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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) Why Vietnam Ignored Its Own Laws to Fast-Track a Trump Family Golf Complex
As President Trump blurs the lines between politics and business — and threatens steep tariffs on trade partners — governments feel compelled to favor Trump-related projects.
By Damien Cave, Photographs by Linh Pham, May 25, 2025
Reporting from Hung Yen Province, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Among those who attended a groundbreaking ceremony on Wednesday for a Trump golf project in Vietnam were Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, second from left, the businessman Dang Thanh Tam, third from left, and Eric Trump and Lara Trump, center.
When officials in the home province of Vietnam’s top leader went door to door recently, pressing residents to sign letters agreeing to the Trump Organization’s plans for a new golf community, Le Van Truong wanted to refuse.
Planning documents promised a “new benchmark in luxury, recreation and business.” Mr. Truong, 54, pictured something else: the uprooting of a cemetery with five generations of his ancestors and the loss of rich farmland that has sustained local families for centuries.
Yet he signed anyway, because, as he put it, “there’s nothing I can do.”
“Trump says it’s separate — the presidency and his business,” Mr. Truong said. “But he has the power to do whatever he wants.”
This $1.5 billion golf complex outside the capital, Hanoi, as well as plans for a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City, are the Trump family’s first projects in Vietnam — part of a global moneymaking enterprise that no family of a sitting American president has ever attempted on this scale. And as that blitz makes the Trumps richer, it is distorting how countries interact with the United States.
To fast-track the Trump development, Vietnam has ignored its own laws, legal experts said, granting concessions more generous than what even the most connected locals receive. Vietnamese officials, in a letter obtained by The New York Times, explicitly stated that the project required special support from the top ranks of the Vietnamese government because it was “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally.”
And Vietnamese officials have waved the development along in a moment of high-stakes diplomacy. They face intense pressure to strike a trade deal that would head off President Trump’s threat of steep tariffs, which would hit about 30 percent of Vietnam’s exports.
Eric Trump, the president’s second son, stands at the center of the drama. Mr. Trump was in Vietnam to break ground for the golf project on Wednesday, less than a year after meeting a local building partner, Dang Thanh Tam. Inside a tent with a gold facade, Mr. Trump told guests, including the country’s prime minister, that “the Trump family is going to make you very, very proud.”
The White House said, in an emailed statement, “All of the president’s trade discussions are totally unrelated to the Trump Organization.” It argued that there are no ethical issues as the president’s family develops about 20 Trump-branded properties worldwide, because the president’s sons run the businesses. President Trump’s financial disclosure report, however, shows that he still personally benefits financially from most of these ventures.
Eric Trump, who did not respond to interview requests, has insisted that he is just doing his job, developing properties. Vietnamese officials say that prioritizing Trump projects assists the country’s economic rise.
But as the deal-making accelerates and collides with U.S. threats to free trade, the line between Trump the president and Trump the tycoon is now seen by diplomats, trade officials and corporations worldwide as so obviously blurred that governments feel more compelled than ever to favor anything Trump-related.
While other Trump deals are happening in Serbia, Indonesia and the Middle East, Vietnam has become a case study for how the Trump brand wields influence and gains advantage, challenging local norms and encouraging leaders to rush approvals, to please the Trump family.
With trade negotiations intensifying, Vietnamese officials have allowed the Trump project to break ground without completing at least a half-dozen legally required steps, from securing all the land and financing to conducting environmental reviews.
The process usually takes two to four years. But records show that initial planning documents were filed only three months before Wednesday’s event, which was held on newly leveled land under an archway announcing “THE GROUNDBREAKING CEREMONY OF TRUMP INTERNATIONAL, HUNG YEN.”
Vietnam’s foreign ministry did not respond to questions about the legality of the project.
Residents, who gathered outside the development site to watch the groundbreaking, were held at a distance by the police. Many worry that their livelihoods and land will soon be taken. Fifty years after the end of a brutal war with the United States, they say they fear becoming collateral damage as the new move-fast-and-defy-the-rules approach of Trumpism marches on.
Taking Land for Villas
In Vietnam’s communist system, all land is owned by the people and managed or leased out by the state. Most of the property for the golf project is still controlled by families with long-term rights of use. In the Khoai Chau district of Hung Yen province — where the Trump project will take up nearly four square miles along the Red River — a sense of betrayal has been rumbling.
At town-hall meetings in early April, officials told hundreds of residents that the best they could expect was about half of what their land would have sold for even before the golf project was announced in October.
Amid a chorus of outrage at one meeting, nearly everyone stormed out. Word of the offered rate spread through streets and into the fields. Opposition has hardened as farmers fear losing investments in saplings that take years to mature, and the security that the land has provided for generations.
“They’re not listening to us,” Le Thi Thanh, 57, said on a recent fever-hot afternoon, squatting to graft young custard apple trees. “They just come here and impose their will.”
Vietnam’s construction approval process is supposed to begin with independent scrutiny in the public interest at the district and provincial level. In reality, as interviews and government documents show, little of that happened and planning laws have been shoved aside.
After the March 20 letter from provincial officials that said the project needed special treatment, the government cut short public comment and did not follow the usual rules on using public funds for preliminary research, documents show. Legal experts said the project was in conflict with the province’s housing master plan. The entire complex, with Trump-designed villas and 36 holes of golf in one of four development zones, would add 35,000 residents, theme parks and an urban commercial district.
On top of that, the project is planned in a riverfront area that flooded during a typhoon last year, and the province is dotted with unexploded ordnance from the Vietnam War. A 200-pound bomb was discovered six months ago.
Nonetheless, on May 15, just over three months after the first official filing, Vietnam’s central government ended the planning process early, to allow for investment and a groundbreaking event that would — as the letter in March had requested — align with Eric Trump’s availability and avoid “missing the window to capitalize on the support of the Donald Trump administration.”
That same day, residents rushed to the site of the groundbreaking, only to find that some construction had already begun. A black Rolls-Royce Phantom (valued at about $500,000, belonging to the Trump partner, Mr. Tam) sat near excavators, photographs showed, 100 yards from Mr. Truong’s family cemetery and families working the land.
At the groundbreaking, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh seemed sensitive to the possibility of public backlash in a country where, despite the power of a one-party state, people are not afraid to protest over being forced from where they live and work.
Raising his voice to a crowd of bankers, generals and Trump invitees in suits or shimmering stilettos, Mr. Chinh instructed the provincial authorities to ensure that those who sacrificed property would “have a new livelihood and new home better than their old ones.”
He also said the project would “receive maximum support” to “further strengthen the relationship between Vietnam and the U.S.” He promised that it would be completed in 2027.
Several lawyers and developers said that while Vietnam’s bureaucracy can be slow, the Trump project’s pace was unprecedented, illegal and unfair to other investors.
Residents said their needs were being tossed aside to please the already rich.
“They’ll have hotels, golf courses and swimming pools,” Mr. Truong said. “We’ll have nothing.”
The American Connection
The first Trump project in Vietnam got its start with the previously undisclosed efforts of two former Marine Corps platoon commanders with post-combat idealism in mind.
Billy Birdzell, 45, grew up in Larchmont, N.Y. David Lewis, 47, comes from an oil and gas family in Texas. The Iraq war welded them together forever after Aug. 5, 2004, when a rocket skipped off Mr. Lewis’s helmet and then exploded during a brutal battle in Najaf.
“He got very badly injured,” Mr. Birdzell said. “My guys, we evacuated him.”
They stayed in touch, as veterans do, and each separately developed a connection to Vietnam.
Mr. Birdzell visited in 2007, trekking to Khe Sanh and other Marine Corps landmarks before starting an investment banking firm, Horatius Group, and moving to California. In 2015, Mr. Lewis started Energy Capital Vietnam, which develops natural gas power projects.
In January 2024, they were at the Melia hotel in Hanoi, on a joint business trip, when Mr. Birdzell came down to breakfast and explained that he had been texting “a friend” who was interested in real estate in Vietnam.
“That was Eric,” Mr. Birdzell said.
In an interview, he would not say how they had met. They share a passion for guns and hunting. Mr. Birdzell is also married to a niece of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services.
Mr. Lewis, with a decade of work and connections in Vietnam, said he saw in Eric Trump a chance to bring the United States and Vietnam closer together. So, right after he heard of his interest, he reached out to Mr. Tam, the founder of the industrial construction firm Kinh Bac City, who embraced the idea immediately.
Mr. Birdzell and Mr. Lewis said that if the new development succeeded, it might be a catalyst for fostering deals and updating American perceptions about Vietnam after the war.
“It’s to elevate the Vietnamese people,” Mr. Birdzell said, “and to elevate Vietnam.”
Mr. Birdzell added that he had mainly been an intermediary, though he hoped for a role in raising capital. Mr. Lewis said he had stepped back and had no financial stake in the project.
But they have watched it advance. They attended the first meeting at Trump Tower between Mr. Tam and Eric Trump in July. They were there again on Sept. 24 to witness the signing of initial documents for the deal.
That day, the Trump family’s personal-political blend was on full display. Surrounded by Vietnamese business leaders and officials, Donald J. Trump took a break from his campaigning — just weeks before the U.S. presidential election — to play a leading role.
In a promotional photo from that day, Eric Trump sits on one side, Mr. Tam on the other. The past and future president occupies the center, smiling in front of two American flags.
Risks for U.S.-Vietnam Relations
Like those two former Marines, who saw the Trump golf course as a potential extension of America itself and this White House, Vietnam’s government sees Mr. Trump’s administration and the Trump Organization as one.
“When he wants to build a project in Vietnam, it’s under his personal brand name, and Vietnam wants to show off that connection,” said Dang Hung Vo, a former deputy minister of natural resources and environment who helped write some of the country’s land laws.
Part of the draw is national pride: Only some countries have Trump developments, and Vietnam would like to join that club. Many Vietnamese also admire Mr. Trump for his riches and resistance to China.
China is central to the U.S.-Vietnam relationship — and its current tensions.
In late April and early May, according to U.S. officials, Washington warned Vietnam that its hopes for lower tariffs were at risk because of the American perception that too many Chinese companies have been setting up in Vietnam and using the country to avoid tariffs on China.
Vietnamese officials say, in public and in private, that they hope the Trump golf project will serve as a good-will token, and further intertwine the U.S. and Vietnam.
The groundbreaking occurred just a few days after the Trump administration’s trade negotiator, Jamieson Greer, met with Vietnam’s trade minister, Nguyen Hong Dien, in South Korea. It was their first in-person meeting since Mr. Trump imposed (then paused) 46 percent tariffs on Vietnam, which sends more of its exports to the United States than anywhere else.
But as economists note, big development projects driven by political favors or optics, rather than by traditional investment calculations, often lose focus. By elevating patronage over merit, they can erode public trust.
The Trump project, initially announced as a golf community, now includes a lot more, and residents who had gathered near the groundbreaking demanded greater transparency about what it entails and how it will affect them.
Many analysts say that providing special treatment for the Trump family business undermines the efforts of To Lam, Vietnam’s top leader, to create a modern, evenhanded business environment with less corruption.
“This pushes Vietnam in the direction of more personalistic business transactions, rather than those more invested in markets, transparency and uniformity,” said Ja-Ian Chong, a political science professor at the National University of Singapore who studies Southeast Asia.
The faster things go, he added, the greater the risk of major problems. In Indonesia, the authorities halted construction on another Trump golf project this year because of water mismanagement. Mr. Tam, the Trumps’ local building partner in Vietnam, promised at the groundbreaking to continue working quickly before handing over the private golf project to the Trump Organization to operate.
