressive thought has been creeping in.”
Still another part of the movement, which usually gets the most attention even though it has the least power, is the mass of voters who remain faithful to Mr. Trump. They come in many different varieties. No doubt some saw a vote for him as a vote against “Biden-flation” and the sharp rise in the cost of living. Some may really believe that the 2020 election was stolen or that public schools are indoctrination camps forcing gender change on students. Some did not understand the threats to democracy, others did not take them seriously and some simply don’t value democracy.
What is to be done? Let’s start with that dread word: messaging. In the coming months and years, the anti-democratic movement will cause many people to suffer real harm. We need to make sure these people know who did this to them — and who will fight for them.
As people lose their jobs or have to pay more as a consequence of needless tariffs, as they lose out on the benefits they earned and government services they deserve, as the Trump administration prioritizes buffoonish stunts over sound policy, as our most trusted allies abandon us, as women find more of their rights at risk, as people who don’t fit the regime mold find their careers faltering, and as the oligarchs behave ever more outrageously, we need to say, over and over: They did this.
But there is much more we can do. Now is not the time to curl up in despair. We have institutions to protect, pro-democracy organizations to support, and elections in less than two years. We have lawsuits to pursue, corruption to expose. In normal times, it is the duty of democratic citizens to help a newly elected president succeed. In the present circumstances, it is our duty to protect our democratic republic from a lawless president and the profoundly anti-American movement he leads.
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11) ‘He’s Just Old and Homeless’: California Jail Death Leads to Accusations of Neglect
Court-appointed monitors of Sacramento County jails say a man’s fatal overdose was one of multiple deaths in which deputies and nurses exhibited a “callous” indifference toward detainees.
By Christopher Damien, Feb. 7, 2025
Christopher Damien is reporting about law enforcement in Southern California’s inland and desert communities as part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
The Sacramento County Main Jail, where David Kent Barefield Sr. died in May. Credit...Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
A Sacramento man suffering from a drug overdose was neglected by a police officer, medical workers and sheriff’s deputies over the course of more than two hours before he died at a county jail last May, according to reports from court-appointed monitors.
That man, David Kent Barefield Sr., 55, was among seven detainees the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office reported dying at its facilities last year — and one of three who died at its main jail in the span of about a month.
Jail staff members claimed he was faking illness, and the Sheriff’s Office told the California Department of Justice that his death was from natural causes. But an autopsy by the county Coroner’s Office found he had overdosed on methamphetamine and fentanyl.
Like many jails and prisons across the country, those in Sacramento County have been faulted for inadequate medical care in recent years. Details of Mr. Barefield’s last hours were captured on jail video footage, which has not been publicly released but was viewed by lawyers appointed to monitor conditions at the county jails as part of a 2020 consent decree in a federal lawsuit.
The lawyers’ report described a culture of neglect for detainees in the jail system. Two medical experts, also assigned to track compliance with court-ordered reforms, asserted that there was misconduct by police officers, sheriff’s deputies and jail medical personnel in handling Mr. Barefield and others who died.
“Review of these deaths showed serious system and individual performance issues, including inadequate emergency response, inadequate medical care prior to death, and in one case, callous deliberate indifference to a man who was so obviously gravely ill that even a lay person would see that the patient needed emergent care,” the medical experts wrote.
The footage — showing Mr. Barefield seemingly unable to sit, stand or lift his head, incoherent and at times passed out — was particularly troubling, according to the court-appointed monitors. The lawyers recounted the details in a letter to Sheriff Jim Cooper obtained by The New York Times and The Desert Sun. The medical experts described it in a report filed with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California last week.
Officials from the three agencies that had contact with Mr. Barefield at the jail declined to respond to questions about the circumstances of his death and any lapses in his care.
The Sacramento Police Department requires officers to oversee arrestees until another agency takes custody, and to transport them to the hospital if needed. The Sheriff’s Office — which said it had done a full investigation of the matter but has not released any of its findings — asserted that Mr. Barefield was only its responsibility for 15 minutes, after his booking process was complete. Both the Sheriff’s Office and the health agency supervising the jail’s medical staff said they made changes to the intake process but did not provide details.
