Memorial for David Johnson of the San Quentin 6
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A Trial Date Is Set on August 26 for Alejandro Orellana, Join the Call for National Protests to Drop the Charges!
https://stopfbi.org/news/a-trial-date-is-set-on-august-26-for-alejandro-orellana-join-the-call-for-national-protests-to-drop-the-charges/
A trial date of August 26 was set for immigrant rights activist Alejandro Orellana at his July 3 court appearance in front of a room packed with supporters. Orellana was arrested by the FBI on June 12 for protesting against ICE in Los Angeles. He faces up to 5 years in prison for two bogus federal charges: conspiracy to commit civil disorder, and aiding and abetting civil disorder.
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression is calling for a national day of protests on the first day of Orellana's trial, August 26th, to demand that the charges be dropped. To everyone who believes in the right to free speech, to protest ICE, and to say no to deportations, we urge you to organize a local protest on that day at the nearest federal courthouse.
Orellana has spent much of his adult life fighting for justice for Chicanos, Latinos, and many others. He has opposed the killings of Chicanos and Latinos by the LAPD, such as 14-year-old Jesse Romero, stood against US wars, protested in defense of others targeted by political repression, and has been a longtime member of the activist group, Centro CSO, based out of East LA. His life is full of examples of courage, integrity, and a dedication to justice.
In contrast, the US Attorney who charged him, Bilal Essayli, believes in Trump's racist MAGA vision and does a lot to carry it out. He defended Trump's decision to defy the state of California and deploy the California National Guard to put down anti-ICE protests. Essayli has charged other protesters, including David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union California, who was held on a $50,000 bond.
Another Centro CSO immigrants rights activist, Verita Topete, was ambushed by the FBI on June 26. They served her a warrant and seized her phone. Orellana and his fellow organizers like Topete stand for the community that protested Trump last month. Essayli represents Trump’s attempts to crush that movement.
This case against Orellana is political repression, meant to stop the growth of the national immigrants rights movement. The basis for his arrest was the claim that he drove a truck carrying face shields for protesters, as police geared up to put down protests with rubber bullets. People of conscience are standing with Orellana. because nothing he did or is accused of doing is wrong. There is no crime in protesting Trump, deportations, and ICE. To protest is his - and our - First Amendment right. It’s up to us to make sure that Essayli and Trump fail to repress this movement and silence Orellana's supporters.
Just as he stood up for immigrants last month, we call on everyone to stand up for Orellana on August 26 and demand the charges be dropped. On the June 27 National Day of Action for Alejandro Orellana, at least 16 cities held protests or press conferences in front of their federal courthouses. We’ll make sure there are even more on August 26. In addition to planning local protests, we ask that organizations submit statements of support and to join in the call to drop the charges.
You can find protest organizing materials on our website, stopfbi.org. Please send information about your local protests and any statements of support to stopfbi@gmail.com. We will see you in the streets!
On August 26, Protest at Your Federal Courthouse for Alejandro Orellana!
Drop the Charges Now!
Protesting ICE Is Not a Crime!
Copyright © 2025 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) 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.
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2) 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.
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3) 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.
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4) 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.
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5) 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.”
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6) Marjorie Taylor Greene Is First Republican Lawmaker to Call Gaza Crisis a ‘Genocide’
Ms. Greene is the first Republican in Congress to use the term to describe the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, two years after she led the push to censure a Democrat for speaking out against conditions there.
By Robert Jimison, Reporting from Washington, July 29, 2025
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene became the latest prominent voice on the right to condemn the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who often casts herself as the standard-bearer of MAGA politics on Capitol Hill, said a “genocide” is underway in Gaza, becoming the first member of her party in Congress to use the term as she condemned the humanitarian disaster unfolding there.
“It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct. 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza,” Ms. Greene said in a social media post on Monday evening.
It was the strongest in a series of escalating statements she has made in recent weeks criticizing Israel’s conduct of the war and calling for action to end the suffering in Gaza. The stance is a clear break with the vast majority of Republicans in Congress, who have made unconditional support for Israel a hallmark of their foreign policy approach.
Ms. Greene’s comments were a direct rebuke of one Republican colleague in particular, Representative Randy Fine of Florida, who has drawn intense criticism for comments he made on social media last week calling the images of starving children in Gaza a campaign of “Muslim terror propaganda.”
“Release the hostages,” Mr. Fine wrote, adding, “until then, starve away.”
Mr. Fine, a first-term lawmaker who has been outspoken in Congress about his Jewish faith and staunchly pro-Israel views, made the remarks the same day that he was elevated to a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the influential panel that focuses on international policy.
Mr. Fine made his comments before President Trump said there was “real starvation” happening in Gaza and made commitments to offer additional support to increase aid.
“That’s real starvation stuff — I see it, and you can’t fake that,” Mr. Trump said on Monday after a series of meetings with European leaders while in Scotland. “We have to get the kids fed.”
Ms. Greene had already started to make her pivot before Mr. Trump’s comments, as had some others in the MAGA movement.
“Standing with Israel means eliminating every barbaric Hamas terrorist,” Representative Lance Gooden of Texas wrote on social media, in a quote Ms. Greene recirculated. “It also means rejecting the killing and starvation of children in Gaza.”
Earlier this month, she said in a statement that: “Israel bombed the Catholic Church in Gaza, and that entire population is being wiped out as they continue their aggressive war in Gaza.” The remarks were made after a failed bid, led by Ms. Greene, to strip $500 million of American military funding that Congress had approved as part of annual defense support for Israel.
The effort failed with only six members, two Republicans and four Democrats, voting in favor. That coalition included Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan and the only Palestinian American serving in Congress.
The pairing of Ms. Greene and Ms. Tlaib on the effort to revoke the funding, for Israel’s Iron Dome weapons system, was an unlikely one. Ms. Greene two years ago led a failed effort to censure Ms. Tlaib, accusing her of “antisemitic activity” and “sympathizing with terrorists” after the Democrat spoke at a pro-Palestinian protest about the “dehumanizing conditions” in Gaza and called for “lifting the blockade” against humanitarian aid.
On Sunday, Ms. Greene posted on social media that she could “unequivocally say that what happened to innocent people in Israel on Oct 7th was horrific. Just as I can unequivocally say that what has been happening to innocent people and children in Gaza is horrific.”
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7) ‘Worst-Case Scenario of Famine’ Unfolding in Gaza, U.N.-Backed Body Says
Access to food has plummeted to unprecedented levels, a monitoring group warned, as global outrage over Israel’s aid restrictions persisted.
By Patrick Kingsley and Amelia Nierenberg, July 29, 2025
Outside a charity kitchen in Gaza City on Wednesday. The crisis began in early March, when Israel cut off all food supplies to the enclave. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Famine is unfolding across most of Gaza, a U.N.-backed food security group said on Tuesday, citing months of severe aid restrictions imposed by Israel on the territory.
“The worst-case scenario of famine is playing out in Gaza,” the group, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or I.P.C., said in a statement. The I.P.C. is an initiative backed by the United Nations, aid agencies and governments.
“Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths,” the group added, noting that one in three people had gone without food for days at a time.
The announcement came as Gaza’s health ministry said that the death toll had passed 60,000 since the start of Israel’s invasion, its response to the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 that killed some 1,200 people. Gaza’s health ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The latest crisis began in early March, when Israel cut off all food supplies to the enclave, saying without evidence that Hamas was systematically stealing aid. Although there have been food shortages in Gaza since Israel restricted aid soon after the war began almost two years ago, the situation has never been as dire as it is now. The I.P.C. report said one in three Gazans goes without food for days at a time.
When Israel partly lifted the blockade in late May, it changed how most food was distributed. The new method, which largely relies on private contractors instead of the United Nations, requires Palestinians to walk for miles through extremely dangerous areas to reach the distribution sites, making it almost impossible for them to find food safely or cheaply.