For the people wondering about their land, the pace of change makes trouble look inevitable and close at hand.
“In just five days, they filled up all that farm’s land and put up that tent for the ceremony,” said Do Thi Suat, 63, watching the groundbreaking from a row of saplings. “Why are they moving so fast?”
“They will take our land away,” she said. “Then what will we do with our lives?”
Tung Ngo contributed reporting from Hanoi, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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2) Five Years After George Floyd’s Murder, the Backlash Takes Hold
The Black Lives Matter movement, kicked into high gear after Mr. Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, has given way to the politics of “white grievance” championed by President Trump.
By Clyde McGrady, May 25, 2025
Clyde McGrady covers race from Washington, D.C.
Black Lives Matter Plaza is gone from Washington, D.C. The bold yellow letters that once protested police violence are now paved over, though police killings nationally are actually up.
The Justice Department has abandoned oversight agreements for police forces accused of racial bias, even as it begins an investigation of Chicago after the city’s Black mayor praised the number of Black people in top city jobs. The U.S. refugee resettlement program is effectively shut down, but white South Africans have been granted an exception.
Sunday is the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, a searing moment of brutality that ignited what may have been the largest social movement in U.S. history. Five years later, the movement that his death helped begin may feel like it’s in reverse.
There has always been a rhythm to American social movements: forward momentum followed by backlash. Abolitionism’s triumph gave way to the Ku Klux Klan and the end of Reconstruction. Civil rights marches dissipated, as Richard M. Nixon and his “silent majority” rose to power.
But even by historical standards, the current retrenchment feels swift and stark. Five years ago, Republicans and Democrats shared the nation’s streets to denounce police violence and proclaim that Black lives matter. Now, Donald J. Trump, a president who has long championed white grievance, is setting the tone of racial discourse.
To conservatives, the shift is a necessary course correction away from violence in the streets and crippling mandates that overburden police departments.
“President Trump is tirelessly enacting policies to ensure America’s safety, prosperity, and success for all Americans,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “The Trump Administration is committed to stopping crime, upholding justice, protecting communities, and empowering federal, state, and local law enforcement.”
But Manisha Sinha, who teaches American history at the University of Connecticut, sees the resurgence of old power structures as intentional though not inescapable.
“I don’t think that there’s something inevitable or cyclical about it,” Dr. Sinha said. “As historians, we know that things just don’t happen on their own.”
The Black Lives Matter movement well predated Mr. Floyd’s death, emerging from the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2013 and the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York, both of which happened at the hands of the police.
But it exploded after the killing of Mr. Floyd. A half million people turned out in nearly 550 communities across the United States on a single day, June 6, 2020. Between 15 million and 26 million people participated in demonstrations or showed their support in the weeks after May 25, 2020, including Republican mainstays such as Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, and Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations.
Much has changed since then. Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Americans say “the increased focus on race and racial inequality after Floyd’s killing did not lead to changes that improved the lives of Black people.” The popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement has dipped 15 percentage points from its June 2020 peak, though a slight majority of the public still voiced support.
The toll can be personal. Selwyn Jones, 59, still speaks out about the death of his nephew, Mr. Floyd, under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. But as one of a handful of Black people in his small South Dakota town, Mr. Jones said his activism had alienated some people he once considered close.
“Those people that I thought were my friends, that I’ve known for 20 plus years, I haven’t talked to any of them in about five years,” Mr. Jones said.
Ibram X. Kendi, a professorial proponent of “antiracism,” has seen his academic star dim since 2020, when he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University with $55 million in donations. But in an interview, he said he still was taking the long view. The “antiracist revolution” has slowed, he conceded, but it was never going to ascend unimpeded.
“I know it became particularly popular in recent decades that there’s this singular arc of racial progress,” said Dr. Kendi, who will lead the Institute for Advanced Study at Howard University. “It’s political rhetoric, but it’s actually not historical reality.”
Still, it is difficult to ignore the headwinds facing racial justice activists, especially when those gusts seem to be blowing hardest from the highest levels of American power.
Mr. Trump may have vowed in his second inaugural address to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” but the president’s belief that “anti-white” discrimination has tilted society in favor of African Americans remains a driver of administration policy. Those policies include the dismantlement of “diversity, equity and inclusion” in government, the targeting of perceived racial preferences in academia and the private sector and the rooting out of what Mr. Trump called “improper ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution.
As far back as 1989, Mr. Trump said, “if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated Black, because I really believe they do have an actual advantage.” In the 1990s, Mr. Trump expressed concern that white people losing majority status would lead to a revolution.
In an Oval Office exchange on Wednesday with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, Mr. Trump accused the leader of not doing enough to protect the white South Africans who he said were “being executed.” He also has falsely claimed a genocide against white people was taking place. During the meeting Mr. Trump referred repeatedly to “dead white people.”
For some who achieved a new level of fame after Mr. Floyd’s death, to only later receive recriminations and scorn, the last five years have been disorienting.
“I’ve tried not to take it personally,” said Dr. Kendi, whose scholarship has been impugned by Mr. Trump’s supporters and whose tenure at Boston University included charges of mismanagement that were later dismissed. “I know it has less to do with me and more to do with this attempt to make people like me, or the people who are doing the type of work that I’m doing, into these scary, harmful characters.”
But Dr. Kendi has also faced criticism from his ostensible allies that his framework for antiracist activism is unworkable and counterproductive. Dr. Kendi has said that most of his critics “either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.”
In the wake of Mr. Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter Foundation Inc. raised a staggering $79.6 million in fiscal year 2021. The next year, that figure was down to almost $8.5 million. By 2023, it was about $4.7 million, with expenses of $10.8 million, according to records tracked by the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica. Allegations of mismanagement have ricocheted between the foundation and its funders, which harmed the reputation of the movement’s leaders.
Historians note that even when social movements are met with backlash, change is never fully rolled back. Despite the violence and terror used by southern states to suppress full Black citizenship in the post-Reconstruction era, slavery was not reinstituted.
And Black activism is American activism, said Dr. Steven Hahn, a professor at New York University, even if some of the white allies who once stood shoulder to shoulder with Black protesters have turned away,
“You wouldn’t have democracy in this country, or at least a sense of a robust democracy without Black people and their own struggles,” he said. “They were the most committed to real democracy that was not bound by exceptions and exclusions.”
But Professor Hahn expressed real worry.
“People get silenced, and then before you know it,” he said, “we’re really back at a really bad square one.”
The police reform movement that was sparked by Mr. Floyd’s murder has had lasting impacts. Many police departments still require officers to wear body cameras. No-knock warrants are banned in some areas. Data collection on police brutality has been enhanced.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to eradicate D.E.I., which critics say has become a catchall term to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male, is beginning to meet grass roots resistance. On Wednesday, the big-box retailer Target reported a drop in foot traffic and sales, a response in part to its retreat from diversity policies, in part to tariff anxiety. The company’s sales fell 3.8 percent last quartered compared with the same quarter a year ago.
On the flip side of that is Michael Green, who like many was moved by the protests of 2020. A self-described “flag nerd,” Mr. Green thought marchers should have proper banners that could match the iconography of Mr. Trump’s movement, so he started Flags for Good, which makes signage for progressive causes, including Black Lives Matter.
A company once run out of a spare bedroom has now become a career. Items in the Black Lives Matter section in particular have seen a huge leap in sales that, he said, was driven by Mr. Trump’s re-election.
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3) Trump Showed Images of ‘Genocide’ in South Africa. One Was From the War in Congo.
During a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, President Trump presented images, videos and news clippings that he said were evidence of genocide in South Africa. Fact-checking debunks the claims.
By Lynsey Chutel and Monika Cvorak, May 23, 2025
President Cyril Ramaphosa and other South Africans met with President Trump at the Oval Office on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
In his meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa on Wednesday, President Trump claimed white South African farmers were victims of genocide and, to support that assertion, he held up an image that he said was from South Africa and which he claimed showed some of those victims being buried. The Reuters news agency said Friday that the photos were actually of the conflict in eastern Congo. That was not the only false claim he made.
Here’s a look at some of the most glaring misinformation from the contentious meeting.
A Misrepresented Image
During the encounter, Mr. Trump presented a stack of articles and blog posts as evidence of the persecution of white farmers in South Africa. He shuffled through them as Mr. Ramaphosa squinted at the pages, trying to see what they said. One of the images Mr. Trump held up showed medical workers in white protective clothing lifting body bags.
“Look, here’s burial sites all over the place,” Mr. Trump said, grasping up a copy of the blog post. “These are white farmers that are being buried.”
The Reuters news agency said on Friday that the image was taken from its recent exclusive video report documenting the aftermath of fighting between Congolese troops and fighters from the M23 rebel group in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The image was later published on the website of American Thinker, a conservative online magazine, with an article that captioned it only as a “YouTube screen grab.”
The White House did not respond to a query from Reuters about the image.
A Controversial Chant
Mr. Trump had aides dim the lights in the Oval Office and showed a video during the meeting that featured the booming voice of a rabble-rousing South African opposition politician known for controversial comments, Julius Malema.
Along with a montage collected from years of interviews, the video also showed Mr. Malema, who is Black, shouting an apartheid-era chant — “Kill the Boer!” “Kill the farmer!” — at a packed stadium rally for his party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, adding a sound meant to imitate a gun.
Mr. Malema has used the song repeatedly to rile up his audiences and roil his political enemies. The Boers in the chant refer to Afrikaners, the descendants of the European settlers, mostly Dutch, German and French, who arrived in South Africa during colonialism. The chant was born at a time when Black South Africans were fighting the country’s violent, racist apartheid government. After the end of apartheid in 1994, the African National Congress transitioned from a liberation movement to South Africa’s governing party, and it distanced itself from the song.
Mr. Malema, however, has held on to it as part of his arsenal of incendiary comments to portray himself and his party as radical revolutionaries.
AfriForum, a group that represents the interests of Afrikaners, took Mr. Malema to court in 2011 and 2022 seeking to block him from singing the song. Initially, a judge ruled that the song was hate speech, but Mr. Malema continued.
Then in 2022, a judge ruled that AfriForum had “failed to show that the lyrics in the songs could reasonably be construed to demonstrate a clear intention to harm or incite to harm and propagate hatred.”
Groups that claim Afrikaners are the victims of violent persecution in South Africa have seized on Mr. Malema’s comments and songs, even as his own party’s popularity dims.
In South Africa, the English-language outlet News 24 traced the video Mr. Trump played to a social media account known for spreading misinformation. The investigative report found that Elon Musk had reposted the same video at least twice on X, the social media platform he owns.
A Misconstrued Memorial
In the video Mr. Trump played, an aerial shot shows dozens of cars driving slowly on a rural road lined on both sides with white crosses.
Mr. Trump described the convoy of cars as people coming to pay respects to their dead loved ones. “It’s a terrible sight,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Those people were all killed.”
“Have they told you where that is, Mr. President?” Mr. Ramaphosa asks, exchanging bewildered looks with other members of the South African delegation. “I’d like to know where that is because this I’ve never seen.”
“I mean, it’s in South Africa,” Mr. Trump responded.
A New York Times analysis found that the footage showed a memorial procession for a white couple who had been killed on their farm that was held on Sept. 5, 2020, near the town of Newcastle, in South Africa’s eastern KwaZulu-Natal province. And the white crosses were installed as symbols and removed after the procession. They are frequently used by demonstrators who are often, but not always, farmers protesting what they say is police inaction around murders and crime in rural areas.
These protests have, at times, been hijacked by groups peddling the idea that white farmers are the victims of targeted killings that they describe as a “white genocide” in South Africa.
