On July 30, organizations across the Bay Area gather to celebrate Medicare’s 60th birthday, protest billions funneled for prisons, instead of health, and call for improved and expanded Medicare for all
San Francisco, CA—As pressure mounts nationwide over cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, The Movement to End Privatization of Medicare and other statewide organizations gather to celebrate Medicare’s 60th birthday.
On Wednesday, July 30, speakers will gather for a press conference at noon, in front of Pier 33, where the Alcatraz Ferry boards. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Interior Secretary Dough Burgum visited Alcatraz last week, saying that the visit was made to "start the work to renovate and reopen the site to house the most dangerous criminals and illegals" meaning detaining individuals rounded up by ICE raids.
“Making America Safe Again?”, said Dr. Ana Malinow, lead organizer for The Movement to End Privatization of Medicare. “We disagree. Building a prison in Alcatraz (and possibly paying the for-profit prison company GEO Group to build and run it) drains money from the public coffers that should be used to expand and improve Medicare for all, not for exploitation and suffering.”
From 2-4 pm, activists will gather at the Harry Bridges Plaza, in front of the Ferry Building, to celebrate Medicare’s 60th birthday. The celebratory rally seeks to turn growing national outrage over the privatization of Medicare and gutting of national public health programs into organized protest by calling for:
· Recognition of healthcare as a human right
· The elimination of private health insurance and for-profit care delivery models
· Legislation to establish a National Single Payer program that ensures comprehensive coverage for all
· A transformation of care delivery, freeing caregivers from corporate control to focus on patient well-being
Organizers say this marks a pivotal moment in healthcare activism.
“Americans are fed up with a system where private insurers siphon public funds, overload care with red tape, and put profits ahead of people’s health. After the passing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, we witnessed a wave of public outrage that exposed just how deeply this resentment runs. We’re channeling that energy into a celebration of Medicare and a determined push for improved and expanded Medicare for All—one that delivers affordable, high-quality healthcare to everyone, free from profit,” said Ligia Montano, Organizing and Partnership Director at Senior Disability Action.
This year’s rally comes on the heels of the passage of H.R. 1, whose policies could result in up to 3.5 million Medi-Cal recipients losing their health insurance. Federal cuts to Medicaid funding could lead over time to the loss of up to 217,000 health care jobs in California and reduce state and local tax revenues by up to $1.7 billion. In response, organizers are pushing for Improved and Expanded Medicare for All free from profit, that would eliminate:
· Medical debt
· Denials of care
· Financial barriers like copays and deductibles
· Privatization schemes such as Medicare Advantage overpayments
· Cuts to Medi-Cal
Organizers stress that now is the time to move health care from a profit-centered industry to a people-centered system, ensuring equity, access, and dignity for all people in the U.S.
For more information about National Single Payer, visit: https://nationalsinglepayer.com/
The mission of The Movement to End Privatization of Medicare is to protect Medicare as a public good. Medicare must not be surrendered to middlemen nor value-based payment schemes which incentivize providers to withhold medical care in pursuit of profit. Medicare and its Trust Fund must be safeguarded for the good of all current as well as future beneficiaries in the US and its territories using grassroots organizing, outreach, education, advocacy, and mobilizing with allies on the path to single payer health care.
Contact: Dr. Ana Malinow Cell: 713-417-6381 anamalinow@gmail.com
Steve Zeltzer Cell: 415-867-0628 lvpsf@igc.org
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Memorial for David Johnson of the San Quentin 6
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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)
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
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
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
1) 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.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
2) 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.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
3) No Meals, Fainting Nurses, Dwindling Baby Formula: Starvation Haunts Gaza Hospitals
After Israeli restrictions on aid, hunger has risen across Gaza. Doctors and nurses, struggling to find food themselves, lack the resources to stem the surge.
By Patrick KingsleyBilal Shbair and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad
Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem; Bilal Shbair from Deir al-Balah, Gaza; and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa, Israel, July 27, 2025
Hanin Barghouth with her 3-month-old daughter, Salam, at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza this week. At birth, her doctor said, Salam weighed roughly 6.6 pounds, and three months later, she weighs only 8.8 pounds — at least three pounds underweight. Bilal Shbair for The New York Times
In several of the hospitals still functioning in Gaza, nurses are fainting from hunger and dehydration. Managers often cannot provide meals for patients or medical staff. Doctors are running low on formula for newborn babies, in some cases giving them water alone.
And at least three major hospitals lack the nutritional fluids needed to properly treat malnourished children and adults.
Those scenes were described in interviews starting Friday with seven doctors — four from Gaza, and three volunteers from Australia, Britain and the United States. All of them worked this past week in four of the territory’s main hospitals.
After months of warnings, international agencies, experts and doctors say starvation is now sweeping across Gaza amid restrictions on aid imposed by Israel for months. At least 56 Palestinians died this month of starvation in the territory, nearly half of the total such deaths since the war began 22 months ago, according to data released on Saturday by the Gaza Health Ministry.
As starvation rises, medical institutions and staff, already struggling to treat war wounds and illness, are now grappling with rising cases of malnourishment.
Weak and dizzy, medics are passing out in the wards, where colleagues revive them with saline and glucose drips. Persistently short of basic tools such as antibiotics and painkillers, doctors are also running out of the special intravenous drips used to feed depleted patients.
In all four hospitals, the doctors described how they are increasingly unable to save malnourished babies and are instead forced to simply manage their decline. The babies are too weak to be flooded with nutrients, which could overload their system and cause them to suffer “refeeding syndrome,” which could kill them.
In some cases, the fluids that the doctors can safely give to the babies are not enough to prevent them from dying.
“I have seen ones that are imminently about to pass away,” said Dr. Ambereen Sleemi, an American surgeon who has been volunteering since early July at the Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza. The babies were brought to the hospital “starving and malnourished,” Dr. Sleemi said in a phone interview on Friday, “and they haven’t been able to get them back from the brink.”
Dr. Nick Maynard, a British surgeon who volunteered at the same hospital until Wednesday, described the shock of seeing a skeletal infant who looked only days old, but was in fact seven months.
“The expression ‘skin and bones’ doesn’t do it justice,” Dr. Maynard said in a phone interview on Friday. “I saw the severity of malnutrition that I would not have thought possible in a civilized world. This is man-made starvation being used as a weapon of war and it will lead to many more deaths unless food and aid is let in immediately.”
Asked for comment, COGAT, the Israeli military department that oversees aid to Gaza, said it “continues to work in coordination with international actors to allow and facilitate the continued entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, in accordance with international law.” Late on Saturday night, the Israeli military began to drop airborne aid over northern Gaza, and said it would pause its military activity for several hours day in key areas to make it easier to deliver aid by land.
One-third of Palestinians in Gaza are forced to go without food for days in a row, the World Food Program said recently. Of the young children and pregnant women treated at clinics run by Doctors Without Borders in Gaza, roughly one-fourth are suffering from malnutrition, the medical aid group said last week.
Doctors say that many other people have likely died from different conditions and injuries that could have been cured or healed if the victims had not been so weakened by malnourishment. Starvation is causing more mothers to suffer miscarriages or give birth prematurely, to malnourished babies with weakened immune systems and medical abnormalities.
“The result is a rise in infections, dehydration and even immune collapse in infants,” said Dr. Hani al-Faleet, a pediatric consultant at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza. “The immediate cause of death in some of these cases is simple: The baby doesn’t get enough to eat, and neither does the mother.”
Starvation has risen sharply since Israel’s total blockade on food aid to Gaza between early March and late May, doctors and rights groups say. While Israel has since allowed food in, it introduced a new method of distribution that is flawed and dangerous, making it almost impossible for Palestinians to find food safely or affordably.
Before March, food handouts were mainly distributed under a U.N.-led system from hundreds of points close to where people lived. Now, they are supplied from a handful of sites run by Israeli-backed private American contractors that, for most Palestinians in Gaza, can be reached only by walking for miles through Israeli military lines.
Israeli soldiers have killed hundreds of people walking these routes, turning the daily search for food into a deadly trap.
Some food is still available from shops in Palestinian-run areas, but only at astronomic prices that are unaffordable to the largely unemployed civilian population. A kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of flour costs up to $30, and a kilogram of tomatoes costs roughly $30; meat and rice are largely unavailable on the open market.
That has forced many Palestinians to routinely choose between two often fatal options: risk death by starvation, or risk death by gunfire to reach food aid sites that are likely to have run out of supplies by the time many arrive.
Israel publicly says the new aid system is necessary to prevent Hamas from stealing the aid. But Israeli military officials have acknowledged to The New York Times that they have no proof that Hamas has systematically stolen food supplied by the United Nations, the main provider of aid to Gaza during most of the war. Israel says that its soldiers have fired “warning shots” to quell unrest along the roads leading to the aid sites. Dr. Maynard and Dr. Sleemi described injuries that indicated soldiers had systematically fired at people’s torsos.
Israel also blames the United Nations for failing to deliver enough food to alleviate the situation. Israel said on Saturday that it had destroyed up to 100 truckloads of food in recent months because aid groups could not distribute the food before it passed its use-by date. U.N. officials say that Israeli restrictions have made it difficult to send convoys through an active war zone.
The food shortages add another challenge to an already very difficult environment for doctors.
“Some staff members have collapsed in operating rooms. Others have fainted in emergency wards because they have not received any proper food,” said Dr. Mohammad Abu Salmiya, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. “The burden on them is immense.”
Salam Barghouth, a 3-month baby girl treated for malnutrition this week at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza, is among the youngest Palestinians failed by the new aid distribution system. Her mother, Hanin Barghouth, 22, is too weak to walk to the new distribution sites. Her father, Akram Barghouth, 27, has never managed to reach the sites before the aid runs out, Ms. Barghouth said.
Like most Gazans, the parents are jobless, rely on donations from relatives and friends and said they survive mostly on falafel balls that cost roughly 10 times their prewar price.
As a result, Ms. Barghouth regularly skips meals and says she has lost 29 pounds, a fifth of her body weight, since the start of the war. She cannot produce enough breast milk to feed Salam, who was born on April 21, after Israel started the blockade.
At Salam’s birth, according to Dr. al-Faleet, her doctor, she weighed roughly 6.6 pounds. Three months later, she weighs only 8.8 — at least three pounds underweight, the doctor said.
“I’m breastfeeding her as much as I can, and when I can’t, I give her formula — but that’s only when I have it,” Ms. Barghouth said. She is reaching the end of a container of formula that she said cost roughly $120, approximately two and a half times the amount it costs outside Gaza.
“She came into the world during a war,” Ms. Barghouth added, “and I’m fighting every day to keep her alive in it.”
While Salam Barghouth can still access medical support in central Gaza, other starving children farther to the north are struggling to find it because aid groups have found it harder to bring supplies to them.
One of them is Yazan Abu al-Foul, 2, a child living with his family in a damaged building beside a beach in Gaza City. His ribs, spine and hip bones jut from his body. An aunt, Riwaa Abu al-Foul, said Yazan’s family cannot find enough food to feed him and hospital staff in his area have told them that they cannot provide him with inpatient care.
