Families First in SAN FRANCISCO!
Saturday, July 26
11am – 12pm PDT
Ocean Beach, Stairway 7
Great Highway & Balboa Street
San Francisco, CA 94121
On July 26, Americans in every corner of the country will come together in peaceful marches, rallies, and actions to say: our families come first—not billionaires, not authoritarians, and not corrupt politicians.
From rural towns to major cities, Families First actions will bring people together to collectively demand an end to policies that harm children, seniors, and our families. We reject the Administration's actions that have gutted essential programs like Medicaid, FEMA, food stamps, school lunches, and more, all so a handful of billionaires can get tax giveaways.
We are coming together to say in unity: our families come first.
A core principle behind all Families First events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events. Weapons of any kind, including those legally permitted, should not be brought to events.
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A Trial Date Is Set on August 26 for Alejandro Orellana, Join the Call for National Protests to Drop the Charges!
https://stopfbi.org/news/a-trial-date-is-set-on-august-26-for-alejandro-orellana-join-the-call-for-national-protests-to-drop-the-charges/
A trial date of August 26 was set for immigrant rights activist Alejandro Orellana at his July 3 court appearance in front of a room packed with supporters. Orellana was arrested by the FBI on June 12 for protesting against ICE in Los Angeles. He faces up to 5 years in prison for two bogus federal charges: conspiracy to commit civil disorder, and aiding and abetting civil disorder.
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression is calling for a national day of protests on the first day of Orellana's trial, August 26th, to demand that the charges be dropped. To everyone who believes in the right to free speech, to protest ICE, and to say no to deportations, we urge you to organize a local protest on that day at the nearest federal courthouse.
Orellana has spent much of his adult life fighting for justice for Chicanos, Latinos, and many others. He has opposed the killings of Chicanos and Latinos by the LAPD, such as 14-year-old Jesse Romero, stood against US wars, protested in defense of others targeted by political repression, and has been a longtime member of the activist group, Centro CSO, based out of East LA. His life is full of examples of courage, integrity, and a dedication to justice.
In contrast, the US Attorney who charged him, Bilal Essayli, believes in Trump's racist MAGA vision and does a lot to carry it out. He defended Trump's decision to defy the state of California and deploy the California National Guard to put down anti-ICE protests. Essayli has charged other protesters, including David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union California, who was held on a $50,000 bond.
Another Centro CSO immigrants rights activist, Verita Topete, was ambushed by the FBI on June 26. They served her a warrant and seized her phone. Orellana and his fellow organizers like Topete stand for the community that protested Trump last month. Essayli represents Trump’s attempts to crush that movement.
This case against Orellana is political repression, meant to stop the growth of the national immigrants rights movement. The basis for his arrest was the claim that he drove a truck carrying face shields for protesters, as police geared up to put down protests with rubber bullets. People of conscience are standing with Orellana. because nothing he did or is accused of doing is wrong. There is no crime in protesting Trump, deportations, and ICE. To protest is his - and our - First Amendment right. It’s up to us to make sure that Essayli and Trump fail to repress this movement and silence Orellana's supporters.
Just as he stood up for immigrants last month, we call on everyone to stand up for Orellana on August 26 and demand the charges be dropped. On the June 27 National Day of Action for Alejandro Orellana, at least 16 cities held protests or press conferences in front of their federal courthouses. We’ll make sure there are even more on August 26. In addition to planning local protests, we ask that organizations submit statements of support and to join in the call to drop the charges.
You can find protest organizing materials on our website, stopfbi.org. Please send information about your local protests and any statements of support to stopfbi@gmail.com. We will see you in the streets!
On August 26, Protest at Your Federal Courthouse for Alejandro Orellana!
Drop the Charges Now!
Protesting ICE Is Not a Crime!
Copyright © 2025 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
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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) Gaza Health Ministry Says Israeli Military Killed 32 Near Aid Site
The latest deaths add to U.N. figures showing that more than 670 Palestinians have been killed since May near sites built under a new Israel-backed aid system.
By Patrick KingsleyBilal Shbair and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad
Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem; Bilal Shbair from Khan Younis, Gaza; and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel, July 19, 2025
"The United Nations said this past week that more than 670 Palestinians had been killed in similar episodes near sites built under the new system."
Mourners at the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Saturday with the bodies of two people killed near a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site. Credit...Mariam Dagga/Associated Press
Israeli soldiers opened fire near a food distribution site in southern Gaza on Saturday morning, according to survivors and the Israeli military, in a series of incidents that the Gazan health authorities said had collectively killed at least 32 people.
The bloodshed was the latest violence connected to a new and deeply contentious food distribution system in Gaza that was introduced by Israel nearly two months ago. The United Nations said this past week that more than 670 Palestinians had been killed in similar episodes near sites built under the new system.
“This has become my terrifying daily routine,” said Luay Abu Oda, 24, who described in an interview how he had survived the violence on Saturday. “I dropped to the ground and pretended to be dead just to survive. I couldn’t even reach for my phone to check the time.”
The Israeli military said in a statement that its troops, positioned about 1,000 yards from a food site in Rafah, southern Gaza, had fired “warning shots” on Saturday morning after people approached them and did not comply with an order to halt. The site had not yet opened for the day, the statement added.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private Israel-backed group that manages the new system and oversees the site closest to the violence on Saturday, said that there were “no incidents at or near any of our aid distribution sites today.” But it acknowledged that some deadly Israeli military activity had “occurred hours before our sites opened,” most of it “several kilometers away from the nearest G.H.F. site.”
Though the foundation has told civilians to avoid the sites before they open, many often head there early, sometimes walking for hours to reach the aid points, because food is so scarce in Gaza and the handouts often run out quickly.
Israeli soldiers have in recent months repeatedly shot at crowds of Palestinians making that journey, seemingly as a crude and lethal form of crowd control. Survivors of Saturday’s incident described a similar pattern.
Mr. Abu Oda, 24, said that he had walked for miles to get close to the front of the line before the site opened on Saturday. After he joined large numbers of civilians several hundred yards from the entrance, the crowd lurched chaotically toward it, prompting soldiers to fire without warning, he said.
“Someone screamed, ‘It’s open now!’ and the crowd surged forward,” Mr. Abu Oda said in an interview near the hospital where the wounded were taken. “I was near the front when gunfire broke out,” he added. “One man ahead of me and two beside me were shot.”
Later, Mr. Abu Oda said, he helped to load wounded people into two tuk-tuks, or three-wheeled taxis.
“The injured were packed like fish in a box — bleeding, screaming, stacked on top of each other,” he said.
Another survivor, Mohammed al-Hato, said he had been shot in a separate incident, about two miles away, after he had joined a fast-moving crowd of people trying to reach the site via an access road. As the crowd ran down the road, soldiers nearby suddenly opened fire, he said.
“I ran like everyone else, and then, halfway down the road, the shooting started,” Mr. al-Hato, 33, said in an interview in the hospital. “I saw people dropping around me.”
After Mr. al-Hato tried to flee, he was shot in his right leg, he said.