Israel has rejected such criticism, saying that the United Nations is welcome to deliver as much aid to Gaza as it wants. It has attributed the food shortages to the reluctance of the United Nations to do so. U.N. officials say that Israeli restrictions and combat operations make it hard to safely coordinate aid convoys.
On Sunday, Israel tried to counter that criticism by announcing daily pauses in military operations, which it said would make it easier to send in U.N. convoys. Israel also revived the practice of dropping airborne aid over Gaza.
The I.P.C. said previous moves by Israel to ease restrictions had failed to meet the needs of Palestinians. “Humanitarian aid remains extremely restricted due to requests for humanitarian access being repeatedly denied and frequent security incidents,” it said.
Here is what to know about the situation.
What is causing starvation in Gaza?
The U.N. World Food Program said last week that nearly a third of Gaza’s population was not eating for multiple days in a row. The hunger and malnutrition is largely linked to Israel’s decision to block aid between March and May, and to the way it chose to end that blockade.
Before March, food handouts were mainly distributed from hundreds of points close to where people lived, in a system overseen by the United Nations. Since late May, handouts have mainly been supplied from a few sites run by private contractors that, for most Palestinians in Gaza, can only be reached by walking for miles through Israeli military lines.
To contain crowds walking along these routes, Israeli soldiers have shot and killed hundreds of people, according to the United Nations, often turning the daily search for food into a deadly trap.
Some food is still available from shops in Palestinian-run areas, but only at astronomical prices that are unaffordable to the largely unemployed civilian population. Late last week, a kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of flour cost up to $30, and a kilogram of tomatoes cost roughly $30; meat and rice were mostly unavailable on the open market.
That has forced Palestinians to routinely choose between two deadly options: risking death by starvation, or risking death by gunfire to reach food aid sites that often run out of supplies by the time most people arrive there.
What is happening at the new aid distribution sites?
The sites are in areas under Israeli military control in the central and southern parts of Gaza. To reach them, Palestinians must often walk for miles. To arrive before the food runs out, they often set off at night.
That has led to large crowds moving chaotically across the devastated landscape of Gaza, usually at night, when visibility is poor. Sometimes scuffles break out or people veer off the designated route, witnesses have said in interviews. Responding to that unrest, Israeli soldiers have repeatedly fired at the crowds, killing hundreds of people over the last two months on the paths that lead to the sites.
The Israeli military has said it has fired “warning shots” when people approach military lines. But international doctors who have treated the wounded say that the location of their injuries indicated that soldiers systematically targeted their torsos.
What is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation?
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which oversees the new aid sites, was conceived mainly by Israeli officials and businessmen who wanted to create a new aid system that circumvented the United Nations. It is now run by Americans who say they want to work in tandem with the United Nations. Its director, Johnnie Moore, is an American public relations professional and evangelical Christian with ties to the Trump administration.
The foundation’s previous chief, Jake Wood, resigned after news outlets, including The New York Times, raised questions about the group’s independence and its connections with Israel. The United States says it has provided the foundation with $30 million, but it is not clear who else funds the group.
On the ground in Gaza, the foundation has outsourced security and logistics to contractors led by Philip F. Reilly, a former senior C.I.A. operative.
Israeli officials have said that the foundation’s methods are necessary to prevent Hamas and civilian looters from stealing the aid. The group said it aims to “deliver a practical, immediate, and secure approach to delivering essential aid — one that ensures the dignity of Gazans.”
Human rights organizations say the new foundation’s approach contravenes internationally established methods to protect people in need. Its “militarized model, coupled with its close collaboration with Israeli authorities, undermines the core humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence,” 15 rights groups from several countries said in a statement last month.
Is the U.N. sending in aid?
Having blocked the United Nations and other international organizations for months, Israel is now allowing them to send their own convoys into areas controlled by Hamas. Israel has even criticized the United Nations as failing to scale up its deliveries fast enough.
U.N. officials say that Israeli restrictions make it difficult to load trucks and coordinate their onward passage through an active war zone. The United Nations office for coordination of humanitarian affairs said in a briefing note last week that it takes an average of 20 hours for trucks to enter and exit a major Israeli-controlled border area where they are loaded with food.
Lawlessness in Gaza also makes it hard for the United Nations to distribute aid. Its convoys are frequently met by thousands of desperate Palestinians, some of whom loot the trucks. The Israeli military has sometimes opened fire on crowds trying to ransack U.N. convoys, adding to the dangers and the complexity of delivering food.
What changes did Israel make over the weekend?
After the global outcry, Israel on Monday began to enact hourslong pauses in its military operations in the most densely populated parts of Gaza. It also said it was creating official “humanitarian corridors” that the U.N. convoys could use to reach those areas. Finally, it reintroduced airborne aid deliveries, allowing Arab air forces to revive a practice tried and then halted last year.
It is still unclear whether the new measures will significantly change the situation. Antoine Renard, who leads the area branch of the U.N.’s World Food Program, said on Sunday that Israel still needed to allocate more access routes for aid convoys. And critics say that the airdrops are mainly for show: Before they were discontinued last year, the drops often missed their targets, hitting people and property and sometimes landing in the sea or in Israel.
Reporting was contributed by Aaron Boxerman, Isabel Kershner, Natan Odenheimer and Lara Jakes.
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8) They Saw Their Neighbors Taken Away by ICE. Then They Made a Plan.
By Michelle Goldberg, Photographs by Daniel Terna, July 30, 2025
Ms. Goldberg, an Opinion columnist, reported from Pasadena, Calif. Mr. Terna is a photographer in Los Angeles and New York.
Daniel Terna for The New York Times
Elizabeth Castillo wasn’t an activist until Immigration and Customs Enforcement started taking away her neighbors.
It all began in June, after Donald Trump directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to sweep Los Angeles, then used scattered violence at protests of ICE’s tactics as a pretext to send in the military. Castillo felt her working-class neighborhood in Pasadena, just outside Los Angeles, was under siege. Six people, she said, were seized at a Winchell’s doughnut shop. Two people were taken when ICE raided her apartment complex.
“It was just chaos,” she said. “And you can see, you can hear, you could feel the fear, the intimidation. You could feel the terror.”
A small woman with long dark hair, Castillo, the American-born daughter of Mexican immigrants, looks younger than her 38 years. She has five children, two of them grown but three still at home. Before the ICE crackdown she’d followed the news and always voted, but her kids and her job in health care administration took up most of her time. “You know, it’s practices here, practices there,” she said. “‘Mom, pick me up.’ ‘Mom, drop me off.’”
But she’s someone who knows firsthand what deportation can do to families. In 2012, she said, when her kids were all under 10, her husband, who was born in Mexico but grew up in the United States, was thrown out of the country. She’d been a full-time student; he was the family’s sole provider. Castillo had to drop out of college and explain to her children why their father could no longer live with them. “I can relate to what it does to a family,” she said. So this summer, when ICE started grabbing people from her community off the streets, she felt she had to act.
At first, Castillo was on her own with a megaphone. When she saw ICE vehicles in the streets she followed them in her car, honking and shouting to warn people that they were coming. She started getting up before dawn to patrol her apartment complex. Then she contacted the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which runs a nearby job center. Through them, she was plugged into a citywide network of people who are constantly tracking ICE’s activities.
Among those doing amateur anti-ICE reconnaissance in Los Angeles are people from established nonprofits that work closely with the mayor’s office. Then there are more militant groups that, beyond simply documenting ICE’s operations, try to actively disrupt them.
“We have people patrolling all over the city starting at 5:30 in the morning,” said Ron Gochez, a high school teacher and spokesman for one of the more radical organizations, Unión del Barrio. When they find agents, he told me, “We get on the megaphone. We denounce the terrorists for being there, and then we inform the community in the immediate area that they are present. And then we say to the people, ‘If you are documented, come out. Come outside. Join us. Help us to defend your neighbor.’”