“They told us there is a shortage of materials and equipment,” Ms. Abu al-Foul said in a phone interview on Saturday.
Doctors at hospitals in northern, central and southern Gaza described similar hardships in interviews on Friday and Saturday.
“There are no nutritional supplements, no vitamins, no premature infant formula, no amino acid intravenous solutions — nothing,” said Dr. Abu Salmiya from Al-Shifa Hospital. “Their bodies need these basics, and without them they will die.”
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
4) Israel Says It Has Paused Some Military Activity in Gaza as Anger Grows Over Hunger
Operations in three parts of the enclave were temporarily halted on Sunday to allow more aid to enter the territory, the Israeli military said. It was unclear if the decision would relieve the hunger crisis in Gaza.
By Aaron Boxerman, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 27, 2025
Palestinians waiting for food at a charity kitchen in Gaza last week. Aid agencies and many countries say Israel is responsible for a hunger crisis in the territory. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Israel said it had paused military activity in parts of Gaza on Sunday to allow in international aid, amid growing outrage over the severe hunger faced by Palestinians in the territory.
The decision was a sharp reversal by Israel and followed growing international pressure over the dire conditions in Gaza, where nearly one in three people has not been eating “for multiple days in a row,” the U.N. World Food Program says.
Israeli forces will pause operations in at least three parts of Gaza from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. to allow aid to flow in, the Israeli military said in a statement. They will also designate permanent routes for U.N. convoys to deliver aid, it added.
It was unclear whether the policy change would allow enough aid to reach hungry Gazans. Israel has announced similar tactical pauses in the past with mixed results.
Aid agencies and many countries, including some traditional allies, say Israel is responsible for the situation after first blocking and then restricting aid deliveries to Gaza for months.
Six Palestinians died of malnutrition-related causes over the past day, including two children, Gaza’s health ministry said. More than 50 Palestinians have died this month from starvation, the ministry said, and medical workers are themselves increasingly struggling to find food.
Israel has also continued military operations. At least 13 people were killed Sunday by Israeli forces in central Gaza near an aid distribution point, according to Al Awda hospital. The Israeli military did not immediately comment.
Israel has blamed the United Nations and its partners for the hunger crisis, accusing them of failing to bring hundreds of truckloads of aid through Gaza’s border crossings. The United Nations says that Israel has thrown up bureaucratic obstacles and frequently rejects requests to coordinate deliveries.
Israeli officials had also long argued that Hamas was diverting humanitarian aid. But Israeli military officials later said they had no proof Hamas was systematically stealing U.N. relief supplies.
The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and other government politicians were largely silent on the policy shift. But Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, called for Israel to completely shut down the flow of aid and fully reconquer Gaza.
Aid groups welcomed the ability to bring food into Gaza without fear of Israeli bombardment, but they said a full cease-fire was likely the only way to end the crisis.
“Together, we hope these measures will allow for a surge in urgently needed food assistance to reach hungry people without further delays,” the World Food Program said.
Jordan and the United Arab Emirates also dropped air dropped aid into Gaza in coordination with Israel, the Israeli defense ministry and Jordanian state media said. But aid experts said the deliveries were insufficient.
Foreign countries parachuted aid into Gaza last year, but stopped doing so after attempted deliveries killed several people and landed in Israel by mistake.
Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, called airdrops a “distraction,” and that they were “expensive, inefficient & can even kill starving civilians.”
In March, Israel blockaded Gaza for nearly three months, barring the entry of almost all food, fuel and medicine. It relented at the end of May after Israeli military officials privately warned that the enclave was at risk of widespread starvation.
Instead of relying on the previous U.N.-coordinated process to deliver aid, Israel instead overhauled the whole process, creating aid sites operated by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Under the new system, armed American security contractors patrolled Israeli-backed aid sites in southern and central Gaza, forcing Palestinians to walk miles through Israeli military lines in hopes of finding food.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed near the sites after Israeli soldiers opened fire on crowds, according to Gaza health officials and the Israeli military, which described their actions as “warning shots” to disperse Palestinians they said were a threat.
Attempts by the United Nations and other aid agencies to deliver food have also led to tragic scenes as hundreds of desperate Palestinians rushed to seize supplies. In one instance, the Israeli military opened fire on crowds seeking to get aid, killing dozens, according to Gaza officials.
Almost 60,000 people have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s war against Hamas, including thousands of children, the Gaza health ministry says. Those figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The war began when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages.
Israel’s allies initially backed the country’s military counterattack in Gaza. But as the fighting continues and the Palestinian death toll skyrockets, some have started calling for an end to the war.
President Trump has said the war in Gaza must come to an end. But, at least publicly, he has avoided putting substantial pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to immediately stop the fighting.
Last week, Israel and the United States withdrew their negotiators from cease-fire talks with Hamas in Doha, Qatar after accusing the group of intransigence. Hamas officials said they had made concessions in their latest counterproposal.
Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting in Rehovot, Israel.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
5) Israel Intercepts Gaza-Bound Ship of Activists and Aid
It was at least the third vessel blocked this year while challenging Israel’s naval blockade and seeking to deliver supplies by sea to a population facing rising starvation.
By Pranav Baskar, July 27, 2025
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition ship leaving a southern Italian port for Gaza earlier this month. Credit...Giovanni Isolino/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Israeli navy intercepted a ship aiming to bring aid to Gaza this weekend, Israeli officials and pro-Palestinian activists said, in at least the third case this year in which a vessel has been stopped while challenging Israel’s naval blockade of the enclave.
The ship was rerouted to Israel and all its passengers were safe, Israel’s foreign ministry said in a statement early Sunday.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition, an activist group, said it had organized the mission by the ship, which it called the Handala, to aid a population in Gaza facing rising starvation. The Israeli foreign ministry called the ship the Navarn, using another name associated with the vessel.
The ship was roughly 40 nautical miles from Gaza when it was intercepted, according to a statement by the activist group, which opposes the nearly two-decade-old naval blockade of Gaza. Twenty-one activists from 12 countries were on board, the group said, adding that the ship carried supplies like baby formula, diapers, food and medicine from Italy, from where it set sail last week.
One of those aboard was a French member of the European Parliament, Emma Fourreau, according to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s website.
The group’s efforts to reach Gaza by sea have been repeatedly thwarted. In May, a Gaza-bound aid ship called Conscience was crippled by explosions and an ensuing fire, stopping the mission off the coast of Malta. In June, Israel intercepted the coalition’s second effort, the Madleen, whose passengers included the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and another French member of the European Parliament, Rima Hassan.
After the latest vessel was stopped, the coalition described the Israeli navy’s actions as a “violation of international maritime law.”
Adalah, an Israeli human rights group whose lawyers have represented flotilla participants detained by Israel in the past, said the vessel had been taken to the port of Ashdod. It added that “despite repeated demands, Israeli authorities have refused to allow Adalah’s lawyers access to the detained activists to provide legal consultation.”
Israel imposed its blockade on Gaza, with Egypt’s help, after the Islamic militant group Hamas took control over the coastal strip in 2007. Israeli officials say the measure was necessary to prevent the smuggling of weapons into the territory.
Since Hamas led the October 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the current war in Gaza, living conditions in the territory have steadily deteriorated, and Israel has tightly controlled the flow of aid into the territory by land, sea and air.
Its restrictions have drawn condemnation from many nations and rights groups, and on Saturday night the Israeli military announced that it would revive the practice of dropping aid from airplanes, and make it easier for aid convoys to move through Gaza by land.
Before the ship was captured, the activist coalition published a statement saying that two vessels believed to be operated by the Israeli military were nearby. At that point, the ship altered its course toward the Egyptian coast, the statement said.
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
6) ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?
Glenn Valley Foods tried to verify every hire through a federal system. After a raid, the company is wondering how it can keep going.
By Eli Saslow, Visuals by Erin Schaff, July 27, 2025
They gathered in a conference room for the weekly management meeting, even though there was hardly anyone left to manage. Chad Hartmann, the president of Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, pushed a few empty chairs to the side of the room and then passed around a sheet totaling the latest production numbers. “Take a deep breath and brace yourselves,” he said.
For more than a decade, Glenn Valley’s production reports had told a story of steady ascendance — new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska.
Hartmann, 52, folded the printed sheet into tiny squares and waited out the silence.
“So, this gives you a pretty good sense of the work we have ahead of us,” he said.
“It’s a wipeout,” said Gary Rohwer, the owner. “We’re building back up from ground zero.”
It had been almost three weeks since dozens of federal agents arrived at the factory’s door with a battering ram and a warrant for 107 workers who they said were undocumented immigrants using false identification — part of a wave of workplace raids carried out by the Trump administration this summer. The president’s advisers had set a target of 3,000 arrests per day, shifting the focus of enforcement away from the border and into the heart of the American economy. Trump had vowed to pursue “blood-thirsty criminals” during his campaign, but he had also promised the “largest mass deportation in history,” which meant agents were rounding up hundreds of immigrants from restaurant kitchens, avocado groves, construction sites and meat processing facilities, where most of the work force was foreign-born.
Rohwer, 84, had always used a federal online system called E-Verify to check whether his employees were eligible to work, and Glenn Valley Foods itself had not been accused of any violations. Rohwer was a registered Republican in a conservative state, but he’d voted for a Democrat for the first time in the 2024 election, in part because of Trump’s treatment of immigrants. Rohwer couldn’t square the government’s accusations of “criminal dishonesty” with the employees he’d known for decades as “salt-of-the-earth, incredible people who helped build this company,” he said. Most of them had no criminal history, aside from a handful of traffic violations. Many were working mothers, and now they were calling the office from detention and asking for legal advice. Their children, U.S. citizens, were struggling at home and in some cases subsisting on donations of the company’s frozen steak.
“I’m still furious about what happened to our people, but we have to keep the machines running,” Rohwer said. “We need more people trained and ready to go.”
“Trained by who?” another manager asked. “We lost every supervisor out there. If you ran a machine or checked temperatures or did anything important, you’re gone.”
“Then we pick up our hiring,” Rohwer said.
He looked out into the lobby and saw three women filling out applications. Glenn Valley paid well, with an average hourly wage of almost $20 and regular bonuses, but the work was repetitive and demanding. Employees who came mostly from Mexico and Central America stood on a manufacturing line for as much as 10 hours a day, six days a week, and processed hundreds of pounds of meat through dangerous machinery in a cold factory.
Ever since videos of the raid spread across social media, Rohwer had answered dozens of calls from strangers who accused him of “stealing American jobs.” But Nebraska was experiencing a work shortage, with only 66 qualified workers for every 100 positions. Almost every one of the company’s new applicants was also a Hispanic immigrant.
“There are some jobs Americans don’t want to do,” Rohwer tried explaining to one caller. “We’re caught up in a broken system.”
The Homeland Security Department had accused many of the company’s former employees of working under stolen IDs, which E-Verify didn’t always catch if the ID number itself was valid. Rohwer had met with officials after the raid to ask for a better system, and they told him to keep using E-Verify. One agent gave the company a hotline number to call for hiring questions. Hartmann tried it once and waited on hold for 57 minutes before giving up.