Mr. Barefield, who was homeless and had a history of drug abuse, was handcuffed, pulled from a police car and brought to Sacramento’s main jail around 1 a.m. on May 12, accounts from the lawyers and medical experts note. A police officer had dragged him about 100 feet over the concrete floor of the parking garage to get to the jail entrance, according to an attorney representing the dead man’s relatives in a lawsuit. The family did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
The police department said Mr. Barefield had been arrested on theft and trespassing charges, but would not provide more details.
Once Mr. Barefield was inside, a certified nursing assistant had difficulty checking his vital signs, and should have alerted a registered nurse to examine him but did not make that request, the medical experts wrote. As Mr. Barefield lay on the floor for several minutes, the nursing assistant and the arresting officer did not attend to him.
The officer “reportedly told health care staff that the patient had been able to walk at the time of arrest but was now ‘playing possum,’” wrote the medical experts — a nurse practitioner and a registered nurse who are both experienced in working in correctional institutions.
Mr. Barefield was soon placed in a cart that is normally used to restrain combative detainees. At around 2 a.m., the medical experts and lawyers said, a nurse cleared him to be held at the jail but failed to complete a medical screening and later falsified his intake papers.
The medical experts, who did not respond to requests for comment, noted in their report that the police should have taken Mr. Barefield directly to a hospital rather than to the jail. The report also said that nurses and sheriff’s deputies should have recognized that he was in dire need of medical care.
Deputies took him out of the cart at about 3:30 a.m., carrying and dragging him to be photographed and fingerprinted. “Stop playing games!” one of them yelled, according to the lawyers.
Two of the lawyers — who work with the Prison Law Office, a nonprofit legal group representing detainees in the federal court case — described Mr. Barefield’s condition in an interview.
“He was near death and completely incapable of engaging throughout the interaction,” said Margot Mendelson, one of the lawyers. “He was not treated like a person who needed care. This should have been the moment to help save his life.”
“He is not standing at any point,” said Patrick Booth, another of the lawyers. “They’re pulling him by the biceps about 30 or 40 feet. His pants had come down. He’s completely exposed.”
Mr. Booth said the footage showed the deputies lifting Mr. Barefield’s head up by the hair, his body on the floor, while taking booking photos from different angles
While he mumbled occasionally throughout the encounter, the lawyers said he made his only discernible comment while being photographed: “I am Jesus Christ.”
Minutes later, a Sheriff’s Office sergeant observed that the man appeared to be unconscious and asked the nurse to confirm he had been cleared medically for booking. All the accounts say the nurse claimed that the man’s vital signs had been normal, adding, “He’s just old and homeless.” The nurse then left the area.
Deputies began checking Mr. Barefield’s pulse, calling for backup and eventually starting chest compressions at 3:46 a.m. A nurse’s note in the family’s lawsuit says Mr. Barefield received overdose medication, though the other accounts do not include that detail.
Mr. Barefield was pronounced dead about 30 minutes later.
His relatives sued the county, the Sheriff’s Office, the City of Sacramento and its police department in December, claiming he was not provided medical treatment and seeking damages.
The two nursing experts warned of serious consequences elsewhere for such lapses.
“In similar cases across the country,” they wrote, “nurses who falsified medical records and jeopardized patient safety have lost their license, and in some cases, were charged and convicted of felonies for patient endangerment.”
They noted that the nurse who faked Mr. Barefield’s intake papers faced disciplinary action, was reported to the California Board of Registered Nursing and resigned.
While Mr. Barefield was technically in the custody of the arresting officer until the jail booking was complete, the Sacramento Police Department said there was no need to investigate further. “It would not be customary for our department to conduct an administrative review, as Mr. Barefield did not die in our custody.”
The federal consent decree requires the Sheriff’s Office to provide timely medical care and improve its investigations of in-custody deaths. The lawyers involved in monitoring the jail said they continued to have concerns.
“The Sheriff must take accountability for the apathy and callousness that pervades the jail and exercise leadership to make immediate changes,” they wrote in their letter to Sheriff Cooper. “Sacramento County should demand decency for the people it incarcerates.”