“I’m still here at the hospital since 8 a.m., waiting for a bone specialist,” Mr. al-Hato said. “All I wanted was a sack of flour.”
Such deadly incidents have become common since late May, when Israel allowed the foundation to distribute food to Palestinians from a handful of sites in areas under Israeli control.
For now, the system has largely replaced one run by the United Nations, which previously distributed food from hundreds of points, mainly in areas controlled by Hamas.
The foundation says it is happy to work with the United Nations, but U.N. officials say Israeli restrictions make it hard to operate.
Israel says the new system is necessary to prevent Hamas from stealing, stockpiling and selling the food at high prices to civilians. Aid groups say it has turned the process of seeking food into a near-daily death trap because it brings crowds of desperate and hungry civilians into regular proximity with Israeli troops.
Israeli officials have acknowledged that troops have fired on crowds approaching the aid sites, but suggested that the death tolls have been inflated. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has said that violence rarely occurs at the sites themselves and has accused Hamas of encouraging the unrest and attacking Palestinians employed at the sites.
More generally, aid groups say that the new system has yet to prevent widespread hunger, which surged in Gaza after Israel’s 80-day blockade on all food and fuel from March to May.
This past week, one of the main United Nations agencies in Gaza, UNRWA, said that it screened about 10,600 children in the second half of June and found that around 900, or nearly one in 10, was suffering from malnourishment.
Ameera Harouda contributed reporting.
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2) Israeli Troops Kill Dozens Seeking Aid Near Border, Gaza Officials Say
Thousands of Palestinians had gathered to try to get aid from U.N. trucks entering the territory.
By Aaron BoxermanIsabel Kershner and Ameera Harouda
Aaron Boxerman and Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, and Ameera Harouda from Doha, Qatar, July 20, 2025
Palestinians mourning their relatives at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Sunday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israeli forces killed and wounded dozens of Palestinians on Sunday in the northern Gaza Strip, after crowds gathered near a crossing from Israel to try to seize aid from United Nations trucks entering the enclave, according to the Gaza health ministry and health workers.
The episode was the latest in a string of deadly shootings as hunger and desperation have gripped Palestinians in Gaza during Israel’s nearly two-year campaign against Hamas.
The latest attack took place near the Zikim crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel. More than 60 people were killed while seeking aid in northern Gaza on Sunday, according to the health ministry and Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
A field hospital operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society in northern Gaza was flooded with gunshot victims from the episode near Zikim. The hospital received two of the dead and more than 100 wounded, said Nebal Farsakh, a spokeswoman for the Red Crescent.
Israeli soldiers fired “warning shots” after thousands of Gazans gathered in the area, the Israeli military said in a statement. They had opened fire to “remove an immediate threat posed to them,” it added, but did not specify the nature of the threat.
The Israeli military also said that the reported number of casualties did “not align” with its initial review, but it did not provide an alternative toll. The military was continuing to examine the episode, it said.
The United Nations’ World Food Program said in a statement that a convoy of 25 trucks carrying food for Palestinians was entering northern Gaza when it “encountered massive crowds of hungry civilians which came under gunfire.”
The agency said it was “working with authorities to gather more details about the incident.”
Chaos has dominated aid distribution in Gaza amid widespread hunger in the territory. Israeli soldiers have repeatedly opened fire near huge crowds of desperate Palestinians heading to sites run by American contractors for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private and controversial Israeli-backed group, according to witnesses and the Israeli military.
At least 32 people were killed on Saturday after Israeli soldiers began shooting near a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site in southern Gaza, according to the Gaza health ministry. The episode on Sunday did not occur near one of the foundation’s sites.
Shadi al-Nazli, 27, said he went to the border area on Sunday morning after hearing a rumor that trucks carrying flour would be entering through the Zikim crossing. The zone is known to be dangerous, as Israeli soldiers sometimes open fire if Palestinians get too close to the border, he said.
Palestinians frequently rush to seize aid from trucks as soon as they begin emerging from the Israeli side, Mr. al-Nazli said. Israeli soldiers shoot in an effort to keep the Palestinians away, but the desperate crowds are frequently undeterred, he said.
On Sunday, he said that “there were massive crowds of people, most of whom had spent the night there.” After the trucks crossed, the situation quickly devolved into gunfire, he said.
After the deadly shooting on Sunday, the Israeli military warned Palestinians to leave the populated areas of northern Gaza and parts of Gaza City that have been subject to previous evacuation orders, describing them as “combat zones.”
That followed an Israeli military order to Palestinians earlier in the day to evacuate parts of the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah, one of the few areas in the territory where Israel has not conducted major ground operations during its military campaign against Hamas.
Many Palestinians had sought refuge around Deir al-Balah after being displaced several times from other parts of the enclave, because it has remained largely intact during the devastating 21-month Israeli campaign. The order to leave further shrinks the areas where the roughly two million residents of Gaza can live in relative safety and caused panic among Palestinians afraid that Israel was set to expand its ground invasion.
It was not clear if the evacuation notice portended an imminent expansion of Israel’s military incursion or was meant as a pressure tactic to wrest concessions from Hamas in the sluggish negotiations for a cease-fire.
More than 57,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children, have been killed during the war, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The war was ignited by a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 others taken hostage.
Many in Deir Al-Balah have been trying to find alternative accommodation, said Abdelhalim Awad, a local bakery owner.
“These are already areas packed with tent encampments,” Mr. Awad said. “People are wondering where else they can even go.”
Mr. Awad’s home is just north of where the Israeli military has ordered people to leave, and his bakery is in the evacuation zone. He said he feared the area where he lives may be next.
“This might be part of the negotiations — or the army might invade tomorrow,” he said. “There’s a lot of fear. We don’t know what will happen.”
Israeli ground forces have largely refrained from operating in a patch of central Gaza, including Deir al-Balah. The military has been worried that doing so could endanger the remaining hostages who were taken in 2023 and are believed to be held there, according to Israeli analysts.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an Israeli organization that advocates for the hostages and their families, expressed alarm over the military’s announcement.
“Can anyone promise us that this decision will not come at the cost of losing our loved ones?” the group said in a statement, adding, “For the hostages, this is not a ‘card’ in negotiations, but a tangible and immediate danger to their fate.”
About 50 captives remain in Gaza, of whom about 20 are believed to be alive, according to the Israeli government. Hamas officials have said that their captors are under orders to kill the hostages should Israeli troops close in on them.
Myra Noveck and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
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3) Mossad Chief Pushes for U.S. Assistance in Ethnically Cleansing Gaza
By The Cradle News Desk
—The Cradle, July 19, 2025
(Photo credit: AFP)
David Barnea, the director of Israel's Mossad spy agency, held meetings in Washington this week seeking help from US officials to convince countries to take hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who Israel plans to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, Axios reported on 19 July.
According to two sources, the Israeli spy chief told White House envoy Steve Witkoff that Israel has been in talks with Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Libya to accept Palestinians as refugees.
