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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Memorial for David Johnson of the San Quentin 6
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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”
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Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
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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) 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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2) JD Vance Claims One of Our Worst Traditions as His Own
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, July 23, 2025
Ken Cedeno/Reuters
More than most recent vice presidents, JD Vance seems to be locked out of the room where it happens.
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, is by most accounts the president’s point person on mass deportation and immigration enforcement. Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, leads the effort to terrorize federal employees, bring the federal bureaucracy to heel and seize the power of the purse from Congress. The Department of Government Efficiency, formerly run by Elon Musk, is busy dismantling the nation’s research capacity and working to centralize government data on Americans.
Vance might have been on the ballot in November, but you’d be hard-pressed to find him anywhere in this triumvirate. He holds no particular portfolio of issues or items to pursue and he appears to have no special relationship with the president. On occasion, you’ll see Vance engaged in the sorts of civic activities that vice presidents are often made to perform — those events where it is important that someone from the high end of the administration makes an appearance, but not so important that you would send the president or the secretary of state. Even then, however, Vance seems to do less of this than past vice presidents. This is perhaps because unlike his predecessors, President Trump is less interested in governing than he is in playing the role of head of state.
As Trump himself will tell you, he tends not to know what his deputies are doing with their time. He professes to be ignorant of the actions of his government. Asked, for example, if his administration was planning to send migrants to Libya, he replied, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the Department of Homeland Security.” He saves his attention and enthusiasm for the pomp and circumstance of the presidency. He’s eager to host other heads of state, to attend celebrations and to speak to crowds of supporters. He also spends a lot of his time at his clubs and resorts, golfing, gossiping and glad-handing with passers-by and hangers-on.
With Trump consumed with the responsibilities of a typical vice president and other members of the administration doing the work of running the country, JD Vance is left largely on the sidelines, away from the action. Why does the vice president of the United States spend so much time writing posts on social media, preening for his allies or tussling with his ideological opponents? Well, why does anyone?
In fairness to the vice president, his online presence speaks to the main role he does seem to have in the White House, something akin to the president’s official fanboy. And in addition to acting as cheer captain for his boss, Vance also works to give the administration a veneer of intellectualism to cover its cruelty, corruption and incompetence — a spokesman for the president’s brand of national populism.
In February, for example, he spoke at a high-profile security conference in Germany, where he chastised European leaders for allowing significant immigration, fighting election interference and opposing the far right in their countries. In March, he touted the administration’s plans — thus far unrealized — to reinvigorate American manufacturing with tariffs. And this month, he met with the right-wing Claremont Institute to collect an award for statesmanship as well as speak on citizenship, in an address that built on key ideas from his acceptance speech last summer for the Republican vice-presidential nomination.
“America is not just an idea,” Vance declared. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” And although he did not say it explicitly, Vance seemed to suggest — in recounting his personal connection to the heritage of the United States — that American identity was less about our national ideals than it was attachment to “a homeland.”
At Claremont, Vance made his meaning clear: “If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,” the vice president said, taking aim at traditional American creedal nationalism. “What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you.”
If the egalitarian values of the Declaration would lead you to see millions of people around the world as potential Americans, then for Vance they would also lead you to exclude those Americans who reject those ideals, even if they had deep roots in the nation. “That answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists,” he said — referring, without explanation, to the Anti-Defamation League — “even those very Americans” who “had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.” For Vance, this is simply unacceptable. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War,” he said, “have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”
Now, the vice president did not completely exclude more recent arrivals from the national political community. He took care to praise the contributions of immigrants. But he conditioned his acceptance of new citizens on their gratitude, condemning those who would criticize or critique the United States as ungrateful. To make this point, Vance went after Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, for the latter’s Independence Day message describing America as “beautiful, contradictory, unfinished.”
“Has he ever looked in the mirror and recognized that he might not be alive were it not for the generosity of a country he dares to insult on its most sacred day?” Vance said. “Who the hell does he think that he is?”
Vance and Mamdani are equal citizens under the law, but the vice president seems to believe that his heritage entitles him to speak in ways that Mamdani can’t. There are tiers of belonging, according to Vance, one for those who can trace their lineage to one of the nation’s two founding revolutions and another for those who can’t.
For Vance, this is something close to common sense. And for some Americans it was, before the Civil War.
The chief issue in Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided in 1857, was whether Scott, the plaintiff, could sue in federal court as a citizen. He had been enslaved in Missouri but brought to both Illinois and the northern territories of the Louisiana Purchase, where slavery was illegal. Upon returning to Missouri, he sued for his freedom, on the grounds that he was emancipated after his extended time on free soil. The defendant, John Sandford — brother-in-law to Scott’s former owner — charged that Scott lacked citizenship and could not sue, “because he is a Negro of African descent; his ancestors were of pure African blood, and were brought into this country and sold as Negro slaves.”
In his opinion for the court, Chief Justice Roger Taney agreed. Blacks could never be citizens, he argued, because the founders had never intended it. Blacks were considered, he insisted, “a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race.” Neither Scott nor any Black American, Taney said, could root himself in the nation’s history of freedom. Their heritage made them subjects. And because in his view, the Constitution spoke “not only in the same words, but with the same meaning and intent with which it spoke when it came from the hands of its framers,” Black Americans could never be citizens either. Their status was fixed.
But what about the Declaration of Independence and its promise of egalitarian freedom? “The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood,” Taney wrote. “But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration.”
For the chief justice, too, the words of the Declaration were overinclusive. They conferred citizenship and belonging to more people than the framers could have possibly meant. And so, Taney concluded, we must look to other sources — in his case, slavery and racial prejudice — to find the truth, which is that American citizenship was a closed door and the United States was a tiered society of rigid hierarchies.
It was against this view that the first generation of Republican politicians defined themselves and their movement. Abraham Lincoln was, as you would expect, especially clear on this point. Here’s what he said on July 10, 1858, in a speech on “popular sovereignty,” the Dred Scott ruling and the expansion of slavery.
“We have besides these men — descended by blood from our ancestors — among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe — German, Irish, French and Scandinavian — men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”
At one point in his speech, when he’s scolding Mamdani for his ingratitude, Vance asks whether Mamdani has “ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again?” It is striking that the vice president invokes the Civil War to make his point.
The great ideological victory of that conflict was to establish the United States as a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” When, at Gettysburg, Lincoln pronounced a “new birth of freedom,” consecrated by those who “gave the last full measure of devotion,” he meant the egalitarian freedom that Taney and others like him sought to deny.
If Vance knows this — and it’s clear he does, as Claremont, where he gave this particular speech, was founded by students of a prominent Lincoln admirer — then he must also know that he is rejecting one of the key outcomes of the Civil War, that he’s cutting the “electric cord” of the Declaration and treating Appomattox as a dead letter.
Vance sees the egalitarian ideals of our founding documents but says, as Taney did, that we must look elsewhere for our vision of American citizenship. And that elsewhere is your heritage — your connection to the soil and to the dead.
It’s here that Vance truly speaks for Trump, who entered American politics as a demagogue denouncing the nation’s first Black president as a foreign usurper. And it’s here that we see the logic of Trump’s attack on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, which wrote the egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution itself.
Trump and Vance envision a world of tiered citizenship, each in his own way, where entry depends on heritage and status rests on obedience. The best traditions of our country make this difficult. And so they have found refuge in our worst.
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3) E.P.A. Is Said to Draft a Plan to End Its Ability to Fight Climate Change
According to two people familiar with the draft, it would eliminate the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse-gas emissions threaten human life by dangerously warming the planet.
By Lisa Friedman, Published July 22, 2025, Updated July 23, 2025
The E.P.A. has sent to the White House a draft plan to repeal a rule known as the “endangerment finding,” according to people familiar with the plan. Credit...Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times
The Trump administration has drafted a plan to repeal a fundamental scientific finding that gives the United States government its authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change, according to two people familiar with the plan.
The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinds a 2009 declaration known as the “endangerment finding,” which scientifically established that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives.
That finding is the foundation of the federal government’s only tool to limit the climate pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industries that is dangerously heating the planet.
The E.P.A. proposal, which is expected to be made public within days, also calls for rescinding limits on tailpipe emissions that were designed to encourage automakers to build and sell more electric vehicles. Those regulations, which were based on the endangerment finding, were a fundamental part of the Biden administration’s efforts to move the country away from gasoline-powered vehicles. The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
The E.P.A. intends to argue that imposing climate regulations on automakers poses the real harm to human health because it would lead to higher prices and reduced consumer choice, according to the two people familiar with the administration’s plan. They asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to discuss the draft proposal.
The draft proposal could still undergo changes. But if it is approved by the White House and formally released, the public would have an opportunity to weigh in before it is made final, likely later this year.
Molly Vaseliou, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., did not confirm the details of the plan. In a statement she said the E.P.A. sent the draft proposal to the White House on June 30, and that it “will be published for public notice and comment once it has completed interagency review and been signed by the Administrator.”
If the Trump administration is able to repeal the endangerment finding, it would not only erase all current limits on greenhouse gas pollution from cars, factories, power plants and other sources. It would prevent future administrations from trying to tackle climate change, with lasting implications.
“The White House is trying to turn back the clock and re-litigate both the science and the law,” said Vicki Arroyo, who teaches environmental law at Georgetown University. She called the evidence that climate change is harmful “overwhelming and incontrovertible.”
Since taking office, President Trump has abandoned U.S. efforts to tackle global warming. He also has moved to roll back virtually every federal policy aimed at curbing greenhouse gases from the burning of oil, gas and coal. His administration has encouraged more production and use of fossil fuels while stifling the growth of clean energy and electric vehicles.
In calling to repeal the endangerment finding, the draft E.P.A. rule does not appear to focus on the science or try to make the case that fossil fuels aren’t warming the planet.
Instead, it argues that the E.P.A. overstepped its legal authority under the Clean Air Act by making a broad finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger the public welfare. It makes the case that the E.P.A. administrator has limited power that apply only to specific circumstances.
Joseph Goffman, who led the air office at the E.P.A. under the Biden administration, said the rule would all but certainly face legal challenges if it is finalized.
He said the Trump administration’s proposed rule conflicts with the 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. E.P.A., a landmark case that found for the first time that greenhouse gases were a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That led the E.P.A. to make the finding in 2009 that said that six greenhouse gases were harming public health.
In more than 200 pages, the E.P.A. at that time outlined the science and detailed how increasingly severe heat waves, storms and droughts were expected to contribute to higher rates of death and disease.
Maxine Joselow contributed reporting.
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4) A Genocide Scholar on the Case Against Israel
An Israeli historian answers his critics and explains why his home country’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide.
By Omer Bartov and Daniel J. Wakin, Produced by Jillian Weinberger, July 23, 2025
llustration by The New York Times; photograph by Ali Jadallah/Getty
Omer Bartov grew up in Israel and served in the Israel Defense Forces. He went on to study the Holocaust and genocide as a historian. In this conversation, he tells the Opinion editor Daniel J. Wakin why he believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and what that means for the future of the Middle East and the next generation of Jews in Israel and the United States.
A Genocide Scholar on the Case Against Israel
An Israeli historian answers his critics, and explains why his home country’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide.
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Daniel J. Wakin: I’m Dan Wakin, an international editor for New York Times Opinion.
The historian Omer Bartov grew up in Israel in a Zionist home. He spent his career researching and writing about the Holocaust and genocide, and last week he published an essay in Times Opinion, describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as just that: a genocide.
We received a huge response to the piece — both positive and negative — because this issue is deeply fraught for many. So I wanted to talk to Bartov about what moved him to write this essay now, and to ask him to respond to some of the criticism we’ve received. And because Bartov is a historian, I wanted to know what using this word means for how we talk about the past and for the way we think about and study the Holocaust.
Omer, thanks for joining me today.
Omer Bartov: Thanks for having me, Dan.
Wakin: I think it’s important to start by saying that you reached this conclusion over time. In fact, about a month after Oct. 7, you published a Times Opinion essay that said, “as a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza.”
A lot has happened since you wrote that first essay. Can you please talk about the process of how you changed your mind?
Bartov: The point of that earlier op-ed was not simply to say that no genocide is happening. What I was trying to say in it was that I could see that there were war crimes being carried out by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza and to warn that if this were not stopped, then what the I.D.F. was doing may deteriorate into genocide. So it was written as a warning, and I was, of course, hoping that somebody would pay attention, either in Israel or, more likely, in the United States.
So at the time, my view was this: If the Biden administration had told Netanyahu in November or December 2023, you have two weeks to wrap it up, and after that, you’re on your own, Israel would’ve stopped. And possibly, we wouldn’t be talking about a genocide in Gaza at all.
In the November op-ed, I cited various political and military leaders in Israel making statements that appeared to be genocidal. At the time, one could argue these were said in the heat of the moment, in response to the massacre of 800 Israeli civilians by Hamas. But it turned out that when you looked at the pattern of operations by the I.D.F., it was implementing precisely those statements: We need to flatten Gaza. There are no uninvolved people there. They’re human animals. They should get no water, no food. All of these statements had a genocidal tone, and they also served as incitement to the troops on the ground, coming directly from their own political and military leaders.
By May of 2024, I concluded that what the I.D.F. was involved in was not simply trying to destroy Hamas and to release the hostages, but instead was engaged in an operation that is ongoing to demolish Gaza altogether — to make the Gaza Strip into a completely uninhabitable territory to the extent not only that people would not be able to live there, not even on the ruins of their own homes, but also that they would never be able to reconstitute their identity as a group even if the fighting were to stop — and one hopes that it will finally stop.
Wakin: I think this is a good point to jump in and ask: How do you define a genocide?
