Surviving State Violence:
The Case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui
and Incarceration in Women’s Prisons
Monday March 24, 2025
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM EDT
Online, YouTube
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Stagnant waters and poverty can be found all around in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.
Haiti Action Committee Condemns Trump’s Decision to End Temporary Protected Status for Haitians
Haiti Action Committee denounces the latest white supremacist attack by the Trump Administration directed at Haitians living in the US. The announcement that the US will end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians puts a target on the back of over 500,000 Haitians.
It is, quite simply, a plan for ethnic cleansing – and it must be opposed.
The US government has granted 17 countries Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which allows undocumented people from those countries to work and live legally in this country, but does not provide a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship. A country is designated for TPS when conditions there are so bad that it’s not safe or economically viable for people to return, for instance in case of hurricanes and other natural disasters or war and political instability. Haiti was granted TPS status after the horrific earthquake of 2010 that killed more than 300,000 people. This was followed by Hurricane Matthew that devastated Haiti’s southern peninsula in 2016 and the disastrous 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in August 2021. By July of 2024, over 520,000 Haitians had been granted TPS, and they are now in the crosshairs of ICE and Homeland Security.
Many of the Haitians who are impacted by this inhumane ruling have been in the United States for years and have families with children who are US citizens. They own homes and businesses, and pay taxes. Deportations will break up families with the US-born children having the option to remain in the country (assuming birthright citizenship is not overturned), and their undocumented parents forced to return to a country called a “living hell” by those who live there.
The current conditions in Haiti are exactly what TPS was set up to address, and it’s unconscionable for the Trump administration to pretend otherwise. There are now no elected officials in Haiti, the result of years of rule by decree by imposed and illegitimate governments, installed by the US and its so-called Core Group of foreign occupiers in the wake of the coup d’etat that overthrew Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, in 2004. In the last year alone, over 5000 Haitians have been killed by paramilitary death squads, armed with weapons that enter the country illegally, mainly from the US. Over one million Haitians have had to flee their homes. Nearly half the population is facing acute hunger, as roads are blocked and markets attacked. Tens of thousands of children have been unable to attend schools. Gang rapes have become the norm as paramilitaries aligned with government and business elites escalate their attacks on opposition communities. The despised Haitian Army, disbanded by President Aristide in 1995, has been reconstituted, readying itself to commit yet more human rights violations.
Already there are lawsuits and protests to prevent mass deportations of Haitians. Haiti Action Committee will be doing all we can to advocate for ongoing TPS protection for Haitians in this country and for an end to the death squad terror in Haiti that has fueled Haitian migration. Please join us in this fight.
To contact us, please go to: action.haiti@gmail.com
For more information, please go to www.haitisolidarity.net or our facebook page athttps://www.facebook.com/HaitiActionCommittee
To support the vital work of Haiti’s grassroots movement, please donate to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund at www.haitiemergencyrelief.org--Haiti Action CommitteePO Box 2040Berkeley,CA 9470233 years of solidarity with the grassroots struggle for dignity, democracy and self-determination of the Haitian people! We Will Not Forget the Achievements of Lavalas in HaitiPlease donate to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund www.haitiemergencyrelief.org - all donations are tax-deductible and support Haiti's grassroots struggle for democracy
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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) Arab Plan for Gaza Leaves Thorny Issues Unanswered
As Israel remains deadlocked with Hamas over key issues, Gaza’s future after the war ends appears no closer to a resolution.
By Vivian Yee, Reporting from Cairo, March 5, 2025
When President Trump said last month that he wanted to move all of Gaza’s roughly two million residents out of the strip to Egypt and Jordan and transform the territory into a beachfront “Riviera” for tourism, the pressure was on Arab leaders horrified by the idea to come up with their own grand plan.
At an emergency Arab summit in Cairo on Tuesday, they laid out their vision: Rebuild Gaza without forcing out the Palestinians who live there. Sideline Hamas, the armed group that currently controls Gaza, and appoint a committee of qualified bureaucrats to run the strip for six months before handing power to the internationally recognized Palestinian government in the West Bank. Then reunite the territory with the West Bank as one Palestinian state — a long-held dream of Palestinians and many Arabs across the Middle East.
For all the talk of statehood and nuts-and-bolts discussion of temporary housing units for Palestinians, however, Gaza’s postwar future appears no closer to a resolution.
While Arab countries presented a unified front against the idea of forcibly displacing Palestinians and a detailed $53 billion reconstruction blueprint, their plan leaves central questions still unanswered. And the Arabs have little influence they can use to push Israel or Hamas to break their deadlock on several key issues, especially as the Trump administration is openly siding with Israel.
“With all respect, the plan was very technical, as if it came from an engineering consultancy,” said Ghassan Khatib, a political scientist at Birzeit University in the West Bank. “And we need a political plan.”
But a political solution was never really in the Arabs’ hands. Ultimately, that must come from Israel, Hamas and the United States, analysts said. The three remain at an impasse, raising fears that the fighting will explode again in Gaza.
The Arab countries’ inability to bridge those divisions were on conspicuous display in Tuesday’s statement. Less road map than wish list, the proposal skipped over how power in Gaza would be transferred from a postwar governing committee to the Palestinian Authority and reiterated that Palestinians must be granted their own state, a possibility the hard-right Israeli government has dismissed.
The statement signed by Arab countries on Tuesday night also avoided directly addressing whether or how to disarm Hamas, a crucial issue. While both Israel and the Trump administration say that dismantling the group’s armed wing is nonnegotiable because of the threat it poses to Israel, demilitarizing is a deal breaker for Hamas.
The furthest the document goes is an oblique reference to Gaza’s security being managed by a single armed force and a single legitimate authority. Elsewhere, it calls for the Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza alongside the West Bank in the future, implying that it would be the authority in charge of security, not Hamas.
That is not to say that Arab countries want to see Hamas keep its weapons. Egypt, which hosted the emergency summit and borders Gaza to the south, has serious national security concerns about Hamas. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and some other Arab countries also want to see it gone.
Still, even if they were united on the need to demilitarize Hamas, no one seems to have a plan for how to do so or who would enforce it. The group, which welcomed the statement on Tuesday, has expressed no openness to giving up its weapons.
Another fundamental impasse centers on the issue of Palestinian statehood. The Arab countries’ calls for establishing a Palestinian state are almost certain to run headlong into Israeli objections.
Arab leaders say that turning Mr. Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” notion into reality would mean destroying any prospect of a Palestinian state. Israel has embraced the proposal, with Israel’s foreign ministry saying on X on Tuesday night that Mr. Trump’s idea was “an opportunity for the Gazans to have free choice based on their free will. This should be encouraged!”
A Trump administration spokesman, Brian Hughes, seemed to stand by the American president’s idea when asked about the Arab plan on Tuesday night, saying the Arab plan “does not address the reality that Gaza is currently uninhabitable,” according to Reuters.
Though the United States has not explicitly scrapped its decades-old support for a two-state solution to the conflict, the Trump administration seems to be moving in lock step with Israel on many issues, raising questions about its commitment to Palestinian statehood. Israel, however, is also heavily dependent on the United States, which gives Mr. Trump room to twist Israel’s arm, analysts said.
“The only thing that really matters at this point is, what’s Trump going to propose?” said Paul Salem, an expert at the Washington-based Middle East Institute.
Mr. Trump has his eye on a grand bargain in which Saudi Arabia would agree to normalize relations with Israel in return for a security pact with the United States. Saudi Arabia has conditioned any deal on achieving Palestinian statehood, dimming the agreement’s prospects.
But with the cease-fire in Gaza wobbling and Israel tightening its grip on the West Bank, Mr. Salem said the Palestinians were in such a weakened position that Mr. Trump could perhaps force a deal.
“They might be in a position to have to accept things that they maybe would not have accepted” before, Mr. Salem said.
The Arab blueprint laid out on Tuesday is most detailed when it comes to rebuilding Gaza, a process that the document says could last until 2030 and cost $53 billion. It calls for a conference next month to mobilize international funding and investments for the plan, but it is unclear who will put money down.
Wealthy Gulf Arab states are often called on to pay for reconstruction and development across the Arab world. Egypt’s foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, has also suggested that Europe could pitch in; and António Costa, the president of the European Council, which brings together European Union leaders, said in a speech at Tuesday’s summit that the bloc “stands ready to provide concrete support.”
Yet Gulf monarchies who would likely have to foot much of the bill, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are wary of spending so much to rebuild Gaza only to see the territory destroyed again if war returns.