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12) Trump’s Gaza Deal: War Crimes in Exchange for Beachfront Property
By Michelle Goldberg, Feb. 7, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/opinion/trump-gaza-war-crimes.html
A beach in the Gaza Strip. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When Donald Trump, speaking beside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, announced this week that the United States would be taking over Gaza and “permanently” resettling its population elsewhere, few in American politics took him seriously.
Trump, after all, has already made trollish imperialistic threats against Greenland, Canada and Panama, but so far, he doesn’t seem ready to back up his bluster with military force. And while some parts of his base are tingling with excitement at the prospect of national renewal through conquest, in the country at large, there’s little appetite for new nation-building campaigns.
In the days following the president’s ludicrous proposal, his aides and allies, in a familiar pattern, tried to retcon it into something sane. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for example, pretended that Trump had merely made a generous offer to help Gaza rebuild. Israel, however, understood the earthshaking significance of Trump’s words. The United States is not, obviously, going to build a Middle Eastern Riviera on Israel’s border. What it has done, however, is grant Israel extraordinary new license to crush Palestinians in Gaza, and maybe in the West Bank as well.
Parts of the Israeli right have long dreamed of expelling Palestinians from their land, a mad ambition that’s only grown more intense and widespread since Oct. 7. Now Trump has taken this once-taboo idea and rendered it kosher. “I welcome the bold initiative of U.S. president Trump, which could allow a large portion of Gaza’s population to relocate to various destinations worldwide,” Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said a statement on Thursday. He ordered the military to begin preparing “exit options” for the Palestinians.
Trump’s proposition, the pundit Amit Segal said on Israel’s Channel 12, is “not 100 percent what Netanyahu wants — it’s 200 percent.” Until now, Israeli politicians who publicly discussed such ideas risked American blowback. Joe Biden’s administration was shamefully unwilling to restrain Netanyahu, but it did rebuke far-right Israeli ministers when they fantasized about building Jewish settlements in Gaza. The Palestinians, Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said last year, “cannot, and they must not, be pressed to leave Gaza.” Netanyahu had to at least pretend to agree, insisting that it wasn’t “realistic” to talk about settling Gaza.
It might seem more realistic to him now. On Thursday, Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media site, “The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” after Palestinians had “already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region.” Never mind that under the terms of the cease-fire he takes credit for, fighting is supposed to be over now. Trump seems to be offering Israel a deal: The U.S. will countenance the ethnic cleansing of Gaza so long as America gets a prime piece of oceanfront property at the end of it.
So far, of course, both Israel and the United States have spoken of the removal of Palestinians from Gaza as if it would be voluntary. No doubt some Palestinians would choose to leave the land that Israel has made uninhabitable if they had a decent alternative, which they don’t. (One Israeli news site reported that among the destinations being considered for Palestinians are Puntland and Somaliland, two regions of Somalia.) But many of the enclave’s nearly more than two million people, seared by a history of dispossession, are determined to stay put. Driving them out would be a war crime. It could not be accomplished without atrocity.
Republicans may brush off Trump’s words as nothing but audacious spitballing, but by opening the door to a Gaza without Palestinians, Trump has already made the world more brutal and unstable. Right now, Israel and Hamas are supposed to be negotiating Phase 2 of their cease-fire agreement, which is meant to lead to a permanent cessation of fighting, the release of the remaining live hostages, and the withdrawal of Israeli forces. But the Israeli delegation has yet to leave for Qatar to participate in talks, and now Trump has removed an important incentive for Hamas to set the hostages free. Why would Hamas release them, asked Samuel Heilman in The Times of Israel, “when at the end of the process they will neither have control of Gaza back nor any hope of a Palestinian sovereign state?”
There’s an idea floating around that even if Trump’s plan is unworkable, he deserves credit for recognizing that the status quo is untenable. “Trump picks up on a real problem, about how to reconstruct Gaza,” the British academic Lawrence Freedman told The New York Times. But there’s nothing admirable about tossing off absurd and impossible solutions to intractable dilemmas. If smart people are convincing themselves otherwise, it suggests to me a desperation to find rationality where there is none.