Bartov: So genocide is a different type of crime to all others. And it was conceived and articulated by a Jewish Polish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who began thinking about this issue in the 1930s when he was considering what happened to the Armenians in World War I. He was trying to understand what it meant when you’re not simply massacring people as a regime, as an organization, but you’re trying to destroy the group as a group.
During World War II, Lemkin had to flee from Poland because he was Jewish. His family was murdered. He ended up in the United States. He published a book in 1944 in which there’s a chapter that defines genocide, and his definition, with all kind of changes, was eventually voted on by the United Nations in 1948 and came into force in 1951. That definition of genocide says that you’re killing people or making life impossible for people, or creating conditions that make their existence increasingly difficult, not as individuals, but as an ethnic, national or religious group. Your goal is to eradicate the group as a group.
So what you have to show if you want to indict a country or any individual for genocide is that they have the intent to do that and that they’re trying to implement that intent. So, of course, numbers matter. They have to be significant numbers. And I’ve seen responses saying, “If Israel killed a million Gazans, then it would be a genocide, but 50, 60, maybe 100,000 — not good enough.” It is good enough if the intent is to destroy the group as a group by violent means, destruction, deprivation of food and chances of life from children, from the next generation and destruction of all the cultural, educational and health institutions. That is clearly an indication of an intent to carry out genocide against that group. That is to eradicate it in whole, in part, as such.
Wakin: The same critics, I think, would also raise the idea that in World War II, the Nazis were killing Jews because they were Jewish, because of their Jewishness. And these critics would say, Israel is not inflicting casualties on Palestinian civilians because they are Palestinian, it’s because Israel is fighting an enemy embedded among the Palestinians: Hamas. That Palestinians may be dying even though Israel is trying to do everything it can to protect them. Is there a distinction there?
Bartov: No. If you really wanted to make an analogy with the Nazis, I would say that the distinction would be between a particular Nazi racial, biological, scientific, racist ideology, which was quite unique for a regime. And in Israel, although there are members of the cabinet who are Jewish supremacists, the Israeli government as such does not speak in those racial terms. However, what Israel is doing is fighting a war against Palestinians. And the goal of this government is to make it impossible for Palestinians to have any right of self-determination or any ability to resist oppression and occupation by the State of Israel.
Wakin: One of the objections raised to your piece was that you’re blaming Israel for carrying out genocide in Gaza, when all that has to happen to stop this situation is for Hamas, which started the war, to surrender and let the hostages go. They could end this there, and they could have ended it at any time. So it’s somehow false to accuse Israel of a genocide when its actions are the result of Hamas’s failure to surrender.
Bartov: Yeah, that unfortunately is merely an indication of the success of Israeli propaganda. If Hamas were to surrender, to hand over the hostages, what do you think Israel and the I.D.F. on the ground would do? They would just wrap up their tents and put their tanks in reverse and leave Gaza? No. The only thing that is preventing the I.D.F. from completely demolishing Gaza, whatever is left of it, from taking over everything, is the presence of Israeli hostages there.
So the only limit on movements by the I.D.F. to completely destroy Gaza is the fact that there’s still hostages there. And Netanyahu himself has said that; his goal is absolute victory. Of course, it’s not really defined what he means by absolute victory, but it means complete control over the Gaza Strip.
Wakin: And finally, critics of the piece have pointed out that in World War II, hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians were killed — the atomic bombings in Japan, the fire bombing of Dresden. Why was that not considered a genocide, and why is this case considered a genocide?
Bartov: That’s a question that’s often asked in World War II. Especially British and American bombers killed and firebombed in Germany alone about 600,000 civilians intentionally. Now, you could have said that was a war crime, why is it not genocide? Well, think about what happened when the Americans occupied Germany. Did they kill all the Germans? Did they say that Germany’s going to never exist again? Did they flatten Germany? No. They decided on the Marshall Plan. Now, they had reasons for that because they were worried, of course, about communist influence. So they wanted to make Germany a viable society. And the German economic miracle was in large part because it began with a Marshall Plan.
And even with Japan — once America came to occupy Japan, it didn’t destroy Japan. Complaints were by the winners that the losers were doing so well economically that they lost the war, but won in the economic competition. Now, had Israel said: Look, we are fighting Hamas. We’re not fighting Palestinians. We’re not fighting the Palestinian people. We are on your side. Inhabitants, help us destroy Hamas and we will help you build a new society together with us. You won’t find such statements in Israel.
Wakin: So let’s move away from the politics and the issue of morality and talk a bit about you personally. You served in the I.D.F. in the 1970s as a young man. You were on patrol in Gaza. And you’ve written that your military service there made you understand what it meant to occupy other people. Did you think about your experiences in Gaza as you wrote this essay? And, if so, how did you think about them?
Bartov: Yes. Look, I was a young officer at the time. My battalion headquarters was in the city of Gaza. It was highly congested. There had been a lot of violence there. People were living in derelict quarters — it was not a great place. I served also in the West Bank as a soldier, and you have to understand, I was raised in Israel, I was raised in a Zionist home. I wanted to be a combat soldier. I was your usual Israeli male.
And it began dawning on me that when you occupy people, there is something about that situation — how would I say it? It was not a profound sort of intellectual consideration. It was a sensation of being an occupier, of being unwanted by the population and asking yourself, Why am I here? There was a sense of mutual threat. When you patrol in a city and you are walking 30 men with guns in a city, you are obviously there to threaten people. That’s what you’re doing. But you see them behind their windows, and there are many of them, and you don’t know who they are and what they might do to you. You feel constantly threatened. That’s a situation of occupation that creates this kind of mutual dehumanization. And for me, this was the beginning. It was a process of several years of realizing what occupation does.
More than 50 years later, I think occupation corrupts and it corrupts completely and it seeps into society. The society that I was a member of in the early 1970s and Israeli society today are completely different. The army is completely different, and much of that is a result of precisely that occupation, of the dehumanizing aspect of occupation.
I always think about sitting in a nice cafe in Tel Aviv, having a coffee or a drink with a young man, and they’re nice people. They’re friendly, they’re open, they have a sense of humor, they look great. They’re like anybody else that you would meet in New York or London or Berlin. But the day before, they were in uniform. And what were they doing? They were controlling the occupation. And how do you do that? You show that you are the boss. And how do you do that? You break into people’s homes at 4 in the morning. You drag old people out of their beds. You break children’s toys. That’s how you enforce an occupation.
What does it do to you? What does it do to your society? And that’s without talking about the effect that Gaza will have on a whole generation of young Israelis who have been fighting there and destroying that place.
Wakin: Is that kind of dehumanization a prerequisite to genocidal action?
Bartov: Yes, it is. One of the signs of genocide is that you start talking about a particular group as not human — as different, and somehow not deserving the same rights or not having the same qualities. You can say: They’re all thieves, they’re all rapists. Or you can say they’re cockroaches. You can say they’re human animals. All this terminology is a prerequisite. It doesn’t mean that necessarily genocide will ensue, but you have to think of the other group as not having rights and not having rights to have rights. And that is something that developed in Israel over time. That for most Israelis — and I’m not talking about the right wing — for most Israelis, the idea that Palestinians should have the same rights as us and the same dignity and the same equality, doesn’t at all rise to people’s consciousness.
People got used to the occupation. That’s one reason I would say why they were so appalled by Oct. 7, because suddenly those people broke out of their cage and attacked us. And we were used to them being on the other side of the fence and being patrolled by our troops, who then the next day could sit with us in a cafe and be completely normal people.
Wakin: You’ve spent your career studying the Holocaust, and many Jews around the world believe that education about the Holocaust is paramount, encapsulated by the slogan “never again.” What do you think that Israel’s conduct in Gaza now will mean for the future of how we think about “never again” and how we think about the Holocaust?
Bartov: So I spent the early part of my career actually studying the crimes of the German Army on the Eastern Front and the brutalization of soldiers, which for obvious reasons I was interested in. Then I started increasingly studying genocide and the Holocaust. And actually, I wrote about what I thought about the notion of the lessons of the Holocaust, and I was always a bit skeptical about that, in the sense that I was always worried about the idea that the lesson of the Holocaust is that what we need is more tolerance, more humanity. If we teach the Holocaust, then we will understand that. And I was never sure why, when you teach brutality, dehumanization, that that should somehow make you more humane. Make you understand that we are all the same as human beings.
So I was always a little wary about that. That was very much the American interpretation of the Holocaust as it grew because it was not always there. It took a long time. It really came in the 1980s and ’90s. In Israel, of course, the understanding of the Holocaust was always completely different. The understanding of the Holocaust was that the Holocaust meant that the Jews should stick to themselves, and if anyone threatens them, they should eradicate them.
I think, again, on two levels, in the case of Israel, what Gaza has done, it will become increasingly difficult for Israel to be able to argue that because of the Holocaust, because of what was done to the Jews, it can do whatever it takes, and it does not have to pay attention to international law or criticism by other states because it is fighting for its bare existence. See what happened to us in Auschwitz. That because Israel was engaged in such extraordinary destruction of human lives, such callous treatment of other people, it won’t be able to draw on that moral capital anymore.
In terms of the whole culture of memory, commemoration, teaching, pedagogy that use the Holocaust with very good intentions to teach tolerance and humanity — that is becoming increasingly difficult now because those institutions and many of the individuals in those institutions who were charged or appointed themselves to disseminate that culture of commemoration, of memory with the humanistic message of “never again” — never again what? Never again in humanity. Never again genocide. Never again indifference to human lives. They have been silent over what is happening in Gaza. They have not spoken out now for two years. And that, I think, has greatly diminished their authority. And I’m afraid the result of that may be that this culture of commemorating the Holocaust may recede back to where it began, which is a kind of ethnic enclave of Jews talking about their suffering with other Jews.
Wakin: I don’t know how to put this. It’s hard to say can anything good come of this. As a historian, maybe 50 years from now — casting yourself in the future, if you look back could you see some kind of positive or some sort of cathartic effect of what is happening? Is that at all possible? Can you even speak of this in those terms?
Bartov: Yes, of course you can, because we’ve seen this happen with other countries, countries that had violent regimes that were engaged in a great deal of violence. And at some point, whether you talk about Germany or South Africa, these countries have shook themselves free of it and rebuilt themselves as completely different societies. But in order to do that, it doesn’t happen simply because people changed their minds. In Germany it happened because Germany was defeated in World War II. In South Africa, it happened because South Africa was under a huge sanctions regime and just could no longer maintain apartheid.
So I think that it can happen, but I have to say that right now, Israel has enjoyed such incredible impunity in the international community — and especially in that community that matters to it, which is the United States and Western Europe, who are its main supporters — that I’m afraid the more likely prediction for now is that Israel will become increasingly authoritarian and may end up being a full-blown apartheid authoritarian state. And such states don’t last very long.
So, yes, after that there may be a reckoning. If that reckoning comes, it would have to come with a process of truth and reconciliation because Israel will not be able to shake itself free just by erasing what happened — the memory of what it did in Gaza. It will have to confront that. It will have to go back all the way to 1948, and it will have to begin a process of truth and reconciliation that could lead to some kind of settlement between the Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants of that land. But right now it’s heading in the opposite direction.
Wakin: The implications for Israel in the immediate future, particularly when it comes to American support, there’s a big growing divide in this country. A generational divide over Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Younger Jews are much more likely than their parents to see Israel as a committer of crimes, as an occupying force. What will that mean for the future of American support for Israel, and what does that mean for Israel’s future?
Bartov: So it took a long time for Israel to build up the kind of support — in many ways, love — for Israel that exists in the United States. In Europe, things are a bit different because there’s also a sense of guilt about the Holocaust, but also a kind of admiration for Israel. It took many, many years to build that — decades — and that is now being eroded. And I can’t say that I’m happy about that.
If Israel loses support and it becomes increasingly violent, erodes any of what is left there of liberal democracy — as is happening right now — then this will not bode well for the state of Israel itself. And, unfortunately, it will also have, I would say, a harmful effect on Jewish communities around the world because Israel presents itself as the representative of the Jews around the world. And so it makes them responsible, willy-nilly, for its own actions. And so that process will not only erode support for Israel, but I’m afraid it can also give license to more prejudice against Jews wherever they are.
Wakin: You’re hinting at this slightly in your last response, but I’m just curious, how do you feel about Israel inside yourself, emotionally? What is your feeling now as a human being, as an individual — not as a scholar about this but as the country of your birth and your origin?
Bartov: Look, I mean, it’s actually heartbreaking. I grew up there. My best friends are there. I have family there. And there are many things I love, and certainly loved, about that country. To see it change so dramatically, both through a long-term process and then in this kind of accelerated, on-steroids transformation since Oct. 7, is heartbreaking.
What I can say is that I’m a big supporter of the state of Israel. I’m an Israeli citizen. I believe the Jewish people, like every other people, have the right to self-determine. I’m not against Zionism at all. I think Zionism was a movement that called for the emancipation and liberation of Jews, for human rights. But the kind of Zionism that exists in Israel now, the kind of state it has become, I can’t support it.
Wakin: Omer, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation. I really appreciate it.
Bartov: Thanks very much, Dan.
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5) Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People
By Jeff Crisp, July 23, 2025
Mr. Crisp is an expert on migration and humanitarian issues.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/opinion/migration-deportation-sudan-trump.html
Natalie Arrué
In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”
Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.
What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin, but also explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.
This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.
Some of these efforts have faced legal challenges. Starting in 2022, for example, the United Kingdom attempted to establish a program that would have automatically deported some asylum seekers and migrants entering the U.K. illegally to Rwanda, costing over half a billion pounds — more than 200 million of which were paid upfront. The British Supreme Court ruled that the policy was unlawful, and Britain’s prime minister scrapped the plan last year.