Only two Gulf heads of state attended the Cairo summit — the leaders of Bahrain and Qatar — undercutting the strong, unified front Egypt had hoped to present and raising questions about the Gulf countries’ support for the plan.
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2) In Oct. 7 Report, Israeli Security Agency Puts Some Blame on Netanyahu Government
The Shin Bet said that it had disregarded intelligence from Gaza about a planned Hamas raid, but also that government policies may have emboldened the militants to attack.
By Ephrat Livni, Published March 4, 2025, Updated March 5, 2025
Ashkelon, Israel, moments after a rocket siren was sounded on Oct. 7, 2023. Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Israel’s domestic security service on Tuesday assumed responsibility for failing to heed warning signs of a planned Hamas attack before the militants’ devastating strike on Oct. 7, 2023. But the agency also faulted the Israeli government for policies it said had allowed Hamas to quietly amass weapons, collect funds and gain support, among other failures.
The conclusions from the Shin Bet, as the security agency is known, were published days after a similar inquiry by the Israeli military found that senior officers had vastly underestimated Hamas and misinterpreted early warnings that a major attack was coming.
The report published on Tuesday consisted only of a declassified summary, leaving an unknown amount of material undisclosed. But even the summary made the agency’s lapses clear.
Plans for a Hamas raid on southern Israel reached the desks of intelligence agents in 2018 and again in 2022, the summary said, but the agency did not treat the warnings as a meaningful threat. As a result, the agency said, it did not include it in scenarios exploring future confrontations with the militant group.
While the Shin Bet said that it took Hamas seriously, it acknowledged that it had not responded appropriately to early indications of attack plans, or to the later signs of impending bloodshed.
The Israeli authorities said they were publishing the findings, even as they kept parts of the report classified, in light of the gravity of the attack. About 1,200 people were killed that day, and some 250 people taken hostage, setting off the war in the Gaza Strip.
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted an independent review of the events leading up to the deadliest day in Israel’s history. It has instead allowed each of the country’s security institutions to investigate itself, despite public demands for a commission of inquiry.
In a debate in the Israeli Parliament on Monday, Mr. Netanyahu said he supported the creation of a commission to investigate the Hamas attack, but suggested that such an inquiry would inevitably generate biased findings aimed at targeting him politically.
“I am not deterred by fabricated investigations and a political manhunt,” he said. “I will continue to insist on the truth. I will continue to demand a balanced commission of inquiry that will reach the truth.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s resistance to an inquiry and to calls for his resignation contrasts with the actions of some other Israeli officials.
The departing military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, who is resigning this month, has taken responsibility for what he called his “terrible failure” to prevent the attack. The Shin Bet chief, Ronen Bar, told the Israeli news media on Tuesday that he did not intend to resign until all the hostages taken from Israel were repatriated, but he acknowledged that the attack could have been prevented.
In its report, the Shin Bet also said it had failed to coordinate sufficiently with the military and to establish a clear chain of responsibility. “This is not the standard that we expected from ourselves and the public from us,” the agency said.
At the same time, the Shin Bet report, unlike the recent military one, directly pointed to government policies as contributing factors to the attack. It said that the government had allowed Hamas to accumulate arms and to raise money for its military wing through Qatar. And it pointed to government reluctance to undertake “offensive” initiatives, including targeting Hamas leaders in Gaza.
The agency also cited the treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention and “the perception that Israeli society has weakened.” Before the attack, Mr. Netanyahu advanced a plan to overhaul Israel’s judiciary, setting off protests nationwide, and many Israelis have blamed Mr. Netanyahu for the Hamas attack, citing domestic unrest as a factor that emboldened the militants.
The Shin Bet report echoes the findings of an article by The New York Times published weeks after the attack, based on interviews with Israeli, Arab, European and American officials, as well as a review of Israeli government documents and evidence.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office declined a request for comment on the Shin Bet’s findings. The Israeli news media reported that the office released an unofficial statement to a small group of local reporters that was “attributed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle.” That statement said the intelligence agency had presented “an ‘investigation’ that answers no questions” and did not correspond to “the magnitude of the organization’s enormous failure.”
The prime minister’s office laid out a series of failures by intelligence agents, including an assessment presented just days before the attack “definitively stating” that Hamas wanted to avoid a campaign against Israel. It accused Mr. Bar of falling short.
“The head of the Shin Bet did not see fit to wake the prime minister on the night of the attack — the most basic and obvious decision one could imagine,” it said.
Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.
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3) As Trump Goes After Universities, Students Are Now on the Chopping Block
Uncertainty about how much money colleges and universities stand to lose has led some schools to reduce the number of doctoral students, in some cases reneging on offers.
By Stephanie Saul, March 6, 2025
At the University of Pennsylvania, administrators have asked departments in the School of Arts & Sciences to cut incoming Ph.D. students. Credit...Rachel Wisniewski for The New York Times
In the early weeks of the Trump administration’s push to slash funding that colleges and universities rely on, grants and contracts had been cut and, in a few cases, researchers had been laid off.
In recent days, the fiscal pain has come to students.
At the University of Pennsylvania, administrators have asked departments in the School of Arts & Sciences, the university’s largest school, to cut incoming Ph.D. students. In some cases, that meant reneging on informal offers, according to Wendy Roth, a professor of sociology.
Her department had to decide which of the students would be “unaccepted.” Dr. Roth, chair of graduate education, was chosen to explain those decisions to them.
“Two of them, I would say, were extremely upset. One person was in tears,” she said. “It’s just the most terrible thing to get that kind of news when your plans are made.”
Since taking office, the Trump administration has issued orders that threaten to broadly undercut the financial foundation of university based research, including deep reductions in overhead cost reimbursements through the National Institutes of Health. Court challenges have paused some of the cuts, but universities are bracing for uncertainty. The University of Pennsylvania could face a $250 million hit in N.I.H. funding alone.
Members of the administration have cast the cuts as a way to reduce wasteful government spending, sometimes in political terms. Last month, Katie Miller, who is working with Elon Musk’s team to trim federal spending, said the cuts would end “liberal D.E.I. deans’ slush fund.”
In some cases, schools are pre-emptively cutting their expenses as a precautionary measure.
North Carolina State University announced on Feb. 14 that it was freezing most hiring. Stanford University announced on Feb. 26 that it was freezing staff hiring, citing “very significant risks” to the community. At the University of Louisville in Kentucky, President Kim Schatzel announced an “immediate pause” on faculty and staff hiring until July. She cited the potential loss of $20 to $23 million in N.I.H. research funding. Dozens of other schools have announced hiring freezes or “chills.”
Many of the cuts are now hitting graduate education, too, which is highly dependent on research grants, leaving students who had dreams of pursuing Ph.D.s with nowhere to go.
A graduate program in biological sciences at the University of California, San Diego, usually enrolls 25 new graduate students a year. This year, the number will be 17.
The reduction may seem small, but Kimberly Cooper, a biology professor, said the Trump cuts would ricochet through the university.
“I hate to sound fatalistic,” said Dr. Cooper, who specializes in the study of limb development. “But at this point I think they’re trying to break the academic enterprise. And cutting academic science has impacts on the educational mission of the entire university.”
At Penn, cuts to graduate programs were made across the board in the school’s 32 programs, professors said. The history department, for example, was asked to offer Ph.D. slots to only seven students, not the usual 17. In English, the normal cohort of 9 to 12 incoming students will be reduced to a maximum of six.
A letter signed by professors in 22 departments at Penn warned that the school’s decision would cause reputational damage.
Asked to comment, the university pointed to a statement signed by J. Larry Jameson, Penn’s interim president, posted on the school’s website, which noted that the cuts “represent an existential threat across our university and American higher education.”
Dr. Jameson said the school was pursuing “cost containment measures and new sources of revenue.” He added: “We will remain judicious, measured, deliberate and focused on sustaining our mission when determining any action.”
As the Trump administration vows to target schools over antisemitism and diversity initiatives, other programs that directly touch undergraduates, such as scholarships, could be affected, too, if the administration clears legal hurdles.
David Kazanjian, graduate chair of comparative literature at Penn, said the cuts to graduate students would reduce opportunities for undergraduates. With fewer graduate student teachers, class sizes may increase, for example.
The cost-cutting measures are taking effect across a variety of schools, from the Ivy League and large public research universities to smaller public schools. The administration’s decision to cap overhead reimbursements on National Institutes of Health grants to 15 percent could cut millions that schools have come to rely on to cover facilities and staff. The overhead rates normally vary depending on the grant recipients, but in some cases provide up to 60 percent of the grant in additional reimbursements.
