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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) 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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2) 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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3) 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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4) 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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5) 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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6) 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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7) As Trump Seeks Iran Deal, Israel Again Raises Possible Strikes on Nuclear Sites
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wary of a diplomatic solution to curbing Iran’s nuclear program, continues to press for military action that would upend President Trump’s push for a negotiated deal.
By Julian E. Barnes, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman and Ronen Bergman, May 28, 2025
President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House last month. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
As the Trump administration tries to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has been threatening to upend the talks by striking Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, according to officials briefed on the situation.
The clash over how best to ensure that Iran cannot produce a nuclear weapon has led to at least one tense phone call between President Trump and Mr. Netanyahu and a flurry of meetings in recent days between top administration officials and senior Israeli officials.
Mr. Trump said on Sunday that there could be “something good” coming about his effort to limit Iran’s nuclear program in the “next two days.”
Others familiar with the negotiations said that at best there would be a declaration of some common principles. The details under discussion remain closely held and would likely only set the stage for further negotiations, starting with whether Iran could continue to enrich uranium at any level, and how it would dilute its stockpiles of near-bomb-grade fuel or ship them out of the country.
The New York Times reported in April that Israel had planned to strike Iranian nuclear sites as soon as this month but was waved off by Mr. Trump, who wanted to keep negotiating with Tehran. Mr. Netanyahu, however, has continued to press for military action without U.S. assistance.
Israel is not a participant in the negotiations between the United States and Iran. At the core of the tension between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump is their differing views of how best to exploit a moment of Iranian weakness.
In October, Israel destroyed key elements of Iran’s strategic air defense system, which helped to protect the country’s nuclear facilities. That would enable Israeli aircraft to approach Iran’s borders without fear of being targeted.
And Israel has crippled Hezbollah and Hamas, which have been supported by Iranian money, arms and rockets. In dealing a blow to Hezbollah in particular, Israel removed the concern of the group threatening Israeli aircraft on their way to Iran and retaliating with missile attacks on Israel after any strike.
Mr. Netanyahu has argued that Iran’s vulnerability will not last long, and that the time is right for an attack. Mr. Trump has argued that Iran’s weakness makes it a perfect moment to negotiate an end to Iran’s enrichment program, backed up by the threat of military action if talks fall apart.
Israeli officials fear Mr. Trump is now so eager for a deal of his own — one he will try to sell as stronger than the one the Obama administration struck in 2015 — that he will allow Iran to keep its uranium enrichment facilities.
Last month Mr. Netanyahu insisted that the only “good deal” would be one that dismantled “all of the infrastructure” of Iran’s vast nuclear facilities, which are buried under the desert in Natanz, deep inside a mountain at a site called Fordow, and at facilities spread around the country.
This account of the tensions between the two men is based on interviews with officials in the United States, Europe and Israel — who have been involved in the diplomacy and the debate between the American and Israeli governments. They insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss delicate diplomacy.
Ron Dermer, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, and David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, met in Rome on Friday with Mr. Trump’s chief negotiator, Steve Witkoff.
The two men then traveled to Washington for a meeting on Monday with John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director. Mr. Dermer met again with Mr. Witkoff on Tuesday, though the topic of that meeting was not immediately clear.
Asked for comment, White House officials pointed to Mr. Trump’s remarks this weekend, when he said he would “love to see no bombs dropped.” Mr. Netanyahu’s office commented after this article was published, sending a two-word statement to describe it: “Fake news.”
The central divide in the negotiations between Mr. Witkoff and his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, focuses on the Trump administration’s position that Iran must halt all enrichment of nuclear material on its soil. Mr. Araghchi has repeatedly rejected that restriction, repeating in a social media post on Tuesday that if the Western powers insist on “ ‘zero enrichment’ in Iran” then “there is nothing left for us to discuss on the nuclear issue.”
In an effort to keep negotiations from collapsing, Mr. Witkoff and Oman, which is acting as a mediator, are discussing creative options. Among them is a possible regional joint venture to produce fuel for nuclear power reactors with Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Arab powers, as well as some U.S. involvement. But where the actual enrichment would take place is undetermined.
Mr. Witkoff, participants say, has also dropped his early objections to an interim understanding that lays out principles for a final deal. But that may not satisfy Israel, or Congress’s hawks on Iran.
That is reminiscent of what the Obama administration did in 2013, though it took two more years to complete a final arrangement. Mr. Trump campaigned against that agreement when he ran for president in 2016, calling it a “disaster” because it allowed Iran to continue enriching at low levels and expired completely in 2030.
Mr. Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018 and reimposed economic sanctions on Iran.
Over the past four years, the Iranians have not only revived and improved their nuclear facilities, they have also produced uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, just below what is considered “bomb grade.” It would take a few weeks to turn that into 90 percent enriched fuel for a bomb, and somewhere between a few months to a year to produce an actual nuclear weapon, American intelligence officials have estimated.
Mr. Ratcliffe traveled to Israel last month to discuss possible covert actions against Iran with Mr. Netanyahu and Israeli intelligence officials. The two countries have cooperated in the past on covert efforts to cripple Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, including an effort during the Bush and Obama administrations to attack the facilities with a sophisticated cyber weapon.
Throughout his decades in government, Mr. Netanyahu has long been skeptical of diplomatic overtures to Tehran. He opposed, and sought to derail, the 2015 agreement, even addressing a joint session of Congress to argue for killing it.
This time, Israeli officials have dusted off an old playbook: threatening to strike Iran, even without American help. They insist they are not bluffing, even though they have made such threats and backed away several times over nearly two decades.
Israeli officials signaled to the Trump administration shortly before Mr. Trump’s first formal foreign trip, to the Middle East this month, that they were preparing to attack Iran’s nuclear sites, according to two people briefed on the discussions. U.S. intelligence also detected Israel’s preparations for a strike.
That led Mr. Trump to speak with Mr. Netanyahu, who did not deny that he had ordered his military and intelligence agencies to prepare for a strike and argued that he had a limited window for one.
But U.S. military officials are skeptical about how effective an Israeli strike conducted without American support would be. In the call, Mr. Trump acknowledged Iran’s weakness but said that gave the U.S. leverage to make a deal to end the nuclear program peacefully, officials recounted.
The Israelis are particularly suspicious of any interim deal that might keep Iran’s facilities in place for months or years while a final agreement is reached. And, initially at least, the Trump administration was also skeptical. Mr. Witkoff, the lead American negotiator, told his Iranian counterpart that Mr. Trump wanted a final deal in a matter of two months or so.
But that deadline is about to expire, and there is still a major gap over the issue of whether Iran will be permitted to continue to enrich uranium, which Tehran says is its right as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Now, the Trump administration seems more open to some kind of interim declaration of common principles, because it could help hold off an Israeli strike.
In order to satisfy the Israelis and the Iran hawks in Congress, experts say, any interim deal would almost certainly have to require that Iran ship its near-bomb-grade fuel out of the country or “down blend” it to a far lower level. That would enable Mr. Trump to claim he had eliminated, at least temporarily, the threat that Iran could speed its way to a weapon.
One concern for American officials is that Israel could decide to strike Iran with little warning. U.S. intelligence has estimated that Israel could prepare to mount an attack on Iran in as little as seven hours, leaving little time to pressure Mr. Netanyahu into calling it off.
But that same American military assessment raised questions about how effective a unilateral Israeli strike would be without American support. And some Israeli officials close to Mr. Netanyahu believe the U.S. would have no choice but to assist Israel militarily if Iran counterattacked.
Israeli officials have told their American counterparts that Mr. Netanyahu could order a strike on Iran even if a successful diplomatic agreement is reached.
After his White House meeting with Mr. Trump in April, Mr. Netanyahu ordered Israeli national security officials to continue planning for a strike on Iran, including a smaller operation that would not require U.S. assistance, according to multiple people briefed on the matter. Israel already has many different plans on the shelf, ranging from the surgical to days and days of bombing Iranian facilities, including some in crowded cities.
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8) Israeli Jets Strike Yemen’s Main Airport Again After Houthi Attacks
Israel said the bombing of the airport, which was targeted for the second time this month, had destroyed the last plane used by the Iran-backed Houthi militia.
By Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Jerusalem, May 28, 2025
"The Sana airport is a vital link for more than 20 million Yemenis in Houthi-held areas, providing access to lifesaving medical treatment, medicine and aid."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/world/middleeast/israel-yemen-sana-airport-houthis.html
Israeli warplanes bombed the main international airport in Yemen again on Wednesday in retaliation for recent missile attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi militia.
A devastating Israeli airstrike earlier this month on the same airport, which serves the capital, Sana, caused extensive damage, and flights were suspended for more than a week. The latest strike destroyed the last remaining aircraft at the airport used by the Houthi government, according to Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, and the airport’s director.
“They destroyed it entirely,” the airport’s director, Khaled al-Shaief, said of the plane. He shared on social media a photograph of burning wreckage with fire trucks attempting to extinguish the blaze, saying the plane had been the last aircraft belonging to the national airline at the Sana airport.
The Sana airport is a vital link for more than 20 million Yemenis in Houthi-held areas, providing access to lifesaving medical treatment, medicine and aid.
The Houthis, who control most of northwestern Yemen, including Sana, have been launching rockets and drones at Israel and targeting ships in the Red Sea since October 2023, in what they call a campaign of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Both the Houthis and Hamas in Gaza are part of Iran’s network of proxy militias around the Middle East.
Sirens sounded across Israel several times this week warning of incoming Houthi missiles. The Israeli military said it had intercepted them all.
Earlier this month, a Houthi missile landed near a terminal of Israel’s main international airport, near Tel Aviv. That episode alarmed airlines, and some temporarily suspended operations in Israel.