But many countries remain undeterred. In 2023, Italy signed a deal that allowed it to send certain migrants rescued by Italian ships in international waters to detention centers in Albania, and is persisting with the effort even in the face of legal setbacks. This spring, the European Union proposed establishing “return hubs” in third countries for rejected asylum seekers.
Although these deals take various forms, states that enter them are motivated by similar concerns. The world’s richer states wish to retain control of their borders and are particularly aggrieved by the arrival of people who enter by irregular means, especially when they are coming from low-income countries that many associate with crime, violence and terrorism. Governments in destination countries are attracted to such deals by the promise of financial, diplomatic and military support.
Throughout much of the West, as public sentiment has turned against newcomers, policymakers and pundits alike have portrayed migrants as a threat to national security and social stability. These migrants, they argue, impose an unsustainable burden on government budgets and public services and deprive citizens of jobs. Racism and xenophobia, fueled by populist politicians and right-wing media outlets, have also played an important part in creating a toxic environment in which the expulsion of migrants to arbitrary destinations is increasingly considered legitimate.
But how legitimate is it? Third-country deportations often sidestep due process and violate international law, under which it is forbidden for states to deport such people to any place where their life or liberty would be at risk. It is also plainly unethical, imposing additional stress on people who have undergone traumatic journeys and who are then dumped in far-off, unfamiliar places.
Several of the countries slated as deportation destinations have bleak human rights records and are unsafe for all civilians, let alone foreign deportees, who are likely to be targets of abuse and exploitation. In the worst instances, as with U.S. deportees in El Salvador, they can find themselves in jails where the authorities routinely inflict physical and psychological violence on inmates.
These deportation deals also have corrosive consequences for international politics. They encourage smaller, weaker countries to engage in transactional behavior, commodifying human life by trading immigrant bodies for cash, development aid, diplomatic support and international impunity. They may even strengthen the impunity of authoritarian regimes that violate the human rights of their own citizens. In the case of El Salvador, for example, deportees from the United States reportedly included some leaders of the criminal gang MS-13, who were thought to be in a position to expose links between President Nayib Bukele and the gang.
For nearly three-quarters of a century, a network of international instruments, institutions and norms have acted as guardrails, if imperfect ones, to ensure that refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants are treated humanely. Now it seems as though the president is looking to rewrite the rules of this system to one in which people are pawns.
By expanding the practice of forced relocation, Mr. Trump is using migrants as currency in a global network of geopolitical negotiation. His administration is normalizing the use of vulnerable people as bargaining chips to extract better deals with friends and foes alike. He is setting a dangerous precedent for other democratic countries by ignoring the moral and reputational cost of shipping desperate people into terrible conditions. As Mr. Trump works to bring this new paradigm to life, leaders the world over will be watching closely. If he can pull it off, so can they.
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6) Aid Groups Blame Israel’s Gaza Restrictions for ‘Mass Starvation’
More than 100 organizations, including Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders, added to growing calls for aid restrictions to be eased and the war to end.
By Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Reporting from London, July 23, 2025
Waiting for food in Gaza on Wednesday. After two years of war, aid groups and governments say the territory is facing a severe hunger crisis. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups, including Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders, warned on Wednesday that “mass starvation” was spreading across Gaza, adding to calls for Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian aid to the besieged enclave.
The joint statement is the latest attempt to draw attention to a growing hunger crisis in Gaza. It was released after the European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France and Canada, on Monday condemned the “drip feeding of aid” and said that civilian suffering had “reached new depths.”
Doctors Without Borders in Gaza has reported a “sharp and unprecedented rise in acute malnutrition.” Adults frequently collapse from hunger, the aid groups said in their statement, adding that stockpiles of food and other supplies warehoused outside the territory were being prevented from reaching people in need.
Gaza’s health ministry said on Wednesday that hospitals had registered 10 deaths because of famine or malnutrition in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total number of deaths from hunger since Saturday to 43.
There was no independent confirmation of the toll and the ministry did not give details. Health experts say that deaths from malnutrition are often undercounted because acutely hungry patients often die of other causes, such as diarrhea or viral infections, that their bodies are too weak to fight.
The United Nations’ World Food Program said this week that nearly a third of Gaza’s population, which stands at 2.1 million, was not eating for multiple days in a row. “People are dying for lack of humanitarian assistance,” it said in a statement.
Israel blocked deliveries of aid between March and May after it ended a cease-fire with Hamas. Since then, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private Israeli-backed group, has managed a new system in which people go to a few distribution sites to obtain aid. The government says that the new system is designed to prevent Hamas from stealing aid, and the sites are in areas of Gaza controlled by Israeli forces.
But the new system has been marred by near-daily violence. The United Nations said last week that more than 670 people had been killed near the new aid sites, many as a result of gunfire, and that hundreds of others had been injured. One consequence has been that some people have been deterred from approaching the sites, which itself has exacerbated hunger, aid groups say.
On Wednesday, Israel’s foreign ministry rejected the aid groups’ claims, and said that the organizations were echoing Hamas’s talking points.
Israel has also blamed the United Nations for failing to distribute supplies that are already in Gaza. On Tuesday, COGAT, the Israeli government agency that oversees policy in Gaza and the West Bank, said that nearly 4,500 aid trucks had recently entered the territory, carrying flour, 2,500 tons of baby food and high-calorie food for children.
The United Nations has said that insecurity and restrictions imposed by the Israeli military often make delivering food within Gaza impossible. Around 500 trucks of aid and commercial supplies were delivered to Gaza each day before the war, it said, but that number plummeted after the conflict started and has dropped even further since the cease-fire collapsed.
The Trump administration has argued that its immediate priority is to secure a new cease-fire, given that the amount of aid entering Gaza spiked during the previous truce.
The administration’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, was set to travel to the region this week for talks on the war, a State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, told reporters on Tuesday. Mr. Witkoff wanted to achieve a cease-fire and a “humanitarian corridor for aid to flow,” she added.
Israel’s foreign ministry said that by issuing the statement, the aid groups were impeding the chances of a new cease-fire to pause the war, which began when Hamas launched a deadly raid on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“These organizations are serving the propaganda of Hamas, using their numbers, justifying their horrors, instead of challenging the terror organization,” it said in a statement on social media.
The groups that signed the statement, which also included CARE, Christian Aid and Amnesty International, said the U.N.-led system that had previously handled aid to Gaza had worked but that it was “prevented from functioning.” They said that only 28 trucks of aid were now being distributed in Gaza each day.
The groups added that their workers in Gaza, whose job is to provide support to civilians, were so hungry that they were now risking their own lives by joining food lines.
Civilians in Gaza said the lack of food had become critical. A’eed Abu Khater, 48, who said he was living in a tent in Gaza City in the north of the enclave, said that his 17-year-old son, Atef, had been hospitalized with severe malnutrition for 15 days and his condition was deteriorating.
“I had to leave the hospital — I couldn’t bear to see him like this. He is not responding to the treatment,” Mr. Khater said in a telephone interview, adding that the boy had been healthy before the war. “I can’t describe how terrible the situation is. I can’t hold back my tears. This is my son.”
David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesman, blamed Hamas for the suffering in Gaza. In a briefing to journalists, he said that Israel facilitated aid through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and shipments of goods for bakeries and communal kitchens coordinated by the United Nations.
“In Gaza today, there is no famine caused by Israel. There is, however, a man-made shortage engineered by Hamas,” he said, adding that aid groups were issuing “false warnings.”
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting
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7) A New Golf Course and Old Grudges Await Trump in Scotland
Many Scots refuse to make peace with President Trump or his golf resorts, even after he deepened his investment in the land where his mother was born.
By Mark Landler, Visuals by Andrew Testa, Reporting from Balmedie, Scotland, July 23, 2025
Trump International Scotland, a beachside golf resort in Aberdeenshire.
Michael Forbes has been at odds with President Trump since the day Mr. Trump turned up with a plan to build a golf resort next to his farm on Scotland’s northeast coast. That was nearly 20 years ago, and Mr. Forbes, a retired quarry worker and salmon fisherman, hasn’t lost any of his vinegar.
“There’s no way I’m ever going to sell,” Mr. Forbes, 73, said this week of his property, which is surrounded by a new golf course that Mr. Trump is expected to dedicate when he visits his two resorts in Scotland this week. “I keep three Highland cows behind the house,” Mr. Forbes said, chuckling that the bucolic spectacle annoys his neighbor, clashing with his manicured landscape.
Such cussedness comes naturally on this wild stretch of the Scottish coast, where the North Sea winds can snap a full-grown spruce tree in two. But it captures a wider refusal among many Scots to make peace with Mr. Trump, even after he regained the White House and deepened his investment in Scotland — a token of his ties to the land where his mother was born.
“Everyone in Scotland hates him,” Mr. Forbes said, a claim that was thrown in doubt a few minutes later by John Duncan, a nearby contractor who clears ditches for Mr. Trump. “I love the man,” Mr. Duncan said, noting that the president’s resort, Trump International Scotland, employs 35 greenskeepers alone.
Mr. Duncan likened Mr. Trump to Nigel Farage, the populist leader of the anti-immigrant party Reform U.K., and said Britain would benefit from their brand of take-no-prisoners leadership. Still, he conceded, “There’s folks who don’t like Donald Trump, and nothing is ever going to change that.”
The police in Scotland are bracing for demonstrations against Mr. Trump during his visit, which will include a weekend at his other Scottish resort, Trump Turnberry, on the west coast about 50 miles from Glasgow. A survey in February by the market research firm Ipsos found that 71 percent of those polled in Scotland had an unfavorable opinion of Mr. Trump, compared with 57 percent of the broader British public polled.
Some of this antipathy may reflect his turbulent history in Scotland, which has been marked by feuds with noncompliant neighbors, breakups with political officials over his business plans, and longstanding grudges, like Mr. Trump’s hostility toward the offshore windmills that turn lazily within sight of his guests in Aberdeenshire.
The common thread is a belief that Mr. Trump never delivered on the promises he made in 2006 when he bought the Menie estate, eight miles north of Aberdeen. Mr. Trump talked about putting up a sprawling hotel to supplement the manor house already there, as well as hundreds of vacation homes. With a total investment projected at 150 million pounds ($202 million), it would have created hundreds of jobs.
None of that happened, though the second golf course at the resort in Aberdeenshire, which Mr. Trump will dedicate this week, is evidence that the Trumps are still pouring money into the project. The resort reported losses of 1.4 million pounds ($1.9 million) in 2023, according to a financial filing. It is listed as having an asset value of 37 million pounds ($49 million) and 84 employees.
“President Trump is proud of his Scottish heritage and roots,” the White House communications director, Steven Cheung, said in a statement. Mr. Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, was a native of Lewis, in Scotland’s western isles.
“He has created projects that have a positive economic impact,” Mr. Cheung said, “generating good jobs and boosting economic activity in the area.”
There is no dispute that the resort has injected some money into a region that depends on its ties to the North Sea oil industry. Mr. Trump alluded to that when he told the BBC last week that he planned to meet Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain in Aberdeen, which he called the “oil capital of Europe.”
“They should get rid of the windmills and bring back the oil,” said Mr. Trump, who fought for years to block the installation of the wind farm off the resort’s coast.
“Windmills,” he said, “are really detrimental to the beauty of Scotland.”
Analysts said Mr. Trump had the dynamics of the two industries backward. Oil production in the North Sea has declined steadily for the last 20 years, while offshore wind is one of Britain’s fastest-growing industries.
“Trump’s thinking would have been way more credible in the 1980s than it is now,” said Tessa Khan, the executive director of Uplift, a research group that campaigns for the transition away from fossil fuels.
Mr. Trump’s history with Turnberry is far less contentious than that with Aberdeen. Turnberry was a faded dowager when he bought it in 2014, and he is credited with restoring the luster of its three courses. But it, too, has become a target: A pro-Palestinian activist group recently painted the slogan “Gaza is not 4 Sale” on the grounds, prompting calls from Mr. Trump to Mr. Starmer.
During his first term, Mr. Trump lobbied the Scottish government to award the coveted British Open golf tournament to Turnberry, which has not played host since 2009, before he owned it. The R&A, a golf association in St. Andrews that runs the tournament, has signaled a greater openness to going back to Turnberry but said its lack of hotel rooms and transport links was a hurdle.
In Aberdeenshire, the tensions are environmental. The links there are carved between sand dunes, which were designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest because of the way they shift over time. A plaque behind the clubhouse, next to a vendor selling Trump Grab & Go sandwiches, declared that the dunes help make it “the greatest golf course anywhere in the world!” But the Scottish authorities withdrew the scientific site designation in 2020, saying the construction of the links had deprived the dunes of their special character.
As technical as that might seem, it has registered with locals, who are proud of the dunes and relish walking among them. On a recent evening at the Cock and Bull restaurant, across the road from the resort, two men could be overheard discussing Mr. Trump and the dunes’ lost “SSSI status.”
Not everybody is nursing grievances. Anas Sarwar, the leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, wrote this spring in The Times of London that “President Trump’s affinity for Scotland is real, regardless of what people think of his politics.” He said Scotland’s first minister, John Swinney, leader of the Scottish National Party, had mismanaged his relationship with the president.
A few days before last year’s U.S. election, Mr. Swinney endorsed the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. He and Mr. Trump are still expected to meet during the president’s visit.
Even Mr. Trump’s most implacable foes recognize there are limits to the feuding. David Milne, who lives in a converted coast guard lookout bordering the Aberdeenshire resort, spent years theatrically protesting his neighbor. He flew the Mexican flag above his house in 2016, when Mr. Trump vowed to build a wall on the southern American border.