Columbia University, which receives about $1.3 billion a year in N.I.H. funding, could lose up to $200 million a year from the formula change, according to one analysis by a group of university faculty and staff members and alumni called the Stand Columbia Society.
A graduate-student union at Columbia reported in a news release last month that university officials had proposed even more draconian cuts than Penn: eliminating up to 65 percent of incoming Ph.D. students in the School of Arts & Sciences. Following criticism, the cuts at Columbia were ultimately scaled back, and no firm numbers have been released.
The graduate workers at Columbia argued that there was no need for funding cuts, citing the university’s endowment, which grew to $14.9 billion at the close of 2024 from $13.6 billion in 2023. Yale, for example, one of the largest recipients of N.I.H. dollars, has announced that it would provide temporary funding from its own coffers for scholars.
But this week, the Education Department said it would review all of Columbia’s federal contracts and grants, accusing the school of not doing enough to curb antisemitism on campus. The administration identified $51.4 million in contracts between Columbia and the federal government that could be subject to stop-work orders.
Schools with large endowments may also be a target of increased taxation. Endowments, generally accumulated with donor funds invested over decades, had largely been considered off limits for taxes because the universities operate as nonprofits.
But in 2017, during Mr. Trump’s first term, Republicans led a charge to impose a 1.4 percent excise tax on the investment income of large private university endowments. Now there are discussions of raising it to 14 percent, or even 21 percent.
The threatened N.I.H. cuts and the endowment tax comes on the heels of other major cutbacks at public land grant universities. Among the Trump administration’s first targets was a U.S. Agency for International Development program called “Feed the Future,” which funded 19 agricultural labs in 17 states. Many of those laboratories are now being shut down.
At U.C. San Diego, which was already facing state budget cuts, Dr. Cooper, the biology professor, said the fallout would have repercussions beyond universities if fewer students passed through their programs, and could affect entire sectors of the economy.
“The bigger issue in all this is that, this is our future biomedical work force,” she said.
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4) Trump Gives ‘Last Warning’ to Hamas: Release Hostages or Face Annihilation
In a blistering social media post, the president told Hamas that if it continued to hold hostages, “you are DEAD!”
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg, March 6, 2025
Hamas militants during the release of three Israeli hostages last month in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
President Trump has directly warned Hamas militants to immediately release all the hostages held in Gaza or face death.
In a blistering social media post on Wednesday, Mr. Trump addressed Hamas militants and built on a statement he made in his address to Congress the night before, when he said his administration was “bringing back our hostages from Gaza,” without providing details.
“Release all of the Hostages now, not later, and immediately return all of the dead bodies of the people you murdered, or it is OVER for you,” he posted on Truth Social on Wednesday.
It was the latest example of Mr. Trump’s use of threats to try to cut through obstacles to a desired political objective. Even as he warned the militant group, officials said that the United States and Hamas had held direct talks in Qatar about the hostages, sidestepping separate negotiations involving Hamas and Israel over the terms of the next phase of a cease-fire in Gaza.
The Israeli government has said that about 25 hostages and the remains of more than 30 others are still in Gaza. Mr. Trump, who has directed strong threats at their captors before, said the militants were “sick and twisted” for keeping bodies.
“I am sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job, not a single Hamas member will be safe if you don’t do as I say,” Mr. Trump wrote.
“This is your last warning,” he went on, adding that if the group continued to hold hostages, “you are DEAD!”
Hamas said in a post on the Telegram app that Mr. Trump’s statement would complicate efforts to negotiate the second phase of its cease-fire agreement with Israel, and would make it easier for the Israeli government not to meet its obligations under the deal. Israel and Hamas are at a deadlock over the second phase, which aims to reach a comprehensive truce that would end the war and free the remaining living hostages.
“The language of threats does not intimidate us. It only complicates matters further,” said Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas official, in a statement.
Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups seized around 250 hostages during the deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that set off the war in Gaza. The Palestinian authorities say more than 45,000 Gazans have been killed in the conflict. Military experts say that while Israel’s military campaign has weakened Hamas, the group still holds power in Gaza.
More than 100 hostages were released during a truce in late 2023, and 30 others — along with the bodies of eight people seized in the attack — were returned during a second cease-fire that began in January. Under the terms of both cease-fires, Israel has released hundreds of Palestinian detainees in exchange.
Mr. Trump’s post made no mention of a prisoner exchange, and he gave no details of the military aid he said he was sending to Israel. But in one possible indication of the administration’s approach, Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week invoked “emergency authorities” to bypass Congress and send $4 billion in weapons to Israel. It was the second time in a month that the administration had skirted the process of congressional approval for sending arms to the country.
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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5) Where the Gaza Cease-Fire Deal Goes Now Is Uncertain. Here’s What to Know.
As negotiators are holding discussions on multiple tracks, Palestinians and Israelis are in limbo.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, March 6, 2025
Hamas handing over hostages captured during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel to Red Cross officials in the Gaza Strip last month. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Nearly a week after the first stage of Israel and Hamas’s cease-fire expired, both Palestinians and Israelis are in limbo, uncertain how long the truce will hold.
The Trump administration, the Arab world, Israel, Hamas and others are now wrangling over the future of the Gaza Strip in a complex series of negotiations — some of which are unfolding along different channels, adding to the confusion.
Here’s a look at the state of the cease-fire talks and who is involved.
Israel and Hamas are negotiating through mediators.
In mid-January, after 15 months of devastating war, Israel and Hamas agreed to a truce that would free hostages held in Gaza since the Hamas-led October 2023 attack on southern Israel in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
But the agreement did not end the war. Instead, the two sides committed to a complex, multiphase plan meant to build momentum toward a comprehensive cease-fire. They were supposed to negotiate terms for the full truce during the first stage, which lasted six weeks.
Last weekend, the six weeks elapsed with little apparent success toward that goal, despite efforts by Qatar and Egypt, who have been mediating the talks. (Israel and Hamas do not negotiate directly.)
Then, Israel mostly closed the crossings into the Gaza Strip, stopping aid from entering to reach Palestinians who are still struggling to recover from a year of hunger and destruction. Qatar condemned the move as a violation of the cease-fire agreement, which stipulates that 600 trucks bearing food, fuel and other goods must enter Gaza on a daily basis.
The Trump administration has sent mixed signals on the next steps. Officials have said that they hope to reach the second, comprehensive phase of the cease-fire.
The U.S. and Israel are talking about a different path.
For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, agreeing to pause the fighting has been the easy part. He has been far more reluctant to declare an end to Israel’s war against Hamas while the group remains firmly entrenched in Gaza.
As the first phase of the cease-fire expired, Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel had accepted a new proposal pitched by Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy. That plan breaks significantly with the truce signed in mid-January.
Under the new proposal, Israel would immediately get half of the remaining hostages back in exchange for another 50 days of a “temporary cease-fire.” During that time, Israel and Hamas would continue talks over a permanent end to the war.
The remaining hostages would be released “if we reach an agreement on a permanent cease-fire,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
Mr. Witkoff’s proposal would effectively allow Israel to get more hostages back without giving Hamas any of its core demands. The Palestinian armed group has called on Israel and the United States to carry out the January deal as written, appearing to rule out the deal as a non-starter.
But at the same time, Mr. Trump has issued proposals that have rattled the region, including urging the permanent displacement of Gaza’s Palestinian residents and a U.S.-led takeover of the territory. He has also issued ultimatums to Hamas to return all of the hostages immediately, a demand that contradicts the staggered releases prescribed by the cease-fire agreement.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump issued a “last warning” to Hamas on social media, calling on the armed group to immediately return the remaining hostages “or it is OVER for you.”
“I am sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job, not a single Hamas member will be safe if you don’t do as I say,” Mr. Trump wrote.
Hamas said that Mr. Trump’s threats were encouraging Israel to avoid negotiating an end to the war. “The language of threats does not intimidate us; it only complicates matters further,” Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas official, said in a statement posted on a Hamas-affiliated Telegram channel.
The Trump administration is also talking to Hamas.
Over the past week, Mr. Trump’s administration held intensive and secret direct meetings with Hamas aimed at securing the release of American citizens seized during the October 2023 attack.
The meetings leapfrogged the seemingly moribund cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas. They also broke with the longstanding U.S. approach toward Hamas, which sought to isolate the Palestinian armed group through a “no-contact” policy.
Critics had long argued that not engaging with Hamas over the years had produced few tangible results. In practice, the United States wound up dealing with the group anyway, typically through mediators like Qatar and Egypt.
Adam Boehler, Mr. Trump’s nominee to be a special envoy for hostage affairs, met Hamas officials in Doha, Qatar, this week, according to a diplomat familiar with the talks.