Even before Trump took office, the “rules-based international order” was deeply decayed, in no small part because of Biden’s complicity in Gaza’s annihilation. Now that order is dead, along with other imperfect remnants of a less chaotic time, like the soft power America built with foreign aid and democratic ideals. Maybe Trump’s menacing of Canada and Denmark and his scheme for a new colony on the Mediterranean will come to nothing. But with his renewed rhetoric of American empire, he’s removed any pretense that other countries should be limited by anything except their own might. He has created a de facto justification not only for Israeli expansionism, but for Chinese and Russian expansionism as well.
The old rules never worked as well as they were supposed to. That doesn’t mean we won’t soon long for them.
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13) ‘We Are in Disbelief’: Africa Reels as U.S. Aid Agency Is Dismantled
The collapse of U.S.A.I.D. at the hands of President Trump and Elon Musk is already leaving gaping holes in vital health care and other services that millions of Africans rely on for their survival.
By Declan Walsh, Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya, Feb. 8, 2025
Tigrayan refugees from Ethiopia collecting food rations provided by the U.S. Agency for International Aid in eastern Sudan in 2021. Credit...Nariman El-Mofty/Associated Press
For decades, sub-Saharan Africa was a singular focus of American foreign aid. The continent received over $8 billion a year, money that was used to feed starving children, supply lifesaving drugs and provide wartime humanitarian assistance.
In a few short weeks, President Trump and the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk have burned much of that work to the ground, vowing to completely gut the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“CLOSE IT DOWN!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Friday, accusing the agency of unspecified corruption and fraud.
A federal judge on Friday halted, for now, some elements of Mr. Trump’s attempt to shutter the agency. But the speed and shock of the administration’s actions have already led to confusion, fear and even paranoia at U.S.A.I.D. offices across Africa, a top recipient of agency funding. Workers were being fired or furloughed en masse.
As the true scale of the fallout comes into view, African governments are wondering how to fill gaping holes left in vital services, like health care and education, that until recent weeks were funded by the United States. Aid groups and United Nations bodies that feed the starving or house refugees have seen their budgets slashed in half, or worse.
By far the greatest price is being paid by ordinary Africans, millions of whom rely on American aid for their survival. But the consequences are also reverberating across an aid sector that, for better or worse, has been a pillar of Western engagement with Africa for over six decades. With the collapse of U.S.A.I.D., that entire model is badly shaken.
“This is dramatic and consequential, and it’s hard to imagine rowing it back,” said Murithi Mutiga, Africa program director at the International Crisis Group. Mr. Mutiga described the collapse of the agency as “part of the unraveling of the post Cold War order.”
“Once, the primacy of the West was assumed” in Africa, he said. “No more.”
Experts say the agency’s abrupt undoing will cost many lives by creating huge gaps in public services, especially in health care, where U.S.A.I.D. has poured much of its resources.
In Kenya alone, at least 40,000 health care workers will lose their jobs, U.S.A.I.D. officials say. On Friday, several U.N. agencies that depend on American funding began to furlough part of their staff. The United States also provides most of the funding for two large refugee camps in northern Kenya that house 700,000 people from at least 19 countries.
Ethiopia’s health ministry has fired 5,000 health care professionals who had been recruited under American funding, according to an official notification obtained by The New York Times.
“We are in disbelief,” said Medhanye Alem of the Center for Victims of Torture, which treats survivors of conflict-related trauma at nine centers in northern Ethiopia, all now closed.
Of over 10,000 U.S.A.I.D. employees worldwide, barely 300 will remain under changes conveyed to staff on Thursday night. Only 12 will remain in Africa.
The most pressing challenge for many governments is not to replace the American staff members or money, but to save American-built health systems that are rapidly crumbling to the ground, said Ken O. Opalo, a Kenyan political scientist at Georgetown University in Washington.
Kenya, for instance, has enough drugs to treat people with H.I.V. for over a year, Mr. Opalo said. “But the nurses and doctors to treat them are being let go, and the clinics are closing.”
Broader economic shocks are also likely in some of the world’s most fragile countries.
American aid accounts for 15 percent of economic output in South Sudan, 6 percent in Somalia and 4 percent in the Central African Republic, said Charlie Robertson, an economist who specializes in Africa. “We could see governance effectively cease in a few countries, unless others step up to replace the hole left by the U.S.,” he said.