Mr. Milne’s views on Mr. Trump have not softened any more than those of Mr. Forbes, with his Highland cows. Mr. Milne, too, said he had no plans to sell his house, which Mr. Trump once called “ugly.” But he has had no run-ins with the resort for years, he said, and has no plans to fly his Mexican flag when Mr. Trump is in residence next week.
“Once the Mexican people told him where to go, there didn’t seem to be any point,” Mr. Milne said. “They’re quite capable of taking care of themselves.”
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8) Gazans Are Dying of Starvation
Severe hunger has gripped the war-torn Palestinian enclave, where growing numbers of people are starving and the doctors treating them are working on empty stomachs.
By Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Isabel Kershner and Abu Bakr Bashir, Visuals by Saher Alghorra, July 24, 2025
Rawan Sheikh Ahmad reported from Haifa, Israel; Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem; and Abu Bakr Bashir from London. Saher Alghorra recorded images in Gaza.
Waiting for food aid in Gaza City on Wednesday.
Atef Abu Khater, 17, who was healthy before Gaza was gripped by war, lies in intensive care in a hospital in the north of the Palestinian enclave, suffering from severe malnutrition.
“He is not responding to the treatment,” said his father, A’eed Abu Khater, 48, who has been sheltering in a tent in Gaza City with his wife and five children. “I feel helpless,” he added in a phone call, his voice strained with grief. “We lost our income in the war. Food is unaffordable. There is nothing.”
Gaza’s hospitals have struggled since early in the war to cope with the influx of Palestinians injured and maimed by Israeli airstrikes and, more recently, by shootings meant to disperse desperate crowds as they surge toward food convoys or head to aid distribution sites.
Now, according to doctors in the territory, an increasing number of their patients are suffering — and dying — from starvation.
“There is no one in Gaza now outside the scope of famine, not even myself,” said Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, who leads the pediatric ward at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. “I am speaking to you as a health official, but I, too, am searching for flour to feed my family.”
The World Food Program, an arm of the United Nations, said this week that the hunger crisis in Gaza had reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row.”
Dr. al-Farra said the number of children dying of malnutrition had risen sharply in recent days. He described harrowing scenes of people too exhausted to walk. Many of the children he sees have no pre-existing medical conditions, he said, giving the example of Siwar Barbaq, who was born healthy and now, at 11 months old, should weigh about 20 pounds but is under nine pounds.
After 21 months of devastating conflict set off by the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the lack of available food and water is taking a heavy toll on Gaza’s most vulnerable civilians — the young, the old and the sick.
The Gaza ministry of health has reported more than 40 hunger-related deaths this month, including 16 children, and 111 since the beginning of the war, 81 of them children. The data could not be independently verified.
Throughout the war, U.N. agencies and independent aid groups have accused Israel of allowing far too little food into Gaza, warning of impending famine for its more than two million people. For much of that time, Israel has said that enough food was reaching Gaza, blaming diversions by Hamas and mismanagement by aid groups for problems.
Yahia al-Najjar was 4 months old when he died of severe malnutrition on Tuesday at the American Hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, his aunt, Safa al-Najjar, 38, said in an interview.
Yahia was born without serious health issues, but his condition soon deteriorated, she said.
The family has been sheltering under a tent made of a blanket held up by four poles. Yahia’s mother, subsisting on one meal of lentils or rice per day, could not produce enough milk to nurse him, though she had no problems nursing her previous three children. The family could not afford baby formula.
At the hospital, the doctors tried to help, but he was already in critical condition and had lost weight. He died shortly after, she said.
After Israel ended a two-month cease-fire in mid-March and resumed its military campaign in Gaza, it imposed a total blockade on the entry of goods for about 80 days to try to pressure Hamas into surrendering, exacerbating the already severe deprivation.
Now, aid enters in two ways. One is a new, much-criticized system run by private American contractors under the auspices of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private Israeli-backed group, which has a few set distribution sites in southern Gaza and one in the center of the strip. The other consists of convoys of aid brought in by independent international organizations.
Both systems have been plagued by worsening chaos and violence after months of siege, war, mass displacement and lawlessness. Most of the Israeli shootings, according to the United Nations, have occurred around the Israel-backed distribution sites.
The hunger crisis is the result of human failings, with each of the involved parties blaming someone else for the suffering.
Israel accuses Hamas of engineering a narrative of starvation by looting aid trucks and disrupting the distribution of aid to Gazans. It also accuses the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations of failing to collect hundreds of truckloads of aid that have piled up on the Gaza side of the border crossings.
Aid groups blame Israel for laying siege to Gaza, restricting supplies and failing to provide safe routes for their convoys inside Gaza. The only solution, they have long said, is an extensive increase in food deliveries.
Israel countered the images of starving children this week with images of pallets of supplies lying uncollected on the Gaza side of a border crossing and footage of what the military described as Hamas terrorists enjoying platters of food and fresh fruit in the group’s underground tunnels. The military declined to say when the video was recorded.
The leaders of Israel and Hamas are engaged in sluggish negotiations, through mediators, for another temporary cease-fire that could bring relief and have Hamas release hostages it is holding in the tunnels in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.
Doctors warn that malnutrition in early childhood can have long-term effects, disrupting growth, cognitive ability and emotional development.
Mohammad Saqr, head of the nursing department at Nasser Medical Complex, said that on Monday afternoon alone, the hospital received 25 women and 10 children requesting intravenous glucose solution.
While the treatment may briefly relieve symptoms, Mr. Saqr warned, “they feel the hunger again soon after.” He added, “Some arrive shivering from hunger.”
The hospital’s limited supply of IV solution cannot meet the growing demand, he said, adding: “The team is exhausted from hunger. Yesterday, some staff members ate just 10 spoons of plain white rice.”
Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City had recorded three deaths from malnutrition in the previous 36 hours, Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the hospital director, said in an interview on Tuesday. One was a 5-month-old baby.
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9) As Starvation Rises, Israeli Minister Says Israel Is ‘Driving Out’ Gazans
Amichay Eliyahu’s comments came amid growing hunger in the territory, where Israel controls the delivery of food.
By Patrick Kingsley and Johnatan Reiss, July 24, 2025
Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem and Johnatan Reiss from Tel Aviv.
“Early in the war, Mr. Eliyahu attracted global attention for suggesting that Israel might drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu condemned those comments and suspended him from the cabinet, before swiftly reinstating him.”
Amid rising starvation in the Gaza Strip, an Israeli government minister said on Thursday that Israel had no duty to alleviate hunger in the territory and was seeking to expel its population.
Amichay Eliyahu, a far-right lawmaker who leads Israel’s Heritage Ministry, said in a radio interview that “there is no nation that feeds its enemies,” adding that “the British didn’t feed the Nazis, nor did the Americans feed the Japanese, nor do the Russians feed the Ukrainians now.” He concluded that the government was “rushing toward Gaza being wiped out,” while also “driving out the population that educated its people on the ideas of ‘Mein Kampf,’” an antisemitic text written by Adolf Hitler.
The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to comment on whether Mr. Eliyahu’s remarks had represented the government’s official position.
An Israeli military official, speaking on condition of anonymity to comment on Israel’s political leadership, said Mr. Eliyahu’s comments did not reflect military policy. Mr. Eliyahu oversees historical and archaeological sites and institutions in Israel and has no authority over the Israeli military. He does not participate in meetings of a small group of ministers who oversee security decisions. His office did not reply to requests for clarification.
Mr. Eliyahu’s comments were swiftly condemned by Israeli opposition politicians, who said the minister did not represent the Israeli mainstream. Polling suggests a majority of Israelis favor reaching a cease-fire to release hostages held by Hamas.
Mr. Eliyahu’s interview came amid increasing cases of starvation in Gaza. Israel — which controls all access to Gaza — blocked all food deliveries to the enclave between early March and late May.
While Israel now allows some food into Gaza, it has drastically reduced the number of places from which food is distributed, forcing Palestinians to receive food aid from a handful of sites that are hard to access. In a crude form of crowd control, Israeli soldiers have repeatedly shot and killed scores of Palestinians along routes leading to the new food distribution sites, forcing civilians to choose between the risk of gunfire and the risk of starvation.
After initially dismissing the reports of starvation, Mr. Eliyahu appeared to recognize its occurrence by blaming Hamas for it. “We are starving them? They are starving them!” Mr. Eliyahu said in an interview with Kol Barama, a radio station popular among ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis.
“The day they return the hostages, there will be no hunger there,” he said.
While Mr. Eliyahu’s comments echo some made by other members of Mr. Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, they were criticized by politicians outside the government.
Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of Israel’s political opposition, said in a public statement that Mr. Eliyahu’s comments were “a moral stain and a public diplomacy disaster. Israel will never convince the world of the justness of our war against terror as long as we are led by an extremist minority government with ministers who glorify blood and death.”
Mr. Lapid added that Israeli soldiers “do not fight, die, and get injured to erase a civilian population. They fight to return the hostages and ensure Israel’s security.”
A large majority of Israelis support a diplomatic deal to free the hostages held in Gaza, instead of continued military efforts to defeat Hamas, according to recent polling. Protesters were expected to gather in Tel Aviv on Thursday night to call for an immediate cease-fire and hostage release deal.
Early in the war, Mr. Eliyahu attracted global attention for suggesting that Israel might drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu condemned those comments and suspended him from the cabinet, before swiftly reinstating him.
Myra Noveck contributed reporting.
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10) Israel to Allow Humanitarian Airdrops Over Gaza
Jordan and the United Arab Emirates were expected to begin airdrops in the coming days, but experts warned that the bulk of necessary aid could come only by land.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 25, 2025
Last year, the Jordanian Air Force dropped aid over northern Gaza. Israel said on Friday that it would soon allow countries to drop aid into the area, which is in a humanitarian crisis. Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Israel said on Friday that it would soon allow other countries to drop aid from the air into the Gaza Strip during a widening humanitarian crisis in which several children have died of malnutrition.
Jordan and the United Arab Emirates were expected to begin airdrops in the coming days, according to COGAT, the Israeli military agency that regulates humanitarian affairs in Gaza.
Experts criticized the drops as largely symbolic and warned that they were unlikely to provide enough aid to the roughly two million Palestinians in Gaza, who are in dire conditions after 21 months of war.
Nearly one in three people in the territory is coping with food insecurity, according to the United Nations’ World Food Program. The Gaza health authorities say that acute malnutrition is rising and that children have died.
Airdrops are extremely expensive and typically as a last resort, said Juliette Touma, the chief spokeswoman for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees. Thousands of truckloads of aid, she said, were awaiting Israeli approval to enter Gaza.
“Why use airdrops when you can drive hundreds of trucks through the borders?” Ms. Touma asked. “It’s much easier, more effective, faster, cheaper.”
On Friday, the United Nations accused Israel of throwing up “bureaucratic, logistical, administrative and other operational obstacles” to the distribution of aid. Those restrictions compound other problems with getting food to hungry people, the U.N.’s office of humanitarian affairs said in a statement, including attacks on convoys by armed criminals inside Gaza.
Over the course of Israel’s nearly two-year war with Hamas, the Israeli authorities have permitted some aid drops, including by the United States. But U.N. officials have consistently argued that the best way to bring enough food into Gaza is by land, through borders controlled by Israel and Egypt.
Israeli officials say they have not limited the number of trucks entering the territory, and they say the U.N. has failed to distribute hundreds of truckloads’ worth of food and other provisions from border crossings deeper into the Gaza Strip.
Israel permitted hundreds of trucks with aid to enter each day for several weeks during a cease-fire that lasted from January to March. But as further truce talks between Israel and Hamas sputtered to a halt, Israel barred practically all aid from entering the Gaza Strip for more than two months, including food, fuel and medicine.
The Israeli authorities began allowing convoys into Gaza again in May. But relatively little assistance entered the Gaza Strip in June compared with other points during the war, according to official Israeli data.
At least one recent attempt by the U.N. to bring food into Gaza led to chaotic scenes as Israeli soldiers shot at crowds of Palestinians rushing to seize bags of flour. Gaza health officials reported that dozens of people were killed and wounded.
On Sunday, a 25-truck convoy operated by World Food Program made its way into the Gaza Strip. Shortly after passing the final checkpoint into Gaza, the trucks encountered huge crowds of hungry Palestinians.
“As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire,” the World Food Program said in a statement. “These people were simply trying to access food to feed themselves and their families on the brink of starvation.”
The Israeli military said its forces had fired “warning shots” after thousands of Palestinians rushed the area. The military disputed the death toll provided by Gaza officials but did not provide an alternate figure.
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11) The World Must See Gaza’s Starvation
By Mohammed Mansour, July 24, 2025
Mr. Mansour is a senior nutrition manager with the International Rescue Committee in Gaza.
Mahmoud Abu Hamda/Anadolu, via Getty Images
The ground shook as another airstrike slammed down nearby, a thunderclap ripping through the makeshift field clinic. Inside, panic surged. A baby wailed from one corner; a mother screamed for help in another.
Amid toppled boxes of therapeutic food, I held a skeletal boy no older than 4 — limbs limp, eyes sunken. Just moments before, I had managed to feed him a spoonful of nutritional, peanut-rich paste. As I was readying another, an explosion knocked the food from my hands and scattered dust into the boy’s open mouth. He didn’t flinch; he was too weak even to cry.
It was the end of June. I cradled the boy in silence, surrounded by war.
I am a senior nutrition manager with the International Rescue Committee, one of the few organizations that is still able to deliver aid in Gaza. On a typical day, my colleagues and I screen hundreds of children for malnutrition at mobile clinics across the territory. We provide therapeutic food for kids who are at risk of starvation and counsel parents who are doing their best to care for their daughters and sons under unimaginable conditions.