The negotiations focused on freeing Edan Alexander, the only American Israeli hostage still believed to be alive, and the bodies of four other U.S.-Israeli dual citizens who were kidnapped and taken to Gaza in the October 2023 attack, officials told The New York Times.
One of those is Itay Chen, 19, an American-Israeli soldier. The Israeli military said last year that he was presumed killed during the Hamas-led attack, although his family has expressed hope that he could still be alive.
“If Israel’s government isn’t able to free Itay,” Ruby Chen, his father, said after news of the direct talks with Hamas broke, “then it’s reasonable for the United States to try and do so.”
Adam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.
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6) D.C.’s Planned Removal of Black Lives Matter Mural Reflects Mayor’s Delicate Position
Mayor Muriel Bowser’s decision comes amid calls by the president and other Republicans for more federal control of the city.
By Campbell Robertson and Tim Arango, Campbell Robertson reported from Washington, March 5, 2025
On Wednesday morning in downtown Washington, D.C., Keyonna Jones stood on her artwork and remembered the time when she and six other artists were summoned by the mayor’s office to paint a mural in the middle of the night.
“BLACK LIVES MATTER,” the mural read in bright yellow letters on a street running two city blocks, blaring the message at the White House sitting just across Lafayette Square. In June 2020, when Ms. Jones helped paint the mural, demonstrations were breaking out in cities nationwide in protest of George Floyd’s murder. The creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza was a statement of defiance from D.C.’s mayor, Muriel E. Bowser, who had clashed with President Trump, then in his first term, over the presence of federal troops in the streets of her city.
But on Tuesday evening, the mayor announced the mural was going away.
Ms. Jones said the news upset her. But, she added of the mayor in an interview, “I get where she is coming from.”
The city of Washington is in an extraordinarily vulnerable place these days. Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation that would end D.C.’s already limited power to govern itself, stripping residents of the ability to elect a mayor and city council. Mr. Trump himself has said that he supports a federal takeover of Washington, insisting to reporters that the federal government would “run it strong, run it with law and order, make it absolutely, flawlessly beautiful.” In recent days, the administration has been considering executive orders in pursuit of his vision for the city.
“We have bigger fish to fry” than a fight over the plaza, she said at a town hall on Wednesday, which was set up to provide guidance to laid-off federal workers. Ms. Bowser said that the mural was a significant part of the city’s history, particularly in the summer of 2020. But “now our focus is on making sure our residents and our economy survive,” she said.
If Mr. Trump was satisfied, he gave little sign of it. In a post on Truth Social on Wednesday night, the president said his administration had ordered the mayor to “clean up all of the unsightly homeless encampments” in the District. “If she is not capable of doing so, we will be forced to do it for her!” he wrote. He then thanked her for her efforts.
To be sure, Ms. Bowser did not say whether the decision about Black Lives Matter Plaza was in direct response to any specific actions or threats by Congress or the White House, though she acknowledged that people in the administration did not like the mural.
On Monday, U.S. Representative Andrew Clyde, a Georgia Republican who has often taken legislative aim at Washington, introduced a bill threatening to withhold millions in federal funds if the city did not repaint and rename the plaza. But the mayor said the decision had been made for some time and that she had planned to announce it later this month at a meeting on the celebrations around the country’s 250th birthday.
In a social media post on Tuesday evening, the mayor said the plaza would be redesigned as part of a citywide mural project in connection with the anniversary. But, she said on Wednesday, news media inquiries about the fate of the plaza forced her hand. The mayor’s office gave few details as to whether or when Black Lives Matter Plaza might be renamed, or how the mural itself would be removed, a process that is more complicated than a simple paint job given its inlaid bricks and other features.
At the town hall, Ms. Bowser said that she believed one executive order possibly aimed at cracking down on crime and homelessness in the District of Columbia had apparently been withdrawn, as The Washington Post had reported.
But Trump administration officials said they remained committed to addressing the president’s complaints about the District and said an executive order from the White House focused on the city could still come as soon as next week. Officials declined to elaborate on the specifics of the president’s order, saying it was still under review and that the timeline remained fluid.
“President Trump has been crystal clear that he intends to restore law and order to the nation’s capital and reinvigorate the majesty of this storied city,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.
Ms. Bowser suggested that the risks to Washington of additional federal intervention and even a takeover were always present, given the city’s complicated status within the U.S. government. She expressed no second thoughts about her decision concerning Black Lives Matter Plaza.
“This is the threat to our city right now,” the mayor said. “We go into a budget season where our revenue was estimated to be down by a billion dollars and we still have the threat of Medicaid cuts looming. That’s what D.C. residents want me to be focused on.”
“They want us to be smart and strategic and get to the other side,” the mayor added. “And that’s my job: I’m going to navigate us to the other side.”
Ms. Bowser has mostly taken a diplomatic approach toward Mr. Trump, visiting him at Mar-a-Lago before the inauguration and pledging to work closely with him on shared priorities, like bringing federal employees back to the office.
When she characterizes her discussions with the White House about D.C., which she describes as frequent and ongoing, Ms. Bowser often emphasizes a quintessentially Trumpian goal of making D.C. “the most beautiful capital city in the world.” She has tried to make the case that some things the administration has apparently mulled, like putting a multitude of large federal buildings on the local real estate market all at once, would be counterproductive to that aesthetic vision.
The decision about Black Lives Matter Plaza was perhaps the most high-profile sign yet of the mayor’s attempted balancing act. Not everyone was sympathetic.
“I would never understand why she’s doing it,” said Angela Harrelson, an aunt of George Floyd, who lives in Minnesota. “They can make up all the excuses that they want to about this. The message they are sending is still the same: You are trying to destroy history, you are trying to erase a memory.”
At the plaza on Wednesday afternoon, as a steady rain fell, Kevin Thornton, 63, a Black man who works at a nearby hotel, asked what the mayor hoped to achieve by ceding anything to Mr. Trump.
“You can kiss the ring all day” and get nothing, he said. He believed Ms. Bowser showed strength back in 2020 when she ordered the mural painted in the first place. “I thought you got a backbone,” he said.
Still, Ms. Jones, the artist who helped paint the mural five years ago, said she understood the mayor’s difficult position, with so much at stake for the city. Ms. Jones said she was grateful to have played a part in the creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza, even if it would likely be gone soon.
“Being a Black woman, I’m kind of used to the feeling of things being taken away and being erased from our history,” Ms. Jones said. “It’s a moment in time. You cannot take it away. I think the whole world felt that moment, recognized that moment. I think they are going to feel this moment too, when it’s taken away.”
Clyde McGrady, Tyler Pager and Darren Sands contributed reporting.
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7) How Trump’s ‘51st State’ Canada Talk Came to Be Seen as Deadly Serious
President Trump, in an early February call, challenged the border treaty between the two countries and told Justin Trudeau he didn’t like their shared water agreements.
By Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Reporting from Toronto, March 7, 2025
After President Trump imposed tariffs on Canada on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an extraordinary statement that was largely lost in the fray of the moment.
“The excuse that he’s giving for these tariffs today of fentanyl is completely bogus, completely unjustified, completely false,” Mr. Trudeau told the news media in Ottawa.
“What he wants is to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us,” he added.
This is the story of how Mr. Trudeau went from thinking Mr. Trump was joking when he referred to him as “governor” and Canada as “the 51st state” in early December to publicly stating that Canada’s closest ally and neighbor was implementing a strategy of crushing the country in order to take it over.
The February Calls
Mr. Trump and Mr. Trudeau spoke twice on Feb. 3, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, as part of discussions to stave off tariffs on Canadian exports.
But those early February calls were not just about tariffs.
The details of the conversations between the two leaders, and subsequent discussions among top U.S. and Canadian officials, have not been previously fully reported, and were shared with The New York Times on condition of anonymity by four people with firsthand knowledge of their content. They did not want to be publicly identified discussing a sensitive topic.
On those calls, President Trump laid out a long list of grievances he had with the trade relationship between the two countries, including Canada’s protected dairy sector, the difficulty American banks face in doing business in Canada and Canadian consumption taxes that Mr. Trump deems unfair because they make American goods more expensive.
He also brought up something much more fundamental.
He told Mr. Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation.
The border treaty Mr. Trump referred to was established in 1908 and finalized the international boundary between Canada, then a British dominion, and the United States.
Mr. Trump also mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations, which is regulated by a number of treaties, a topic he’s expressed interest about in the past.