While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims his government's goal of expelling much or all of Gaza's population will be "voluntary" for Palestinians, US and Israeli legal experts say it would constitute ethnic cleansing and a clear war crime.
During their meeting, "Barnea told Witkoff that Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Libya had expressed openness to receiving large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza," the two sources speaking with Axios said.
"Barnea suggested that the US offer incentives to those countries and help Israel convince them," Axios wrote.
Witkoff did not commit to assisting Israel with its plans, one source said.
The White House, the Israeli Prime Minister's Office, and the foreign ministries of Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Libya did not comment on the report when queried by Axios.
In February, President Trump proposed the expulsion of all two million Palestinians from Gaza to allow Israel to annex and develop it as the "Riviera of the Middle East."
US officials reportedly insisted that Netanyahu find countries that would agree to receive large numbers of Palestinians displaced from the Gaza Strip.
Nearly all of Gaza's over 2 million residents have been internally displaced during the war, as Israel's bombing campaign has leveled much of the strip, including homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools.
Huge swathes, including residential neighborhoods, have also been destroyed by Israeli bulldozers in an effort to make Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians and force them to live in tent camps.
Israel is seeking to force them all into a large concentration camp to be constructed on the ruins of the destroyed city of Rafah on the Egyptian border.
"That plan has sparked concerns in Egypt and many Western countries that Israel is preparing for the mass displacement of Palestinians out of Gaza, something Netanyahu's ultranationalist coalition partners and many inside his own party have been pushing for years," Axios wrote.
On 13 October, just one week after Hamas attacked Israeli settlements and military bases, Israel's Ministry of Intelligence issued a report recommending the occupation of Gaza and total transfer of its 2.3 million inhabitants to Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.
The document, which was leaked a short time later, identifies a plan to transfer all residents of the Gaza Strip to North Sinai as the preferred option among three alternatives regarding the future of the Palestinians in Gaza at the end of the current war.
The document recommended that Israel evacuate the Gaza population to Sinai during the war, establish tent cities and new cities in northern Sinai to accommodate the deported population, and then create a closed security zone stretching several kilometers inside Egypt.
The deported Palestinians would not be allowed to return to any areas near the Israeli border, the leaked proposal stated.
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4) Two Deadly Shootings in Two Days Show Dangers That Now Come With Aid in Gaza
On Saturday, Israeli soldiers shot Palestinians near an Israel-backed food site. On Sunday, they fired at people gathering near a U.N. convoy. Both incidents were symptoms of broader problems.
By Patrick Kingsley, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 21, 2025
Mourners after Israeli troops opened fire on people trying to get aid north of Gaza City on Sunday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Over the weekend, two deadly incidents on consecutive days highlighted how the two main ways of distributing food to the hungry in Gaza — one backed by Israel, the other involving the United Nations — both come with profound risk for Palestinian civilians.
In an incident on Saturday, Israeli soldiers opened fire on civilians moving chaotically toward food distribution sites run by Israel-backed private contractors in Israeli-controlled areas. In another incident on Sunday, Israeli soldiers opened fire on civilians rushing to seize aid from a convoy of food trucks sent by the United Nations toward areas controlled by Hamas.
Supporters of the Israel-backed system used the episode on Sunday to highlight the failures of the U.N.-led system. Those favoring the U.N. system said the killings on Saturday illustrated the failures of Israel’s approach.
Israel says it is necessary to put food distribution sites in areas beyond Hamas’s control in order to make it harder for both fighters from the militant group and civilian looters to steal supplies. Critics of that approach say it forces hungry civilians to cross Israeli military lines, putting them at greater risk.
Three broader dynamics highlight the problems associated with both approaches.
In both incidents over the weekend, the Israeli military used live fire to contain unrest, instead of using nonlethal forms of crowd control.
Civilians are also ready to risk death by Israeli gunfire to avoid death by starvation in Gaza, where food is scarce following Israel’s 80-day blockade between March and May.
In addition, after 22 months of war, there is no functional governing system in most of Gaza, with Hamas no longer providing social services or law enforcement in most of the territory.
Israel has decapitated Hamas’s leadership, demolished many government buildings and controls the majority of the land. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has repeatedly decided against creating a system of transitional governance — whether through formal military occupation or the empowerment of Palestinian alternatives to Hamas.
“There’s a blame game and everyone is looking at the technical details and about how the aid is distributed,” said Shira Efron, an expert on aid systems in Gaza at Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group.
Three broader dynamics highlight the problems associated with both approaches.
In both incidents over the weekend, the Israeli military used live fire to contain unrest, instead of using nonlethal forms of crowd control.
Civilians are also ready to risk death by Israeli gunfire to avoid death by starvation in Gaza, where food is scarce following Israel’s 80-day blockade between March and May.
In addition, after 22 months of war, there is no functional governing system in most of Gaza, with Hamas no longer providing social services or law enforcement in most of the territory.
Israel has decapitated Hamas’s leadership, demolished many government buildings and controls the majority of the land. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has repeatedly decided against creating a system of transitional governance — whether through formal military occupation or the empowerment of Palestinian alternatives to Hamas.
“There’s a blame game and everyone is looking at the technical details and about how the aid is distributed,” said Shira Efron, an expert on aid systems in Gaza at Israel Policy Forum, a New York-based research group. “But the bigger issue is the lawlessness and the breakdown of governance,” she added. “After 22 months of war, it’s anarchy in Gaza. And without addressing the core issue of what should happen next in Gaza, there won’t be a solution.”
Responding to such criticism, Mr. Netanyahu has said that Hamas must be completely defeated before detailed postwar plans can begin. But his critics, including many in Israel, say that it is harder to defeat Hamas without planning for its replacement.
My NYT Comment: Are you serious, Mr. Kingsley? The problem is lack of law and order among Palestinians? Is this a bid to call for full-scale US/Israel military occupation to "maintain law and order"? It's US/Israel outright murder and mayhem of innocent men, women and children to fortify Israel as a firm base for the U.S. military in the region. What about ending Israeli apartheid—one set of laws for Palestinians under Israel's military rule and another set of laws for Israeli's who are ruled by their own police force. And what about the West Bank and the illegal Israeli settlers stealing Palestinian land and destroying their streets and houses? Genocide is Israel's law and order fortified by the U.S.—by our tax dollars! What about freedom, democracy and equality for all? —Bonnie Weinstein
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5) Israel Refuses to Renew Visa of Top U.N. Humanitarian Official for Gaza
The head of the agency that helps oversee international aid deliveries to the territory had criticized the impact of Israeli policy on civilians.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 21, 2025
In a screen grab taken from a handout video provided by the United Nations, Jonathan Whittall is standing near a destroyed hospital in Gaza in 2024. Credit...United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, via Reuters
Israel has refused to renew the visa of a senior United Nations official who oversees humanitarian affairs in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, the country’s foreign minister said on Sunday, further straining the already tense ties between the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the organization.
The U.N. official, Jonathan Whittall, will not be allowed to continue working in the country, said Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister. Mr. Whittall is the acting head of the local branch of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which plays a major role in managing the entry of desperately needed aid into the territory.