In response, Israel struck the Sana airport on May 6 and, since then, neither side has shown signs of backing down.
“Whoever harms us, we will harm them,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said after the strike on the Sana airport on Wednesday. He put some of the blame for the Houthi actions on Tehran.
“The main force behind them is Iran, and it is responsible for the aggression emanating from Yemen,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
Mr. Netanyahu’s remarks come as Israel has been threatening a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear program, which it views as an existential danger. Mr. Trump has been pursuing a nuclear deal with Tehran and has rebuffed Israeli urging to launch a joint attack on Iran.
Yemen, located at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, is the poorest Arab country and endured a bloody civil war that led to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Analysts say that Israeli and U.S. attacks have further destabilized the nation and deepened the suffering of Yemeni civilians.
In mid-March, the American military escalated a bombing campaign in Yemen, underway for more than a year, aimed at weakening the Houthis’ ability to target shipping. President Trump pledged at the time that the Houthis would be “completely annihilated.”
But this month, he announced the end of the U.S. bombings, claiming that the Houthis “don’t want to fight anymore.” He did not provide details on whether Washington and the Houthis had reached any kind of understanding.
After Mr. Trump’s remarks, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior Houthi politician, said that if the United States halted attacks on Yemen, the Houthis would cease their attacks on “American military fleets and interests.”
However, he said the Houthis would continue other military operations “in support of Gaza” until Israel ended the war.
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem; Vivian Nereim from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot, Israel.
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9) Chaos Mars Opening of Israeli-Backed Aid Distribution Site in Gaza
Starvation looming, desperate Palestinians surged toward an aid center that Israel says was designed to circumvent Hamas.
By Ephrat Livni, Patrick Kingsley, Ameera Harouda and Aaron Boxerman, Published May 27, 2025, Updated May 28, 2025
Chaos and confusion broke out at a new aid center in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, the first full day that humanitarian assistance was being distributed through a contentious effort conceived by Israelis.
A blockade by Israel since March had halted food and fuel entering the enclave, leaving Palestinians desperate for supplies. Aid organizations suspended their operations as food stockpiles dwindled, and relief officials have been warning that widespread hunger has become a daily reality.
The desperation was evident at the distribution site on Tuesday, where footage verified by The New York Times showed chaotic scenes unfolding, with hundreds of people gathering in the compound. Large crowds, including women and young children, could be seen running toward the center of the site where boxes of aid had been piled up earlier in the day, and the chaos grew as more people climbed up and over sand berms surrounding the location.
In one video, a large crowd can be seen suddenly running away from the distribution site as several short bursts of gunfire are heard in the distance. The panicked crowd tramples the metal fencing set up round the perimeter of the site.
Security at the new distribution sites is being provided by private American contractors, but the Israeli military is stationing forces nearby, outside the perimeter.
On Tuesday, the military released a statement saying that “troops fired warning shots in the area outside the compound” but denied carrying out aerial fire. The Times verified the videos by matching key details in the footage — such as metal fencing and the shape of silos inside the compound — to satellite imagery and visual materials released by the military.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the organization behind the effort, hinted at some of the chaos at its distribution site in Tel al-Sultan, in Rafah, in a statement on Tuesday. It noted that “the needs on the ground are great,” and that in the late afternoon, the volume of people at the southern Gaza distribution site was so overwhelming that it had prompted the foundation’s team to retreat “to allow a small number of Gazans to take aid safely and dissipate.”
Two people involved in the initiative said that in the late afternoon, crowds did break into the site, with one of them estimating that about 100 people were involved in the rush. They said the contractors working for the foundation had been prepared and, in accordance with their plan, retreated to avoid a clash, while a group of Palestinian workers involved in the initiative formed a cordon around the affected area, essentially allowing those who broke in to take food packages. Calm was eventually restored, they said, and the contractors did not fire any shots.
One Palestinian, who asked to be identified only as Hassan because he feared retribution from Israel or Hamas, said he had traveled to the site from his shelter in Khan Younis — but ultimately fled empty-handed after the chaotic crush. His stomach empty, he said, he walked more than three miles back to the tent where he has been staying with his family.
Videos filmed earlier in the day confirmed that some people at the distribution site had received boxes of aid, but it was unclear how many in total were able to get access the supplies.
Mohammad, 26, who also asked for his surname to be omitted for fear of retribution from Hamas and other Palestinian factions, said that he lived close to the site and that he had been among the first 50 people to arrive.
Addressing concerns about Israel’s involvement in the plan and its military’s proximity to sites, Mohammad said he had seen no one arrested or searched. The Israeli army was visible in the distance, he said.
But he said that tanks later fired machine guns as warning shots to control the crowds.
According to Mohammad, recipients were able to get aid whether or not they had identification. The aid boxes he saw bore the logo “GHF,” weighed around 20 kilograms, and included basic food items such as oil, sugar, salt, flour, pasta, and fava beans, he said. Some packages contained different items, with varying quantities, he said.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said on Tuesday that about 8,000 food boxes had been distributed in the enclave so far, with each one feeding “5.5 people for 3.5 days, totaling 462,000 meals.” The flow of aid is expected to increase daily, it added.
But the supplies constitute a mere trickle of assistance for the about two million people of Gaza, and there were conflicting reports on Tuesday about what was happening on the ground. The foundation mentioned only one distribution site in its statement, and people involved with the initiative said it was the sole site opened. But the Israeli military said two sites had been opened.
The centers are operated by international aid organizations and secured by an American civilian security company, the Israeli military said. But the foundation coordinating the effort has faced criticism, and its executive director resigned on Sunday, hours before the program was set to start. He said he had found it impossible to perform the job independently after reports in several news outlets, including The Times, raised questions about the group’s connections with Israel.
Israel has said it was blocking aid from entering Gaza to prevent it from reaching the hands of Hamas. Under the new plan, aid is being distributed at sites the foundation has set up in coordination with the Israeli authorities.
But the plan to have the Israeli military stationed at a visible distance from the sites has drawn an outcry from humanitarian organizations. Critics say it puts Palestinian civilians at risk of more contact with Israeli soldiers. And there are fewer sites proposed than aid groups once had in place, raising fears that there will be less access to food and that civilians will have to travel farther to get it.
The new system has also raised concerns from Palestinians and the international community that the approach, which concentrates sites in southern Gaza, will forcibly displace residents into a single area of the enclave. Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, last week condemned what he said were plans by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to “drive Gazans from their homes into a corner of the strip to the south and permit them a fraction of the aid that they need.”
Basem Naim, a Hamas official, on Tuesday accused Israel of using aid as a weapon in its “bigger plan” to concentrate the enclave’s Palestinians in “ghettos” and eventually deport them, referring to a proposal from President Trump in February that neighboring countries take in Gazans, a notion that Mr. Netanyahu embraced but one from which Mr. Trump has since retreated.
In a speech on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu defended the aid distribution effort, saying it would prevent Hamas from stealing supplies. The idea, he said, is to ensure that Hamas cannot loot aid and use it as a tool of war. He also said the plan was “eventually, to have a sterile zone in the south of Gaza where the entire population can move for its own protection.”
Mr. Netanyahu sought to characterize the shoving crowds and chaos as small bumps in the overall project. “There was some loss of control momentarily,” he said. “Happily, we brought it back under control.”
Johnatan Reiss and Sanjana Varghese contributed reporting.
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10) ICE, Shifting Tactics, Detains High School Student at N.Y.C. Courthouse
The detention of a 20-year-old Venezuelan appears to be the first reported instance of immigration officials apprehending a student in the city this year.
By Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Dana Rubinstein, May 27, 2025
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested a New York high school student outside an immigration courthouse last week. Credit...Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When a 20-year-old from Venezuela was arrested last week at an immigration courthouse in New York, it was the first reported instance of a public school student in the city being apprehended by federal officials since the start of President Trump’s second term.
It also signaled a shift in strategy by immigration authorities who are intent on expediting deportations.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers last week began standing inside and outside of immigration courts across the United States in an effort to detain certain migrants who are appearing for scheduled hearings. Immigration lawyers said ICE officers — from San Diego and Los Angeles to Boston and Miami — were targeting migrants shortly after their cases were dismissed by judges. Government lawyers are requesting that the cases be dismissed in order to place the migrants in expedited deportation proceedings.
Dylan, the New York student, was arrested on Wednesday in the lobby of a courthouse in Lower Manhattan by ICE officers who showed up at the city’s immigration courts in large numbers. Dylan’s last name was withheld at the request of his family, which fears retaliation from the government.
On Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams fended off a barrage of questions about the student’s arrest.
Mr. Adams, who oversees a school system serving thousands of immigrant students, sought to distance himself from Dylan’s apprehension, saying that the arrest was a federal issue beyond his purview because it did not happen on school grounds.
“I’m interested that you all are using all this time to talk about something without my span of control,” Mr. Adams told reporters during an unrelated news conference on Tuesday. “I don’t handle federal enforcement policies, let’s be clear on that.”
“My opinion,” he continued, “doesn’t matter.”
ICE appears to be using the new strategy to place the apprehended migrants in deportation proceedings that can be fast-tracked and don’t require court hearings, an escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to meet the president’s deportation goals.
Dylan, whose arrest was reported earlier by Chalkbeat, was detained by ICE agents at the immigration courthouse after he showed up for a mandatory hearing. He was enrolled in Ellis Prep. Academy in the Bronx, which is part of the public school system and serves older immigrants learning English. Dylan is one of more than 40,000 migrant students who have entered the city’s schools in recent years.
The young man left Venezuela last year and entered the United States in April 2024 under a Biden administration program that permitted thousands to temporarily live and work in the country while applying for asylum, according to his mother and lawyers. He did not have a criminal record, according to them, and, when not in school, worked part time as a delivery driver to help his mother and two younger siblings save enough money to move out of a shelter.