“They said the only thing we can do is verify, verify, verify,” Rohwer said.
“But we’re already doing that,” Hartmann said. “How do we avoid ending up in the same situation?”
Their first step was to rebuild the hiring process, so one morning Hartmann met in his office with the company’s newest employee, Alfredo Moreno. It was Moreno’s second day as the H.R. director. He still didn’t have an office and he’d never seen the factory floor, but Hartmann had given him a stack of dozens of applications to review.
“How many people did you lose total?” Moreno asked.
Hartmann looked at his computer and tried to count. “They arrested 76, which doesn’t include the ones who were too shaken up to come back,” he said. “How does that happen if you E-Verify and do everything right?”
“I think I can help you with that part,” Moreno said.
He had spent the last 25 years hiring for pork plants and chicken factories across the Midwest, and he’d shown up at Glenn Valley unannounced a few days after the raid, convinced he understood their problem. Over the years, Moreno had reviewed hundreds of applicants through E-Verify, checking their ID and Social Security numbers against federal records to confirm they were eligible to work.
In his experience, E-Verify was good at checking numbers, not people. The government maintained that Glenn Valley employees had been using IDs that were stolen. One number belonged to a nursing student in Missouri, who lost her student loans as a result of the identity theft. Another came from a disabled man in Texas, who could no longer get his medications.
Moreno told Hartmann that the only way to truly prevent fraud was to scrutinize IDs with black lights and magnifying glasses to make sure they weren’t fake, and then interview each potential employee in person. He had memorized regional accents and studied the geographies of Central America, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. He estimated that about half of the people he interviewed for meat processing jobs lied about some aspect of their documentation.
“I ask where they were born, what town, where they traveled,” Moreno said. “Does the person on paper fit the person in the chair? I don’t want to say I interrogate, but I ask very specific questions without discriminating.”
“Yes. I like that,” Hartmann said. “Because we can’t go through this again. Honestly, it was very traumatic for everyone involved.”
Hartmann started to tell Moreno about that Tuesday morning, when the company was humming through one of its best months in 12 years. More than 130 workers walked into the factory at 7 a.m. All five manufacturing lines started moving at full speed. Hartmann was taste-testing a new meat product with the sales team when he heard a knock on the front door. He walked into the lobby and saw several agents in tactical vests, carrying nightsticks and wearing bandannas to cover their faces.
His first thought was that maybe one employee had gotten into trouble, but then he glanced outside and saw several government vans, a drone circling the roofline and dozens more agents surrounding the property. “We’re going to be busy here,” one of the agents said.
They moved past Hartmann into the factory, shouting instructions in Spanish, telling workers to come out with their hands up. Most complied, but a few dozen people started to scream and run. A group of five women clambered up stacks of packing pallets. Other workers enclosed themselves inside industrial freezers, only emerging after they lost feeling in their arms and hands.
Hartmann saw a maintenance worker named Marvin Zepeda, 37, who scampered into the rafters with his tool belt. Zepeda was responsible for cleaning offices, and his colleagues had once nominated him for employee of the month because of his ability to laugh and tell jokes even while checking mousetraps. Now Zepeda squeezed into a crawl space in the ceiling and resisted orders to come out, allegedly holding agents off by displaying his box cutter and other tools. An agent shot him with a stun gun. Zepeda pulled the probes out of his leg, retreated farther into the crawl space and threw tools in the direction of the agents. They shocked him again and threatened to send in a dog. Finally, a factory manager went into the crawl space, calmed Zepeda down and helped convince him to surrender. Agents restrained his wrists and led him out of the factory. Zepeda spotted Hartmann in the lobby and flashed him a smile and a thumbs-up as the agents walked him toward a bus with the windows blacked out.
“The whole thing just gutted me, and obviously I had it easy,” Hartmann told Moreno.
“It’s terrible for everyone,” Moreno said. “I’ve seen whole companies go under after a raid. The supply chain stalls. Beef prices go up. Consumers pay more.”
“The ripple effects,” Hartmann said, nodding. He pulled up a roster of the company’s former employees and started to read through names: Ruiz. Gonzalez. Hernandez. Rodriguez.
“That’s the part I keep thinking about,” Hartmann said. “What happens to these people?”
It had taken three days for Elizabeth Rodriguez’s family to figure out where she was. Her children had seen the raid on Facebook and watched online videos that showed Rodriguez, 46, being marched onto a bus in her factory smock and hard hat. Her eldest son, Omar, 23, searched through detention records and contacted her co-workers, the police and local politicians. “Where are they taking her?” he kept asking, until his mother finally called from a detention center across the state.
“This call will be limited to 15 minutes,” a recording warned, and his life had been revolving around those phone calls ever since.
Now Omar felt his phone ringing again in his pocket and checked the number. “Mom Jail,” the caller ID read. He answered and waited for the line to connect.
His parents had spent the last 25 years in Omaha, building an undocumented life with such care that to Omar it started to feel “normal, even stable,” he said. His parents met in Mexico and eventually crossed the border together on foot in their teens. They married, found work in Nebraska and bought a small house on the outskirts of downtown where they could raise their four children, all U.S. citizens. A few months earlier, Omar had encouraged his mother to hire a lawyer to help her explore a path to citizenship. She had a “perfect case,” the lawyer wrote: No criminal record. Longstanding ties to the community. A steady job with good reviews.
She took on extra hours to pay legal fees and nursed sores on her feet. It wasn’t in her nature to complain, not even now, about the raid, the detention center or the lawyer she could no longer seem to reach.
“How are you?” Omar asked in Spanish, once Elizabeth came on the line. Her children crowded onto the couch and gathered around the phone.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Tell me about all of you. Are you eating? Sleeping?”
“Don’t worry,” Omar said. “Everything’s OK.”
This was how they survived these calls: each side reassuring the other even as they continued to unravel. Omar was working the graveyard shift at a local call center to help pay for groceries. His two younger sisters, 17 and 13, were trying to cook for the family from her mother’s recipes. Omar’s younger brother, 7, was waking up at night short of breath, wheezing and choking, until Omar took him to the emergency room. Doctors said he was suffering from panic attacks. He had never spent a night away from Elizabeth, and he didn’t know what it meant to be undocumented, or detained, or deported. The family had decided it was best to tell him that his mother was still at work.
“I’ll be home soon,” she told him now.
“When?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m trying my best.”
“You have five minutes remaining on this call,” the automated voice said.
Omar took the phone so they could talk through the logistics of her case. She had declined the government’s offer of $1,000 and a free plane ticket to self-deport back to Mexico. Omar was in the final stages of borrowing $5,000 to pay for her bond so she could be released to her family while her deportation case played out in the courts.
They had all begun drafting letters to submit on her behalf. Omar’s oldest sister, 17, had written about how her mother had supported her through episodes of depression, helping her find a therapist and switch schools. “I am still alive because of my mother,” she wrote to the judge. “Now that she’s gone, it’s like I’m breaking a little more every day. I fear what will happen to us if she can’t come home.”
“You have one minute remaining,” the automated voice said.
“Are you still there?” Omar asked.
“Yes. I’m here. I love all of you,” she said, and the children took turns saying goodbye.
“Everything is going to work out,” Omar told her, but the line was already dead.
The factory was empty. The machines sat silent. Back orders continued to pile up as a skeleton crew arrived at 7 a.m. to restart the manufacturing lines.
Hartmann walked through the lobby, handing out coffees and greeting eight new employees who were reporting for their first day. They had already been interviewed and hired, but they couldn’t start until they were authorized to work through E-Verify, so a manager named Daisy Hernandez took their IDs and I-9 forms into her office and started punching in the numbers.
None of the eight new hires were U.S. citizens. They had submitted paperwork based on green cards, alien registration numbers, temporary visas and work authorizations. Hernandez tried to log into E-Verify, but her password didn’t work. She tried again, and the account was locked.
“How’s it going?” Hartmann asked, as he stopped by her office, but the answer was implied: The new employees were waiting in the break room. The manufacturing lines were falling further behind. Hernandez called Glenn Valley’s former H.R. manager for help, and a few minutes later Hernandez was logged back into the account. She typed a new set of names into the same system and checked the first employee.
“The information entered did not match D.H.S. records.”
“Down to seven,” Hernandez said. She set the application to the side and moved on to the next.
“Alien authorized to work,” it said.
Cruz. Rivas. Lopez. Dominguez. “Authorized to work,” it said, and even if the system had failed them before, it was still what the government suggested they use. Hernandez printed out a batch of company IDs and brought them into the break room, where seven new employees were waiting for their final words of training.
“Thanks for being here in our time of need,” Hartmann said, as he glanced around the room, registering all the people who were still missing.
Another manager briefed the employees on food safety and handed out white smocks and construction hats. Then he opened the factory door to a rush of cold air and the clatter of machines. The workers lined up alongside a company slogan printed at the entrance.
“Together we achieve more,” it read, and they stepped onto the factory floor.
Erin Schaff contributed reporting.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
7) José Andrés: People of Good Conscience Must Stop the Starvation in Gaza
By José Andrés, Mr. Andrés is the founder of World Central Kitchen, July 27, 2025
Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press
Forty years ago, the world’s conscience was shocked into action by images of emaciated children and starving babies dying in their mothers’ arms. There was a surge in international aid, airdrops of food and activism from the world’s most popular artists. Thanks to the news media and events such as Live Aid, we could not look away from the hungry in Ethiopia.
A generation later, people of good conscience must now stop the starvation in Gaza. There is no excuse for the world to stand by and watch two million human beings suffer on the brink of full-blown famine.
This is not a natural disaster triggered by drought or crop failures. It’s a man-made crisis, and there are man-made solutions that could save lives today. The hunger catastrophe in Gaza is entirely caused by the men of war on both sides of the Erez crossing: the ones who massacred Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ones who have been killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in the more than 21 months since.
We are far beyond the blame game of who is the more guilty party. We don’t have the time to argue about who is holding up the food trucks.
A starving human being needs food today, not tomorrow.
As the occupying force, the Israelis are responsible for the basic survival of civilians in Gaza. Some people may find this unfair, but it is international law. To that end, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israeli-backed aid group, put a new plan in place that distributes food from a few hubs, which forced desperately hungry people to walk for miles and risk their lives. At the time it was created, international aid groups warned this would be dangerous and ineffective. Those warnings have sadly proved true.
It’s time to start over.
Food cannot flow quickly enough to Gaza right now. The World Food Program, led by its American executive director, Cindy McCain, said last week that one-third of Gaza’s population had not eaten for multiple days in a row. Small children are dying of starvation in numbers that are rising rapidly.
World Central Kitchen, the international aid group I founded, works with our partners in Gaza to cook tens of thousands of meals a day. Last week we resumed cooking a limited number of hot meals after a five-day pause caused by a lack of ingredients. It was the second time we were forced to stop cooking because of food shortages this year. Our teams on the ground are committed and resilient, but our day-to-day ability to sustain cooking operations remains uncertain.