Canadian officials took Mr. Trump’s comments seriously, not least because he had already publicly said he wanted to bring Canada to its knees. In a news conference on Jan. 7, before being inaugurated, Mr. Trump, responding to a question by a New York Times reporter about whether he was planning to use military force to annex Canada, said he planned to use “economic force.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
During the second Feb. 3 call, Mr. Trudeau secured a one-month postponement of those tariffs.
This week, the U.S. tariffs came into effect without a fresh reprieve on Tuesday. Canada, in return, imposed its own tariffs on U.S. exports, plunging the two nations into a trade war. (On Thursday, Mr. Trump granted Canada a monthlong suspension on most of the tariffs.)
Glimpses of the rupture between Mr. Trump and Mr. Trudeau, and of Mr. Trump’s aggressive plans for Canada, have been becoming apparent over the past few months.
The Star, a Canadian newspaper, has reported that Mr. Trump mentioned the 1908 border treaty in the early February call and other details from the conversation. And the Financial Times has reported that there are discussions in the White House about removing Canada from a crucial intelligence alliance among five nations, attributing those to a senior Trump adviser.
Doubling Down
But it wasn’t just the president talking about the border and waters with Mr. Trudeau that disturbed the Canadian side.
The persistent social media references to Canada as the 51st state and Mr. Trudeau as its governor had begun to grate both inside the Canadian government and more broadly.
While Mr. Trump’s remarks could all be bluster or a negotiating tactic to pressure Canada into concessions on trade or border security, the Canadian side no longer believes that to be so.
And the realization that the Trump administration was taking a closer and more aggressive look at the relationship, one that tracked with those threats of annexation, sank in during subsequent calls between top Trump officials and Canadian counterparts.
One such call was between Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick — who at the time had not yet been confirmed by the Senate — and Canada’s finance minister, Dominic LeBlanc. The two men had been communicating regularly since they had met at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and club in Florida, during Mr. Trudeau’s visit there in early December.
Mr. Lutnick called Mr. LeBlanc after the leaders had spoken on Feb. 3, and issued a devastating message, according to several people familiar with the call: Mr. Trump, he said, had come to realize that the relationship between the United States and Canada was governed by a slew of agreements and treaties that were easy to abandon.
Mr. Trump was interested in doing just that, Mr. Lutnick said.
He wanted to eject Canada out of an intelligence-sharing group known as the Five Eyes that also includes Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
He wanted to tear up the Great Lakes agreements and conventions between the two nations that lay out how they share and manage Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario.
And he is also reviewing military cooperation between the two countries, particularly the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
A spokesperson for Mr. Lutnick did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Mr. LeBlanc declined to comment.
In subsequent communications between senior Canadian officials and Trump advisers, this list of topics has come up again and again, making it hard for the Canadian government to dismiss them.
The only soothing of nerves has come from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the four people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Rubio has refrained from delivering threats, and recently dismissed the idea that the United States was looking at scrapping military cooperation.
But Canada’s politicians across the spectrum, and Canadian society at large, are frayed and deeply concerned. Officials do not see the Trump administration’s threats as empty; they see a new normal when it comes to the United States.
On Thursday, at a news conference, a reporter asked Mr. Trudeau: “Your foreign affairs minister yesterday characterized all this as a psychodrama. How would you characterize it?”
“Thursday,” Mr. Trudeau quipped ruefully.
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8) South Carolina Inmate Set to Be Executed by Firing Squad
The last time such an execution took place was in 2010, in Utah. The inmate chose the method because of his concerns about lethal injection, according to his lawyer.
By Eduardo Medina, Reporting from Columbia, S.C., March 7, 2025
South Carolina’s death chamber in Columbia. The firing squad became a legal execution method in the state in 2021. Credit...South Carolina Department of Corrections, via Associated Press
South Carolina is planning to execute a prisoner on Friday evening with a firing squad, an extremely rare method that has not been used in the United States since 2010.
The inmate, Brad Sigmon, 67, was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents, David and Gladys Larke, with a baseball bat in 2001.
A judge ordered Mr. Sigmon to choose from three methods of execution: lethal injection, electrocution or firing squad. His lawyer, Gerald King, said that Mr. Sigmon chose to be shot because he had concerns about South Carolina’s lethal injection process.
If the execution is carried out, Mr. Sigmon will be the first inmate killed in such a manner in the state’s history. Polls show that a majority of Americans favor the death penalty, but many view the firing squad as an archaic form of justice. But as lethal injection drugs have become harder to obtain — and have at times resulted in botched executions — several states have recently legalized firing squads as an execution method.
Utah is the only state that has used a firing squad in modern times; in addition to 2010, it did so in 1996 and 1977.
Mr. Sigmon is to be executed in the death chamber at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, S.C., the state capital, shortly after 6 p.m.
Mr. Sigmon will be strapped to a metal chair that sits above a catch basin in a corner of the room, according to the state’s protocols, and his lawyer will read his final statement. A hood will then be placed over his head. The South Carolina Department of Corrections said that “a small aim point will be placed over his heart by a member of the execution team.”
The metal chair is 15 feet from a wall with a rectangular opening. Behind the wall will be a three-person firing squad facing Mr. Sigmon through the opening, according to the Department of Corrections.
Because of a shield law passed in 2023, little is known about the firing squad members. According to a spokeswoman with the Department of Corrections, they train every month, year-round. A 2022 news release about renovations to the death chamber said that the firing squad consists of Department of Corrections employees who volunteer to take part. They will shoot a type of ammunition often used in police rifles.
After the warden reads the execution order, the firing squad will shoot through the opening at the “aim point” on Mr. Sigmon’s heart. Witnesses sit in chairs along one wall of the chamber behind bullet-resistant glass. According to the department, witnesses can see the inmate, but not the firing squad’s rifles through the opening.
Three other states — Mississippi, Oklahoma and Idaho — allow the firing squad as a secondary method of execution, to be used only if a lethal injection drug cannot be obtained. In Idaho, the State Senate recently passed a bill that would make death by firing squad the primary method.
The firing squad became legal in South Carolina in 2021, after the state passed a law that allowed death by electric chair or firing squad as options for people on death row. Inmates sued the state, claiming that both methods were cruel, corporal or unusual punishments, which are prohibited by the state Constitution.
The South Carolina Supreme Court, which is dominated by Republican appointees, ruled last year that both methods are legal, writing that neither could be considered cruel or unusual because prisoners choose their method.
Since that ruling, the state’s Department of Corrections has executed three people, all of whom chose to be killed by lethal injection. But Mr. King said that Mr. Sigmon had chosen a firing squad because of his concerns about South Carolina’s process with the lethal injection drug, pentobarbital.
Mr. King has argued in court that the Department of Corrections has not shared basic facts about the drug that one “would want to know to feel confident that they’ll work as intended,” such as how it is stored, how quickly it expires and how it has been tested. South Carolina does not make its lethal injection protocol public.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections said last month that it had turned over all information about the drug in litigation and that the agency had “sworn to the effectiveness” of it.
Lindsey Vann, the executive director of the nonprofit Justice 360, represented two inmates in the state, Richard B. Moore and Marion Bowman Jr., whose recent executions by lethal injection did not go as planned.
Ms. Vann said that in both instances, a second dose of pentobarbital was administered 10 minutes after the first, and that in both cases, the men did not die for more than 20 minutes after the procedure began. (Mr. Moore initially chose to be executed by a firing squad, but changed his mind after the state procured lethal injection drugs.)
Mr. King said Mr. Sigmon felt that “the firing squad is what is left, given what he knows about the electric chair, and what he doesn’t know about lethal injection.” Mr. King said his client was feeling a “mix of fear and frustration.”
“Everything about this barbaric, state-sanctioned atrocity — from the choice to the method itself — is abjectly cruel,” Mr. King said in a statement.
Mr. Sigmon’s lawyers have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case and issue a stay of execution. In case that is not granted, Mr. Sigmon has also asked Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, for clemency, though the governor has not granted that to a prisoner on death row since the state restarted executions last year.
Mr. Sigmon’s lawyers have said that he suffered from an inherited mental illness and childhood brain damage. Those factors, they have argued, contributed to him murdering the Larkes with a baseball bat. After he killed them, Mr. Sigmon tried to kidnap his ex-girlfriend.
The victims’ grandson, Ricky Sims, told The Greenville News that Mr. Sigmon needed to pay for what he had done. “He took away two people who would have done anything for their family,” he said.
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9) Newsom Splits With Democrats on Transgender Athletes: ‘It’s Deeply Unfair’
The remarks by Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a potential White House hopeful, were an extraordinary break from fellow Democrats and signaled a newly defensive position on the issue.