“He was like a father to my two children,” his mother, Raiza, who also asked that her last name be withheld, said in an interview in Spanish.
Dylan showed up at court — with his mother but without a lawyer — believing the hearing would be routine. Instead, he was arrested by ICE agents in plainclothes shortly after his case was dismissed, which stripped him of certain legal protections, his lawyers said.
He was whisked away in an unmarked car and has remained in detention since May 21, his mother said.
“My son is not a criminal,” she said. “My fear is that he will be deported to Venezuela and arrested there or worse.”
Dylan has been moved between facilities in New Jersey, Texas, Virginia and Pennsylvania, his lawyers said.
“Dylan entered the United States with permission to seek asylum, and his detention robs him of the opportunity to seek that relief with the full protections offered to him under the law,” the New York Legal Assistance Group, an organization that provides free aid to low-income clients and is representing him, said in a statement. “He works, goes to school, has friends and was fully complying with immigration proceedings. All this does is disrupt communities and unnecessarily put people in chaotic and potentially harmful situations.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement that Dylan had “illegally” entered the United States last year, even though his lawyers and family said that he had used a Biden-era mobile app that allowed migrants to arrive legally through a port of entry to claim asylum. The White House has questioned the legality of the app, which officials argue was abused by the Biden administration to let hundreds of thousands of migrants into the country.
“Most aliens who illegally entered the United States within the past two years are subject to expedited removals,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been.”
ICE issued guidance in January allowing its officers to conduct arrests near courthouses, and federal officials have said that arresting undocumented immigrants there is safer for ICE agents, and the public, because the migrants have already gone through security screenings.
Dylan’s arrest unsettled administrators at his Bronx high school and prompted Melissa Aviles-Ramos, the schools chancellor appointed by Mr. Adams, to issue a statement on Monday saying, “Our hearts go out to the student who was detained by ICE.”
“While this incident did not occur on school grounds, we want to reassure our families: We will continue to speak out and advocate for the safety, dignity and rights of all of our students,” she wrote in a post on X, encouraging parents to continue sending their children to school.
Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, a union representing thousands of New York educators, said that Dylan had been “taken advantage of and stripped of his legal rights during a court hearing.”
New York City’s so-called sanctuary laws preclude city officials from helping with most federal immigration enforcement matters. But after successfully lobbying the federal government to abandon his criminal corruption charges, the mayor, a Democrat, has shown reluctance to criticize the Trump administration’s efforts. The government sought to dismiss the charges, arguing, in part, that the indictment limited the mayor’s ability to aid the White House’s deportation agenda.
Mr. Adams has said that while he supports the intent of the sanctuary city laws, they go too far in limiting cooperation with the federal government. He has fostered an apparently good working relationship with Thomas Homan, the president’s border czar, who famously promised to be up “his butt” should Mr. Adams not advance the Trump administration’s agenda.
The mayor sought to allow ICE to open an office at the Rikers Island jail complex, but the City Council filed a lawsuit that has temporarily stymied that effort.
On Tuesday, Mr. Adams insisted he could not comment substantively on Dylan’s case because the issue was outside the ambit of New York’s mayor.
“You have to speak to the federal authorities,” he said, responding to a question from The New York Post about whether the arrest might undermine efforts to have immigrants cooperate with law enforcement. “I don’t know how I could be any clearer. Federal authorities handle ICE. I don’t control the borders.”
He also seemed to suggest that he could not leverage his relationship with Mr. Homan to help the student, because it might run afoul of the sanctuary laws.
“We have to be extremely careful, because the New York City Council laws are limited on what coordination I can do,” he said.
That explanation made little sense to Rendy Desamours, a spokesman for the Council’s speaker, Adrienne Adams, who is running for mayor.
“Neither the city’s sanctuary laws nor any other city law prevent the mayor from advocating for New Yorkers being targeted by federal immigration overreach,” he said.
Troy Closson contributed reporting.
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11) Stalin’s Image Returns to Moscow’s Subway, Honoring a Brutal History
The Kremlin has increasingly embraced the Soviet dictator and his legacy, using them to exalt Russian history in a time of war, but he remains a deeply divisive figure in Russia.
By Ivan Nechepurenko, Reporting from the Moscow metro, May 28, 2025
A new statue of Joseph Stalin in a Moscow metro station reflects Russia’s efforts to rehabilitate the memory of a bloody ruler. Credit...Alexander Nemenov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
After a nearly six-decade absence, the face of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator who was not known for sparing lives to achieve his goals, is once again greeting commuters in one of Moscow’s ornate subway stations.
A new statue was unveiled by the authorities this month, showing Stalin gazing sagely into the distance, flanked by adoring workers and children holding out flowers to him. A replica of one that was removed in 1966 during a de-Stalinization campaign, the new relief quickly became an attraction, with people leaving flowers, stopping to pose for pictures, including with their children, or just watching pensively.
The sculpture is part of the gradual rehabilitation of a brutal leader who still has the power to divide Russians, 72 years after his death. The Kremlin has revived parts of his legacy in its effort to recast Russia’s history as a series of glorious triumphs that it is determined to continue in Ukraine.
Among those admiring the work on a recent visit was Liliya A. Medvedeva, who said she was “very happy that our leader got restored.”
“We won the war thanks to him,” said Ms. Medvedeva, a pensioner born in 1950, adding that she was grateful that Stalin didn’t send her father to the Gulag even though he was taken prisoner during World War II — something that was equated with treason at the time. “Yes, there were many mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes.”
In a country where criticizing government action can be dangerous, it is unclear how many people disagree with Ms. Medvedeva’s positive view, but some are dismayed, even enraged, by what they see as revisionist whitewashing of history.
Vladimir, a 25-year-old history student who refused to give his last name for fear of retribution, said he came to watch the crowd drawn by Stalin, whom he called “a bloody tyrant.”
“It is hard for me to express my own opinion,” he said. “But no other monument would draw as much attention.”
Stalin was responsible for mass purges, including the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, when more than 700,000 people were executed, including military leaders, intellectuals, members of ethnic minorities, landowning peasants and others. Under his leadership, entire ethnic groups, like Crimean Tatars, were expelled from their homelands. His policies contributed to mass famine across the Soviet Union, including in Ukraine.
But nostalgia for the Soviet era is strong, especially among older generations traumatized by the painful transition to capitalism, reinforcing memories of Stalin as a strongman who imposed order on a sprawling country and led it to victory against Nazi Germany. His admirers see purges, famines and mass deportations as “excesses” for which overzealous local officials were mostly responsible.
Since Vladimir V. Putin took power more than 25 years ago, at least 108 monuments to Stalin have been erected across Russia, and the pace has accelerated since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, said Ivan Zheyanov, a historian and journalist who has kept track of the statues. One was installed this year in the Ukrainian city of Melitopol, currently occupied by Moscow’s forces.
But none of them have the visibility of the new sculpture in the subway, passed daily by legions of Muscovites changing between the main circle line and the purple line.
Yelena D. Roshchina, an English instructor walking by it, said she recalled Stalin’s death in 1953 and how people “valued him.” But, Ms. Roshchina, 79, added: “We should not go to the extremes. We always have it either black or white.”
For years the Kremlin tried to maintain something of a balance, taking note of Stalin’s repressions while opposing the liberal intelligentsia whose main ideological tenets included anti-Stalinism.
President Putin has repeatedly condemned Stalin over the years, and recognized that terrible crimes were committed under his rule. He has visited the sites of mass graves and convened human rights activists and historians to discuss Stalinism.
“It is very important that we all and future generations — this is of great significance — know about, and remember this tragic period in our history when entire social groups and entire peoples were cruelly persecuted,” Mr. Putin said in Moscow in 2017, at the opening of the “Wall of Sorrow” monument to victims of Stalinist repression. “This terrifying past cannot be deleted from national memory or, all the more so, be justified by any references to the so-called best interests of the people.”
In 2001, Moscow City Hall founded the Gulag History Museum, which vividly showcased how a system of mass labor camps led to as many as two million deaths.
But for several years, something entirely different has been happening in parallel.
The Memorial, the most prominent Russian civil rights organization founded by dissidents during late Soviet times, was declared a foreign agent in 2014. At the end of 2021, Moscow City Court ordered it to disband.
In 2017, Mr. Putin told the filmmaker Oliver Stone that “excessive demonization of Stalin has been one of the ways to attack the Soviet Union and Russia.”
After a series of lengthy trials, Yuri A. Dmitriev, an amateur historian who discovered graves of Stalin’s victims in a remote pine forest in northern Russia, was sentenced in 2021 to 15 years in prison. Mr. Dmitriev had been found guilty of sexually assaulting his adopted daughter, charges his family and friends dismissed as fabricated.
The Gulag History Museum was shut down in 2024 citing fire regulations and has not reopened. Roman Romanov, its longtime director, was removed from his post and the museum’s exhibits are being redone under a new leadership.
This April, the government renamed Volgograd’s airport for Stalingrad, as the city was called from 1925 to 1961, honoring both the colossal battle fought there in World War II and the ruler it had been named for.
“The creeping re-Stalinization of the country is dangerous not only for society, as it justifies the largest government atrocities in the country’s history, but also for the state,” said Lev Shlosberg, a Russian opposition politician and member of the liberal Yabloko party that started a petition to dismantle the monument in the Moscow metro. “Sooner or later, repression consumes the government itself.”
In the metro, activists left a framed poster in front of the new Stalin monument, a very risky protest by the standards of today’s Russia. The poster contained Mr. Putin’s quotes criticizing Stalin’s methods.
Security guards quickly removed it, and the police later detained one person who had taken part in the protest.