Despite statistics debunking this myth, the idea has taken root among conspiratorial far right groups on the internet. It has also made its way to the White House, where it has shaped foreign policy and upended refugee norms after Mr. Trump offered expedited asylum to white Afrikaners.
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4) Israeli Airstrike Kills at Least 7 of a Doctor’s Children, Gaza Officials Say
Two more children were missing, while her husband and one other child were injured in the strike on Friday, the officials said. Israel said it was checking if it had harmed “uninvolved civilians.”
By Aaron Boxerman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, May 25, 2025
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel
The children’s father, Hamdi al-Najjar, suffered burns and shrapnel wounds and was being treated at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza on Saturday. Credit...Hussam Al-Masri/Reuters
It began on Friday afternoon with an immense boom that residents say reverberated throughout the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis.
Alaa al-Najjar, a pediatric physician, was at work at the city’s Nasser Hospital when she heard her neighborhood south of the city had been hit in an Israeli airstrike. By the time she arrived, emergency workers were pulling out the bodies of her children, said Ali al-Najjar, her brother-in-law, who had also rushed to the scene.
“We had pulled out three charred bodies and were pulling out the fourth,” said Mr. al-Najjar. “She recognized them immediately.”
At least seven of the Najjar family’s 10 children were killed, according to Gaza health officials and the family. Two remain missing, presumed dead under the rubble of their home, according to Ali al-Najjar and Mohammad al-Najjar, the nephew of Dr. Najjar’s husband.
The building next door had been storing car tires, said Ali al-Najjar, and they went up in flames in the blast. The fire quickly spread to the Najjars’ home, he said.
They were the latest casualties in a renewed round of fighting between Israel and Hamas after more than a year and a half of full-blown war. The Israeli military has escalated its airstrikes across the enclave in recent weeks and threatened a major ground assault.
The New York Times provided the approximate time and coordinates of the strike to the Israeli military. In response, the military said it had “struck a number of suspects” in a structure near Israeli forces in Khan Younis but was still checking if “uninvolved civilians were harmed.”
There were believed to be only two survivors, the Gaza officials said. Hamdi al-Najjar, the doctor’s husband, remains in critical condition with severe brain injuries, while one of their children, Adam, was in moderate condition, said Ahmed al-Farra, the head of the pediatric care ward at Nasser Hospital. Dr. al-Farra backed the family’s account of the deaths of the children in the strike.
The deadliest war in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel’s battle against Hamas has killed more than 50,000 people in Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but its published casualty lists include thousands of children.
Hamas began the war on Oct. 7, 2023, with a surprise attack on southern Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw roughly 250 others taken back to Gaza as hostages. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has vowed that the latest offensive will finally lead to the defeat of Hamas, the militant group that has long run Gaza.
But critics — including many in Israel — say the war appears set to drag on with no clear end in sight. In the meantime, the already immense civilian toll in Gaza is rising.
An investigation by The New York Times published last year found that Israel changed its rules of engagement at the start of the war, raising the number of civilians it deemed permissible to endanger in strikes on military targets.
The Israeli military has ordered many Palestinians living near Khan Younis to flee their homes or face potentially deadly Israeli attacks. Israeli officials say the measures show how committed they are to protecting Gaza’s civilians in a complex war.
The evacuation orders included the neighborhood of Qizan al-Najjar — a southern suburb of Khan Younis — where the Najjar family lived.
“The Khan Younis area is a dangerous war zone. Before beginning operations there, the I.D.F. evacuated civilians from this area for their own safety,” the Israeli military said in a written response to a request by The New York Times for confirmation of the strike Friday, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
But the Najjars had stayed in their home nonetheless, feeling that they could not move their 10 children — including a baby — into a crowded tent camp without any services, said Ali al-Najjar.
Nor were they convinced that anywhere else in Khan Younis would be safer, he added. The Israeli military has occasionally struck areas designated as humanitarian zones, arguing that Palestinian militants were operating from within. Hamas fighters have also hidden under residential neighborhoods in Gaza, storing their weapons in tunnels, houses, mosques and other places.
“At home, they had water, they had solar panels with electricity,” Mr. al-Najjar said.
Alaa al-Najjar had worked at Nasser Hospital for about a decade as a pediatrician, said Dr. al-Farra, who oversaw her work in the ward. He described her as a “kind person” who “treated the children with a blend of maternal care and professional expertise.”
Her husband is also a doctor. He occasionally wrote social media posts in which he appeared to praise Hamas and the Oct. 7 attacks. His family denied that he had any formal connection to the armed group.
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5) New Gaza Aid Plan, Bypassing U.N. and Billed as Neutral, Originated in Israel
Foreign contractors are set to carry out a contentious new food aid system in Gaza, displacing experienced aid agencies like the United Nations. It was conceived and largely developed by Israelis as a way to undermine Hamas.
By Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman and Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, May 24, 2025
“Group members promoted the idea of distributing aid from pockets of territory occupied by the Israeli military and out of Hamas’s reach. The Israelis wanted to circumvent the United Nations, but did not want Israel to take on the responsibility of caring for Gaza’s roughly two million residents. As time went on, they settled on the idea of private contractors managing food distribution, the people familiar with the meetings said. Writing in a journal published by the Israeli military last July, Mr. HaCohen proposed a version of the plan now set to be implemented. ‘To meet the war’s goals over the long term, Israel needs to develop tools that will pull the rug out from under the Hamas movement and not just (temporarily) dismantle the Hamas government,’ Mr. HaCohen wrote. ‘Pulling the rug out will come once Israel begins to work directly with the civilian population, manages the distribution of aid itself, and begins to take responsibility for building the ‘day-after.’”
Displaced people at a charity food kitchen in Gaza City on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Throughout the war in Gaza, U.N. agencies and experienced aid groups have overseen the distribution of food aid in the territory. Now, Israel is set to transfer that responsibility to a handful of newly formed private organizations with obscure histories and unknown financial backers.
Supporters of the project describe it as an independent and neutral initiative run mainly by American contractors. The main group providing security is run by Philip F. Reilly, a former senior C.I.A. officer, and a fund-raising group is headed by Jake Wood, a former U.S. Marine, who said in an interview that the system would be phased in soon.
Announcing the arrangement in early May, Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said it was “wholly inaccurate” to call it “an Israeli plan.”
But the project is an Israeli brainchild, first proposed by Israeli officials in the earliest weeks of the war, according to Israeli officials, people involved in the initiative and others familiar with its conception, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak more freely of the initiative.
The New York Times found that the broad contours of the plan were first discussed in late 2023, at private meetings of like-minded officials, military officers and business people with close ties to the Israeli government.
The group called itself the Mikveh Yisrael Forum, after a college where members convened in December 2023. Its leading figures gradually settled on the idea of hiring private contractors to distribute food in Gaza, circumventing the United Nations. Throughout 2024, they then fostered support among Israel’s political leaders and some military commanders, and began to develop it with foreign contractors, principally Mr. Reilly.
The plan was designed to undermine Hamas’s control of Gaza, prevent food from falling into militants’ hands or the black market, and bypass the United Nations, which Israeli officials do not trust and have accused of anti-Israeli bias. Israeli officials argued, too, that their plan would move distribution out of chaotic and lawless areas into zones under Israeli military control.
U.N. officials pushed back, contending that the plan would restrict food aid to limited parts of Gaza, and warning that it could endanger civilians by forcing them to walk for miles, across Israeli military lines, to reach food. The U.N. also warns that the system could facilitate an Israeli plan to displace civilians out of northern Gaza, since the initial distribution sites would only be in the south.
Under the new plan, Mr. Reilly’s group, Safe Reach Solutions, and other security firms would initially secure four distribution sites in parts of southern Gaza under Israeli military control, Mr. Wood said. His nonprofit, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, will finance the arrangement, which would gradually replace a U.N.-run system in which civilians collect food from hundreds of places across Gaza.
Mr. Wood, the foundation’s executive director, said in an interview that the system is “imperfect,” but added, “The reality is, any food that is getting into Gaza today is more food than got into Gaza yesterday.”
He said his foundation had been endowed with “the necessary autonomy to operate independently,” and that it had no funding from Israel. As an example, he said he had pushed for new sites to be built in the north, and added, “I would participate in no plan in any capacity if it was an extension of an I.D.F. plan or an Israeli government plan to forcibly dislocate people anywhere within Gaza.”
The project’s genesis was in the chaotic aftermath of Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, when hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians rejoined the military as reservists, many of them reaching positions of influence.
That process created a huge cohort of Israelis with one foot in the military and another in civilian life, blurring the boundary between the two worlds. It fostered unlikely connections and conversations between career officers and influential part-timers, as well as their business associates.
An informal network formed among like-minded officials, officers, reservists and business people who believed the Israeli military and government lacked a strategy for the future of Gaza — and set out to develop one themselves.
That group, some of the people interviewed for this article said, included Yotam HaCohen, a strategic consultant who joined COGAT, the military department that oversees aid delivery to Gaza; Liran Tancman, a well-connected tech investor who also joined COGAT; and Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli-American venture capitalist who remained outside the military.
Mr. HaCohen soon became an assistant to Brig. Gen. Roman Goffman, a senior COGAT commander who is now the prime minister’s military adviser.
In December 2023, Mr. HaCohen, Mr. Tancman and Mr. Eisenberg helped lead a brainstorming session with both officials and influential civilians at the college near Tel Aviv, according to people with knowledge of it. Its members would later meet in other venues, including Mr. Eisenberg’s Jerusalem home.
Mr. Eisenberg confirmed he had joined meetings about these ideas with both Israeli officials and private individuals but said in a statement that so many people, including U.S. officials, had been involved that “it is hard to know exactly how this all emerged.” A representative for Mr. HaCohen’s and Mr. Tancman’s group declined to comment.
At the meetings, people familiar with them said, the group discussed how difficult it would be to defeat Hamas through military force alone, and sought ways of undermining Hamas’s control of Gaza’s civilians, including through aid.
Group members promoted the idea of distributing aid from pockets of territory occupied by the Israeli military and out of Hamas’s reach. The Israelis wanted to circumvent the United Nations, but did not want Israel to take on the responsibility of caring for Gaza’s roughly two million residents. As time went on, they settled on the idea of private contractors managing food distribution, the people familiar with the meetings said.
Writing in a journal published by the Israeli military last July, Mr. HaCohen proposed a version of the plan now set to be implemented.
“To meet the war’s goals over the long term, Israel needs to develop tools that will pull the rug out from under the Hamas movement and not just (temporarily) dismantle the Hamas government,” Mr. HaCohen wrote. “Pulling the rug out will come once Israel begins to work directly with the civilian population, manages the distribution of aid itself, and begins to take responsibility for building the ‘day-after.’”
Lamenting how Israel was “at the mercy” of traditional aid agencies, Mr. HaCohen said that “non-state contractor companies must be employed” to enact the plan, including private, non-Israeli contractors “in the areas of security, aid and services.” He added that he had developed these ideas while serving as General Goffman’s assistant, and thanked Mr. Tancman and the Mikveh Yisrael Forum for their help.
By this time, Israeli officials, including Mr. HaCohen and Mr. Tancman, had begun meeting with Mr. Reilly and promoting him to Israel’s military and political leadership, some of the people familiar with the meetings said. Other private contractors pitched their services, but the former C.I.A. officer gradually emerged as Israel’s preferred partner.
In a brief interview, Mr. Reilly said he began to discuss Gaza aid with Israeli civilians in early 2024, and confirmed meeting Mr. Eisenberg and Mr. Tancman later in the year.