Mr. Saar cited what he called Mr. Whittall’s “biased and hostile conduct against Israel” as the grounds for the decision. Andrea De Domenico, Mr. Whittall’s predecessor, also had to leave Israel when the government refused to allow him to continue working there.
The Israeli authorities had indicated that Mr. Whittall’s visa would not be extended beyond August, according to the U.N. agency, which is known as OCHA. It said the decision had come after remarks that he had made about Gazans being killed while trying to get food at aid distribution sites.
“Speaking about conditions we see on the ground is a core element of OCHA’s mandate,” the agency said in a statement in response to the decision not to renew Mr. Whittall’s visa. “Attempts to silence us are not new, but threats of reduced access to the civilians we’re trying to serve are intensifying.”
On Sunday, Israeli troops killed and wounded dozens of Palestinians after opening fire near a border crossing as U.N. aid trucks entered the territory, according to the Gaza health ministry and health workers.
The United Nations has strongly criticized the devastating humanitarian impact of the nearly two-year Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza. The war was set off by the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which the Israeli authorities said killed roughly 1,200 people and saw the taking of about 200 people hostage.
The subsequent Israeli military campaign has killed more than 57,000 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry there. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Its tolls include thousands of children.
A vast majority of Gazans have been displaced and now face a hunger crisis, with the World Food Program saying that nearly one in three are not eating for days at a time because they have limited access to food.
Mr. Whittall had been a frequent critic of Israeli policies on aid, particularly an Israeli-backed relief effort run by the private and contentious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Hundreds of Palestinians seeking aid near the foundation’s sites have been shot dead as huge crowds have flocked to the area. Palestinian witnesses have said Israeli soldiers opened fire; the Israeli military has frequently said its soldiers fired “warning shots.”
“What we are seeing is carnage. It is weaponized hunger,” Mr. Whittall said in June. “It is forced displacement. It’s a death sentence for people just trying to survive.”
The decision to effectively prevent Mr. Whittall from continuing in his position — where he has split his time between Gaza and Jerusalem — adds to a growing list of tensions between Israel and the United Nations.
In January, Israel effectively banned the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the main U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, from operating in the country. The agency, known as UNRWA, has been a lifeline for Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza, employing thousands of teachers and health workers.
The Israeli government has long been at odds with UNRWA. But since the war in Gaza began, Israeli officials have branded the agency as fundamentally compromised by Hamas. They have also accused specific employees of involvement in the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
The agency fired several employees after Israel leveled the accusations last year. A U.N.-mandated review of the broader allegations found that UNRWA had “a significant number of mechanisms and procedures to ensure compliance with the humanitarian principles.”
Tom Fletcher, the head of OCHA, has also been a prominent critic of Israeli policy in Gaza. Mr. Fletcher, a former British diplomat, has accused Israel of “deliberately and unashamedly imposing inhumane conditions on civilians in the occupied Palestinian territory.”
But he has also been sharply criticized for some of his public statements. In May, Mr. Fletcher claimed that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die in two days unless Israel allowed in sufficient aid. His agency subsequently walked back the claim and Mr. Fletcher later said he regretted making the widely reported accusation.
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6) Disabled Americans Fear What Medicaid Cuts Could Do to Them
The White House says roughly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts won’t limit home- and community-based care. Health care experts disagree.
By Maggie Astor, July 21, 2025
Courtney Demmitt-Rice at home in Herriman, Utah, with her daughter June Rice, 10. Credit...Alex Goodlett for The New York Times
It takes round-the-clock care to keep 10-year-old June Rice alive.
Her ileostomy bag needs to be emptied multiple times a day, and the exposed end of her intestine must be inspected. Her body has to be regularly repositioned in her wheelchair so that she won’t get sores. Her saliva needs to be suctioned from her mouth to prevent aspiration, and her food and medication must be administered through a gastric tube.
June has rare diseases that affect her intestines and brain. Her parents do what they can for her, but they have jobs and two other children — they can’t do it all. What allows June to live at home, go to school and hang out with friends is a Medicaid program in Utah that provides in-home nurses, a type of benefit called home- and community-based care.
That care means she doesn’t have to live in a nursing home or other medical institution, said her mother, Courtney Demmitt-Rice.
“We would do anything to keep that from happening,” she said. “But your body can only give so much.”
Medicaid is best known as a program for low-income people, but it is also a key vehicle by which disabled Americans of varying income levels receive health care that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. June is one of about 4.5 million Americans who depend specifically on its home- and community-based care services, which often come through specialized programs known as waivers.
That 4.5 million includes many older Americans who are on Medicare too but can’t get the home care they need through that. But it also includes many working-age adults, and about 14 percent of the total are 18 or younger, according to the health research group KFF.
Now many of these Americans, and their families, fear the services could be at risk because of the roughly $1 trillion in federal Medicaid spending cuts to come over the next 10 years, part of the sweeping policy bill that President Trump signed into law this month.
“Everyone’s just bracing for impact,” said Alison Chandra, a pediatric nurse who provides home care for June.
Federal law deems most home- and community-based services as optional, so they are often targeted when states have to tighten their belts. When temporary Great Recession increases in Medicaid funding expired in the early 2010s, for example, every state reduced home care by limiting enrollment or lowering spending on existing recipients.
The White House and congressional Republicans said people with disabilities would not be affected by the cuts; the Trump administration maintains that states can balance their budgets just by reducing hospital reimbursements for Medicaid services. Theo Merkel, a policy adviser to Mr. Trump, said claims of a threat to home care were “intentionally misleading.”
But health care experts disagree. They said that lower hospital reimbursements would be insufficient for many states, and that cuts to home- and community-based care were a real possibility.
“It’s not accurate to argue that every state can simply make up any funding gaps by cutting hospital reimbursement only,” said Dr. Benjamin Sommers, a physician and professor of health care economics at Harvard. He called it “wishful thinking.”
Any reductions could affect disabled people’s ability to live with loved ones, go to school, hold jobs, enjoy public activities and contribute to their communities.
Rob Stone, 28, a disability rights advocate in Maryland, relies on two state Medicaid programs for nursing and other assistance to manage a rare form of dystonia linked with Parkinson’s disease.
“I don’t want to just survive,” he said. “Medicaid helps me live a fulfilling, independent life in my community. I should be able to control my own life, just like anyone else.”
Health care experts anticipate cuts to home- and community-based care in some states because the new law limits provider taxes. Almost every state taxes hospitals, then uses the revenue to pay the hospitals for treating Medicaid patients. That increases Medicaid spending on paper and triggers more federal matching funds, which states use to cover various Medicaid services.
The 22 affected states where provider taxes are higher than the new law’s cap — 3.5 percent of net patient revenue — will lose federal money. The White House argued that this would not affect home- and community-based care because states could make up the difference by paying hospitals less for Medicaid services, reducing the rates to match those of its sister program, Medicare.
Experts said the White House’s argument was unrealistic. Not all states pay higher prices for Medicaid than for Medicare, and even for those that do, the numbers don’t add up, Dr. Sommers said. Many states will have to find money somewhere else, too, and each state will have to choose whether that somewhere is home- and community-based care or another part of their budget.