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12) How a Generation’s Struggle Led to a Record Surge in Homelessness
Late baby boomers have endured challenges that have left many economically vulnerable and dependent on parents for help. With their parents dying, they are ending up on the streets in growing numbers.
By Jason DeParle, Reporting from Washington, Published May 27, 2025, Updated May 28, 2025
Anthony Forrest, whose life has been sculpted by twin forces — economic inequality and inner-city distress — personifies his generation’s struggle. Credit...Lawren Simmons for The New York Times
When his mother moved to a nursing home in 2009, Anthony Forrest was a struggle-laden man of willed cheer with rising health problems, declining job prospects, and no place to go. She paid the rent on the Washington, D.C., apartment they shared. He slept on the couch.
Only a niece’s warning that she was turning in the keys forced him hurriedly to pack. He stuffed his clothes into two trash bags, caught a ride to the gentrifying neighborhood of his youth, and slept in a parking lot.
Mr. Forrest’s displacement in late middle age began a homelessness spell that has lasted more than 15 years, and it epitomizes an overlooked force that has helped push homelessness among elderly Americans to a record high: the loss of parental aid. Without it, “I hit the skids,” said Mr. Forrest, now 70. “That’s when I became homeless.”
Throughout their lives, late baby boomers like Mr. Forrest — people born from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s — have suffered homelessness at uniquely high rates, for reasons many and varied. Their sheer numbers ensured they came of age facing fierce competition for housing and jobs. They entered the work force amid bruising recessions and a shift to a postindustrial economy that pummeled low-skilled workers.
Rents soared. Housing aid faltered. Crack, especially in poor neighborhoods, left many in their prime grappling with addiction and criminal records.
Now the death of parents in their 80s or beyond is extending the tale of generational woe, leaving thousands of people newly homeless as they reach old age themselves. In four years, the number of homeless people 65 or older has grown by half to more than 70,000.
“You have a generation of adult children who depend on their parents because they can’t afford housing on their own,” said Dennis Culhane, a social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “When their parents die, they have no place to live. We’re seeing more and more of them on the streets and in the shelters.”
While homelessness is brutal at any age, Mr. Culhane called its surge among the elderly especially troubling. “If you go back to the creation of the American safety net, public destitution among old people is the very condition it was meant to prevent,” he said.
A worn figure whose life has been sculpted by twin forces — economic inequality and inner-city distress — Mr. Forrest personifies his generation’s struggle.
He has been a dishwasher, a janitor and what his mother called a “prodigal son,” whose drinking and drug use have been hard to overcome. A drunken driver nearly killed him two decades ago and left him too weak for steady work. Through a lifetime of rising rents, he has never had his own housing.
But in health or hardship, one safety net caught him: his mother’s apartment.
Since losing her, he has returned to his childhood neighborhood to sleep in shelters and abandoned buildings, rustle odd jobs and commandeer friends’ couches. Most days he sits on a stoop, drinking beer with an affable presence so enduring he calls himself “the mayor of Ninth Street.”
Street life has stolen many of his teeth and numbed his fingers. In a reminder that homelessness kills, his longtime partner in sidewalk survival recently died when a fire consumed the abandoned camper where he slept. A year ago, Mr. Forrest began working with two outreach workers who said his vulnerability might gain him a scarce spot in subsidized housing. After a winter of waiting, he could be housed as early as next month.
Despite the painful odyssey, Mr. Forrest sees himself less a victim of the outsized forces that left his generation prone to homelessness than a man with the strength to survive them. “I been through hell and high water,” he said. “But I’m still here. Good Lord willing, I always make a way.”
Recessions and a neighborhood in decline
The matriarch on whom Mr. Forrest relied came to Washington amid a vast migration that carried millions of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north and reordered both regions. Leaving Fremont, N.C., for Washington in 1948 brought Thessie Greene to a city 600 times the size. The move was filled with promise and peril, and her children would know both.
After gaining a foothold waiting tables, she had one career as a nursing aide and another as a teacher’s assistant, in a marathon of working-class advancement that lasted 60 years. She married a steam engineer, Royce Forrest, and raised six children. Outside work and family, life revolved around the Baptist church, where she served as a deaconess, sang in the choir, and earned acclaim in the cooking ministry.
Borrowing from her upwardly mobile script, one son left for college in Iowa and became a pharmacist in Maine. One works in information technology at Tulane University.
Mr. Forrest never got on the same ladder. Her third child, born in 1954, he reveled in sports and neighborhood friends but mostly felt lost in class. “That’s what I didn’t know how to do — study,” he said.
Graduating from high school in 1974, Mr. Forrest joined the work force during the worst recession since the Great Depression. Two recessions followed in the early 1980s, meaning the economy shrank for more than a third of his first decade as a worker.
Recessions have scarring effects on young workers, reducing their long-term earnings and employment on average and elevating problems like disease, divorce and increased mortality well into middle age, with disadvantaged groups harmed the most.
Mr. Forrest found work but not advancement. He buffed the floors of federal buildings for cleaning contractors. He washed dishes in a museum and a nursing home. He calls the work satisfying, not drudgery, and did it long enough to qualify for Social Security.
But the jobs were low paid, nonunion and often less than full time, in an economy with a declining need for manual labor. While his parents had unionized government jobs in an age of rising blue-collar pay, Mr. Forrest’s generation faced union retreat and falling wages. Two decades after he took his first job, wages for the bottom tenth of workers were nearly 10 percent lower, after inflation, than when he began. He made do, in part, by living with his parents.
As his earnings prospects declined, so did the neighborhood, Shaw. Once a showcase of Black achievement a mile or so from the White House, Shaw had already gone through decades of decline when crack arrived in the 1980s and hit it with special force. Mr. Forrest pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor drug charges in his 30s (two for cocaine and one for PCP). Another misdemeanor cocaine conviction in his 50s suggests addiction was hard to escape.
As his record closed more doors, Mr. Forrest combined odd jobs with other ways to get by. “You know Malcolm X, everything he went through — that’s my story,” he said. “The drugging, mugging, stealing, trying to make money.”
Misfortune mounted when a drunken driver sped through a Shaw intersection as Mr. Forrest crossed the street. The blow broke his ribs, an arm and an ankle. He spent months in a wheelchair and emerged with the prospect of self-support more remote.
One safeguard remained. His mother was a source not just of shelter but also emotional ballast — the person he trusted most not to give up on him. “She used to tell all her children, ‘Look in the mirror and talk to the Lord — he’ll tell you what to do,’” he said.
Though her life was as straight as his was wayward, she made sure her son, however prodigal, had a key to the apartment.
She worked until 79 and had a heart attack two years later. Mr. Forrest was 55 when she moved to a nursing home. Unlike his mother, he did not have a pension. His siblings, wary of his drinking and drug use, did not take him in, and the housing market had little to offer.
Even if he could have worked full time at the District’s elevated minimum wage, it would have taken more than three-quarters of his pretax earnings just to rent a modest efficiency apartment. Housing aid reached only one eligible person in four.
A Shaw parking lot had an empty booth. Mr. Forrest made it his.
A uniquely vulnerable generation
While Mr. Forrest’s story is unique in detail, the elevated risk of homelessness stalks millions of people his age. They have consistently been homeless at rates much higher than people born before or after.
The existence of a generation uniquely vulnerable to homelessness was first identified in 2013 in a study led by Mr. Culhane of the University of Pennsylvania. A co-author, Thomas Byrne of Boston University, working with others, recently updated the findings. Analyzing census data at 10-year intervals, he found that throughout their lives late baby boomers had been at least 1.5 times as likely to become homeless as people born roughly a decade later.
That was true in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. It was true whether the economy was weak or strong. It was true in every geographic region.
With Social Security meant as a safety net, it was not clear if the trend would persist in old age. But in an analysis for The New York Times, Mr. Byrne found that late baby boomers in their early 60s were 1.4 times as likely to be homeless as people who had reached that age a decade earlier and twice as likely as those two decades ahead.
“It continues to be really unlucky to have been born in the latter half of the baby boom generation,” Mr. Byrne said.
While the data concerned men in shelters, he said, the same pattern most likely exists for women and people sleeping outdoors.
As with Mr. Forrest, many aging people say they became homeless after the loss of a parent. In a survey of people aged 50 or older when they first became homeless, more than one in eight cited the death of a friend or relative as a reason.
“We hear that again and again,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, director of the Benioff Initiative on Housing and Homelessness at the University of California, San Francisco, which conducted the survey. “It’s usually guys who worked in low-wage jobs throughout their lives and made it by living with Mom.”
The costs can be measured in part by medical bills, often borne by taxpayers. Homelessness raises the risk of injury or infection. It thwarts the management of chronic diseases like diabetes. It lengthens hospital stays among people who could be discharged if they had places to store medication and keep wounds clean.
The human toll may be greater. Homeless people in their late 50s bear the medical likeness of people two decades older, Dr. Kushel and others found, on measures that include cognitive decline, urinary incontinence, mobility limitations and falls. Compared to housed people the same age, they die at rates 3.5 times higher.
A generation uniquely vulnerable to homelessness may also cast light on why homelessness exists. Policymakers sometimes debate whether homelessness is best understood as the product of human failings or structural forces like inequality or aid policy.
While individual stories often can be read as failures of personal responsibility, “a birth cohort is by definition a structural explanation,” Mr. Culhane said. “Something happened to these people as a group that continues to generate homelessness.”
‘The mayor of Ninth Street’
In seeking places to sleep, Mr. Forrest proved inventive beyond the parking lot. A padlocked school had sheltered steps. The playground never closed. For a while Mr. Forrest thought his problem solved with free rent in a boardinghouse that he cleaned in exchange. But his girlfriend stole from other residents, he said, and the landlord put them out.