Since the start of the war, we have prepared and distributed more than 133 million meals across Gaza, through large field kitchens and a network of smaller community kitchens. We have delivered thousands of meals to displaced Israeli families, including last month when Israeli towns and cities came under intense missile attacks from Iran.
The Israeli government has claimed that Hamas is stealing the food in Gaza. It also says it is doing “everything possible” to feed Palestinians.
Here is the reality we have seen on the ground. Before Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid, which started in March, our convoys experienced very little violence or looting. After the blockade was lifted, the situation worsened significantly, with widespread looting and anarchy. It is rare now for trucks entering Gaza to make it safely to our kitchens or those of other aid groups without being looted. Drivers and kitchen workers are often attacked by armed groups of unknown origin.
The blockade that was supposed to pressure what’s left of Hamas only strengthened these gunmen and gangs. It precipitated mass deprivation and the collapse of society in Gaza.
Our proposal is to change how we feed people, secure distribution and scale up quickly.
First, we urgently need to open humanitarian corridors accessible to all aid groups operating in Gaza, to ensure that food, water and medicine can arrive safely and at scale.
Second, we need to substantially increase production of hot meals. Unlike bulk food supplies, hot meals have little resale value for organized gangs.
Third, we need to feed people where they are. We must deliver meals to where the Palestinian people are sheltering, rather than expect them to travel to a few distribution points, where violence often breaks out.
Fourth, we want to prepare one million meals a day, not tens of thousands. We estimate this would require five large cooking facilities in safe zones, where bulk food supplies can be delivered, prepared and distributed without risk of violence. These large kitchens would also supply hundreds of smaller community kitchens at the neighborhood level throughout Gaza, empowering communities as essential partners.
This proposal is dependent on securing food, equipment and vehicles. By itself, it won’t be sufficient. We want to see all aid groups operating in Gaza able to work freely in their own way.
I understand that many Israelis are still grieving and are focusing first on their own. On the long list of those who continue to suffer, there are the surviving hostages, the traumatized families and the wounded soldiers.
We have seen in the past several months how Israel is able to pursue what it sees as its national interest with courage. The challenge of feeding starving Palestinians is no different.
We are approaching the Jewish fast of Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of two holy temples in Jerusalem. It is a solemn day of suffering and remembrance.
The Book of Isaiah reminds us that fasting is not enough. The true fast is to share our bread with the hungry and give our clothes to the naked.
“If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness,” it reads. If we want to light the darkness, we need to extend our soul to the hungry. And we need to do it now.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
8) What Will It Cost to Renovate the ‘Free’ Air Force One? Don’t Ask.
To hide the cost of renovating the plane Qatar donated to President Trump, the Air Force appears to have tucked it inside an over-budget, behind-schedule nuclear modernization program.
By David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, David E. Sanger has covered five American presidents and flown around the world in the cramped press section of Air Force One. Eric Schmitt has covered the Pentagon for 35 years, riding on far less comfortable planes, July 27, 2025
The Boeing 747-8 from Qatar at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida after President Trump took a tour of the plane in February. Renovation will begin soon at a Texas facility known for secret technology projects. Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
President Trump makes no secret of his displeasure over the cost of renovating the Federal Reserve headquarters — around $2.5 billion, or even higher by the president’s accounting.
But getting the White House to discuss another of Washington’s expensive renovation projects, the cost of refurbishing a “free” Air Force One from Qatar, is quite another matter.
Officially, and conveniently, the price tag has been classified. But even by Washington standards, where “black budgets” are often used as an excuse to avoid revealing the cost of outdated spy satellites and lavish end-of-year parties, the techniques being used to hide the cost of Mr. Trump’s pet project are inventive.
Which may explain why no one wants to discuss a mysterious, $934 million transfer of funds from one of the Pentagon’s most over-budget, out-of-control projects — the modernization of America’s aging, ground-based nuclear missiles.
In recent weeks, congressional budget sleuths have come to think that amount, slipped into an obscure Pentagon document sent to Capitol Hill as a “transfer” to an unnamed classified project, almost certainly includes the renovation of the new, gold-adorned Air Force One that Mr. Trump desperately wants in the air before his term is over. (It is not clear if the entire transfer will be devoted to stripping the new Air Force One back to its airframe, but Air Force officials privately acknowledge dipping into nuclear modernization funds for the complex project.)
Qatar’s defense minister and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed the final memorandum of understanding a few weeks ago, paving the way for the renovation to begin soon at a Texas facility known for secret technology projects. The document was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
Mr. Trump’s plane probably won’t fly for long: It will take a year or two to get the work done, and then the Qatari gift — improved with the latest communications and in-flight protective technology — will be transferred to the yet-to-be-created Trump presidential library after he leaves office in 2029, the president has said.
Concerns over the many apparent conflicts of interests involved in the transaction, given Mr. Trump’s government dealings and business ties with the Qataris, have swirled since reports of the gift emerged this spring. But the president himself said he was unconcerned, casting the decision as a no-brainer for taxpayers.
“I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer,” the president said in May. “I mean, I could be a stupid person and say, ‘No, we don’t want a free, very expensive airplane.’”
It is free in the sense that a used car handed over by a neighbor looking to get it out of his driveway is free. In this case, among the many modifications will be hardened communications, antimissile systems and engine capabilities to take the president quickly to safety as one of the older Air Force Ones did on Sept. 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda attacked the United States. And there is the delicate matter of ridding the jet of any hidden electronic listening devices that U.S. officials suspect may be embedded in the walls.
Then, of course, it has to be stuffed with the luxuries — and gold trim — with which the 47th president surrounds himself, whether he is in the Oval Office or in the air. The jet’s upper deck has a lounge and a communications center, while the main bedroom can be converted into a flying sick bay in a medical emergency.
So it’s no surprise that one of Washington’s biggest guessing games these days is assessing just where the price tag will end up, on top of the $4 billion already being spent on the wildly-behind-schedule presidential planes that Boeing was supposed to deliver last year. It was those delays that led Mr. Trump to look for a gift.
Air Force officials privately concede that they are paying for renovations of the Qatari Air Force One with the transfer from another the massively-over-budget, behind-schedule program, called the Sentinel. That is named for the missile at the heart of Washington’s long-running effort to rebuild America’s aging, leaky, ground-launched nuclear missile system.
The project was first sold to Congress as a $77.7 billion program to replace all 400 Minuteman III missiles, complete with launch facilities and communications built to withstand both nuclear and cyber attack. By the time Mr. Trump came back into office, that figure had ballooned by 81 percent, to $140 billion and climbing, all to reconstruct what nuclear strategists agree is the most vulnerable, impossible-to-hide element of America’s nuclear deterrent.
And that was the number before the Air Force announced a few months ago that it would have to dig all new silos across Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota, because the old Minuteman silos were leaking and crumbling.
The first of the Minutemans were installed 55 years ago, when Richard Nixon was president and Leonid Brezhnev was inside the Kremlin. Washington and Moscow had a combined total of more than 30,000 nuclear weapons pointed at each other. (Today it is closer to 3,100.)
The good news is that in the first Trump administration, the Air Force got rid of the command-and-control systems that still used 8-inch floppy disks, proving that the so-called deep state can get something done when it digs, well, deep.
Some nuclear strategists argue that the ground-based nuclear weapons do not need to be replaced at all; they are far more vulnerable than weapons traveling under the sea on stealthy submarines, or that can be loaded on bombers. But the Pentagon doesn’t want to part with a third of the nuclear “triad,” and the silos and their command posts are big employers in the rural West.
They serve another function in the second Trump administration. The modernization program has proved to be the perfect thing if you were determined to hide how much you are spending on an airplane, especially one equipped to order up a nuclear strike, if needed.
In testimony before Congress in June, Troy E. Meink, the Air Force secretary, said that he thought the cost of the Air Force One renovations would be manageable. “I think there has been a number thrown around on the order of $1 billion,” he said. “But a lot of those costs associated with that are costs that we’d have experienced anyway, we will just experience them early,” before Boeing delivers its two Air Force Ones. “So it wouldn’t be anywhere near that.”
“We believe the actual retrofit of that aircraft is probably less than $400 million,” he said.
If so, that would be a bargain. But engineers and Air Force experts who have been through similar projects have their doubts that it can be accomplished for anything like that price. Members of Congress express concern that Mr. Trump will pressure the Air Force to do the work so fast that sufficient security measures are not built into the plane. When asked last week, the Air Force said it simply could not discuss the cost — or anything else about the plane — because it’s classified.
(For collectors of such bureaucratic evasions, yes, the Air Force is willing to discuss the cost of building a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, but not the cost of renovating the president’s aircraft.)
Only at the Pentagon could someone reprogram $934 million and expect no one to notice. The coffers were refilled with the passage of the budget reconciliation bill several weeks ago, budget officials say.
“The more we learn about this deal, the more disturbing it becomes,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, who serves on the Armed Services Committee. “The security implications of accepting a private plane from a foreign nation as Air Force One and the resulting ethical concerns a gift of that sizes creates were already significant.”
But it was more worrisome, Ms. Shaheen said, that “this administration is diverting funds from the nuclear modernization budget to finance costly renovations to this plane.”
In doing so, she said, “we’re weakening our credibility to fund a vanity project for President Trump.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
9) ‘1984’ Hasn’t Changed, but America Has
J By Charlie English, Mr. English is the author of, among other books, “The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature.” July 27, 2025
Matt Lipps for The New York Times
I traced a copy of George Orwell’s “1984” to the library of the social sciences department at Warsaw University, a literary treasure trove heavy with the scent of dust and old paper, and so jammed with shelves that in places the only way to move around was sideways. For months I had been searching for this particular volume, a book that had played, in my view, a small but significant role in winning the Cold War.
There are myriad reasons the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989. The economic stagnation of the East and the war in Afghanistan are two of the most commonly cited. But literature also played its part, thanks to a long-running U.S. operation conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency that covertly moved millions of books through the Iron Curtain in a bid to undermine Communist Party censorship.
While it is hard to quantify the program’s effect in absolute terms, its history offers valuable lessons for today, not least since some of the very same titles and authors the C.I.A. sent East during the Cold War — including “1984”— are now deemed objectionable by a network of conservative groups across the United States.
First published in English in 1949, Orwell’s novel describes the dystopian world of Oceania, a totalitarian state where the protagonist, Winston Smith, works in a huge government department called the Ministry of Truth. The ministry is ironically named: Its role is not to safeguard the truth but to destroy it, to edit history to fit the present needs of the party and its leader, Big Brother, since, as the slogan runs, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
In the real Soviet system, every country had its equivalent of the Ministry of Truth, modeled on the Moscow template. In Poland, the largest Eastern European nation outside the Soviet Union, this censorship and propaganda apparatus was called the Main Office for the Control of Presentations and Public Performances, and its headquarters occupied most of a city block in downtown Warsaw.
From art to advertising, television to theater, the Main Office reached into all aspects of Polish life. It had employees in every TV and radio station, every film studio and every publishing house. Every typewriter in Poland had to be registered, access to every photocopier was restricted, and a permit was needed even to buy a ream of paper. Books that did not conform to the censor’s rules were pulped.