As a young C.I.A. operative in the 1980s, Mr. Reilly had helped to train the Contras, right-wing militias fighting Nicaragua’s Marxist government, according to a 2022 podcast interview. Two decades later, he was one of the first U.S. agents to land in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the interview. He became the C.I.A. station chief in Kabul, then left to work as a private security expert for groups including Orbis, a Virginia-based consulting firm.
It was in this capacity that Mr. Reilly liaised with Israeli military and intelligence officials to develop new models for food distribution in Gaza, according to a document produced by Orbis. In late 2024, while working for Orbis, Mr. Reilly worked on a study that outlined a more detailed version of the plan to outsource food aid delivery to private companies and foundations, according to the document.
Last November, Mr. Reilly’s representatives registered two such entities in the United States, S.R.S. and G.H.F., according to two people familiar with the move.
S.R.S. began to operate in Gaza in January 2025, with Mr. Reilly as chief executive. During a cease-fire that ran from January until March, the firm’s contractors staffed a central Gaza checkpoint that screened Palestinian cars for weapons. In a statement, S.R.S. said it had no Israeli shareholders or interests. Still, the effort was seen in Israel as a small-scale trial for a future security model that could be rolled out more widely.
Mr. Wood said S.R.S. is now the main security company chosen to secure the food distribution sites in southern Gaza, essentially implementing the ideas articulated by Mr. HaCohen and Mr. Reilly.
Mr. Wood said the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a nonprofit organization that will hire S.R.S. and raise the money to pay for its operations.
The foundation now operates at “arm’s length” from S.R.S., said Mr. Wood. But one lawyer, James H. Cundiff, registered both organizations in the United States, and until this month the two groups shared the same spokeswoman. Mr. Cundiff did not reply to requests for comment.
At least two other groups named the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation have been registered, one in the United States and another in Switzerland. A spokesman for Mr. Wood’s foundation said that one established in February in Delaware was his.
It is unclear who is financing the foundation’s enormous aid operation, which aims to pay for food for roughly 1 million people, roughly half of Gaza’s population. It would also involve roughly one thousand armed security guards, according to the Orbis document.
Mr. Wood said that the foundation had received a small amount of seed funding from non-Israeli businessmen, but declined to name them or the people had appointed him.
Later, the foundation said in a statement that a Western European country had donated over $100 million for its future operations, but declined to name the country.
Johnatan Reiss and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting. Jack Begg contributed research.
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6) Risking Their Lives to ‘Self Deport’
Thousands of Venezuelan migrants are doing just what U.S. leaders want them to. But to get home, they face as many dangers as on the journey north.
By Annie Correal, Visuals by Federico Rios, May 26, 2025
Annie Correal and Federico Rios traveled by boat from Panama with migrants heading back to South America.
Junior Sulbarán, 26, with his wife, Josliacner Andrade, 18, and their daughter, Samantha Victoria, 1.
They climbed onto the boat on Panama’s Caribbean Coast, around 40 people in all, their belongings stuffed in garbage bags and their children clinging tight to them for the arduous trip ahead.
They were not defying the U.S. government by moving toward the border. They were heading back to Venezuela — doing exactly what American officials want them to do — even though it meant facing threats of robbery, kidnapping and a dangerous crossing once again.
“It’s a broken dream,” said Junior Sulbarán, who, like the others, had fled Venezuela the year before, carrying his infant daughter thousands of miles north and through the treacherous jungle pass known as the Darién Gap.
He and his family arrived in Mexico City before President Trump’s second term, and soon heard the administration’s message. “If you are considering entering America illegally, don’t even think about it,” Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, said in a White House video posted in February. “If you come to our country and you break our laws, we will hunt you down.”
There is no clear figure for how many people have decided to leave the United States or given up on reaching it, and migration at the southern border had dropped sharply even before Mr. Trump took office for a second time.
But in one indication that some migrants are starting to return to South America, more than 10,000 people — virtually all from Venezuela — have taken boats from Panama to Colombia since January, according to Panamanian officials, who say that more are setting out each week.
That is a tiny number compared with the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who entered the United States and Mexico in recent years, but the busy new boat route toward South America is a sign, according to migrants, officials and rights groups, that the Trump administration’s harsh tactics are having an effect.
“The world is hearing our message that America’s borders are closed to lawbreakers,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement. “Migrants are now even turning back before they reach our borders.”
For those in the United States, she said, “it’s an easy choice: Leave voluntarily and receive $1,000,” referring to the government’s offer for “voluntary self deportation.”
While the administration may claim success, experts say, many migrants face so many barriers to heading home that even if they are willing, it is extremely challenging to turn back.
“They’re stuck, wherever they are,” said Juan Cruz, who served as Mr. Trump’s top Latin America adviser during his first term, noting that many migrants are impoverished and indebted and lack travel documents. Venezuelans, he added, also face a government hostile to those who left for the United States.
The Trump administration may not care how people get home, said Mr. Cruz. But if it wants to encourage more people to leave, ignoring the obstacles that migrants face “isn’t the way to do it,” he said. “They don’t have a single thing going for them.”
Among those leaving, migrants from Venezuela, in particular, say they feel targeted by the administration, which recently ended deportation protections and has sent hundreds of men accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador.
In Texas, buses heading south are filling up with Venezuelans who say they fear being detained over tattoos or separated from their children. In Mexico, there is a desperate, monthslong competition to get on flights to Caracas. In Panama, the outskirts of Colón have become a hub for boat operators charging hundreds of dollars to get on rickety boats to skirt the Darién on the way back to South America.
For many migrants from Venezuela, it is not so easy as raising a hand and boarding a plane.
Some do not have travel documents after years on the road, or any documents at all — and because Venezuela has few consulates, they are extremely difficult to replace. One passenger on the boat in Panama, Adrián Corona, said that his passport had expired and his ID was lost in the Darién.
He had turned around in Mexico, much like Mr. Sulbarán, his wife and their toddler, Samantha Victoria, who had been on the move for over a year by the time they made it back to Panama.
“We left Santiago, Chile, went through Bolivia, then Peru, then Ecuador, then Colombia, and finally entered the Darién,” Mr. Sulbarán said of his tortuous escape from crumbling Venezuela. “We spent six days in the jungle.”
Leaving Mexico, they took buses south to Panama’s coast, where they put their belongings in trash bags to protect them from storms and splashing waves.
“All of it was a waste of time and money,” said Josliacner Andrade, Mr. Sulbarán’s wife.
Now, new obstacles stood in their way. Panama has all but sealed the Darién, seeking to help the United States stop northbound migration and asserting that the crossing, by foot, has become too dangerous.
“Since they closed the jungle, we had to take the boats,” said Dayerlín Sandoval, who had traveled to the boat from San Antonio, fearing that she would be deported without her son.
Many of the Venezuelans saved up for months to make the difficult journey, which can cost a small family a few thousand dollars.
Geraldine Rincón, who learned of the boat route on TikTok, said her mother had sold a motorcycle in Venezuela to help finance the trip for her and her small son and daughter.
Simply to squeeze on a boat, each migrant pays about $300, wearing pink wristbands as proof.
And once they’re onboard, the dangers don’t end.
The boats travel more than 200 miles across the Caribbean, stopping at a village on the edge of the Darién, before continuing toward their destination, Colombia. Along the way they sometimes pass postcard views — cargo ships by the Panama Canal, palm-covered islands — but often travel over rough seas and under a scorching sun.
At least one trip has been deadly. In February, an 8-year-old from Venezuela drowned and around 20 migrants had to be rescued after their boat capsized.
For a moment, the migrants who set out in early May feared another disaster. As their boat neared a migration checkpoint on the island of El Porvenir, there was a loud crack. A propeller had hit a reef.
They made it to the checkpoint, where the Panamanian authorities count heads and mainly ensure that migrants continue on their way. But about an hour later, the damaged motor gave out, leaving only one.
The captain searched for a cellphone signal to call for backup and the passengers baked in the midday sun. When the boat was moving steadily, the heat was bearable. At this pace, it was stifling.
Alejandra Rojas tore open a juice pack for her panting dog, Milú, who had followed her through the Darién jungle. Ms. Rojas wore a hat, but most passengers had nothing but their T-shirts to pull over their heads. Two children vomited.
After 40 minutes in the sun, the backup boat arrived, and one by one the migrants passed children, bags and the dog over the side. Then they were on their way, the surf rising and the boat banging down hard on the waves.
Finally, after eight hours, the group pulled into Puerto Obaldía, a tiny village without roads near the Colombian border.
There they were, at the edge of the Darién, facing a region that has come to see migrants as a financial opportunity — again.
Juanita Goebertus, the director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch, said that the remote corner of Colombia where the boats go is essentially run by a criminal group. And the migrants knew what lay in store: paying locals top dollar for food, water, a scrap of space to sleep on their yards or floors.
“You’re a little gold mine, Mr. Corona said. “Everyone sees you like that.”
The migrants who made it to the border town would board boats to Colombia the next day, then scatter. Those heading to Venezuela knew their relatives, many going hungry, would have little to offer.
Prepared for the worst, Mr. Sulbarán said he and his wife planned only to pick up his 9-year-old son and see family. Then they would turn around and leave Venezuela once more.
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7) We Are Not Being Asked to Run Into Cannon Fire. We Just Need to Speak Up.
By Drew Gilpin Faust, May 26, 2025
Ms. Faust is the author of “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” and a former president of Harvard University.
Nathaniel Shoup died in 1862 while serving with Company C, 84th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Credit...Library of Congress
Frederick Douglass thought Decoration Day — the original name for Memorial Day — was the nation’s most significant holiday. On May 30, 1871, the day’s fourth annual observance, he honored the unknown Union dead at Arlington National Cemetery, addressing President Grant, members of his cabinet and a crowd of dignitaries surrounded by graves adorned with spring flowers. The Civil War’s losses were still raw, and the presence of the conflict’s victorious commander at the Arlington property that was once the home of Robert E. Lee, the recently deceased rebel general, could only have deepened the war’s shadow.
Yet Douglass worried that the lives and purposes of the approximately 400,000 Northern soldiers who died in the war and even the meaning of the war itself might be forgotten. If the nation did not keep the memory of the conflict alive, he implored, “I ask in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?” The Union dead must not be honored only for their bravery or their sacrifice, he insisted. It mattered what they died for. It mattered what the nation chose to remember.
“They died for their country. … They died for their country,” Douglass repeated. They had fought against the “hell-black system of human bondage” and for a nation that embodied “the hope of freedom and self-government throughout the world.” Americans must not forget that this was why the dead had laid down their lives in numbers no one had anticipated or could even have imagined.
Decoration Day honored those who had fought for the promise of America — the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln envisioned in his Gettysburg Address, delivered to dedicate a soldiers’ cemetery while the conflict still raged. Eight years later, Douglass echoed the words of a president who had himself become a casualty of the war. Lincoln and hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers had died to defend and preserve what the president described in 1863 as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Douglass devoted the remainder of his life to ensuring those men did not die in vain.
Decoration Day gradually assumed a firm place in the calendar of national celebrations. The commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a politically powerful organization of Union veterans, first proclaimed the observance in 1868. By 1890, all the Union states had officially adopted it. In the aftermath of World War I, it came to encompass the dead of all American wars. In 1967 Congress changed its name to Memorial Day, and four years later, as part of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, moved its date from May 30 to the last Monday of the month, to create a three-day weekend. Somewhere along the way Memorial Day came to be celebrated by many as the start date for summer, a holiday to spend at the beach, not to reflect on history, decorate graves or honor the dead.