By Reid J. Epstein and Laurel Rosenhall, March 6, 2025
Reid J. Epstein reported from Washington, and Laurel Rosenhall from Sacramento.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has backed L.G.B.T.Q. causes for decades and was one of the earliest American elected officials to officiate at same-sex weddings. Credit...Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, embarking on a personal post-mortem of the failures of his Democratic Party, suggested this week that the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports was “deeply unfair.”
The comments by Mr. Newsom, who has backed L.G.B.T.Q. causes for decades and was one of the first American elected officials to officiate same-sex weddings, represented a remarkable break from other top Democrats on the issue, and signaled a newly defensive position on transgender rights among many in his party.
Just as surprising as Mr. Newsom’s remarks was the person to whom he made them: Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old right-wing influencer best known for starting Turning Point USA, the pro-Trump organization that is active on college campuses.
Mr. Newsom invited Mr. Kirk, who has a history of inflammatory and conspiratorial remarks, onto the debut episode of his new podcast, “This Is Gavin Newsom,” for an 81-minute discussion. The governor, who has long been fascinated with the conservative media ecosystem and tried to inject himself into it, explained his unlikely guest by saying, “People need to understand your success, your influence, what you’ve been up to.”
Mr. Newsom is widely seen as having presidential ambitions in 2028 — something he joked about on the podcast. For years, he was one of the fiercest Democratic antagonists toward President Trump, casting himself as a next-generation liberal warrior fluent in conservative orthodoxy who could lead his party into the post-Biden era.
But in recent months he has softened his tone toward Mr. Trump and attacked Democrats over their strategy. In December, Mr. Newsom cursed the president-elect’s name in an interview with The New York Times, but shortly after the inauguration, the governor traveled to Washington for a meeting with Mr. Trump to discuss funding for wildfire relief.
Mr. Newsom spent much of his conversation with Mr. Kirk reflecting on the myriad ways that former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign failed to reach key voters during the 2024 election, losing ground with young people, men and Hispanic voters.
But his most significant revelation on his podcast, which was released on Thursday morning, came when Mr. Kirk pressed the California governor to agree with him that it was unfair for transgender women to compete in women’s sports.
“I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that,” Mr. Newsom said. “It is an issue of fairness. It’s deeply unfair.”
He also acknowledged the effectiveness of Mr. Trump’s signature campaign ad, which declared: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
“It was devastating,” Mr. Newsom said. “And she didn’t even react to it, which was even more devastating.”
Since Democrats’ election loss last year, Mr. Newsom has become the most prominent official in the party to lament its position on transgender participation in sports, but he is hardly the first. Hours after the presidential race was called, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told The Times that he did not want his young daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” a remark that set off weeks of blowback.
A New York Times/Ipsos poll conducted in January found that nearly 80 percent of Americans, including more than two-thirds of Democrats, opposed allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has taken steps to try to erase transgender people from American life. He has eliminated the T — for transgender — from federal L.G.B.T.Q. policies online and moved to ban transgender people from serving in the military.
Mr. Trump also signed an executive order meant to prohibit transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports, directing federal agencies to withhold funding from schools if they did not comply. A day later, the N.C.A.A. instituted such a ban. More than two dozen states now bar transgender athletes from school sports, whether in K-12 schools or at colleges.
Democrats have shown increased caution on the issue, but many have tried to push back. On Monday, the party’s senators blocked a Republican bill that closely resembled Mr. Trump’s executive order, arguing that the G.O.P. was seeking political gain by targeting a small, vulnerable group of children. Broadly, many Democrats have argued that athletic associations, not lawmakers, should decide who can participate in youth sports.
Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator from San Francisco who is openly gay, said it was deeply disappointing to hear Mr. Newsom “align” with Republicans on the issue.
“It was a gut punch from any Democratic leader, and particularly from Governor Newsom, because he has been such a staunch ally for the L.G.B.T.Q. community,” Mr. Wiener said.
Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group, said Mr. Newsom’s comments were misguided and politically inept.
“The fight for equality has never been easy, but history doesn’t remember those who waver — it remembers those who refuse to back down,” Ms. Robinson said. “Our message to Governor Newsom and all leaders across the country is simple: The path to 2028 isn’t paved with the betrayal of vulnerable communities.”
On his podcast, Mr. Newsom spoke at length about the political effectiveness of attacking transgender people in the presidential campaign. He called Mr. Trump’s “they/them” commercial “a great ad.” He also questioned the practice of people announcing their preferred pronouns when introducing themselves.
“I had one meeting where people started going around the table with pronouns,” Mr. Newsom said. “I’m like, ‘What the hell, why is this the biggest issue?’”
But at other points in the conversation, the governor criticized “the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities” and discussed the high rates of suicide and depression among transgender people.
“So, both things I can hold in my hand,” he said.
At the beginning of Mr. Newsom’s political career, after he was elected mayor of San Francisco in 2003, he officiated at same-sex weddings before they were allowed by law. He routinely participated in the city’s famed Pride parade and for decades has supported expanding rights for L.G.B.T.Q. people.
He is also the godfather to Nats Getty, a designer and oil heir who came out as transgender in 2021 and is married to Gigi Gorgeous, a transgender YouTube personality. The governor delivered a video toast at the couple’s wedding in 2019.
Last year, as school boards in conservative regions of California passed policies to require educators to notify parents if a child went by a different gender identity at school, Mr. Newsom signed a state law prohibiting such rules.
L.G.B.T.Q. advocates welcomed the law, while conservatives said it infringed on parents’ rights. Elon Musk cited the law as a reason to move the headquarters of his company SpaceX to Texas from California.
A California law that allows students to play on sports teams that align with their gender identities was signed in 2013 by Jerry Brown, the Democratic governor at the time. In recent months, Republican legislators have introduced bills to reverse it, but they have not yet been heard in committee. Democrats hold a supermajority in the California Legislature and typically scuttle bills they perceive as attacks on L.G.B.T.Q. rights before they can reach Mr. Newsom’s desk. He has not publicly taken a position on the new legislation.
Mr. Newsom has also tried to show that he wants to talk with Republicans, and is willing to tangle with them. He has kept up a regular line of communication with Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox News host, and he debated Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican of Florida, on live television in 2023. He has also long maintained private social media accounts curated to show him pro-Trump content.
So it was little surprise that Mr. Newsom expressed familiarity with the issues that most animated Mr. Kirk, who is himself a prominent podcaster and TikTok influencer. Mr. Newsom spent much of the discussion agreeing with Mr. Kirk on issues that have long been anathema to Democratic voters, seemingly working out in real time why Democrats lost ground to Republicans last year.
As to what the party should do next, Mr. Newsom blasted prominent Democrats — notably the strategist James Carville — who have suggested that the party allow Mr. Trump to become unpopular on his own and wait to offer a competing alternative.
“I’m thinking about, ‘We’re going to stand back and watch you run circles around us for six months, the next two or three years, waiting for the moment to finally strike,’” Mr. Newsom said. “Struck me as not necessarily the best advice.”
Mr. Newsom also called his visit during the coronavirus pandemic to the French Laundry, one of the country’s most expensive restaurants, the “dumbest bonehead move of my life,” adding, “Own it, move on, grow up.” That outing, which infuriated Californians who were living under rules discouraging gatherings, helped prompt a recall election in 2021 in which Mr. Newsom prevailed.
The governor also said that the only time he thought Joseph R. Biden Jr. had experienced any “mental decline” during his aborted 2024 campaign was during a Hollywood fund-raiser that preceded his disastrous debate performance. Several allies of Mr. Biden, including the actor George Clooney, said later that the fund-raiser had made them newly worried about the president’s vigor.
“I saw a different person,” Mr. Newsom said. “That was the one time.”
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10) ‘You Can’t Pin Him Down’: Trump’s Contradictions Are His Ultimate Cover
President Trump’s shifting positions and outright lies have presented the American public with dueling narratives at every turn.
By Erica L. Green, March 8, 2025
Since his first days in office, President Trump has leaned on distortions of the truth in his statements and made contradictory policy moves. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
What does President Trump really believe?
Does he want to run for a third term, or is that just a joke? Does he intend to seize control of Gaza and expel millions of Palestinians, or is that just a suggestion? Is Black History Month a waste of time and money, or worth a lavish celebration at the White House?
Anyone looking for definitive answers will have a hard time finding them.
Since storming back into office, Mr. Trump has used a dizzying rhetorical tactic of shifting positions like quicksand, muddying his messages and contradicting himself, sometimes in the same day. The inconsistencies have presented the American public with dueling narratives at every turn, allowing people to pick and choose what they want to believe about the president’s intentions.