Adrianna McIntyre, an assistant professor of health policy and politics at Harvard, noted that many hospitals were going to lose revenue from other parts of the law, too, and said cutting their payments could force some to close.
The law technically allows states to expand home- and community-based care to some people who weren’t previously eligible. However, Alice Burns, a Medicaid expert at KFF, said that provision “does nothing to address the fiscal pressures states will face” from the law overall.
Reductions could come in several forms. States could place further restrictions on who qualifies for coverage, cover fewer hours of care or lower pay for home health workers. Or they could eliminate waiver programs altogether. Even at existing funding levels, hundreds of thousands of people are on waiting lists for waivers, and those lines could get longer.
Disabled adults and families of disabled children said any cuts would have a profound effect on their lives. For many, home- and community-based care is the difference between living in an institution and a life comparable to peers who don’t have a disability.
In Kentucky, Boone Studer, 4, has a condition that causes severe skin wounds; a waiver program covers infection-preventing supplies that private insurance does not, plus physical and occupational therapy.
Ian Otbot, an 8-year-old in Pennsylvania who uses a feeding tube and catheter because of a mitochondrial disease, cannot go to school when one of his nurses is sick or unavailable.
And 9-year-old Spencer Everett, who has a gastric tube and tracheostomy, has been in regular public-school classrooms since kindergarten, thanks to the help of Ms. Chandra, who works with him in addition to June.
Even if the care for these children is not affected, states could cut services for new applicants. Pay reductions could also drive away home-care providers, making waiting lists for care even longer.
As a nurse for Medicaid recipients with 20 years of experience, Ms. Chandra makes $33 an hour, less than what she made one year out of nursing school in a pediatric intensive care unit.
Cuts may affect her work, but for her it’s personal, too. Her son, Ethan, once relied on Medicaid for open-heart surgeries for a life-threatening condition.
She said that she, and other families of disabled children, would do everything they could to handle cuts that came their way. But she didn’t know how people would manage if their fears materialized.
“Giving up is not something that parents of medically complex and disabled children know how to do,” she said. “I just don’t understand why they’re making it harder.”
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7) Trump’s Perversion of Justice Has Reached a New Phase
By David French, Opinion Columnist, July 20, 2025
President Trump’s Justice Department is turning civil rights enforcement upside down.
Last week, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, asked a federal judge to sentence a former Louisville police officer named Brett Hankison to one day in prison. Last year, a Kentucky jury convicted Hankison of violating Breonna Taylor’s civil rights when he fired multiple rounds from his handgun into her apartment on the night the police killed her.
The Taylor case was one of a series of dreadful killings of unarmed Black Americans that helped touch off America’s racial reckoning in 2020. It was also a paradigmatic example of the way that flawed systems interact with reckless police conduct to create fatal injustice.
In the early morning hours of March 13, 2020, police officers gathered outside Taylor’s apartment door. They had obtained a no-knock search warrant based on allegations that a suspected drug dealer named Jamarcus Glover had received packages at Taylor’s home. Glover and Taylor once had a relationship, but Taylor was not the target of the warrant.
The police on the scene were instructed to knock, even though they had a no-knock warrant. And here’s where the stories of witnesses start to diverge. Officers at the scene say they knocked and announced that they were the police. The early 911 calls indicate that neighbors didn’t know the police were present.
In fact, in initial statements made after the raid, not a single neighbor reported having heard the police identify themselves. One witness initially said the police did not announce themselves, but he later changed his story and claimed he heard the police identify themselves.
Taylor was in the apartment with her boyfriend, a man named Kenneth Walker. He testified that they were startled by a loud pounding on the door, and he said he never heard the police announce themselves. Concerned that the pounding might be coming from an intruder, he grabbed his gun, which he owned lawfully, and approached the door.
At that point, the police chose to forcibly enter the home and broke the door down. Walker, fearing a home invasion, fired and hit an officer. The police returned fire. They didn’t hit Walker, but they did hit Taylor, fatally wounding her. The injustice is staggering. She was innocent, she was unarmed, and she was gunned down in her own home.
So far, the story is more tragic than criminal. The police were serving a lawful search warrant. Walker was a lawful gun owner, and Kentucky’s so-called castle doctrine gave him a legal right to use deadly force if he had “reason to believe” that a person was unlawfully and forcibly entering his home.
At the same time, the police officers had their own legal right to return fire. Obviously, if a police officer is shot at, he can fire back to preserve his life. If that was the entirety of the case, then no charges should have been filed against anyone — not against Walker, who thought shadowy figures had just broken down Taylor’s door, and not against officers who were under fire.
In one of the terrible quirks of American law, because each of them was exercising his right to self-defense, the officers and Walker were essentially engaged in a legal gunfight.
But not Brett Hankison. As Rukmini Callimachi, my newsroom colleague, reported in 2020, Hankison “shot blindly into Breonna Taylor’s apartment from dozens of feet outside in the parking lot.” He fired 10 shots, three of which passed through the wall and slammed into a neighboring apartment, where a pregnant woman lived with her son and partner.
Hankison’s bullets didn’t hit Taylor, but his indiscriminate use of force violated her rights. The Louisville police department fired him in June 2020, and the termination letter said that his actions that night were “a shock to the conscience.”
Kentucky state prosecutors brought a wanton endangerment case against Hankison, but a state jury acquitted him of the charges in March 2022. Federal prosecutors obtained a civil rights indictment against Hankison, claiming that he had violated Taylor’s civil rights through the use of excessive force.
The first federal trial ended in a hung jury. The Biden Department of Justice tried him again and secured a conviction in November.
In her filing requesting a one-day sentence, Dhillon argued that the “jury’s verdict will almost certainly ensure that defendant Hankison never serves as a law enforcement officer again and will also likely ensure that he never legally possesses a firearm again.”
In other words, he’s suffered enough.
It’s hard to read those words — dripping with sympathy for an officer who wrongly used deadly force, endangering innocent people in two different apartments — at the same time that the Trump administration has been sending immigrants who’ve been convicted of no crimes at all into indefinite confinement in brutal and inhumane conditions overseas.
Here’s the key point: Trump’s corruption of justice isn’t just individual; it’s categorical. We have grown accustomed to him rewarding his loyalists and punishing his critics. That he fired the prosecutors who worked on his federal criminal cases while pardoning the Jan. 6 rioters represents a textbook case of individual favoritism.
The Trump administration’s abuse of the civil rights division is something else entirely. It had already initiated a “litigation freeze” on filing new civil rights cases, and it had indicated that it was even going to reconsider previous settlements and consent decrees intended to address police misconduct.
There is nothing inherently wrong with a new administration evaluating the actions of the old, but if that evaluation is resulting in perverse miscarriages of justice — as it is in Hankison’s case — then the very purpose of the civil rights division is being subverted, right before our eyes.