“What shall men remember?” Douglass asked. We need this year more than ever to be reminded of the meaning of the day. At a moment of national crisis that is frequently compared to the divisiveness and destructiveness of the Civil War era, we should look anew at the responsibilities Douglass and Lincoln handed down to us. Between 1861 and 1865, some 2.7 million men, almost all volunteers, took up arms to preserve the Union as a beacon of democracy at a time when representative government seemed to be fading from the earth. Today democracy is once again under worldwide threat, assailed as disorderly and inefficient by autocratic leaders from Budapest to Moscow to Beijing, leaders our own president openly admires. Yet in 1861, ordinary men from even the remotest corners of the Union risked their lives because they believed, as Lincoln articulated for us all, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.”
Lincoln regarded secession as lawless, as a direct assault upon the principle that defined the American nation: the belief in a government of “a majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations.” Those structured checks and the rule of law that embodies and enacts them are once again at risk as we confront the subservience of Congress, the defiance of judicial mandates and the arrogation of presidential power in a deluge of unlawful executive orders.
The “new birth of freedom” Lincoln promised in the Gettysburg Address all but faded with the overturning of Reconstruction and the re-establishment of white supremacy in the era of Jim Crow. Only a century later, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, did the United States at last fully commit itself to multiracial democracy and the war’s emancipationist vision. But even this belated progress is now being reversed with voter suppression efforts, challenges to the 14th Amendment’s establishment of birthright citizenship and the evisceration of the Civil Rights Act, most recently with an executive order abandoning the regulations that have been central to its enforcement. The unfinished work of freedom seems to be in full-throttle reverse.
Douglass invoked the “eloquence” of the dead. We should listen to them. As a historian, I have read dozens of these men’s letters and diaries, windows into why they fought, into what and whom they loved and what they hoped for at the end of a war they knew they might not survive. Together they did save the Union, the nation that has given me and so many others opportunities that the war-born imperative of ever-expanding freedom has offered. These men made our lives possible. They were impelled to risk all by a sense of obligation to the future. We possess a reciprocal obligation to the past. We must not squander what they bequeathed to us.
This debt and this duty should be at the forefront of our minds this Memorial Day. We must honor these men, their bravery, their sacrifice, and especially their purposes. We are being asked not to charge into a hail of Minié balls and artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it?
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8) Trump’s Comments on Gaza Reflect Israel’s Growing Isolation
For months, Israel’s strongest allies had been reluctant to join a wave of global censure against the war. Now, even the Trump administration appears to be growing impatient.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 26, 2025
“Still, all of these countries, which have condemned Hamas for carrying out the Oct. 7 attacks, continue to support Israel in many practical ways, not least through military, economic and intelligence partnerships. The United States continues to supply Israel with billions of dollars in military aid, helping to sustain the military operations in Gaza. The U.S. secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, visited Israel on Sunday and Monday, meeting with Mr. Netanyahu and other leaders, and attended a ceremony in honor of two Israeli Embassy staff members killed in an attack in Washington last week. Britain and France helped protect Israel last year during huge barrages of ballistic missiles from Iran, and they would most likely do so again. Moreover, they remain wary and have sometimes been critical of some of the moves made against Israel by other countries, including the push to charge Israel with genocide.”
Destruction in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza. In recent weeks, partners such as the United States, Britain and France have become more willing to place Israel under overt pressure. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Through more than 18 months of war in Gaza, Israel has faced intense criticism from foreign leaders and aid groups but has rarely experienced sustained public censure, let alone concrete repercussions, from its close allies.
Until now.
In recent weeks, partners such as the United States, Britain and France have become more willing to place Israel under overt pressure, culminating in President Trump’s call on Sunday for the war to wind down.
“Israel, we’ve been talking to them, and we want to see if we can stop that whole situation as quickly as possible,” Mr. Trump told reporters in New Jersey shortly before boarding Air Force One.
Those comments contrast with the public position Mr. Trump held entering office in January, when he blamed Hamas rather than Israel for the war’s continuation. He was also careful to present a united front with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
Mr. Trump’s latest intervention came hours before the German government, normally a steadfast supporter of Israel, expressed unusually strong criticism of Israel’s expanded attacks in Gaza. “What the Israeli Army is doing in the Gaza Strip right now — I honestly don’t understand what the goal is in causing such suffering to the civilian population,” said Friedrich Merz, Germany’s new chancellor, during an interview broadcast on television on Monday.
The German shift came days after a similarly worded intervention from the right-wing Italian government, another ally of Israel that has previously avoided such strong condemnation of Israel. “Netanyahu must halt the raids on Gaza,” said Antonio Tajani, the Italian foreign minister, in an interview posted on his ministry website. “We need an immediate cease-fire and the release of hostages by Hamas, which must leave Gaza.”
In turn, those comments followed a coordinated effort by Britain, Canada and France to criticize Israel’s decision to expand its operations in Gaza. In a joint statement last week, the three countries — which had broadly supported Israel’s right to respond to the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023 — said the expansion was “wholly disproportionate.” All three countries warned of concrete repercussions if Israel did not change course.
Britain has since suspended trade negotiations with Israel. It also placed sanctions on Israeli extremists leading efforts to force Palestinians from land in the Israeli-occupied West Bank — one of its most consequential moves against Israeli interests since it dropped its opposition last year to an arrest warrant issued against Mr. Netanyahu.
Separately, France is organizing a conference, which will be held in June in partnership with Saudi Arabia, to discuss the creation of a Palestinian state — an outcome Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to oppose.
Still, all of these countries, which have condemned Hamas for carrying out the Oct. 7 attacks, continue to support Israel in many practical ways, not least through military, economic and intelligence partnerships.
The United States continues to supply Israel with billions of dollars in military aid, helping to sustain the military operations in Gaza. The U.S. secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, visited Israel on Sunday and Monday, meeting with Mr. Netanyahu and other leaders, and attended a ceremony in honor of two Israeli Embassy staff members killed in an attack in Washington last week.
Britain and France helped protect Israel last year during huge barrages of ballistic missiles from Iran, and they would most likely do so again.
Moreover, they remain wary and have sometimes been critical of some of the moves made against Israel by other countries, including the push to charge Israel with genocide.
But the shift in the tone of their messaging, coupled with some small practical limits on Israeli interests, indicates that Israel’s strongest partners are beginning to lose patience with Mr. Netanyahu.
So far, Israel appears unmoved. Responding to the European threats, Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, said that his country would take its own “unilateral measures” if further steps were taken against Israel.
In Gaza, Israeli troops have continued to advance, and officials say the military now controls roughly 40 percent of the territory. The Israeli Air Force continued to strike targets in Gaza on Monday, including a school-turned-shelter that Israel said was used by militants.
And while Israel has ended an 80-day blockade on food, allowing some aid into the enclave in recent days, much of that has yet to reach the people who need it most, according to aid agencies. Israel is also pushing ahead with a contentious effort to reshape how food is distributed in Gaza that critics say will accelerate the displacement of people from northern to southern Gaza.
Mr. Netanyahu has remained defiant, accusing Britain, Canada and France of “emboldening Hamas.”
In a speech last week, he addressed their leaders directly, saying, “You’re on the wrong side of humanity and you’re on the wrong side of history.”
Within Israel, the moves have been perceived as a step toward diplomatic isolation.
“After 593 days of war, Israel has reached a diplomatic nadir: Some of its most important friends in the world — Great Britain, France and Canada — have taken the liberty of issuing a statement threatening Israel with sanctions if it continues the war in Gaza,” wrote Itamar Eichner, a diplomatic correspondent, in Yediot Ahronot, a centrist broadsheet, last week.
“Never before has such a statement been issued against Israel, turning it into a pariah state,” Mr. Eichner added. “The most worrisome part: The United States, which has always stood up for Israel, responded with silence.”
Gabby Sobelman and Myra Noveck contributed reporting.
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9) Head of New Gaza Aid System Resigns Over Lack of Autonomy
Jake Wood quit the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, saying it was “not possible” to implement a new Israeli-backed aid system in the enclave while remaining neutral and independent.
By Patrick Kingsley and Jin Yu Young, May 26, 2025
Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem and Jin Yu Young from Seoul.
“The foundation has hired private contractors, including one run by a former C.I.A. officer, to secure and distribute food from four sites in areas of southern Gaza under Israeli military control. One site was expected to open on Monday, according to people familiar with the process. … The Times found that the contours of the project were first conceived in late 2023, weeks after the start of the war, by a group of Israeli officials and military officers and their partners in the Israeli business sector. Throughout 2024, Israeli officials developed the project with private American security contractors, principally Philip F. Reilly, a former senior C.I.A. officer. By late 2024, a team led by Mr. Reilly had settled on the idea of forming a foundation to fund and hire private contractors to take over aid distribution in Gaza, according to a planning document reviewed by The Times. Last November, representatives of Mr. Reilly started a version of the foundation, as well as the main security company that will be securing the project within Gaza.”
Jake Wood, seen in 2021, had led humanitarian operations in scores of crisis zones over the past decade, including in Haiti, Myanmar and Sudan. Credit...Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images
The head of a group overseeing a contentious new aid program in the Gaza Strip resigned on Sunday, hours before the program was set to start operating, saying that he had found it impossible to perform the job independently.
Jake Wood, the executive director of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, stepped down after reports in several news outlets, including The New York Times, raised questions about the group’s independence and its connections with Israel.
In a statement distributed by the foundation, Mr. Wood said: “It is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”
Mr. Wood’s departure followed growing acrimony within the traditional aid sector about efforts by Israel to replace the current aid system in Gaza with one overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a new and untested group founded late last year.
The foundation has hired private contractors, including one run by a former C.I.A. officer, to secure and distribute food from four sites in areas of southern Gaza under Israeli military control. One site was expected to open on Monday, according to people familiar with the process.
Aid agencies have warned of a looming famine since early March, when Israel implemented a blockade on food and fuel to Gaza. That blockade has only just begun to ease.
The project’s supporters say it will enable Palestinian civilians to access food while preventing Hamas from stealing, stockpiling and even selling it at elevated prices. Critics, including the United Nations, say it is a dangerous plan that will force civilians to walk miles through Israeli military lines to find food, and likely accelerate an Israeli goal to displace people from northern to southern Gaza.
Responding to Mr. Wood’s departure, the foundation said its operations would begin without him — as soon as Monday — and would be feeding more than 1 million Palestinians, or roughly half of Gaza’s population, by the end of the week.
The group said that critics “who benefit from the status quo have been more focused on tearing this apart than on getting aid in, afraid that new, creative solutions to intractable problems might actually succeed.”
It added: “We will not be deterred. Our trucks are loaded and ready to go.”
Until his resignation, Mr. Wood had maintained that he operated independently of Israel and its interests, and had pledged in an interview with The New York Times that he would not participate in a program that enabled the displacement of civilians.
Then, on Saturday, The Times and other outlets published articles that cast doubt on the project’s autonomy. The Times found that the contours of the project were first conceived in late 2023, weeks after the start of the war, by a group of Israeli officials and military officers and their partners in the Israeli business sector.
Throughout 2024, Israeli officials developed the project with private American security contractors, principally Philip F. Reilly, a former senior C.I.A. officer. By late 2024, a team led by Mr. Reilly had settled on the idea of forming a foundation to fund and hire private contractors to take over aid distribution in Gaza, according to a planning document reviewed by The Times.
Last November, representatives of Mr. Reilly started a version of the foundation, as well as the main security company that will be securing the project within Gaza.