The result was intellectual stultification, what the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz called a logocracy, a society where words and language were manipulated to fit the propaganda needs of the regime. In the logocracy, the Warsaw Pact was said to protect Poland from attack by “revisionist” German neo-Nazis and “Western imperialists,” even though the main imperialist threat came from the East.
Troublesome people, inconvenient facts and awkward areas of journalistic inquiry were removed from public life. It was forbidden to reference the fraught history of Russo-Polish relations, for instance, or the secret police massacres of Polish officers at Katyn, or mention the fact that Poland had a giant alcoholism problem. People existed in a world of Orwellian “doublethink,” believing certain things to be true at home, but adopting a very different, party-sanctioned “truth” outside it.
Orwell was made a “nonperson” in the Soviet Union, after the publication of his satire of the Russian Revolution, “Animal Farm,” in 1945. It was dangerous even to mention the author’s name in print there, and when “1984” was published it was banned in the Eastern Bloc in all languages. But when copies of the novel did slip through the Iron Curtain, they had enormous power. The book was “difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess,” Milosz wrote, but Orwell — who had never visited Eastern Europe — fascinated people there because of “his insight into details they know well.”
What some Eastern European readers of contraband copies of “1984” suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that these and millions of other uncensored texts were not reaching them entirely by chance, but were part of a decades-long U.S. intelligence operation called the “C.I.A. book program,” based for much of its existence in the nondescript office building at 475 Park Avenue South in Midtown Manhattan. There, a small team of C.I.A. employees organized the infiltration of 10 million books and periodicals into the Eastern Bloc, sending literature by every imaginable means: in trucks fitted with secret compartments, on yachts that traversed the stormy Baltic, in the mail, or slipped into the luggage of countless travelers from Eastern Europe who dropped in at C.I.A. distribution hubs in the West.
The C.I.A. program operated across the Eastern Bloc and assigned specialist editors for each country, from Hungary to the mighty Soviet Union itself. But it was in Poland that the books were most warmly received, partly because the Warsaw regime was more liberal than others in Eastern Europe and partly because Poland had a long tradition of underground literature dating back to tsarist times. From the late 1970s, banned books would also be reproduced in huge quantities by underground printers in Poland, often on presses bought and smuggled by associates of the C.I.A. program, amplifying the literature’s effect.
The first Polish translation of “1984” was published in France in 1953, by the Polish émigré Jerzy Giedroyc, a C.I.A. asset known to the agency by the cryptonym QRBERETTA. It was a copy of this edition that I found that day at Warsaw University. In 1957, this copy was given with a few other contraband titles to a Polish art critic who had been allowed to travel to Paris, who carried it back to Poland through the border. Inside the Eastern Bloc, the book spent the next three decades performing the task for which it had been published: quietly undermining Soviet Communism from within.
By the mid-1980s, Poland was flooded with uncensored publications, some smuggled in, many printed underground. The system of Communist Party censorship started to break down, and in losing its grip on information, the Polish state lost its grip on the people too. The Communists were forced to hold semi-free elections in June of 1989, which were won by the opposition movement, Solidarity. After Poland came the deluge: A year later, all of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe had been replaced by democratically elected governments.
In the mid-2020s, “1984” is again being restricted, this time by conservative, Trump-aligned politicians in the United States. In May 2023, the Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, signed into law Senate File 496, which according to the governor “puts parents in the driver’s seat” when it comes to their children’s education. In fact SF 496 forces Iowa schools to remove from their libraries thousands of books of which cultural conservatives disapprove.
Mostly, SF 496, which is the subject of an ongoing legal battle, bans books that feature L.G.B.T.Q.+ characters or progressive themes such as feminism or are written by people of color. But the legislation also sweeps up several authors whose works lampoon totalitarianism and that were sent east by the C.I.A. book program, including Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut and Orwell, whose “1984” and “Animal Farm” are both on banned lists.
SF 496 is but one cog in the growing apparatus of American censorship, as conservative action groups seek to ban books around the country. PEN America has documented close to 16,000 bans (instances in which a book has been withdrawn or access to it has been restricted because of its content) in schools since 2021, with 10,046 in the 2023-24 school year alone. The censorship efforts are mostly driven by Republican state legislators and parental-rights groups. Florida takes the lead, with more than 4,561 book bans recorded in that school year — including in one case a graphic novel adaptation of “1984” — via a combination of new state laws and parental pressure. Next come Iowa (with 3,671 book bans that year), Texas (538), Wisconsin (408), Virginia (121) and Kentucky (100).
Banning books doesn’t stop at the local level.This year, after Mr. Trump signed three executive orders aimed at combating “wokeness,” the Department of Defense’s education agency removed and reviewed more than 500 titles from its school system, including, according to one report, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which the C.I.A. had sent to the Eastern Bloc. Federal funding agencies have compiled a list of more than 350 banned words and phrases, including “women,” “diversity” and “ethnicity.”
In the Cold War, the United States chose “freedom” — democratic freedom, freedom of speech, intellectual freedom and freedom of choice — as its key point of difference with the Soviet enemy. Since the end of World War II, U.S. presidents from both parties have wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of the “free world” that they led. When Ronald Reagan — who spearheaded the Cold War “freedom” agenda and oversaw an upswing in C.I.A. literary programs — spoke to the British Parliament in 1982, he invoked “the march of freedom and democracy,” which would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.” It was no coincidence that George Minden, the leader of the C.I.A. book program, once described his operation as “an offensive of free, honest thinking.”
Mr. Trump, JD Vance, Ron DeSantis and their fellow travelers expound the virtues of the First Amendment while dismantling guardrails against disinformation and working to suppress political ideas they oppose. Book bans aren’t their only tool. They also block access for independent journalists, intimidate news organizations and defund outlets they perceive as hostile to the MAGA agenda, including NPR, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.
There are two lessons from the history of the C.I.A. book program that the book banners would do well to heed. One is that censorship — whether by Communists, fascists or democratic governments — tends to create demand for the works it targets. (That, and Mr. Trump’s Orwellian tactics, may explain why “1984” has been surging up the book charts in recent years.)
The other is that the totalitarians lost the Cold War, and freedom of thought won the day. The former Polish dissident Adam Michnik, whose own works were promoted by the C.I.A., presumably without his knowledge, said: “It was books that were victorious in the fight. We should build a monument to books.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
11) ‘Revenge Is Not a Policy’: Israelis Voice Dissent Against the War in Gaza
After a long silence, prominent Israelis and activists are increasingly raising alarms about potential war crimes being carried out by the government.
By Isabel Kershner, July 28, 2025
To report this article, Isabel Kershner and the photographer Amit Elkayam attended Israeli antiwar protests near the border with Gaza and on university campuses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Protesters gathered in May at the Shaar Hanegev junction near the Gaza border, holding photos both of Israeli hostages and of children killed in strikes in the enclave. Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
Abhorrence of Israel’s devastating war in Gaza has resonated for months in capitals and in university campuses abroad. Now, a growing number of Israelis are speaking out against what they describe as atrocities carried out in their name in the Palestinian enclave.
Israeli protesters are holding aloft portraits of Palestinian children killed in Gaza. Academics and authors, politicians and retired military leaders are accusing the Israeli government of indiscriminate killing and war crimes.
In the early months of the war, the vast majority of Israelis considered the offensive a just and necessary response to the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, even if they were skeptical that the government’s long-term goal of eliminating Hamas was attainable, opinion polls showed.
Despite that, a majority of Israelis have long wanted a deal that would end the war in exchange of the release of all the hostages still held in Gaza and relieve soldiers exhausted by months of deadly conflict, according to the polls.
But in recent months, a small but increasingly vocal minority has made anguished calls to end the war on moral grounds, even if many Israelis aren’t even aware such protests are even happening. Many of the protesters may have supported Israel’s right to self-defense after the Hamas attack, but many now say it has gone way too far and contravenes their values.
“We are on the edge of the abyss,” said Tamar Parush, 56, a lecturer in sociology at Sapir College in southern Israel, speaking at a recent antiwar protest attended by hundreds of Israelis at the busy Shaar Hanegev junction near the border with Gaza.
“Revenge is not a policy,” she said, adding: “We could have fought a smarter war.”
At first, such voices of internal dissent were raised only on the fringes of Israeli society.
About 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed by Palestinian assailants during the October attack, making it the deadliest day in Israel’s history, and about 250 others were taken hostage. Many Israelis held Hamas solely responsible for the subsequent suffering in Gaza and said they felt little sympathy for civilians there.
About 60,000 Palestinians have since been killed in the war, according to Gaza health officials, whose tally does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but includes more than 10,000 children. The war has displaced most of the two million residents of Gaza several times and brought the territory to the brink of famine. More than 80 children have died from starvation and malnutrition, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5 percent of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
About three-quarters of Israeli Jews thought that Israel’s military planning should not take into account the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, or should do so only minimally, according to another recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Jerusalem.
But the institute said that over time it had found a slight increase in the share of Israeli Jews who thought the suffering should be taken into account to a large extent, and a mirroring moderate decline in those who said they were unconcerned.
That increase is reflected in the growing discomfort and activism in Israel’s liberal camp.
“There has been a discernible shift in the discourse,” said Lee Mordechai, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has been documenting the war and believes that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — an accusation vehemently rejected by the Israeli government.
“There is still a crisis in the peace camp over what can and can’t be said, but people are speaking out more,” Dr. Mordechai added.
He was speaking at the Hebrew University campus in late May where dozens of students and faculty members held a half-hour silent vigil carrying portraits of children killed in Gaza. Simultaneous protests were taking place at Tel Aviv University and other campuses.
Some prominent Israelis have also raised alarms. Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister, decried what he called the “cruel and criminal killing of civilians” and the starvation of Gaza as a government policy. Moshe Yaalon, a former military chief and defense minister, has warned for months of ethnic cleansing. Yair Golan, a former deputy chief of the military and leader of the Democrats, a left-leaning opposition party, caused a furor when he said the government was killing babies “as a hobby.”
The Israeli government denies committing war crimes in Gaza, though the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Israel’s military insists that it acts in line with international law, saying it takes steps to minimize civilian casualties and is fighting a complex campaign against an enemy that hides among the population and exploits civilian infrastructure.
One inflection point came about a year into the war, Dr. Mordechai said, when reports emerged of an Israeli plan to move all the residents of northern Gaza to the south. The government did not officially adopt the plan, proposed by commanders in the reserves, but critics said that elements of it were quietly underway.
Then this year, in mid-March, Israel ended a two-month cease-fire and resumed fighting in a decision that many Israelis believed was primarily politically motivated, to help Mr. Netanyahu keep his far-right coalition partners from bringing down his government. A New York Times investigation found that Mr. Netanyahu had acted to prolong and expand the war, allowing Israel to defeat and weaken more of its enemies but also deferring an internal political reckoning.
Hundreds of reservists and retired officers in Israel’s air force signed an open letter in April urging the Israeli government to agree to a deal with Hamas to return hostages. “The continuation of the war doesn’t advance any of the declared goals of the war, and will bring about the deaths of the hostages, of I.D.F. soldiers and innocent civilians,” the letter stated, using an abbreviation to refer to the Israeli military. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza.