Mr. Trump has long dealt in distortions and lies, including in his first term. But as he executes a much more aggressive agenda at home and abroad, his contradictions have become more brazen and more pronounced.
“He says so much, you can’t really pin him down,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton history professor and editor of a book of essays about Mr. Trump’s first term. “The point isn’t to have a contradiction, the point is to have cover.”
“The reality of our modern information world is that you can pick and choose what you want to believe,” Mr. Zelizer added. “He instinctively knows that.”
Within hours of taking office, Mr. Trump pardoned Jan. 6 rioters who assaulted Capitol Police officers, a move that clashed with his professed support for law enforcement.
He spent his first weeks disparaging diversity, equity and inclusion policies as “harmful” and blamed diversity efforts at the Federal Aviation Administration for a deadly plane crash over the Potomac River. But just hours after the Jan. 29 crash, he backtracked.
“We want the most competent people,” he said. “We don’t care what race they are.”
Mr. Trump has eviscerated federal programs aimed at combating inequality in America and his Defense Department announced that the military would no longer “use official resources” to mark Black History Month.
Mr. Trump then marked the occasion in a formal ceremony in the White House.
His foreign policy pronouncements are equally baffling.
Last month, after making a stunning announcement that the United States would seek to seize the Gaza Strip, permanently displace the Palestinian population and rebuild the seaside enclave as the “Riviera of the Middle East,” Mr. Trump changed his proposal several times over two weeks, before saying it was merely a recommendation.
Earlier this week, during an address to Congress, he invited Greenland to choose to be owned by the United States. “We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America,” he said.
Moments later, he suggested it may not be a choice at all.
“One way or the other, we’re going to get it,” he said.
On the matter of Ukraine, Mr. Trump in a social media post called the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator without elections.” Later, when pressed on whether he actually believed that, Mr. Trump said: “Did I say that? I can’t believe I said that.”
White House officials argue that especially on foreign policy matters, Mr. Trump is showing his skill as a tough negotiator whose messages adjust to the fluidity of serious situations. An aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Trump’s ambiguity about the situations in the Middle East and Ukraine had pushed both regions closer to peace.
“The American public has ample opportunity to listen to the words of President Trump directly when he speaks to the press and directly to the American people on a near daily basis as the most accessible and transparent president in American history,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement, adding that Americans “recognize the beauty of the art of the deal.”
Throughout his career as a businessman and a politician, Mr. Trump became known as much for deal-making as he was for perfecting contradictions. Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Mr. Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal,” has said the president has one goal.
“His aim is never accuracy,” Mr. Schwartz wrote in an opinion essay during Mr. Trump’s first term, “it’s domination.”
Mr. Trump has boasted about his meandering speaking style, which he calls the “weave,” and he often muses about things — like whether he should be granted a constitutionally prohibited third term — with a wink and a nod.
But experts say the dissonance can become dangerous.
“Once you undermine consistency, the shared sense of reality, you’re undermining the basis of democracy,” said Jason Stanley, a Yale professor who has written books about propaganda and the erasure of history. “If there’s no shared sense of reality, we can’t collectively make decisions. So the only decision maker will be the disrupter in chief.”
Mr. Stanley said Mr. Trump’s contradictions boil down to a simple truth.
“If you’re constantly contradicting yourself,” he said, “you’re constantly lying.”
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11) Gaza War Led to Deaths of More Than 3 Dozen Hostages, Officials Say
Israel’s leaders promised that their military campaign in Gaza would help save the lives of hostages. At least 41 have died in captivity, some killed by Hamas and others in Israeli airstrikes.
By Natan Odenheimer, Ronen Bergman and Gabby Sobelman, March 8, 2025
The reporters reviewed forensic reports and military investigations and interviewed Israeli officials and the relatives of slain hostages.
Itay Svirsky, 40, was a therapist who loved philosophy. Eden Yerushalmi, 24, was training to become a Pilates instructor. Alex Lobanov, 32, a father of three, never met his youngest child.
They are among the 41 hostages killed since being taken captive by Hamas and its allies during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to an analysis by The New York Times of forensic reports and military investigations into their deaths, as well as interviews with more than a dozen Israeli soldiers and officials, a senior regional official and seven relatives of hostages.
Some were killed by Hamas, some by Israeli fire, some their cause of death unknown. The losses — and most acutely, the scale of them — are now at the heart of an anguished debate within Israeli society about whether more people could have been brought back alive if a truce had been reached sooner.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has long contended that only military force could compel Hamas to free the hostages. Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents argued that the longer the war, the likelier that the hostages would be executed by Hamas or killed in Israeli strikes.
The debate has gained more resonance in recent days as the country faces the prospect of returning to war since the lapse of the recent truce. The Israeli government recently upended the process by proposing a new framework, immediately rejected by Hamas, that called for a seven-week extension during which the group would release half the living hostages and return the remains of half the deceased ones.
Of the 59 hostages still believed held in Gaza, the Israel government has said that only 24 are alive. The fear and uncertainty over their fates has been seared on the national psyche.
In late February, thousands of Israelis lined the streets along the funeral route of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, who were kidnapped during the Hamas-led attack on Israel and killed in Gaza. Many held signs that read “sorry,” an apology for not doing enough to save them.
Of the 251 people abducted during the Hamas-led raid that ignited the war in October 2023, more than 130 have been exchanged alive for Palestinian detainees. The Israeli military has retrieved the corpses of more than 40 others, many of whom were taken dead into Gaza during the attack. Hamas has handed over eight bodies as part of the latest cease-fire agreement.
A few hostages were almost certainly killed in the first days of the war, before it was possible to seal a truce, according to two Israeli officials. But many others have died since the brief first cease-fire collapsed in November 2023 and the fighting continued in a war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
The soldiers and officials all spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive findings.
Although Israel and Hamas neared another cease-fire deal in July, the talks collapsed, and it took another five months to strike an agreement, one largely similar to the one discussed in the summer. Mr. Netanyahu’s political rivals and some of the hostages’ relatives have said that the months of extra fighting, while degrading Hamas and its allies in Lebanon and Iran, led to the deaths of more hostages and ultimately failed to defeat Hamas.
“We could have brought home more hostages — earlier and for a smaller price,” Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister until November, said in a televised interview last month.
While Mr. Netanyahu’s office declined to comment, he has long blamed Hamas for the failure to reach a truce. “Only continued military pressure, until total victory, will bring about the release of all of our hostages,” the prime minister said last year.
The Israeli military declined to comment on the specific circumstances in which the hostages were killed but said in a statement that it has carried out operations with numerous precautions taken to protect the captives.
The statement added that it “expresses deep sorrow for every incident in which hostages were killed during their captivity and is doing everything in its power to prevent such occurrences.” The military also said that it regularly updates the families of hostages on the status of their loved ones.
Seven hostages were executed by their captors as Israeli soldiers drew near, and four others died in Israeli airstrikes, according to Israeli officials and the public findings of military investigations.
Three hostages were killed by Israeli soldiers who mistook them for Palestinian militants, the Israeli military said publicly; one was shot dead in crossfire. The circumstances surrounding the deaths of 26 others remain inconclusive.
In some cases, there are conflicting claims, such as in the case of the Bibas family. Hamas said that the three were killed in an Israeli strike, but the Israeli military said they were murdered.
Neither side has offered evidence for their conclusions. After examining the bodies, Dr. Chen Kugel, the director of Israel’s national forensic institute, said in a statement that there is no evidence they were killed in a bombing.
Some relatives of the hostages blame Hamas alone for these deaths. Nira Sharabi’s abducted husband was killed in an Israeli airstrike, according to a military inquiry. She said in an interview that Hamas was ultimately responsible “because they took him and put him there.”
Others believe that the government cared more about fighting Hamas than saving their loved ones.
“The government deceived the public by downplaying the risks the war posed to hostages,” said Merav Svirsky.
Her brother survived an Israeli airstrike only to be executed by his Hamas captor days later, according to three Israeli officials and Ms. Svirsky, who was briefed by military.
“The captor murdered my brother. But the reason he shot him was the military’s campaign,” Ms. Svirsky added.
Killed in Airstrikes
When Israel hit a subterranean Hamas command center in November 2023, the strike killed two Hamas commanders, including Ahmed al-Ghandour, a Hamas general who Israel said helped organize the October attack.
A month later, Israeli infantry scouring the site of the strike discovered the bodies of three unintended victims: an Israeli kidnapped from a music festival on Oct. 7 and two soldiers captured at a nearby military base.