Mr. Wood, a former U.S. Marine, was hired in early 2025 to run the project. As a co-founder of Team Rubicon, an aid organization, he had overseen humanitarian operations in scores of crisis zones over the past decade, including in Haiti, Myanmar and Sudan.
At the time of his appointment, he said in his resignation statement, the foundation was “a loose constellation of various ideas and concepts among a wide range of stakeholders and I sought to establish it as a truly independent humanitarian entity.”
Months later, Mr. Wood feels that goal is “not possible,” he said on Sunday.
“I urge Israel to significantly expand the provision of aid into Gaza through all mechanisms, and I urge all stakeholders to continue to explore innovative new methods for the delivery of aid, without delay, diversion, or discrimination,” he said.
Ronen Bergman and Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.
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10) Noem Visits Israel Amid Tensions Between Trump and Netanyahu
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, expressed continued U.S. support for Israel despite recent disagreements.
By Johnatan Reiss, Reporting from Tel Aviv, May 26, 2025
“According to Mr. Netanyahu’s office, Ms. Noem spoke in a meeting on Sunday of her “unwavering support for the prime minister and the state of Israel.” She also expressed “great appreciation” for Mr. Netanyahu’s conduct of the war, his office said. Ms. Noem also met on Sunday with her Israeli counterpart, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister for national security. Mr. Ben-Gvir’s office said he “thanked his counterpart for American support for Israel and for President Trump’s immigration plan,” referring to the president’s proposal in February to displace Gaza’s residents while the United States leads the rebuilding of the territory.”
Kristi Noem, second from left, visiting near the Israel-Gaza border on Monday. Credit...Pool photo by Alex Brandon
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, met with officials in Israel on Sunday and Monday as she underscored American support for Israel amid policy disagreements between the two countries.
Ms. Noem met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and attended a ceremony on Monday that commemorated two Israeli embassy aides who were killed last week in a shooting in Washington.
Speaking at the ceremony, Ms. Noem said President Trump “extends his greetings and his grief to all of you, and he stands with you as we fight this hatred in the world.” She also spoke of “a unity among us that will help us defeat our enemies.”
Israeli leaders presented her visit as proof of strong United States-Israel relations, following disagreements between Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu over how best to approach Iran and its proxies in Yemen, and Mr. Trump’s growing frustration with the continuation of the war in Gaza. Mr. Trump did not visit Israel during a recent tour of the Middle East, an omission interpreted as a sign of tension with Mr. Netanyahu.
According to Mr. Netanyahu’s office, Ms. Noem spoke in a meeting on Sunday of her “unwavering support for the prime minister and the state of Israel.” She also expressed “great appreciation” for Mr. Netanyahu’s conduct of the war, his office said.
Ms. Noem also met on Sunday with her Israeli counterpart, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister for national security. Mr. Ben-Gvir’s office said he “thanked his counterpart for American support for Israel and for President Trump’s immigration plan,” referring to the president’s proposal in February to displace Gaza’s residents while the United States leads the rebuilding of the territory.
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11) A Tornado Came for Cave City. Would Trump’s FEMA?
“On-the-ground reality will show that most small communities don’t have a lot of room in the budget,” the mayor of Cave City, Ark., said after a tornado ripped through town in March.
By Emily Cochrane, Photographs by Houston Cofield, Reporting from Cave City, Ark., May 26, 2025
Cave City
Veda Rose Knappenberger lost everything in March when a tornado tore up her house in Cave City, Ark., leaving her bruised and shaken to the core.
A neighbor, Kathy McLeod, invited Ms. Knappenberger, 78, to sleep on her couch until help arrived. But by then, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had delivered startling news: It was denying assistance to residents of the nine counties hit by the storm system, saying the damage appeared contained enough for state and local officials and volunteers to handle.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican who served as President Trump’s press secretary in his first term, appealed the denial. Another month passed. Governor Sanders made a personal appeal in a phone call with her former boss. Shortly after, on May 13, Mr. Trump announced he had approved a disaster declaration for Arkansas, allowing residents to apply for a type of FEMA aid known as individual assistance.
“They shouldn’t have denied it — they should have at least said, ‘We’re working on it,’” Ms. McLeod said upon learning that federal help was coming after all. “That way, people wouldn’t have thought they were just forgotten.” She would tell Ms. Knappenberger the news when she picked her up from physical therapy, which she needed in part for injuries she suffered during the storm.
Disaster experts and government officials have long wrestled with where to draw the line for federal assistance, especially as climate change makes severe weather events more frequent and costly. Indeed, FEMA has denied aid requests in the past, under both Democratic and Republican presidents.
But at a moment when the Trump administration is openly discussing dismantling FEMA and has sharply reduced its staff, it has taken FEMA months to make decisions about disaster declarations. At one point, before a series of approvals on Friday, there were about twice as many outstanding disaster declarations as that time last year.
And even as disaster-struck states waited to hear from the federal government, some in FEMA had proposed quadrupling the amount of damage that communities must incur to qualify for federal funds to rebuild roads, schools and other public infrastructure.
In Arkansas, Ms. Knappenberger and others whose homes or businesses were damaged by the tornadoes that struck on March 14 and 15 are now eligible for housing assistance, rental money or help with other expenses that insurance doesn’t cover. But another type of FEMA aid that Governor Sanders had requested — to help repair public infrastructure — was denied soon after.
On Thursday, she announced that the state would cover 35 percent of costs to repair infrastructure, and that local governments would cover the rest. “The State of Arkansas is going to step up,” Governor Sanders said in a news release.
Arkansas’s experience has further deepened the anxiety that many local officials and their constituents are feeling at the outset of hurricane and wildfire season. So has the lack of clarity around whether other states walloped by tornadoes recently will receive aid. Mississippi, which suffered damage in the same system as Arkansas in March, just received aid approval on Friday, more than two months after the tornadoes.
Last week, a team from FEMA arrived in Cave City to start the agency’s belated relief efforts. As of Sunday, 78 applications for nearly $750,000 in assistance had been approved there and across the state.
Still, “there’s no doubt that in the interim, while we’ve been waiting on this, it’s put people in a pretty tough situation,” Mayor Jonas Anderson, whose office is nonpartisan, said. And while there was relief and gratitude over the individual assistance and help from the state, he was worried about how communities like his could shoulder a majority of infrastructure repair costs.
“On-the-ground reality will show that most small communities don’t have a lot of room in the budget,” he added. While the initial denial stung Cave City residents, many were already skeptical that the federal government could help them, regardless of who was in charge. The city of nearly 2,000 people leans conservative, and many pointed to their Christian faith as a guiding force.
“I’m not placing my confidence or faith in our federal government — I put my confidence in Jesus and he’s going to take care of us,” said Irma Carrigan, 71, seated outside the elaborate stone cabins that stand over the city’s cave earlier this month as a handyman worked on a nearby roof.
She added, “If I didn’t look at it that way, I’d be in the insane asylum right now.”
The appeal of Cave City, nestled in a constellation of rural towns in northeastern Arkansas, is in its quiet, tightknit community. Some of its residents can trace their ancestry to the families who first settled there around 1890.
Before the summer harvest in July, when thousands come for a festival celebrating “the world’s sweetest watermelons,” the town always faces the threat of spring tornadoes. But until March 14, few had experienced such a direct hit.
One tornado, part of a cluster that ripped through Arkansas that Friday and Saturday, traveled low to the ground for more than 70 miles.
It destroyed Cave City’s only grocery store, the relatively new dentist’s office, the funeral home and the auto parts store. One of the city’s churches was reduced to a tiled floor, where the shape of a cross was still intact.
It also swept through part of the old motel court, whose 1930s stone and geode cottages stand over the city’s eponymous cave, where residents once stored milk and butter to keep them cool. And it ripped up more than a dozen homes, many uninsured, and dozens of trees that had stood for generations.
The denial of federal aid affirmed for many residents the importance of being self-reliant, yet it also served as a reminder that some of their neighbors simply cannot be.
“You can’t count on that, and that isn’t, I don’t think, how God wants us to be,” said Jill Carr, speaking of relying on government assistance. Her ancestors had helped build the old bank vault where she, her daughter-in-law and her dogs huddled for safety when the tornado came through. It sent a piece of roof crashing down on the statue of Jesus in her prayer garden.
“He wants us to be self-sufficient and do our best to do it ourselves,” she said. But for those who do not have insurance, savings or family support, Ms. Carr said a few weeks before the FEMA aid came through, “my feelings are hurt for those people.”
“It feels terrible,” she added, her eyes repeatedly filling up with tears.
No lives were lost in Cave City, though the tornadoes killed three people nearby in the state. But the damage was extensive enough that there were immediate pleas for help.
Church volunteers drove into town to remove downed trees and deliver food. A visitor from Wisconsin handed Ms. Carrigan a bag with two blocks of cheese after clearing trees from the motel grounds, without mentioning the couple hundred dollars tucked inside.
When word first circulated that Mr. Trump had denied their state’s aid request, some residents chalked it up to problems that existed with FEMA before he returned to office.
Others guessed that the request had not reached his desk. Or maybe Mr. Trump had not understood how bad a hit Cave City had taken.
“If he saw, surely he would do something about it,” Rebecca Mullins said of the president, standing near the holes in her roof where birds have built nests. “Any godly person would.”
Still others believed Cave City should receive federal aid as a matter of fairness, after watching their tax dollars go to other causes and people across the country.
“FEMA’s not really what you need to stop the funding on,” said Beverly Wilkerson, 64, whose family room was now an unrecognizable pile of pink insulation.
Looking ahead, Mayor Anderson said, he hoped that any changes to FEMA’s operations would be made quickly, like ripping off a Band-Aid.
“We just need to get that process moving and get it decided and figure out what we’re going to do so that we’re not sitting here in this kind of limbo state,” Mr. Anderson said. “No matter what political party is in charge and what that leads to, we’ve got to make sure we’re taking care of people.”
Christopher Flavelle contributed reporting.
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12) In Nashville, Volunteers Are Figuring Out How to Counter ICE
By Alex Pena and Emily Cochrane, May 27, 2025
Word spread quickly through Nashville in early May: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had been spotted alongside state highway patrol officers along the southern roads where much of the city’s Latino population lives.
The outcry over the nearly 200 immigration-related arrests was fierce in Nashville, a liberal enclave in an otherwise ruby red state. But even as the city’s Democratic mayor, Freddie O’Connell, condemned what he called the operation’s “deep community harm,” it reflected how most Tennessee leaders have embraced President Trump’s crackdown on immigration.
With little official recourse, several Nashville residents and immigration advocacy groups are now acting as unofficial chroniclers of immigration activity. Among them is The ReMIX Tennessee, which set up a hotline for community members to call in and report any sign of immigration enforcement.
On social media, they also circulate warnings about where the Tennessee Highway Patrol and ICE agents have been spotted together. State troopers can make routine traffic stops. Immigration officers legally cannot without probable cause or a warrant, but together, it meant traffic stops could end in immigration arrests.
“Anyone who’s from Nashville knows those areas are densely immigrant, Hispanic, Latino areas,” said Cathy Carrillo, a co-founder of the organization. She added, “if we weren’t out there documenting everything that they were doing, they would be doing double what they were doing, and they would be treating people worse.”
Brian Acuna, an official in ICE’s New Orleans field office, said the operation was focused on “identifying and removing individuals who pose a threat to the safety and security of Tennessee residents.” While some of those detained have not been identified, the agency said that 96 of the 196 arrests had either prior convictions or pending charges.