Nearly half a million Gazans now face catastrophic levels of food insecurity, one of the worst hunger crises in the world today. They are on the brink of starvation; roughly 100,000 children and women are facing severe acute malnutrition, the harshest diagnosis. After the Israeli government imposed a blockade on humanitarian aid entering Gaza in March, I saw a sharp rise in hunger, especially among infants and toddlers, that has not abated. More and more mothers sit beside their sick children, clinging to hope. More and more fathers come to me with empty hands and tired eyes, asking if there’s anything — anything — we can give.
Gaza’s entire humanitarian infrastructure is under siege. Officially, Israel’s aid blockade ended in May. But the new system of food distribution that Israel has set up isn’t working and is making it harder for us to do our work. Increasing hostilities, Palestinians who are waiting for aid being killed in the hundreds, blocked crossings, delays in permissions and critical shortages of fuel, medical supplies, water and food are making it nearly impossible to reach families in need.
Mothers arrive at our clinics exhausted, often after walking for hours carrying malnourished babies in their arms. They ask, “Will my child survive?” or “Do you have any milk or food?”
These are questions we can’t always answer. Today, many children in Gaza are so hungry they may never recover, and our supplies are critically low. Therapeutic food, high-energy biscuits and basic medicine arrive sporadically and must be rationed. Sometimes we are forced to turn families away or ask them to return later, knowing later may be too late. I often think of a 2-year-old boy whom we tried to help this month. He was severely malnourished, his condition deteriorated quickly, and he passed away because we didn’t have enough to give. We had so little then. We have less now.
It’s not just children who are starving; parents tell me they’ve gone days without proper food. They skip meals so that their children can eat, even if it’s just a few bites of bread, if they can find any. They are not statistics to me. These are people I see each day, the people I live with. They tell me, “We’ve lost everything, but we can’t lose our children.”
Before the war, my family lived an ordinary life in Gaza City. My older daughter, Sela, went to school each morning with a backpack nearly her size. After work, we would visit relatives, share meals or take evening walks. Our lives were not without hardship, but they had structure, dignity and dreams. Now those days are distant.
Since our home was destroyed in an airstrike, we’ve spent months in tents and temporary shelters, exposed to the cold and heat, with little access to clean water or electricity. The markets are nearly empty. I used to be able to buy 15 loaves of bread for $1; now just one loaf costs $3 or $4. On many days, we eat once. On some, not at all.
Sela, who is now 8, hasn’t seen a classroom since the war began. She often asks, “Baba, when can I go back to school?” This is another question I can’t answer. Some 645,000 children in Gaza are out of school. I don’t know of any playgrounds left — only ruins. My daughters, Sela and Ayla, who is 19 months old, flinch at every loud noise.
Most days, I work in an overcrowded shelter in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, with barely enough phone signal to send an email or join a call. The shelters are packed by the thousands — loud and filled with uncertainty — but they are the only safe places left. Like us, about 90 percent of Gazans have been displaced, many several times. I do my best to serve people who are simply trying to survive. I coordinate with our teams across Gaza to keep programs running despite the war, despite shortages, despite power cuts.
I haven’t seen my mother in months; she lives in the south, closer to Rafah, and needs care. I worry constantly about her, but the roads are unsafe, and movement is restricted. She still calls to check on me. Her calm voice on the other end of the line gives me strength. “Don’t give up,” she says. “They need you.”
She’s right. People need us. Every colleague I know is carrying a personal trauma. Some have lost homes. Some have lost family members. Some are grieving while still showing up for others. That, to me, is the definition of courage.
I want Sela and Ayla and all of the children we see at our clinics to grow up in a place where they feel safe and cared for, where textbooks replace rubble, where sleep comes easily without fear of what the night might bring and where they go to bed with full bellies — not from scraps, but from real, nourishing food. Every child deserves that, regardless of who they are or where they live.
We need the world to see us. Gaza is fading from the headlines, but the suffering continues. Every day, quietly, relentlessly. The international community must act: to open access to aid, to protect civilians and to demand an end to this devastation.
We are exhausted, but we endure. We have to. Our children are watching.
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12) U.S. Conducts Rare Raid in Syria, Killing a Senior Islamic State Leader
The military gave few details on the ground operation, but counterterrorism raids have typically involved helicopter-borne Special Operations commandos.
By Eric Schmitt, Reporting from Washington, July 25, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/us/politics/us-raid-syria-isis.html
Near the Citadel of Aleppo in May. Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
U.S. military forces conducted a rare raid in northwestern Syria on Friday, killing a senior Islamic State leader and two other ISIS insurgents, the Pentagon’s Central Command said.
In a statement, Central Command said that U.S. forces killed the leader, Dhiya’ Zawba Muslih al-Hardani, and his two adult sons in the Aleppo area.
Central Command provided few details on the ground operation, but military counterterrorism raids — as opposed to airstrikes — have typically involved helicopter-borne Special Operations commandos, often supported by attack planes and drones.
Such ground operations are riskier than drone strikes because they put troops in harm’s way. They often mean that the target is particularly important and likely to be near civilians to try to ward off an air attack. And the location of the raid may contain sensitive information — like computer hard drives, cellphones and other data — that could help counterterrorism forces plan future raids.
“These ISIS individuals posed a threat to U.S. and coalition forces as well as the new Syrian government,” Central Command said in a statement, which noted that three women and three children who were at the location of the raid were unharmed.
A Pentagon official said on Friday that there were no American casualties in the mission.
The raid comes just weeks after President Trump signed an executive order in late June that lifted most of the U.S. economic sanctions on Syria, tightening his embrace of the country’s new government despite concerns about its leaders’ past ties to Al Qaeda.
The move, which ended decades of American policy toward Syria, delivered on a surprise announcement by Mr. Trump in May during a trip to the Middle East. At a stop in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump met with President Ahmed al-Shara of Syria, who assumed power in December after his fighters deposed the longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Mr. Trump declared Mr. al-Shara, who previously led a rebel group designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, “young, attractive” and “tough,” and said Syria deserved “a chance” to rebuild after a devastating civil war that began in March 2011.
Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York, said in an email, “Publicizing the raid makes sense, as the U.S. may be eager to highlight the anti-ISIS fight, in partnership with Turkey and Syria, particularly the latter, in an effort to show the lengths Damascus is going to in order to make tangible changes and accede to U.S. demands.”
Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, who oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, said in the statement that “U.S. Central Command is committed to the enduring defeat of ISIS terrorists that threaten the region, our allies and our homeland.”
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13) No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say
Israel has long restricted or completely blocked aid to Gaza on the argument that Hamas steals it to use as a weapon of control over the population.
By Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 26, 2025
Palestinians with food handouts northwest of Gaza City last month. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza.
But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.
In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.
Now, with hunger at crisis levels in the territory, Israel is coming under increased international pressure over its conduct of the war in Gaza and the humanitarian suffering it has brought. Doctors in the territory say that an increasing number of their patients are suffering from — and dying of — starvation.
More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups warned this past week of “mass starvation” and implored Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian assistance. The European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France and Canada, issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza’s two million Palestinian residents.
Israel has largely brushed off the criticism.
David Mencer, a government spokesman, said this week that there was “no famine caused by Israel.” Instead, he blamed Hamas and poor coordination by the United Nations for any food shortages.
Israel moved in May toward replacing the U.N.-led aid system that had been in place for most of the 21-month Gaza war, opting instead to back a private, American-run operation guarded by armed U.S. contractors in areas controlled by Israeli military forces. Some aid still comes into Gaza through the United Nations and other organizations.
The new system has proved to be much deadlier for Palestinians trying to obtain food handouts. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, almost 1,100 people have been killed by gunfire on their way to get food handouts under the new system, in many cases by Israeli soldiers who opened fired on hungry crowds. Israeli officials have said they fired shots in the air in some instances because the crowds came too close or endangered their forces.
The military officials who spoke to The New York Times said that the original U.N. aid operation was relatively reliable and less vulnerable to Hamas interference than the operations of many of the other groups bringing aid into Gaza. That’s largely because the United Nations managed its own supply chain and handled distribution directly inside Gaza.
Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.
A Hamas representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
An internal U.S. government analysis came to similar conclusion, Reuters reported on Friday. It found no evidence of systematic Hamas theft of U.S.-funded humanitarian supplies, the report said.
“For months, we and other organizations were dragged through the mud by accusations that Hamas steals from us,” said Georgios Petropoulos, a former U.N. official in Gaza who oversaw aid coordination with Israel for nearly 13 months of war.
The senior military officials and others interviewed by The Times spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of the military or government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, the military said that it has been “well documented” that Hamas has routinely “exploited humanitarian aid to fund terrorist activities.” But the military did not dispute the assessment that there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole aid from the United Nations.
The Israeli government and military have often clashed over how to conduct the war in Gaza. Early last year, top commanders urged a cease-fire with Hamas to secure the release of hostages. Mr. Netanyahu’s government instead expanded the ground operation in southern Gaza.
Israel used the rationale that Hamas steals aid when it cut off all food and other supplies to Gaza between March and May. In March, after a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel collapsed, Mr. Netanyahu said: “Hamas is currently taking control of all supplies and goods entering Gaza,” and he declared that Israel would prevent anything from entering the territory.
That blockade, and problems with a new aid system that launched in May, brought hunger and starvation in Gaza to the current crisis levels.
For most of the war, the U.N. was the largest single source of aid entering Gaza, according to data from the Israeli military unit that oversees policy in the territory.
Now, the new aid system is managed instead by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or G.H.F., a private American company led by a former C.I.A. agent. It was intended to eventually replace international aid organizations and the U.N. role.
But it has only a few distribution hubs, compared with hundreds under the former U.N.-run operation.
The new system’s rollout at the end of May was quickly followed by near-daily episodes of deadly violence near distribution sites. Desperate and hungry Palestinians must go to the few aid distribution sites located in areas controlled by Israeli forces. The hours of operation are limited and supplies run out, so crowds arrive early, with some walking for miles to get there.
After concluding that Hamas had not stolen from the United Nations on a regular basis, members of the Israeli military met in mid-March with Mr. Netanyahu’s military adviser to discuss the government’s emerging plans for a new aid system, according to the officials interviewed by The Times.
At the meeting, they said, military officials expressed concerns about the intention for G.H.F. to be the sole provider of aid for all of Gaza and presented a plan to expand the U.N. role in parts of Gaza where the private group was not expected to operate.
The military officials in the meeting also suggested that the United Nations could distribute other types of aid that the G.H.F. does not hand out, such as medical supplies.
But the government initially dismissed the military’s plan, according to three of the people familiar with the matter and records reviewed by The Times.
Eventually, when the military warned of looming hunger in Gaza in May, the government changed its position and allowed the United Nations and other organizations to distribute aid along with the G.H.F.
Since May 19, when Israel allowed emergency supplies to resume entering Gaza after its two-month blockade, half of the aid has been distributed by the United Nations and international organizations, with the other half coming through the G.H.F., the Israeli military says.
Over the course of the war, the Israeli military released records and videos purporting to show how Hamas has been exploiting humanitarian aid. The army also shared what it described as internal Hamas documents found in a headquarters in Gaza, which discuss the percentage of aid taken by various Hamas wings and dated to early 2024. But those documents do not specifically refer to the theft of U.N. aid.
Israel has long had tense relations with the United Nations, which spilled over into open hostility during the Gaza war. Israel accuses the organization of bias and says that it was infiltrated by Hamas, including claims that U.N. staff took part in the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack that started the war.
Israel has accused the United Nations of failing to collect truckloads of aid sitting idle near a border crossing into northern Gaza.
The United Nations, in turn, says the Israeli military has not provided enough secure routes to send those trucks in. It accuses Israel of destroying Gaza and blocking critical aid.
This past week, Israel refused to renew the visa of Jonathan Whittall a senior U.N. humanitarian official who oversees humanitarian affairs in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said the official had “spread lies about Israel.”
Mr. Petropoulos, the former U.N. official in Gaza, welcomed the notion that some Israeli officials had recognized the U.N.-led aid system as effective during the war. But he said he wished that endorsement had come much sooner.
“If the U.N. had been taken at face value months ago, we wouldn’t have wasted all this time and Gazans wouldn’t be starving and being shot at trying to feed their families,” he said.
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14) How Seeking Food in Gaza Has Become So Deadly
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed over the past month near aid hubs set up under a new Israeli-backed system, according to Gaza health officials.
Hosted by Rachel Abrams, Produced by Clare Toeniskoetter, Rachelle Bonja and Mooj Zadie, Edited by Maria Byrne, With Paige Cowett and Ben Calhoun, Original music by Dan Powell and Pat McCusker, Engineered by Chris Wood, July 24, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/podcasts/the-daily/gaza-palestine-aid-food.html?
Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
TRANSCRIPT:
Ghada Al-Kurd
Well, this is Ghada Al-Kurd from Gaza.
[Sighs]
We are really starving. Honestly, there is nothing to be eaten here in Gaza. I’m not eating anything.
[APPREHENSIVE MUSIC]
We are losing too much weight. For me, maybe, I lost more than 10 kilos now. And my bones, you can see my bones now. Soon I’ll be a skeleton.
It’s very hard. I couldn’t imagine in my life that I’ll be in this situation, like starving in 2025.
Rachel Abrams
From “The New York Times,” I’m Rachel Abrams. And this is “The Daily.”
The suffering in Gaza has reached new depths. And now finding food, which was already scarce, has become a deadly endeavor.