The widespread raids that have upended life in Los Angeles may soon spread to other cities, especially now that Republicans in Congress have increased ICE’s budget to $27.7 billion, up from about $8 billion. (That’s more than that of most militaries.) “We are a petri dish,” Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles told me. “They’re experimenting with us. If they come and make this stand in Los Angeles, then they can scare all the other cities, just like the universities have been scared, just like the legal firms have been scared.”
Yet if Los Angeles is a testing ground for mass deportation, it’s also a place to see how the resistance is evolving. Though there have been some big anti-Trump marches this year, many of those most horrified by this administration are looking for more immediate, tangible ways to thwart it. The movement against ICE in Los Angeles — one that is starting to take root, in different forms, in cities like New York — is part of a growing shift from symbolic protest to direct action.
It may be no match for the Trumpian leviathan. But it can protect a few people who might otherwise get swept into the black hole of the administration’s deportation machine. And in the most optimistic scenario, it could be a foundation for a new, nationwide opposition movement.
“We have been abandoned by the courts, by the business community,” and, with few exceptions, “by the political class in Washington, D.C.,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-founder of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “All we have are our friends, our allies and ourselves.” One of his group’s slogans is, “Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo.” It means, “Only the people can save the people.”
These days, when Castillo isn’t working, she’s usually in the parking lot of a small, run-down shopping plaza on Orange Grove Boulevard and Garfield Avenue. There, with N.D.L.O.N.’s help, she and a few others who live nearby have set up a sort of command post that they call the community defense corner. They have a canopy tent and literature tables. Each day, volunteers meet there from 6:30 a.m. until around 10 at night. Some of them are new to activism. Others have been protesting Trump since he was first inaugurated. They half-jokingly call Castillo their C.E.O. It stands, she says, for “controllo everything over here.”
The volunteers distribute know-your-rights fliers and pictures of ICE agents and vehicles that have been spotted in the area, along with the number of a hotline to report sightings. “Meet the Clown Squad fascists in your hood,” says one handout. There’s a pile of orange whistles to blow if you see something suspicious, and beaded friendship bracelets with the phone numbers of local immigrant rights groups.
When the volunteers get word of a raid, they rush over to make a commotion. Wearing a custom black “Grupo Auto Defensa” T-shirt, Jesus Simental, a middle-aged man who works delivering industrial equipment, told me, “They don’t want noise, and we bring the thunder.”
In the first Trump presidency, the resistance announced itself with the Women’s March, a gargantuan display of feminist fury at Trump’s improbable victory. No similar spectacle greeted his return. For those who abhor him, Trump’s re-election was devastating, but it wasn’t shocking. He’d won the popular vote, giving him a democratic legitimacy he didn’t have the first time around. The dominant mood in many blue precincts was despair rather than outrage. Organized opposition to Trump seemed, at least to some observers, to be dormant. A Politico headline shortly after the election announced, “The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out.”
While the exhaustion was real, it wasn’t the whole story. Anti-Trump forces may have been quieter than they were before, but they never stopped meeting and planning. As the administration exceeds many of its opponents’ worst fears, they’re becoming more visible.
Resistance in the second Trump term, however, looks a bit different than it did in the first. There’s less focus on big marches and rallies, and more on trying to make a concrete difference, often close to home. Think of the doctors sending abortion medication into states with prohibitions, or the protests in front of Tesla dealerships that helped push down the company’s stock price. “Resistance 2.0 is much more locally grounded and community embedded,” said Dana Fisher, an American University sociologist who studies protest movements.
The shift in tactics derives, in part, from a changing understanding of the crisis we face. During Trump’s first term, the resistance often put its trust in existing institutions. Indivisible, founded by two former Hill staffers, organized people by congressional district and taught them how to lobby their representatives. Some liberals made heroes of establishment figures like Robert Mueller, the special counsel who led the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Newly awakened citizens showered the Democratic Party and big nonprofits like the A.C.L.U. and Planned Parenthood with donations.
The assumption underlying the resistance then, said Fisher, was “that Trump was a blip,” elected by a freakish confluence of unlucky circumstances. His victory was seen as a mistake that future elections could fix. The resistance, she said, “was all about getting us to 2018, and all about trying to create the capacity to push back using the political system.”
This is, of course, a generalization; there was plenty of civil disobedience and left-wing radicalism during Trump’s first term, especially in the febrile summer of 2020. But looking back from the bleak vantage of 2025, it’s striking how optimistic many people were that some established power in American life — be it Congress, law enforcement, government bureaucrats or the media — could stop Trump from doing his worst.
As such faith has withered, the character of the resistance has changed. “We recognize that in a period of authoritarian breakthrough where there is a very rapid sprint to consolidate power, you cannot focus purely on the formal political avenues of representation,” said Leah Greenberg, one of Indivisible’s founders. “Getting out of this is going to require a symphony of defiance.”
Indivisible is running a campaign called “One Million Rising” aimed at training a million people in strategies of protest, noncooperation and civil disobedience, especially around mass deportation. The emphasis on ICE is in part simply a response to the sheer cruelty of Trump’s immigration regime. Far from prioritizing criminals, ICE, under pressure from Trump’s fanatical deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, seems desperate to round up as many people as possible. That includes people with American spouses and children who’ve been here for decades, those who’ve followed all the rules in seeking asylum, and even those with green cards.
In recent months viral videos have shown ICE agents breaking car windows, throwing people to the ground, and ripping parents away from their kids. Human Rights Watch has reported on the degrading treatment of immigrants in federal detention; at one Florida facility, men described being forced to eat “like dogs” with their hands shackled behind their backs. Venezuelan migrants sent by the United States to a megaprison in El Salvador have reportedly faced even worse conditions; Andry Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist later freed as part of a prisoner exchange, described being tortured and sexually assaulted by guards.
Yet the campaign against ICE isn’t only about immigrants, because to many on the left, the agency is understood as the tip of the authoritarian spear. Trump and those close to him, after all, are openly fantasizing about stripping Americans of citizenship or sending them to the same El Salvador gulag that held Hernández Romero. Americans are being forced to acclimate to the once-unthinkable sight of masked men, wearing civilian clothes and refusing to show identification, grabbing people off the streets and throwing them in the back of vehicles. There have been reports of ICE assaulting and detaining U.S. citizens. At a Home Depot in Hollywood last month, agents reportedly tackled an American photographer who was recording a raid; he was held for more than 24 hours. (He’s now seeking $1 million in damages.)
“They have made a calculation that they can get away with a bunch of things as long as it’s framed as immigration enforcement,” said Greenberg. “That will then allow them to ratchet up authoritarian conditions for the rest of us.”
With ICE increasingly seen as the front line of a growing police state, people all over the country are looking for ways to stand up to it. In New York, ICE arrests seem to be concentrated in immigration courts, where agents have been snatching people after their asylum hearings, even when judges ask them to come back for further proceedings. Activists, in turn, are showing up at the courts to try to provide whatever support to immigrants they can. They hand out fliers — languages include Spanish, French, Urdu, Punjabi and Mandarin — informing immigrants of the few rights they have. They collect emergency contacts and immigration ID numbers so that when people are arrested, someone can inform their loved ones and track them through the detention system.
When the hearings are over, the volunteers try, often in vain, to escort the immigrants past intimidating groups of masked, armed ICE agents to the elevators and onto the street. That’s what New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, was doing when he was arrested in June.
A week after that arrest, Lander was back in immigration court with his wife and daughter. After shouting ICE agents took the husband of a very pregnant woman from Ecuador, Lander’s wife, Meg Barnette, spent an hour consoling her, then connected her to an immigrant rights nonprofit. When a woman from Liberia collapsed, panicked and sobbing, after hours of watching other immigrants being dragged away, Lander’s daughter held her baby girl.