The Tennessee Highway Patrol “categorically rejects any suggestion that our troopers engage in racial profiling or target individuals based on ethnicity, race, or national origin,” Jason Pack, a spokesman for the department said. Troopers were focused on “observed hazardous driving behavior,” conducting 660 traffic stops and 16 arrests between May 3 and May 13.
“Each stop was lawful, consistent with department policy, and conducted in accordance with the Constitution,” Mr. Pack said.
The agency is now one of more than 600 state and local agencies that have signed a formal agreement with the federal government that allows them to help with immigration enforcement.
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13) Republican Crackdown on Aid to Immigrants Would Hit U.S. Citizens
The Trump administration’s efforts and the G.O.P.’s tax bill aim to restrict benefits for families that include immigrants without permanent legal status.
By Madeleine Ngo and Lydia DePillis, May 27, 2025
Volunteers preparing groceries at a food pantry run by Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services in New Haven, Conn. The tax bill would cut off food stamps for nearly all immigrants who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times
President Trump has vowed to end what he calls the “waste of hard-earned taxpayer resources” by cutting off federal benefits for undocumented immigrants and ensuring that funding goes to American citizens in need.
Administration officials have said they would root out “illegal aliens” who are living in federally-subsidized housing. The Agriculture Department has ordered states to enhance immigration verification practices used to determine eligibility for food stamps. And House Republicans just passed a tax bill that would limit certain immigrants from accessing Medicaid and Medicare, a popular tax credit for parents, and federal financial aid, among other benefits.
The actions amount to an aggressive attempt to curb immigrant families’ use of safety net programs. Although Republicans say they want to remove incentives for people to enter the country illegally, unauthorized immigrants generally do not receive federal benefits given efforts to chip away at their eligibility.
Immigration experts and advocates for immigrant rights say the changes would instead largely be felt by children who are U.S. citizens but whose parents are undocumented or immigrants who are authorized to live in the United States, such as refugees and people granted asylum.
Twelve percent of American children, or about nine million people, are citizens with at least one noncitizen parent. Children with at least one immigrant parent are twice as likely to live in poverty than those with native-born parents, according to a 2022 report by researchers at the Boston University School of Social Work.
“In the name of wanting to take a harsh policy stance against immigrants, in many different ways the reality is that they’re going to be punishing citizens and other immigrants that have been eligible in the past,” said Shelby Gonzales, the vice president for immigration policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank.
Some of the most substantial changes would come with the tax bill, a centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s economic agenda that House Republicans narrowly passed on Thursday. If approved by the Senate, the package would boost the child tax credit to as much as $2,500, but limit its availability to parents with Social Security numbers.
Current law allows children who have Social Security numbers to receive the benefit, even if their parents have only individual taxpayer identification numbers, which are issued to noncitizens for the purpose of paying taxes.
The change would make roughly two million children with Social Security numbers no longer eligible for the benefit, according to an estimate from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Some proponents of the change argue that the child tax credit currently allows undocumented immigrants to benefit from taxpayer money, and that such funding should be shut off even if their children are citizens.
“In the real world, the money is going to the unlawful alien parents, and they’re not obligated to spend that money on the children,” said George Fishman, a senior legal fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors restricting immigration.
Others said the potential changes would undermine the well-being of children who are U.S. citizens in immigrant households. Families where someone doesn’t have a Social Security number are already ineligible for the earned-income tax credit, which provides a significant boost to low-income households. Research has found that children who receive similar cash benefits go on to have better health, earn more and commit fewer crimes later in life.
“Going forward, they are the adults of this country,” said Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, a professor of social work at Boston University who studies immigrants. “Do we want to disinvest in them now so that their education and health and everything deteriorates, and then we have to face that in a few years from now?”
The tax bill would also tighten eligibility for federal health insurance programs. Immigrants who are authorized to live in the United States but are not legal permanent residents would no longer qualify for Medicare unless they fall under certain exceptions. The package would also bar those immigrants from receiving subsidized health insurance on marketplaces set up by the Affordable Care Act. Those changes could affect refugees, immigrants granted asylum and people with temporary protected status. It would also deny access to marketplace plans entirely for people brought to the United States as children who are currently protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy.
Some of those immigrants have a path to obtaining a green card, but not all of them do, such as foreigners granted immigration parole or temporary protected status.
The tax plan would also trim Medicaid expansion funding by 10 percentage points for states that use their own money to cover low-income undocumented immigrants, which could penalize 14 states that provide health coverage to children regardless of immigration status, according to KFF, a health policy research group.
States could choose to stop covering undocumented immigrants, and preserve their federal matching funds. Or they could keep that coverage and take the hit to their federal reimbursement, which would mean less money to go around for U.S. citizens who depend on Medicaid. Research has also found that people who don’t have health insurance are more likely to rely on emergency rooms for preventable care. Hospitals must provide emergency care regardless of a patient’s immigration status, which they can receive reimbursements for through emergency Medicaid.
“So they’re going to need to look to other programs, or just cut the funding for undocumented immigrants, which is going to have an impact on everyone in that family, including citizen family members,” said Wendy Cervantes, the director of immigration at the Center for Law and Social Policy.
The bill would also end a requirement for states to provide Medicaid benefits to applicants during a grace period in which their immigration or citizenship status is being verified, which could deny coverage to those who don’t have easy access to documents like a passport or birth certificate.
And the tax bill would cut off federal tuition assistance and food stamps for nearly all immigrants who are not citizens or permanent residents.
Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said he supported efforts to curtail immigrants’ access to federal benefits. But he said the changes would not result in major budget savings, given that noncitizens receive just 3.5 percent of all welfare and entitlements.
“The budget deficit cannot be plugged by kicking noncitizens off welfare benefits,” Mr. Nowrasteh said. “That being said, they should be removed because a dollar saved is a dollar saved, and that’s good enough. I’d much rather they kick immigrants off welfare than kick immigrants out of the country.”
Although the tax bill is still working its way through Congress, many federal agencies are already trying to restrict undocumented immigrants from accessing programs. In March, the Housing and Urban Development Department said it would partner with the Homeland Security Department to ensure that federal housing programs were not benefiting undocumented immigrants over citizens. The Small Business Administration has barred lending to companies with any amount of investment from people without Social Security numbers, constraining credit for American-born entrepreneurs.
Many housing authority directors and housing policy experts expect the Trump administration to propose a rule that would ban families with any undocumented members from subsidized housing, even if their children are U.S. citizens and eligible for the benefit. The administration proposed a similar rule during Mr. Trump’s first term but did not put it in place. The housing department found at the time that doing so could displace 55,000 children who were in the country legally, and that more than 108,000 people receiving assistance lived in a household with at least one undocumented member.
“Children in immigrant families, who are often U.S. citizens, would be harmed both by the threat of family separation and the risk that they may become homeless,” said Tanya Broder, a senior counsel at the National Immigration Law Center.
Other agencies that run benefit programs have reiterated that undocumented immigrants are not permitted to receive funding. The Labor Department sent a letter to states last month warning that they could lose federal funds if they allowed unauthorized immigrants to receive unemployment benefits. The Social Security Administration also expressed its “full support” for Mr. Trump’s efforts to ensure that undocumented immigrants did not receive Social Security benefits.
The Trump administration has also put pressure on Democratic states that aid undocumented immigrants, including starting an investigation into a California program that has provided cash assistance to some undocumented immigrants and revoking waivers to state colleges and universities that use federal money to provide some services to unauthorized immigrants.
The effort to target immigrants could create a chilling effect, making people hesitant to enroll for benefits over fears that their family members could be deported if they share their information with the government, said Valerie Lacarte, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
“Even if you’re eligible and you can get those benefits, you’re also letting the state or agency know that there’s an unauthorized immigrant in your household,” Ms. Lacarte said. “The rhetoric essentially discourages people from using public benefits.”
Andrew Duehren contributed reporting.
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14) Israeli Forces Said They Killed a ‘Terrorist.’ He Was 14 Years Old.
The death of Amer Rabee, a Palestinian American in the West Bank, has spurred anger over soldiers’ use of force and an apparent lack of accountability.
By Isabel Kershner and Fatima AbdulKarim, May 27, 2025
The reporters visited the village of Turmus Aya in the occupied West Bank to report this article and went to the spot where the shootings occurred.
Mourners carrying the body of Amer Rabee, a 14-year-old who was killed by Israeli forces, at his funeral in Turmus Aya in the West Bank last month. Credit...Ammar Awad/Reuters
The clothes were strewn on a ridge dotted with olive and almond trees, perched above a highway in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. On rust-colored earth sprinkled with wildflowers were a torn black T-shirt, black Converse socks and a pair of Nike Air white sneakers.
Nearby lay a pair of bloodied, gray Nike sweatpants and a black hoodie perforated with holes.
Here, on April 6, near Turmus Aya, a village in the West Bank where most of the residents have U.S. citizenship, Israeli soldiers gunned down Amer Rabee a 14-year-old Palestinian American boy who was born in New Jersey. The military handed over his naked, bullet-ridden body a few hours later in a blue body bag, according to his family.
The Israeli military has accused Amer and two of his friends of hurling rocks toward the highway and endangering civilians. It described the boys as “terrorists,” and said its soldiers had “eliminated” one and shot the two others.
Amer’s family and one of the surviving boys deny the accusation, saying that they were picking almonds. Amer was shot multiple times in his upper body, according to photographs his family shared with The New York Times.
Amer’s killing has added to accusations that the Israeli military uses excessive force and operates with impunity. It came amid a sharp spike in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, where the Israeli military has been carrying out raids and tightening control in the most sweeping crackdown on militancy there in a generation. Rampages by extremist settlers against Palestinians have also increased recently.
Amer’s death has also raised questions about the American response to helping its own citizens. Senators Andy Kim and Cory Booker of New Jersey have called for an American-led investigation into Amer’s death, but the Trump administration has remained largely noncommittal.
Last month, the State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, said at a press briefing that the Israeli military believed it was stopping an act of terrorism. “We need to learn more about the nature of what happened on the ground,” she added. American officials did not respond to a request for further information.
More than 900 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, mostly by the Israeli military and some by settlers, since the Hamas-led offensive against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to the United Nations. Roughly 30 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians in the West Bank during that period.
From 2018 to 2022, less than a third of complaints that soldiers had harmed Palestinians in the West Bank resulted in an investigation, according to a recent report by Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization. Only a fraction have led to legal action.
A Hail of Gunfire
The three young boys had gone out to pick green almonds, a seasonal delicacy, in a terraced orchard between Turmus Aya and Route 60, a busy north-south artery linking a patchwork of Palestinian towns and Jewish settlements, one of the friends, Ayoub Jabara, 14, told The Times at his home in Turmus Aya.
He denied that they had thrown stones, saying that they had merely been throwing dried almonds at each other. Ayoub, who is also a Palestinian-American, described reaching a point very close to the main road, and finding a tree with dried-up nuts. “Amer picked one up and was joking that it was like a stone and threw it at me. I threw it back,” he said.
Amer was shot at least 11 times, according to his father, Mohammed Rabee. Photographs taken on the cellphone of a family friend who accompanied Mr. Rabee when they picked up Amer’s body appeared to show several entry wounds, including one in the center of his forehead and others in his neck and upper torso.
Hours after the shooting, the Israeli military issued a 10-second clip of blurry footage without a time stamp that shows three unidentifiable figures appearing to gather things from the ground. One of the figures appears to fling something in a downward motion, though no object is visible. The video cuts out as all three appear to turn and run.
The military said that its footage was filmed from a military post and that the soldiers were lying in ambush in what they described as a counterterrorism operation in the area.