Israeli forces have opened fire on crowds of desperate, hungry people who are trying to access aid sites established by a new and controversial humanitarian group. Hundreds of people have been killed, according to Gaza health officials. Today, my colleague Aaron Boxerman on who is behind the distribution system and why it’s been so deadly. It’s Thursday, July 24.
Aaron, welcome back to the show. It’s about 7:00 PM where you are in Jerusalem, I think. So we really appreciate you making the time for us.
Aaron Boxerman
Always great to be here.
Rachel Abrams
So, Aaron, to start, the humanitarian situation in Gaza has obviously been dire since the start of the war. But in recent weeks, the situation seems to have deteriorated even further. Specifically, we’ve been hearing reports about hundreds of Palestinians that have been killed by the Israeli military while trying to reach what limited aid has actually gotten into Gaza. So can you explain what has been going on at these aid sites. And why have these people been killed?
Aaron Boxerman
So, first of all, you’re absolutely right, Rachel. We’ve seen for many months now that for many, many Gazans, finding food and water has been an endless daily struggle. And the situation was really exacerbated earlier this year when Israel put a blockade on basically all food, medicine, and fuel entering Gaza for nearly three months.
Since then, the blockade was eased. Aid is going back into the Gaza Strip. But the way that it’s being distributed has been totally upended.
And so we’re seeing a situation on the ground that we haven’t really seen during the course of this nearly two-year war. In less than two months, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and wounded near new aid distribution sites that are under the control of the Israeli military. And Palestinians in Gaza, who’ve spoken to us, have described how just getting a box of food for themselves and their family has become a life-threatening endeavor.
Rachel Abrams
Do we know exactly how many people have died?
Aaron Boxerman
All of these incidents are difficult to assess from the outside. The Israeli military doesn’t allow international journalists into Gaza so that we could report and investigate these incidents freely. But according to Gaza health officials, over a thousand people have been killed, more than 600 of them near these new aid distribution sites.
Israeli officials have broadly disputed those figures. They’ve suggested that they’re exaggerated. But they also haven’t provided any alternative death toll.
Rachel Abrams
So this new aid system, what about it is resulting in all of these deaths?
Aaron Boxerman
So there’s a number of factors. And if we want to understand the new aid system, we have to understand what it replaced. So much of the international aid that was entering the Gaza Strip, that was reaching its two million people, was going through a system coordinated by the United Nations, which ran or coordinated a big network of hundreds of sites across the Gaza Strip, where aid would be distributed to Gazans more or less where they were. And Israel had long been critical of that system.
Rachel Abrams
Why?
Aaron Boxerman
Israeli officials said that Hamas was profiting off the existing system, either by diverting aid or by selling aid. And they essentially said that as the current aid system was set up, they were essentially providing a lifeline to Hamas. That these hundreds of trucks of aid that were going in were undermining Israel’s ability to topple the Palestinian-armed group that had launched the deadliest attack on its civilians in Israeli history on October 7, the attack that triggered the war.
Rachel Abrams
Is that credible, the idea that Hamas was basically seizing on this food, this aid that was coming in?
Aaron Boxerman
As far as we know, there have been incidents where, for example, gunmen have hijacked aid convoys, where they’ve stolen bags of flour from aid trucks. But it’s really hard to tell whether this is Hamas or other gangs. And then there’s the bigger question of whether this is systemic, if it’s happening on a large scale. The United Nations says that they haven’t seen a lot of evidence of that. And Israel, as well, hasn’t presented a lot of evidence publicly to back up that claim.
And another reason that Israel was sort of frustrated and skeptical with the old UN-dominated system was long-standing tensions between Israel and the UN. Many Israeli leaders have called the United Nations biased. And there’s a fundamental mistrust between Israel and the United Nations about the humanitarian situation as a whole.
Rachel Abrams
Israel has consistently said that the UN is exaggerating or is not correct or saying that it’s worse than it is, right?
Aaron Boxerman
Yeah. Israel has frequently said that UN officials are distorting the reality on the ground. At various points, Israeli officials also said that there was no wide-scale humanitarian crisis in Gaza, even as UN officials and aid workers on the ground were describing a very different picture. And so many of our listeners have probably seen videos of people in need of food in Gaza, videos that show crowds of hungry Gazans trying to get aid.
But Israel and the UN have been at odds, really, throughout much of the war about the nature and the depth of the crisis in Gaza. So we see that there are these long-standing tensions between Israel and the United Nations. And Israel, basically, wanted to make a new aid distribution system in a way that officially was described as neutral and independent.
Rachel Abrams
So talk about that new system. Describe it for us.
Aaron Boxerman
So earlier this year, in the spring, we started hearing about how Israel was starting to brief the aid community. They were starting to brief UN workers and tell them, there’s going to be a huge overhaul in terms of how aid is done in Gaza. And then about a month later, we started to understand that there was a separate group that was going to be involved that circumvented the United Nations and that really circumvented every existing aid organization that we were aware of.
It was going to be carried out by a totally new organization, which had been established seemingly for this purpose, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. But who was behind this organization? How was this organization formed? All of that was murky.
There were not a lot of public details about who and what and how this organization was going to function. And so my colleagues and I, Patrick Kingsley, Natan Odenheimer, and Ronen Bergman began looking into it.
Rachel Abrams
So what did you all find?
Aaron Boxerman
So what my colleagues found was that even though the project was billed as neutral and independent, it was actually an Israeli creation. As far back as the earliest weeks of the war, a whole host of people — businessmen, tech people, military officials — they all started meeting. And they came up with this plan that would basically replace the aid system in Gaza as we knew it to that point.
And all throughout 2024, they lobbied for the idea. They met with Israeli leaders. And they really built up a coalition of support for the project. Essentially, the idea that they had was that private contractors would distribute aid in Gaza.
These would be in areas that were controlled by the Israeli military, where Israel would be overseeing what was going on, even though Israel would not be responsible for handing out the aid. And that would circumvent what Israeli officials saw as a problematic United Nations system and enable Israel to exert more control over the flow of aid. And eventually, they decided that those private companies would be American ones.
Rachel Abrams
American companies, why American?
Aaron Boxerman
Well, it appears Israel didn’t want this to be a project that had an Israeli face. So they looked abroad for help. The people behind the idea tried to bring on board respected humanitarians who would really provide legitimacy to the project. The Israeli government even reached out to the UN to see if they would work under these new conditions.
But they, as well as much of the international aid community, really wanted nothing to do with this. They said that working so closely with Israel would compromise their independence. And they were really worried that the combination of Israeli soldiers and crowds of Palestinians desperate for aid would lead to violence.
And so many of the people whose names were floated to potentially help with the project, including a former head of the World Food Program, said no. But one of the people they did manage to get was someone named Jake Wood, who’s a former US Marine. He becomes the executive director of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is a set up as a nonprofit in the United States and which basically serves as the public face of the group. And it raises funding to fund the group’s operations.
And it’s not really clear who is actually providing much of the funding to this group. We know that the US government has said, publicly, that they’ve provided $30 million. The foundation has said that they’ve received more than a hundred million dollars from an unnamed European country. But a lot about the group’s finances, a lot about how this group has been operating is still very murky and has not been disclosed to the public.
Rachel Abrams
Do we have any sense about whether Israel is providing any funding for it?
Aaron Boxerman
That’s another big mystery. There’s been a lot of speculation about it. But at the end of the day, we really don’t know for sure whether Israel has provided financial backing. We know that they support it, that they’ve advocated for it. But in terms of financial backing, we just don’t know for sure yet.
Rachel Abrams
I see.
Aaron Boxerman
So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, that’s the public-facing element. But there’s also the people that are really carrying this out on the ground. That’s a different company.
It’s called Safe Reach Solutions. And it’s run by Phil Reilly, who’s an ex-CIA officer. And under this system, Reilly and the contractors who work for him are basically going to be the ones who are overseeing security at the aid sites themselves.
Rachel Abrams
And what would that look like?
Aaron Boxerman
So really the idea was that there would be four sites at least to start. And they would be in southern and central Gaza. And that’s a huge reduction. Remember, the UN had about 400 distribution sites across the Gaza Strip.
These four new sites would be in areas that are under Israeli military control. So Palestinians, if they wanted to get aid from the sites, would have to walk through areas with armed Israeli soldiers. And only after that, they would arrive at these aid sites, which were run by American contractors. And again, that was really one of the biggest issues for the humanitarian community.
Rachel Abrams
What specifically was the complaint or the concern?
Aaron Boxerman
Well, they thought it was going to be really dangerous, basically. I mean, they thought that Gazans would have to walk really long distances to get to these places, that there was going to be huge amounts of crowding as desperate people tried to get to a small number of sites. And they were really worried about the potential for Israeli soldiers or contractors to use force to control these large crowds of people arriving.
And another concern that the United Nations and other people raise about this was that Israeli leaders, at the time, were already suggesting that they wanted to move a huge number of Palestinians in Gaza from the north to the south. And they worried that this whole idea of creating a new aid system was actually just a strategy for forcibly displacing huge numbers of Palestinians, by ensuring that the only place where they could get aid was going to be in this very small area of southern Gaza.
And so they saw this as not really an aid system, but as a military strategy, as a way for the Israeli military to sort of conveniently hem off a large number of people in a small area by using food, essentially, as a way to keep people in a small part of Gaza. And so there’s been all this criticism before the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation even opens its doors at the end of May.
And just hours before it’s set to start distributing aid for the first time, when Jake Wood, the organization’s public face who defended it, then resigns suddenly. In the middle of the night, he puts out a statement which says, it is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan, while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.
[PENSIVE MUSIC]
He essentially repeats many of the criticisms which the United Nations and which other people had made of the foundation. And this is really another blow to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was set to open its first site for aid distribution just hours later.
Rachel Abrams
We’ll be right back.
So, Aaron, before the break, you talked about how this new aid distribution system launched, despite what sounds like a lot of criticism from many different quarters. Talk to us about the early days. How did the launch go?
Aaron Boxerman
So it started in late May. And it’s been difficult to really get a sense of what’s going on, because Israel doesn’t allow us to freely move around in Gaza, and visit, and see the sites for ourselves in an independent way. And so my colleagues and I managed to speak to several people who tried to get aid from those sites during those first few extremely chaotic days.
Aaron Boxerman
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
So I got on the phone with a man named Mohammed Sugger. He’s 43 years old. He lives in a half-destroyed apartment in the southern Gaza City of Khan Younis, with his three kids and his mom.
Aaron Boxerman
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
He went to one of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites on June 1. So that was just a few days after it opened.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
He told me that he learned that the site was going to be open at 5:00 AM. And he wanted to get there as early as possible, so that he’d be at the front of the line.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
So Mohammed told me that he left his house in the middle of the night and began walking to the distribution site, which is several kilometers away from his house in Khan Younis.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
He arrived in the area at about 3 o’clock in the morning. It was still dark. And he waited along with other people near the distribution site, inside the perimeter controlled by the Israeli military.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
Everybody was pushing, pushing. They’re trying to get forward. A lot of Gazans, including Mohammed, were worried that if they weren’t at the front of the line, there wouldn’t be any food left and they would have walked for hours in the dark basically for nothing.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
And then he said there was an announcement from a drone, basically telling people to get back. But there were so many people and basically nobody could move back. And then —
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
He said he started hearing what he described as warning shots, but the crowd was still pressing forward.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
And that’s when, according to Mohammed, people started getting shot. And everybody dropped to the ground out of fear.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
And he says, there was an old woman next to him who got shot in the leg.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
He remembers someone yelling, my grandma, my grandma. But he says there was basically nothing they could do. People were just too scared to move, so no one could help them.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
And later, the sun came up. It started to grow light out. He said he could see bodies from people who had been shot. And despite all of this —
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
— Mohammed actually goes to the site. He says that he ran as fast as he could. He grabbed one of the boxes that was on the floor. And he tried to run away as quickly as possible, because he was scared that after all of that, somebody might attack him on the way back and steal the food that he’d fought so hard to get.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
And he said the situation at the aid site was a kind of race for food. It was almost like, everybody was sort out for themselves. Everybody racing each other to try to get a box of food.
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Aaron Boxerman
That’s the level of chaos and desperation that Mohammed said he saw.
Aaron Boxerman
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
Mohammed Sugger
[SPEAKING ARABIC]
[TENSE MUSIC]
Rachel Abrams
That is just a horrific story. What details from it have you been able to confirm? And what do we know about how many people died that day?
Aaron Boxerman
It’s absolutely a horrific story. And when we heard stories, both Mohammed’s and stories like it, we try to verify and confirm them as much as possible, which is often difficult to do in Gaza. But here’s what we do know.
We know on that morning, early on June 1, the Red Cross, which has a field hospital in Rafah nearby, had a mass casualty influx shortly after the shooting near the aid site began. More than 170 people arrived. Most of them had gunshot wounds or shrapnel wounds. 21 of them were declared dead upon arrival.
And the patients who survived, the wounded, said that they’d been trying to reach an aid distribution site. So the Red Cross, in its statement, doesn’t say who shot them. But Mohammed and other Palestinians who we spoke to who were there that day, said that it was Israeli soldiers.
Now, this was an extremely contested incident. The Israeli military denied shooting civilians near or at the aid site. But an Israeli military official later briefed reporters and told them that Israeli troops had fired what the official described as warning shots at, quote, “several suspects,” as the crowds of Palestinians had approached them during a period when the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site wasn’t open yet.
Rachel Abrams
OK, so that’s what the Israeli military said. What about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation? What did they say?