The Liberian woman said she had a lawyer, but he didn’t show up, so Lander found one in the building to accompany her to her hearing. It’s hard to say if that’s the reason the woman was able to walk out of the court freely; at least to outsiders, there’s very little rhyme or reason as to who gets detained. “It’s like an awful game of roulette,” said Lander.
At a news conference later that day, Lander confessed to feeling he hadn’t done enough, and called on other New Yorkers to come to the courts, bear witness, and maybe engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. “We have to find ways to gum up the works of this hideous system,” he said.
Because ICE’s efforts in New York have largely revolved around the courts, that hideous system has been hidden from much of the public. It’s more conspicuous in Los Angeles, where Trump has treated the entire city like a hostile colony to be subdued.
This month, armed ICE agents backed by National Guard troops, some on horseback or in armored vehicles, stormed into the city’s MacArthur Park, forcing kids at a nearby summer camp to shelter inside. Bass was livid, but the administration made clear that she had little authority. “I don’t work for Karen Bass,” the Border Patrol chief, Gregory Bovino, told Fox News. “Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”
Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News that roving ICE patrols had the right to stop people because of what they look like. “They don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them,” he said, based on “their location, their occupation, their physical appearance.” On July 11, a judge issued a temporary restraining order enjoining such racial profiling, but a widespread sense of dread and anxiety remained, especially in immigrant strongholds. With frightened people staying inside, several Angelenos told me that the eerie emptiness in their neighborhoods reminded them of the pandemic.
One thing Los Angeles has going for it, however, is a deep, established immigrant rights ecosystem. These groups, said Bass, “have prepared for this type of stuff in the past, though not as massive, not as egregious as this.” Indeed, she told me her office relies on activist networks to keep abreast of ICE activity in the city. “That’s how I learn about where raids are happening,” she said. “It’s not like we’re notified of anything.”
It’s a jarring statement about the relative impotence of city government, but also a testament to what an important role the activists are playing.
Since Castillo and her neighbors started their community defense corner, a few others have popped up around Pasadena, including outside a Home Depot on East Walnut Street. The stores have become a central site in the battle over mass deportations; day laborers often gather there to look for work, making Home Depots a common target for ICE. In response, groups of activists have, as they put it, “adopted” Home Depot locations, showing up in shifts to look out for immigration agents. On East Walnut Street, several of the day laborers told me they feel safer with the activists around. “There’s fear, but now we feel protected,” said one, knowing there will at least be a warning if ICE arrives.
While the community defense corner on East Walnut Street operates every day, extra people show up on Wednesdays, part of a weekly demonstration organized by a local librarian. Several of the protesters, mostly middle-aged and older women, told me they were part of local Indivisible chapters.
Alvarado, from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, was grateful for their presence. “The way we view it is that you stop fascism, you stop authoritarianism by protecting those that are at the end of the whip,” he said. “If you want to protect democracy, you protect the most vulnerable. That’s what we want people from all walks of life to understand. That’s why it’s beautiful to see the soccer moms, the teachers, getting it.”
Recently, said Alvarado, a woman from Van Nuys, a neighborhood about a half-hour away, visited the community defense corner on East Walnut Street, with plans to start something similar in her own area. He expects the model to spread further. In late October or early November, N.D.L.O.N. is planning a conference in Los Angeles to train people from all over the country in its strategies.
“Los Angeles was used as an experiment, and we want to share the things that we’ve done right, the things that we’ve done wrong,” he said. With ICE’s new cash infusion, said Alvarado, he expects similar crackdowns all over the country. People “need to know what to do, how to resist, how to fight back,” he said. “Peacefully, lawfully, orderly, but resist.”
There is, of course, only so much such resistance can accomplish in the face of a heavily armed, spectacularly well-funded and politically powerful deportation machine. More than 2,000 immigrants have been arrested in Los Angeles over the past month. Gochez, from Unión del Barrio, believes many more would have been taken without the work of groups like his, but there’s no way to quantify it.
Clearly, however, it matters that people are watching what ICE is doing. As Alvarado points out, a major reason public opinion is turning against Trump’s mass deportation campaign is the viral videos showing what it looks like in practice. Activist groups train people to record ICE activities wherever they see them, helping to capture both arrests and agents’ aggression toward civilian observers. “Men in masks, wearing civilian clothes, pulling guns against people who are exercising their rights while filming, that’s exactly what Americans don’t like to see,” he said.
Alvarado is a citizen now, but he grew up in El Salvador, fleeing the civil war with his brother when he was 22. The sight of masked men taking people away to sites unknown feels to him familiar. “This is a word I don’t take lightly, but people talk about disappearances,” he said of the situation in Los Angeles. “For now, it’s a stretch, I will say, but that’s how it starts. No right to due process. People just snatch you and put you in the vans. It’s something I’ve seen, and I know where that leads.”
To fight what’s coming, he believes, people will have to depend on each other. “Not by being violent and responding with more violence, but by building community and understanding,” he said.
If nothing else, neighbors banding together to weather an emergency is an antidote to helplessness and isolation. The three people volunteering at Orange Grove and Garfield when I was there — Castillo, Simental and Karen Skelly, who works as a personal and administrative assistant — hadn’t known one another before June. Now, said Simental, they’re intertwined like shoelaces: “We just all tied up together.” As we spoke, people kept walking up to take signs, fliers or bracelets, or just to say thank you. Passing drivers honked in appreciation. Simental told me about a local man who checks with him to make sure the coast is clear before he goes to the laundromat or the market.
“Everyone is protecting each other right now, and we can see it, we can feel it,” said Castillo. “I don’t know — we feel like the sheriffs in town.”
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9) A Seaside Refuge in Gaza, Torn Apart by an Israeli Strike
The Israeli military said it killed at least three Hamas operatives at Al-Baqa Cafe. It also killed a journalist, an artist and two best friends reconciling after a fight.
By Bilal Shbair, Vivian Yee, Iyad Abuheweila and Ameera Harouda, Photographs by Saher Alghorra, July 30, 2025
Bilal Shbair and Saher Alghorra reported from the Gaza Strip. The other reporters, working from outside Gaza, interviewed survivors of the attack and relatives of those killed.
The scene at Al-Baqa Cafe on the day of the strike in June.
Some came to get Wi-Fi, some to hang out, one woman for “me time,” just her and a good book. Al-Baqa Cafe sat facing the beach and the waves, away from the wreckage of Gaza City. There, it seemed almost possible to relax, to forget — if only for the space of a few cups of coffee.
“Everything about the place brought back memories, of safety, of life before,” said Mohammed Abu Shamala, 25, an aid worker who grabbed a table there last month with two friends.
He had just started chatting with another friend when the place exploded. Chairs barreled through the air, he said. Dust blocked the sea from sight. Mr. Abu Shamala and his friend were slammed to the concrete floor, where blood was pooling.
“It felt like the world was pushing down on me from every direction,” he said later. “I screamed, not because of the pain, but just to hear my own voice, to make sure I was still alive.”
An Israeli warplane had bombed the cafe. The strike, on June 30, killed 32 people, Gaza’s health ministry said.
The Israeli military said it killed at least three Hamas operatives there, including a man it identified as the commander of Hamas’s naval forces in northern Gaza and two it said belonged to the group’s mortar unit. It did not provide evidence tying the men to Hamas.
But the cafe contained many others: a cross-section of residents trying to feel human again for a few hours, which is to say, all kinds of people.
Journalists there for the reliable internet. A young boxer making up with her best friend after an argument. A family having a birthday party for their little girl. Waiters chatting in the shade. They were all hit, new casualties of a war in which Israel has made it easier to order airstrikes on those it says are Hamas militants, even if it risks killing many civilians.