Four days after Amer died, reporters for The Times searched the ridge where he was killed for any signs of the shooting and came across the clothes.
Garments that appeared to have been cut off by soldiers and blue surgical gloves were scattered around a bloodstained rock. The military said it was standard procedure to remove clothes to ensure the body was not booby-trapped. The clothes were later identified by the family as Amer’s, when the reporters returned them to the family at their home.
Even if the boys did throw stones, said Mr. Rabee, Amer’s father, the soldiers could have fired warning shots to scare them away, or could have chased and detained them. “He was 14 years old,” he said. “It takes no special training to catch a little kid.”
Instead, the soldiers fired a barrage of bullets at him. His family believes they wanted to kill him. The military declined to confirm or deny that it has a shoot-to-kill policy for stone throwers.
Ayoub, Amer’s friend, suffered “multiple gunshot wounds,” according to medical records from the Istishari Arab hospital in nearby Ramallah, where he spent three days in the intensive care unit. Both Dr. Mohammad Qneibi, a physician at a local clinic where Ayoub was first taken, and Ayoub’s father, Ahed Jabara, told The Times that the boy was shot at least three times in the groin area.
The family of the third boy, Abdulrahman Shihada, 15, declined to be interviewed.
Hopes of Living in America
In Turmus Aya, Amer’s parents were still reeling from their loss in the days after the shooting, and Amer’s siblings and cousins from the United States had flown in to mourn him.
Mr. Rabee and his wife, Majed, left the West Bank for New Jersey in 2001. They moved back to Turmus Aya in 2013, when Amer, the youngest of their five children, was a toddler. The parents wanted their children to be schooled in Arabic and to absorb Palestinian identity and culture.
Amer’s four older siblings had moved back to the United States after finishing high school. He had dreamed of joining them, and the night before he was killed, he had been texting in English with his siblings about his future business plans to market mini cotton candy machines.
Villagers first started moving to the United States more than a century ago and relatives followed. Now, about 85 percent of Turmus Aya’s residents are dual Palestinian-American citizens. Many, like the Rabee family, come and go.
The evening Amer died, he left the house without saying goodbye, his mother, Majed, said. “He didn’t think he was never coming back.”
Amer’s father, Mr. Rabee, got a call from a friend at 6:41 p.m. saying there had been a shooting. Word had been spreading in the village that Amer was involved. Mr. Rabee called his son’s phone several times but got no reply. At 6:58 p.m., he called the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem’s hotline and said his son needed immediate help. He said American officials did not respond with any practical assistance. The embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
At about 9:30 p.m., a Palestinian official called to say that Amer had been killed. Mr. Rabee went to an Israeli military base in the northern West Bank where, shortly before midnight, Amer’s body was transferred to a Palestinian ambulance.
“I said, ‘Praise be to God,’ and I kissed him,” Mr. Rabee said.
Mr. Rabee said that he did not trust any of the authorities to investigate and that Amer had been buried a day later, without an autopsy. “Only God can judge; I have sent the case to God for judgment,” Mr. Rabee said.
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15) Conflicting Claims Over Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire Talks Sow Confusion
Israel, Hamas and the Trump administration have issued different messages about where efforts to reach a truce stand.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 27, 2025
Israel’s renewed offensive on Hamas in Gaza has drawn criticism from traditional allies. Credit...Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Israel, the United States and Hamas have sent conflicting messages in recent days about progress in cease-fire talks that would free hostages still held in Gaza, amid mounting pressure from President Trump to end the war.
As they press a renewed offensive, Israeli forces have continued to launch strikes across the enclave. More than 70 people were killed on Monday, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The deadly strikes came amid a series of contradictory comments about negotiations.
On Monday, the Hamas-run Al-Aqsa television channel said that the group had accepted a cease-fire proposal from Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy.
Mr. Witkoff, however, quickly rejected that claim. “What I have seen from Hamas is disappointing and completely unacceptable,” he told the Axios news site.
Later that evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said he was hoping to announce progress in the talks “if not today, then tomorrow.” But he later suggested that he had been speaking figuratively, and blamed Hamas for the impasse.
On Tuesday, Basem Naim, a Hamas official, doubled down on the group’s claim. “Yes, the movement has accepted Mr. Witkoff’s proposal,” he wrote on social media, adding that Hamas was awaiting Israel’s response.
The exchange reflected the confusion surrounding the indirect cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas to free the dozens of remaining hostages held in Gaza and end Israel’s offensive.
Israel and Hamas refuse to negotiate directly. The result has been a yearlong process of back channel discussions involving Middle Eastern intelligence chiefs, U.S. government officials and various other middlemen.
Qatar, which hosts members of Hamas’s political leadership, and Egypt, which borders Gaza, have passed messages along between the two sides. The United States has also been involved in the talks, first under the Biden administration and now under President Trump.
Mr. Trump has appeared to become increasingly impatient with the protracted war in Gaza. “Israel, we’ve been talking to them, and we want to see if we can stop that whole situation as quickly as possible,” Mr. Trump told reporters in New Jersey on Sunday.
Earlier this month, the U.S. administration opened its own communication channel with Hamas to negotiate the release of Edan Alexander, the last living hostage with American citizenship.
Some of Israel’s other traditional allies have become increasingly critical and denounced Mr. Netanyahu’s plans to launch a massive new ground offensive in Gaza against Hamas, as well as the country’s two-month blockade on all aid entering the territory. Last week, Israel finally began allowing some aid into the territory, but aid agencies say it is far from enough for Gazans, who have faced widespread hunger and deprivation.
The war in Gaza began on Oct. 7, 2023 when a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel killed about 1,200 people and led to about 250 others being taken hostage. The subsequent Israeli campaign in Gaza has killed more than 53,000 people, according to Palestinian health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
In January, Israel and Hamas agreed to a multiphase cease-fire deal that would have ultimately ended the war and freed the remaining hostages. Israel ended the truce in mid-March when it launched a new offensive, citing deadlock in talks over details of the next phase of the agreement.
In recent days, Bishara Bahbah, a Palestinian-American businessman, has sought to broker a new cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas on behalf of Mr. Witkoff, according to two Israeli officials who both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
After Hamas said it had accepted the proposal, one of the Israeli officials said that the offer Mr. Bahbah had floated to Hamas differed significantly from earlier U.S.-backed frameworks acceptable to Israel.
The back-and-forth and lack of clarity has left both Palestinians in Gaza and the families of Israelis held hostage by Hamas alternating between hope and despair.
Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan was abducted during the Hamas-led attacks, accused Mr. Netanyahu of “psychological terrorism” for his remarks on Monday evening.
“I’m fed up,” she wrote on social media. “Just bring my son back already.”
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16) A Modern Townhouse Rises in Brooklyn and an Anonymous Critic Follows
Neighbors say the in-your-face design of the building made it a target for criticism, leading someone to tag it with a museum-style plaque that commented on New York City’s affordable housing crisis.
By T.M. Brown, May 27, 2025
The five-story, two-family modern townhouse made of all-white stucco fully unveiled itself earlier this year in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Erected on a corner lot in a neighborhood dominated by brownstones and prewar buildings, it’s impossible to miss — made even more striking by entry doors painted traffic cone orange. The house hit the market in March with an eye-watering price tag of $5.25 million to match the eye-catching design.
That, residents say, made it a target. And sometime in May, the building got tagged — not with traditional spray-painted graffiti, but with a small museum-style plaque that spoke to a much larger issue.
“New York City
Housing Crisis, 2025
New apartments, full furnished, warmly lit, no inhabitants
This piece asks us to consider the tension between NYC’s historically low apartment vacancy rate (1.6%) and the price of this vacant duplex ($5.25m).”
The New York Times could not locate the identity of the unauthorized mystery curator. Sometime between Sunday afternoon and Monday afternoon, the plaque was removed.
The award-winning Swiss architect Inès Lamunière, who designed the house, and Matthias Müller, the owner of the Brooklyn-based firm MuNYC Architecture, did not respond to requests for comment. Lucy Perry, the listing agent, also did not respond to requests for comment.
But the neighborhood is talking.
Nate Patterson, 40, who has lived in Clinton Hill since 2020, said he first thought the architects might have been ego-tripping and labeled their own work a piece of gallery-worthy art. But then he looked closer.
Mr. Patterson works in fund-raising for the nonprofit City Harvest, a food rescue organization. The guerrilla plaque spoke to him. “I thought it summed up what I don’t like about this building perfectly,” he said.
The statements on the plaque weren’t perfectly accurate. The building at 272 Greene Avenue is not a single duplex; it includes a duplex and a triplex, as well as a garage. And as of May 21, the asking price has fallen to $4.85 million.
The conspicuous house has arrived at a time when Clinton Hill is increasingly in demand and out of reach even for wealthier New Yorkers. The neighborhood was declared the “hottest housing market” in the U.S., according to data from Redfin, with median home prices at $1.4 million. That is combined with a citywide affordability crisis, with half of New York families unable to afford food, health care and housing, according to a 2023 report by the Fund for the City of New York, which advises government agencies.
Concerns about further gentrification and the lack of affordable housing have clouded what some in the architectural community consider an imaginative design. The building’s structure looks like a pair of paper triangles sitting on top of one another. Ms. Lamunière, 70, has designed prominent buildings and complexes throughout Europe, including the Pictet Tower in Geneva, which is set to be the city’s tallest building when completed.
Mason Nabors, a Brooklyn-based architect, said he admired the building’s design, especially considering the placement of the lot on a busy intersection, which can introduce a lot of design complications. “A corner is a huge condition to address, so you’re bound to have critics, regardless,” he said.
Not everyone is upset about the new neighbor.
Hazra Ali has lived in the neighborhood for 22 years and said that she didn’t think there was anything wrong with a developer trying to sell a building at market price. “Someone spent the money to buy the lot and build something,” said Ms. Ali, a local community leader who is also a landlord with a property in East New York. “Are they supposed to sell it for $50 because there’s a housing crisis? If you can’t afford to live here, then move.”
Still, standing outside the Greene Food Deli directly across the street from 272 Greene, Sam Habib, the deli owner, and John Boyd, a regular customer, were bewildered yet captivated. They couldn’t take their eyes off it.
The building, with wall-to-wall windows on the second and third floors, is invitingly voyeuristic. Passers-by have an unobstructed view into two of the second-floor bedrooms, both of which have been staged with furniture.
“It just doesn’t really fit with the rest of the neighborhood,” Mr. Boyd, 77, said. “All that glass and white concrete. It looks so out of place.”
Mr. Habib, 68, has been in the neighborhood for 50 years, and said change was inevitable and with it comes wealth. “The amount of money in this neighborhood now — someone will buy it,” he said, gesturing to a set of new condos that sold quickly just up Classon Avenue.
He remembers when the 272 Greene Avenue lot was home to a gas station and then a garage. Then, the property was neglected before a developer bought it for $1.166 million in 2016.
Ian McGillivray, a graffiti artist, moved to the neighborhood more than 20 years ago. He was commissioned to paint a colorful mural of overlapping cartoon faces on the garage to generate interest in the lot in 2016.
When he first moved to Clinton Hill, many of his neighbors were using Section 8 housing vouchers and the neighborhood was more affordable, he said. “I realized after I painted the mural that it was being used to upsell the neighborhood,” Mr. McGillivray, 40, said. “It left a sour taste in my mouth.”
To see what was ultimately built on the lot is disappointing, he said, so he, too, was a fan of the plaque.
“It spoke volumes about the housing crisis,” Mr. McGillivray said. “An art plaque on that big, white, faceless cement wall. I thought it was a great tribute to the community.”
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