Whether U.S.A.I.D. is truly dead may yet be determined by Congress and the U.S. courts, where supporters have filed a raft of legal challenges. But the Trump administration seems determined to move faster than its challengers.
As Mr. Musk and his team have commandeered the agency’s operations in Washington, shuttering its headquarters and sacking or suspending 94 percent of its staff, its vast aid machinery in Africa has shuddered to a halt.
In major hubs in Kenya, South Africa and Senegal, American aid officials were shocked to find themselves labeled “criminals” by Mr. Musk, then ordered to return to the United States, according to eight U.S.A.I.D. employees or contractors who all spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
On Friday, the Trump administration gave all U.S.A.I.D. staff members 30 days to pack their bags and come home, causing turmoil among families now faced with the prospect of pulling children out of school on short notice. If the federal court that is now reviewing that directive does not overturn it, few will have jobs to return to.
Several U.S.A.I.D. officials noted that Google’s artificial intelligence system, Gemini, had been activated on their internal communications systems recently, and that internal video calls conducted on the Google platform were suddenly set to automatically record.
Officials said they worried that Mr. Musk’s team could use A.I. to monitor their conversations to ferret out dissenters, or to excerpt snippets of conversations that might be weaponized to discredit the agency.
Colleagues at the agency have turned to Signal, an encrypted messaging app, this week to share information unofficially. People are being driven by fear, one of them said.
In private, even senior U.S.A.I.D. officials agree that the agency needs an overhaul. In interviews, several recognized the need to streamline its bureaucracy, and even questioned an aid system that relies so heavily on American contractors and fosters a damaging culture of dependency among African governments.
Announcements by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and acting head of U.S.A.I.D., that emergency food and lifesaving aid would be exempted from the administration’s cuts were initially welcomed by employees. But, officials said, it turned out to be largely a mirage. Despite the promise of waivers, many have found it impossible to obtain one.
Worst of all, many said, were the broadsides delivered by Mr. Musk and the White House portraying the agency as a rogue, criminal agency run by spendthrift officials pursuing their personal agendas. Such attacks were false and deeply hurtful to Americans who sought to relieve human suffering around the world, several people said.
In Nairobi, where U.S.A.I.D. has about 250 Kenyan and 50 American staff members, several Kenyans spoke at a tense town hall this week.
They worried that talk at the White House of widespread corruption inside the agency might cause other Kenyans to believe that they, too, had benefited from fraud, said an official who attended the meeting.
Like the Americans present at the town hall, the Kenyans worried they were about to be fired. But there was one major difference between the two groups, the official noted: While the Kenyans were anxious for their livelihoods, the Americans were worried about their country.
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14) Trump halts all aid to South Africa, claiming mistreatment of white landowners.
By Michael D. Shear and John Eligon, Feb. 7, 2025
"South Africa’s colonial regimes were particularly brutal in dispossessing Black people of their land and forcefully removing them. Despite the efforts of postcolonial governments, the result remains clear to this day: White South Africans, who make up 7 percent of the population, own farmland that covers the majority of the country’s territory."
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02/08/us/trump-administration-news#trump-south-africa-aid-white-landowners
President Trump on Friday ordered that all foreign assistance to South Africa be halted and said his administration would prioritize the resettling of white, “Afrikaner refugees” into the United States because of what he called actions by the country’s government that “racially disfavored landowners.”
In the order, Mr. Trump said that “the United States shall not provide aid or assistance to South Africa” and that American officials should do everything possible to help “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”
It follows Mr. Trump’s accusation on his social media site on Sunday that the South African government was engaged in a “massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum.” He vowed a full investigation and promised to cut off aid.
“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY,” the president wrote in the post. “It is a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn’t want to so much as mention.”
The order was stunning in providing official American backing to long-held conspiracy theories about the mistreatment of white South Africans in the post-apartheid era.
Mr. Trump has made repeated claims without evidence that echoed those conspiracy theories. In 2018, he ordered his secretary of state to look into “the large scale killing of farmers” — a claim disputed by official figures and the country’s biggest farmers’ group.