About 140,000 Israelis from various professional fields have signed on similar letters, according to Standing Together, a grass-roots organization of Jewish and Arab Israelis that has spearheaded antiwar protests and advocates peace and equality.
Thousands of Israelis packed the main conference center in Jerusalem in May for a “People’s Peace Summit” organized by a coalition of more than 50 local peace and social justice organizations. It began with a minute’s silence for all the victims of the war — Palestinians and Israelis, civilians and soldiers.
Since then, more than 1,300 university faculty members have signed an open letter decrying what they called a “horrible litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity, all of our own doing.”
“We have been silent for too long,” the letter stated, adding, “It is our duty to stop the slaughter.”
The best-selling Israeli authors David Grossman, Zeruya Shalev and Dorit Rabinyan were among scores of writers who signed another letter expressing “shock” over Israel’s actions in Gaza. In the days after the October 2023 attack, Ms. Rabinyan had said that her compassion for the suffering on the other side was “paralyzed.”
The mainstream domestic news media has rarely provided vivid coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. While the left-wing Haaretz newspaper has covered the suffering, a popular right-wing television station, Channel 14, regularly provides a platform for people calling for even harsher action against Gaza’s civilians.
This month, Standing Together activists have been demonstrating outside the studios of the main Israeli television channels to press local journalists to report on the dire hunger situation in Gaza.
“People debate starving or deporting Gaza’s residents on television as if these are legitimate options,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer. “But a different voice is trying to penetrate the almost unified public discourse,” he added.
Criticizing soldiers’ conduct is also a sensitive matter in a country where most Jewish 18-year-olds are conscripted and many Israelis are loath to accuse an army made up of their own relatives or friends of war crimes.
Itamar Avneri, a Tel Aviv City Council member and a founder of Standing Together, said for that reason the group was careful to criticize the government, not the soldiers.
“This is a war of destruction,” he said at the protest near the Gaza border, adding, “The Gazans are our neighbors.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
12) In a First, Leading Israeli Rights Groups Accuse Israel of Gaza Genocide
Israel says it is fighting against Hamas, not Palestinians as a group. But two of Israel’s best-known rights groups — long critical of Israeli policy — now say they disagree.
By Aaron Boxerman, July 28, 2025
Palestinians mourning the dead after an airstrike in Gaza City in June. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Two of the best-known Israeli human rights groups said Monday that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, adding fuel to a passionately fought international debate over whether the death and destruction there have crossed a moral red line.
The two groups were B’Tselem, a rights monitor that documents the effects of Israeli policies on Palestinians, and Physicians for Human Rights — Israel. Their announcement was the first time major Israeli rights groups have publicly concluded that the Gaza war is a genocide, an assessment previously reached by some organizations like Amnesty International.
In a report titled “Our Genocide,” B’Tselem cited the devastating effects of Israel’s war on ordinary Palestinians to support their claim: the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza; the razing of huge areas of Palestinian cities; the forced displacement of nearly all of Gaza’s two million people; the restriction of food and other vital supplies.
All together, the Israeli campaign has amounted to “coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip,” the organization wrote. “In other words: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Israel rejected the accusations as “baseless.” David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesman, said that Israeli troops were targeting Palestinian militants, not civilians. If Israel truly intended to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, the country would not have facilitated nearly two million tons of aid to the territory, he said.
The debate over whether the war in Gaza constitutes genocide has also played out at the International Court of Justice, where South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel. The court has yet to rule on the matter.
Speaking at the International Court of Justice in January 2024, Tal Becker, a member of Israel’s legal defense, said that Israel was fighting Hamas, not targeting Palestinians wholesale.
“What Israel seeks by operating in Gaza is not to destroy a people, but to protect a people, its people, who are under attack on multiple fronts, and to do so in accordance with the law,” Mr. Becker told the court.
Genocide has a specific definition in international law: particular acts carried out with intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. The accusation hits a painful nerve for Israel, a state founded after Nazi Germany’s attempt to exterminate European Jewry.
Israel vigorously denies that its war against Hamas in Gaza amounts to genocide, countering that Hamas seeks to destroy the Jewish state. Israeli officials have also pointed to the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed, mostly civilians, which prompted the devastating Israeli response.
The subsequent Israeli bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza have killed more than 59,000 people, including thousands of children, according to the Gazan health ministry. That toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants; at one point, the Israeli military said nearly 20,000 Hamas fighters had been killed in the conflict, without providing evidence.
Yuli Novak, the director of B’Tselem, said that she was not seeking to minimize the “horrific attack” that Hamas had perpetrated on Oct. 7. But the assault had prompted an Israeli assault on Palestinian life in Gaza that had spiraled into genocide, she said.
“The report we are publishing today is one we never imagined we would have to write,” Ms. Novak said at a news conference in Jerusalem. “But in recent months, we have been witnessing a reality that has left us no choice but to acknowledge the truth.”
As part of the case for genocide, international law requires that there be proof of intent. In the report on Monday, B’Tselem cited a string of dehumanizing remarks by Israeli government officials, such as a statement by Yoav Gallant, a former defense minister, that Israel was fighting “human animals” in Gaza. Some Israeli politicians have also said that their goal is to drive the remaining Palestinians out of Gaza.
Israeli leaders argue that the country has adhered to humanitarian law, that generals work closely with legal advisers who ensure compliance with standards, and that Israel has gone above and beyond what other Western countries have done in similar situations. Mr. Netanyahu has at times distanced himself from the most extreme statements made by his political allies.
But for the vast majority of Gazan civilians, the past 22 months have been a desperate attempt to survive constant Israeli bombardment, find enough food and clean water for their families, and flee amid Israeli warnings to immediately evacuate or risk being killed. The growing number of Gazans now starving has contributed to rising criticism of Israel by some of its longtime allies.
Israeli military officials often attributed the deadly impact of the war on Palestinians to Hamas’s strategy of fighting its insurgency by hiding among civilians. The Israeli rights groups said that alone could not explain the rampant death and destruction in Gaza.
“Israel’s claim that Hamas fighters or members of other armed Palestinian groups were present in medical or civilian facilities, frequently without providing any evidence, cannot justify or explain such widespread, systematic destruction,” B’Tselem wrote.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
13) What We Talk About When We Talk About the Right of Return
By Sari Bashi, July 28, 2025
Ms. Bashi is a former program director at Human Rights Watch and the author of the forthcoming book “Upside-Down Love.”
Sari Bashi
My mother-in-law, Fatima, can’t read or write. She speaks only colloquial Palestinian Arabic and stops walking after just a few steps because of debilitating arthritis in her knees. And yet, thanks to recurrent displacement by the Israeli military, she is now, in her 80s, forced to travel the world. Following a stay in Cairo, she’s currently in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on a visa due to expire shortly. She’s casting about for where to go next.
Fatima was born in a village called Isdud, close to what is now the southern Israeli city of Ashdod. She was about 5 years old when the Israeli military closed in on the village in October 1948. My mother-in-law fled with her parents and thousands of neighbors to Gaza. Shortly after occupying Isdud, the Israeli military expelled its remaining residents and demolished the village.
After the war, my future mother-in-law became one of more than 700,000 Palestinian refugees prevented from returning home as part of the nascent state’s goal to maintain a Jewish majority in as much of historic Palestine as possible.
The Israeli government is now advancing plans to forcibly displace more Palestinians, mostly in Gaza but also in the West Bank. In early July, Defense Minister Israel Katz said he ordered the military to prepare a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, which the Israeli military has almost entirely destroyed.
Everyone in Gaza would eventually be concentrated there, he explained. They would not be allowed to return to their homes in other parts of the strip.
Mr. Katz said international humanitarian organizations — as yet unnamed — would be charged with managing the area. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has also said he’s working with the United States to find third countries to resettle displaced Gaza residents.
The Israeli military has already displaced a vast majority of Gaza’s more than two million residents. Still, some Israeli politicians, among them a former defense minister from Mr. Netanyahu’s own Likud party, have balked at Israeli authorities’ unabashed embrace of what is hard to describe as anything other than ethnic cleansing.
The right of return to one’s home country is enshrined in both U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194, adopted in December 1948, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which protects all people’s rights to return to their own territory, even if sovereignty has changed hands. The right applies to a refugee’s descendants, like my mother-in-law’s four children, 19 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren, if they have maintained enough links with the area that it would be considered their “own country.”
Those within and outside Israel who oppose forcing Palestinians out of Gaza today should also oppose ongoing forced displacement of Palestinian refugees like my mother-in-law from their homes in what is now Israel — and support their return.
I’m an Israeli American Jew. I have lived in Israel and the West Bank since 1997. In the American Zionist communities where I grew up, writers, rabbis and school principals warned that respecting the right of return for what is now an estimated six million Palestinian refugees worldwide would mean the end of Israel as a majority Jewish state.
That’s probably true. Israel may soon lose its Jewish majority anyway. Since 1967, the Israeli government has controlled historic Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, an area now home to about 7.4 million Jews and 7.4 million Palestinians.
When I was a child, my elders taught me that Jews could not be safe unless we were in control of Israel. It took me years to realize that this is logic used to justify a zero-sum game, in which Israeli authorities commit abuses against Palestinians in the name of preventing Palestinians from committing abuses against Israeli Jews.
That is the same bloody reasoning behind the Israeli government’s use of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 crimes against Israeli civilians to justify crimes continuing against Palestinian civilians. Israeli acts of what I — and many others — believe to be forced displacement, starvation as a weapon of war and genocide in Gaza are shocking but not surprising, because maintaining Jewish demographic superiority requires the ongoing oppression of Palestinians.
My mother-in-law’s forced displacement did not end in 1948. She spent the rest of her childhood in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip and never resumed the education she had begun in Isdud. Instead, around age 13, Fatima was married, a child bride, to a fellow refugee. Her husband fled Gaza, without her, when Israel captured the strip in 1967. A few years later, as a single mother of five, she was displaced a second time: Israeli military bulldozers demolished her home, presumably to make it easier for tanks to move through the refugee camp.
Her family built a new house on land they received from the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s. Then, on Oct. 13, 2023, the Israeli military ordered her and everyone else in northern Gaza to leave. She sheltered in Rafah for months, until the Israeli military arrived. The family was forced to flee once more.
Unwilling to leave her behind, and knowing her lack of mobility would have endangered everyone, Fatima’s children pushed her to join a U.S. convoy leaving Gaza for Egypt — a privilege made possible because her second-youngest son, my spouse, is an American citizen. The moment she arrived in Egypt, Fatima wanted to return to Gaza. She’s 82 years old. She’s not afraid to die; she’s afraid of spending the rest of her life separated from her family now scattered throughout Gaza.
Her three children in Gaza are lucky enough to have returned to one of the few homes in their refugee camp that the Israeli military did not destroy, but they face a daily risk of new evacuation orders, or worse. Twenty-four of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are still sheltering across the strip — some are under tarpaulins or at relatives’ homes, others are in a school, an office and rented rooms. Most no longer have homes to return to.