Civil rights laws are designed in part to protect innocent citizens — including, of course, innocent citizens from minority communities — from unjust government officials. Here, the legal world is turned upside down. The Justice Department is using its civil rights division to protect an unjust government official who violated the civil rights of an innocent individual.
It’s hard to describe how thoroughly Trump is disrupting and corrupting our system of justice. At every turn, the pattern is the same. His friends catch a break, and his foes get the boot. The same week that Dhillon intervened on behalf of Hankison, the Trump administration fired Maurene Comey, an assistant U.S. attorney who helped prosecute Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Sean Combs.
Comey wasn’t given a detailed explanation for the termination, but she’s the daughter of James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., one of Trump’s most hated foes.
Also last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted — as Democrats walked out in protest — to advance the nomination of Emil Bove III to serve as a judge on the federal Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Bove is one of Trump’s former criminal defense lawyers, and in Trump’s second term, he’s been one of Trump’s key loyalists in the Department of Justice.
Bove is the man who fired the Jan. 6 prosecutors. He ordered the Justice Department to dismiss the political corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York in exchange for his cooperation with Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda. A whistle-blower claims that in meetings Bove signaled his readiness to defy orders from federal courts, a claim he denies.
The judge in Hankison’s case, Rebecca Grady Jennings — a Trump appointee — does not have to accept Dhillon’s recommendation. She has the power to hold the line and impose a just sentence for Hankison’s criminal acts.
Even if she does the right thing, though, we can’t rely only on judges to preserve our system of justice. That isn’t how the system is supposed to work. Each branch of government has its own constitutional obligations. In the best of times, even a good president has too much power to be adequately restrained by the judicial branch alone.
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8) Trump’s Student Arrests, and the Lawsuit Fighting Them, Tread New Ground
The Trump administration’s efforts to deport foreign students who espoused pro-Palestinian views under a little-used foreign policy provision have no obvious legal parallel.
By Zach Montague, Reporting from Boston, July 22, 2025
Demonstrators rally outside of Columbia University at West 116th St. and Broadway in Manhattan to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and former Columbia student in March. Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
The four veteran immigration agents who recently took the stand in federal court had at least two things in common. All were career law enforcement officials. And none could remember ever being asked to make arrests like the ones they carried out earlier this year.
The men said they acted on orders handed down from Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s office in March to detain several noncitizen students, including a doctoral student from Tufts University whose arrest was captured on video and garnered significant attention. Mr. Rubio had abruptly revoked their legal status, which cleared them for detention by immigration agents, citing a rarely used law.
The agents’ testimony — given as part of a trial that concluded in Boston on Monday over the Trump administration’s efforts to deport foreign students who espoused pro-Palestinian views — underscored a major theme of President Trump’s return to the White House. The administration’s tactics have no obvious parallel as Mr. Trump pushes the bounds of executive power and defies legal limits to carry out his agenda.
Challenges to his policies are also, by necessity, treading new ground.
The academic associations that sued over the highly publicized wave of arrests in March have said the government targeted those international students in violation of the First Amendment. In court over the past two weeks, lawyers for the associations argued that the Trump administration stretched Mr. Rubio’s narrow power to revoke visas and green cards in order to stifle the speech of the most vulnerable activists and chill political activity on campuses more broadly.
The government dismissed the notion in its closing arguments on Monday, saying the idea of a coordinated policy targeting noncitizen activists is “the product of the imagination and creative conjuring.”
The Supreme Court has already held that noncitizens in the United States have the same First Amendment rights as citizens in several contexts. Still, constitutional scholars and legal experts have warned that it is precisely because the Trump administration’s actions are so novel that the lawsuit carries some inherent risk, as courts have not previously addressed all the potentially thorny legal questions at hand.
The suit fundamentally pits a clear authority, granted to the secretary of state by Congress, against the protections granted to noncitizens under the First Amendment, in a way that has not been tested before. And should it eventually reach the Supreme Court, the court’s conservative majority may be particularly unconstrained by legal history in deciding whether to allow the Trump administration to continue.
“It is risky because obviously the courts might decide the government can deport people because of what they say, and that would be just an incredible setback — a terrifying setback, I would say — for freedom of speech,” said Michael Kagan, a law professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He added that “one reason we haven’t had this test before is because governments did not do this before in the modern era of free speech law.”
In their testimony last week, the four current and former Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents recalled gearing up to arrest individuals including Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and legal permanent resident, and Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts doctoral student, after being notified the students’ green card or visa had been revoked.
Mr. Khalil played a leading role in pro-Palestinian protests on his campus. Ms. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen in the country on a student visa, attracted attention for an essay she helped publish in a student newspaper that criticized university leaders for their response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
The orders advised that Mr. Rubio had relied on a little-used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a 1952 law amended in 1990, that allows the government to deport a person based on speech only after the secretary personally determines that their presence “would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.”
The use of the provision on student activists represented a sharp break from decades of immigration policy. During the Biden administration, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, then the homeland security secretary, formalized a policy promising that a noncitizens’ exercise of First Amendment rights “should never be a factor in deciding to take enforcement action.”
When Mr. Khalil was arrested in March, the first of several similar detentions, 150 lawyers and legal scholars filed a brief arguing that the provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act invoked against him was so vague that it should be found unconstitutional.
“No one outside the Department of State and, perhaps, the president ever knows what our nation’s frequently covert foreign policy is at any given time,” they wrote, quoting from a related Supreme Court case.
A data analysis accompanying that brief found that out of 11.7 million immigration cases logged by the Justice Department since 1990, the foreign policy provision had previously been invoked only 15 times and, even then, typically alongside other charges. In only four cases was the person facing the charge ultimately removed from the country.
Multiple students arrested by the Trump administration were held in immigration detention for months, and have since been released as their individual immigration cases proceed.
Cristina Rodríguez, a professor at Yale Law School, said that Congress had revised the law in the 1990s with the intent of raising the threshold for its use.
“This is a provision in the immigration code that is ripe for abuse because it is so vague,” she said.
Mr. Rubio’s conclusion that multiple pro-Palestinian activists all interfered with U.S. foreign policy was dubious, she added, because in time the government’s argument “could apply to a whole range of speech. It could apply to climate change activism, or any number of forms of speech that we think ought to be protected.”
Civil rights organizations involved in the Boston case or lawsuits brought by individual students, including the A.C.L.U. and the Knight First Amendment Institute, have argued that the Trump administration clearly set out with a goal of stamping out political speech on campuses in a way that could have far-reaching consequences.
“If noncitizens can be deported based on their political speech, then they have no First Amendment rights at all because they must always, always worry that their speech and associations will displease those in power,” Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute, said in closing arguments on Monday.
The emerging facts in the case, coming from sworn testimony, suggest that the administration specifically investigated professors and students who had protested against Israel, while claiming publicly without evidence that those individuals had helped rally support for Hamas or terrorist organizations more generally. Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist group, attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The Israeli government’s military response in Gaza prompted the campus protests.
Jonathan Jacoby, the national director of the Nexus Project, a Jewish watchdog organization, said the justifications the Trump administration has leaned on closely tracked with strategies laid out in Project Esther, a policy proposal by the Heritage Foundation aimed at undermining the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States.