Mr. Trump’s recent comments were in reference to a policy that President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa signed into law last month.
The law, known as the Expropriation Act, repeals an apartheid-era law and allows the government in certain instances to acquire privately held land in the public interest without paying compensation — something that can be done only after a justification process subject to judicial review.
The order from Mr. Trump came a day after Mr. Ramaphosa delivered his State of the Nation address with a defiance that appeared to be a reference to the American president’s accusations.
“We will not be bullied,” he said. The South African leader vowed to stand united in the face of what he called “the rise of nationalism and protectionism.”
“We will speak with one voice in defense of our national interest, our sovereignty and our constitutional democracy,” he said.
In addition to the halt in foreign aid, Mr. Trump ordered officials to provide “humanitarian” assistance to Afrikaners and to allow members of the white South African minority to seek refuge in the United States through the American refugee program.
Since the transition to democracy in 1994, the South African government has taken a willing-seller approach to try to transfer the ownership of more land to the country’s Black majority. The new law, with limited exceptions to that approach, came as many Black South Africans have argued that Nelson Mandela and other leaders did not do enough to force the white minority to give up wealth that had been accrued during apartheid.
South Africa’s colonial regimes were particularly brutal in dispossessing Black people of their land and forcefully removing them. Despite the efforts of postcolonial governments, the result remains clear to this day: White South Africans, who make up 7 percent of the population, own farmland that covers the majority of the country’s territory.
In an earlier executive order, Mr. Trump had demanded a three-month pause in the United States’ refugee program, blocking the admission of desperate people fleeing war, economic strife, natural disasters or political persecution. Friday’s order appeared to make white South Africans an exception to the broader halt.
While it is not clear whether he had an influence on the president’s order, Elon Musk, the billionaire who has become a close adviser to the president, is from South Africa. In 2023, Mr. Musk posted similar far-right conspiracy claims about South Africa on X, the social media platform he owns.
“They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa,” Mr. Musk wrote.
Mr. Ramaphosa and Mr. Musk spoke by phone after that social media post, with the South African president trying to clarify what his administration has called “misinformation” peddled by Mr. Trump.
In much of South Africa, Mr. Trump’s attacks in recent days inspired a rare bit of political unity, with leftist, centrist and even some far-right activists all saying that the American president’s characterization of the land transfer law was wrong.
His comments amplified a long-held grievance among some white South Africans who claim they have been discriminated against by the Black-led government after apartheid. But Mr. Trump’s comments also angered many South Africans, who saw the law as a necessary means of redressing historical injustice.
Since 1994, when South Africa became a democracy, the country has enjoyed a close relationship with the United States. Barack Obama visited there several times during his presidency, including when he attended the memorial service for Mr. Mandela, who had been imprisoned for 27 years before becoming the country’s president.
But Mr. Trump’s actions on Friday made it clear that he does not view the relationship in the same way.
South Africa received more than $400 million in aid from the United States in 2023, almost all of which went to funding efforts to fight H.I.V. and AIDS. The government has said that American funding makes up about 17 percent of its budget for battling H.I.V.
Far-right white Afrikaners applauded Mr. Trump’s attacks on South Africa’s government in recent days.
Ernst Roets, the executive director of the Afrikaner Foundation, which lobbies for international support of the interests of Afrikaners, said that while the government was not seizing land, it was trying to create a legal and policy framework to be able to do so.
The expropriation law opens the door to abuse, Mr. Roets said, because the government “can justify a lot of things under the banner of public interest.” But even Mr. Roets and his group had not called on Mr. Trump to broadly cut aid to South Africa, instead seeking targeted actions against government leaders.
After Mr. Trump first commented about land confiscation, the South African government tried to broker a conversation between its foreign minister and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, according to Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s ambassador to the United States. But the Trump administration did not respond, he said.
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15) 3 Israeli Hostages Are Released for 183 Palestinian Prisoners
The hostages, who were made to give public speeches thanking the Hamas militants who had held them captive, looked frail and gaunt, sparking dismay and outrage Israel.
By Aaron Boxerman, Feb. 8, 2025
Hamas released three Israeli hostages on Saturday in exchange for more than 180 Palestinian prisoners in a heavily staged handover that sparked outrage in Israel.