One story he likes to tell sounds like a caper in a buddy movie — and produced a buddy. A street acquaintance had the keys to an empty building awaiting conversion to condominiums. The two men moved in and rented out rooms. The “Abando-minium” scheme got them through the winter and established a contentious friendship of the sort that homeless people often form for mutual aid and protection.
Though younger than Mr. Forrest, Jason Vass was another late baby boomer rendered homeless in part by the death of a parent, his father, with whom he often had stayed. He was also an inspired storyteller and a legend as a drinker. “I’m not an alcoholic — I surpassed that,” he said a few months ago. “I’m a drunk!”
Students of each other’s flaws, the two men bickered, bantered and retained enough familiarity to eat from each other’s dinner plate without asking. “Put it this way — you messin’ with him, you messin’ with me,” Mr. Vass said. “We’re Frick and Frack. Heckle and Jeckle. Copacetic.”
Mr. Forrest, in turn, described his companion as an ally needing impulse control. “Hey Jason, better slow your roll,” he liked to say.
Despite his stoic front, homelessness has left Mr. Forrest worn — slower, sadder, and sicker than when his street sojourn began. His gait is unsteady. His bones ache. Last year he fell off a ladder and broke the ankle spared in the car accident. Months of inpatient rehabilitation followed.
The “mayor of Ninth Street” has spent much of his time as a homeless man within sight of his childhood home, as if looking for comforting memories. But the gentrified Ninth Street of today is not the Ninth Street of his youth. Young professionals have flooded in and helped displace longtime residents. The drafty rowhouse his parents rented, long refurbished, would sell for more than a million dollars. Efficiency apartments a block away fetch rents of $2,600 a month.
Once a landing zone for poor southerners, Shaw also now hosts a different migration, of entrepreneurial Ethiopians whose success has helped revive the area but also bid up housing costs. “Damn right I resent it,” said Mr. Forrest, who sweeps the immigrant merchants’ floors. “They come over here and get all this stuff and the Black man gets nothing!”
His mother’s death after years in a nursing home added to his sense of loss. He had a seizure after seeing her in the coffin.
The District of Columbia has an extensive network of outreach workers to serve the homeless. Last year, two of them — Nicole Dixon of Miriam’s Kitchen and Quinntez Washington of District Bridges — introduced themselves to Mr. Forrest and Mr. Vass as the men sat on a Ninth Street stoop.
Mr. Forrest said he did not need help. Overcoming his wariness, they helped him replace his lost ID and claim a range of benefits he said he had not known he could receive, behavior at odds with stereotypes of poor people maximizing aid. With Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, disability aid and food stamps, he now has health insurance and $1,300 a month in cash and food assistance.
Housing aid is in shorter supply, and neither man proved an easy client. After the caseworkers secured Mr. Vass a rare spot in assisted living through Medicaid, he showed up drunk and berated the staff, who rescinded the offer.
For a few weeks no one saw him. Then on the coldest night in February, the fire department responded at 3:45 a.m. to a report of flames in an abandoned camper. When they extinguished the fire, they found Mr. Vass inside, dead.
Mr. Forrest was stunned. For all his vulnerability in living on the street, his partner had seemed to him invulnerable, built for sidewalk survival.
Last year, the caseworkers put Mr. Forrest on the list for permanent supportive housing. The program provides chronically homeless people with subsidized apartments and offers voluntary treatment for problems like substance abuse and mental illness. But the aid is limited, and waits are often lengthy.
Conservatives have criticized the program, and the Trump administration wants to end it. The examples of Mr. Forrest and Mr. Vass encapsulate the debate. Critics say providing housing without treating mental illness or addiction leaves them unstable. Supporters say the housing saves lives by getting fragile people off the street — a program with a sobriety test is not one either man would pass.
After a year’s wait, Mr. Forrest was tentatively offered an apartment. It is a mile and a half from Ninth Street, outside his comfort zone. At first he said no. He was sleeping on a friend’s couch. Then his friend died. Mindful of Mr. Vass’s death on the street, he agreed to the move.
Final approval is pending. But seven decades after being born into the most homelessness-prone generation in modern history, Mr. Forrest may soon have a home.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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13) A Desperate Haiti Turns to Erik Prince, Trump Ally, in Fight Against Gangs
The Haitian government has signed a contract with Mr. Prince, the private military contractor who founded Blackwater, a company notorious for a civilian massacre in Iraq.
By David C. Adams, Frances Robles and Mark Mazzetti, May 28, 2025
David C. Adams and Frances Robles combined have covered Haiti for over five decades, and Mark Mazzetti has written about American private military contractors for 20 years.
Erik Prince, a private military contractor and prominent supporter of President Trump, is working with Haiti’s government to conduct lethal operations against gangs that are terrorizing the nation and threatening to take over its capital.
Mr. Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, signed a contract to take on the criminal groups that have been killing civilians and seizing control of vast areas of territory, according to senior Haitian and American government officials and several other security experts familiar with Mr. Prince’s work in Haiti.
Haiti’s government has hired American contractors, including Mr. Prince, in recent months to work on a secret task force to deploy drones meant to kill gang members, security experts said. Mr. Prince’s team has been operating the drones since March, but the authorities have yet to announce the death or capture of a single high-value target.
Security experts said Mr. Prince has also been scouting Haitian American military veterans to hire to send to Port-au-Prince and is expected to send up to 150 mercenaries to Haiti over the summer. He recently shipped a large cache of weapons to the country, two experts said.
The Haitian government is awaiting the arrival of arms shipments and more personnel to step up its fight against the gangs.
American officials said they were aware of Mr. Prince’s work with Haiti’s government. But the full terms of the Haitian government’s arrangement with Mr. Prince, including how much it is paying him, are unknown.
This article is based on interviews with a dozen people who follow Haiti closely. All but one spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss sensitive security matters publicly.
The State Department, which has provided millions of dollars in funding to equip and train Haiti’s National Police, said it is not paying Mr. Prince or his company for any work in Haiti.
Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article. Blackwater no longer exists, but Mr. Prince owns other private military entities.
The involvement of civilian contractors like Mr. Prince, a Trump donor who has a long and checkered history in the private security industry, marks a pivotal moment in Haiti. Its crisis has deepened since its last president was assassinated in 2021, and the government now appears willing to take desperate measures to secure control.
Armed groups escalated the violence last year by uniting and taking over prisons, burning down police stations and attacking hospitals. About 1 million people have been forced to flee their homes and hundreds of thousands are living in shelters.
Gangs have captured so much territory in recent months that U.N. officials have warned that the capital is in danger of falling under complete criminal control.
The situation is dire enough that officials and civilians alike say they are eager for any overseas help, particularly after a $600 million international police mission started by the Biden administration and largely staffed by Kenyan police officers failed to receive adequate international personnel and money.
With Haiti’s undermanned and underequipped police force struggling to contain the gangs, the government is turning to private military contractors equipped with high-powered weapons, helicopters and sophisticated surveillance and attack drones to take on the well-armed gangs. At least one other American security company is working in Haiti, though details of its role are secret.
Since drone attacks targeting gangs started in March, they have killed more than 200 people, according to Pierre Esperance, who runs a leading human rights organization in Port-au-Prince.
After the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq ended, security firms like those owned by Mr. Prince started seeing big streams of revenues dry up. Private military contractors are looking for new opportunities, and they see possibilities in Latin America.
Before presidential elections in Ecuador this year, Mr. Prince toured the country with local police and promised to help security forces. The country has faced a wave of violence unleashed by gangs.
Ecuadorean officials denied that they had signed any security deal with Mr. Prince.
A person close to Mr. Prince said he hopes to expand the scope of his work in Haiti to include help with customs, transport, revenue collection and other government services that need to be restored for the country to stabilize. Rampant government corruption is a key reason Haiti’s finances are in shambles.
The Haitian prime minister’s office and a presidential council, which was formed to run the country until presidential elections can be held, did not respond to several requests for comment.
Mr. Prince, whose sister Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education during Mr. Trump’s first term, donated more than $250,000 to help elect Mr. Trump in 2016, according to campaign finance records. He was often cited as an informal “adviser” to Mr. Trump’s first transition to office, a description he denied.
Days before Mr. Trump took office in 2017, the United Arab Emirates organized a meeting between Mr. Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as part of an effort to set up a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and the incoming president, a meeting that later came under scrutiny.
The House Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department about Mr. Prince, saying he lied about the circumstances of the meeting, but no charges were ever filed.
Mr. Prince has a decades-long history of military interventions overseas, some of which ended badly. Blackwater faced legal problems over its work for the U.S. military in places like Iraq, including an episode in 2007 in which its employees killed 17 civilians in Baghdad. (President Trump pardoned four Blackwater guards in 2020.)
In 2011, Mr. Prince helped recruit and train an army of Colombian mercenaries for the United Arab Emirates to use in conflicts around the Middle East. In 2017, he proposed a plan to use contractors to take over Afghanistan. In 2020, The New York Times revealed that he had recruited former spies to help conservative activists infiltrate liberal groups in the United States.
A year later, the United Nations accused him of violating an arms embargo in Libya, which he denied.
“My name has become click bait for people who like to weave conspiracy theories together,” Mr. Prince said in a 2021 interview with The Times. “And if they throw my name in, it always attracts attention. And it’s pretty damn sickening.”
Haiti’s experience with private military contractors goes back decades. When U.S. forces returned former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in 1994 after he was ousted in a bloody military coup, he was accompanied by a private security team from the San Francisco-based Steele Foundation.
In recent years, military contractors in Haiti have had a more tainted record. Colombian mercenaries hired by an American security firm were accused of taking part in the 2021 assassination of the last elected president, Jovenel Moïse.
Rod Joseph, a Haitian American U.S. Army veteran who owns a Florida-based security officer training company, said he had been in talks with Mr. Prince to help supply personnel for his contract since late last year.