Gaza health officials say the death toll has topped 60,000 Palestinians since Israel began striking the enclave in response to the October 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, which Israel says killed more than 1,200 people. The Gaza officials’ figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Gaza health officials are also tracking a growing category: People who have starved to death. They say scores of people have died of malnutrition, including dozens of children, though aid workers say that is probably an undercount. It is not clear how many also had other illnesses.
Al-Baqa Cafe was busy at the time of the strike on June 30, shortly before 3 p.m. It often was, partly for offering steady Wi-Fi, and partly because the Israeli military had not ordered the beach area evacuated recently, giving people the hopeful impression that it was safe.
They were the latest to learn that no place in Gaza truly is.
“Now, instead of making drinks, we spent our time picking up human remains and wiping blood off the wooden walls,” said Yaqoub Al-Baqa, 35, the manager. “It’s beyond heartbreaking.”
The quarter-century-old cafe had been closed for much of the war as Gaza City became a repeat battlefield and residents fled. But as families returned during the two-month cease-fire that had begun in January, the cafe reopened, serving tea, coffee, crepes, ice cream and pastries, and it stayed open after Israel broke the cease-fire in March.
Many of the people there knew each other. They had been coming for years, claiming the same tables as if they, too, were old friends.
Mr. Abu Shamala and his friends usually sat in the section for single men. But given recent drone strikes on other cafes, they felt safer in the so-called family section, where women could sit together or with men they knew.
Walking in felt comfortingly familiar, he said. He waved hi to Ismail Abu Hatab, a well-known photojournalist and filmmaker, and Frans al-Salmi, an artist, before flagging down a waiter to order tea. Then he noticed Bayan Abusultan, a journalist friend he hadn’t seen in two months.
Ms. Abusultan had arrived at Al-Baqa that morning to read a book of Palestinian literary criticism and enjoy what she called a bit of “fake peace,” she later wrote on Facebook.
When she saw Mr. Abu Hatab and Ms. al-Salmi, she sat by them instead of in her usual spot, she wrote. They were filming a video for one of Mr. Abu Hatab’s international exhibitions, and they had picked that table for the nice light, they told her.
Mr. Abu Hatab was even better dressed that day than usual, she wrote, so she ribbed him gently: “You’ve got a lot of money, man!”
He denied it, laughing.
In other exhibitions abroad, Mr. Abu Hatab, 33, had shown his photographs of displaced Gazans living among the ruins. He had wanted to become successful enough to be able to move his family out of Gaza, said his brother, Abdul Hakim Abu Hatab, 23.
Instead, his earnings mostly went toward buying sacks of flour to feed his family.
Ms. al-Salmi, 36, born Amna but called Frans by everyone, was also saving up money to someday travel and sell her paintings abroad, said her sister, Alaa al-Salmi, 24.
Yet two days earlier, she had donated her whole month’s salary from her job at an aid group to children who had lost their parents during the war, her sister said.
“She didn’t leave a single shekel for herself,” her sister said.
As Ms. Abusultan, the journalist, sat down after chatting with the two, she complimented a girl sitting nearby on her beautifully embroidered blouse. The girl was laughing with her friends, she recalled. Another table opposite her was more somber: Two women in their early 20s sat there quietly, a giant pink teddy bear gift-wrapped with pink ribbon in a chair next to them.
Their names were Nidaa al-Mashharawi and Malak Musleh. Ms. al-Mashharawi worked at a charity for orphans. Ms. Musleh was a boxer with dreams of representing Palestine someday at international championships. She had been training since she was 14, ignoring social strictures that said girls shouldn’t box, said Noor Musleh, 40, her mother.
The usually inseparable best friends had recently had a spat, said Noor Musleh and Mohammad al-Mashharawi, 25, Ms. al-Mashharawi’s brother. Ms. Musleh had called her friend the night before to make up. The teddy bear was her peace offering.
But they started arguing again soon after arriving at Al-Baqa. Ms. al-Mashharawi stormed upstairs, her brother said. Ms. Musleh followed her, and they made peace again.
At another table sat Naseem Abu Sabha, 25, and Ola Abed Rabou, 22, who had gotten engaged at a more hopeful time, during the cease-fire.
They had picked a spot away from the other tables so they could talk privately, she said. To her surprise, her fiancé got her a cookie, a rare and expensive treat in Gaza these days. They dared to talk about what life might look like if they ever managed to leave Gaza. Maybe he could find a job abroad, he said.
A blast, and he lay next to her on the ground, moaning in pain. Then he fell silent.
Yet with blood staining only his back and right leg, “I believed we would walk out of the hospital together,” she said. It was only after doctors treated her injured left leg that her parents delivered the news of his death.
The Israeli military identified Mr. Abu Sabha as part of Hamas’s mortar unit, but did not provide evidence when asked. His fiancée said he had belonged to Hamas in the past but left the group before the war.
Ms. Abusultan, the journalist, was hurled to the ground alongside Mr. Abu Shamala, the friend she’d been chatting with, her book gone. A wave of shrapnel bloodied her face and body, she wrote.
Looking right, she saw a severed leg.
Then she looked at Ms. al-Salmi and Mr. Abu Hatab’s table. The artist and the photographer were dead.
So were the best friends.
Also among those killed were eight workers, said Mr. Al-Baqa, the cafe’s manager. They included Hadi and Moataz Abu Dan, 21- and 19-year-old brothers who had worked on and off at Al-Baqa since childhood.
Mr. Al-Baqa said he did not believe the Israeli military’s justifications for targeting the cafe. “There’s nothing military about this place,” he said. “It’s a cafe by the beach.”
But when they reopened in a few weeks, he said, the staff would be careful to allow in only customers they knew.
Mr. Abu Shamala, the aid worker who had come to unwind with friends, said he did not know if he could ever go back.
“That day changed me,” he said. “Al-Baqa was once the calmest, safest corner of our lives. Now it’s the darkest, most terrifying place in our memory.”
Isabel Kershner and Adam Rasgon contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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10) Britain and France Have Pledged to Recognize a Palestinian State. What Would It Mean?
The announcements reflect deep frustrations with Israel’s conduct in Gaza and in the occupied West Bank, experts say.
By Ephrat Livni, Published July 29, 2025, Updated July 30, 2025
The aftermath of a strike by Israel on a building in Gaza City in June. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
Britain on Tuesday said it would recognize a Palestinian state if Israel did not reach a cease-fire agreement on the war in Gaza by September. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s move followed France’s announcement last week that it would officially acknowledge Palestine statehood.
Both announcements reflect the deep frustrations by both nations with Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, analysts say, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and left a population of about two million in a state of extreme privation and hunger.
They also came in response to Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank: Its military activity there has displaced Palestinians en masse this year, settlement plans have expanded, and violence by settlers against Palestinians has risen since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel ignited the war. That assault killed about 1,200 people and led to the abduction of about 250 others to Gaza.
The announcements raise questions about what the recognition of a Palestinian state would mean and what it can actually do.
What is a state?
The criteria for statehood were laid out in an international treaty in 1933.
They include four elements: a permanent population, defined territorial boundaries, a government and an ability to conduct international affairs.
Recognition is an official acknowledgment that a would-be state broadly meets those conditions. It can occur even if an element is in dispute, including territorial boundaries.
Like all legal questions, “interpretation matters,” said Zinaida Miller, a professor of law and international affairs at Northeastern University.
The criteria for recognizing a Palestinian state have been met at a basic level, many experts on international law say.
A permanent population and land exist. The borders, while disputed, are broadly understood to be in Israeli-occupied territories, including the West Bank and Gaza, which was seized in 1967 in a war with a coalition of Arab states; as well as East Jerusalem, which Israel has effectively annexed.
The Palestinian Authority is a government body that administers part of the West Bank and represents Palestinians. Its creation was authorized by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which represents Palestinians internationally.
While there are limits to what the Palestinian Authority can do, given the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Hamas’s control of Gaza, foreign recognition of a Palestinian state would mean the establishment of direct diplomatic contact between the Authority and the recognizing nation.