The three men, all appearing frail and gaunt, were made to give speeches thanking the Hamas militants who had held them captive for more than 16 months in Gaza.
All three — Eli Sharabi, 52; Or Levy, 34; and Ohad Ben Ami, 56 — were being taken to hospitals, where they were being reunited with loved ones.
The images of the men, surrounded by rifle-toting captors, were broadcast live, and Israeli joy turned to dismay for many at seeing their conditions.
“The Israeli hostages look like Holocaust survivors,” wrote Gideon Saar, the foreign minister.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that he had ordered the Israeli authorities to “take appropriate action” over what it said were repeated Hamas violations of the cease-fire under which the exchanges are taking place. But the statement did not specify what those actions might be.
The scene could put further public pressure on the Israeli government to make more concessions to bring the remaining hostages home. Roughly 75 of those taken hostage in the October 2023 attack on southern Israel have still not returned from Gaza, and some are believed to be dead. Most are not expected to be returned under the current stage of the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
After the hostage handover, Israel released 183 Palestinian prisoners, including some who had been serving life sentences. Big crowds greeted the arrival of a Red Cross bus carrying freed prisoners in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Saturday’s release was the fifth in a tense series of exchanges outlined in the cease-fire deal. Since the deal went into effect, Hamas has tried to use the hostage releases for propaganda purposes. Its armed fighters have fanned out in the streets and squares where the exchanges take place as a show of ongoing dominance in Gaza despite Israel’s 15-month war to uproot the group.
Israel and Hamas are scheduled to be negotiating terms for the second phase of the truce, which would end the war permanently and free the remaining hostages. But it is far from clear that the two sides can come to an agreement: Israel has vowed not to end the war without an end to Hamas rule in Gaza, a stipulation that Hamas has rebuffed.
Here’s what else to know:
· Red Cross: The International Committee for the Red Cross said it was concerned about conditions “surrounding release operations,” without specifically naming Israel or Hamas.
· Gaza truce: In this first phase of the cease-fire, slated to last 42 days, Hamas pledged to release at least 25 living hostages and the remains of eight others who are believed to be dead in exchange for more than 1,500 Palestinians jailed by Israel. In previous exchanges, about 18 hostages have been freed for more than 550 Palestinian prisoners.
· Gaza proposal: This week, President Trump proposed evacuating Gaza’s roughly two million Palestinian residents and the United States taking over the devastated enclave. Some analysts viewed his remarks as an effort to kick-start the negotiations, while others said his ideas could torpedo them.
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16) Grenfell Tower Was a Death Trap. Some Wanted It to Stand as a Warning.
Britain’s government confirmed Friday that the tower block in London, where 72 people died, would be demolished, provoking a combination of anger and relief from survivors and bereaved families.
By Mark Landler, Reporting from London, Feb. 7, 2025
"In its ruined state, with the green hearts and the phrase 'Grenfell, Forever in Our Hearts,' stamped at the top of the wrapped building, Grenfell Tower has become a different kind of landmark — a symbol of social inequality and the costs of rampant deregulation. To some, it is even a source of solace."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/world/europe/grenfell-tower-demolition-memorial-debate.html
Grenfell Tower has been clad in plastic sheeting since the fire nearly eight years ago. Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times
For nearly eight years, wrapped in white and crowned with green hearts, Grenfell Tower has stood as a tragic monument to the worst residential fire in the post-World War II history of Britain. On Friday, the government confirmed it would demolish the building, where 72 people died in a blaze that a public inquiry blamed on a lethal combination of negligence, cost-cutting and deregulation.
The decision, by the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, divided families of the victims when she told them of it on Wednesday, in advance of the official announcement. Some condemned the plan to tear down the building before justice had been meted out to those responsible for the disaster; others conceded the tower could not stand in its present state indefinitely.
The anguished debate over Grenfell Tower echoes those over the sites of other tragedies, such as the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington or the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, where ruined structures become sacred ground, steeped in symbolism and memory.