Mr. Joseph, who trained Haitian police on the use of surveillance drones, said Mr. Prince gave him the impression that his plans were under the auspices of the U.S. government but then shifted to be directly under the purview of the Haitian government.
He said Mr. Prince told him that he planned to send private soldiers from El Salvador to Haiti along with three helicopters to engage in attacks against the gangs.
Mr. Joseph said he was uncomfortable with the idea of contractors working directly with the Haitian government, without any American oversight.
“We should be very worried, because if he’s from the U.S. government, at least he can have the semblance of having to answer to Congress,” he said. “If it’s him, his contract, he doesn’t owe anybody an explanation.”
“It’s just another payday,” he added.
Mr. Prince texted him a few days ago, Mr. Joseph said, seeking a list of Haitian American veterans to send to Haiti, but he declined to provide names unless Mr. Prince could provide more precise details of their mission and would allow Mr. Joseph to lead them.
U.S. military contractors doing defense work overseas are required to obtain a license from the State Department, but those licenses are not public record.
Mr. Prince has been trying to expand his portfolio and has traveled overseas in search of new business, said Sean McFate, a professor at the National Defense University and author of “The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order.”
Mr. Prince is viewed skeptically by other members of the private military industry, Mr. McFate said, because of his showy nature and the negative publicity he generates for a security industry that prides itself on a “sense of professionalism.”
“It’s always worth noting where Prince is going, because it’s sort of a barometer of where he thinks Trump world might end up, and he wants to make a buck from it,” Mr. McFate said.
But experts stress that Haitians are desperate for solutions — regardless of where they come from.
“The doors are open. All possibilities must be on the table,” Haiti’s Minister of Economy and Finance, Alfred Métellus, told Le Nouvelliste, a Haitian newspaper, last month. “We are looking for all Haitians, all foreigners who have expertise in this field and who want to support us, want to support the police and the army to unblock the situation.”
Mr. Joseph said he worried that outsourcing the work of fighting gangs to private military contractors would not do anything to improve the skills of the Haitian police and military.
“When you do it this way, it’s trouble,” he said. “Every time you parachute knowledge in and parachute out, the locals will always be in need of that knowledge. If you don’t have knowledge of security, you will just have a bunch of dead people.”
Reporting was contributed by Maria Abi-Habib, Eric Schmitt and Michael Crowley.
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14) U.S. Will ‘Aggressively’ Revoke Visas of Chinese Students, Rubio Says
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the students who will have their visas canceled include people with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and those studying in “critical fields.”
By Edward Wong, Reporting from Washington, Published May 28, 2025, Updated May 29, 2025
Secretary of State Marco Rubio testifying at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday evening that the Trump administration would work to “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in “critical fields.”
He added that the State Department was revising visa criteria to “enhance scrutiny” of all future applications from China, including Hong Kong.
The move was certain to send ripples of anxiety across university campuses in the United States and was likely to lead to reprisal from China, the country of origin for the second-largest group of international students in the United States.
Mr. Rubio’s brief statement announcing the visa crackdown did not define “critical fields” of study, but the phrase most likely refers to research in the physical sciences. In recent years, American officials have expressed concerns about the Chinese government recruiting U.S.-trained scientists, though there is no evidence of such scientists working for China in large numbers.
Similarly, it is unclear how U.S. officials will determine which students have ties to the Communist Party. The lack of detail on the scope of the directive will no doubt fuel worries among the roughly 275,000 Chinese students in the United States, as well as professors and university administrators who depend on their research skills and financial support.
American universities and research laboratories have benefited over many decades by drawing some of the most talented students from China and other countries, and many universities rely on international students paying full tuition for a substantial part of their annual revenue.
“I think it is terribly misguided, counterproductive and another way in which we are shooting ourselves in the foot,” said Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University.
The move against Chinese students comes as the Trump administration has sought a broader crackdown on elite universities and international students. And it coincides with heightened tensions between the United States and China over President Trump’s trade war. The foremost target of Mr. Trump’s expansive tariffs is China, which he has asserted has taken unfair advantage of the international trade system for decades.
It is unclear how quickly the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security will move to cancel the visas of affected students, or whether China will now take retaliatory actions on the relatively fewer number of American students in the country and move to expel some of them.
Until now, family members of most Chinese Communist Party officials could study at American universities. Many top party officials sent children to American universities in recent decades. Mr. Xi sent his daughter, Xi Mingze, to attend Harvard under a pseudonym. Harvard administrators and a few professors knew who she was before her graduation in 2014.
Around the same time, Bo Guagua, the son of a prominent former Politburo member who is now imprisoned in China, got a master’s degree at Harvard Kennedy School and attended Columbia Law School.
In 2020, officials in the first Trump administration canceled the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese graduate students and researchers after announcing they were banning from campuses Chinese citizens with direct ties to military universities in their country. It was the first time the U.S. government had moved to bar a category of Chinese students from getting access to American universities, a ban the Biden administration kept in place.
U.S.-China relations were in a fraught state throughout the Biden administration, but Chinese officials sought to stabilize them in part by emphasizing the need for more person-to-person exchanges, including at educational institutions. The number of American students in China has been tiny compared with that of their Chinese counterparts in the United States. On a visit to San Francisco in November 2023, Mr. Xi announced that China was ready to welcome 50,000 American students over five years while it would keep sending its students to the United States.
“America has always thrived by welcoming the brightest minds from around the world,” said Gary Locke, a U.S. ambassador to China in the Obama administration and chairman of the Committee of 100, an advocacy group of prominent Chinese Americans. “Shutting the door on Chinese students doesn’t just betray our values — it weakens our leadership in science, technology and innovation.”
A report published last year by the State Department and the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit group, said that China had the second-largest share of the more than 1.1 million international students who enrolled in American higher education institutions in the 2023-24 term. More than 277,000 students came from China, behind India, with its more than 331,000 students. The number of Chinese students had dropped 4 percent from the previous academic year, while the number from India had surged by 23 percent.
In another move on visa restrictions, Mr. Rubio announced Wednesday that the State Department would not give visas to foreign officials who engage in censorship of the speech of American citizens.
“It is unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil,” he said in a statement.
He added that “it is similarly unacceptable for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies or engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States.”
Trump administration officials have criticized European governments and Brazil for what the officials call efforts to censor free speech on social media platforms run by American companies. Those include Meta and X, a platform once called Twitter that is owned by Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser to Mr. Trump who was by far the biggest donor to the president’s 2024 election campaign. Some European governments ban certain types of online posts by far-right groups.
Mr. Rubio’s latest announcement on visa restrictions came a day after he sent a cable to U.S. embassies and consulates telling them to halt interview appointments for foreign citizens applying for student and exchange visas. Those are the visa categories called F, M and J.
The Homeland Security Department announced last week that it was revoking the certification that allows Harvard University to enroll foreign students, although a federal judge temporarily blocked the move. In the policy’s announcement, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said the administration was seeking to hold Harvard “accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus.”
The words “Chinese Communist Party” were emphasized in boldface, though Ms. Noem did not explain what she meant by that coordination or provide evidence of such activities.
“It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments,” she said.
Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that Harvard University should have a cap on the number of international students it admits to create more spots for Americans. About one-quarter of Harvard’s student body is from abroad. Mr. Trump suggested that the figure should be no more than 15 percent.
On Chinese social media, the immediate reaction to Mr. Rubio’s announcement appeared to be limited. But broader discussion of the Trump administration’s various announced restrictions on international students and on universities, and on Harvard in particular, had been trending for days.
Those who commented on Mr. Rubio’s announcement expressed both resignation and triumph. Some nationalist citizens celebrated the notion that Chinese students who had previously looked up to the United States would be disillusioned, or that Chinese universities would benefit from the return of talent.
Shen Yi, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, said in a post that Mr. Rubio had acted “as expected.”
Bernard Mokam contributed reporting from New York, and Vivian Wang from Beijing.
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15) Chinese Students Express Helplessness and Frustration Over U.S. Visa Bans
As student applicants in China wait to see how sweeping the new action might be, one said of the United States, “They make people too scared.”
By Vivian Wang, Reporting from Beijing, May 29, 2025
Waiting outside the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on Thursday. Credit...Vivian Wang/The New York Times
In the hours after the Trump administration announced that it would begin “aggressively” revoking the visas of Chinese students, the line to apply for new visas at the United States Embassy in Beijing still stretched down the block on Thursday.
But for many of the hopefuls — including some who walked out of the embassy with their visa applications approved — any celebration was laced with a mix of anxiety and helplessness.
“What now? Something new every day?” said Li Kunze, 18, who had just successfully applied for a visa to study as an undergraduate. He had not heard the news until he left the embassy. “I don’t even know if they can give me this visa that I just got.”
He sighed. Since it was too late to apply elsewhere for his undergraduate years, “I can only brace myself,” said Mr. Li, who plans to study applied mathematics. But, “in the future, if I can avoid going to the United States to study, I will. They make people too scared.”
The scene outside the embassy captured the complicated feelings many Chinese students have toward studying in the United States. Hundreds of thousands still go each year, lured by the promise of a world-class education. Some also have deep admiration for America’s professed values of openness and diversity.
But they must reckon with the fact — made clearer by the Trump administration every day — that many in the United States may not share that admiration.
Even before the announcement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the United States would begin revoking student visas, Chinese students and their families were uncertain about their prospects for studying in America. Two days earlier, Mr. Rubio had ordered a pause on new interviews for student and exchange visas.
Chinese students have been singled out before. In 2020, during his first term, President Trump issued a proclamation barring students from certain Chinese universities from graduate study in the United States, alleging that those universities had ties to China’s military. The parameters of that proclamation, which is still in effect, were vague, but it has been used mostly to deny visas to people in fields such as the physical sciences, engineering and computer science, according to researchers.