“These are examples of the Trump administration weaponizing legitimate concerns about Jewish safety, capitalizing on or manipulating Jewish fear to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” he said. “What you see happening in Boston right now is part of that script: They’re saying that pro-Palestinian demonstrations are an expression of support for Hamas.”
The academic organizations behind the lawsuit aim to block the government from continuing to carry out any deportations based on pro-Palestinian viewpoints. But the lawsuit notably does not challenge the foreign policy provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, or the legal authority Mr. Rubio has claimed, focusing narrowly on the way the administration has exploited the law.
Throughout the trial, the Justice Department has denied that the government ever pursued a deportation policy targeting student activists, and said it made determinations about students on a case-by-case basis.
William G. Young, the judge presiding over the trial, indicated he would need some time to think before ruling.
Ms. Rodríguez said it was important for the academic associations and civil rights groups to pursue the case on First Amendment grounds precisely because of the question of whether Mr. Rubio had worked outside of Congress’s vision for the law. (Judges in other cases have questioned whether the law itself is unconstitutional as applied to individual students.)
But she said the law as it is written gives the government discretion, and it can be very difficult for groups on the outside to prove that the government set out to abuse those authorities in a systematic way.
“They’re using their discretion to go after people with this provision in ways it has not been used before — in fact, I think you could say based on Congress’s amendments in 1990, ways it was not intended to be used,” she said. “It’s just that proving that in court will be challenging.”
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9) Trump Releases Thousands of Martin Luther King Jr. Files
Historians said they saw little of note in the assassination records that President Trump disclosed despite opposition from most of Dr. King’s family.
By Rick Rojas and Glenn Thrush, Published July 21, 2025, Updated July 22, 2025
Rick Rojas reported from Atlanta, and Glenn Thrush from Washington.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. before his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. Credit...Bettman Archive, via Getty Images
More than 6,000 documents related to the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., totaling nearly a quarter-million pages, were posted to the website of the National Archives late Monday afternoon, in what the administration hailed as a triumph of transparency.
But several noted King historians said they had found little in the way of new revelations about the death of the civil rights leader in the documents, and noted that the trove does not include F.B.I. wiretap recordings of Dr. King and other materials that remain under court seal until 2027.
The release on Monday, with no prior notice, came at a time when Mr. Trump and White House officials have sought to divert attention from right-wing backlash demanding the release of files related to the death of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump administration officials said the King assassination documents include notes on the leads pursued by investigators, interviews with people who knew his killer, James Earl Ray, and previously unreleased details of interactions with foreign intelligence services during the manhunt for Mr. Ray.
A lone audio file released on Monday includes part of a law enforcement interview with Jerry Ray, one of James Earl Ray’s siblings. In a statement, officials said the published documents had “never been digitized and sat collecting dust in facilities across the federal government for decades.”
Many of the pages have been rendered almost illegible by time and the digitizing process. There were random and wide-ranging accounts of the investigation and manhunt, including hundreds of news clippings, tips from the public, accounts of Mr. Ray’s forays into dance classes and locksmith school, and his fondness for aliases drawn from James Bond novels.
David Garrow, the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning King biography as well as a book about the F.B.I.’s spying campaign on him, said his initial review led him to conclude that there was little of public interest in the files, much of which had already been disclosed. “I saw nothing that struck me as new,” he said.
In 2019, Mr. Garrow published an article that recounted claims he had found in F.B.I. documents released in relation to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Those claims include accounts of Dr. King witnessing an alleged rape in 1964 in a Washington hotel room where he had been staying.
It is unclear from the documents, which do not appear to be included in the current tranche, who is making those claims. Mr. Garrow was criticized by some historians for elevating incendiary assertions that were part of an F.B.I. smear campaign, without corroborating evidence.
The F.B.I. wiretaps and other surveillance were part of an effort to uncover damaging material on Dr. King, which the agency hoped to leverage in its campaign to derail the civil rights movement. Tapes and transcripts from that surveillance are part of what remains under seal, though summaries and other related material had been released previously. A federal judge last month denied a Justice Department request to unseal the surveillance records two years early.
Dr. King had a well-documented history of extramarital relationships. Still, some experts and Dr. King’s family have expressed doubts about the veracity of some of the contents of those previously released documents, particularly when it comes to the more provocative claims about aspects of Dr. King’s romantic and sexual life.
Those details, they said, could be more reflective of official efforts to undermine the civil rights leader’s reputation than of reality.
“You’ve got to read this carefully and don’t take it at face value,” said Larry J. Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, who was reviewing the new documents on Monday with his own team of researchers.
“I’m skeptical of anything I read from F.B.I. files about M.L.K.,” he said, adding that he suspected that agents inflated or manufactured material to please J. Edgar Hoover, the agency’s longtime director. “He wanted dirt on M.LK. and his movements and his associates.”
Dr. King’s surviving children, Martin III and Bernice, argued in a statement on Monday that their father had been “relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign.” The children beseeched researchers and the general public to view all of the material from the government’s files in the context of their father’s contributions to American society.
“We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint and respect for our family’s continuing grief,” they said. Trump administration officials have been in contact with Dr. King’s family, but it remains unclear if his relatives were given the right to request redactions of the newly released material.
In a news release announcing the document upload, the administration quoted Alveda King, Dr. King’s niece and a high-profile supporter of Mr. Trump, who praised the government for providing transparency. “The declassification and release of these documents are a historic step towards the truth that the American people deserve,” she said.
As a candidate last year, Mr. Trump vowed to release files related to President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, and the 1968 murders of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. King. The Kennedy documents, released in March, contained little new information about the assassination itself.
Talya Minsberg and Campbell Robertson contributed reporting. Research was contributed by Mitch Smith, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Eduardo Medina, Audra D. S. Burch, Tim Arango, Kurt Streeter, Pooja Salhotra, Livia Albeck-Ripka and Daniel Victor.
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10) U.S. Says It Will Withdraw From U.N. Cultural Organization, Again
A decision to pull out of UNESCO was the latest move by the Trump administration to cut ties with international organizations.
By Aurelien Breeden, Reporting from Paris, July 22, 2025
President Trump at the White House on Friday. The move to leave UNESCO reflects Mr. Trump’s deep mistrust and distaste of multilateralism and international institutions. Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
The United States said Tuesday that it would withdraw from UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization, the latest move by the Trump administration to cut ties with international organizations.
The State Department announced the move, which will take effect at the end of next year. It reflects President Trump’s deep mistrust and distaste of multilateralism and international institutions, especially those connected to the United Nations.
“Continued involvement in UNESCO is not in the national interest of the United States,” Tammy Bruce, a State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Ms. Bruce accused the organization of promoting “divisive social and cultural causes” and of maintaining an “outsized focus on the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy.”
President Trump has already taken the United States out of the World Health Organization and the United Nations Human Rights Council.