Ms. Rayner said the demolition would be carried out methodically over two years behind the protective wrapping. Parts of the tower, and material from it, will be preserved so they can become part of a future memorial. The carefully worded statement, issued by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, tried to navigate the emotional crosscurrents of the debate.
“The tower was the home of the 72 innocent people who lost their lives, and of survivors whose lives were forever changed,” the statement said. “It is clear from conversations it remains a sacred site. It is also clear that there is not a consensus about what should happen to it.”
The government might well have been alluding to the reaction after Ms. Rayner’s meeting with survivors and families of the victims when she informed them of the decision. One of the groups, Grenfell United, accused her of ignoring their views and claimed there was little support in the room for tearing it down.
Karim Mussilhy, whose uncle, Hesham Rahman, perished in the fire, said the government had short-circuited the debate by asserting — wrongly, he claimed — that there was no alternative to demolishing the building completely.
“There’s no reason the tower needs to come all the way down,” Mr. Mussilhy said. “There are parts of it that can remain forever.”
But another group, Grenfell Next of Kin, said the focus should be on a memorial rather than preserving the blackened remains of the building. “Do we wish the whole tower could stand forever? Yes. Is that an option? Not from a structural point of view,” the group said. “Do we need a way forward? Yes.”
Although the building had been reinforced after the fire with thousands of props, structural engineers warned that it would continue to deteriorate. The government said that preserving multiple floors did not make sense from an engineering point of view. Even preserving a smaller number of floors, it said, would raise issues of equity with the families of victims.
“It would not be fair to keep some floors of the building that are significant to some families, whilst not being able to do so for others and knowing that, for some, this would be deeply upsetting,” the statement said.
Some have argued that the building should be preserved because it is, in effect, a crime scene. The public inquiry concluded that the disaster was caused by unscrupulous manufacturers, who supplied cheap, flammable cladding, which turned the tower into an inferno after it caught fire in the early hours of June 14, 2017.
The inquiry’s report also blamed the Conservative-led local council, which was eager to cut costs, as well as acquiescent contractors and the architecture firm that oversaw the 2015 renovation of the 24-floor building. Originally constructed in 1972, Grenfell Tower became a Brutalist landmark, near some of London’s most upscale neighborhoods.
In its statement, the government said it had consulted the police, the coroner’s office and the office of the public inquiry, all of which said they had what they needed to pursue investigations of the fire. The Metropolitan Police may not bring the first criminal charges in the case until 2027.
The treatment of sites where a tragic loss of life occurred has long been a fraught issue. After a truck bomb destroyed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, there was a lively debate over about whether to preserve and display remnants of the ruined building as a monument to the 168 people killed there.
A small section of the building’s granite wall was preserved and integrated into a memorial. More symbolically, so was a segment of the chain-link fence that had surrounded the site for four years after the attack and became a repository for flowers, photos and other mementos left by visitors.
“These conversations are not about who’s right or who’s wrong,” said Edward T. Linenthal, an emeritus professor of history at Indiana University, who has advised memorial commissions on how to honor victims of terror attacks and mass shootings. “It’s about whose sensibilities you choose to honor, and why.”
In the case of Grenfell Tower, he said, the unresolved quest for justice adds another layer of complexity: While the fire was an accident not an attack, unlike in Oklahoma City or on Sept. 11, 2001, it has some of the same qualities.
“When there’s malfeasance of any kind involved — loose wiring, class issues, poor regulation by the authorities — that adds a sharpness to it,” Professor Linenthal said. “People died there who weren’t supposed to. Whatever they decide to do, it has to take time, and it has to be done carefully.”
Among the proposals for a memorial are a garden and a monument that would reach into the sky. Last month, the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission named a short list of five candidates to submit designs. It hopes to choose a winning team by the end of the summer and submit a detailed plan by the end of 2026.
In its ruined state, with the green hearts and the phrase “Grenfell, Forever in Our Hearts,” stamped at the top of the wrapped building, Grenfell Tower has become a different kind of landmark — a symbol of social inequality and the costs of rampant deregulation. To some, it is even a source of solace.
“Being able to see the tower every day helps some people continue to feel close to those they lost,” the government said. “For others, it is a painful reminder of what happened and is having a daily impact on some members of the community.”
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