Almost 77 years have passed since my mother-in-law’s first expulsion. It’s difficult to draw a legal or moral distinction between contemporary plans to empty Gaza of Palestinians and denying the right of 1948 Palestinian refugees to return.
Given the staggering physical, social and economic destruction that the Israeli military has wreaked on Gaza, the obstruction of humanitarian aid and the likelihood of continued hostilities even if the parties reach a cease-fire, many Palestinians in Gaza will want to relocate away from the strip, at least temporarily. But they have a legal right to return to Gaza, now, or in the future. And under international law, the 1.6 million 1948 refugees and their descendants in Gaza also have a right to resettle on the land taken from them and their families three-quarters of a century ago, and to benefit from the housing, infrastructure, services, schools and universities in the land that is now Israel that they have been unlawfully denied.
It can be difficult to imagine Palestinian refugees returning after so many years and so much violence. But their return would be an opportunity to transform the Israeli system of governance from one supporting an ethnonationalist state aimed at maintaining Israeli Jewish dominance over Palestinians to a rights-respecting democracy that protects the equality, freedom and security of all residents.
My mother-in-law can’t stay in Saudi Arabia much longer, but, as Israel isn’t allowing travel to Gaza, nor can she return to her beloved seaside home. For now, she doesn’t know where she will go.
I recently visited Fatima’s childhood home, Isdud, on Israel’s southern coast. What had been the village center now abuts a cement factory and serves as grazing land for cows. I found the unmarked ruins of a mosque, its stunning vaulted arches partially intact, and the boys’ and girls’ schools, which were piles of rubble. I took photographs and a small stone from the mosque, tying a ribbon around the latter as a gift to my stateless, homeless mother-in-law.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
14) Doctors Have Lost Their Mount Olympus of Medicine
By Danielle Ofri, July 28, 2025
Dr. Ofri is a primary care physician in New York.
Kyle Ellingson
The other day I was talking to one of my patients about her vaccinations, and I noticed that she hadn’t had a Covid-19 vaccine since the early days of the pandemic. “The virus has changed so much since then,” I told her, “so we recommend that you get the current vaccine——”
And then I stopped dead in my tracks, the words “we recommend” lingering in the air. This is how I’d always phrased these types of recommendations, but I was suddenly unsure of who the “we” was. Up until recently, it meant a medical community that included not just my health care colleagues, but also the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, respected medical journals and the research community. It’s not remotely feasible for practicing clinicians to review every medical study out there, so we rely on trusted colleagues and institutions with the relevant expertise to help guide us.
The “we” suddenly rang hollow. The institutions I trusted to be deliberative and evidence-based sources of knowledge that extend my medical abilities are no longer that. In the first Trump administration, despite relentless attacks from the president, the nation’s public health institutions remained largely intact, if wearied. But the plunder of the second Trump administration has disemboweled them and installed fox-guarding-the-henhouse leadership. Medical professionals can no longer fully trust federal health guidance, and our patients are the ones who will suffer the most.
For most of my colleagues and me, the C.D.C. and the N.I.H. were the medical Mount Olympus, the towering pillars of medical authority. Contrary to right-wing portrayals, these were not dictatorial authorities. These were earned authorities, comprising our best, brightest and most dedicated peers. The formidable talents of these doctors and scientists would have commanded enviable salaries had they taken jobs in industry, but they chose the public sector instead — something that we clinicians were forever grateful for.
Were there egos, missteps and shortcomings? Sure. But by and large, the people I met who worked for the C.D.C. or N.I.H. were brilliant and rigorous, and cared passionately about the science they were pursuing. While there are some doctors who viewed our public health institutions with disdain — some of them now are running these very organizations — most practicing physicians relied heavily on them to deliver the best care possible to their patients, despite occasional quibbles.
What a relief, I always felt, that there were people organizing the things I can’t do — testing new treatments, conducting population studies, keeping tabs on worldwide diseases, issuing guidelines and more.
But now that support is a shell of what it once was. I can no longer automatically rely on these institutions because their scientific North Star, even if imperfect at times, has been replaced by one that seems nakedly political. Remaining staffs are no doubt working valiantly to do their jobs, but they are hobbled by loss of colleagues, resources and reliable leadership. So when I hear that the C.D.C. has changed a vaccine recommendation, I now question whether that’s a recommendation I can trust. When the F.D.A. commissioner says he wants to change how the agency approves or rejects new treatments, I no longer feel sure that science is driving those decisions. It’s hard to convey how profoundly grieved my colleagues and I feel.
The rapid-fire evisceration of our public health institutions initially baffled me. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would support moves that weakened America’s medical enterprise and dissuaded the top minds here and abroad from joining these institutions. Don’t they want the most advanced treatments when their mother gets cancer? But Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s view seems to be that we doctors are shills for corporate interests and government bureaucrats, and that torching our vaunted institutions is the prescription to fix us.
Mr. Kennedy’s ire seems oddly directed. I, too, am disgusted by the role of money in health care, but I see it more as a result of the system we’ve set up, rather than the people who labor within it. And the public seems to be able to make that distinction as well. Americans may be upset with how the system works and how much care costs, but most people say they are satisfied with their medical care. Most trust their doctors, even if that has declined slightly over the years. Nursing continues to top the list for most trusted profession.
Notably missing from Mr. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda is any suggestion that we provide universal health care, as most other developed countries do. There is no push to expand Medicare and Medicaid, which help some of our sickest patients. There is no focus on expanding access to early childhood education and supplemental nutrition programs, which offer steep health benefits. In line with the thrust of most of the Trump administration’s actions and the outlines of Project 2025 is a barely concealed antipathy toward the people who are the engine of these institutions — doctors, scientists, policy wonks.
These attacks feel deeply personal for so many of us in health care. And of course, we are most pained about what this means for those we take care of. Cuts to infectious-disease surveillance means that outbreaks will almost certainly creep up more stealthily on our patients. Cuts to the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion means fewer resources for prevention of cancer, heart disease and diabetes — some of the leading causes of death. Cuts to the N.I.H and the F.D.A. could drastically reduce the development and approval of new medical treatments. Add in cuts to injury-prevention research and patient safety programs, and it’s a prescription to make America sick again.
Every time you go to your doctor or get treated by a nurse, there’s a chorus of researchers, public health workers, policy experts, epidemiologists and advisory panels arrayed behind them, aided by laboratories, databases, websites, early-detection systems and clinical guidelines. Our current government seems determined to wrench this away, handicapping your health care team’s ability to care for you.
Professional medical groups might pick up some of the slack, but there’s no organization with sufficient heft or reach to replicate what the C.D.C., N.I.H., F.D.A. and other institutions do. So many of our resources are now gone, and those that remain no longer feel trustworthy. Americans’ health will decline at the hands of our federal government. And there’s no vaccine for that.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
15) Fear of ICE Jolts a Maine Beach Town
Wells, like many U.S. tourist spots that rely on foreign labor, is fearful of immigration raids. The local police department’s agreement to collaborate with federal agents only adds to the anxiety.
By David Goodman, Photographs by Ryan David Brown. July 28, 2025
Residents of Wells, Maine, and the surrounding area participate in a protest in front of the Wells police department. The protests have become regular events after the department agreed to a collaboration with ICE.
The rituals start early in Wells, a popular tourist destination on the southern coast of Maine.
At 6:30 on a recent morning, a gaggle of dog walkers on Wells Beach strolled vigorously behind their canines as a blanket of fog lifted off the ocean.
At 7 a.m., a line of bleary-eyed customers was already snaking out the door at Congdon’s Doughnuts, the town’s 70-year-old doughnut shop.
Around 8 o’clock, yet another ritual, new this year, began as a small group of protesters gathered in front of the Wells police department, waving signs at cars on Route 1, Maine’s coastal artery. Wells recently became the only town in Maine whose police department agreed to a collaboration with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and the protesters’ objections to the partnership were clear.
“No ICE in our community,” read a cardboard sign held by a resident, Daria Cullen. “Fight ignorance, not immigrants,” read another. Many drivers honked and waved approvingly. A smaller number of drivers seemed to feel otherwise, flipping the finger at the protesters.
One Wells resident, Jim Loring, was walking past and shook his head. He confessed ignorance about the agreement with ICE, but said that the police “are supposed to be cooperating with ICE. I mean, that’s protecting the citizens of this town. Everyone should be cooperating with ICE, not fighting with them.”
The protests, which began in April, have become a weekly event in Wells, which relies on foreign workers to staff its hotels, restaurants and other businesses. Police leaders, in turn, are now taking a cautious approach and have yet to participate in ICE enforcement actions — but that hasn’t quieted the furor or the concerns about how Wells, and Maine broadly, will be seen by tourists and foreign workers.
Six months into Donald Trump’s presidency, national politics have crashed into this small New England resort town like a rogue wave.
Feeling the Pressure
Wells, along with many U.S. tourist areas, is in the tightening grip of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Nationally, one-third of workers in hospitality and tourism are immigrants. When ICE arrested about 40 immigrants on Martha’s Vineyard in May, it forced some local businesses to temporarily close.
Maine, too, is feeling pressure. Last year the state’s work force included 4,375 workers on temporary H-2B nonagricultural visas and 3,382 J-1 student visas, according to The Maine Monitor, an investigative news organization. Businesses around the state also rely on seasonal employees — who work as hotel housekeepers, restaurant cooks, dishwashers and in other essential roles — to return year after year. Some 5,800 undocumented workers fill other jobs in the state, including home care and farming, according to the American Immigration Council.
Wells and the neighboring towns of Kennebunk and Ogunquit employ hundreds of seasonal workers, including many from Jamaica, to work in restaurants and hotels. Congdon’s Doughnuts, for instance, has eight H-2B employees among its staff of 100. Congdon’s president, Jillian Shomphe, said she would hire more if she could find enough housing.
“They like it here,” Ms. Shomphe said of her international staff, shouting over the din of bakers, cashiers and customers.
Paul Patel, an Indian-born entrepreneur who owns 11 hotels on the Maine coast, put things in more existential terms. “The entire Maine coast from Kittery all the way up to Bar Harbor will not survive without international help,” he said.
Wells and ICE: The Police Partnership
The controversy in Wells began in March, when the town’s police department signed an agreement with ICE. The partnership deputizes police in this community of 12,000 to help enforce immigration laws, an authority normally reserved for federal agents.
The town’s police chief, Jo-Ann Putnam, said that in signing the agreement she wanted to provide officers with “another tool in their toolbox.”
It allows her officers “a safer way to deal with ‘designated criminal aliens,’” she wrote in an email. (She acknowledged that Wells is one of the safest towns in Maine.)
The agreement comes as Maine tourism is facing headwinds over some of President Trump’s actions and language. In June, about 30 percent fewer travelers crossed the border from Canada into the state, evidence of the Canadian travel boycott that was triggered by President Trump’s tariffs and his comments about making Canada “the 51st state.”