The decision to leave UNESCO came after years of rocky relations between successive American administrations and the organization, which is headquartered in Paris. The United States cut funding for UNESCO under the Obama administration after it voted to include Palestine as a full member, and then pulled out completely during President Trump’s first term.
But in 2023, the Biden administration reversed that decision and decided to rejoin. U.S. officials argued at the time that leaving an empty chair at UNESCO had created a vacuum that competing powers, most notably China, were filling.
UNESCO is best known for designating World Heritage sites, more than 1,200 of them since 1972, including the ruins of Palmyra in Syria, the Minaret of Jam in Afghanistan, Petra’s Treasury building in Jordan and a series of national parks in the United States. It also keeps an “intangible cultural heritage” list of humanity’s most worthy creations — like the French baguette or opera singing in Italy.
Officials at UNESCO lamented the U.S. decision to withdraw but said the financial impact on the organization would be minimal.
“However regrettable, this announcement was anticipated, and UNESCO has prepared for it,” Audrey Azoulay, the director general of the organization, said in a statement.
In 2011, the United States stopped funding UNESCO after it voted to include Palestine as a full member. The move was because of U.S. legislation requiring a complete cutoff of American financing to any United Nations agency that accepted Palestine on such terms. The lack of money deprived UNESCO of nearly a fifth of its budget, forcing it to slash programs.
Then, in 2017, the Trump administration went further and announced that it was withdrawing from the organization completely, citing anti-Israel bias. The United States remained a nonmember observer after that.
But Ms. Azoulay said that UNESCO had diversified its funding sources over the past few years — including by relying more heavily on voluntary contributions from member states and private contributors. Today, the U.S. financial contribution accounts for only 8 percent of Unesco’s total budget, Ms. Azoulay said, adding that the organization was not considering any layoffs.
UNESCO is also known for its educational programs, and it works extensively to promote sex education, literacy, clean water and equality for women. It also helps to set standards on a range of issues including ocean protection and the ethics of artificial intelligence.
Ms. Bruce, the State Department spokeswoman, also cited “the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization” as one of the reasons for withdrawal. In the past, the organization has faced similar accusations of political bias on matters related to Israel and the Palestinians.
But UNESCO argued that Tuesday’s decision to withdraw ignored the organization’s efforts to curb the politicization of heritage issues and was harmful to its efforts to promote education about the Holocaust and to fight antisemitism.
“The reasons put forward by the United States to withdraw from the organization are the same as seven years ago, even though the situation has changed profoundly, political tensions have receded and UNESCO today constitutes a rare forum for consensus on concrete and action-oriented multilateralism,” Ms. Azoulay said.
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11) Israeli Strikes Hit W.H.O. Site After Military Expands Gaza Offensive
The aid agency says its buildings in the central part of the territory were attacked after the military targeted Deir al-Balah, which had largely been spared.
By Aaron Boxerman and Bilal Shbair, July 22, 2025
Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem, and Bilal Shbair from al-Zawayda, Gaza
Gazans hauling belongings on Tuesday in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, after the Israeli military broadened its operations in the area. Credit...Hatem Khaled/Reuters
The World Health Organization has accused Israel of attacking its site in central Gaza after the Israeli military expanded its operations in a part of the territory that had been left relatively unscathed during the war with Hamas.
Israel has leveled much of Gaza during the 21-month war. But Israeli forces had not previously launched a major assault on the city of Deir al-Balah, fearing that Hamas was holding Israeli and foreign hostages there.
In recent days that seemed to be changing after the Israeli military ordered residents in parts of the city to leave. Some Palestinians hoped the warning over the weekend was a tactic to force Hamas to make concessions in cease-fire talks, but Israel has stepped up attacks in the area.
A W.H.O. staff residence was damaged by airstrikes on Deir al-Balah on Monday, the agency said in a statement. An Israeli military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to comply with protocol, said the strike took place after the staff was evacuated.
Israeli forces also entered the building, handcuffed and stripped male staff and family members sheltering there, and held them at gunpoint, the statement added. Women and children were forcibly evacuated, the agency said.
Another W.H.O. building, a major warehouse, was damaged in a separate attack and later looted by “desperate crowds,” the U.N. agency said.
The Israeli military said that its forces had come under fire while operating in the vicinity, leading them to respond “toward the area from which the shooting originated.” It did not deny raiding the W.H.O. facility but said any “suspects” had been treated “in accordance with international law.”
The Israeli military has launched strikes and ground operations around Deir al-Balah but has not advanced into the densely populated city center, where some residents were already fleeing north.
Yasser Rihan, 37, who left one of the evacuation zones on the southern outskirts of the city, said his family had huddled at home on Sunday night as airstrikes pummeled the area and gunfire echoed all around.
By Monday morning, other residents were frantic to get out, waving white flags in the hopes that they would not be shot, he said.
“The whole scene was unspeakable: children crying, women screaming in fear, everyone shouting and confused, asking, ‘Where should we go?’” Mr. Rihan said.
Deir al-Balah had been an informal refuge for Palestinians escaping other parts of Gaza, and huge tent camps have sprung up in the city. In the relative calm, a modicum of normalcy had survived. The city also hosts major warehouses for the United Nations, as well as guesthouses for the organization’s staff.
Many Palestinians fled to the north of the city after Israel issued its evacuation order, seeking safety in areas that the Israeli authorities had not declared potential combat zones. According to the United Nations, tens of thousands of people were sheltering in the zone covered by the evacuation order.
But there are few places left to flee to in Gaza. More than 85 percent of the enclave is under direct Israeli military control or subject to Israeli evacuation orders, according to the United Nations. The rest of Gaza’s nearly two million residents have been mostly hemmed into the shrinking parts that remain.
More than 57,000 people, including thousands of children, have been killed in the Israeli campaign against Hamas in Gaza, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
A wider offensive in Deir al-Balah is unlikely to generate many major achievements for Israel, even if its forces manage to kill additional Hamas fighters in the area, said Shlomo Brom, an Israeli retired brigadier general.
Nearly two years into the war, which began with the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has said it will continue its military campaign until Hamas is destroyed. But the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has yet to articulate a clear vision publicly for who could take Hamas’s place in leading Gaza.
Some members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition government want to control Gaza indefinitely and establish Jewish settlements there, but Mr. Netanyahu has rebuffed those demands for now.
Without a clear path toward an alternative postwar order in Gaza, Israel’s military is simply “treading water,” General Brom said.
“A ground offensive and aerial strikes, no matter how intense, won’t change affairs except to increase the killing and suffering of the local population, even as we continue to lose more soldiers,” he added.
For the families of Israeli hostages, the potential of expanded attacks in Deir al-Balah has fueled fears for the lives of their loved ones. About 50 of the 250 captives seized during the Hamas-led attacks in October 2023 remain in Gaza, though dozens of those are presumed by the Israeli authorities to be dead.
The Hostage and Missing Families Forum, an advocacy group, has demanded that the Israeli government explain how an attack in central Gaza would avoid putting captives’ lives at risk.
“The people of Israel will not forgive anyone who knowingly endangered the hostages,” the forum said in a statement on Monday.
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