Yet the effect of the earlier measure was relatively limited, resulting in the revocations or denials of about 3,000 visas between 2020 and 2021, according to U.S. government data.
It is unclear what the scope of the new revocations will be, but they are likely to be much more far-reaching. Mr. Rubio’s order said only that they would include “those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party” or “studying in critical fields.”
As Chinese students were digesting the announcement, the response from Chinese officials was relatively muted.
Asked at a regularly scheduled news conference on Thursday about the move, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry said that the United States was “using ideology and national security as an excuse” to harm Chinese students.
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16) Trump’s Attacks on Black History Betray America
By Ibram X. Kendi, May 29, 2025
Mr. Kendi’s newest book is “Malcolm Lives! The Official Biography of Malcolm X for Young Readers.”
“Life is named story. Afterlife is named history. Racist Americans have murdered Black lives and tried to murder Black afterlives, Black stories and Black history, Black storytellers and Black historians. So when Black people die, what we created, what we contributed, what we changed, what we documented dies, too. No funeral. Just gone from memory.”
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The Trump administration is in a hurry to bury not only America’s future but also its past. Burying futures usually involves burying the truths of history.
Right now the Trump administration has been systematically attacking Black history. It’s set about purging Black historical content from government websites and social media accounts (only restoring a few items after being called out), removing Black history books from libraries, eliminating Black history observances, butchering the reputations of historians and starving libraries, museums, universities and historical institutions of funding. At this rate, many Americans could one day believe that George Floyd “dies after medical incident during police interaction,” as the Minneapolis Police Department put it in its first public statement on the matter, and that the officer Derek Chauvin attempted to save his life.
There is a precedent for this, of course. Consider what happened in downtown Atlanta beginning on Sept. 22, 1906. Grotesque newspaper headlines detailing alleged assaults, later referred to as a “carnival of rapes,” mobilized white Atlantans into a mob. The violence over the next few days snatched the lives of around 40 Black Atlantans and two white Atlantans. Black Atlantans were forced to organize a self-defense, with some community members arming themselves. The carnage largely ceased with the arrival of a state militia.
What became known as the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 had been several months in the making. It was an election year, and all year long, candidates for governor and their propagandists had enraged white Atlantans with tales of “uppity” Black Atlantans refusing to stay “in their place.”
“Uppity” Black Atlantans like J. Max Barber, the editor of The Voice of the Negro, perhaps the first Southern magazine to be edited by Black people. Barber had dedicated the magazine to rendering current events and “history so accurately given and so vividly portrayed that it will become a kind of documentation for the coming generations.”
Born in South Carolina, Barber had come a long way from the place of his parents, who had been enslaved. After graduating from Virginia Union University in 1903, he moved to Atlanta to edit The Voice of the Negro. He secured contributors including the renowned educator Mary Church Terrell and the Atlanta University historian W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1905, Barber joined Du Bois and 27 others in forming the Niagara Movement, a predecessor of the N.A.A.C.P. One of the Niagara Movement’s main initial outlets: Barber’s Voice of the Negro, which touted 15,000 subscribers.
Barber refused to publish the lie about the causes of the Atlanta massacre in 1906. “There has been no ‘carnival of rapes’ in and around Atlanta,” he wrote. “There has been a frightful carnival of newspaper lies.” He figured “this mob got its first psychological impulse from Tom Dixon’s ‘Clansman,’” which “came to Atlanta last winter” as a play.
Thomas Dixon Jr. had published “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan” in 1905, depicting Klan attacks as heroic acts of justice. D.W. Griffith adapted the novel for his 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation.” One of the film’s intertitles had been written by the president of the United States, who screened the film in the White House. “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation,” Woodrow Wilson had written in 1902, “until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South to protect the Southern country.”
The Trump administration’s framing of Black history as “D.E.I.” — and “D.E.I.” as harming white Americans — recasts its attack on Black history as protecting white Americans. As administering justice. Which is the justification of nearly every Klan and racist mob attack in history. The justification of the Atlanta attack in 1906.
When Barber challenged the “carnival of rapes” justification for the Atlanta Race Massacre in 1906, Gov. Joseph Terrell of Georgia and his Atlanta allies weaponized the criminal legal system. They threatened Barber with arrest. Police officers surveilled Barber’s office. Sound familiar?
Barber “did not care to be made a slave on a Georgia chain gang.” He ran away from Georgia slavery by another name (just as there are some Americans today who are fleeing red states — and even the nation itself — out of fear). Barber fled with The Voice of the Negro on financial life support. The magazine died in Chicago in 1907.
Barber’s career documenting Black life and history died, too. The electrifying writer became a dentist in Philadelphia. He contributed to a few campaigns, such as erecting a statue for John Brown at the abolitionist’s upstate New York gravesite in 1935 that still stands. But terror had largely silenced Barber’s voice of the Negro.
Life is named story. Afterlife is named history. Racist Americans have murdered Black lives and tried to murder Black afterlives, Black stories and Black history, Black storytellers and Black historians. So when Black people die, what we created, what we contributed, what we changed, what we documented dies, too. No funeral. Just gone from memory.
President Trump's raid on the Black historical record is a raid on the opportunity for all Americans to know the endurance of racial inequity and injustice are consequences of the enduring history of anti-Black racist policy and violence, not what’s wrong with Black people as a group. For Americans to know Black history is to know how Black ingenuity over the years has benefited them, how Black-led antiracist movements helped bring into being more equity and justice between Black people and white people, between Latino, Asian, and Native Americans and white Americans, between white men and women, between superrich white men and low- and middle-income white men. After all, the Ku Klux Klan didn’t just terrorize Black Americans.
Klan attacks are most remembered for whom they murdered. They are less remembered for what they murdered: all the Black towns, businesses, homes, churches, libraries, publications and careers. The very things that preserved public memory of Black history.
In 1949 Barber died in Philadelphia. He was not murdered in public, like other victims of the Atlanta Race Massacre in 1906, but he was murdered from public memory. His ability to create public memory was murdered: the point of Mr. Trump’s attack on Black history.
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17) Israel Bombards Gaza Amid Chaos Surrounding Aid Handouts
Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed more than 60 people over the past day, according to local health officials.
By Isabel Kershner and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, May 29, 2025
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel.
Palestinians collect aid supplies from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Khan Younis on Thursday. Hatem Khaled/Reuters
Israel bombarded Gaza again on Thursday and local health officials said more than 60 people had been killed in the attacks over the past day, as hungry Palestinians scrambled for food handouts under a new Israeli-backed aid operation that has been heavily criticized.
The United Nations says the new aid system, known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, is insufficient to meet basic needs for survival. In a reflection of the chaotic atmosphere surrounding distribution and the desperation of much of the population in Gaza, a large crowd of hungry people broke into a warehouse run by the U.N.’s World Food Program on Wednesday in search of food.
Images from the scene showed large crowds of Palestinians converging on the warehouse and removing sacks of looted flour. The W.F.P. said in a statement that initial reports indicated that two people had been killed and several others were injured.
While hundreds of distribution points existed under the previous aid-distribution system run by the United Nations, the new initiative requires Gaza residents to pick up aid packages from the three distribution hubs that it has operating in southern and central Gaza.
Some U.N. trucks are still making their way through a single border crossing into the enclave. But U.N. officials say that distribution to warehouses and bakeries inside Gaza has been hampered by the lack of secure routes, and that negligible quantities of food are reaching the people who need it.
Against the backdrop of the humanitarian crisis and mounting international pressure to end the devastating 19-month war in Gaza, Israel and Hamas were considering on Thursday a new version of a cease-fire proposal formulated by President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff.
The full details of the new proposal remain unclear.
But both Israel and Hamas have said they are willing to accept at least some of its terms, including the release of 10 living hostages held by Hamas and the remains of others who died in captivity in exchange for an agreed-upon number of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.
An Israeli official familiar with the details said the initial phase of the deal would provide for a 60-day cease-fire and a flow of aid through U.N.-run operations. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the sensitive negotiations.
It was unclear, however, whether the new proposal could address the main sticking point between the sides. Israel is insisting on having an option to resume fighting if Hamas does not surrender and disarm. Hamas is demanding firm guarantees that a temporary cease-fire would lead to a permanent cessation of hostilities and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
The war began in October 2023 with a deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people and saw about 250 others taken hostage, according to the Israeli government. More than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
At least 20 living hostages are still being held in Gaza, according to the Israeli authorities.
Israel ended a previous cease-fire in March and has since embarked on a new phase of fighting, advancing slowly and expanding its control over larger swathes of the territory.
On Thursday, Gaza’s health ministry said that hospitals in the enclave had received more than 60 bodies over the past 24 hours.
Khalil Degran, a spokesman for Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, said his facility had received 20 bodies on Thursday morning following a reported Israeli airstrike in Al-Bureij, a few miles to the north.
The majority of the victims were civilians, including nine children, Mr. Degran said. The hospital had also received wounded people suffering extensive burns, and multiple cases of limb amputations, according to Mr. Degran.
“The situation is catastrophic and dire. We simply don’t have the capacity to provide adequate medical care,” he said, noting that his hospital is the only major health facility currently operating in central Gaza.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the reports of a strike in Al-Bureij but said in a midday statement on Thursday that its airstrikes over the past day had hit dozens of Hamas targets throughout the Gaza Strip.