Then there are the challenges posed by Maine’s demography. “A lot of Black and brown people thought Maine was cold, old and white,” said Lisa Jones, who recently lived in Wells and owns Black Travel Maine, which is working to attract diverse visitors to the Pine Tree State. If the perception spreads that Maine towns are cooperating with ICE, it could undermine that effort, she said.
The president has waffled about immigration raids in hotels, restaurants and farms, briefly sparing these sectors in June, only to resume the crackdown days later, then teasing the idea of a “temporary pass.”
“We’re going to look everywhere,” Mr. Trump said last month.
ICE arrests in Maine have risen 49 percent since Trump came into office.
The arrests, say supporters of immigrant rights, are sweeping up people who are working in Maine legally, keeping everyone on edge.
Lisa Parisio, a policy director at the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project in Portland, said, “We have tracked 17 minor traffic stops that have happened since March where more than 40 people have been handed over by local law enforcement to immigration officers.” This includes people with valid work permits and no criminal history, she said.
The crackdown has unsettled Maine’s business community. Patrick Woodcock, the chief executive of the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, noted that the state’s economy contracted 1.2 percent the first quarter of this year, making it the slowest-growing economy in the Northeast. “Given the debate on immigration,” he said, there was concern that foreign workers would stay away from the state, further jeopardizing the economy.
“We do need to ensure that those who are authorized to work feel welcomed,” he said.
Mr. Patel, the hotel owner, said that if foreign visitors and workers stay away, Maine’s $9 billion tourism economy, which draws 15 million visitors annually, “will collapse like a domino.”
A ‘Wait-and-See’ Approach
Trump’s quest to enlist local enforcers landed with a thud in most of Maine, where Kamala Harris won 52 percent of the vote in the 2024 presidential election.
After Chief Putnam signed the memorandum of agreement with ICE on March 28, the ACLU of Maine said on its website that the agreement was an “open invitation to racially profile community members.” It noted that “municipalities have lost millions in legal settlements after violating people’s civil rights when enforcing federal immigration law.”
In June, the Maine legislature approved a bill restricting local police departments from carrying out immigration enforcement. But the Democratic governor, Janet Mills, has postponed until next year a decision on whether to sign the bill into law.
For now, the Wells police department can collaborate with ICE.
In the face of local anger, Chief Putnam announced on May 20 that she would take a “wait-and-see” approach to working with ICE.
“We are not participating in proactive immigration enforcement,” she said in a statement. She said that Wells police officers had engaged in 40 hours of online training with ICE, but that the officers had not yet been “credentialed.”
ICE still lists the department as an active partner.
Other Maine communities have taken note of the backlash in Wells. Monmouth and Winthrop have withdrawn their applications to partner with ICE. Paul Ferland, the police chief for both towns, told the Monmouth select board in April, “We’re not here to divide the community.”
‘An Environment of Fear and Rancor’
While residents, activists and immigrants wait to see how the Wells-ICE collaboration plays out, a sense of unease has become part of the fabric of the normally tranquil town.
Janet Campagna, 68, retired in Wells four years ago after running an asset management firm in New York. She came here for “the people, the scenery, the beaches, the access to really good food and cultural venues.”
In May, Ms. Campagna testified in the Maine legislature in support of the bill to restrict local partnerships with ICE. She told lawmakers that the agreement in her community “has created an environment of fear and rancor.”
Foreign-born residents and workers around Wells have reacted to the ICE threat by trying to stay out of sight.
Many are scared, said a woman from southern Africa who lives near Wells and helps connect asylum seekers with social services and jobs, including in tourism businesses. The woman, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, asked to remain anonymous out of concern for her safety.
She said that following the revelation that Wells police officers were working with ICE, some local immigrants would only attend church online and are keeping their children from school.
Mr. Patel, the hotel owner, said that when his foreign H-2B employees heard about the ICE collaboration, they came to him in a panic, asking if they should carry their passports and visas everywhere they went.
“Not knowing how to deal with it was very frustrating for me as a business owner and all my employees,” said Mr. Patel. He said he was assured by Chief Putnam that he and his workers did not need to carry their passport or worry about being stopped by police.
Chief Putnam said that the Wells police department is not actively collaborating with ICE. But the town does not plan to withdraw from its agreement “at this time.”
But such reassurances are not sufficient for some. Mufalo Chitam, the director of the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, said that the events in Wells have intensified the anxiety that immigrants already feel.
She noted that 200 families from Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo, most of them asylum seekers, had settled in the region in the last five years and now worked in area businesses. Turning police into immigration agents makes them fearful of calling law enforcement when they need it, she said.
“People fear for deportation, fear for arrest, people are afraid of helping other immigrants,” she said. “They are afraid there will not be anyone to defend them, and afraid to have their kids playing in the community because their kids might not return.”
“The normalcy of life,” she said, “has evaporated.”
David Goodman, a journalist based in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to the Travel section.
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
16) Tehran Is at Risk of Running Out of Water Within Weeks
After a five-year drought and decades of mismanagement, a water crisis is battering Iran.
By Farnaz Fassihi, Sanam Mahoozi and Leily Nikounazar, Photographs by Arash Khamooshi, Published July 26, 2025, Updated July 28, 2025
The water behind the Amir Kabir dam north of Tehran, which supplies the city with water, has plummeted to its lowest levels in history.
Some of Iran’s deepest reservoirs have shrunk to shallow ponds. Water pressure is so low in some cities that taps in apartment buildings run dry for hours on end. People desperately search for water tanks, and hoard every drop they can find.
Temperatures are so high that one day last month a part of Iran saw a heat index of 149 degrees Fahrenheit, according to sites that track extreme weather, making it one of the hottest places on Earth.
Iran is in the throes of an acute water crisis, on top of a monthslong energy shortage that has prompted daily scheduled power cuts across the country. Iranians still recovering from a 12-day war with Israel and the United States last month must now confront life without the basics.
The government announced this week that many reservoirs, particularly those that supply the capital, Tehran, with drinking water, were drying out. Water supplies for Tehran are predicted to run out in just a few weeks, officials said, pleading with the public to reduce water consumption.
“The water crisis is more serious than what is being talked about today, and if we do not make urgent decisions today, we will face a situation in the future that cannot be cured,” President Masoud Pezeshkian said at a cabinet meeting on Monday, adding, “We cannot continue this way.”
Already prone to droughts, Iran has exacerbated the problem with poor water management policies, which Mr. Pezeshkian acknowledged on Monday. Climate change, too, has played a role; the country has weathered five consecutive years of drought.
Now, the crisis has grown so extreme that the government shut down all government offices and services in Tehran and more than two dozen other cities across the country on Wednesday, creating a three-day weekend in an attempt to lower water and electricity usage. Fatemeh Mohajerani, a government spokeswoman, said cities could have similar closures once or twice a week going forward, and suggested people “go on holiday.”
The Tehran Province Water and Wastewater Company announced this week it had reduced water pressure to such low levels that in Tehran — a city of 10 million people, many living and working in high-rise buildings — water could not flow above the second floor of apartment buildings.
Some residents in Tehran said in interviews that water trickled from their faucets, making it difficult to flush the toilet or wash dishes and clothes. In some neighborhoods, water service was disrupted for 48 hours, residents said.
Many people and buildings are scrambling to buy water tanks, hoping to stockpile what little water there is to make it through future disruptions. The manager of one high-rise in the upscale neighborhood of Elahiyeh said the building was in its third day without water service.
When that building finally secured a water tank, the supply lasted for just two hours. It then procured water from a freelance water truck, the manager said, only to realize it was polluted seawater, not suitable for drinking or bathing.
Across town, Nafiseh, a schoolteacher, questioned the water storage strategy. “My mom has filled half the kitchen with bottles of water, big and small, but I think it’s a mistake. In a real crisis, a few containers won’t save us,” said Nafiseh, 36, who like all Iranians interviewed for this article asked her last name not be published out of fear of retribution.
The water shortage comes on top of scheduled daily power cuts across the country. Since December, Iran, which has one of the biggest supplies of natural gas and crude oil in the world, has struggled with a full-blown energy crisis, forcing schools, universities and government offices to close or reduce their hours and power to be rationed at industrial factories.
The cumulative effect of crises on top of crises — from war, to daily explosions suspected to be sabotage, to skyrocketing inflation, to water and power cuts — has many Iranians reeling. In interviews and social media posts, they say that it feels as if their country is in free-fall, and question the government’s ability to reverse the situation.
“Addressing just one aspect of the crisis is futile; both electricity and water governance must be reformed,” Hamidreza Khodabakhshi, the head of the union for water engineers in the province of Khuzestan in southern Iran, said in a telephone interview. “Repeated calls for public conservation — without action from authorities — shift blame unfairly to citizens.”
Environmental experts say that the water crisis stems from decades of mismanaging water resources and other misguided policies, including the overdevelopment of urban areas, draining of ground water for farming and excessive construction of dams. Iran has also piped water to the central desert regions to feed water-intensive industries, such as steel-making, owned by the government.
Climate change is also exacerbating the crisis. The Ministry of Energy says that annual rainfall over the past five years has declined from about 11 inches to below six, creating the worst drought in 50 years. Mohammad Sadegh Motamedian, the governor of Tehran province, told local news media that at four dams supplying drinking water to the capital, water reserves had dropped to about 14 percent of their capacity.
Lush wetlands have crusted into beds of sand and dust storms, and wells have gone dry. Crops and livestock are dying. Parts of the country are sinking at alarming rates after water aquifers have been sucked up — in Tehran, parts of the city are sinking over 12 inches a year, officials said. Lakes and water reservoirs where boating, fishing and swimming were once summer staples have dried or shrunk.
“I remember swimming in these places when I was little, and it was full — now they are all dry and empty, and we can walk through them from one side to the other,” said Saeed, a 37-year-old owner of a technology firm in Tehran.
Negin, a 28-year-old mother of two, lives in the southern city of Bushehr, where temperatures average above 120 degrees in the summer and humidity weighs heavy in the air. Recently, running water has been available for only a few hours a day in her neighborhood, she said in an interview.
Running the air conditioning has been difficult and often impossible because of daily power cuts, she said, leaving her home feeling like a sauna and her angry at the government.
“How are we supposed to live like this?” she asked. “What are we supposed to use to clean our kids? To wash clothes?”
Periodic water shortages over the past few years in Khuzestan, Isfahan and Sistan and Baluchistan provinces prompted protests that quickly turned political, with some farmers clashing with security forces. In Sabzevar, a small city in northeast Iran, crowds gathered outside the governor’s office for a few nights in a row this week chanting, “Water, electricity, life is our basic right,” videos shared by BBC Persian showed.
Kaveh Madani, the director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, said that a decade ago, when he served as deputy head of Iran’s Department of Environment, the water shortages were mild and confined to remote areas. Now, he said, with Tehran and other major cities at risk of running dry, the situation can best be likened to a bankruptcy, but what is in a fast, apparently irreversible decline is not cash but water.
“Responses are chaotic, urgent, confused, and reactive,” Mr. Madani said in an interview. “What worries me most is the inequity. Wealthier urban residents can afford water storage, tanker deliveries, or other solutions, while the poor will bear the brunt of the suffering.”
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*