Aaron Boxerman
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said that it was unaware of any attacks in or around its site. And that all the aid was distributed between 5:00 AM and 6:00 AM, which is when the site was open. But according to Palestinian witnesses and the Israeli military official who spoke to reporters, the incident seemed to have been about a kilometer away from the site. And —
Archived Recording 1
Today there was another deadly shooting involving civilians at a food distribution center in Gaza.
Aaron Boxerman
— we’ve seen similar episodes recur —
Archived Recording 2
Palestinian health officials say four people were killed this morning at a food distribution center in Gaza.
Aaron Boxerman
— again —
Archived Recording 3
Medics said at least 38 Palestinians were killed today in new shootings near food distribution centers in Gaza.
Aaron Boxerman
— and again.
Archived Recording 4
At least 49 people have been killed while waiting for trucks across Gaza over just 24 hours, according to Palestinian health officials.
Aaron Boxerman
We’ve seen incidents where crowds of Palestinians seeking aid from these sites in southern Gaza have repeatedly come under fire —
Archived Recording 5
At least eight people have been killed in the last 24 hours and 74 injured.
Aaron Boxerman
— including as recently as this week.
Archived Recording 6
32 people are confirmed dead after they tried to reach an aid site in southern Gaza. This is according to Gazan hospital officials.
Archived Recording 7
Israeli troops say they’ve had to control rowdy crowds trying to get to these sites. The foundation says there’s been no violence in or near the sites themselves.
Rachel Abrams
Aaron, you mentioned that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation only has four aid distribution sites set up. And that’s compared with 400 sites that were in place before this new system took over. I think that everybody can understand why crowded situations can be more dangerous generally, but especially in a place like Gaza. But in these situations that we’ve been talking about, people are actually getting shot near these aid sites, right? So it feels like there’s probably something else going on besides simply that these sites are incredibly crowded.
Aaron Boxerman
You’re absolutely right to point to crowding as an issue. But really, I think the fundamental problem goes back to what the original critics from the United Nations and from the aid community said at the beginning, which is that thousands of people are crossing Israeli military lines in a war zone. And they’re going to aid sites, which, unlike in the past, are now surrounded by Israeli soldiers. That is the deadly combination that we’ve seen.
Now, it’s important to point out, the United Nations and other aid organizations are still bringing some aid into Gaza. And there have also been some shootings linked to their distribution. But the majority of the deaths reported by Gaza officials took place in the vicinity of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites.
Rachel Abrams
Obviously, live ammunition is not an accepted form of crowd control. Has Israel explained why this has happened over and over again?
Aaron Boxerman
At times, they’ve said that Israeli soldiers fired warning shots at people who approached them and who posed a kind of threat. They’ve also basically disputed the casualty tolls that come out of Gaza. They say that casualties that are released by the Gaza Health Ministry, which is a branch of the Hamas-run administration in the Gaza Strip, are not reliable. And at times, they’ve accused people that have echoed these reports of mass casualties of distorting reality.
Rachel Abrams
So it basically sounds like Israel is denying that this is a huge issue.
Aaron Boxerman
So the Israeli military says that they’ve learned lessons, that they’re working on renovating some of the sites, that they’re trying to ensure that whatever incidents there have been don’t recur. But just last weekend, we saw two deadly incidents, one related to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, another related to the World Food Program convoy, where Israeli soldiers reportedly opened fire, killing and wounding dozens of people.
And so, unfortunately, we’ve seen these deadly shootings are continuing. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has also rejected a lot of these reports. But at the same time, they’ve said that mostly they’re speaking about what happens at their sites or immediately around their sites. So they’re not really commenting as much on what happens to people on the way to the site, which is, at least in our reporting, when a lot of the deadly shootings, unfortunately, have taken place.
Rachel Abrams
And what about the US and all of this? Has the US said anything? Because as you mentioned, the US is providing at least a chunk of funding to this effort.
Aaron Boxerman
So the US has emerged as a staunch defender of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. After Jake Wood, the former executive director, left the initiative, they brought in a new head, an evangelical leader named Johnnie Moore, who’s seen as quite close to President Trump. And, in fact, the $30 million in funding from the State Department was actually authorized weeks after these reports of shootings began to emerge. So that certainly feels like a real vote of confidence in the new system, even as the Trump administration was actually cutting foreign aid elsewhere in the government.
Rachel Abrams
Obviously, this war has invited international condemnation. And I’m curious whether we have heard from the International community in response to this effort specifically.
Aaron Boxerman
So it’s been condemned by many, including Israel’s own allies. Countries that are historically supportive of Israel, like the United Kingdom and Germany and France, have expressed a lot of skepticism about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. And just earlier this week, a coalition of around 30 countries issued a joint statement where they really condemned this new system, which they said deprived Gazans of their human dignity.
Rachel Abrams
Have any of those condemnations moved the needle at all, just in terms of Israel acknowledging any kind of problem or conceding that this aid distribution system had issues that perhaps it didn’t earlier recognize?
Aaron Boxerman
So publicly, at least, Israeli officials have defended the initiative. But there’s also a reason to believe that they’re not totally thrilled with how it’s turned out. After all, Israel promised that this was going to be an orderly system, not just for the sake of Gazans, but also because the whole reason behind this overhaul was to prevent the aid from going to Hamas or benefiting Hamas.
But the rollout has been so messy and so disorganized that it doesn’t really seem like anyone is checking who’s coming to pick up these boxes of aid. So some officials and analysts have suggested that even by the Israeli’s own standards, it’s not clear whether they’ve been so successful. But at the end of the day, this is all really symptomatic of a much bigger problem with Israel’s whole approach to Gaza.
Rachel Abrams
How do you mean?
Aaron Boxerman
All these scenes of desperation and chaos, they all really underscore that right now, nobody is really responsible for governing in Gaza, for providing for the welfare of Gazans, and for instituting law and order. The Israeli military has decimated the Hamas government, which used to run Gaza. And it hasn’t allowed anything to come up in its place.
So the result has been anarchy. Now, this might be the result of bad planning. But there are also critics of Israel who have argued that for Israel, the chaos in Gaza could also be part of a larger strategy, either to further weaken Hamas or just to make the situation in Gaza so unlivable that Palestinians might volunteer to leave on their own.
[PENSIVE MUSIC]
So we’re now nearly two years into this war. We’re at almost 60,000 Palestinians killed, according to Gaza health officials. There’s rising malnutrition. The Israeli military now controls much of the Gaza Strip. And ordinary Gazans are still just trying to survive from one day to the next.
Rachel Abrams
Aaron, thank you so much.
Aaron Boxerman
Thank you.
Rachel Abrams
On Wednesday, more than a hundred aid agencies and human rights groups, including Save The Children and Doctors Without Borders, warned that, quote, “mass starvation was spreading across Gaza.” The joint statement adds to growing calls for Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian aid and for the war to end. Israel’s foreign ministry rejected the group’s claims, saying that the organizations were echoing Hamas’ talking points.
We’ll be right back.
Here’s what else you need to know today. Columbia University has agreed to pay a $200 million fine to settle allegations from the Trump administration that it failed to do enough to stop the harassment of Jewish students. The settlement is part of a sweeping deal to restore the university’s federal research funding, which the White House had canceled. Columbia had been the earliest target of the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul the country’s most elite academic institutions. As part of the settlement, the university also agreed to a number of different terms, including the appointment of a provost to oversee Middle Eastern studies and the appointment of three dozen public safety officers with arrest powers.
And on Wednesday, a judge sentenced Bryan Kohberger, who was convicted of killing four Idaho college students in 2022, to life in prison with no chance of parole. Friends and family members of the victims spoke of their loss, with one telling the killer to quote, “Go to hell.” Others demanded to know why he had committed his crimes. Mr. Kohberger declined to speak or explain his motives.
[THEME MUSIC]
Today’s episode was produced by Claire Toeniskoetter, Rachelle Bonja, and Mooj Zadie. It was edited by Maria Byrne with help from Paige Cowett and Ben Calhoun, fact-checked by Susan Lee. It contains original music by Dan Powell and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.
That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.
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15) What Iranians Lost When Israel Bombed Its Most Notorious Prison
By Sahar Delijani, July 26, 2025
Sahar Delijani is an Iranian American writer in New York City.
Tarini Sharma
The clock in Evin Prison stopped just before noon on June 23. That was the hour Israeli bombs tore through the compound, heavily damaging the health clinic, visitation center, administrative buildings and multiple wards — including the infamous Ward 209, where Evin’s many political prisoners were held. The attack took place amid 12 days of Israeli airstrikes, an unlawful war targeting Iran’s military and nuclear facilities. But Evin is no military site: It is known for holding the regime’s dissenters and critics.
Israeli authorities called the strike on Evin “symbolic”— an attack on a prison that represented “oppression for the Iranian people.” In a social media post, Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar suggested it was a strike aimed at liberation. That symbolism did not ring true for the many Iranians killed in the blasts: visiting family members, social workers, medical staffers, teenage conscripts tasked with escorting prisoners and inmates, among them transgender prisoners whose ward was reduced to rubble. Anguished families were left scrambling for news of their loved ones. Prisoners who were already at risk were pushed into deeper peril — relocated to distant prisons, cut off from support and left to endure even harsher conditions under the unrelenting grip of a regime that punishes survival itself.
If there’s anything symbolic in Israel’s bombing of Evin Prison, it is the false and dangerous narrative that wars help those fighting to bring democracy to Iran. Far from weakening the Islamic Republic’s apparatus of repression, Israel’s war has emboldened it, rolling back the fragile gains won through years of homegrown civil defiance. It has sabotaged decades of grass-roots organizing and collective labor by Iran’s civil society, tearing through the very scaffolding of democratic resistance and undermining the only force capable of changing Iran from within: the Iranian people.
I come from a long lineage of resistance to repression and tyranny. I was born in Evin Prison in 1983. My parents were secular leftist activists who fought to overthrow the Shah, and after the 1979 revolution continued their activism against the newly established Islamic Republic. In 1983, when my mother was pregnant with me, she and my father were arrested along with thousands of other political activists. After I was born, I stayed with her for a month before I was taken from her arms and given to my grandparents, who raised me while my parents remained behind bars. They were eventually released after serving yearslong sentences.
My parents’ arrest came during a wave of mass detentions and intimidation targeting the regime’s political opponents. By 1983, as the Iran-Iraq war raged on, the regime used the conflict to justify a sweeping crackdown, framing dissent as treason in times of national crisis. My mother and father’s imprisonment took place amid a ruthless campaign of repression that would culminate in 1988 in the bloodiest political purge in Iran’s post-revolutionary history.
Few things are more dangerous than a dictatorship in panic. The deeper the fear, the more ruthlessly it strikes back. That summer, weakened by eight years of war with Iraq and determined to consolidate power, the Iranian regime launched a campaign of executions against political prisoners it deemed unrepentant. Thousands were killed, their bodies dumped into unmarked mass graves. My uncle Mohsen was among them. The 1988 massacre remains seared into the collective memory of Iranians, an open wound in the nation’s conscience.
Today a similar cycle of violence is at risk of repeating. The once abstract threat of foreign invasion, long invoked to justify crackdowns, became real, giving the regime cover to escalate repression in the name of security. Now a familiar purge is underway in Iran. Dissidents, activists, journalists, writers, minority leaders, community organizers and protesters of the 2022-23 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising are facing a renewed crackdown by authorities. Many face execution, accused of “espionage” for Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan residents were deported in days. Ordinary people live in fear of an ever-deepening oppression.
The Woman, Life, Freedom movement in particular — born out of outrage at the death in police custody of a young Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, arrested for allegedly wearing her mandatory hijab improperly — was one of the largest pro-democracy revolts in Iran’s post-revolutionary history. The uprising struck at the very core of the regime’s patriarchal, authoritarian and theocratic foundations, initiating a profound shift in society. Now it is precisely these brave women and men who face persecution as the Islamic Republic moves to reclaim control.
The harrowing aftermath of the Evin Prison bombing mirrors what has unfolded across Iran since Israel’s attacks. According to testimonies from political prisoners inside Evin, Iranian security forces stormed the prison just hours after the airstrikes — not to offer aid or protection to prisoners fearing further strikes but to turn their guns on them, aiming at terrified inmates’ heads and chests as they forced them back into blown-out cells. The prisoners were then chained together, shackled at hand and foot and marched at gunpoint through the wreckage and, darkness, past corpses in body bags, before they finally reached buses bound for other prisons.
The injustice of these cruel acts is twofold for Iranians: It’s not just that the oppressive regime is carrying them out, it’s also that the bombs of “liberation” were dropped by Israel, a country that has committed unspeakable violence for the last 22 months in Gaza, killing and starving Palestinians.
Israel’s assault has shattered something deep within the Iranian people, sparking a realization that decades of fragile gains in the civil rights struggle could be set back in a few days, that outside forces could bomb their way into their lives and homes with no accountability. With chilling clarity, we witnessed how swiftly our generational fight for democracy could be cast aside as futile and insignificant, too slow for warmongering powers that trade in conquest, not change and justice. In this moment, we see how alone we truly are in our fight for a better life.
Two prominent political prisoners, Mehdi Mahmoudian and Abolfazl Ghadyani, captured the stark reality of the aftermath of the war in a letter they wrote from Evin Prison: “On one side, Iran was under attack by Netanyahu’s government, which has been accused of ‘war crimes’ by the International Criminal Court. On the other, the Islamic Republic — also accused of ‘crimes against humanity’ by U.N. legal experts for its suppression of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement — kept prisoners behind bars under wartime conditions.”
As the dust from the Israeli airstrikes settles and the ruins of Evin are laid bare, the picture is now clear: Iranians are still caught between a ruthless regime that extinguishes life under the hollow claim of protecting a revolution and foreign powers that drop missiles on innocent people under the treacherous guise of liberation.