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18) U.K. Weighs Sanctions on 2 Israeli Cabinet Ministers as Gaza Crisis Worsens
Facing rising pressure over the acute suffering of civilians in Gaza, the British government is considering sanctions on two far-right ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
By Mark Landler, Reporting from London, May 29, 2025
Britain has hardened its position toward Israel over its conduct of the war in Gaza. But as it weighs the next possible step — imposing sanctions on Israeli ministers — it confronts a complex landscape, not least because of the recent deadly shooting of two Israeli embassy employees in Washington.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government has been mulling sanctions against two far-right Israeli ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, for months — a proposal first floated by David Cameron, a foreign secretary in the previous Conservative government. But it has still not decided whether to go ahead, according to several officials.
Momentum toward the sanctions had accelerated in recent weeks, after Britain joined France and Canada in condemning Israel’s expansion of military operations in Gaza. British officials encountered little resistance to the idea of sanctions from the United States, where President Trump has also turned critical of Israel, warning that he wanted to “stop that whole situation as quickly as possible.”
Still, the fatal attack on the two embassy staff members, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, by a pro-Palestinian gunman outside a Jewish museum has given pause to some British officials, who question whether this is the right moment to punish senior Israeli leaders, according to one diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Britain now seems likely to wait to see if Israel will allow a measurable increase in aid to Gaza, according to officials. If the situation in the Gaza Strip improves, it could further defer a decision on whether to blacklist Mr. Ben-Gvir and Mr. Smotrich, who favor relocating Palestinians outside of Gaza, which would be a grave breach of international law.
The two men staunchly support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expanded operations against Hamas, which have led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians, including many children, in recent weeks.
British officials are similarly ambivalent about when to recognize an independent Palestinian state, a step taken by Norway, Spain and Ireland. France is considering such a move and has encouraged Britain to act in concert with it, potentially at a summit meeting in June. But some diplomats argue that doing so at this moment would have little effect.
The debate has laid bare differences between the Foreign Office, which is viewed as more forward-leaning, and 10 Downing Street, which is viewed as more cautious. But Mr. Starmer is under mounting pressure to do more, both from his Labour Party and from leading human rights lawyers in Britain, a cohort to which he once belonged.
“I think people the prime minister interacts with are saying, ‘You do know this will be more than a footnote in your legacy if you don’t do something?’” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator who now runs the U.S./Middle East Project, a research group in London and New York.
Speaking in Parliament last week, David Lammy, the current foreign secretary, used the harshest language yet by a British official to denounce Israel’s conduct of the war. He said that Britain would suspend talks on a trade agreement and blasted comments by Mr. Smotrich about “cleansing” Gaza and moving its two million people to other countries.
“We must call this what it is,” Mr. Lammy said. “It is extremism. It is dangerous. It is repellent. It is monstrous.”
Mr. Lammy did not, however, accuse Israel of genocide, despite the cries of “Genocide!” from some Labour Party backbenchers while he spoke. The government is under pressure from lawmakers to invoke that term, which could open the door to the sanctions and a total suspension of weapons sales to Israel (Britain announced a partial suspension last September).
The Netanyahu government has rejected accusations of genocide in Gaza, claiming that the Israeli military has tried to limit deaths among Palestinian civilians.
On Monday, more than 800 lawyers, academics and retired judges called on Mr. Starmer in an open letter to impose sanctions, saying that Israel was guilty of war crimes and had met the threshold for genocide. They said that the limited aid Israel was allowing into Gaza, after an 11-week blockade of food and medical supplies, was not sufficient to avert an “unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.”
“War crimes, crimes against humanity, and serious violations of international humanitarian law are being committed,” said the signatories, who included two retired Supreme Court justices, Jonathan Sumption and Nicholas Wilson. “Genocide is being perpetrated in Gaza, or, at a minimum, there is a serious risk of genocide occurring.”
Mr. Starmer has long said that he will be guided by the principles of international law. His attorney general, Richard Hermer, also has a voice in setting the policy. Mr. Hermer was influential in Britain’s decision to drop objections to an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
In the aftermath of the shootings in Washington, Mr. Netanyahu lashed out at Mr. Starmer, as well as President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada. The three leaders had issued a joint statement demanding that Israel agree to an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.
“When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you,” he said in a video statement, “you’re on the wrong side of justice, you’re on the wrong side of humanity, and you’re on the wrong side of history.”
But it is Mr. Netanyahu, not Mr. Starmer, who has become more isolated. On Monday the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, joined the chorus of outrage in Europe over the dire situation in Gaza, saying Israel’s actions “can no longer be justified.” Even Mr. Trump, who once wrapped Mr. Netanyahu in a warm embrace, is now expressing impatience.
Britain, like other countries, has struggled to separate Mr. Trump’s statements, which can be impulsive and quickly reversed, from substantive policy shifts. That job was further complicated by drastic staff cuts last week at the National Security Council, which removed some of the officials that British diplomats consult.
Mr. Starmer has hesitated to diverge too sharply from the United States on issues from trade to Ukraine. But a shift in tone by Mr. Trump could theoretically give him more room to maneuver on Israel.
Given how the harrowing images and videos from Gaza are galvanizing world opinion, Mr. Levy predicted that Mr. Starmer might be forced to cast aside his cautious approach. “We may get to a moment where he may need to do a reversal,” Mr. Levy said.
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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19) Children in Gaza Are Starving. Let the U.N. Do Its Job.
By Catherine Russell, Ms. Russell is the executive director of UNICEF. May 29, 2025
On the morning of May 15, Miran Mohammad was helping her grandfather bake bread at his home in Beit Lahia, a town in northern Gaza. Given the scarcity of food, the 7-year-old Miran was hungry and was eager to have a piece of the freshly baked bread. She wouldn’t get the chance.
Miran’s mother insisted she wait to eat until the family returned to their home. As they entered their house, it was hit in an airstrike, collapsing on top of them and causing them both serious injuries.
Miran is now a patient at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital; doctors tell us her legs permanently damaged. She is one of the more than 3,700 children under 18 years old in Gaza reported to have been wounded since the end of the recent cease-fire. Over 1,300 other children are reported to have been killed in hostilities during the same period. Through nearly 20 months of war, nearly 17,000 children have been reported killed and more than 34,000 have been wounded — around one in every 20 children in Gaza — making it the deadliest conflict for children in recent memory.
With the threat of famine growing by the day, the plight of Gaza’s children will surely worsen. According to the latest analysis from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a tool used by UNICEF and its partners to assess food security and malnutrition, the entire population of Gaza now faces acute food insecurity. Nearly half a million people are teetering on the edge of starvation. We estimate that over 71,000 children and 17,000 mothers will suffer from acute malnutrition, characterized by rapid weight loss and low weight-to-height ratio, in the next 10 months without sufficient humanitarian aid and treatment.
UNICEF and its partners are doing everything possible to respond. Yet because of Israel’s two-month-long blockade of aid, now unevenly lifted, we have extremely limited stocks in Gaza. Unless we regain safe, sustained access to Gaza and are allowed to scale up, more children will suffer.
On Tuesday, the world watched as thousands of hungry Palestinians in Rafah rushed to get food from a new aid delivery system backed by Israel that bypasses the United Nations as the main aid supplier in the territory. As the chaotic scenes made clear, rather than increasing access to lifesaving supplies, the new aid distribution plan, facilitated by an organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, threatens to make things worse.
Before hostilities resumed, the United Nations operated a vast and effective aid delivery system inside Gaza. During the recent cease-fire, we were delivering assistance like essential vaccines and medicine, lifesaving nutrition services and access to clean water through more than 400 distribution points, including in sites close to shelters for displaced families. UNICEF and our partners went even further, delivering aid door-to-door, reaching malnourished children and pregnant women directly in their places of refuge.
That extensive system is now sidelined, and our operations have been significantly curtailed. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is reportedly channeling aid through a few distribution points in southern Gaza that have security on site provided by private American contractors, and Israeli soldiers standing outside the perimeter. Having a limited number of distribution sites will force civilians to travel far from their homes, exposing them to violence.
According to Israeli authorities, these aid distribution sites are being supplied by 60 trucks a day — a tenth of the number going into Gaza during the recent cease-fire — and dole out “family boxes,” food aid meant to meet minimum survival needs. But our team on the ground report these boxes are woefully insufficient for ensuring children’s well-being. This plan cannot support a population of 2.1 million people, including over a million children.
We believe this new mechanism is also incompatible with humanitarian principles, including neutrality, impartiality and independence, and fails to meet Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law. That law requires parties to a conflict to allow and facilitate rapid, safe and unimpeded passage of humanitarian assistance.
Further, because the new system includes the presence of security at the distribution sites, there have been concerns that these locations could be perceived as military objectives. This could place humanitarian personnel and civilians seeking assistance at those sites at risk of attacks.
Israel has defended the new distribution effort as a way to prevent Hamas from stealing supplies. But the United Nations and its partners already know how to get humanitarian aid inspected, cleared, offloaded and delivered — without diversion, without delay and with dignity.
Our aid can be tracked from point of registration to point of delivery. Together with our partners, we accompany our supplies to the end. Our food reaches the malnourished child. Our vaccines go into a child’s arm. And we are transparent about the sources of funding for our aid programs.
What we need is for UNICEF and its humanitarian partners to be allowed to do our jobs. We have proven that essentials like medicine, vaccines, water, food and nutrition for babies can reach those in distress, wherever they are, when we have unfettered and safe access.
We are not asking for the impossible. We are asking for international humanitarian law to be respected and applied; for a return to the functioning U.N.-led aid pipeline with safe and sustained humanitarian access through all available crossings; for the return of all remaining hostages; and for Hamas and Israel to agree to a durable cease-fire.
If these steps are taken, we can begin to light a path out of the darkness of war for Miran and all the other children in Gaza and Israel affected by this war. I urge all parties and those with influence over them to let us and our humanitarian partners get on with our work. The alternative risks the militarization of humanitarian aid and would likely doom Gaza’s children to more suffering and death.
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