Recognition would also send diplomatic and political messages. It would acknowledge the Palestinian right to self-determination and reject the positions and actions of the Israeli government that undermine that right, Ms. Miller said.
‘A basis for added pressure.’
A major consequence of recognizing Palestinian statehood is that it provides a basis for “a complete revision of bilateral relations with Israel,” said Ardi Imseis, an associate professor at Queen’s University Faculty of Law in Ontario and a former United Nations official.
A country that recognizes Palestine has to review agreements with Israel to make sure they do not violate its obligations to the Palestinian state. This would include political and territorial integrity, as well as economic, cultural, social and civil relations, he said.
For example, if an aspect of trade aids or assists Israel in violation of the rights of a Palestinian state, then the recognizing nation would have to cease that exchange.
“Practically speaking, recognition would provide a basis for added pressure to be brought to bear by civil society and lawmakers in the recognizing state” to change policies and align them with other requirements, Mr. Imseis said.
A recognizing nation would not have to stop all trade with Israel, said Paul Reichler, a lawyer who represents sovereign states and has argued for the state of Palestine at the International Court of Justice.
But if, for example, a country that recognizes a state of Palestine imports agricultural products from farms belonging to settlers in occupied territories, those agreements would be aiding and abetting the commission of a wrongful act, he said.
International law experts note that an advisory ruling from the International Court of Justice last year concluded, among other things, that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories violated a prohibition on territorial conquest.
A U.N. majority for recognition already exists.
Most countries in the United Nations — 147 out of 193 — already recognize a Palestinian state.
Britain and France would be joining them, and their position has extra heft because they are permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, with the power to veto any substantive Council resolution, including on the admission of new member states.
The two countries would be bolstering the stance taken by most other nations and sending a political message, but their shift would also have a practical effect. They would join China and Russia in recognizing a Palestinian state and leave the United States as the sole permanent member of the Security Council with veto power that is holding out.
The state of Palestine currently has observer status at the U.N., and that will not change if the United States maintains its opposition to full membership.
What is the goal of recognition?
It is part of a political, diplomatic and legal push to reach a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict despite resistance from Israel’s current government.
“There are two peoples living between the river and the sea, not one, and they are entitled to separate states in which each of these peoples enjoys the full panoply of civil and human rights,” Mr. Reichler said.
“The only solution is two states, and it so happens that is what international law requires and is reflected in U.N. resolutions and in determinations of the I.C.J.,” he said.
Although the declarations of Palestinian statehood may appear symbolic, “small steps” like recognition “make a contribution” to the goal of establishing two states, he said.
Some nations. like Norway, once held off recognizing a Palestinian state in the belief that recognition would someday emerge from a negotiated peace process. With such a process seemingly currently out of reach and outrage over Israeli policies growing, some countries have put recognition first in the hope that it would lead to a peace process.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said that the establishment of a Palestinian state would endanger Israel’s security, and he has rejected the notion, particularly since the war in Gaza began. His governing coalition includes far-right ministers who are settlers and staunchly opposed to a Palestinian state, and he risks their abandoning the bloc if he indicates a willingness to consider it.
In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu said Britain’s announcement “rewards Hamas’s monstrous terrorism & punishes its victims.”
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11) Anger Over Starvation in Gaza Leaves Israel Increasingly Isolated
Global outrage at the Netanyahu government’s actions has grown since the war began, and the suffering of children in the enclave has accelerated the disdain.
By Steven Erlanger, July 31, 2025
Steven Erlanger, a former bureau chief in Jerusalem, has covered the Israeli-Palestinian issue for many years.
A demonstration in support of Gaza outside the U.N. headquarters in New York on July 25, 2025. Bing Guan for The New York Times
Some of Israel’s most important Western allies, under political pressure from voters appalled by mounting evidence of starvation in Gaza, now say that they will recognize a Palestinian state. President Trump, himself convinced that Gazans are starving, has sent his Mideast envoy to Israel for the first time in months to look at the chaotic food distribution system.
More scholars are debating whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Opinion polls in the United States and elsewhere show an increasingly negative view of Israel. And there is no clear plan to bring the war against Hamas to an end.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has responded angrily to the growing skepticism. He has said that the reports of starvation are exaggerated, that Hamas must be destroyed, that critics are often antisemites and that Western recognition of a Palestinian state is a reward to Hamas for the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that killed more than 1,000 people.
“The usual Israeli view is that this crisis is another temporary problem,” said Natan Sachs, an analyst of Israeli politics. “But that’s a misreading of the world, because it’s accelerating a global turn against Israel that has dramatic effects, especially among young people.”
As anger grows over widespread hunger in Gaza, Israel risks becoming an international outcast. The deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel in 2023 remains a vivid, salient event for many Israelis. But for others around the world, the devastation and hunger in Gaza have become more visible and urgent.
Since Israel cut off aid in March to try to force Hamas to give up hostages, Israel’s effort to install its own distribution system has been marred by chaos and casualties while hunger has increased. Scores have been killed as Gazans rushed to get food.
And no one has a clear idea of how the war will end, even as Israel has retaken large areas of Gaza several times over. The number of dead in the enclave has reached more than 60,000, a majority of them civilians, according to the United Nations. Mr. Netanyahu has not outlined what he has in mind for Gaza or who should try to rule it instead of Hamas. He has refused to engage with the countries most likely to help do that — the Persian Gulf states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Trump remains a strong supporter of Israel in its fight against Hamas, and he has in the past given Mr. Netanyahu carte blanche in how to do it. But even Mr. Trump has seemed shocked by the televised videos of hunger in Gaza, and some of his most fervent supporters are publicly questioning the relationship with Israel.
The increasing debate over whether Israel is committing genocide is also reflective of how “something fundamental has shifted in how Israel is perceived,” said Daniel Levy, a negotiator under former Labor Party-led governments in Israel and current president of the U.S./Middle East Project, a nonprofit.
He points to a sharp cultural shift, with anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian and sometimes antisemitic demonstrations at places including opera houses and music festivals. Pop stars like Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande have made strong appeals for a cease-fire and for the delivery of aid to Palestinians in Gaza.
“For a long time, Israel thought that if we throw antisemitism and the Holocaust at them loudly enough, it will all go away,” Mr. Levy said. “But the zeitgeist is shifting, and the Israeli attempt at outrage works with an ever-smaller cohort.”
Opinion polls reflect the change. A Pew poll in April found that American views of Israel had turned more negative. About 53 percent of U.S. adults now express an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 42 percent before the Hamas attack. Of those, the share who voice very unfavorable views of Israel went up to 19 percent of adults this year, from 10 percent in 2022.
Another Pew poll, conducted last month, found that in 20 of 24 countries surveyed, half or more of adults had an unfavorable view of Israel. Around three-quarters or more hold this view in Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Turkey. The figures are higher among younger people — and one of the largest gaps between young and old is in the United States.
The largest danger to Israel in the future is not the stances taken by European leaders or its most passionate critics, Mr. Sachs, the analyst, argued. “From the Israeli perspective, the most troubling phenomenon is the people on the fence. Either they don’t know about the issue or want to stay away from it, because it’s toxic,” he said. “The average person who might normally support Israel would rather stay away.”
Mr. Netanyahu has been too slow to understand the reality of the shift and its cost to his country, said Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel. It is difficult to know the full reality in Gaza, because Israel does not allow foreign journalists to enter independently. But aid groups have described mounting malnutrition and cases of starvation.
“There is some truth to the privation and even limited numbers of cases of starvation in Gaza, and there is some antisemitism in the reactions,” Mr. Freilich said.
“But whatever the causes, it doesn’t matter,” he added. “The bottom line is that Israel is or is becoming an international pariah, and Israel cannot afford that.”
Israel needs diplomatic support, he said. And it desperately needs good economic relations with Europe and the United States, said Bernard Avishai, an Israeli American professor and analyst.