The military has tried to prevent harm to hostages. Throughout the war, intelligence officers gathered information about each captive and maintained records of their last known location, according to more than 12 officials.
But the military couldn’t pinpoint the whereabouts of many hostages, especially in the first weeks of the war when information was scarce and aerial bombardments were at their most intense, according to three military officials. If there was no clear indication of a hostage’s location, the air force was able to strike, as in the attack on al-Ghandour.
After eventually concluding in March 2024 that the airstrike had killed hostages, the military didn’t inform their relatives for months, according to two defense officials. The military declined to comment on the incident.
In January 2024, the military allowed relatives to see a forensic report, later reviewed by the Times, that suggested the men may have been suffocated by noxious gases.
Maayan Sherman, the mother of one of the victims, soon began a public campaign to press the military to admit that the gases were emitted during an explosion caused by an Israeli missile.
It was not until September that the military acknowledged the men were killed in one of its own airstrikes. It has not disclosed the exact cause of death.
Executed by Hamas
In late August, Israeli commandos advanced through a town in southern Gaza, hoping to find Hamas’s top leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, according to five Israeli defense officials.
As they were hunting for Mr. Sinwar, the Israeli military assessed there were people potentially being held in tunnels in the same neighborhood. The commandos confirmed the presence of at least one hostage on Aug. 27, when they discovered a living captive, Farhan al-Qadi, an Arab Israeli, in a tunnel.
Fearing their presence might endanger other hostages, the forces initially suspended their mission, according to a military investigation.
The area was already previously marked as restricted for operations on military maps, which were reviewed by the Times. Three officials said that by operating in the area, the military risked their lives, since militants had been ordered to kill captives if cornered.
Ultimately the need to hunt Mr. Sinwar took higher priority, according to four defense officials.
After a daylong pause, the commandos pressed ahead on Aug. 28 with their search.
On Aug. 31, instead of Mr. Sinwar, the commandos discovered the bodies of six hostages who had been shot, killed and abandoned in a narrow tunnel.
Hamas issued conflicting messages shortly after the incident — one official blamed Israel for killing them, while another strongly suggested they were killed by Hamas fighters.
The military inquiry later concluded that they had been killed by their guards as the Israeli forces approached.
Mr. Sinwar was ultimately killed in another operation on Oct. 16.
Killed During Rescue Attempts
One night in December 2023, a squad of Israeli commandos thought they were on the cusp of rescuing a female hostage. The squad stormed a Hamas hide-out in Gaza, expecting to find an Israeli woman in a separate room from her captors, according to three Israeli officials.
Instead, they found themselves in a gun battle with Hamas militants. The woman was nowhere in sight. Without Israeli intelligence officers realizing, Hamas appeared to have swapped her for a male hostage, Sahar Baruch, according to the officials.
Soon, Mr. Baruch was dead — killed in crossfire that also injured Israeli soldiers, the officials said. It is unclear whether Mr. Baruch was killed by friendly fire or his captors; Hamas later released a video of his body.
Mr. Baruch’s remains are still in Gaza.
Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting
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12) Self-Deportation Taught Me What I Know About This Country
By Jill Damatac, March 8, 2025
Ms. Damatac is the author of “Dirty Kitchen,” a forthcoming memoir of her two decades as an undocumented Filipino immigrant in the United States.
Lukas Schmitz
On Jan. 1, 2015, I self-deported from the United States, my home of more than 22 years, to return to the Philippines, where I was born and lived until the age of 9. At takeoff, sorrow overtook the terror I felt at check-in. The T.S.A. agent had scanned my passport — renewed in 2002, devoid of a visa — and waved me through. I froze in place: Where were the ICE agents?
That day, I found out that no one cares if an undocumented immigrant leaves America. Only my husband, waving from beyond the gate, cared. He would eventually meet me in London; I was to go to Manila first to apply for a British spouse visa, which I couldn’t do in the United States because I was an undocumented person.
America is home; it raised me. I came in 1992, the daughter of Filipinos who left their homeland — an economy drained by dictatorship — in search of a better life. I left in 2015 as a broken adult of 31, still in search of that better life. When I returned last month, I found a different country.
My decision to leave the United States seemed crazy, the resulting bar on returning for 10 years a self-inflicted wound. This view requires the belief that America is exceptional, the only nation capable of caring for its people and helping them achieve their potential. After a near-lifetime of being undocumented, I had stopped believing this.
In my experience, America had become a place to flee from, not to. At the time I lived in New York without papers, I couldn’t secure a license to drive, afford to go to college, start a career, get health care, vote, open a bank account or travel freely. My life was a struggle with domestic and sexual violence, financial hardship and suicide attempts. By self-deporting, I ended my American life to save what remained of my actual life.
In the years before I left New York City, in my 20s and early 30s, I worked, hoping to save for a bachelor’s degree I would never earn. On Craigslist, I found temp jobs that didn’t require proof of legality: street fund-raiser, receptionist, assistant, office manager. The city’s buoying energy saved me in those years. I convinced myself that hiding and surviving was enough, that I didn’t need papers.
For many undocumented immigrants, the only path to papers and citizenship is through marriage to an American citizen. I avoided this, even when romantic partners and friends offered. I believe in love. In 2012, two years after meeting one night on the Lower East Side, my now-husband and I married: me a Filipino and American at heart; he a white, working-class-raised British man on an H-1 visa.
Two years into married life in New York City, my undocumented status complicated everything — an apartment under both our names, a joint bank account, the thought of children. We decided to move to Britain, his homeland. The privilege of this choice wrenched me with guilt: Most undocumented immigrants, including my family, couldn’t do what I was doing, couldn’t go where I was going.
Acquiring a British spouse visa was straightforward, in my experience smoother than America’s processes. My new start in London was suffused with unfamiliar optimism. Freed from being undocumented, and even without a bachelor’s degree, I graduated with two master’s degrees, one from Cambridge University in creative writing.
In my decade of becoming British, I found self-fulfillment, leavened by ambivalence: Britain is far from good to refugees and migrants, to its working-class people and people of color. In late 2023, I became a British citizen. My certificate of naturalization and British passport are locked in a safe with other pieces of paper that also make me legible: my Philippine birth certificate, our New York City marriage license, my British voter registration.
The decision to return to America was possible because of the privilege of my husband’s career in international finance. As a natural-born British citizen, he has the freedom to readily meet his ambitions and his career’s demands.
At the American Embassy in London, we applied for my L-2 visa, attached to his L-1 employment visa. Vulnerable to the whims of the consulate employee that day, I was swiftly denied. I had to serve out the last three months of the immigration ban that began when I self-deported in 2015 — no exception granted despite my British citizenship and the career I built as a filmmaker and later a writer with a book deal.
On Jan. 1, 2025, the 10-year ban expired; on Jan. 6, I was approved for the L-2 visa. My husband and I could go to San Francisco. I was going home.
But first, a short stay in Manhattan, which felt to me less like where I once lived — a place of bodega owners, mom-and-pop shops and the kind neighbors who’ve lived next door since the ’60s. It now feels like a clenched fist. In tears of guilt, I remembered my parents, struggling in the ’90s to be legalized, fleeced by unscrupulous immigration lawyers until time ran out on their tourist visas.
I wished I could go to New Jersey to see my parents for dinner and join my sister for wine at her Hell’s Kitchen apartment. But my dad died of a heart attack in 2022, while preparing to self-deport with my mother. Mom self-deported to Manila just before the 2024 election, after 32 years away. My sister, who left in 2017, is now Dutch, a neuroscience Ph.D. living just outside Amsterdam.
My survival does not make me exceptional — undocumented people survive every day under worse circumstances. “All you did was marry a white British guy,” someone said to me last week. Relative to other undocumented immigrants, I am lucky: I grew up with good teachers who provided the care and encouragement I needed; my mother was accidentally given a Social Security card permitting her to work. No deportation, ICE or cages for my family.
My experience shows that undocumented immigrants are not a monolith: We are a patchwork of different oppressions and privileges, coming to America to escape economic depression, poverty, war, trafficking, persecution, famine.
Why was the luck of falling in love and my proximity to white and white-collar privilege required to lift me out of my struggle with undocumentation in the first place? Shouldn’t the United States, a country of immigrants that sees itself as a bastion of democracy, do more for immigrants like my family, who lived here for decades?
I’m probably expected to feel grateful to return to America. Instead, I feel survivor’s guilt and a sense of love for the place where I grew up, the kind that recognizes its flaws and strengths, but loves anyway. There is still work I want to do now that my time is no longer spent just surviving.
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