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16) More Freedom, Less Violence: Some States Look to European Prisons
States of all political stripes, including Oklahoma, North Dakota and Massachusetts, have sent officials to tour prisons in Germany in search of ways to improve conditions for American inmates.
By Shaila Dewan, Photographs by Lena Mucha For The New York Times. July 25, 2025, Shaila Dewan reported from Berlin.
At Tegel Prison in Berlin, maximum-security prisoners have many of the same freedoms as minimum-security prisoners in the United States. Credit...Lena Mucha for The New York Times
It was a lovely spring day in Berlin when a tour bus pulled up outside a maximum-security prison called Tegel. Cobblestones, bike racks and blooming azaleas gave it the air of a college campus.
But what Shannon Davison, a deputy prison warden from North Dakota, noticed were security threats.
Ms. Davison, part of a delegation of U.S. prison officials who were there to learn about Germany’s system, clocked them in seconds. Inmates working outside the gate. Guards using vape pens, potentially a valuable commodity. Broom handles, a cart with metal wheels and cell windows that opened.
There were other things you simply would not see in an American prison, like a warden casually placing a giant ring of keys on the floor beside her chair.
“They treat their maximum-security prisoners like minimum-security prisoners,” Ms. Davison marveled. And yet, Tegel Prison is far less violent than many American prisons.
Over the course of a week, officials from Massachusetts, North Dakota and Oklahoma toured four German prisons where inmates wore street clothes, maintained their right to vote, cooked their own meals, played in soccer leagues and learned skills like animal husbandry and carpentry. One, called the Open Prison, allowed residents to come and go for work, school and errands.
A growing number of American states are looking abroad for ideas that can be adapted to their state prison systems, most often to Scandinavian countries famous for the IKEA-utopia design of their correctional institutions, but also to places like Germany and New Zealand.
In the past two years, California, Arizona and Oklahoma’s prison systems have shifted their focus to rehabilitation rather than punishment. In 2022, Pennsylvania opened a unit known as Little Scandinavia, and last year Missouri began a similar transformation project in four prisons. Six other states have established European-style units for younger prisoners.
The efforts are still small, dwarfed by the sheer size of the American prison population, and limited by political and financial roadblocks. Prison conditions are not a priority for voters, polls show, and changes are sometimes unwelcome.
In March, thousands of corrections officers in New York state walked off the job to protest new limitations on the use of solitary confinement, saying they would make their jobs more dangerous. In Arizona, a new head of prisons who had sought to make them more humane faced sharp criticism after a prisoner who had been moved out of maximum security killed three fellow inmates. And harsh punishments are part of the American DNA. President Donald J. Trump has said he would “love” to send American convicts to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Still, making prison life more like normal life is catching on in some surprising places.
“I’m amazed by how quickly these ideas are taking off across the United States,” said Keramet Reiter, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Prisoner advocates say the changes make communities safer by better preparing prisoners for their eventual release, and create a less stressful environment for prison workers. But the real catalyst is that U.S. prisons are in crisis, struggling with severe staffing shortages, crumbling facilities and frequent violence. Inmates in U.S. prisons often endure extreme temperatures, vermin-infested food and years, or even decades, in solitary confinement. High-profile cases have brought attention to prolonged shackling, fatal beatings and sexual abuse.
“It’s unsustainable, which is why we have to change the justice system to lock up only those who are a danger to others,” said Tricia Everest, the secretary of public safety for Republican-led Oklahoma.
The state once had the country’s highest incarceration rate. But in 2016, voters approved measures to lower the penalties for some crimes and to direct the savings into mental health and substance abuse treatment. Ms. Everest has presided over the closure of four prisons.
European prisons are far safer than those in the United States, experts say, with lower recidivism rates and healthier, happier employees. In Berlin, which has 3.9 million residents and operates a correction system analogous to that of an American state, suicides are rare and homicides are virtually nonexistent.
Of course, the United States has higher crime than European countries. Its system of prisons and jails is the largest in the world, incarcerating nearly 2 million people, according to the World Prison Brief, which tracks global data on incarceration.
Change on that scale is difficult to accomplish, especially when the American public can be skeptical of spending money on what they regard as prisoners’ comfort.
Even in states that have been noted for overhauling some aspects of their criminal justice system, like Georgia and Texas, prison conditions can remain abysmal. Georgia was singled out by the Justice Department last year for failing to protect inmates from “frequent, pervasive violence,” and in March a federal judge declared the heat in Texas prisons to be “plainly unconstitutional.”
By contrast, German prison officials say they consider loss of liberty to be punishment enough. The courts have ruled that new prisons must provide single-occupancy cells at least 10 square meters in size. Many have kitchens where residents may cook their own meals. One prison for young adults is experimenting with removing bars from some of the windows, on the premise that looking at bars is depressing.
Many of the rules were made in response to the shame of the country’s Nazi past, when prisons were used to suppress dissent and concentration camps held unspeakable horrors.
“What it all boils down to is the core principle, human dignity,” said Deputy Warden Johanna Schmid as she led the group through Tegel Prison’s leafy courtyards.
At Heidering Prison, Andreas Kratz, the warden, showed off a visiting room with a kitchenette, bed, crib and balcony. Time with family, German officials said, helps prisoners maintain the ties they will need to stay out of trouble when they are released.
In the United States, privacy, time outside of cells and family visits are considered risky, and “over-familiarity” between correction officers and inmates is prohibited. German prisons take the opposite approach, known as dynamic security. Correction officers are expected to develop relationships with inmates and know when problems may arise.
Yvonne Gade, a correction officer in a ward that houses a small number of prisoners deemed particularly dangerous, shrugged off concerns about their access to a gym with free weights.
“It would be a huge potential for violence if you locked them up all the time,” she said.
Prisons in Europe are certainly not perfect. The Americans and Germans shared frustrations over gangs and a recent influx of synthetic marijuana.
Some of Germany’s problems show just how different the system is: In one facility for young adults, a resident set his curtain on fire using a lighter he was permitted to have. In Saxony-Anhalt in April, a prisoner was accused of killing his wife during a five-hour, unsupervised conjugal visit.
The idea of showing U.S. policymakers how European prisons work originated with a civil rights lawyer named Don Specter, whose lawsuits have led to changes to the California prison system. In 2011, he accompanied a group of students on a visit to prisons in Germany and Scandinavia, and was struck by how it changed the “hearts and minds” of people with diverse political views.
“It seemed that the magic sauce was actually seeing it in person,” Mr. Specter said.
When Mr. Specter was awarded a large attorney’s fee in one of his cases, he used it to fund a trip abroad for prison officials in 2013. Out of that grew the Global Justice Exchange Project at the Vera Institute of Justice, which organizes regular trips to Germany, and a program at the University of California, San Francisco called Amend, which has worked with Washington, Oregon, California and other states to change prison culture.
Working with Vera, six states have gone on to create special units for 18- to 25-year-olds that allow more frequent visits with family, shared responsibility for resolving conflicts and more out-of-cell time.
The effect of these transformations is difficult to measure, in part because many of the units are quite new, and in part because doing research in prison is inherently complex. But a randomized, controlled trial in South Carolina showed that residents who were placed in the special units were 73 percent less likely to be disciplined for violence and 83 percent less likely to be sent to restrictive housing.
Such efforts can also improve staff morale. Guards whose interactions with prisoners go beyond shackling and unshackling them are likely to consider their work more meaningful, said Dr. Reiter, the criminology professor.
Throughout the German tour, U.S. officials were intrigued, but also wrestled with how much of what they saw would work at home. The biggest obstacle was cost, especially increasing staff-to-inmate ratios when states are already struggling to recruit officers. But even simple acts like a guard and inmate sharing a cup of coffee could require an overhaul of longstanding policies designed to prohibit fraternization.
Differing concepts of liability also get in the way. In Germany, prisoners can use the toilet behind a closed door, while in the U.S. toilets are typically installed in open cells, said Colby Braun, director of the North Dakota Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“You live in your bathroom,” he said. “With another person.”
When the state was planning a new prison, designers tried for a more dignified arrangement but could not achieve it, Mr. Braun said, because of a requirement that officers be able to see prisoners on their rounds.
The officials compared notes on how to overcome political resistance in their own states. Mr. Braun said he tried to develop relationships with lawmakers so he could fend off proposals he viewed as counterproductive, like a recent one that would have ended the use of rehabilitation programs and halfway houses.
On the other hand, the Massachusetts delegation was frustrated because, they said, its liberal legislature did not want to replace their prisons, some of which are more than 100 years old, even though new ones could make incarceration more humane.
For her part, Ms. Everest of Oklahoma said she had learned how to speak the language of her state’s legislators and law enforcement officers.
“I don’t do criminal justice reform. It’s been politicized,” she said. “We are modernizing the system.”
Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.
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17) Removal of Castro and Guevara Statues Ignites Outcry in Mexico City
The Cuban Revolution leaders joined forces in Mexico in 1955. A local mayor removed a memorial to them, drawing protests and condemnation from Mexico’s highest office.
By James WagnerPhotographs by Marian Carrasquero, Reporting from Mexico City, July 26, 2025
Statues of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, before their removal, at Tabacalera Park in Mexico City in 2021. Credit...Eyepix/NurPhoto, via Associated Press
The bench in Jardin Tabacalera after the statues of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were removed.
The bench in Jardin Tabacalera after the statues of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were removed.
When Fidel Castro first met Che Guevara in Mexico City in 1955, they began planning a guerrilla war that would sweep Cuba and change the course of Latin American history.
Mr. Castro became Cuba’s Communist leader, defying the United States for decades. Mr. Guevara, an Argentine, became a legend to his supporters and enemies alike, even after he was executed in Bolivia in 1967. In 2017, Mexicans commemorated their meeting with statues, linking Mexico to a pivotal moment in the Cold War.
But the statues were removed last week by a local Mexico City mayor, setting off a political firestorm that has drawn in the country’s president and reignited a debate about how to recognize a divisive history.
The local mayor, Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, said the statues were improperly installed and that the men should not be honored, calling them “murderers” who “continue representing a lot of pain.” She pointed to people who were silenced, jailed and killed under Mr. Castro’s nearly half-a-century reign, and to how Cuba still struggles with food and electricity shortages.
“I understand that there are people who see Fidel and Che as their revolutionary figures, but governing isn’t about choosing which victims to show solidarity to,” Ms. Rojo de la Vega said in an interview.
But her actions have provoked protests and condemnation, including from Mexico’s highest office. President Claudia Sheinbaum, who leads the leftist Morena party, denounced the removal this week, calling it “total intolerance” and “illegal.” She said Ms. Rojo de la Vega’s argument was “hypocritical,” because the local mayor had once vacationed in Cuba.
Ms. Rojo de la Vega, 39, argued her actions were legal and said that her trip to Cuba was 10 years ago, before she ran for office, and she has since learned more and developed her position.
She also drew attention to past decisions of Ms. Sheinbaum, who was the mayor of Mexico City before she became president.
In 2020, Ms. Sheinbaum had a plaque commemorating Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, a former Mexican president known as a right-wing authoritarian, removed because it “alluded to an era of repression and ignominy in the country’s history.”
That year, she also oversaw the removal of a Christopher Columbus monument, calling it part of an effort to “decolonize” the city’s statue-filled main boulevard.
So Ms. Rojo de la Vega — who is not a Morena member — said she did not expect a controversy when she had the statues hauled away. “In my opinion, we were acting the same way” as Ms. Sheinbaum, she said.
“You have to be consistent,” she added. “I don’t think a dictator is any less of a dictator if they’re from the left, the center or the right.”
The statues were first installed in late 2017 by Ricardo Monreal, then the municipal chief and still a key politician in Ms. Sheinbaum’s party. The cast bronze figures, weighing over 550 pounds with their bench, depicted the men seated and in conversation, and cost roughly $32,000 in public funds then.
The statues, which were once vandalized with paint, were removed in 2018 because of inadequate government approvals. A city committee that oversees public monuments approved their re-installation in 2020.
Ms. Sheinbaum said that any removal must be decided by the committee, which said this week that the statues were improperly removed.
Ms. Rojo de la Vega argued that the committee does not have authority over art paid for by the municipality, citing Mexico City’s 2017 Constitution, which gave municipalities more autonomy.
Since taking over as local mayor in October, she said, her office has heard weekly from residents complaining about the statues.
But people in the area have also defended the memorial. On Sunday, more than 200 people gathered where the statues once sat and demanded they be reinstalled. Some dressed in revolutionary outfits or donned Communist symbols, and many carried images of Mr. Castro, Mr. Guevara or the Cuban flag.
The Cuban Embassy in Mexico City did not respond to a request for comment. Its ambassador, Marcos Rodríguez Costa, wrote on social media last week, “The true Revolution is not made of stone or bronze.”
Others simply argued that the history should be memorialized regardless of politics.
“Beyond whether you sympathize ideologically or not, it cannot be denied that the Cuban Revolution historically changed the story of Latin America and the world,” said Olivia Garza Joa, a protest organizer and vice president of the José Martí Association of Cuban Residents in Mexico.
For now, the statues are covered in Bubble Wrap and hidden in a municipal facility. Although Ms. Rojo de la Vega has suggested auctioning them off to recoup some funds — Ms. Sheinbaum called that illegal — the local mayor said her team was in discussions with federal and city officials. The statues could be sent to a museum or another part of Mexico City, she said.
Mere feet from where the figures once sat, though, a bust of Mr. Guevara remained.
The municipality had not yet determined who paid for it, Ms. Rojo de la Vega said, and thus who had the authority to remove it.
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