“Israel made a fantastic bet on globalization, and its economic life depends on its technological elites finding partners in developed countries,” Mr. Avishai said. “What happens when companies like that get a cold shoulder from people around the world?”
There is built-up anger in the West at having been pushed for years to keep down criticism over Israeli actions like the occupation of the West Bank, Mr. Avishai said, and that anger is now coming out more strongly over Gaza. “What’s happening in Gaza is appalling,” and it diminishes the willingness of people to travel to Israel and to work with its scientists and companies, he said. “For the Israeli economy,” he noted, “this is already devastating.”
Pushed by public reaction and by his own frustration, President Emmanuel Macron of France has said that his country will recognize Palestine as a state at the United Nations in September. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, said Wednesday that his country would do the same. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made Britain’s recognition conditional, but the moves nonetheless reflect how swiftly views of the war — and of Israel — have changed among Western countries.
Recognizing a Palestine that doesn’t yet exist is more of a symbolic gesture — 147 nations already do. But if both Britain and France join in, it will isolate the United States as the only permanent member of the U.N. Security Council that does not. And it would likely force Washington to veto such recognition.
While still blaming Hamas for rejecting a cease-fire, Mr. Trump now seems to understand that Mr. Netanyahu has little interest in ending the war. A lasting truce would force Mr. Netanyahu to make a political choice about Gaza’s future that could collapse his governing coalition, which depends on support from far-right Israeli politicians who favor annexing and resettling the enclave.
Even to allow more aid into Gaza and to institute a temporary halt in hostilities in a belated response to criticism, Mr. Netanyahu had to hold a security cabinet meeting on the Sabbath last week, when his far-right ministers would be unavailable to attend.
Jeffrey C. Herf, emeritus professor of history at the University of Maryland, said that he had seen a shift toward anti-Zionism in academia and society and that he expected it to last. He blames Mr. Netanyahu for failing to understand that the war against Hamas was also one of political narrative.
“The backlash now is a sign of Israeli incompetence, falling into the trap of Hamas’s cynical and long-term strategy to use the suffering of Gazans for its own advantage,” he said.
After World War II, the Allies aided German civilians, arguing that they had freed them from a mad dictatorship, Mr. Herf said. “Israel should have come to Gaza to liberate the people from Hamas, the way the Allies liberated the Germans from the Nazis,” he said. “But now the world hates Israel.”
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12) This Is What Basic Food Costs in Gaza Now, if You Can Find It
Obtaining humanitarian aid can be difficult and dangerous, and though some essentials are available at markets, they are prohibitively expensive for many Gazans.
By Adam Rasgon and Ashley Wu, July 31, 2025
Adam Rasgon reported from Tel Aviv, and Ashley Wu from New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/world/middleeast/gaza-market-prices-flour.html
Deadly chaos and violence have engulfed aid distribution in Gaza since Israel reconstituted the system in May as part of what it said was an effort to keep aid out of the hands of Hamas.
The mayhem — and the limited amount of aid entering the enclave in the first place — has led many Palestinians to give up trying to get humanitarian aid, even though starvation is mounting.
One of the few alternatives has been to buy food from markets in Gaza, which are stocked with a combination of aid materials — some of which may have been looted — commercial goods, and small amounts of locally grown produce. But the prices of many basic goods have skyrocketed.
“Have I ever seen this anywhere else to this extent?” Arif Husain, the chief economist at the U.N. World Food Program, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “Absolutely not.”
Sugar now costs about $106 per kilogram compared with 89 cents before the war, flour is $12 per kilogram compared with 42 cents, and tomatoes are $30 per kilogram compared with 59 cents, according to data published this week by the Gaza Governorate Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
The data were collected by some of the chamber’s staff members, who have been conducting surveys at markets in Gaza City, Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis. An emergency committee representing chambers of commerce in multiple areas of the enclave authorized the Gaza Governorate chamber to conduct the surveys and publish the results.
“The prices are insane, totally insane,” said Mohammad Fares, 24, a resident of Gaza City who was staying with a relative alongside his parents and two brothers because his family’s home was destroyed earlier in the war. He has lost more than 50 pounds since the start of the war, he said.
Mr. Fares said that he was unwilling to risk his life by going to aid sites, describing them as “death traps” where Israeli soldiers fatally shoot people and desperate Palestinians threaten one another with knives. (The Israeli military has said that its forces have fired “warning shots” when people approached its forces outside aid sites in what it described as a threatening manner.)
Staying alive, Mr. Fares said, required his family to dig into what remains of its savings to purchase small quantities of flour and lentils. His family was no longer purchasing vegetables and fruits, which had long exceeded what it can afford, he added.
“At a certain level, people get priced out,” Mr. Husain said. “The prices are so high that they become meaningless.” The focus, he said, becomes on getting small amounts of the most essential goods.
The instability in the supply of goods has caused drastic price fluctuations. For example, the price of flour reached $891 for a 25-kilogram sack on July 20, dipped to $223 on Sunday and climbed to $334 on Wednesday, data from the enclave’s Chamber of Commerce showed. The same amount of flour cost a little over $10 before the war.
Ayed Abu Ramadan, the chairman of the Gaza Governorate Chamber of Commerce, said his biggest takeaway from the surveys was that prices rise and fall as restrictions on the entry of goods are tightened or loosened.
During a cease-fire this year, the cost of basic goods fell significantly as thousands of trucks entered Gaza, but a blockade between March and May caused prices to shoot up once again, he said.
“We’re not just facing a war in terms of bombs — we’re facing a war in terms of prices, hunger and thirst, too,” said Mr. Abu Ramadan, who also leads the emergency committee for the chambers of commerce across Gaza.
The prices of nonfood items have also been extraordinarily high.
A bar of soap is about $10, compared with 59 cents before the war; a pack of 40 diapers is $149, compared with $8.61; diesel is $36 per liter, compared with $1.87; and 400 grams of baby formula is $51, compared with $7.43, according to recent surveys. By comparison, in the United States, diesel costs about a dollar per liter, and 40 diapers can be bought for about $5.
Another challenge is getting hard cash, which many Palestinians can find only on the black market in exchange for exorbitant commissions. With banks and A.T.M.s in ruins or shut down, people stockpiling cash have been selling Israeli shekels, the predominant currency in Gaza, at internet cafes and street corners in the enclave for commissions of around 50 percent.
“There’s suffering built into every aspect of life,” Mr. Fares said. “Suffering on top of suffering.”
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13) As Trump Shifts Blame to Hamas, His Envoy Plans to See Hunger Crisis Firsthand
Steve Witkoff met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was expected to visit an aid distribution site in Gaza, as desperation there widens.
By Natan Odenheimer, Reporting from Jerusalem, July 31, 2025
Steve Witkoff’s visit to Israel on Thursday is the first time he is known to have visited the country in months. Credit...Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, was holding talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel on Thursday, his first known visit to the country in months, as global outrage intensifies over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Mr. Witkoff was set to visit an aid distribution site in Gaza operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to an Israeli official and a person familiar with the details who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the trip publicly.
His visit comes as the Gaza health ministry said 111 Palestinians had died in the territory over the past 24 hours, including 91 people who were seeking aid. The circumstances of the deaths was unclear. The ministry, which is managed by Hamas, does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its figures.
Mr. Witkoff, the Trump administration’s lead negotiator in the cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas, met with Mr. Netanyahu at his office in Jerusalem on Thursday afternoon, hours after the families of Israeli hostages had protested outside and called for a cease-fire.
Israel and the United States pulled back last week from negotiations to try to agree another truce and to secure the release of hostages.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump called for Hamas to release the captives. “The fastest way to end the Humanitarian Crises in Gaza is for Hamas to SURRENDER AND RELEASE THE HOSTAGES!!!” he wrote on social media. The comments were a shift in tone from remarks earlier in the week, when he implied that Israel bore primary responsibility for improving humanitarian conditions in the territory.
Mr. Witkoff’s visit comes as Palestinians in Gaza are facing a hunger crisis, with a U.N.-backed food security group warning this week that “famine” was unfolding across the territory. The food crisis has become especially acute after Israel cut off all food supplies to the enclave between March and May. Israel has said without evidence that Hamas was routinely stealing U.N. aid supplies.
The crisis has been exacerbated by Israel’s decision, backed by the Trump administration, to introduce a new aid-distribution system led by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private American organization. It has given out food at a only a few sites in Gaza in areas that are controlled by the Israeli military. But amid chaotic scenes at the sites, hundreds of people have been killed while seeking food, according to the Gaza health ministry. In many cases, Israeli soldiers have been accused of firing on crowds. The Israeli military said that it had fired warning shots into the air.
In recent weeks, dozens of people have died from starvation, including children, according to the Gaza health officials. The worsening conditions in the territory have prompted a growing wave of international outrage toward at Israel. Canada said on Wednesday that it would recognize a Palestinian state, following similar moves by Britain and France in the past week. All three countries are longstanding allies of Israel.
The war began after a Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed about 1,200 people and saw roughly 250 people taken as hostages into Gaza. In response, Israel launched a sweeping military campaign that has killed more than 60,000 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Israel pulled out of a U.S.-brokered cease-fire in March and resumed its attacks on Gaza after accusing Hamas of refusing to release the hostages. About 50 hostages are believed to be held in Gaza, though Israeli officials say some are presumed to have been killed.
On Thursday, a group of mothers and family members of the hostages held a protest outside the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem to call on Mr. Netanyahu to reach a deal to bring the remaining captives home.
In recent weeks, international organizations have become increasingly alarmed about the spread of hunger in Gaza.
Outrage inside Israel over the scale of the crisis has also been growing.
Separately, in a letter sent to the government and military, 16 Israeli law professors warned that the death and suffering of Gaza’s civilian population “amounts to violations of the gravest offenses under international law and constitutes a serious moral stain on the army, the government, and Israeli society as a whole.”
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14) Energy Dept. Attacks Climate Science in Contentious Report
The agency asked five climate skeptics to write a report criticizing the consensus on global warming. Scientists are pointing out its errors.
By Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer, Reporting from Washington, July 31, 2025
The Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times
Sea level rise is not accelerating. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be good for plant growth. The computer models used to predict global warming tend to exaggerate future temperature increases.
These arguments, routinely made by people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change, were included in an unusual report released by the Energy Department on Tuesday. The report, which is meant to support the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to roll back climate regulations, contends that the mainstream scientific view on climate change is too dire and overlooks the positive effects of a warming planet.
Climate scientists said the 151-page report misrepresented or cherry-picked a large body of research on global warming. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and the payments company Stripe, called the document a “scattershot collection of oft-debunked skeptic claims” that “are not representative of broader climate science research findings.”
The report demonstrates the extent to which President Trump is using his second term to wage a battle against climate change research, a long-held goal of some conservative groups and fossil fuel companies. While the first Trump administration often undermined federal scientists and rolled back more than 100 environmental policies, officials mostly refrained from trying to debate climate science in the open.
This time, Trump officials have gone much further.
The Environmental Protection Agency this week cited the Energy Department report in its proposal to repeal a landmark 2009 finding that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, pose a threat to public health. That determination, known as the endangerment finding, underpinned the agency’s legal authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and other industrial sources of pollution.
The new report also comes months after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship analysis of how climate change is affecting the country. That analysis, known as the National Climate Assessment, was set to explore how rising temperatures will influence public health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the economy.
“It is a coordinated, full-scale attack on the science,” said Dave White, who directs the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University. “This was present in the first Trump administration, but it’s being exacerbated in the second.”
The vast majority of climate scientists agree that carbon dioxide, which is released by the burning of fossil fuels, is accumulating in the atmosphere and raising global temperatures. This warming is increasing the risk of destructive storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves around the globe.
The Energy Department commissioned its own report from five prominent skeptics of the consensus view. They include Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Judith Curry, a climatologist who has said there is too much “alarmism” about warming.
An Energy Department spokesman, Ben Dietderich, wrote in an email that the report “critically assesses many areas of ongoing scientific inquiry that are frequently assigned high levels of confidence — not by the scientists themselves but by the political bodies involved, such as the United Nations or previous presidential administrations. Unlike previous administrations, the Trump administration is committed to engaging in a more thoughtful and science-based conversation about climate change and energy.”
In response to emailed questions, four of the report’s authors wrote that they would address any criticism during their report’s 30-day public-comment period.
“Is the final draft perfect? No,” Dr. Christy wrote. “We will be sifting through numerous public comments to fix the mistakes that we may have made or to include evidence we overlooked.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, Dr. Koonin proposed that the E.P.A. conduct a “red-team, blue-team” exercise to challenge mainstream climate science. A “red team” of climate skeptics would critique major scientific reports on global warming, and a “blue team” of climate scientists would rebut the claims.
But that plan was ultimately blocked by John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff. He and other White House aides worried that the exercise could harm Mr. Trump’s re-election chances and distract from the administration’s efforts to repeal Obama-era environmental regulations.
Now, however, the views of Dr. Koonin and other skeptics are prominently featured in the Energy Department report. Its title is “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.”
The report does not directly dispute that carbon dioxide is heating the planet. And it does not attempt to deny many effects of global warming, such as the melting of vast ice sheets that sit on top of Greenland and Antarctica that are contributing to rising sea levels around the world.
But in many cases, the authors question established research on the significance and the risks of this warming.
For instance, the report suggests that solar activity may be an “underestimated” contributor to warming, citing a recent paper that has been sharply criticized. In contrast, a 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was compiled by hundreds of scientists, determined that human activity is responsible for essentially all of the global warming seen to date, while natural factors like sunspots have played little role.
The Energy Department report also repeatedly highlights the positive effects of carbon dioxide, saying that “rising CO2 levels benefit plants, including agricultural crops.” The report does not mention recent research that found that rising global temperatures can have an adverse effect on yields of staple crops like rice, soybeans and wheat.
The report’s authors “are right that crops breathe CO2, just like we breathe oxygen,” said Andrew Hultgren, an assistant professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But exposure to extreme heat reduces the ability of plants like corn, wheat and other staples to produce food, he said, “and that’s where they get things wrong.”
The authors also wrote that U.S. tide gauges “show no obvious acceleration in sea-level rise beyond the historical average rate.” But satellite measurements for the past 30 years have found that sea level rise is accelerating globally. The authors seem to have selectively chosen data from certain tide gauges that supported their point, said Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University.
Experts said they were struck by how quickly the Energy Department’s report was put together. When the federal government has previously compiled National Climate Assessments, it has convened hundreds of scientists who spend years gathering research and go through several rounds of peer review.
In contrast, the five scientists assembled by the Energy Department began work in early April and finished by a May 28 deadline, according to the report. “The short timeline and the technical nature of the material meant that we could not comprehensively review all topics,” the authors wrote.
Some experts said that a push for more debate on certain aspects of climate science could be productive.
Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist, has previously criticized other climate researchers for misrepresenting evidence on how global warming has affected extreme weather to date. He said that parts of the report appeared reasonable, such as its point that some of the very worst-case scenarios used in climate research are now widely seen as unrealistically dire. He added that it was a problem for climate science when dissenting views get marginalized.
“These scientists have said they want to motivate discussion and debate,” said Dr. Pielke, who is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “So let’s see if they live up to that expectation.”
But others were skeptical that the Trump administration was merely trying to start a discussion, particularly since the E.P.A., in its proposal to repeal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, was leaning on the Energy Department’s scientific review to make its case.
Raymond Zhong contributed reporting from London.
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